From olive oil to matcha, soy sauce to sage and onion stuffing, there’s a frozen designer dessert out there to tickle even the most jaded palate. Here’s the best – and worst – of what’s on offer in Britain this summer

What’s with all the weird ice-cream flavours this year? It feels as if supermarkets and independent companies are vying to make the most novel alternatives to a good old scoop of vanilla. But which are actually worth having? I tried 99 varieties of ice-cream tubs and ranked them from sickeningly sweet to dinner party-worthy.

99. Paxo sage and onion stuffing, Anya Hindmarch
(One scoop £4.50 or 500ml tub £16, The Ice Cream Project, London)
Anya Hindmarch’s Ice Cream Project has become a yearly summer fixture, in which the fashion designer collaborates with well-known brands to create nostalgic novelty flavours (at designer prices) for which customers queue round the block. This year the flavours skew toward roast dinners, and include Oxo (which I couldn’t try, being vegetarian) and Paxo. It tastes exactly like the stuffing … which isn’t really what I want from an ice-cream. Taste 1/10, Value 1/10, Originality 7/10

Esperanto had always seemed to me like an idealistic movement that had failed. So why was its annual congress so vibrant and full of young people?

• The summer issue of the Long Read magazine is out now. Click here to order

One day, as a 16-year-old in the late 2000s, I received an AOL instant message from my friend Kenyon. He wanted to know whether I had heard of Esperanto, the universal language. Kenyon was several years older than me, and something of a mentor. Like me, he was a musician – he engineered my teenage band’s first record – but unlike me, he had a head full of trivia that made him the confidently nerdy star of any Saturday-night gathering of outcasts. His pitch: Esperanto was invented in the late 19th century by a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist named LL Zamenhof, who aimed to create a language so irresistibly easy to learn that it would be adopted as a shared second tongue by people the world over. From a position of mutual understanding, world peace would surely follow. Yes, the language had been around for well over 100 years and, yes, universal fellowship had yet to be achieved. But the internet had inaugurated a new era of global connectivity, and users could learn through an abundance of online classes. Perhaps we were on the verge of an Esperanto renaissance. Kenyon had been practising for a few years and was practically flua.

As a typical adolescent, I was in the midst of my own social awakening. I had begun to travel the US playing music, relying on nothing but the hospitality of friends of friends of friends. I was finding communion and what felt like boundless possibility in mass bike rides and sweaty dance parties in derelict churches. I was also dabbling in the world of hitchhiking and freight-train-hopping, visiting new places by exploiting the only slightly off-limits mechanisms of our industrialised society. Goods needed to move, and I could move with them, thanks to the kindness of those who showed me the ropes just because I wanted to learn. Esperanto seemed comparable: another disparate social club with a baked-in rejection of the forces, writ large and ill-defined, that sought to divide us. But even then, its goals felt redundant: the internet had already given me new tools to communicate across distance and difference. Simple as it might be to learn the language, why bother?

Activists under threat from Beijing are facing strange difficulties with UK immigration. Our safety must not be traded for warmer relations with China

• Nathan Law is a pro-democracy activist and former legislator from Hong Kong. He is currently a political refugee in the UK

As authoritarian countries such as Russia, China and Iran are more active in engaging in long-arm strategies to silence their critics in the UK, transnational repression is garnering more attention. It is right that the Metropolitan police and other British law enforcement agencies have specific units and mechanisms to counter it. But it takes more than just confronting this long-distance repression to make political dissidents of these authoritarian countries feel safe in the UK, and the UK government is not living up to expectations.

The threat is real. Members of the Hongkonger community have received threats from the Chinese regime – some have had threatening letters, some people were deepfaked into sexual content, some even had families questioned and arrested back home. With the level of this targeting linked to the deterioration of Hong Kong politics, many have utilised the humanitarian pathway enabled by the previous government to relocate.

Netflix documentary A Child of My Own tells the stranger-than-fiction story of a hospital worker who went to extreme lengths in her efforts to become a mother. Its director recounts their meetings in a Mexican prison

The CCTV footage of the hospital corridor is grainy but you can make out a young woman carrying an oversized gift bag. Nothing unusual there. Except that inside the bag is a newborn baby girl, just hours old. And the woman carrying the bag, walking out of the hospital’s main entrance, past two security guards who are idly chatting, is not the baby’s mother.

Her name is Eleonor Alejandra Marín Mendoza, known to everyone as Alejandra. When film-maker Maite Alberdi met her in a low-security Mexican prison, Alejandra was in the final year of a 13-year jail sentence for snatching the baby. Alberdi listened rapt as Alejandra told her story: “Everything she was telling me was extraordinary, stranger than fiction.”

Met officers issue a final appeal for information as they seek a breakthrough in hunt for missing London estate agent

Det Ch Insp Teresa Foster, who leads the Metropolitan police’s cold case homicide team, first heard about the disappearance of the London estate agent Suzy Lamplugh when she was 12 years old watching the TV news at home in the small New Zealand town where she grew up.

“It was a huge story,” she said, recalling how the unsolved case attracted global attention in 1986. “It was shocking.” Foster later emigrated to the UK and four decades on is making a final appeal for information that could lead to the discovery of Lamplugh’s body and bring closure for her family.

In normal times the Mashala shelter founder takes in strays, but in wartime, he is the only lifeline for animals in the area

During Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah, Houssein Hamze woke up one night to the sound of barking. Alarmed, he got up to check on the dog – his first rescue pet. Moments later, a bomb dropped next to his home and a piece of shrapnel landed right where he had been sleeping.

“I swear to God, he really saved me from death. Animals always possess a sixth sense we don’t have,” Hamze said.

Suffolk police ceded investigation into James Loubeau to the US military, leading to court martial acquittal

A US airman accused of a “spree” of rapes and sexual assaults in England, drugging some women and breaking into the homes of others, was able to avoid British justice after local police handed over part of the case to the American military.

Two British women went to Suffolk police in August 2019 to allege that James Loubeau and another US airman had drugged and raped them after they met in a nightclub in Bury St Edmunds, a local market town.

The Conservative party leader said that Labour’s plan allows for too many serious offenders to be freed early

Alan Milburn, the former Labour cabinet minister, is carrying out a government review intended to address the crisis of the growing number of Neets – young people not in education, employment or training. His first report, analysing the causes of the problem, was published in May to wide acclaim. He is due to publish a final report with recommendations in the autumn.

The plan announced by Andy Burnham today for more localised, technical education is not just a response to the Neets problem. But it overlaps with what Milburn is recommending, and in a statement Milburn said:

The changes the PM is announcing today are very welcome. They are a big step in the right direction and consistent with the findings of my review. A whole system reset is needed across health, welfare and labour market policy as well as in education and skills. I know the PM recognises this and my final report will outline the further changes that are needed.

Obviously, the trend is rising at the moment, so first thing I’ve got to do is to stop that rise.

It’s hard to say and put a firm date on it at the moment when you can say there are fewer than now, but certainly I am completely on a mission with relation to this. I cannot accept the situation where we have so many young people in their 20s on benefits. It’s just not right for them.

It would be wrong to blame the young people when we have an education system that doesn’t set them up properly, where some struggle to find opportunities at 16, where work experience and work placements aren’t there for them. We’ve got to put those building blocks in place, and then, in time, that number will come down.

And I will commit, in my time in office, to get the number of young people who are not in education, employment, and training down. I will commit to that. When precisely I can get there is a hard thing to say right now.

We know that the situation with prisons is challenging. When we were in government, we saw the challenge. We created 14,000 new prison places – it was nowhere near enough.

We had a prison-building target in our manifesto. Covid derailed that programme.

We also had early release but not like this. We never had this category of prisoners being released. We never had killers, rapists, paedophiles on early release. That is what I want to stop.

If Andy Burnham wants to prove that he is serious about this, he needs to revoke the commencement order [the regulation saying the Sentencing Act measures will come into force on 2 September]. That is a simple action that I’m asking for today.

It’s quite clear that the prime minister sees that this is a problem, but I don’t think he knows what to do about it.

Emmanuel Macron warns that ‘we have to hold out’ as fires burn near city; Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez warns of ‘difficult hours’ ahead

• France and Spain race to contain huge wildfires before fresh heatwave begins

But it’s not all good news: up to 4,000 people have been evacuated from campsites in Lacanau near Bordeaux in south western France as part of a “precautionary” move.

“Due to weather conditions (heatwave) and to facilitate emergency operations, the Prefect has ordered the preventive evacuation of campsites in Lacanau, as well as group tourist residences and holiday villages,” the Lacanau town hall said on its Facebook.

Unions say basic needs still not being met a year after regulator told operators to improve facilities

Train drivers are considering strike action over a lack of toilets, with unions saying basic needs are still not addressed a year after the rail regulator told operators to provide more facilities and breaks.

Aslef said it was “putting the industry on notice”. The train drivers’ union added that companies had failed to deliver adequate toilets and reduce maximum driving times without a toilet break.