Drugs, drink and dancing made Bez famous. Thirty-five years on, has he really swapped it all for filtered water, intermittent fasting and walks with the dogs?

Bez has both shoelaces undone and it’s making me nervous. Out walking his dogs, we’re up and over barbed wire, across streams and over gates. We bash through brambles and skid down slopes. I’m becoming fixated on the perilously trailing laces of his trainers and why he hasn’t tripped over them. Can he be such a thrill-seeker that a dog walk can be turned into an hour of jeopardy?

Of course he can. This is Bez, anarchic maraca-shaker, party person, the man Shaun Ryder, his Happy Mondays bandmate and partner in crime, says is a bad influence. Bez, whose real name is Mark Berry, has been in more scrapes than seems possible for one person. A small sample: knocking his teeth out in a motorbike crash at the age of 16, threatened with a gun when he and Ryder were trying to buy crack in New York, kidnapped and held hostage during another drug deal, smashing his body up in another motorbike crash in 1999 and then getting MRSA in hospital and ending up in a coma for a month.

A toxic debate over anti-Zionism leaves the Green leader looking like a passenger in the movement that carried him to the top

When Donald Trump calls someone a socialist he is not using the word in the same way that, say, Zohran Mamdani does. The mayor of New York espouses democratic socialism as a mission of equitable distribution of wealth and opportunity. The US president says socialism only pretends to be democratic “because it sounds so nice”; that “it’s really communism you’re talking about” and that people such as Mamdani pose “the biggest threat to our nation … since its founding”.

People who despise an idea, seeing it as the manifestation of everything wicked, cannot be expected to define it accurately. As with the radical right and socialism, so it is with the left and Zionism.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Israeli communities shattered by Hamas massacres are torn between rebuilding their lives and remembering lost friends and relatives

Keith Siegel spent many of his long hours in Hamas captivity in Gaza etching everything that happened after 7 October 2023 into his memory. For 484 days, he recited to himself every place he was held, the dates he was moved and every attack or humiliation he endured or witnessed.

He aimed to store intelligence that could help Israeli forces free other hostages if he was released, to keep track of time as the days slid by and be able to tell his family what happened to him. Now his body is free, but he cannot loosen those memories.

From blood pressure to ageing, research suggests the first 1,000 days of sugar exposure could leave a decades-long mark on health

They were born into a Britain still recovering from the hardships of war. Though the air-raid sirens had fallen silent, many everyday foods remained rationed, including sugar. Adults were restricted to about 3 tablespoons (40g) a day to stretch between cups of tea, baking and desserts; children were limited to less than a tablespoon. Babies and very young children were expected to have little or no added sugar.

Then, in 1953, the brakes came off. Separate restrictions on sweets and chocolate were lifted in February, followed by sugar in September. By the second half of 1954, average sugar consumption had almost doubled.

After a phenomenal decade-long run, the Cursed Child two-parter is being pruned. Will it still work? Our writer swishes her cloak, levitates her luggage – and hops aboard the streamlined Hogwarts Express

‘Silencio!” Two dozen tank-topped and T-shirted figures fall quiet, and look expectantly at movement director Nuno Silva. “If you’ve got a cloak, accio it now …” With that summoning charm cast, broomsticks are stowed, wands holstered, suitcases grabbed.

The Harry Potter and the Cursed Child rehearsal room – a creaky church hall whose Victorian wall clock gives a serendipitously Hogwarts flavour – is a near-permanent bustle of activity. A sound technician quickly re-sets cues on her laptop, a costume designer helps an actor into a suspiciously long pair of gloves. Associate director Nicola Samer is quietly running notes with a couple of the leads while the rest of the company preps for the next scene.

Beldina Odenyo was on the verge of stardom when she took her own life in 2021. In this beautiful documentary, her grief-stricken sister Leah attempts to finish her album – and her journey will make you cry again and again

In 2021, the Kenyan-Scottish singer-songwriter Beldina Odenyo was on the brink of major stardom. That October, aged 31, she headlined a gig at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, delivering an instantly legendary performance; barefoot, cloaked and bone-shaking in its intensity. Everyone in that concert hall knew they were witnessing something extraordinary that night. Two weeks later, Odenyo took her own life.

This tender and grief-stricken documentary, which opens a year after her death, is directed with remarkable care by Louise Lockwood. What emerges is a sensitively drawn portrait of a visionary artist haunted by trauma, formed through her teenage video diaries, the words of those who loved her, the handful of exquisite songs she left behind – kept in a folder on her hard drive named “passable demos” – and the determination of her older sister, Leah McAleer, to keep her astonishing voice alive. A deeply painful venture that she understands is itself a product of her insurmountable grief.

Exclusive: Officials working on further radical changes that would change how much energy companies could charge customers

John Healey is planning a major intervention to cut energy bills for poorer households in this month’s budget, after ministers became alarmed at forecasts that show bills rising by hundreds of pounds in January.

The chancellor is working on plans to spend more than £1bn to help energy consumers, the bulk of which is likely to go towards increasing the discount given to households on certain benefits.

1,200 died in attack that led to launch of devastating war in Gaza

• ‘All I want to do is cry’: trauma of 7 October survivors three years after the attacks

Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, said he had put the military on high alert yesterday, a day before the third anniversary of the 7 October attack.

Without providing evidence, his office said the instruction came “in light of intelligence regarding Hamas’s intentions to attempt to carry out attacks and terror operations against our forces in Gaza on that day”.

Conservative leader will deliver her keynote speech to Tory conference later

As Andrew McDonald and Megan McElroy point out in their London Playbook briefing, there are broadly two options if Kemi Badenoch wants to cut inheritance tax without getting rid of it completely. They report:

There were persistent rumors and some reporting before this conference that the Tories were looking to scrap that tax altogether. But since then, Badenoch’s team has been making more cautious noises. Right-leaning papers including the Telegraph, Times and Sun all report this morning that Badenoch will cut IHT, but not scrap it. That would sit well with the broad theme of the speech on the state of the public finances, given inheritance tax is expected to raise more than £10 billion a year from next year onwards. To put it another way: scrapping IHT would effectively cost the same as building a “Britannia Shield” every year.

Instead: The Times’ Oliver Wright and co. reckon Badenoch will announce a cut to the 40% inheritance tax rate, which only applies to an estate’s value over £325,000 (or £500,000 if a home is given to a direct descendant). If that is what Badenoch opts for … it’s still an expensive tax cut. Estimates from 2023, the last time the Tories were looking at this, reckoned a 10 percentage point cut to 30% would cost a few billion a year. The other rumor doing the rounds is that she could change the thresholds at which IHT kicks in.

It’s a tax that is charged on estates when people die, but only around one in 20 estates will actually end up paying it.

The prisoner received two doses of pentobarbital as authorities tried to put her to death on 30 September

Christa Pike, a Tennessee prisoner who survived the state’s attempt to execute her, is awake and speaking as she receives treatment at a hospital, her attorneys said on Tuesday.

Pike, 50, survived two doses of pentobarbital, a sedative, as Tennessee officials attempted to put her to death last Wednesday in a case that shocked many in America and created headlines around the world. She was set to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.