The right is unafraid to show its might on the world stage – meanwhile the prime minister is tinkering with potholes. That just about sums up the centre-left

Last weekend, as the world wondered whether Donald Trump would swipe Greenland, Keir Starmer made his own big geographic intervention: he published a map of which councils were fixing potholes.

Yes, potholes. Yes, a map. Barely 18 months into office, with crucial elections just ahead and his party lagging behind the ragtag troops of Nigel Farage and even Kemi Badenoch, this was how Team Starmer kicked off 2026. To be fair, as the young people say, the map is colour-coded.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

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I’d love to claim the Hand & Heart in Nottingham taught me something profound – but it was mostly about bankrolling free rounds

When I was a teenager, before Tripadvisor, pubs lived as mental notes rather than star ratings. There was the one where – exactly like that scene in The Inbetweeners – we realised they’d serve us a pint at 16 if we ordered some food (one shared plate of chips). There was the one you might get lucky in on Christmas Eve; the one you’d take a girl to, to impress her with the romantic views; and the one that only served cider in halves because it was so brain cell-poppingly strong – a pub best tackled before a bank holiday Monday, known colloquially as “Super Cider Sunday”, when you still had a few brain cells to spare.

Hamnet and H Is for Hawk fuse themes of loss, birds and elemental female emotion. But whose fault is it if you remain dry-eyed?

‘Is it porn or is it art?” A familiar, even dated question where nudity is involved, and (forgive thumbnail) pretty well-resolved– which is to say: we let the tastemakers decide, and it tips the scale towards “art” if one or both protagonists are not that good-looking.

“Is it grief-porn or is it grief-art?” is a more vexed question. Grief-porn, in relation to cinema, would suggest that the film in question is emotionally manipulative, formulaic; grief-art would suggest the film unleashes feelings both universal and true.

This week’s furore is microplastics researchers’ ozone moment. If they fail, the powerful plastics lobby will step into the breach

• Debora MacKenzie is a science journalist and author of Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

Are we being injured and killed by ubiquitous, teeny-tiny shards of toxic plastic? Or aren’t we? For many months, the Guardian has reported a series of worrying scientific results that our bodies are full of jagged microplastic particles that could be giving us everything from heart attacks to reproductive problems.

But on Tuesday, the Guardian revealed that a significant number of scientists think many of these studies showed no such thing. Or maybe they did. The methods are new and riddled with problems, so we can’t always reliably tell.

Debora MacKenzie is a science journalist and author of Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

An appetite for self-destruction left Dave Vanian, Captain Sensible and Rat Scabies hugely influential but financially insecure. They’re back with a big show and their first album together since 1995

‘There isn’t one songwriter, and so the flavour of the band is always going to change,” says Dave Vanian, reflecting on 50 years of the group of which he has been the sole constant member, the Damned. “Captain Sensible is a great fan of syrupy pop music and prog and glam rock. So his writing is very poppy, melodic and quite wonderful. My writing is more melodramatic, more theatrical. And Rat Scabies was a mod who really loved bands like the Who. That melting pot would either not work at all, or be an absolute firecracker.” As the history of the Damned attests, it has, on occasion, been both.

There have been three break-ups: in the late 70s, late 80s and early 90s; Sensible and Scabies have had repeated spells out of the band; Scabies only started working with them again in 2022, after 27 years away. “The rift was really between him and Captain,” says Vanian, though at one time or another, it seems as though each of the three principals has been in a relationship-ending rage with one or both of the others.

The campaign by ‘Candidate Vieira’ mirrors the country’s growing anti-establishment sentiment

In Lisbon’s Campo de Ourique market earlier this week, conversation had turned – a little inevitably – to Sunday’s presidential election, which will decide who will take over from the outgoing Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.

But amid the usual claims and counter-claims, promises and pledges, one candidate has been offering voters something a bit more enticing than his competitors.

Badenoch said ‘Nigel Farage is doing my spring cleaning for me’ by ‘taking away my problems’

• ‘Not so clever after all’: how Jenrick was ejected before he defected

Kemi Badenoch said Robert Jenrick is now “Nigel Farage’s problem” and that he creates “instability” wherever he goes.

The Conservative party leader told the Press Association that Tories who supported Jenrick feel “betrayed” he has joined Reform UK.

Absolutely, he’s Nigel Farage’s problem. Now he and his acolytes are people who create instability wherever they go, and they can go do that in Reform.

They are a party that is just about people who want drama and intrigue - the public, quite frankly, are sick of this.

Trump heaped praise on the Venezuelan opposition leader for presenting him with ‘her Nobel peace prize for the work I have done’

The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has presented her gold Nobel peace prize medal to Donald Trump after meeting him in the White House, nearly a fortnight after he ordered the abduction of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro.

Machado, who received the award last year for her struggle against Maduro’s “brutal, authoritarian state”, told reporters on Thursday she had done so “in recognition [of] his unique commitment [to] our freedom”.

Despite restrictions announced this week, Guardian reporters find standalone app continues to allow posting of nonconsensual content

X has continued to allow users to post highly sexualised videos of women in bikinis generated by its AI tool Grok, despite the company’s claim to have cracked down on misuse.

The Guardian was able to create short videos of people stripping to bikinis from photographs of fully clothed, real women. It was also possible to post this adult content on to X’s public platform without any sign of it being moderated, meaning the clip could be viewed within seconds by anyone with an account.

Pair will be absent ‘for short period’ from vocational trainer, whose charity is under investigation by Charity Commission

The two most senior executives at City & Guilds have been put on leave shortly after a scandal over millions of pounds of bonuses triggered a Charity Commission investigation into the vocational training body.

City & Guilds has told staff that its chief executive, Kirstie Donnelly, and the chief financial officer, Abid Ismail, will be “absent from work for a short period”.