While many people in the UK recognise the need to preserve water, others are furious and planning to flout the ban in their area. The target of their anger? Failing water companies and frighteningly thirsty data centres

‘Plants are like your babies,” says Harry. And accordingly, he argues, most people would do anything to keep them alive, including break the law. This is what he plans to do this week – defying a hosepipe ban in place across large parts of England, to ensure his shrubs maintain a steady pulse.

He may not be alone. On Tuesday, Thames Water became the latest company to ban hosepipes – a restriction that will affect more than 10 million people. Since mid-July, Welsh Water, Anglian Water, Affinity Water (serving Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Surrey), Southern Water and Cambridge Water have all announced hosepipe bans. And earlier this week, South East Water extended its existing ban to cover an additional 1.5 million.

Industrial poultry farming is killing our rivers. But rather than stop it, the government has been facilitating it. Will Andy Burnham end this ecocide?

There’s a slightly mean question I often ask British people with an interest in the living world: can you name the environment secretary? I don’t intend to show them up: it’s not them I’m testing. I watch the brows knit, a finger go up, the mouth open and close. “It’s, you know, the one who … no, they went, didn’t they? That other one …” It’s been like this for seven years.

Why? Because throughout this period, we’ve not had environment secretaries. We’ve had portals through which corporate lobbyists may pass. The last incumbent to represent the wider public interest (and I can scarcely bring myself to type these words) was Michael Gove. In his other roles, he’s widely remembered with loathing and disgust. Out of office, he continues to poison public life, as editor of the Spectator. But in this role, to general astonishment, he placed the public good above special interests.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

With the outbreak of this year’s war, Iraq’s balancing act between the two antagonists has collapsed, exposing a perilously fragile state

One week after the United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and ignited a regional war, drones started flying over Basra in southern Iraq. They were targeting Iraq’s oil industry. They hit an oilfield operated by BP, as well as a cargo terminal at Basra airport and a large compound that houses foreign companies that service the oil sector. Another attack on 6 March hit the same compound, striking offices and warehouses used by Halliburton and KBR, two US companies that have been in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. The attack sparked a massive fire that lit up the night sky.

In the wider war, it was not a particularly notable day – but in Iraq the strikes laid bare just how weak the state had become and “how easily sovereignty could be violated”, as one senior Iraqi security official put it to me. For 40 years, the US, Iran and Israel existed in an uneasy equilibrium of neither peace nor war. As this has come to a sudden, dramatic end, Iraq finds itself caught in the middle.

Glasgow stepped in at the last minute to host the games, after Victoria in Australia pulled out

“A lot of people aren’t fully aware it’s happening,” says one man working on a stall selling Commonwealth Games merchandise in Glasgow city centre on Wednesday, a day before the competition begins.

“It’s been slow – the first two days we didn’t really sell anything but it’s picking up now.”

Judy Bain, 81, spent most of her life unaware she was a direct descendant of the daring pilot Arthur Whitten Brown

In the spring of 1944, Elsie Barber, a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, had a fling with a Royal Air Force pilot named Arthur Brown, known as Buster. The liaison at the RAF base near High Ercall in Shropshire was clandestine. She was 24 and single, he was a recently married 21-year-old.

Buster died months later, on D-day, when his Mosquito fighter plane crashed in the Netherlands, leaving Elsie with a lonely dilemma. She was pregnant, and after giving birth to a daughter, made the decision to give her up for adoption.

Exclusive: Darren Rosheski won NHS payout over partner Helen Dutton’s death from rectal cancer after GP misjudged her symptoms

“I remember the doctor, after he’d examined Helen and found a large lump in her colon, saying ‘it’s very sinister – we need to bring you in to be investigated.”

Darren Rosheski is recalling the moment a consultant doctor at Tameside hospital broke the news to his partner, Helen Dutton, that her symptoms – which also included back pain, passing blood and altered bowel habits – were so worrying that they needed further tests.

No 10 announces reprieve after Andy Burnham previously pledged to raise tax from e-commerce warehouses and channel it to cutting hospitality sector’s bills

Business rates will be cut by 20% for pubs, clubs and live music venues across England from April next year, Downing Street has announced.

The discount will apply to nearly 32,000 hospitality businesses and is expected to save a typical pub about £1,100 annually, but will not be available to the very largest live music venues.

Exclusive: Elizabeth Warren says it is unclear how bank failed to uncover former CEO’s links with sex offender

The leading US senator Elizabeth Warren has called for urgent answers from Barclays over what she claimed was its “apparent failure to meaningfully investigate” ties between the bank’s former boss, Jes Staley, and the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

In a letter sent privately to Barclays’s chair, Nigel Higgins, and seen by the Guardian, Warren – the most senior Democrat on the US senate banking committee – said it was “deeply unclear how Barclays, supposedly investigating Staley’s connection to Epstein, failed to uncover this decades-long relationship”.

More than 70 attacks have been recorded over past year, including acts of violence, property damage and vandalism

One mosque is attacked in Britain every five days, according to new data released by the government’s partner for monitoring anti-Muslim hatred.

More than 70 attacks on mosques in the UK have been recorded over the past year, which include acts of intimidation, violence, property damage, harassment, anti-Muslim hate speech, online abuse and vandalism.

Analysis shows how heatwaves are making atmosphere thirstier, damaging water supplies, food production and power generation

Extreme heat supercharged by the climate crisis is sucking Europe dry in summer and intensifying the drought hitting the continent, a scientific analysis has found.

Record-breaking heatwaves meant the hot atmosphere strongly evaporated water from rivers, lakes, soils and plants – conditions made 80 times more likely by global heating in western Europe and 40 times more likely in eastern Europe, the study showed. The level of soil dryness in the west was made five times more likely by the pollution from fossil fuels in the west, and 11 times more likely in the east.