The follow-up to Trainspotting sees Renton, Begbie and co settling down. The bestselling author explains why now is the perfect time for romance

I was born in the great port of Leith. Stories are in my blood; listening to them, telling them. My family were typical of many in the area, moving from tenement to council scheme, increasingly further down the Forth estuary. I was brought up in a close community. I left school with practically no qualifications. I tended towards the interesting kids, the troublemakers. All my own fault. I was always encouraged to be more scholarly by my parents, who valued education. But I left school and became an apprentice technician, doing a City & Guilds course. I hated it. I was always a writer: I just didn’t know it. I cite being crap at everything else in evidence.

It’s why I’ve never stopped writing stories about my youth and my go-to gang of characters from Trainspotting. Their reaction to events and changes in the world helps inform my own. They’ve been given substance by people I’ve met down the decades, from Leith pubs to Ibiza clubs.

A teacher in London and a student in Margate had differing views on feminism and intimacy outside of marriage – could they find some common ground over sex workers?

Jo, 38, London

Occupation Teacher

With the UK still shaking off the psychological side-effects of Covid, Rachel Reeves might want to broaden her aims

Every parent who battled their way through home schooling during the long months of lockdown, and every vulnerable person forced to shield themselves away, can have had little doubt that the Covid pandemic was an unhappy time.

But research by the non-profit consultancy Pro Bono Economics (PBE), suggests that the nation’s wellbeing has never fully recovered from the plunge it took in mid-2020.

A year ago the image of Trump’s raised fist became a political touchstone, helping force Joe Biden from the race and fuelling a presidency like no other

Blake Marnell was standing in the front row, about 10 yards from Donald Trump, when the shots rang out. He watched the Secret Service pile on the former US president. “I was able to see him standing and I could see the blood on his ear,” Marnell recalls. “When he put his fist up, I remember yelling, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’”

Sunday marks one year since the assassination attempt on Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and a week that changed US politics. Eight days later then-president Joe Biden, 81, dropped out of the election race amid concerns over his mental and physical decline.

From photo-editing apps to ‘Instagram face’, technology has radically altered the way we see ourselves. Ahead of a new exhibition at Somerset House, our critic considers the meaning of art in a digital age

It’s the artist Qualeasha Wood who tells me about Snapchat dysmorphia, “a term coined by plastic surgeons who noticed there was a shift in the mid 2010s when people started bringing in their AI-beautified portraits instead of a celebrity picture”. To resolve your Snapchat dysmorphia, you get your real face remodelled to look like the ideal version of you that artificial intelligence has perfected on your phone screen.

There is a fundamental problem with this, says Adam Lowe, whose Factum Foundation in Madrid is at the forefront of art and technology, digitally documenting artworks and cultural heritage sites around the world. When you have surgery to look like your best self as shown on a flat screen, the results in three-dimensional reality can be very odd indeed. You can feel Lowe’s sadness at the way plastic surgery botches human restoration in pursuit of screen perfection: “I have to look away,” he says.

The curators of shattered historical buildings near the eastern frontline are preserving wartime memories as they reconstruct their collections

The museum of local history in the eastern Ukrainian town of Izium has, like the community around it, endured much since Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country.

When Izium was bitterly fought over in early 2022 at the start of the Russian assault, the 19th-century building suffered two direct hits from missiles that blew out the roof and led to flood damage. Under occupation from March to September 2022, a Russian guard was posted on the door – but invaders never transported its collection any deeper behind Russian lines, or found the rare early 18th-century volume of the gospels – one of only three of its type – that museum workers had spirited away and hidden.

Exclusive: Party talks up sums that can be saved by cutting DEI jobs, but there are only a handful of such roles across the 10 councils it runs

Councils run by Reform UK have an average of fewer than 0.5 diversity and equality roles each, it has emerged, calling into question the party’s stated aim to save significant sums of money by cutting such jobs.

According to freedom of information requests, across the 10 Reform-run English councils there was a combined 4.56 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs connected to equality and diversity, not including roles required by law such as those for inclusion in education, including for pupils with disabilities.

Previously, the only way to reduce levels of Pfas was by bloodletting or a drug with unpleasant side effects

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Certain kinds of gut microbes absorb toxic Pfas “forever chemicals” and help expel them from the body via feces, new first-of-its-kind University of Cambridge research shows.

The findings are welcome news as the only options that exist for reducing the level of dangerous Pfas compounds from the body are bloodletting and a cholesterol drug that induces unpleasant side effects.

Relatives call for ‘honesty, transparency and an unwavering commitment to uncovering the full truth’

Families of the Air India crash victims have said they are hoping for more answers from investigators after a report found the plane’s fuel switches were cut off, deepening the mystery of what happened.

The preliminary report from India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, published on Friday, said both of the plane’s fuel switches moved to the cut-off position immediately after takeoff, stopping fuel supply to the engines.

Graduate recruiter says much use of AI goes undetected as specialist says half of candidates are now using it

• Key takeaways for graduates battling AI in the jobs market

• Graduates share their job-hunting woes amid the AI fallout

One of the UK’s biggest recruiters is accelerating a plan to switch towards more frequent face-to-face assessments as university graduates become increasingly reliant on using artificial intelligence to apply for jobs.

Teach First, a charity which fast-tracks graduates into teaching jobs, said it planned to bring forward a move away from predominantly written assignments – where AI could give applicants hidden help – to setting more assessments where candidates carry out tasks such as giving “micro lessons” to assessors.