She has built an unlikely career in mould, maggots and excrement, cleaning for those who most need it. It can take months building trust with a stranger, before she and her boyfriend go in and transform everything

‘There might be a dead bird in the box room. We think it has been there for a couple of years,” says Bea Elton, raising her voice to be heard through her respirator. It is particularly robust, as she has a dust and cat hair allergy. “Not ideal,” in her line of work, the 28-year-old concedes.

Knowing it would be difficult to talk on the job, we spoke before we arrived, struggling into hazmat suits, shoe covers, gloves and masks in the overgrown garden outside the front door. “I refer to myself as a cleaner. I would never refer to myself as a cleanfluencer,” says Elton. The slick videos on her platform, CleanWithBea, which record her transforming homes fallen into extreme dirt, decay and dilapidation, tell a different story. She has more than six million followers across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, who have crowned her a celebrity of this genre, her audience keen to watch the imperfect made perfect in a world that feels increasingly out of control. Yet no matter how many of her polished videos you watch, nothing can prepare you for entering one of the homes she cleans in person.

Versatile character actor who gained international star status with standout performances in Jurassic Park and The Piano

• Neill dies aged 78

• His 20 best performances

• A life in pictures

• ‘A true gentleman’: actors, directors and leaders pay tribute to Neill

• Neill interviewed in 2023, 2024 and 2026

Born in Northern Ireland, raised in New Zealand, adopted by the Australian film industry as one of its own and elevated to Hollywood stardom before he was 50, the actor Sam Neill, who has died aged 78, conveyed a seen-it-all worldliness without ever seeming jaded. With his floppy fringe and amused, rueful eyes, he was a man of decency, humility and wit. “I’m just Mr Triviality, as shallow as my washbasin,” he said. “No deep glacial lakes of profundity here.” The intelligence of many of his performances suggested otherwise.

Though he was never defined by one role, it was a pair of films released in 1993 which promoted him to the A-list and showcased his versatility. In Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Jurassic Park, groundbreaking in its use of computer-generated imagery, he played a palaeontologist who is awestruck to find himself among dinosaurs created from prehistoric DNA. He reprised the role in two of the film’s sequels, Jurassic Park III (2001) and Jurassic World: Dominion (2022).

The suffering of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya is no isolated case. The abuse of Palestinian detainees is happening in plain sight, yet nothing changes

“This is the end. I don’t see myself surviving. They brought me here to kill me.” These were the words of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya to his lawyer earlier this month. Abu Safiya was the director of the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza. Eighteen months ago he was seized by Israeli forces and has since been held without charge or trial. He reports being struck with hammers and batons, daily beatings and loss of consciousness. The latest images of him show a much gaunter man than the one who had been the voice of besieged healthcare workers in Gaza, doing their jobs in impossible circumstances.

In June, Abu Safiya was transferred to Rakefet prison, an underground facility first built to hold senior organised crime figures, then closed on the grounds that it was inhumane. It was reopened in late 2023 by the far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Abu Safiya and the other Palestinian prisoners there never see daylight, a violation of the Geneva conventions. Across the Palestinian territories and Israel, about 3,500 prisoners like him are held under “administrative detention” that can be renewed every six months, indefinitely. Nearly 200 of them are children. Once a Palestinian is detained under these rules, they are essentially abducted by the state.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

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The warm, gentle conditions I was hoping for turned out to be ferociously windy. The anchor couldn’t hold our boat in place. And then my mum got trapped in the cabin …

It started so well. A catamaran full of loved ones floating into the azure, taking pics, feeling glam, anticipating the sun sinking over the yardarm. I’d been reunited with my sister and family, who live in Australia, for the first time in three years, after Covid. Her husband, a fearless Australian giant, had got into sailing and offered to take me and my then 77-year-old mum, along with their three teens, out in the south of France for my sister’s 50th birthday. I knew sailing could get rough – my dad capsized us at the mouth of the River Dart when I was little – but it’s not every day you get such a generous invitation. How could I resist?

It was October. I was manifesting warm, gentle conditions, but instead the wind blew ferociously and stubbornly the wrong way. Before we knew it, we were charging up mountainous waves, then crashing into the void beyond. Our captain calmly steered while I sat below, feeling as if I was in a disaster movie, at which point I realised I hadn’t even located the lifejackets.

Indonesia’s government is grappling with how to manage waste at Bantar Gebang – Jakarta’s largest landfill – which supports the livelihood of thousands of waste pickers

On the outskirts of Jakarta, huge rolling peaks of rubbish stretch across more than 100 hectares (247 acres), towering over nearby villages. Each day a convoy of trucks plough in and dump more garbage into one of Asia’s largest landfills.

Here, thousands of people live on the fringe of the site and make their income picking through the waste and salvaging scraps for resale. The work is dangerous – earlier this year seven people died after one of the massive trash mounds caved in, burying them alive.

One manager expects takings to treble during England’s semi-final with Argentina on Wednesday; while national sales are up 10%

The beleaguered pub sector is getting a boost from England’s World Cup run, with some landlords reporting roaring sales as anticipation builds for a bumper night on Wednesday for the semi-final clash with Argentina.

Lisa Mayall, the manager of the British Oak in Kingswinford near Dudley in the West Midlands, was jubilant after England’s 2-1 win against Norway on Saturday night and brisk takings at the pub’s till. She expects hundreds more customers for the team’s next game at 8pm BST.

Extreme heat led to 440 deaths a day during June peak, say scientists, with climate crisis ramping up temperatures

The heatwave that affected England and Wales in June killed about 440 people a day during its three-day peak, scientists have estimated. Across the whole of the June heatwave, plus the one in May, about 2,700 people lost their lives prematurely.

The data starkly illustrates the danger of extreme heat, which is being supercharged by the climate crisis. More than 40% of the people affected would not have died without the 1.4C of human-caused global heating to date, according to the analysis. For comparison, about four people die each day as a result of road traffic collisions and about 35 a day because of alcohol and drug use, according to government statistics.

New Zealand actor built career as dashing romantic leads and charismatic villains across film and television

• Sam Neill’s 20 best performances

• A life in pictures

• ‘A true gentleman’: actors, directors and leaders pay tribute to Sam Neill

• Obituary

• Neill interviewed in 2023, 2024 and 2026

Sam Neill, the versatile New Zealand actor whose career spanned Oscar winners and blockbusters such as The Piano and Jurassic Park, has died aged 78.

The actor’s death was announced on Monday in a statement shared on his Instagram account. No cause of death was given, but Neill had only recently revealed he was cancer-free after being diagnosed with stage three angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, a type of blood cancer, in 2022.

Robbins is suing the government over Keir Starmer’s decision to sack him as permanent secretary at the Foreign Office

Back to Andy Burnham, and Dan Bloom has a good long read at Politico about Burnham’s plans to impose devolution on the civil service. Bloom says there is talk of a “Bank of England” moment.

It will be hard to wrestle a head-turning policy announcement from structural reforms to the state, though his allies are discussing a potential big bang early on.

One ally of Burnham recalled Gordon Brown’s announcement that the Bank of England would be made independent, four days after he became Labour’s finance minister in 1997. The person said: “He wants a Bank of England moment.”

It’s about “forcing the civil service to understand this is not just data on a graph,” said one Labour MP allied to Burnham. “Once you have a base where you can’t get free affordable integrated transport that gets you somewhere within 20 minutes easily, it changes perspectives pretty much overnight.”

Civil servants and Burnham’s allies are unanimous that No. 10 North will only be more than a gimmick if people with real power (including Burnham) spend serious time in Manchester — forcing Westminster’s lobbyist and journalist ecosystem to move with them. [Lucy] Powell predicted “big chunks” of Whitehall power will leave the capital. [Steve] Rotheram said: “You can’t have a No. 10 and then just have a load of junior officials there.”

The senior civil servant quoted above said a key test will be whether the No. 10 policy unit ends up based permanently in the northern version of Downing Street.

US military says it hit dozens of Iranian sites in strikes on Monday while UN chief warns that a return to full-scale fighting would be ‘catastrophic’

• US launches new attack wave on Iran as Tehran says diplomacy has proven ‘futile’

Bahrain’s military has accused Iran of targeting civilians with its latest attacks on the country, after Tehran said it had struck US military facilities and infrastructure there earlier.

“Iran continues its systematic hostile approach through its heinous attacks with missiles and drones that target civilians in the Kingdom of Bahrain,” the general command of Bahrain’s military said, adding that air defences “intercepted and destroyed a number of Iranian aerial attacks” this morning.