The Grammy-winning Puerto Rican megastar delivered a powerful, detail-packed performance that paid tribute to his history and teased more greatness for his future

When the NFL announced in September that Bad Bunny would perform at the Super Bowl half-time show, the immediate expectation was that Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio would Make a Statement.

There was, of course, backlash from the people who think a performance in Spanish is un-American (all while Puerto Rico remains a US territory). But there was also criticism from those who argued that, post-Kaepernick, there is no performance on an NFL stage that could meaningfully challenge the power whose invitation into its center of capital and nationalism these artists accepted. And as we’ve reached peak Bad Bunny this week, Puerto Ricans have pointed out that many fans’ investment in the island ends with the artist.

She was just 14 when she was groomed by the R&B star, and filmed in an explicit video. She tells the extraordinary story of how she survived

Picture Reshona Landfair in 1996 at 12 years old, when she met the R&B superstar R Kelly (real name Robert Kelly). Her world, she says, seemed like “a buffet” spread out before her. She was a popular girl, a seriously talented basketball player and the youngest member – in her words, “the pint-sized girl rapper” – of 4 The Cause, the singing group she had formed with three cousins. They’d been signed to a record label, made the Top 10 in eight countries and toured much of Europe. Her large extended family from the West Side of Chicago was tight-knit. Life was filled with music, sport, church, Sunday lunch at Grandma’s, family road trips and everybody knowing everybody’s business. “That was a beautiful time,” she says. “I had love and good people all around me. I was living in my true light of who I wanted to become. I felt like I was on my way.”

Fast forward to Landfair at 26 years old, when she finally left Kelly’s orbit. By then, half her family weren’t speaking to the other half, and the relationships that survived were charged with guilt, unasked questions and terrible past mistakes. She had no friends left, as Kelly hadn’t allowed it. Her hopes of a musical career were also long gone – Kelly had made her leave 4 The Cause when she was just 15. She had no qualifications beyond high school and no idea what she wanted to do because, for more than a decade, she’d relied on Kelly to tell her. She couldn’t imagine a healthy relationship; she’d learned sex, she says, “through the lens of a paedophile”. Every element of her 12-year-old life, everything on that “buffet table”, had been destroyed by Kelly. Yet she is still told regularly by total strangers that she must be a “gold digger”, that she “rode the gravy train” and took Kelly for all she could get.

He has been jailed, tracked and threatened by China’s government. What was it like pay a visit home? As he publishes a polemic about surveillance and state control, he relives a momentous trip to see his mother

Ai Weiwei is talking me through the decision-making process before his first visit to China in over a decade. The artist, known around the world as the most famous critic of the Chinese communist regime, had to do some fraught arithmetic before deciding to head back home.

Before boarding a flight with his son, who had never met the artist’s elderly mother, Ai thought back to his time in detention when his captors told him he would spend the next 13 years in custody on bogus charges: “They said, ‘When you come out, your son won’t recognise you.’ That was very heavy and really the only moment that touched me.”

Whoever succeeds Keir Starmer will still have an almost impossible task: convincing voters that politicians will serve the people, not themselves

So, there goes Morgan McSweeney, leaving Keir Starmer even more exposed, and the British side of the vast Jeffrey Epstein scandal still unfolding. The resignation note penned by the prime minister’s former chief of staff is as clear as it had to be, and acknowledges that McSweeney advised Starmer to make the most fateful choice of his time as Labour leader. “The decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was wrong,” it says. “He has damaged our party, our country and trust in politics itself.” The vetting process for such decisions, it goes on, “must now be fundamentally overhauled”. But the key question festers on, and it has always been political rather than procedural: between late 2024 and early 2025, despite knowing that Mandelson had maintained his friendship with Epstein after the latter’s conviction for what US law calls soliciting prostitution from a minor, why did McSweeney, Starmer and their inner circle still conclude that he was the right man to be the UK’s ambassador in Washington DC?

There is a very important contextual element of the story, which began to surface at the end of last week, about the absence of alarm – in both politics and the media – at the appointment at the time it was made, suggestive of an amazing collective amnesia about details of the Mandelson/Epstein relationship that had been made public. But even so, that doesn’t detract from the awfulness of what the prime minister and his people did, which sits at the heart of the story like an incurable headache. They surely know it, and so does everyone else: presented with a due diligence report based on a vivid account of what Mandelson had been up to (much of which was well known anyway), they apparently took his denials at face value. Despite warnings to the contrary – from, we now hear, the-then foreign secretary David Lammy and Starmer’s then-deputy Angela Rayner – they gave Mandelson exactly what he wanted.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

Labour faces a battle to hold on to its 13,000 majority, with the Greens the bookies’ favourite and Reform hoping to gain from split vote on left

As Nigel Farage cut the ribbon on Reform UK’s byelection headquarters in Greater Manchester this week, Labour’s candidate, Angeliki Stogia, sat tearfully in a cafe nearby.

Politicians do not often show their emotion but for Stogia, who arrived in Britain as a student from Greece in 1995, this is personal. “I am angry,” she said of Farage’s party. “I am very, very angry. How dare they come here and spread this division?”

After a sexually frustrating marriage led to divorce, I chased increasingly extreme BDSM encounters. But I never felt truly satisfied. Had I been looking for the wrong thing all along?

To everyone else, it probably looked like a regular summer’s evening. Couples and families enjoying the beer garden, people playing cricket on the green – and I was being handcuffed in the passenger seat of a 4x4 by a man I barely knew.

My name is Leesa, and I’m a recovered sex addict.

Allies hope aide’s departure can quell anger over Mandelson scandal but others say it leaves PM dangerously exposed

• Profile: Labour election guru undone by poor judgment

• ‘Only honourable course’: resignation statement in full

Keir Starmer is fighting to reassert control over his party after accepting the resignation of his closest adviser, Morgan McSweeney, amid anger over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador.

After days of pressure over the scandal, his departing chief of staff said on Sunday he took “full responsibility” for his advice to send Mandelson to Washington despite his ongoing relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, which McSweeney conceded had undermined trust in Labour and in politics itself.

Exclusive: Labour peer, who came to UK as a refugee, says some ministers try to show they won’t ‘just do things because of their background’

Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, whose parents migrated to the UK from Pakistan, is facing the suggestion from a veteran Labour peer that she is “pulling up the drawbridge once inside” when considering the plight of refugee children trapped abroad.

Alf Dubs, who came to the UK aged six in 1939 fleeing the persecution of Jews in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, said the home secretary and other ministers had “kowtowed” to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK by preventing unaccompanied children from seeking refuge with UK-based family members.

Met Office issues fresh yellow warning for rain as parts of England are still recovering from extensive flooding

More than 200 flood alerts were active across the UK on Sunday as parts of England and Wales braced for more downpours after the Met Office issued a fresh yellow warning for rain.

The warning spans noon to midnight on Monday, covering parts of southern Wales as well as south-east and south-west England. The Met Office said that “10-15mm of rain is likely fairly widely with 20-30mm in some places exposed to the strong south to south-easterly winds”.

Art Not Evidence group wants change in law that currently allows lyrics by defendants to be presented as evidence of gang affiliation

Campaigners are urging ministers to change the law so that music lyrics are inadmissible in court, a shift that they say would stop a practice that disproportionately affects young black men and criminalises creativity.

At present, police can produce lyrics written by defendants, and even flag an appearance in the background of a music video, as evidence that a suspect is affiliated with a gang or involved in criminality.