Whether in streets draped in anti-drone nets or deep in urban basements, Kherson residents go about their everyday activities with the constant threat of Russian bombing

Galyna Lutsenko, a crisis psychologist, is moving busily among a small group of children seated around a table in a basement in Kherson, unique in being Ukraine’s only leading city almost directly on the frontline with Russian forces – and one where people live with the daily threat of attack.

She dangles a plasticine butterfly on a thread over a playhouse on the table. Her own house in the city, she says, was hit by Russian shelling in 2024, injuring her in the leg and stomach.

She’s gone from ‘queen of the soaps’ to Loose Woman known for her outspoken opinions and rockstar son Matty Healy. Now sober, she is enjoying another reinvention

Denise Welch doesn’t seem the kind of woman who would turn up with an entourage. But here she is having her hair primped in a makeshift changing room by two people. One tickling her fringe, the other tweaking her tufts. Blimey, I say, have you got two assistants? She grins. “No. There are three.” And now it turns out she’s got a fourth. I offer to make her a cup of coffee. She warns me she’s fussy. “Three teaspoons of Coffee-Mate, please.”

Welch is having a moment. She calls it, with a fabulously camp flourish, her renaissance. The actor and Loose Women regular has hardly been invisible in recent years. But this is on another level. For most of the 2000s, she has been best known for dishing out blithe opinions about anything and everything, and being the mother of the 1975’s frontman, Matty Healy. Now, though, it’s the acting that’s getting the attention. Earlier this month, she returned to the drama series Waterloo Road as the hopeless French teacher Steph Haydock after a 15‑year absence. This time around, she’s a supply teacher and is even more hopeless. Welch has also got parts in the new Russell T Davies drama series Tip Toe, the Josh Pugh sitcom Stepping Up, both on Channel 4, and the adaptation of Graham Norton’s novel Forever Home.

You’re already doing all the right things for your premenstrual dysphoric disorder, but perhaps it’s time to ask others for more help

I’m 32, and was recently diagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), though I suspect I have had it for around five years. It severely affects every area of my life.

For 10 days every month I become irritable and impatient, and have debilitating brain fog. At my worst, I am depressed, with uncontrollable crying and suicidal ideation. I go to weekly therapy sessions, take a variety of supplements, and live a healthy lifestyle – exercise, minimal alcohol, eating well, etc, but all these habits become almost impossible during my luteal phase after ovulation and I feel as though I am completely stuck.

Plaintiffs in case say they were lured from Japan, exploited for labour and cut off from families for generations

It has been more than six decades since Eiko Kawasaki left Japan to begin a new life in North Korea. Then 17, she was among tens of thousands of people with Korean heritage who had been lured to the communist state by the promise of a “paradise on Earth”.

Instead, they encountered something closer to a living hell. They were denied basic human rights and forced to endure extreme hardship. Official promises of free education and healthcare plus guaranteed jobs and housing had been a cruel mirage. And to their horror, they were prevented from travelling to Japan to visit the families they had left behind.

The Doomsday Clock is ticking ever more loudly as arms-control mechanisms fail and leaders become more reckless. The time to be alarmed is now

Keir Starmer’s tentative pivot to the Dragon Throne has played well in Beijing, though not in Trumpland. That’s partly because, like other needy western leaders, Britain’s prime minister did not dwell on awkward subjects such as human rights abuses, the Jimmy Lai travesty, spying and Taiwan. But in talks with President Xi Jinping, one vital issue was avoided altogether and should not have been: China’s dangerous, unexplained, secretive and rapid buildup of nuclear weapons.

More than the climate crisis, global hunger, Kaiser Trump’s Prussian militarism and the ever prevalent threat of pandemic disease, the uncontrolled proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is the most immediate, existential threat to humanity. Last week, the Doomsday Clock advanced to 85 seconds to midnight – closer to Armageddon than ever before. “Nuclear and other global risks are escalating fast and in unprecedented ways,” warned the clock-watchers, via the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Five years after the junta’s coup, the civil war devastating Myanmar has reached a turning point. The military is carrying out large-scale counter-offensives across the country to reclaim territory seized by pro-democracy rebels of various ethnic and religious backgrounds

In Tanintharyi, the southernmost region of Myanmar, the local resistance has managed to contain the military. After five years of guerrilla warfare, the revolutionary youth there remain determined to restore democracy through armed struggle.

A long, narrow stretch of land at the southern tip of Myanmar, between the Andaman Sea to the west and Thailand to the east, Tanintharyi region is one of the areas where the resistance challenges the military’s authority. For decades, the region has been home to an armed rebellion led by the Karen ethnic minority, which operated mainly in the peripheral mountains.

Soldiers from the Karen National Union (KNU) inspect the ruins of a Buddhist monastery destroyed by a junta airstrike in Myeik district, Tanintharyi region

Andrew Mounbatten-Windsor features heavily in the latest tranche of the Epstein files, released on Friday by the US justice department

We can bring you more from the interview with housing secretary Steve Reed on Sky News’ Trevor Phillips programme this morning (see this post for what Reed said about Peter Mandelson in the same interview).

When asked if the British government would comply with an extradition request from the US if there was a charge brought against Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Reed said he could not answer that question as it was an “entirely hypothetical” one.

Pressure mounts after government said it would publish names of those killed during recent unrest

Calls are growing inside Iran for an independent inquiry into the number of people killed during recent protests after the government said it would oversee the publication of the names of the deceased.

The highly unusual government move, announced on Thursday, is designed to head off claims that crimes against humanity have been committed and that as many as 30,000 Iranians have been killed. Iran’s official death toll released by the Martyr’s Foundation is 3,117, including members of the security services.

Late singer said kids loved his personality and wanted to touch and hug him, and ‘sometimes it got me into trouble’

As Michael Jackson saw it, children would become enamored with his personality as well as want to touch and hug him – and “sometimes it [got] me into trouble,” the late US pop superstar says in previously unheard audio recordings contained in a new documentary.

The UK’s Wonderhood Studios included the recordings of Jackson voicing those thoughts for a new four-episode documentary series beginning on Wednesday that explores his acquittal on child sexual abuse charges after a 14-week criminal trial near Los Angeles in 2005.

Networks created after police killed George Floyd were reactivated to challenge Trump’s mass deportation policy

Cory never expected he’d spend hours each day driving around after immigration agents, videotaping their moves. The south Minneapolis resident is “not the type of person to do this”, he said.

The dangers of what he’s doing, even after the killings of two observers, largely stay out of his mind when he’s watching Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents – even when he’s gotten hit with pepper spray. In quieter moments, it occurs to him that agents likely know where he lives. Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old whom agents killed while he was filming them, “100% could have been me”, Cory said.