When Zac Brettler jumped to his death in London, the coroner recorded an open verdict, admitting: ‘I don’t know what happened.’ The acclaimed author of Say Nothing and, now, London Falling, talks about his search for answers

In the summer of 2023, the American writer and journalist Patrick Radden Keefe was in London for the filming of Say Nothing, the television adaptation of his much-lauded, much-awarded account of a Troubles murder. It was there, on set, that Keefe got talking to a visitor, a friend of the director, who happened to tell Keefe about friends of his, the Brettlers, a London family who had experienced something tragic, strange and terrible.

Rachelle and Matthew Brettler’s 19-year-old son, Zac, had died in November 2019 when he jumped from the fifth-floor balcony of a luxury apartment overlooking the Thames. There had been no reason to believe he was suicidal – but plenty to suggest that he was very afraid. Zac had spent his last few months in the orbit of two men who believed him to be the son of a Russian oligarch, heir to a £200m legacy. Both men had been with Zac on the night he died – one had been in the apartment at the time – and gave varying accounts in police interviews. The family believed that the Met response had been full of holes – key witnesses hadn’t been formally interviewed, bloodstains on the apartment walls hadn’t been tested – and the investigation concluded in 2021 with the Crown Prosecution Service deciding there was insufficient evidence to bring charges for murder and perverting the course of justice. The inquest in 2022 ended in an open verdict. “I can’t fill in the gaps; I can’t speculate,” the coroner concluded. “I don’t know what happened.”

Some people using retatrutide, which is not yet approved, are reporting ‘emotional flattening’, but experts point to a more complex picture

• ‘Traceability is vital’: labs test thousands of unregulated substances amid peptide craze

• What are peptides, are they safe and is there evidence to back up the hype?

A recent TikTok video shows a man in a black baseball cap, with text over the video stating: “strange effects of Reta” and “ruining relationships”.

He is referring to retatrutide, an experimental weight-loss drug that targets three appetite-related hormones. It is still in clinical trials but has generated such interest that some users are already sourcing it illegally online before approval. The “weird theory going around”, the TikTok poster says, is that the drug can “make you fall out of love”.

Knife-wielding skeletons, wild experiments with toilets, an audience with the bassist from The Jam … the team behind the globe-conquering spookfest open up about their astonishing success

‘Oh. Em. Bloody. Gee.” Danny Robins, “high priest of the paranormal”, has removed his trademark red anorak and is pacing around the London Palladium stage telling ghost stories. A phantom baby. A haunted Teams meeting. A … “hairy flasher”. He dissects each tale with parapsychologists Evelyn Hollow (Team Believer) and Ciarán O’Keeffe (Team Sceptic – he exposed Most Haunted’s medium, Derek Acorah, as a fraud in a rift Robins calls “the Biggie and Tupac of the paranormal”). The rapt audience – a harmonious mix of millennials, boomers and gen Z – are eager to share their own stories, too: a woman’s voice quivers into a microphone as she describes a skeleton that wanted to stab her sister. This is the enthralling world of Uncanny.

A lot has happened in the five years since Uncanny started life as a Radio 4 paranormal investigations podcast, with those spine-tingling opening lyrics, “I know what I saw.” In the first episode, The Evil in Room 611, Robins met scientist Ken, who recalled unexplained scares from decades ago in his university halls. Details of an evil dark figure and shaking doors were met with the reaction: “Bloody hell, Ken.” Two experts then shared their theories: parapsychologist Caroline Watt proffered hypnagogic hallucinations, while ordained minster Peter Laws claimed poltergeist activity.

Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s dark dramedy is a stylish acting showcase, but does it do justice to its weighty themes?

Ever since its first trailer dropped – and, on certain corners of Reddit, even before that – the internet has been abuzz with speculation over just what goes down in The Drama. The auteur production powerhouse A24 somewhat ingeniously pitched writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s pitch-black film as a tart romantic comedy, with Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as a seemingly happy couple derailed by a disturbing revelation a week before their wedding. The actors, among a cohort of vanishingly few young movie stars, appeared as their characters in a fake wedding announcement in the Boston Globe; Zendaya’s rumored marriage to actor Tom Holland became a meta discussion point on a press tour that saw her method dressing in “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”, her wardrobe slowly darkening in a nod to something gone horribly awry.

The Norwegian film-maker’s second English-language film depicts what we could loosely call premarital jitters as a psychological unraveling with a surrealist touch. The Drama is lustrously filmed, virtuosically acted and crisply edited – but, inevitably, attention will focus on its very combustible, deliberately provocative premise, one somewhat spoiled by a pre-embargo TMZ headline citing a recent American tragedy. There’s no way to talk about this movie without talking about “the twist” – which plays out less as a dramatic turn of events than as an unsettling divulgence that, depending on your view, the film may or may not justify. Obviously, spoilers ahead, so tread carefully and, presuming you’ve seen it … let’s discuss.

The heavyweight from Dagestan now lives in Canada and describes Saturday’s opponent as the ‘professor’ of boxing

“This guy is the professor,” Arslanbek Makhmudov says of Tyson Fury as he looks forward politely to their fight on Saturday night at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London. There is none of the usual bluster and malice of heavyweight boxing as the huge Russian from Dagestan shows considerable respect for the former world champion who is making yet another comeback to the ring.

“Tyson Fury is the professor of mind and boxing,” Makhmudov continues in his functional but effective English. “A lot of boxing is mental and he is a master. But boxing is also spiritual. I am going to be strong, spiritual and smart. You can say this is a war between mental and spiritual and we’ll see who is more successful. Inshallah it is spiritual.”

I don’t want to minimise the scenes in Clapham High Street. But how about dialling things down a notch?

Last week, some teenagers in the Clapham area of south-west London started running up and down the high street. The terms used to describe them ranged from “feral gang” to “chaotic swarm”; evidently, it is in the eye of the beholder as to whether they were closer to animals or insects. Definitely, positively, some of them shoplifted.

Fireworks were let off, which sounds like the kind of mischief the Bash Street Kids would get up to, but is quite scary in real life, and the line between “Beano” and “scary” is finer than I thought. Marks & Spencer needed a police guard and closed early; Oliver Bonas briefly had a security guard, which was like seeing a bouncer outside a library – either a mad overreaction, or the end of days.

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.

Israeli military warns Iranians to immediately stop using trains or being near railway lines, saying it would ‘endanger’ their lives

Here are some of the latest images coming in from the Middle East as the war continues in week six.

The Israeli military has just warned the people of Iran not to use trains, saying that doing so “endangers your life”.

Dear Citizens, for the sake of your security, we kindly request that from this moment until 21:00 Iran time, you refrain from using and travelling by train throughout Iran.

Your presence on trains and near railway lines endangers your life.

Exclusive: Call for nudity-detection tech on phones as number of under-18s reporting blackmail attempts rises by 34%

• ‘I felt ashamed and scared’: how an online friendship became a sextortion nightmare

Children are reporting online sextortion attempts in record numbers in the UK, as campaigners urge tech companies to do more to stamp out the crime.

The Report Remove service, which allows children to flag intimate images or videos of themselves that have appeared, or could appear, online, said it received 394 reports from under-18s last year of blackmail attempts after sending sexual images to predators. The figure is 34% higher than in 2024.

Exclusive: Health secretary says industrial action in England also threatens to derail NHS progress on waiting times

Wes Streeting has accused resident doctors of “torpedoing” their own pay rises and training jobs by walking out on strike again, as tens of thousands of doctors began a six-day stoppage in England.

The health secretary said there was a “legitimacy” to concerns over jobs and wages but that the British Medical Association had scuppered any chance of a breakthrough when it rejected what he said was a serious offer from the government to transform medics’ conditions.

Increased recognition of crime and perpetrators using technology to track victims are behind rise, say experts

The number of stalking offences recorded by police has soared over the past decade, with experts saying the rise has been driven by increased recognition, and technology making it easier for perpetrators to track their victims.

House of Commons library data analysed by the Liberal Democrats found more than 135,000 offences were recorded last year, up from just under 3,000 10 years ago.