When Nato helped overthrow Gaddafi in 2011, there were hopes of a new beginning. A decade later, this former CIA asset runs the country – and Libya has become yet another lesson in the unintended consequences of foreign intervention

In July 2025, four of Europe’s most senior officials landed in eastern Libya for an urgent meeting. Italy’s interior minister had watched migrant arrivals surge during the previous six months. Greece’s migration chief was reeling after 2,000 people reached Crete in a single week. Malta’s home minister feared his island was next. And the EU’s migration commissioner was scrambling to rescue an agreement worth many hundreds of millions that was visibly failing to stop the boats.

Libya is a place where crises converge. Its 1,100-mile coastline, the Mediterranean’s longest, has become the main departure point for migrants heading north. Since Muammar Gaddafi was toppled in 2011, the country has been torn apart by successive civil wars. Russia, Turkey, Egypt and the UAE arm rival factions, and the contest no longer stops at Libya’s borders. From military bases in the south, Russia and the UAE funnel weapons and fighters into Sudan’s civil war, which has driven hundreds of thousands more refugees north towards Libya’s coast.

This adaptation of the 2022 novel – starring Weisz, Leo Woodall and John Slattery – fits it perfectly to television. It’s a proper show for proper grownups

Vladimir is that rare visitor to the screen – proper television for proper grownups. The eight-part adaptation of Julia May Jonas’s provocative 2022 debut novel of the same name has not shied away from the properties that made the book great – black comedy, bleak insight, evisceration of accepted pieties – and fitted them perfectly to the new form. The screenwriter, Jeanie Bergen, who has obviously absorbed the book into her very bones, retains all of Jonas’s wit, confidence and, crucially, her willingness to dwell in grey areas and luxuriate in the complexities that govern life in middle age.

She also has Rachel Weisz, giving an unswervingly brilliant performance as the unnamed protagonist, a tenured English professor beloved by her students, whose husband, John (John Slattery, playing his one part, but he does it so well and so much better than anyone else, who are we to object to seeing it again?), another tenured academic on the same campus – has just been suspended for sleeping with students. His defence is that this was before the rules changed. “It was a different time” is a recurring phrase – not just from him (for here is the beginning of Jonas and Bergen’s devotion to rug-pulling) but from his wife and other members of their faculty and peer group, male and female.

In the vacuum of the players’ silence, it has been the Iranian diaspora in Australia who are speaking out against the regime

As Iran’s national anthem began to trumpet around Gold Coast Stadium on Monday night, members of an Iranian fan group who had gathered near the halfway line began to unfurl red, white and green flags.

They weren’t the flags of their home nation, though. At least, not the nation they want to remember.

Shabana Mahmood’s new rights clampdown looks outlandish until we remember that this kind of hardline action is part of our country’s fabric

Our political memory fails us. We treat government policies as if we’re seeing them for the very first time. But much of what appears to be novel has deep historical roots. If we fail to understand those roots and the soil in which they grow, we will fail to resist the assaults on our humanity.

The home secretary’s new attack on the rights of immigrants and refugees is shocking and disorienting. Shabana Mahmood wants to raise the qualification period for immigrants to achieve indefinite leave to remain in the UK from five years to 10 (and up to 20 for refugees). It looks outlandish. So does her wider assault on asylum seekers, denying them permanent refugee status even if their claims are successful. But both are eerily familiar.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

At the council recycling tip in Chingford, people drop off fridges, dishwashers, mattresses, golf clubs, bicycles and batteries – then head into the shop to hunt through the weird and wonderful treasures

When an embalmed rabbit in a Perspex box arrived at the dump in Chingford, north-east London, last year, with fur on its head but its organs and skeleton exposed to teach veterinary students about the digestive system, Lisa Charlton knew she had to save it from landfill. She was sure that one of her regulars, a man interested in anything “a bit weird, macabre and bizarre” would buy it. And he did.

Charlton, who has worked at the recycling centre’s onsite ReUse shop for a year and a half, has salvaged items ranging from furniture, old toys and lampshades to walking frames brought in by local people. She has put aside some cast-iron cauldrons for her sister who is “into crystals and healing” and runs a shop in Cornwall. Items that have come through her shop include vintage crockery, antique crystal vases with solid silver rims, a spindly chair from the 1920s and an old ammunition box.

As the Peaky Blinders film is released this week, we follow in the footsteps of the Shelbys, make a heavy metal pilgrimage and find the city’s best places to eat, drink and dance

The runaway success of the TV crime drama Peaky Blinders has been credited with boosting tourism to Birmingham and the West Midlands since it first aired in 2013, even though much of the series was actually shot farther north, in Merseyside, Yorkshire and Manchester. The release this week of the Peaky Blinders movie The Immortal Man (much of which was filmed in and around Birmingham this time) will undoubtedly generate a new wave of interest, particularly in the Black Country Living Museum in nearby Dudley, whose authentic recreations of streets, houses and industrial workshops appear in key scenes in the TV show and the film – most notably as the location for Charlie Strong’s yard (pictured below).

Tehran says it hit groups ‘opposed to the revolution’, amid reports the US is looking to arm Kurdish militias

Iran says it has targeted Kurdish groups in Iraq and warned “separatist groups” against action in the widening war.

Tehran said on Thursday it had hit Iraq-based Kurdish groups “opposed to the revolution”, as reports said the US was looking to arm Kurdish militias to infiltrate Iran.

We will not tolerate them in any way.

Experts say backing Iran’s ethnic communities could ‘open up a hornet’s nest’ and increase risk of chaotic civil war

Intense waves of airstrikes have hit dozens of military positions, frontier posts and police stations along northern parts of Iran’s border with Iraq in what appears to be preparation by US and Israel for a new front in their war.

A US official with knowledge of the discussions between Washington and Kurdish officials said the US was ready to provide air support if Kurdish peshmerga fighters crossed the border from northern Iraq.

John Healey meets Cypriot counterpart after Shahed-style drone evaded defences and hit Akrotiri airbase on island

• US-Israel war on Iran – live updates

John Healey has flown to Cyprus to calm the diplomatic fallout over a drone that evaded detection and hit an RAF base, which has prompted fury from local ministers.

UK officials believe a drone that hit an RAF base in Cyprus evaded detection by flying low and slow when it was launched by pro-Iranian militia in Lebanon or western Iraq.

Donald Trump has also criticised Keir Starmer’s initial decision not to allow the US to use UK military bases in the war

The US did not share exact operational details or timings with the UK before the joint strikes with Israel on Iran, sources have told the Guardian.

The US decision to cut the UK out of the official loop on the airstrikes came alongside Keir Starmer’s decision to decline permission for the US to use British military bases for the operation.