Drugs, drink and dancing made Bez famous. Thirty-five years on, has he really swapped it all for filtered water, intermittent fasting and walks with the dogs?

Bez has both shoelaces undone and it’s making me nervous. Out walking his dogs, we’re up and over barbed wire, across streams and over gates. We bash through brambles and skid down slopes. I’m becoming fixated on the perilously trailing laces of his trainers and why he hasn’t tripped over them. Can he be such a thrill-seeker that a dog walk can be turned into an hour of jeopardy?

Of course he can. This is Bez, anarchic maraca-shaker, party person, the man Shaun Ryder, his Happy Mondays bandmate and partner in crime, says is a bad influence. Bez, whose real name is Mark Berry, has been in more scrapes than seems possible for one person. A small sample: knocking his teeth out in a motorbike crash at the age of 16, threatened with a gun when he and Ryder were trying to buy crack in New York, kidnapped and held hostage during another drug deal, smashing his body up in another motorbike crash in 1999 and then getting MRSA in hospital and ending up in a coma for a month.

A toxic debate over anti-Zionism leaves the Green leader looking like a passenger in the movement that carried him to the top

When Donald Trump calls someone a socialist he is not using the word in the same way that, say, Zohran Mamdani does. The mayor of New York espouses democratic socialism as a mission of equitable distribution of wealth and opportunity. The US president says socialism only pretends to be democratic “because it sounds so nice”; that “it’s really communism you’re talking about” and that people such as Mamdani pose “the biggest threat to our nation … since its founding”.

People who despise an idea, seeing it as the manifestation of everything wicked, cannot be expected to define it accurately. As with the radical right and socialism, so it is with the left and Zionism.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

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Israeli communities shattered by Hamas massacres are torn between rebuilding their lives and remembering lost friends and relatives

Keith Siegel spent many of his long hours in Hamas captivity in Gaza etching everything that happened after 7 October 2023 into his memory. For 484 days, he recited to himself every place he was held, the dates he was moved and every attack or humiliation he endured or witnessed.

He aimed to store intelligence that could help Israeli forces free other hostages if he was released, to keep track of time as the days slid by and be able to tell his family what happened to him. Now his body is free, but he cannot loosen those memories.

Bestselling author and Conservative politician whose scandal-ridden career ended with a prison sentence

Jeffrey Archer, who has died aged 86, was irrepressible, though not necessarily in a good way. Ordinary humans would be sunk by the allegations of lies, thefts, frauds, gussied-up CVs, expenses fiddles, charity swindles, plagiarisms, insider trading deals, funding illicit coups and – perhaps most unforgivable of all – unpleasantness to underlings that dogged Archer’s life. But Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare – bestselling novelist, disgraced politician, one-time athlete and convicted liar – was not ordinary: he was what the Titanic was designed to be, unsinkable.

One morning in September 2000, for instance, Archer emerged from Wimbledon police station. He had just been charged with perjury for persuading a friend to lie for him during his 1987 libel action against the Daily Star newspaper, which had claimed he had paid a sex worker to buy her silence.

From blood pressure to ageing, research suggests the first 1,000 days of sugar exposure could leave a decades-long mark on health

They were born into a Britain still recovering from the hardships of war. Though the air-raid sirens had fallen silent, many everyday foods remained rationed, including sugar. Adults were restricted to about 3 tablespoons (40g) a day to stretch between cups of tea, baking and desserts; children were limited to less than a tablespoon. Babies and very young children were expected to have little or no added sugar.

Then, in 1953, the brakes came off. Separate restrictions on sweets and chocolate were lifted in February, followed by sugar in September. By the second half of 1954, average sugar consumption had almost doubled.

After a phenomenal decade-long run, the Cursed Child two-parter is being pruned. Will it still work? Our writer swishes her cloak, levitates her luggage – and hops aboard the streamlined Hogwarts Express

‘Silencio!” Two dozen tank-topped and T-shirted figures fall quiet, and look expectantly at movement director Nuno Silva. “If you’ve got a cloak, accio it now …” With that summoning charm cast, broomsticks are stowed, wands holstered, suitcases grabbed.

The Harry Potter and the Cursed Child rehearsal room – a creaky church hall whose Victorian wall clock gives a serendipitously Hogwarts flavour – is a near-permanent bustle of activity. A sound technician quickly re-sets cues on her laptop, a costume designer helps an actor into a suspiciously long pair of gloves. Associate director Nicola Samer is quietly running notes with a couple of the leads while the rest of the company preps for the next scene.

Conservative leader is addressing delegates in Birmingham

Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, is speaking now at the conference. He described Nick Timothy as the “Bob the Builder” of the next parliament on the basis of the Tory pledge to build 50,000 prison places.

“Can he fix it? Yes he can,” Philp said. He went on:

I know we didn’t get everything right in government, but we now have a plan to make things better, whereas Labour is making them worse.

Dangerous men released early from jail. Police numbers down by 2,000. Stop and search opposed. 92% of crime unsolved. Illegal immigrants and foreign criminals not deported.

So many parts of government are corrupted by radical identity politics and a deference to clan culture.

We can no longer trust our institutions to work for us all, to uphold the principle that justice is blind, that we’re all equal before the law.

Postal service says cuts will focus on on head office and ‘support function roles’

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Royal Mail is to cut up to 2,500 jobs as the embattled company seeks to restructure its business amid intense competition and the continuing decline in letter deliveries.

The postal service, which has been fined a total of £37m since 2023 for missing delivery targets set by Ofcom, said the job cuts would focus on head office and “support function roles” with the restructure to be completed by the end of next year.

1,200 died in attack that led to launch of devastating war in Gaza

• ‘All I want to do is cry’: trauma of 7 October survivors three years after the attacks

The Israeli military said it launched several security operations across the West Bank overnight, arresting dozens of people suspected of being involved in terrorism, including expressing support for the 7 October attack, the Israeli military said.

A young man was shot and wounded by Israeli soldiers during one of the campaigns in Jenin, according to Wafa, the Palestinian news agency.

Exclusive: Officials working on further radical changes that would change how much energy companies could charge customers

John Healey is planning a major intervention to cut energy bills for poorer households in this month’s budget, after ministers became alarmed at forecasts that show bills rising by hundreds of pounds in January.

The chancellor is working on plans to spend more than £1bn to help energy consumers, the bulk of which is likely to go towards increasing the discount given to households on certain benefits.