Lucia Osborne-Crowley has endured threats and sexual harassment to report on Jeffrey Epstein’s chief enabler. Maxwell’s conviction was only the start of the quest for justice, she says

On 9 September 2022, Lucia Osborne-Crowley flew from London to Miami and caught a Greyhound bus north to West Palm Beach. The writer and journalist had arranged to meet Carolyn Andriano, who was abused by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell from the age of 14 until she was 17, starting in 2001. Andriano had been a crucial witness in the trial against Maxwell in 2021.

When the two women met, Andriano said she had just been visited by a private investigator – a man in his 60s, who had heard she was talking to someone about a book. In a restaurant that afternoon, Osborne-Crowley was approached by a man in his 60s. What was she writing, he wanted to know. He offered her drugs, cash and a meeting with one of Epstein’s pilots, then put his hands under her skirt. When the manager asked him to leave, he waited in the car park; Osborne-Crowley had to escape through a staff exit.

Countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE are finding their carefully projected image of stability has been blown away

There is a tendency to think of the Gulf powers as static and unchanging. They are, after all, fortified by massive wealth and absolute monarchical rule, and secured with deep economic and military relationships with the US. The past week of US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran, and Iran’s retaliations, have brought into focus what these countries export (oil and gas) and what they import (tax avoiders and labour). But beyond thinking about energy-supply challenges to the global economy and engaging in the cheap and popular sport of smirking at influencers in war zones, we must remember that the current conflagration will have profound consequences for the entire region. This is not just about the US, Israel and Iran; it is about a complex, overlapping political order in the Middle East that is much more fragile than it looks.

Amid all the ways the region has been changing over the past few years, the low-key evolution of three Gulf countries in particular has been the most significant. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have been rapidly making changes, the effects of which have been felt from Libya to Palestine. The 7 October attacks, which arguably set off the chain of events that led to this moment, were partly inspired by Hamas’s desire to stop the normalisation process that Saudi Arabia was undertaking with Israel; this was following the UAE and others signing the 2020 Abraham accords with Israel. The three countries have been pursuing in different ways, often at odds with each other, ambitious global and regional agendas. And they are also much more unsteady than their decades-long familial rule suggests.

Yes, we all know blueberries and kale are good for us. But what about some of the other less well-marketed food heroes that have fallen out of favour?

Think of a superfood. What comes to mind? Avocado? Turmeric? Quinoa? Many of us will have a grasp of the most mainstream so-called superfoods. The ones that have become dietary superheroes thanks to savvy marketing. Larger-than-life in the public imagination, they walk among us with a sheen: blueberries with their polyphenols; kale and its vitamin K; goji berries and all their antioxidants.

But what is and isn’t a superfood is actually down to trends – take the current resurgence of a previously shunned, tragically uncool food: cottage cheese. Beloved by Richard Nixon with pineapple (the Watergate tapes weren’t just illuminating in the ways Woodward and Bernstein hoped for) and a diet-culture favourite in the 60s and 70s, the creamy, tangy cheese curd concoction is back. And there are other supposed superfoods that are just as nutrient-rich, but that marketing hasn’t (yet) brought to our attention. Once a regular part of the UK diet, they have fallen, perhaps unfairly, out of favour. So which foods with serious nutritional chops have we forgotten? Which should we reintegrate?

A Guardian investigation with DeSmog reveals thousands of tonnes of fish are illegally turned into fishmeal and oil off the coast of Guinea-Bissau

The only ice factory on Bubaque, an island in west Africa’s Guinea-Bissau, is out of service. Local fishers, such as Pedro Luis Pereira, are forced to source ice from factories on the mainland, about 70km away – a six-hour round trip by boat.

“The machines have been broken for months,” Pereira says, as he pulls in his nets on the shore of the island inside the protected Bijagós archipelago. “We’ve alerted the ministry of fisheries, but so far, no one has come to fix them.”

Foreign industrial vessels anchored near the port of Bissau. Photograph: Davide Mancini

In search of a new adventure, Craig Munns went back to school. Now, at 65, he spends his days examining long-vanished life forms

Craig Munns has a large model of a T rex on his desk. He got it with a magazine subscription two decades ago. One day, a few years ago, he was sitting in his study, which was dense with books and yellow sticky notes and posters charting evolution from single cells upward, and he thought, “What am I going to do next in my life?” And his eyes lit upon the T rex.

Munns had recently taken on a job at the public library in Canberra, but it had always rankled with him that he had not studied for a degree, starting instead as an electronics trainee after he left school in Sydney, Australia. So he decided to enrol as a part-time student. He graduated at 62, with honours in palaeontology from the University of New England in Armidale, NSW.

It is estimated that every year more than one million bald people fly to Istanbul. They go for two reasons – hair transplant quality and competitive costs

“I used to look at my father and understand that I was destined to go bald,” says James McElroy. He smiles when he thinks back to his trip to Istanbul a year ago. “I had a few doubts at the beginning, but today I’m happy and satisfied. Yes, I had a hair transplant, I don’t hide it and I’m not ashamed of it. It was a somewhat intense experience, but I’d do it again – especially now that I’m single. I’m happy to talk about it and I’m happy to receive compliments. That wasn’t the goal, but I appreciate them.”

A patient is reading the terms and conditions of his contract before the transplant begins at Sule Hair Clinic.

Iran has named hardliner Mojtaba Khamenei as the country’s new supreme leader; Donald Trump says oil price spike ‘a small price to pay’ as markets tumble

• Full report: Ali Khamenei’s son Mojtaba chosen as Iran’s new supreme leader

• Tell us: how have you been affected by the latest events in the Middle East?

Donald Trump has said a decision on when to end the war with Iran will be a “mutual” one he’ll make together with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Times of Israel has reported.

It said Trump also claimed in a brief telephone interview on Sunday that Iran would have destroyed Israel if he and Netanyahu had not been around. The US president said:

Iran was going to destroy Israel and everything else around it … We’ve worked together. We’ve destroyed a country that wanted to destroy Israel.

I think it’s mutual … a little bit. We’ve been talking. I’ll make a decision at the right time, but everything’s going to be taken into account.

Shares slide and government bond yields jump, as oil price jump to four-year high threatens new inflationary spike

• Iran war drives oil prices above $100 a barrel for first time since 2022

Research show that poorer people are hit hardest by surging oil prices.

As our economics editor Heather Stewart wrote yesterday:

Recent research published by economists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst identified energy, along with food and agriculture as among the commodities that had “a disproportionate capacity to increase inequality when their prices rise”.

Where there are benefits, these are narrowly shared. Another striking recent paper showed that after the 2022 oil price surge in the US, 50% of the windfall benefit from higher prices in the sector went to the wealthiest 1% of individuals, via the stock market. The bottom 50% of people received only 1%.

The prime minister is facing pressure from unions and some backbenchers to prepare a support package as oil and gas prices threaten to push up inflation

As we mentioned in the opening post, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has a call with fellow G7 finance ministers this afternoon to discuss surging oil prices and the economic impact of the US-Israeli war with Iran.

You can follow all the latest market developments in our business live blog, which is leading on how stock markets are tumbling after the oil price surged over $100 a barrel for the first time in four years:

The longer this conflict goes on, the more effect it will have on the cost of oil.

Any time Brent Crude passes 100 dollars per barrel raises concern across the markets, for the haulage industry and drivers.

Average petrol and diesel prices have rocketed in the last week and are unfortunately likely to keep on rising, so the situation for UK drivers is looking increasingly bleak.

Unleaded is almost certainly going to reach an average of 140p in the next week or so, while diesel looks highly likely to climb to at least 160p a litre.
We encourage drivers to continue filling up as normal but to shop around for the best prices.

Leaders discuss military cooperation day after US president hit out at PM over lack of immediate backing for attacks

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Keir Starmer sought to repair fractured relations with Donald Trump over the war with Iran on Sunday, as a Labour backlash gathered pace over Tony Blair’s assertion the UK should have supported the US’s initial airstrikes on Iran.

The prime minister spoke to the US president on Sunday afternoon after a barrage of criticism from Trump, who told his UK ally on Saturday that his help was not needed, even as the US continued to use UK bases for strikes against Iran.