Olivia Rodrigo, Noah Kahan and Morgan Wallen have all dealt with audience effluence in recent weeks – but that’s only one part of a fearsome subculture that has built up around fandom, endurance and ‘getting barrier’

The front row of a gig is a sacred space. When you love an artist, you want to be as close to them as possible, without a view obscured by someone else’s hairdo. You want the possibility that the artist will pluck you from the crowd, form a deep and enduring connection and end up marrying you. Or at least notice you.

Last month, Olivia Rodrigo revealed how acutely she had noticed some of the fans lining the barriers at her shows. “People wear diapers so that they can be front row,” she said, adding, to everyone’s absolute horror: “That’s been an experience as a performer that I have smelled.”

This is no aberration, and while genuine medical needs should be taken into account, situations down the front have clearly got out of control. Also last month, video of a very stoic stadium worker cleaning up human excrement at a Noah Kahan gig went viral and prompted Kahan himself to post on X: “If you have to poop at a show please dear god just go to the bathroom lmao.” This week, a fan of US country star Morgan Wallen complained that he, his brother and his niece were urinated on by another concertgoer, and police are investigating. Must we be subjected to headlines such as “Someone Also Shit Their Pants at a 5 Seconds of Summer Concert”? And in 2024, someone urinated on the floor of the standing section of a Sabrina Carpenter concert, causing a run on a fairly horrifying item called a “pit diaper”, whose mere existence speaks to a wider problem.

From over-hyped shows to the woeful Turner prize, this huge institution has been beset by problems – yet new boss Jessica Morgan seems too much like a safe pair of hands to shake things up
• Jessica Morgan named new Tate director

Even Tate knows it needs to change. This top-heavy montage of four museums really needs to scrutinise itself and ask hard questions about its aims and how it works – including why it often doesn’t. Apparently aware of the crisis, it hails its new director Jessica Morgan as “an agent of change”. Well that’s a relief. But is she really?

Morgan is a highly rated curator of contemporary art, recently leading the Dia Art Foundation in the US to great acclaim and with an earlier track record at Tate Modern itself. Yet these very strengths suggest she will stay within a groove that Tate is all too comfortable with. It’s unlikely she’s going to rush to put on a show about art and the Reformation, for instance.

We asked readers what they hoped to see and consistent themes around courage and communication emerged

• UK politics live – latest updates

With Andy Burnham entering Downing Street we asked people to tell us what they wanted from the new prime minister and government. About 400 people from around the UK responded to an online call-out asking about the values and issues they care about.

The words that came up most when people outlined how they wanted Andy Burnham to govern were honesty, integrity and courage, and the issues were climate change, cost of living and health and social care.

Anger, guilt, shame: the deepest unseen wound of this war is the rift between those who left and those who stayed behind

“Can we reschedule?”

Over the years of working with western colleagues, I had learned to accept that they don’t fully understand what war feels like from the inside. They would ask me to find someone in occupied Mariupol for an interview, or seem genuinely puzzled that I couldn’t just log on at a time that suited them. I made my peace with this long ago – they don’t have to understand. But this time, it was a Ukrainian who asked.

Diana Berg is a Ukrainian artist, writer and cultural manager from Mariupol, and the founder of Platform TU, an independent cultural initiative now operating in exile after Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Gold dances, the Good Friday agreement and standup superstardom … get ready to blub because here are the most heartwarming denouements in TV history

Warning: this article contains spoilers

Despite official claims that the São Francisco River project supplies 12m people, many of those who had to make way for its construction in 2007 still have no water at all

A concrete canal cutting through the Caatinga scrubland feeds a surface reservoir two and a half miles from Maria de Fátima Ferreira da Silva’s home in rural Brazil. The canal passes Sertânia and continues until it reaches Monteiro, the next town along, where it spills its precious cargo into the bed of the Paraíba River – a human-directed inflow into the seasonally dry waterway.

Such proximity to a reliable water source would usually be considered a blessing in the sertão, a vast outback in Brazil’s north-east known for its punishing droughts. But not for Ferreira, who was displaced nearly 20 years ago by the construction of the canal and now lives in a house without any water supply, despite the nearby reservoir.

Maria de Fátima Ferreira da Silva in her maize crop at Salão productive rural village. She bathes at the reservoir and collects water there for her smallholding and donkey, and pays to fill her barrel with drinking water each month

Exclusive: Guardian investigation of CT Group uncovers practice that appears to seek hidden influence over public opinion

A political lobbying firm founded by the former electoral strategist for David Cameron and Boris Johnson secretly pays journalists to write pieces for British newspapers that are favourable to their clients, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

In a practice that appears to create a backdoor for private companies to influence public opinion, lobbyists for CT Group – co-founded by the campaign strategist, Lynton Crosby – told an undercover reporter that they had paid journalists to place apparently independent stories in newspapers.

PM says he wants to make sure ‘everything has been looked at’ after backlash from victims’ organisations

• UK politics live – latest updates

Plans to release killers, rapists and sex offenders early from jail in September are to be reviewed, Andy Burnham has said, following a backlash from bereaved families and victims’ organisations.

The prime minister said he wanted to make sure that “everything has been looked at again” before a fresh tranche of about 6,000 offenders were freed on tags into the community.

Proposal ‘throws global south countries under the bus’, says ActionAid UK director

• Burnham announces bus fares to be capped at £2

• UK politics live – latest updates

The world’s most vulnerable people will be put at risk by Andy Burnham’s decision to use the aid budget to pay for cheaper bus fares in England, charities have said.

The prime minister announced on Wednesday that he would reduce the fare cap from £3 per journey to £2 for next year, funded mainly by changing international climate donations into repayable loans.

Threat from US president comes after US military completes 11th night of strikes on Iran

The Jordanian army said it intercepted four Iranian missiles on Wednesday with two additional missile falling in an open area, AFP reports.

The two missiles that the army did not intercept fell in “two remote, uninhabited areas, without causing any human casualties or material damage” the army said in a statement.