City plans to triple system of underground pipes that distribute chilled river water, reducing need for individual cooling units

As heatwaves intensify across Europe, most cities are reaching for a familiar fix of more air conditioning. But in 1990s Paris, planning began for a different kind of solution: one of the world’s largest district cooling networks.

The system has 120kms (75-miles) of underground pipes distributing chilled water to museums, offices, hospitals, schools and other public buildings including the Louvre, the Grand Palais, and some luxury hotels and office districts. Instead of thousands of individual air-conditioning units, cooling is produced centrally and shared across the city like a utility.

They were a big 00s buzz band – but looked in danger of fading out. Empowered by fatherhood and anger at war and AI, the New Yorkers explain why they ‘really showed up’ again

Suits. Gnomic poetry. Moody, insistent riffs. It used to be that you’d know what to expect from NYC rockers Interpol. The band’s first two albums, in the early 00s, were blockbuster successes, shifting half a million units each thanks to dramatic songs also fit for jerking around at an indie disco. Interpol duly jumped up to a major label, but then quickly fell back down again. Their talismanic bassist Carlos Dengler quit, and the band settled into a decade of solidly successful but pretty predictable albums. The most recent, 2022’s The Other Side of Make Believe, only reached No 178 on the US charts.

So it’s a bit unexpected that their upcoming eighth album, This Mirror Weighs a Ton, is their masterpiece. “We just all really showed up,” frontman-guitarist Paul Banks says of a band that has swelled to a quintet as two touring musicians, bassist Brad Truax and keyboardist Brandon Curtis, become full-time members. “The lyrics on the last record, it’s really hard for me to identify with what I was doing,” Banks continues. “I felt as if I made some mistakes.” What were they? “I don’t want to draw attention to them! I just didn’t want to walk away with that feeling again.”

The Socceroos locked in their place in the last 32 as Group D runners-up while Paraguay finished third and face a nervous wait after a goalless draw

Jonathan Liew considers the impact of this World Cup being the most individual > collective in tournament history.

… something does feel qualitatively different this summer: a tectonic shift driven partly by events on the pitch and partly at the behest of the industry itself. This is a World Cup swimming in star names, and never have those star names been so unapologetically, unquestioningly invoked. France do not beat Iraq; instead Kylian Mbappé throws down the gauntlet to Erling Haaland, Harry Kane and the rest. According to Google, Miroslav Klose’s goals record has been searched more at this tournament than in the year he set it. At times the group phase has felt like an inconvenient distraction from the real business of the Golden Boot race. (Can Lionel Messi lift the one trophy he hasn’t won yet?)

Dorfman theatre, London
The director and writer of the hit 2014 film deliver a stage celebration of togetherness in the face of adversity

A group of 1980s LGBTQ+ activists begin fundraising for a south Wales pit village in the dark days of the miners’ strikes. It leads to an enduring friendship between the communities and a massive ripple effect beyond. This nugget of intersectional queer/mining history might sound like the unlikely trajectory of a feelgood Richard Curtis film – but it really happened.

There is, in fact, already a film. Pride, from 2014, was made with a bucket-load of national treasures including Imelda Staunton and Bill Nighy, created in the same “against-the-odds” mould as Billy Elliot and The Full Monty. This magnificent new musical reunites the screenwriter Stephen Beresford (book and lyrics) with director Matthew Warchus, who has developed the show as well as staged it.

Rescue efforts under way after buildings reduced to rubble in capital and along northern coast

Hundreds of people are feared to have died and thousands have been injured in Venezuela’s largest earthquake in more than a century.

Two earthquakes of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 hit 39 seconds apart near the town of Morón.

Packed with fun memories from Ben Elton and Stephen Fry plus heartbreaking regret from his former partner, the Bottom star is so adored that this documentary risks descending into cringe – but his punky spirit shines through

Rik Mayall: Magnificent B’Stard is a homage to the man and an elegy for what you have to presume were the lost youths of most of the viewing audience. I don’t know what the current youth would make of it. I suppose they’re not watching television anyway, so the question’s moot.

Plus, of course, it doesn’t matter. This is 90 minutes of television for us – the generation that grew up with Mayall on screen as Rick the Poet (“This is my angriest poem – Theatre!”), then self-styled investigative reporter from and mostly in Redditch, Kevin Turvey, then in The Young Ones as anarchist sociology student Rick and on through its less wildly popular follow-up Filthy Rich & Catflap. Then there was his unforgettable turn as Lord Flashheart in Blackadder II (and as the horndog lord’s equally priapic descendant Squadron Commander Flashheart in Blackadder Goes Forth); the unexpected pivot towards a more restrained demonstration of his comic talents as oleaginous, ruthless, corrupt, entirely fictional Tory MP Alan B’Stard in Marks and Gran’s brilliant The New Statesman; a Hollywood punt as Drop Dead Fred; then the huge success of Bottom as a sitcom and a live show throughout the 90s until a terrible quad biking accident in 1998 trimmed his sails.

Study also finds high humidity means people in hundreds of cities are enduring their worst ever heat stress

The heatwave scorching western Europe is the most severe and widespread ever and is only possible due to the climate crisis driven by fossil fuel burning, scientists have said.

Almost half of Europe’s 850 largest cities are also enduring their worst ever heat stress, a combination of temperature and humidity, they found. Muggier conditions mean sweating is less effective at cooling the body, making heatwaves even more dangerous.

Jacob Wulfson’s fellow airmen decided his fate after a court martial at RAF Lakenheath – a distressing week for Sarah Steele, the academic he assaulted

• Explainer: how the US bypasses British courts to try its military over crimes in the UK

When Sarah Steele woke up on the morning of 2 December 2023, she found herself in a pool of cold water in a bathtub. She was naked and in the apartment of an American fighter pilot she had met in person for the first time the night before. She was confused. Her head hurt, and so did her neck.

This was the account Steele, a British academic, provided to prosecutors. They later accused the pilot, Capt Jacob Wulfson, of drugging and strangling Steele in his apartment in the east of England, and penetrating her vagina with his penis without her consent.

Kremlin may attempt to test Nato cohesion as Russia comes under growing pressure from Ukraine, according to sources from two countries

Two countries on Nato’s eastern flank have warned that Russia is preparing a possible “provocation” in the Baltic states or Poland in an effort to test the cohesion of the western military alliance.

Western sources also fear there could be danger on the horizon because the Kremlin is coming under pressure from Ukraine’s campaign of long-range attacks on targets near Moscow and St Petersburg.

International Maritime Organization says safety guarantees must be confirmed before ships can move again

A United Nations agency has paused the evacuation of ships through the strait of Hormuz after the British military said a vessel was hit by a projectile off the coast of Oman following the passage of several tankers that used a route backed by the UN.

The head of the UN’s International Maritime Organization said on Thursday that the plan to move stranded ships out of the Persian Gulf through the strait would be on hold until the agency could confirm safety guarantees for the ships on the evacuation list and in the region.