Israelas military has called for people to evacuate eastern neighbourhoods of Rafah and head to what it claimed was an aexpanded humanitarian zonea in southern Gaza

• Follow all our coverage of the Israel-Gaza war

An anonymous Israeli official with knowledge of the ceasefire negotiations has told the New York Times that the two sides were close to a deal a couple of days ago but that comments by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu about Rafah pushed Hamas to harden its demands in a bid to protect the city from an Israeli ground invasion.

On Tuesday Netanyahu vowed that Israel would proceed with an offensive on the southern city even if renewed efforts at internationally brokered talks with Hamas result in the release of hostages and a ceasefire.

The idea that we will halt the war before achieving all of its goals is out of the question. We will enter Rafah and we will eliminate the Hamas battalions there a with or without a deal, in order to achieve total victory.

British ambassador is summoned and told that installations and equipment in Ukraine and elsewhere could be targeted

The British ambassador to Moscow, Nigel Casey, was summoned to the Russian foreign ministry, Russian state agency RIA reported on Monday. Reuters said the ministry did not give the reason but there is speculation that it is linked to statements made last week by the foreign secretary, David Cameron, saying he had no issue with British-supplied weapons being used by Ukraine to strike inside Russia.

It comes as Russia has cited statements by the west as justification for upcoming nuclear weapons drills.

New leader says he will focus on athe economy, jobs, the cost of livinga but does say he will seek to persuade people on the case for independence

Labour has marked the anniversary of the Conservatives re-entering government at the 2010 election by launching a what the opposition have called aConflixa website [geddit?] that mockingly tells the story of a14 years of Tory chaosa

The partyas chair, Anneliese Dodds, was challenged about the site on Sky News this morning and whether the party was relying on astuntsa rather than policy proposals. She insisted that the adetail of policya was there, in the form of initiatives like GB Energy.

Exclusive: Analysis of NHS England figures highlights structural inequalities and cultural attitudes to mental health, expert says

• aStark disparitiesa: why black mothers are more at risk of perinatal mental illness in England

Black mothers are over twice as likely to be admitted to hospital with perinatal mental illnesses than their white counterparts, a Guardian analysis of NHS figures shows, with the racial disparity being described as ahorrifyinga.

There were 777 admissions to NHS England hospitals of people with a primary diagnosis for puerperal mental disorders a occurring in the six weeks after childbirth a between 2020 and 2023. Of these, black women made up 12%, despite accounting for only 5% of deliveries in the same period. They were also more than twice as likely to be admitted to hospital than their white counterparts, according to the analysis.

Downpours may cause flooding and travel disruption across much of the country on bank holiday Monday

Bank holiday plans for many could be ruined after forecasters warned thunderstorms and heavy downpours could cause flooding and travel disruption across the UK.

The Met Office issued yellow weather warnings for parts of central and southern Scotland, Wales and parts of England on Monday, warning that spray and sudden flooding could create difficult driving conditions.

Study suggests almost everyone with two copies of genetic variant ApoE4 goes on to develop disease

Having two copies of a gene variant known to predispose people to Alzheimeras could in fact represent a distinct genetic form of the disease, researchers have said.

The variant, known as ApoE4, has long been known to increase the risk of developing Alzheimeras, with two copies conferring greater risk than one.

Campaigner resolved to set up awareness charity after being told she had stage 4 cancer when she was 23

Kris Hallenga, the founder of the charity CoppaFeel!, which raises awareness of the importance of young women checking their breasts for early signs of cancer, has died aged 38 after being diagnosed with the disease 15 years ago.

The campaigner, from Cornwall, was 23 when she was given the news she had stage 4 cancer that had spread to her spine.

Judge holds Donald Trump in contempt again for violating gag order

• Trump trial to resume after teary testimony from key aide Hope Hicks

Hereas a look at judge Juan Merchanas latest criminal contempt order against Donald Trump, published just now. It cites the former presidentas social media attacks on the jury, and those he made in TV interviews:

This court finds that the People have established the elements of criminal contempt beyond a reasonable doubt. This courtas expanded order is lawful and unambiguous.

Defendant violated the order by making public statements about the jury and how it was selected. In doing so, defendant not only called into question the integrity, and therefore the legitimacy of these proceedings, but again raised the specter of fear for the safety of the jurors and of their loved ones.

Ministers say move will combat growing concerns about aprivacy and dignitya in gender-neutral facilities

• How the single-sex toilet law in England will work

New restaurants, offices and hospitals in England will be required to have separate male and female toilets, in a move ministers say will combat growing concerns about aprivacy and dignitya in gender-neutral facilities.

The law will mean newly built non-residential buildings require separate facilities, and cannot solely have auniversala lavatories.

Suspect subdued and arrested in incident captured on live stream, with man also found dead at would-be shooteras home

A Pennsylvania man tried to shoot a local pastor in the middle of a Sunday sermon, but the attackeras gun jammed, giving a congregant and the minister a chance to subdue him without anyone being hurt.

The harrowing encounter was caught on the churchas live stream before authorities found a man shot to death at the home of the pastoras would-be shooter, CBS News reported.

Poverty, discrimination, and cultural stigma around mental health are among reasons, experts say

• Black mothers twice as likely as white mothers to be hospitalised with perinatal mental illness

Perinatal mental illness affects more than a quarter (27%) of new and expectant mothers across England and covers a range of conditions including postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis. A Guardian analysis of NHS figures has shown that for instances of perinatal mental illness that result in hospital admissions, black patients are more than twice as likely to be admitted than their white counterparts.

Part of the reason why black mothers are more at risk of perinatal mental illness is because black people are more at risk of experiencing mental illness in general.

Much is at stake as Republicans and Democrats vote in the Super Tuesday primaries, and a Biden and Trump rematch looms

As a Joe Biden v Donald Trump rematch looms, much is at stake. From the future of reproductive rights to the chances of meaningful action on climate change, from the strength of US support for Ukraine in its war with Russia, and Israel in its war with Hamas, to the fate of US democracy itself, existential issues are firmly to the fore.

Hereas a look at why.

Ministers have proposed that many new non-domestic buildings must have separate facilities for men and women

Ministers have announced plans that new non-domestic buildings in England must have single-sex toilets. Here we explain how the new law would work and what has motivated it.

Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, and various Trump casinos have all failed a but has the ex-president finally found himself a winning product?

There was a time, not so long ago, that Donald Trump did not seem to be very familiar with the Bible.

When he first ran for the nomination of the very Christian Republican party, Trump was unable to name a single Bible verse. Early in his 2016 presidential campaign he referred to the eucharist as a alittle crackera. In a subsequent church visit, as he attempted to prove his religious credentials, he put cash in a plate that was meant to hold the communion.

This is it! The Fifteenth Doctor is here a and heas a dazzling, all-singing, all-dancing delight. If only Russell T Davies didnat spend so much time spoon-feeding new fans

Christmas specials donat count. Intermediate trilogies where David Tennant is the Fourteenth-and-a-Half Doctor or whatever donat count. The new era of Doctor Who, with Russell T Davies back as the showrunner and Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor, only really begins here, with the new season proper. The first double bill, comprising Space Babies and The Devilas Chord, points to a stellar future for Who as a youthfully chaotic playground of the imagination, far more fancy of foot and light of outlook than it has been for years. It only takes baby steps, for now, towards that new destination, but we can see it.

Gatwa establishes himself as a cracking Doctor immediately. What an obviously perfect piece of casting he is: commandingly hench in his colourful costumes, and naturally able to express the dazzling extremes the Doctor has to embody. He glowers, and the end of the world descends; a nanosecond later, he grins and weare having the most fun in the universe. Heas delightful, but heas also consciously more delighted than some of his predecessors, skipping and dancing and, on a few occasions here, doing a sideways gallop when he enters a room, like Kramer from Seinfeld with springs on his heels.

Playing unhinged head-butting Yosser Hughes in Boys from the Blackstuff made Hill a legend. But, from Titanic to The Lord of the Rings, his entire 50-year career was outstanding

Some time in 1980, on the first sheet of a script that would eventually run to 221 pages, Alan Bleasdale typed the line: We see Yosser with his three children. He is leaning forward.

When the jobcentre clerk explains he is aafraida he canat do anything, the pale-faced, dark-moustached man snaps: aAfraid? Yall be terrified in a minute. [Leans in.] Now sort me soddina Giro check out before I knock yainto the disability department.a

A year after coronation, firms that were under patronage of Queen Elizabeth II or former Prince of Wales reapply, while others get in on act

On first glance the list of prestigious brands reads like the wedding gift registry of a wealthy eccentric.

aSome kid had credited a column of life advice in the Chicago Tribune to the writer of Slaughterhouse-Five. It then spread on a new invention called the world wide web. I thought it would make a great spoken word songa

In 1997, my music supervisor Anton Monsted and I decided to make a charity album with remixes of songs from my films. I was working on a new version of Rozallaas rave banger Everybodyas Free (To Feel Good) that, for Romeo + Juliet, we had turned into an ecclesiastical song with vocals from Quindon Tarver and Kingas College Choir.

Around this time, a graduation speech apparently by Kurt Vonnegut offering life advice was spreading on a new invention called the world wide web. It was what we would now call viral a but it was also a hoax. Some kid had taken a column by a smart, respected columnist called Mary Schmich, who wrote for the Chicago Tribune, and instead credited it to the Slaughterhouse-Five author.

We thought it would make a great spoken word song. We found a voiceover artist, Lee Perry, to impersonate an imagined Vonnegut and spent a great deal of time getting it right, so that it felt naturally spoken and rhythmic.

Nurtured by Bernie Connell for almost a decade, the mollusc now weighs more than 3kg and is about to enter the record books

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Every so often, oyster farmer Bernie Connell comes across an unusually large specimen. He separates it from the rest of his crop, names it and lowers it back into the Clyde River at Batemans Bay, where he lets atender love and care and good watera do the rest.

Now almost 10 years old, Jill a an oyster that caught his eye nine years ago a weighs 3.01kg. That makes Jill Australiaas a and potentially the worldas a heaviest oyster, after it beat Big Boppa, at 2.44kg, and Keithy, 2.4kg, to win the title at Australiaas biggest oyster competition at the Narooma oyster festival on the New South Wales south coast on Saturday.

Emmanuel Macron and Viktor OrbA!n among leaders Xi is meeting, with several key issues on the table

Chinaas president, Xi Jinping, has begun a three-country tour of Europe a his first state visit to the continent in five years a at a time when China-EU ties are under strain from trade disputes and Russiaas war on Ukraine.

Physical and online abuse, detentions, deportations and sexual violence a a global crackdown on women in journalism is intensifying

Female journalists are at the aepicentre of riska as attacks on press freedom intensify around the world.

According to organisations representing women in journalism, the past year has seen an escalation of smear campaigns; racist and gendered attacks; detentions; deportations; censorship; and police violence levelled at female journalists, which is leading to a achillinga silencing of womenas voices in the media landscape.

At Columbia University I saw young people who feel they have no choice but to risk their futures

On a hot day last week, the pavements outside Columbia University were heaving. About 200 protesters were gathered, making a noise that was bigger than their numbers, raising pro-Palestine chants and signs. It was a disparate crowd, diverse across ethnicities and generations. aIave lived in this neighbourhood all my life,a said one of them when I asked him why he was there. One smiling elderly lady walked through the crowd offering small bottles of water. A helicopter circled overhead. The police who encircled the crowd were jittery, yelling at passersby to keep moving, and raising the temperature of what was a loud but perfectly orderly and amiable crowd.

Once inside the campus, I made my way to the reason for protesters, the police and the high security at the university gates: an encampment of students on a patch of lawn at the heart of campus. It had been up for about two weeks at this point, after a series of demands to university administrators, including divestment from acompanies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheida, were not met.

Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham won elections in areas with large Muslim populations. Both engaged with us as citizens

The local and mayoral elections saw many traditional Labour-voting Muslim voters abandon the party theyave loyally supported for decades.

One incident from one interview, and one sentiment in particular that I heard in my local area, sits front and centre: aI was disgusted when Keir Starmer supported Israelas collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza a how can I vote for someone who wonat even apologise for this?a said one man, referring to Starmeras performance in an interview on LBC last October and corroborated by a senior colleague that same week.

As a bloke, I have been met with disbelief and suspicion when Iave applied for part-time work. Didnat I realise this was womenas work?

The job I was applying for was three days a week. It was a backwards step, career-wise, but the hours were attractive. By that I mean that the roleas part-time nature would allow me to continue meeting my KPIs as majority parent.

I could keep up with all that important driving and shouting that comprises a career as primary caregiver a the constant shuttling from school to ballet to football to dentist and, more generally, the endless forcing of kids to do things that they will really enjoy.

Radical honesty isnat for the faint-hearted, but itas one of the greatest joys Iave ever discovered

I never used to think of myself as a liar. I always saw myself as an honest person. The only time Iad ever veer from the truth was to protect someoneas feelings. But that wasnat really lying, I would tell myself, it was an act of kindness!

And then I had a therapy session, where I realised that all of this was actually people-pleasing behaviour and it turned out I was a prolific liar. Not only that, but according to my therapist, by constantly hiding my true feelings to protect those I loved, I was blocking them from ever getting to know the real me and creating true intimacy.

Radhika Sanghani is a writer and author. Her childrenas book The Girl Who Couldnat Lie is published on 9 May

Cosmetic procedures are on the rise among younger people; Iam barely 30. Still this is about more than just clinging to youth

Everyone goes through it: a reckoning with oneas own mortality in the mirror, poking at eye bags and tugging at folds of loose skin. Am I looking a bit rough? Itas part of the human condition to fear ageing, but among millennials and gen Z there seems to be a heightened anxiety around growing older, coupled with an increasingly casual attitude towards getting fillers and Botox compared with previous generations.

Almost half of millennial women polled by the BBC in 2019 said they believed that having a cosmetic procedure was akin to having a haircut. I can say from experience that it is not. Like many, I have fallen victim to negative anti-ageing rhetoric. After months of staring at my tired face on Zoom calls during lockdown, I felt as if my hot years were slipping through my fingers. When the world opened up, I found a doctor to arestorea my hollowed out under-eyes with 1ml of filler. I was barely 28.

Georgina Lawton is the author of Raceless: In Search of Family, Identity and the Truth About Where I Belong

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Australian studio Aggro Crab has a hit on its hands a and behind all its jokes and excellent crustacean combat lies an uncomfortable truth about our world

The Arcane Kids, a video game collective from Los Angeles, have a manifesto that I think about all the time, but particularly when I find art that surprises me, or approaches traditional formats in new and exciting ways. The second line simply states: aThe fastest way to the truth is a joke.a Another Crabas Treasure, the second offering from indie Australian studio Aggro Crab, is full of truth and jokes a and something else, something rarer, too.

Another Crabas Treasure is ostensibly a combat-oriented adventure game, in which you play a tiny hermit crab whose shell has been stolen. You must explore the depths of the ocean to find a way to retrieve it from the Loan Shark, so you can return the wee crab to his peaceful life in the tide pools on the shore. Unexpectedly for such a welcoming, colourful-looking game, it has intense, complex, Dark Souls-style battling a and the juxtaposition is really refreshing. Our hero, Krill, may only be armed with a tiny fork, but with a little concentration and practice he can face down the enormous, grotesque crustaceans he comes up against time and time again.

After the local elections, the PM has a broken party and an unenviable destiny. He is now the fall guy for the Tory wipeout to come

How to react to unfolding calamity? Tory MPs took different approaches. aDisastrous. Worse than I expected and pointing to a total wipeout.a Thatas how one Conservative MP a and not one of the disaffected usual suspects a summed up the local election results to me as the gloom deepened on Saturday. Others preferred to focus on how football teams were doing.

Then there were some game attempts at spin a aLabour are tracking Cameron in 2009, ended up not getting a majority,a said one a but they were few and far between. After Andy Streetas defeat in the West Midlands, the last filigree traces of a silver lining vanished.

Critics might have fallen for Luca Guadagninoas erotic tennis romp but itas a vapid string of disappointing choices

I have spent the week and a half since seeing Challengers on the brink of throwing a racquet-trashing, expletive-scattering, McEnroe-style tantrum. Is Hawkeye working? Did they not see it? How, for an exhausting Mahut-Isner length of huffing and puffing, practically every single one of the wild swings taken by Luca Guadagninoas film missed its target and landed out by a country mile? Four-star reviews? Five-star reviews? Camon, fellow critics. You cannot be serious.

Some points I will concede as inarguable. The film is a box-office champion. And itas pure fire on the internet, a movie more memeable than even the sainted Saltburn. There are clear generational issues in play: I can see why excitable younger viewers, raised on a largely sexless cinema, have fallen so hard for the filmas sprayed-on sweat and forceful faux sophistication. Itas my senior-tour colleagues Iam staring at with hands on hips, wearing an expression of disbelief. The film theyave been politely applauding looks to me less a modern classic than another marker of American cinemaas ongoing infantilisation: a Muppet Babies redo of Jules and Jim.

Possibly some spectators were swayed by the spirit of indulgence fostered by the filmas on-screen umpire, handing out code violations as if they were candy. (In actual tennis, those breaches of court decorum have consequences: loss of whole games and matches. Not so in Luca-land.) Swallow those, and maybe youall also overlook how neither of the filmas male leads persuade as the whey-bulked jocks observed swaggering around Americaas secondary tennis circuits. Even at their most drained, Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh OaConnor) resemble the gauche nerds of a thousand other teen comedies, sniggering at their own witless masturbation stories.

Authoritarian governments are extending their pursuit of critics far beyond their borders

Forty-five years ago, the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was killed in London with a poison-tipped umbrella as he made his way home from work. The horrifying case transfixed the British public.

So transnational repression is not new, including on British shores. But unless its target is unusually high-profile, or it uses startling tactics such as those employed by Markovas killers a or in the attempt to assassinate Sergei Skripal a much of it passes with minimal attention.

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