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As a nation we face a choice: either follow the far-right rhetoric of hate and division, or unite under our values of decency and determination

• Jeevun Sandher is Labour MP for Loughborough

Like you, I was horrified when I watched the video of Henry Nowak’s death. I cannot imagine what his family are going through.

He was 18 years old. I think of my family members about the same age as Henry, with their whole lives ahead of them. I know how devastated I would feel if they were murdered.

Jeevun Sandher is Labour MP for Loughborough

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Want to spend less time on your phone? We asked psychotherapists, professors and specialists for practical (and achievable) ways to cut down

• The best screen-free activities

Everywhere you look, people are glued to their smartphones. If you haven’t noticed this phenomenon, it’s likely because you, too, are glued to the little dopamine-deliverer.

In March, Meta and YouTube had to pay a combined $6m after a US court found that the tech companies’ platforms were designed to be addictive. Put such tempting apps in a device that’s carried everywhere, and that’s a recipe for compulsive behaviour.

Plays about political extremes, religious sects, swimming the Channel and an 80th birthday party are among the highlights at this summer’s arts spectacular

Producer Francesca Moody has shown a sure touch for spotting fringe hits (Fleabag and Baby Reindeer among them). Her new offering, by Australia’s Hannah Reilly, is about a feminist podcaster who becomes an online “slutfluencer” to earn some easy money, but has a price to pay.
Summerhall, 6-31 August

Somerset House, London
Escher’s paradoxical geometries and impossible gravities may baffle the mind – yet even his wildest works were never just fanciful, as this fun and gripping show makes clear

We think we know the world of Maurits Cornelis Escher with its mind-bending staircases and buildings that impossibly twist upon themselves. Yet a shocking glimpse of reality intrudes in Somerset House’s gripping journey through his metaverse. In 1945, Escher designed a diploma for students at a temporary academy in Eindhoven, recently liberated from Nazi rule. Behind a wise old owl in the foreground, twisting columns of black smoke rise from a riverside town, their evil sinuousness reflected in the water. The message of this depiction of war is not only that Escher was a civilised individual surviving a brutal age but also that his visual delights were never just fanciful. Even his wildest speculations reveal the workings of the world itself, grounded as they are in what Galileo called “the language of mathematics” in which “the book of nature is written”.

You don’t have to be fluent in that language to lose yourself in Escher’s art. You just need to look, and this exhibition lets you look so much more closely and deeply than you can in books and reproductions and imitations of his work. At times you feel you are actually inside his paradoxical places. I chuckled for ages in front of his 1958 lithograph Belvedere in which a king and queen survey a mountainous landscape in different directions from two storeys of a Renaissance building, but wait, they don’t just face different ways, their separate floors are totally at odds, the king’s pointing sideways while the queen faces out of the picture in a 90-degree shift: the columns on the front of the king’s balustrade support the back of the queen’s floor and the whole building turns in two different dimensions inhabiting two truths at once. No wonder the builders are dressed as jesters while an architect sits studying geometry.

As recent conflicts expose vulnerability of fertiliser markets and its effect on food security, VunaNexus offers an alternative

When staff answer the call of nature at the European Space Agency’s headquarters in Paris, their urine is not simply flushed away – it is turned into something much more useful. While urine-diverting toilets are often associated with smelly festival loos, there is nothing bohemian about recycling nutrients from human pee, said David de Chambrier, the chief executive of VunaNexus.

The process isn’t so different from recovering minerals in used electronics.

Exclusive: Greater Manchester mayor sets out his priorities before Makerfield byelection – and what might happen after the vote

Andy Burnham has signalled he would begin transforming England’s broken social care system this year if he became prime minister, accusing Westminster of “flinching away” from tackling difficult policy problems.

The Greater Manchester mayor said politicians must be willing to take on “the weight of the system” that stood in the way of radical change, as he began to set out his prospectus for government if he won the Makerfield byelection.

Said Labour should be a broad church with more government ministers from the left of the party, but Jeremy Corbyn should not be allowed back in.

Signalled there would be no snap election if he replaced Keir Starmer, but defended himself from criticism over a shadow leadership campaign.

Defended his comments that politicians should not be “in hock” to the bond markets, and denied he was boxing himself in by sticking to Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules.

Argued it would be a mistake to rerun the Brexit referendum but that he wanted the UK to rejoin the EU in his lifetime.

Praised Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, for “facing up” to the big issues on immigration.

Exclusive: Greater Lincolnshire mayor walks out on cabinet minister after row over social media role in community tensions

Andrea Jenkyns walked out of a meeting with a cabinet minister and several other metropolitan mayors on Thursday after a heated discussion about the murder of Henry Nowak and the civil unrest that has followed.

The Reform mayor of Greater Lincolnshire walked out of the meeting with the communities secretary, Steve Reed, and other regional leaders after a row over the role social media has played in exacerbating community tensions.

Zulkernain Ahmed was in pursuit of a group on bikes when he hit Abdullah Yaser Abdullah Taleb, who was walking on pavement

Two brothers have been jailed for killing a 16-year-old boy who was “in the wrong place at the wrong time” when he was hit while walking by a car being deliberately driven at a group on bikes.

Abdullah Yaser Abdullah Taleb, who had come to the UK “in search of safety and a better life”, was hit by the vehicle, driven by 21-year-old Zulkernain Ahmed in Sheffield in June 2025.

Farage’s party brings in £9m largely from crypto billionaires in three months, more than twice that of Labour and Tories

• UK politics live – latest updates

Reform UK is raising millions more than the other political parties from private donations, bringing in £9m largely from cryptocurrency billionaires in the first three months of the year.

Nigel Farage’s party took a £3m donation from the cryptocurrency and aviation investor Christopher Harborne, who is a British-Thai dual citizen, and £4m from the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Ben Delo, who is relocating to the UK from Hong Kong.