In new docu-drama Broken English, the much misunderstood singer looks back at all her past selves – and gives a performance that moves her audience to tears. Its makers relive an extraordinary shoot

When Marianne Faithfull died early in 2025, at the age of 78, she left the world one final musical performance. It comes at the end of a new film, Broken English, celebrating her six-decade career. It is a deeply moving scene, almost guaranteed to leave you in tears. You don’t need to be a full-on fan, up to that point, to have relished Faithfull’s unvarnished takes on her astonishing life – but that final husky-voiced number, with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis accompanying, should clinch it.

How do you make a film about Faithfull without rolling out all the cringey 1960s rock mythology? Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard seem to have nailed it. The film-makers initially had just three days with Faithfull, on a set at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire. She was living in a care home and needed oxygen intermittently, meaning the pair had to work quickly. “She was so ill when we first met her,” says Pollard.

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.

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).

A Palestine Red Crescent Society mental health centre provides one of the few places left where children in Gaza can play and feel safe

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

• Airstrikes hit Iran-Iraq border as US and Israeli plan to mobilise Kurds gathers pace

• US may not have capacity to take down full barrage of Iranian drones, officials warn

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.

Iranian blockade of the strategic strait of Hormuz is hitting global fertiliser supply chain

The global fertiliser supply chain could face significant disruption if the effective closure by Iran of the strait of Hormuz persists, prompting concerns from analysts about crop production and food security.

Passage through the waterway, located off Iran’s southern coast, has mostly stopped since the US and Israel launched their attacks at the weekend.

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.