Girls Gone Bible is on tour in the US, touting a regressive ideal of femininity through discussions of abstinence and mental health struggles

At first glance, the crowd gathering outside a music venue in Red Bank, New Jersey, could have passed for a group of sorority rush hopefuls – or Ella Langley fans on their way to the country star’s show. Most of them were under the age of 30. They wore cowboy boots, maxi sundresses and soft, bouncy blowouts, scrolling on their phones outside the doors as they waited for friends to arrive.

But one accessory gave them away: the Bibles they toted. These women were there to pray.

Christine Edzard’s The Man With the Plan tours the country with a timely message about tackling want, disease, squalor, idleness and ignorance

A new film that addresses issues fundamental to the new prime minister’s declared mission will star Simon Callow as a historical British political figure.

The hero of The Man With the Plan is William Beveridge, who helped to lay the foundations of the postwar welfare state. It shows that the Liberal peer was much more radical than is usually assumed – and certainly far more so than Churchill anticipated when he asked Beveridge to draw up a report into the future of Britain’s fragmented social insurance and national health system after the second world war.

Youth club closures, unaffordable housing and social media cited as factors contributing to a sharp decline in wellbeing

The number of young people with no close friends has risen fivefold since 2014 as a result of growing up in a “bleak world” dominated by austerity, the pandemic and social media.

New research paints a sobering picture of how 11- to 24-year-olds in England are increasingly lonely, isolated and “disconnected” from themselves, peers and wider society.

A year on from the purge, with thousands of jobs cut and billions in foreign aid lost, a former leader reflects on the sorry saga – and why it would never happen to Nasa

A year has passed since I and thousands of colleagues lost our jobs at USAID. Asking myself “Why us?” I have come to the conclusion that the American public had very little idea of what we were doing and why.

Doge, the “department of government efficiency”, began its work in January 2025, with USAID as its first target, in a reckless campaign that even Elon Musk has said he would not repeat. At that moment of chaos, Americans lacked the knowledge that could contradict the false narrative presented by Musk, who called the agency a “criminal organisation” and “a viper’s nest of radical left-marxists who hate America”.

U-turn on early release scheme will create ‘stresses and strains’ on prison system, says former justice secretary

Andy Burnham is taking a “big risk” by seeking to continue running prison capacity to the limit, according to the former justice secretary appointed by Keir Starmer to oversee a review of sentencing.

As parliament resumes on Tuesday, the government will confirm its U-turn on its early release scheme, which would have seen thousands of prisoners released early as part of a plan to ease prison overcrowding.

The last time she displayed a sculpture in public in Britain, someone covered it in white paint. But, undeterred, the acclaimed artist is a placing a black woman in Trafalgar Square

Tschabalala Self is relentlessly positive and unstoppably optimistic. The US artist is waiting for the unveiling of Lady in Blue, her new sculpture for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, a towering, colourful painted bronze of a black woman striding (positively, optimistically) into the future. Self seems resolutely hopeful about the work, which is pretty impressive considering what happened to her last public sculpture in the UK. “Yeah,” she says, speaking from her home in upstate New York. “I mean, that was a completely racist act.”

In 2022, Self unveiled Seated at Coal Drops Yard in King’s Cross, London. Like Lady in Blue, it was a vast, brightly painted bronze depiction of a black woman, this time seated demurely on a chair. After being shown at Coal Drops Yard without incident, it was moved to the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, where the reception wasn’t quite as warm. “Within the first week,” says Self, “it was spraypainted white, but only on the skin of the sculpture.” As vandalism goes, it doesn’t get much more pointed, or racist. “The first feeling I had was just pain that my sculpture had been harmed. That someone had enacted violence on an object I had imbued with love and affection.”

Exclusive: FCA pressures firms to do more to sort 760,000 accounts as watchdog urges families to use free tracking service

Child trust fund providers are being put under the spotlight to check they are treating savers fairly and doing all they can to reunite young people with lost accounts.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said about 760,000 accounts worth an average of £2,000 were yet to be claimed – more than £1.5bn in total – as it launched a review of the market.

Assisting an ageing loved one can start with small tasks but may lead to full-time caregiving that requires more support

Helping an ageing parent or loved one often begins with easy-to-field requests: Pick up a prescription. Drive them to a doctor’s appointment. Grab groceries.

However, light tasks – just “helping out” here and there – may eventually snowball into the avalanche of full-time caregiving, a phenomenon becoming known as “caregiver creep”. Like “caregiver burnout”, it’s not a formal term, but there is growing awareness about this slow build among healthcare providers and experts.

Technology trained on millions of routine ECGs could fast-track high-risk patients for treatment

Doctors have developed a “superhuman” AI tool that can spot heart disease in less than two seconds.

The groundbreaking technology has been trained on millions of patients and works by extracting more information from a routine electrocardiogram (ECG) than the human eye can typically see.

Technology trained on millions of routine ECGs could fast-track high-risk patients for treatment

Doctors have developed a “superhuman” AI tool that can spot heart disease in less than two seconds.

The groundbreaking technology has been trained on millions of patients and works by extracting more information from a routine electrocardiogram (ECG) than the human eye can typically see.

Exclusive: Labour MPs believe Gordon Brown-era SMC has become ineffective and its work ‘should be a core function of government’

Ministers are considering a shake-up of the government’s social mobility watchdog that could range from giving it more teeth to abolishing it outright.

The move comes amid concerns that the Social Mobility Commission (SMC) – originally conceived under Gordon Brown’s government in 2010 – has become ineffective.

Apparently a dedicated mud room will make you less stressed. But I have a very different approach

I was excited to learn that the latest interiors essential, according to the Washington Post, is a “dirty zone”. I’m ahead of the curve – I’ve already got a dirty zone by each main door (and also one directly outside the back door, where, rudely, a mystery animal has defecated). The fridge drawers are dirty zones thanks to the windfall apples I thought I would cook, but predictably left to liquefy. There’s a dirty zone next to the washing machine and a mildewy one inside it. There’s the festering compost bin I’m too chicken to tackle post-heatwave, plus the cupboard under the stairs, which we don’t talk about. Good luck finding a clean zone, basically.

Does this make me kinda chic? Unfortunately not: the Post is actually preaching the benefits of confining the sordid ephemera of life to carefully delineated and hidden areas: storage benches, monogrammed totes or even a “mud room” (for coats, shoes, skis, lacrosse sticks and dog-washing sinks – I think posh Britons call it a boot room). A 2021 study in the Netherlands found that participants who did chores in chaotic environments had higher levels of the stress marker salivary alpha-amylase. I always wonder what’s brewing in my mouth as I fall over piles of filthy shoes yet again while running to answer the door.

More than two dozen teenagers stuck in the Spanish territory of Ceuta shared their reasons for joining the treacherous mass crossing in July

For Fatin, one of the teenage girls now living in limbo in a makeshift camp in the Spanish city of Ceuta, the decision to leave her home in Morocco began to form when she had to give up school.

She wanted to continue studying, she says, but at home she was expected to take responsibility for the housework instead. As classes and learning gave way to domestic chores, the future she had imagined for herself began to feel increasingly distant.

Checks at pharmacies for people aged 40 to 84 are aimed at identifying those at risk of heart attack or stroke

The NHS in England is to offer free finger-prick blood tests for cholesterol on the high street for the first time under plans to reduce heart disease and stroke deaths by a quarter within the next decade.

The seven-minute tests will be available at participating pharmacies as part of a national rollout to spot “ticking timebombs” earlier.

Will the UK ever rejoin the EU? Who is funding Andy Burnham? And will the bedroom tax be scrapped? In a special episode, Kiran Stacey and Peter Walker answer some of your questions

Please keep sending your comments and questions to Pippa and Kiran at politicsweeklyuk@theguardian.com

This month a predator with ties to the online extortion group known as 764 was sentenced to decades in prison. The mother of one of his victims wants parents to know the truth about this ‘harrowing’ global trend

• Sadistic online exploitation: five warning signs for parents - and how to keep young people safe

“My beautiful, kind, intelligent, trusting daughter had the misfortune of stumbling across a link in a Discord server that led her to your evil and cruel group.

“The grooming of her started immediately, and what followed was unimaginably harrowing and traumatic. You were just one of the group members who abused her, who made her do things that no young person should ever be made to do.”

The movement against datacenters is uniting Americans because they perfectly illustrate how a few individuals hold all the power to control decisions that affect our lives

Bryce Gustafson has been knocking on doors in Indiana for more than a decade. The lead organizer with Citizens Action Coalition (CAC), a consumer and environmental organization, he usually encounters a mix of reactions when he’s out canvassing; whatever issue he’s talking about, there’s always at least a few people on the other side. But at a recent festival in the rural town of Monrovia, Indiana, he was struck by an unusual spirit of unity.

He was there about a proposed datacenter, a 550-acre (222-hectare) Google project in this small town of 1,600 people. “I had 50 people I talked to,” Gustafson told me. “Nobody wanted that datacenter in their community. And at least a half a dozen people came up to me to say, ‘Hey, I voted for Trump. What the heck’s he doing, supporting these things?’”

Campaigners welcome plan to bring IPP sentences to a close but say the move is long overdue

Campaigners have hailed Andy Burnham’s pledge to bring an end to indefinite jail terms as “a day that thousands of families have spent years fighting for”.

The prime minister has said he will “end the injustice” of imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentences during this parliament, meaning people will no longer be trapped indefinitely under a sentence abolished more than a decade ago.

Project in Zambia shows how teaching young women to negotiate better can have a long-term impact on their prospects

Women making their way in patriarchal societies down the ages have always had to wield their meagre economic power deftly. New evidence from a fascinating research project in Zambia suggests that’s a skill that can be learned.

A team of female US academics have been gathering data for more than a decade, which shows that teaching young women to negotiate better can have a long-term impact on their prospects.

A retired software engineer and a planetary scientist disagreed about putting up flags and nationalising private companies, but were they worlds apart on legalising drugs?

• Want to meet someone from across the divide? Click here to find out how

Finley, 23, London

Occupation Planetary scientist