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.

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.

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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

The Carr family took in Steven Judy, hoping to ‘save’ a troubled teen. They didn’t know he would become one of the most hated men in America

Childhood returns to Traci Carr in fragments.

Night-time. She is five. She wakes to shadows on the wall, her room strange in the dark. Her footie pyjamas slip against the wood as she pads downstairs and climbs into bed next to her foster brother, Steven Judy.

New PM says the main perpetrator in the killing of PC Andrew Harper will now ‘not be subject to early release’ and he will also review ‘whole policy’

Wes Streeting said the US president was “right” to demand Europe pays more for its own defence.

Donald Trump has been increasingly critical of Europe for relying too much on the US for its security, and has demanded Nato allies reach 5% of GDP on defence spending by 2035.

President Trump has called on Europe to carry a greater share of the burden for our own defence, and he is right to do so. The UK has always been a leading light on defence spending, but the world is changing and in these dangerous uncertain times it is clear that we have needed to go further.

That’s why we’ve committed £298bn over the next four years, including an additional £15bn on top of last year’s spending review settlement. At the recent Nato summit, all members reaffirmed our commitment to 3.5 by 35 [3.5% of GDP by 2035].

Exclusive: Global investigation reveals 235 lawsuits have been brought against governments in five countries since 2010

The world’s biggest ultra-processed food companies have filed scores of lawsuits challenging government policies that tackle junk diets, the Guardian can reveal.

Ultra-processed food (UPF) is linked to harm in every major organ system of the human body and poses a seismic threat to global health. Worldwide consumption is rising and UPF now makes up as much as half the average diet in many countries, including the UK, the US and Australia.

Trust that treated Valdo Calocane, who killed three people in 2023, sectioned him four times between 2020 and 2022

The NHS trust that treated the triple killer Valdo Calocane in the years before the Nottingham attacks is being investigated by police for corporate manslaughter.

Calocane, who has paranoid schizophrenia, was sentenced to an indefinite hospital order after he fatally stabbed the 19-year-old students Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley Kumar, and the 65-year-old caretaker Ian Coates, on 13 June 2023.

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.