If the monarch thought his sniffy letter would put Harry and Meghan at a disadvantage, he doesn’t understand how the celebrity world works

Once again, it has been a lively week for the Real Housewives of Windsor franchise, with Harry and Meghan back in the UK for precisely 12 days before the king fired out a letter via the lord chamberlain on Monday, reminding viewers that the Sussexes are “private citizens” and not to treat them as working royals. You have to say the producers on this unscripted reality show are truly at the top of their game with these targeted provocations. Harry and Meghan duly took the bait and issued an intemperately hurt rejoinder – but we’ll get to that in a bit.

First, let’s deal with King Charles’s missive to “relevant senior stakeholders across government, the military and Lord Lieutenancies”. Ugh. Not to be too aesthetically sensitive, but I think we can all live without the sovereign being reduced to the ghastly language of “relevant senior stakeholders”. What next? Seeking “buy-in” for ribbon-cutting events and referring to posies as “high levels of audience engagement”? It does all rather reinforce the idea that the Windsors’ cringe-makingly self-styled “the firm” really is some dreary mid-range company with a wan Meet Our Team page on its website, in which Prince William – carefully photographed without a tie – explains that he “enjoys long walks with the dog and is a passionate Aston Villa supporter”.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

What a Time to be Alive! by Marina Hyde (Guardian Faber, £20). To support the Guardian, order your signed copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham collected the testimony of 24 insiders who helped remotely target Gazans’ homes. They explain how they got these self-professed ‘small cogs’ to talk about the killing

On a darkened rooftop in Tel Aviv, Israeli intelligence officers outline the details of their work. These men tell us how they helped develop an AI mapping tool that trawled for phone signals and recommended apartment buildings in Gaza to bomb. Indirectly, they admit, they are responsible for thousands of deaths, but they never spoke up because that wasn’t their place. “My role is technical,” says one. “I’m just a small cog,” says another.

NAZA – directed by the Israeli film-makers Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham and produced by the Guardian – is a chilling documentary about a mass slaughter that was authorised at the highest levels of government. But it is also, primarily, about the process, the system, the little links in the killing chain. Szor and Abraham build their film around the accounts of 24 anonymised military and intelligence insiders. NAZA, we learn, is an acronym used by the intelligence service to indicate how many civilians it expects to die in an airstrike on Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces prefer to target Hamas terrorists in their homes at night – and if they live with their family, or in heavily populated neighbourhoods, too bad. At one point, a source claims, approval was given to kill 500 NAZA for one Hamas member.

Matthew Klimow recalls the day a hijacked airliner crashed into the headquarters of the US defence department in Arlington, Virginia

“All day I had been a good soldier: stolid, resolute, unemotional, rational, and dispassionate,” writes Matthew Klimow, recalling the wave of emotion that overwhelmed him as he arrived home from the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. There was sadness for the lives lost. But there was another emotion, too: humiliation.

“We, as a nation, had been humbled,” writes the retired army colonel, who remained at the Pentagon even after it was struck by a hijacked airliner, killing all 64 people onboard and 125 inside the building. “The fighting force of which I was part had been impotent, unable to protect our fellow citizens. The darkness I felt matched the darkness inside my house as I opened the door.”

Toronto film festival: Erin Doherty plays a happily single mother in a downbeat town courted by an enigmatic James McAvoy in this expertly taut drama

Erin Doherty and James McAvoy both bring their A-game in this startling, involving movie from British writer-director Paul Andrew Williams, whose productivity and creativity continue to be an industry tonic. It’s an eerie mystery drama that Doherty and McAvoy perform with ferocious commitment. There’s something of Atom Egoyan or even M Night Shyamalan here … and I even found myself wondering if Williams intended us to think of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Laertes’ lines about his father, Polonius: “… to his good friends thus wide I’ll ope my arms / And like the kind life-rend’ring pelican, / Repast them with my blood.”

We are in a downbeat British town, perhaps somewhere in the London estuary, a place to which a candy factory provides employment. Mina (played by Doherty) is a smart, capable single mum to 9-year-old Jamie (Smylie Bradwell); she works on the production line in cap and hairnet like all the others: much liked by everyone there. She is not fussed by the absence of Jamie’s dad and is perfectly content with hanging out with her friends and her sister (Liv Hill).

The US president is ever more wayward – and has little interest in defending Europe. The constitution may hold him to account, but we can’t wait

If Americans vote for a Republican majority in both houses of Congress in November, “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.” But they must not spend it in Canada or China or anywhere else outside the US. So said Donald Trump in Texas on Wednesday in advance of the forthcoming midterm elections. He further told voters to “Pretend that I’m on the ballot”. It was a climactic moment in an almost two-hour rant.

Trump does not have the required trillion dollars in his pocket, and it would be illegal to disperse such a sum without congressional approval. In any case, JD Vance now appears to have rowed back on the promise.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

Do you gain weight once you stop using them? Do they make your face saggy? Can they improve your mental health? Experts explain whether 13 common beliefs about GLP-1s are true or false

FALSE “GLP-1 medications mimic Glucagon-like peptide-1 – one of the hormones involved in appetite regulation. It doesn’t completely suppress hunger, but it is powerful,” says Dr Federica Amati, nutrition lead at Imperial College School of Medicine and author of The Appetite Reset. “The medicine is about 1,000 times stronger than what we naturally produce from our gut,” she explains. As food passes through the gut, cells called L-cells sense the nutrients, which sparks the production of the GLP-1 hormone. Without the drugs, these bursts of GLP-1 production last a few minutes. “It’s a bit like a sparkler. In comparison, the drugs are like a bonfire that roars for a week,” says Amati. Because the GLP-1 hormone stays in your body for longer if you are on the drugs, you feel fuller faster and your appetite gets suppressed, but you will eventually get hungry.

Bill’s failure in Commons sparks anger among its supporters after Lords blocked earlier legislation

A renewed attempt to legalise assisted dying has been voted down by MPs in a decision that is likely to scupper the idea for a political generation, sparking anger among supporters after an earlier bill was blocked by the Lords.

A private member’s bill put forward by Labour’s Lauren Edwards, which would have permitted assisted dying in England and Wales in certain limited circumstances, was defeated by 286 to 270 at second reading, the first chance MPs have to vote on a measure.

Chip Roy, Republican US representative from Texas, openly wondered where the government would get ‘well over $1tn’ for supposed payouts

On 11 September, 25 years ago, Osama bin Laden drove with a small number of al-Qaida retainers and aides to a remote location in eastern Afghanistan. His convoy of SUVs was accompanied by a minivan converted into a makeshift communications centre.

The van’s rudimentary equipment did not allow Bin Laden to watch the 19 men he had started sending to the US more than a year before fly planes into the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon near Washington DC, killing about 3,000 people. But he listened as shocked radio announcers broke the news.

Letter from 70 MPs and peers follows Anthropic employee’s claim new technology could wipe out humans

• AI could kill all humans in next decade, warn experts: but how seriously should we take them?

More than 70 MPs and peers have urged Andy Burnham to back a ban on the creation of artificial superintelligence (ASI) and lead an international movement to stop the technology after a week of warnings from experts of a 10% chance it could kill all humans.

Fifteen former government ministers, along with the former head of the civil service Robin Butler, senior Labour MPs including John McDonnell and leading Conservatives, Liberal Democrat and Scottish National party MPs have written to the prime minister. They urged him to throw the government’s weight behind a bill, tabled in the Commons on Tuesday, that would prohibit ASI – an as-yet-nonexistent AI that would outcompete human capabilities in most domains.

Darren Conway pleads guilty to voyeurism and encouraging a husband to abuse his wife

A man has admitted using an online sexual abuse network to commit a host of sexual crimes, along with another man, against the latter’s unconscious wife.

Darren Conway, 52, pleaded guilty to 11 charges at Wood Green crown court. They included voyeurism, possession of extreme pornography and encouraging the other man to sexually abuse his wife on Conway’s behalf.