Scientists believe they may now have found the cause of Fair Isle’s pollution – and warn that it should be ringing alarm bells in other coastal areas

When the wind picks up on Fair Isle, Britain’s most remote inhabited island, puffs of seafoam start to drift across fields like tumbleweed. The pale yellow blobs are ubiquitous enough to hold their own place in the island’s mythology: known as the butter churned by a local troll, Lukki Minni.

“When the Atlantic gets going, foam covers the whole island,” says Tommy Hyndman, an artist who moved to the Fair Isle from upstate New York two decades ago. “Your windows get caked and your plants all die from the salt.”

In the 1990s, there were hundreds of authentic balti restaurants in the English city. Now, there are about 20. Will a big campaign bring back the boom times?

‘Curry might have come from India, but balti was born in Birmingham,” says Zaf Hussain. The 40-year-old’s family business, Shababs, has been on this site on the bustling Ladypool Road in south-east Birmingham since his father opened it in 1987. Settled in between the Indian sweet shops and south Asian bridal boutiques, Shababs is one of the last remaining restaurants in the city that still makes an authentic balti curry – a dish that, if Hussain and other campaigners have their way, could be officially certified as an element of Britain’s living heritage inventory, a preservation scheme established in 2025 by Unesco and the British government.

The problem, says Hussain, is that “people don’t know what the real thing is any more”. True balti, he says, is all about “the bowl in which it’s cooked and served”. The dish is cooked in a steel bowl on a high heat and served straight away, sizzling on the table for the customer. “Lots of people say they do balti, but they actually cook it in a frying pan before dumping it into a bowl,” says Hussain. “The proper thing is fast and it’s very flavoursome.” Balti has become a catch-all term for anything vaguely resembling curry flavour, from curry-flavoured snacks to mass-produced bottled sauces.

Finally, Labour is talking policy, thanks to the leadership contest and Tony Blair’s intervention – and the centre-right is making a much-needed fightback too

“Wouldn’t it be great if Tony Blair kept his mouth shut about the Labour party?” Readers may have cheered that Guardian letter-writer’s response to yet another infuriating assault by Blair from the outer-stratosphere of nowhere. Isn’t Labour in enough trouble with a life-or-death byelection against the forces of darkness without incoming fire from its former leader?

Actually, no. His intentions may not have been benign, but Blair does Labour and national politics a favour, prising open the political omertà preventing serious discussion within parties. There can’t be a new prime minister installed without an honest reckoning of the precarious state of the nation.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Richard Gadd’s follow-up to Baby Reindeer is a relentlessly punishing look at characters being crushed by the unending horror of their lives. At times, it feels like it was made by emo teens

If you look up Baby Reindeer on Netflix, you’ll find it categorised as a comedy series. This may come as news to anyone who has actually seen it, because they might have been labouring under the delusion that it was a terror-filled rolling panic attack of a show, sitting somewhere between psychological thriller and all-out horror.

But the initial labelling makes some level of sense. Richard Gadd was a comedian and Baby Reindeer was based on his Edinburgh show of the same name. Plus, what could be cuter than a baby reindeer? It would be very simple to infer some level of comedy from the description.

It’s natural to focus on breakthroughs, but there are many challenges in Britain and around the world. There is no magic bullet, but there’s room for optimism

Cancer causes nearly one in six deaths worldwide every year, some 10 million all told. That is a stunning number, but it also masks the reality that some cancers are more deadly than others. We have become remarkably good at detecting and treating melanoma and prostate cancer, for example, and today five-year survival rates for those cancers are well over 90% in most rich countries. Others, such as pancreatic cancer, are more difficult. In the UK, just over one in 20 people with pancreatic cancer are still alive five years after diagnosis.

That is why a new drug for pancreatic cancer, called daraxonrasib and announced at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (Asco) annual meeting in Chicago at the weekend, has been met with such jubilation. The drug – taken as a pill once a day – doubled the survival time of those enrolled in a 500-person trial, with fewer side effects compared to traditional chemotherapy. The drug works by shutting down a protein, Kras, that causes cancer cells to grow and divide. One longtime cancer researcher reported that she cried reading the results. With so few effective treatments for this cancer available, the drug is likely to be a real game-changer.

For tens of thousands of years, these Palaeolithic artworks were unseen. When they were rediscovered, onlookers marvelled at their vivid beauty. One of the world’s leading experts took me up close

The aurochs, the mammoth and the steppe bison are long extinct, but their painted likenesses still look relatively fresh across the walls and roofs of Altamira. Or so said Diego Garate Maidagan, who is one of the very few humans allowed to enter that exalted cave in northern Spain.

I met Garate last summer in a small Basque village called Gautegiz Arteaga. A professor of prehistory and Palaeolithic art at the University of Cantabria, he told me he’d been inside Altamira as recently as the week before, furthering his lifelong investigations of the prep work, tools and methodologies developed by early Homo sapiens painters.

Office to look at 21-year minimum term as Hampshire police and crime commissioner calls for review of religious knife laws

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The attorney general’s office is considering whether the sentence given to a man jailed for murdering Henry Nowak should be reviewed, as the killer’s family apologised to the teenager’s relatives and the Sikh community.

Vickrum Digwa, 23, was sentenced on Monday to life in prison with a minimum term of 21 years for the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak.

Items bought by former chief executive included more than £23,000 from a luxury stationery brand and a £3,000 robotic lawnmower

BBC Scotland has more details of the Peter Murrell hearing this morning on its live blog. And, on its live blog, Sky News has pictures of some of the items purchased by Murrell with stolen SNP funds.

Andy Burnham will not call an early election if he becomes prime minister after the Makerfield byelection, a spokesperson for the Greater Manchester mayor has said.

Three studies add to evidence that jabs could be part of cancer-fighting toolkit to cut risk of developing or dying from disease

Weight-loss drugs can cut the risk of developing or dying from cancer by 30%, doctors have said.

Millions of people already use the drugs to treat obesity. Now a series of studies presented at the world’s largest oncology conference suggest the drugs could play a role in preventing and treating cancer.

Nick Thomas-Symonds defends ‘embarrassing’ Whatsapp messages between Pat McFadden and Mandelson

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Labour MPs are not looking to raise taxes to fund more benefits, the Cabinet Office minister Nick Thomas-Symonds has said.

In messages between the work and pensions secretary, Pat McFadden, and Peter Mandelson released on Monday, McFadden wrote: “Every meeting I have is: ‘Who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others?’ They’re asking the wrong questions.”