Steeped in gaming and rightwing culture wars, Musk and his team of teenage coders set out to defeat the enemy of the United States: its people

In 2025, when Elon Musk joined the government as the de facto head of something called the “department of government efficiency”, he declared that governments were poorly configured “big dumb machines”. To the senator Ted Cruz, he explained that “the only way to reconcile the databases and get rid of waste and fraud is to actually look at the computers”.

Muskism came to Washington soaked in memes, adolescent boasts and sadistic victory dances over mass firings. Leading a team of teenage coders and mid-level managers drawn from his suite of companies, Musk aimed to enter the codebase and rewrite regulations and budget lines from within. He would drag the paper-pushing bureaucracy kicking and screaming into the digital 21st century, scanning the contents of cavernous rooms of filing cabinets and feeding the data into a single interoperable system. The undertaking combined features of private equity-led restructuring with startup management, shot through with the sensibility of gaming and rightwing culture war. To succeed, he would need “God mode”, an overview of the whole.

Ditched washing machines, a woman’s bare leg, the back of Willem Dafoe’s head … the Oscar-nominated director talks us through his new photography show in Athens – made with his darkroom assistant Emma Stone

In the centre of Athens, a brand new temple has popped up. Walk around the tall white columns surrounding it and you’ll eventually find the entrance to its inner sanctum. It might not be quite as old as the nearby Parthenon but it does hold a unique kind of treasure: the personal photographs of director Yorgos Lanthimos.

Taken over the last few years as he wandered his home country, they offer a glimpse of Greece through the auteur’s absurdist eye. We see a coffin resting against a wall next to a mop, and a couple of horses with their heads chopped off by foregrounded trees. A roadside memorial is shown underneath a sign warning of danger ahead – the wiggly road symbol points directly upwards, as if suggesting the route to the next life for the poor victim. This last image is poignant, strange and funny, eliciting the same awkward clash of emotions you get from watching Lanthimos’s films.

KPop Demon Hunters fans screamed with glee, Adrien Brody grossed out the audience and Timothée Chalamet broke all the rules. The Guardian’s film critic on a gobsmackingly glamorous ceremony

• Key takeaways from Oscars 2026: horror wins, tech loses and politics is hard to ignore

These were the Oscars for a life during wartime. President Trump’s still-to-be-explained attack on Iran meant warnings of a possible retaliatory drone attack from Tehran on the target-rich environment of downtown Los Angeles. The glittering Dolby Theatre was reportedly in the crosshairs.

It didn’t happen. But this was a ceremony aware of the distant politics of threat, and the politics of a nation that is rich enough to afford war and peace at the same time.

Whistleblowers who once worked at Meta and X (until the guilt got too much) reveal the truth about the companies that increasingly rule our free time – and it’s even worse than you may have feared. Prep those bunkers now

Sometimes it’s a real problem not being able to swear unreservedly in a national newspaper. I mean, I understand social convention and propriety ’n’ all that should be preserved and that, generally, as our parents and teachers told us, swearing is nothing but a sign of a poor vocabulary. But not always. Sometimes – and increasingly so, I think, as I look at the burning world around us – swearing might represent the mots justes. It might be the only fair response. Under certain circumstances, anything else begins to look like obfuscation – a veil being drawn over unpleasantness. We would be in a much better position if, to retool Mrs Patrick Campbell’s notes to George Bernard Shaw for this more brutal age, someone early on had told Trump, for example, to eff off, just once.

But rules is rules and so I must shape with care my response to Inside the Rage Machine, a documentary about how social media is run. The shortest, most honest, most accurate review I could provide would read: “We’re doomed. We’re all doomed,” before advising you to start prepping a bunker now – use your last moments before pulling the plug on the internet to order supplies or buy an isolated homestead in Montana, then gather a go bag and … just go, people. Go.

The PM’s natural instinct to stay out of the Iran war has been a good one, but he is left speaking in code about US relations

It was a message that could just as easily have been given via a ministerial statement in the Commons. But Keir Starmer needs every break he can get at the moment and he wasn’t going to pass up the chance to look like a world leader at a press conference in Downing Street. The advantages were obvious. No need to have to listen to Kemi Badenoch drone on for five minutes with her revisionist fantasies in reply. Avoid the danger of loads of backbench MPs observing that President Trump is a deranged halfwit who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

But best of all a press conference was ideal because the American war with Iran is one of the few occasions when the prime minister’s judgment has been right all along. Just over two weeks in and it’s increasingly looking like the The Donald is only in the war for its entertainment value. Just last weekend, he was saying he might continue bombing Kharg Island for fun. For the lols and social media hits. There has never been a plan or a goal in mind. Not so long ago he was saying the Brits were late to the party and he didn’t need them anyway. Now he is begging for help in keeping the strait of Hormuz open.

The spectacular stage version of Studio Ghibli’s much-loved film has spent a year at the Gillian Lynne theatre in London. To celebrate, photographer Tristram Kenton was granted backstage access

Trump says delay of ‘a month or so’ requested while key official insists move is not to pressure Beijing to help unblock strait of Hormuz; Iraqi officials say drones and rockets attacked embassy

• European countries reject Trump’s call for help to reopen strait of Hormuz

• How have you been affected by the latest Middle East events?

• Are fuel price increases making you cut back?

The Israeli military has issued an urgent warning to residents in a southern Lebanese village to evacuate as the army is about to attack what it calls military infrastructure linked to Hezbollah.

The Arabic-language spokesperson for the Israel Defence Forces, Avichay Adraee, said in a post on X particularly addressing residents of Arab al-Jal village that residents should move at least 300 metres from a building it marked on a map.

Remaining in the area of the specified buildings exposes you to danger

Developments in the Middle East remain highly uncertain, but under a wide range of possible scenarios could add to global and domestic inflation.

PM refuses to be drawn into wider conflict as Germany and Italy defy Trump’s call to help reopen strait of Hormuz

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Keir Starmer has insisted that the UK will not be drawn into the wider war in the Middle East as European leaders ruled out sending warships to the strait of Hormuz.

In his clearest signal yet of the UK’s divergence from Donald Trump’s attack on Iran, the prime minister said he would stand firm in the face of US pressure despite the decision being “difficult, there’s no hiding that”.

Numerous faked images and a string of startlingly inaccurate responses from Gemini and Grok are part of a tidal wave of AI slop engulfing coverage of the Iran war

The graves, freshly dug, lie in neat rows of 20 across. More than 60 have already been carved out of the earth, with a few clusters of people standing gathered around them. Dozens more are marked out on the ground in front: small chalk rectangles, with diggers poised to complete their task.

The cemetery of Minab, photographed as it prepares to bury more than 100 of the town’s young girls, is one of the defining images of the US-Israeli war on Iran, bluntly capturing the devastating civilian toll.

Deaths of student and sixth-former named as Juliette announced as long queues for antibiotics form at Canterbury campus

A university and three schools have been struck by an outbreak of invasive meningitis that has killed two young people and left 11 others in hospital.

One of the young people to have died was a student at the University of Kent, while the second was a sixth-former at Queen Elizabeth’s grammar school (QEGS) in Faversham.