Knowledge learned over more than a century in Australia is being tested by worsening fires. It’s a familiar narrative around the world

The violent hot red flames of deadly wildfires across the UK and Europe and scenes of panicked communities fleeing homes could not, at least geographically, be further away for Jan Harris.

But sitting in her new home at Reedy Swamp in rural New South Wales in Australia, the 67-year-old has found herself in tears.

A Grammy nom at 17, a US No 1 ... then silence. With new album Oh Yeah? finally out after four years away, the genre-hopping artist explains the trauma and heartbreak that informed it

Since Steve Lacy became a Grammy-winning artist with a No 1 hit in the US, little has changed for him. His single Bad Habit was one of the biggest songs of 2022, leading to a sold-out tour across North America, Europe and Australia. But off-stage? He bought a new home in Los Angeles, but he hasn’t made any new famous friends. He doesn’t get hounded in public, because he’s a natural homebody. Besides, he’s not really that famous, is he?

“I think my name is bigger than my face, which is great,” he says, smiling mischievously. Sitting in a private room in a London hotel, wearing a Serge Gainsbourg T-shirt and jeans so ripped that they might as well be shorts, Lacy says he thinks he has pulled off the greatest trick of modern pop stardom: being one of the most celebrated musicians of his generation while remaining almost unrecognisable.

Former 49-day PM helms a Conservative Political Action Conference that’s a far cry from the glitzy US version

Liz Truss has given us all so much in recent years. A mini-budget. A laugh a minute 49 days in office. A new monarch, after the queen decided enough was enough and died two days after Liz began her Airbnb stay in Downing Street. And now she has given us one thing more. She has imported the US Conservative Political Action Conference to the UK.

And like all things Liz, it’s predictably a bit shit. In the US, CPAC is a full glitz Trump fest where all the champions of the far right go to strut their stuff and sell their merch. In Liz’s hands, it’s an altogether more drab affair with little interest from the audience. A going through the motions by C-list speakers who are well past their sell-by dates and have been saying the same things for years. Everyone would have had more fun and more surprises if the conference had been AI generated. There again, with Liz you can never be too sure.

The 2018 final against Germany went to penalties – we thrashed them and won gold

I was 12 years old when I first played foosball – table football – in the summer of 1975 in Beirut. My home city was under siege, split by civil war. School was cancelled and roads were closed. We couldn’t get to the beach and the only place to go was the amusement arcade. Luckily for me, it was across the road.

Alongside billiard tables and games machines were a couple of foosball tables. I watched older kids play for hours, mesmerised by a game where you could outsmart an opponent two feet away, then celebrate in their face. You needed 20 pence, or qurush in Lebanese money, to play: 10 pence for the table and 10 pence for the winner. Money was scarce, so I made a deal with the guy who owned the place – if I cleaned the tables, I could play for free. With machine guns rattling on the nearby green line, which divided the east and west of the city, I’d stuff a towel inside the goal and practise until I was confident enough to play. I got really good. By the following summer, I was winning 10 games in a row.

Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the ancient Greek epic has sparked a new appetite for an old classic. Here are the translations, podcasts and audiobooks that make the Homeric world more approachable

The Odyssey was once all Greek to me. I struggled to keep up with the characters, the mass of heroes and villains, the swarms of sons and daughters. I found the Homeric formula – repeated stock phrases passed down from the oral tradition – confusing and tiring. The prose in my 1946 EV Rieu translation, revised by his son DCH Rieu, felt laboured and laborious. I have put the Odyssey down, several times, in the course of my life. But, like Sirens, difficult books tend to have a hold on us. The recent film adaptation pushed me to once again try reading the Odyssey, so I decided on a new approach. I spoke to classicists and conducted research, aiming to render the inaccessible accessible.

To read the Odyssey, start by avoiding the Odyssey. “Begin with contextualisation” – get to grips with themes and content – Antony Makrinos, associate professor in classics at UCL and director of the Summer School in Homer 2026, told me. He sent me an exhaustive list of recommendations, and I found myself in the British Museum, mid-heatwave, learning about Mycenaean civilisation and ancient Greece. I cooled down that evening with a Simon Armitage documentary, Gods and Monsters: an intriguing assessment of our flawed hero.

Heatwaves, high energy prices, calls for reindustrialisation and North Sea drilling are all high on the to-do list

Wildfires cast a pall of smoke this week over Greater Manchester, whose former mayor Andy Burnham stands on the threshold of No 10. Amid three UK heatwaves so far this year, which have killed thousands of people in England and Wales, damaged harvests and left children crying in classrooms, the new prime minister’s plans for the climate crisis remain as shrouded as his city.

“Burnham has been very quiet about the climate [crisis] so far,” says Chris Venables, an environmental campaigner and fellow at the Green Alliance thinktank. “I don’t think [it] is at the forefront of his mind, but that does not mean he will water down this agenda.”

Boarding of M/T Wen Yao in Gulf of Oman comes as expanded airstrike campaign hits five bridges in southern Iran

American forces boarded a ship in the Gulf of Oman on Thursday as part of the renewed blockade of Iran’s ports that began earlier this week, the US military said.

US Marines boarded the M/T Wen Yao “to ensure full compliance with the ongoing US naval blockade,” US Central Command (Centcom) said in a post on X.

Burnham, who is set to take the job on Friday, will promise to give back control to communities and spread growth

Andy Burnham will pledge he has the “courage to fix the big things that politics has neglected” in his first speech as Labour leader.

Burnham, who is set to be announced in the job at a special conference on Friday, will promise to give back control to communities and spread growth across the country.

Opponents warn president’s speech is smokescreen for him to meddle in upcoming congressional midterms

Donald Trump accused China of interfering with the 2020 election in a primetime televised address that laid bare his continuing obsession with his defeat to Joe Biden, but which opponents warned was a smokescreen for him to meddle in the forthcoming congressional midterms.

In a 25-minute speech on Thursday that had been hyped by Trump himself, the US president cast extraordinary doubts on the integrity of the US electoral process, saying it was “catastrophically” short of standards of fairness and trust, while vulnerable to trespassing by foreign powers.

Female lawyer tells CNN’s Christiane Amanpour about alleged ‘escalation of attempts’ as second woman also speaks out

Two women who have accused the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court, Karim Khan, of sexual abuse have spoken out about their claims against the prominent British lawyer.

In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday, an ICC staffer identified by her first name, Sarah, spoke publicly for the first time about her allegations, which have engulfed the court over the past two years.