The senator and twice Democratic presidential hopeful is on tour with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez trying to build a new progressive movement. He reveals why he thinks Republicans are scared to speak up and what went wrong for Kamala Harris in 2024

‘I think what Trumpism is about, is an understanding that the system in America is not working for working-class people,” says Bernie Sanders, sat in the Guardian’s offices in London. “In a phoney, hypocritical way, Trump has tapped into that. His quote-unquote ‘solutions’ will only make a bad situation worse.”

In person, Sanders’ 83 years read differently than in photograph, perhaps because of how conversational he is. His voice is magnetic – a Brooklyn accent that feels both warm and tough. “But what I have been aware of, and I’ve talked about it for years, is that in America, the very richest people are doing phenomenally well, while 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck.”

Fraudsters use fake artists to juice royalties from streaming services – but real musicians are getting blamed. Might they be better off without Spotify et al?

There is a battle gripping the music business today around the manipulation of streaming services – and innocent indie artists are the collateral damage.

Fraudsters are flooding Spotify, Apple Music and the rest with AI-generated tracks, to try and hoover up the royalties generated by people listening to them. These tracks are cheap, quick and easy to make, with Deezer estimating in April that over 20,000 fully AI-created tracks – that’s 18% of new tracks – were being ingested into its platform daily, almost double the number in January. The fraudsters often then use bots, AI or humans to endlessly listen to these fake songs and generate revenue, while others are exploiting upload services to get fake songs put on real artists’ pages and siphon off royalties that way.

Forget tough scrutiny of small boats or asylum hotels – this home secretary appears to lead a charmed life

What goes around doesn’t always come around. When Yvette Cooper was chair of the home affairs select committee between 2016 and 2021, she was a force of nature. Tireless. Persistent. Forensic. A one-woman opposition party that the government took seriously.

Yvette pretty much did for Amber Rudd – or rather, helped Rudd to do with herself – as home secretary. Sajid Javid was lucky to escape with a score draw in his appearances before her. Priti Patel merely had confirmed what we all knew: that she was one of the worst home secretaries in living memory.

Febos’s life flourished while taking a year off sex and dating. In a new memoir, The Dry Season, she explores the allure of romance

When Melissa Febos decided to be celibate for a year – after what she describes as a “ravaging vortex of a relationship” and “five other brief entanglements” – she felt “pretty self-conscious and kind of weird”. But other people’s reactions surprised her.

“I thought people were going to laugh at me or be like, that sounds boring, but so many people would lean in and either get this eager look on their face or this sort of dreadful look on their face, and they would say, ‘Oh, I think I should probably do that too,’” she says.
“I had no idea how many people had been in relationships for their whole adult life.”

When social media first exploded, we missed our chance to protect women and girls. Now history is repeating itself

Society is sleepwalking into a nightmare. The rate of global investment in AI is rocketing, as companies and countries invest in what has been described as a new arms race. The Californian company Nvidia, which dominates the market in the chips needed for AI, has become the most valuable in the world. The trend has been dubbed an “AI frenzy”, with the components described by analysts as the “new gold or oil”.

Everyone is getting in on the act, and politicians are desperate to stake their countries’ claim as global leaders in AI development. Safeguards, equitable access and sustainability are falling by the wayside: when countries gathered for the Paris AI summit in February 2025 and produced an international agreement pledging an “open”, “inclusive” and “ethical” approach to AI, the US and the UK refused to sign it.

Laura Bates is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project and author of The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny.

In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

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Soueif is willing to do ‘what it takes’ to free Alaa Abd el-Fattah, after a lifetime of speaking up against injustice

Laila Soueif, lying shrunken on a hospital bed at St Thomas’ hospital in London on the 247th day of her hunger strike in pursuit of freedom for her son, imprisoned British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, is locked in what may prove to be her last of many trials of strength with Egypt’s authoritarian regime.

A remarkable, witty and courageous woman, she has the self-awareness to admit: “I may have made a mistake, God knows,” but she will not back down, and anyone looking back at her rich life has little evidence to doubt her perseverance.

Focus on capital spending in northern cities and Midlands is recognition Labour needs better economic story for voters

• Rachel Reeves looks to spending review to shift focus from welfare cuts

Rachel Reeves is announcing £15bn for trams, trains and buses outside London as she launches a charm offensive to persuade fractious Labour MPs that her spending review will not be a return to austerity.

The chancellor has begun meeting groups of backbenchers to argue that the money, part of a £113bn investment in capital projects over the rest of the parliament including transport, homes and energy, would only have happened under Labour.

The former head of Doge said the ‘outrageous’ tax bill will cause the deficit to grow to $2.5tn

• US politics live – latest updates

Elon Musk, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, has opened a new rift with Donald Trump by denouncing the US president’s tax and spending bill as a “disgusting abomination”.

Musk’s online outburst could embolden fiscally conservative Republican senators – some of whom have already spoken out – to defy Trump as they continue crucial negotiations on Capitol Hill over the so-called “one big, beautiful bill”.

Exclusive: National Fire Chiefs Council warns of pressures, with callouts up 20% in a decade as firefighter numbers fall

Fire stations in England are “falling apart”, fire chiefs have warned, with funding plummeting by an estimated £1bn in the last decade as callouts have increased by a fifth.

Fire and rescue must not become the “forgotten emergency service”, the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) urged, warning of mounting pressures that “risk undermining public and firefighter safety”, as it responds to more 999 calls with fewer firefighters.

Trading partners around the world express anger including Mexico which buys more steel out of the US than it sends the other way

The US has doubled tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum imports to 50%, pressing ahead in the face of criticism from key trading partners with a measure that Donald Trump says is intended to revive the American industry.

After imposing and rapidly lifting tariffs on much of the world, only to reduce them, Trump last week refocused on the global steel and aluminum markets – and the dominance of China.