He’s the Democratic politician with movie-star looks and a picture-perfect family, dogged by accusations of being a smooth‑talking elitist. Can he really unite the American left and win the most powerful office in the world?

When you think of the politician Donald Trump isn’t, when you think of the norm he broke, the archetype he shattered, you might well picture a man who looks a lot like Gavin Newsom. Tall and handsome, hair coiffed just so, with a blond wife and four photogenic kids at his side, Newsom, who has been the governor of California since 2019 and is often described as the frontrunner to be the Democratic nominee for the White House in 2028, looks the way professional politicians, and especially presidential candidates, look in the movies.

It’s dogged Newsom for years, that look of his, perennially suggesting that he is, in the words of one California newspaper, “too ambitious, too slickly handsome, and too patrician-seeming”, especially for a populist age that cherishes the authentic and has no truck with anything either phoney or “elite”. The elite tag especially has hung around Newsom’s neck for decades, thanks to the fact that his ascent to the top of California politics has seemed smooth and unbroken, apparently eased by a childhood spent in the orbit of the Getty family, when that name was a byword for astronomical wealth.

As high rents push more adult children back to the family nest, it is vital to have a conversation about who pays what

When her 27-year- old son and 24-year-old daughter moved back home, Tricia Carter decided to ask them to pay rent. The 63-year-old, who lives in south London, charges them £300 each a month to cover bills including electricity and groceries.

She has a comfortable income, but their contributions help to keep the books balanced. The money is also a way to make her children aware of the financial burden of living somewhere, she says.

Falling groundwater, extreme heat and water-intensive farming are accelerating land collapse, forcing a rethink in agricultural practices

Fatih Sik was drinking tea with friends at home when he heard a rumbling sound outside that grew to a loud boom, like a volcano had erupted nearby. From the window, he saw water and mud shoot into the sky, as high as the tallest trees, less than 100 metres away.

The 47-year-old knew what it was, because it is common in Karapınar, Konya, a vast agricultural province known as Turkey’s breadbasket. A giant sinkhole had opened up on his land. Fifty metres wide and 40 metres deep, it had appeared almost a year to the day after a previous one had formed. It was August – the hottest month of the year.

In the past he has been urged to follow strategies that don’t really match his core beliefs. That’s changing, as it must, because he knows the clock is ticking

• Tom Baldwin is the author of Keir Starmer, The Biography

In a crowded and overheated bar towards the end of the evening a few months ago, I received some strange parenting advice from one of those “Labour strategist” types.

We were discussing – maybe arguing – over the government’s position on Gaza. Eventually I asked if he could provide me with a decent explanation to give my son who had shown me stuff on his phone a couple of days earlier about how Israeli army officers were still being trained by Britain’s military. “Here’s what you say to your son,” began his reply, followed by a portentous pause that made me lean in closer. “You should tell him to fuck off.”

Tom Baldwin is the author of Keir Starmer, The Biography

There is no end in sight to the pollution caused by a ‘broken’ system. Experts say it could even be getting worse

Sarah Lambert took her usual morning swim for 40 minutes off Exmouth town beach before her volunteer shift helping disabled people get access to the water.

A wheelchair user herself, Lambert’s regular sea swims twice a week between the lifeboat station and HeyDays restaurant were the perfect form of exercise for her disability.

Stepping off the night train, full of memories of his life there three decades ago, the writer finds a changed city fighting for survival

My first flat in Kyiv was a couple of metro stops outside the city centre, just opposite Volodymyrskyy market, in a nondescript mid-20th century block. The lease was arranged by post. It took me five days to drive there from Edinburgh in an old Polo in November 1991. Finding my way to Kyiv was easy – one road from Calais takes you straight there – but once I got to the outskirts, I must have used a paper map to navigate through the city. I spoke no Ukrainian, and enough Russian to ask basic directions, but not enough to understand the answer. I could read the street signs. I found a parking space round the back and began to unload my stuff.

Recently, I went back. I crossed the road from the square by the metro and went through the market. It’s a neater, quieter place than I remember from the early 1990s, not so much because of the war as from the gradual changes over the intervening years, when peasant farmers around Kyiv became fewer and post-communist supermarkets and commercial food distribution systems replaced the old state shops. In the weeks before and after the 1991 referendum, when Ukrainians voted to leave the Soviet Union, precipitating its quick disintegration, I went to the state shops to queue for cheap, rationed, often scarce items such as bread and hard cheese; the market was a place of plenty and, for locals, high prices. Row upon row of countrywomen in aprons sold huge jars of sour cream, chalk-white towers of cottage cheese wrapped in muslin and pots of horseradish in beetroot juice, alongside vendors from the Caucasus offering persimmons, pomegranates and fresh coriander, and pickle merchants with buckets of Korean carrot salad and wild garlic stalks. All this is still abundant in Kyiv, still locally made, but packaged and stacked on supermarket shelves by big firms. Nobody’s selling homemade sour cream now – perhaps they’ll be back in spring? – there’s only one pickle seller, and the meat counter is no longer quite the shrine to pork fat it once was.

Israel says Iran has fired missiles in retaliation as Trump tells Iranian troops to lay down arms or ‘face certain death’

• Full report: US and Israel attack Iran

• Analysis from Guardian diplomatic editor

• What we know so far

Blasts have been heard in several cities, including the capital, Tehran, and Isfahan in central Iran.

Reuters reports there are long queues at petrol stations in the capital, as many people try to leave. An unnamed Iranian official who spoke to the news agency said several ministries in southern Tehran had been targeted.

US president calls on Iranian people to ‘take over your government’, as explosions heard across central Tehran

• US-Israeli attack on Iran – live updates

• US and Israel strikes on Iran – what we know so far

Israel and the US have launched a war on Iran, with Donald Trump declaring the start of “major combat operations” and calling on Iranians to rise up against their government.

The US president’s comments came soon after explosions were heard across central Tehran. One apparent strike hit near the offices of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran is preparing a “crushing retaliation”, an Iranian official told Reuters.

Second Israeli-US attack during nuclear negotiations may finally jettison any chance of agreement

• US-Israeli attack on Iran – live updates

• US and Israel strikes on Iran – what we know so far

The attack mounted jointly by Israel and the US on Iran had been planned for months, but the timing, in the midst of negotiations between Iran and the US, will again raise questions about whether Washington was ever serious about striking a deal with Tehran.

In June last year, Israel, with the US later in tow, launched a 10-day attack on Iran just three days before Iran and the US were due to meet for a sixth set of talks.

Scale of defeat to Greens has plunged party into fresh despair and again raised prospect of leadership challenge

Keir Starmer is facing an ultimatum from his own party to change direction or risk a leadership challenge within months after the Greens humiliated Labour with a historic byelection victory in Gorton and Denton.

Overturning a 13,000 Labour majority from the general election, Hannah Spencer, a local plumber and Green councillor, became the party’s fifth MP on Friday. Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin was second, just ahead of the Labour candidate, Angeliki Stogia.