When he saw a messy yard being criticised on social media, Stephen Jalland grabbed his trimmer and decided to help. An overgrown garden, he discovered, often hides an overwhelmed owner

Anita Thursby had been dreading the gas engineer coming to service her boiler. They would have needed to enter her kitchen, where the window looked into the jungle of swirling, 2-metre-high brambles that made up her back garden, and her shame had spiralled. “I would have been horrified,” she says. For the same reason, the 54-year-old had stopped inviting friends over to her house and had been living in fear of a complaint from her housing association.

Maintaining the garden had slipped from her grasp, becoming a source of constant worry, yet pride had stopped her asking for help – and tight finances from paying for it. Family barbecues had become a distant memory, even though she longed to have her 83-year-old mother round to sit in the sun; weeks ago, she bought a grill in Tesco with little hope of ever using it.

Whether you’re commuting, training or riding for fun, we asked specialists to break down what to know before you buy – from specs and safety to price

• The best bike locks for every budget

For me, cycling is therapy. It’s calming, meditative and uncomplicated. But there’s a catch. To experience the simple joy of riding a bike, you first have to navigate the maddeningly complex process of buying one.

Make no mistake: this is not a straightforward case of marching into Halfords, saying, “One bike, please!” and leaving with a shiny new steed. But, while complicated, it needn’t be stressful.

Given the size and age of the universe, it should be full of species with technology far more advanced than our own. So where are they?

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

During a visit to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1950, Enrico Fermi, one of the architects of the Manhattan Project, was having lunch with other physicists when the conversation turned to flying saucers. At one point during the discussion, Fermi blurted out: “Where is everybody?” – or, as another participant remembered it, “Don’t you ever wonder where everybody is?” If aliens exist, in other words, why have we never encountered them?

The episode has become famous, marking the moment when extraterrestrial life went from a theme for philosophical speculation to a serious scientific problem. For centuries, people had wondered whether life exists on the moon or Mars, but they accepted that we would never know for certain, since making contact with another planet was impossible. By the 1950s, those limits no longer seemed so fixed. In addition to space flight, researchers were developing tools to detect the radio signals that reach us from stars many light years away. These developments were still in their infancy, but it was already clear that humanity was no longer bound to Earth the way it always had been.

Our cartoonist welcomes the EFL back, with returning characters and a look at what it’s like as an exiled supporter

• Buy a cartoon | Some of David’s favourite works

• And his latest book, Chaos in the Box: get it now

Moon is due to pass directly between Earth and sun on Wednesday 12 August. Here’s all you need to know

On Wednesday evening, millions of Europeans will experience a celestial treat: a solar eclipse. A wide band of north and central Spain, plus a sliver of Portugal and parts of Greenland and Iceland will experience a rare total eclipse. The light of the setting sun will be virtually blocked out across much of western Europe, including the UK, France, Belgium, Switzerland and northern Italy.

Here’s what you need to know:

In the five years since the Taliban’s return to power, the walls have been closing in on the women and girls of Afghanistan.

As the regime has tightened its grip, it has banned girls from education after the age of 12, ejected many women from the workplace and created legal frameworks for child marriage and husbands beating their wives. Taliban rule has ushered in a new era of women being whipped for minor infractions and constant inspections by ‘vice and morality’ officials, with men compelled to become enforcers in their own homes. Even the borders of the online world have been creeping inward, with a new spate of smartphone bans and internet restrictions.

Marking the grim anniversary, a dozen women and girls have, at great risk to their safety, documented their lives for the world to see

Herat province
Every day, I wake up to the silence of dawn. I feel as though I am still holding my weapon. I lie on my bed for a few moments, taking deep breaths. With every awakening, I make a promise to myself: if my husband manages to return home safely today, I will thank God even more.

Prime minister says he has asked justice secretary to push through measures to increase the number of prison places

Andy Burnham has said he is increasingly confident he can adapt the early release scheme for prisoners to exclude the killers of PC Andrew Harper and other serious offenders, saying he understood and shared the public’s concern about their potential release.

Writing on Facebook, the prime minister said on Tuesday he had asked the justice secretary, Alex Norris, to rapidly push through a series of measures to increase the number of prison places, requiring fewer people to be released early to free up room.

Supply in nine blocks in Tower Hamlets affected with some residents suspecting nearby building developments

• They cannot even flush their toilets: life in east London blocks where taps often run dry

Hundreds of residents in blocks of flats in east London have been left without regular running water for more than seven months after development in the area may have left it without an adequate supply.

Taps have been running dry in nine blocks in Tower Hamlets, where residents have been forced to use bottled water while their landlord, the housing association Poplar Harca, delayed works to solve the problem.

Met Office says this warning will likely cause ‘adverse’ health effects with travel and power generation also possibly affected

The Guardian’s environment editor, Fiona Harvey, has written a useful explainer about the UK public services that are struggling in the extreme weather. You can read it in full here:

There’s only one solution in the end to the drought now declared across most of England and that’s rain, says Hannah Cloke, professor of hydrology at the University of Reading.

An important consequence of drought is that very dry soils can become less able to absorb rainfall when it does arrive. This can increase surface runoff and can even contribute to localised flash flooding, particularly if rain falls intensely over a short period.

The current situation highlights the need to improve long-term resilience to both drought and flood risk as climate variability increases, and shows one more damaging impact of the burning of fossil fuels.

José Manuel Albares visited Ceuta earlier as he insisted that Madrid had it all under control

Spanish foreign minister José Manuel Albares visited Ceuta earlier today, as he insisted that Madrid had it all under control despite “the most unique and complex” border arrangements there.

He said Spain was in direct dialogue with the Moroccan authorities on how to prevent another border crisis.