The star was just eight when his friend was stabbed. Decades on, he’s ready to talk about that day – how it shaped him, and how, as he becomes a father himself, it will shape him as a dad

“I feel a bit nervous,” confesses John Boyega, as he sits down in front of the camera. “Speaking about it could possibly help. I haven’t revisited this in a long time. Yeah, my heart is just beating.” The Attack the Block and Star Wars actor is talking in the opening scene of a new BBC Two documentary about the killing of 10-year-old schoolboy Damilola Taylor.

On 27 November 2000, Damilola was stabbed in the leg with a broken bottle and left to die in a concrete stairwell, attacked as he walked home from an after-school club at Peckham library in south London. It took six years and three separate trials at the Old Bailey, costing a total of £16m, to secure a manslaughter conviction. His death shocked the nation not only because he was so young, but because all the suspects were also children. Boyega was one of the last people to see Damilola alive. The pair had enjoyed a close friendship since Damilola’s move to the UK from Nigeria in August of that year.

The whole point of going to Claridge’s in the first place is to sweep in through the grand main hotel entrance

Dante Mayfair, inside Claridge’s on Brook Street in London, has been created, the hotel’s management says, to become “the living room of Mayfair”. It’s a charming idea: pop in, have a cuppa or a bowl of pappardelle bolognese, or lie about on the fancy sofas wearing elasticated tracksuit bottoms and slurping soft-serve with s’mores. No, sorry, I’ve gone too far: it’s nowhere near that informal.

Still, like many well-used living rooms, this one has been rearranged, redecorated and repurposed many times over the years. I’ve eaten fancy-schmancy Simon Rogan dinners here when it was Fera, as well as his table experience at Aulis during which venture capitalist “foodies” bored the pants off me over a 12-course meal in the kitchen itself. I’ve stared unmoved at Daniel Humm’s New York-style pomp at the short-lived Davies and Brook, and have visited several times since Claridge’s took matters in-house in the shape of a rather anonymous ye olde British brasserie.

A Ukrainian publishing boom sparked by the 2022 invasion is now under threat from the force and frequency of Russian attacks

On a Saturday morning in August, Viktor Kruglov, the co-founder and chief executive of the publisher Ranok, was at his headquarters in Kharkiv – the eastern Ukrainian city that, along with Kyiv, is the centre of the country’s publishing and printing industry. Built 15 years ago on the site of a former bread factory, the footprint of the premises is about 10,000 sq metres (107,640ft). Books were stacked 12 metres high on rank after rank of shelves.

Kruglov, along with five senior colleagues, were on the warehouse floor to discuss the approaching school year. The warehouse was holding 628,000 new schoolbooks. “It was the high season of distribution,” he said, “so we were checking all our processes: how to do it more successfully, how to do it in time.”

Learning to be one human among many has always been a little lonely and discombobulating. But young people around the world are lonelier than ever. Why?

In September, a Reddit user identifying themselves as a 25-year-old man turned to the r/ForeverAlone subreddit with a question: How do you deal with touch starvation? “It’s becoming obvious to me that I’ll probably be alone forever,” he wrote. He used to be worried about missing out on sex, but now he just misses hugs. Cuddles.

“I don’t have many friends and none with that kind of physical relationship. I don’t really hug family either anymore. Some days, I feel so desperate for a hug with someone I love.”

No, I don’t want to go for a girl walk before my girl dinner with my girl mates: I am a grown woman who walks and eats and votes – and, patriarchy, I am on to you

This morning, after waking up with my girl cats, I made myself a cup of girl coffee then got stuck into some girl work. I took a break to lift some girl weights, then sent some more girl emails. Finally, after my girl dinner, it was time to get some sleep ahead of another long, hard day of being a girl.

I know what you’re thinking: why is this woman so insistent on gendering her unremarkable activities, and infantilising herself when she is clearly an adult? It’s a fair question. Since the pandemic, when “hot girl walks” followed Megan Thee Stallion’s 2019 song Hot Girl Summer to become one of the first big TikTok trends, this framing has become dismayingly ubiquitous, in person and online.

Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist

He’s the titan of TV who revived a flatlined Doctor Who and turned British queer life into jaw-dropping drama. But the screenwriter’s groundbreaking writing has sometimes made him a target of hate – from homophobes and Whovians alike

• ‘Goodbye Whoniverse. God, that was fun!’: Read an exclusive extract from Davies’s memoir

Russell T Davies is a man who prefers to look on the bright side. That time he was gay-bashed by a gang of bus conductors? “People have been beaten up far worse than me, that was just a bit of a thumping in the street.” When the production schedule of his dystopian drama Years and Years forced him back to work within days of his husband’s death? “Writing was a nice escape.” Even a story about his “tough” father branding him “yesterday’s man” after his initial departure as showrunner on Doctor Who concludes with a cheerful: “I knew I wasn’t.” It’s easy to see how he’s earned a reputation as the most affable man in TV, if not the world. So why has he taken to keeping a kitchen knife by his front door, “ready to use”?

“I’m called a paedophile and a groomer online by people like [Father Ted creator and anti-trans activist] Graham Linehan, and now people believe what they read. People believe it when they’re told the Earth is flat,” he says. His support for trans rights has resulted in years of death threats and “groomer” smears, which he used to brush off. “But the online world is becoming the real world. People have worked out my address, and one person turned up at my house. If you believe a paedophile lives here, it’s not the maddest thing in the world to come and get me. I’ve been saying for years that our rights are paper-thin, and here we are. What scares me is that I can’t see an end to it. Nothing is going to unseat these tech barons – it will require some sort of revolution to stop them. So for the first time in history, hatred is being monetised by an algorithm.”

Critics say scrapping of plans, which aimed to increase judge-alone trials to deliver swifter justice, leaves court system and victims vulnerable

Ministers have scrapped plans that would have slashed the number of jury trials in England and Wales and replaced them with a judge sitting alone.

The proposals had sparked a fierce backlash from lawyers, who have welcomed the U-turn. But the victims’ commissioner expressed concern about the abandonment of measures drawn up by the then justice secretary, David Lammy, under Keir Starmer’s government, to tackle the record backlog in the courts.

Exclusive: Shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith told party members last year he had discussed making further savings if they win next election

The Conservatives are planning to make sweeping cuts beyond the £47bn announced last year if they win the next election, according to leaked comments by the shadow chancellor.

Speaking last year when he was shadow business secretary, Andrew Griffith told Conservative members he and fellow shadow cabinet ministers had discussed making further cuts in “every part of government”.

David Robinson joins other insiders in urging industry to take more care over rapidly developing technology

A safety leader at OpenAI has quit the company, warning that its culture was broken and that AI firms were not “being nearly careful enough” about developing the technology.

David Robinson, who led the writing of safety reports that accompanied the ChatGPT developer’s product releases, explained his resignation in an essay headlined, “I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken”.

Police confirm investigation into period the man reportedly spent in Australia before alleged attempted terrorist attack

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Australian security agencies have launched an investigation after it emerged that the flydubai co-pilot who allegedly tried to hijack an Israel-bound flight spent about two years in the country as a student.

Disaster was narrowly averted on Wednesday when passengers and crew intervened to stop the co-pilot’s attempt to take control of the flydubai flight to Tel Aviv, which had 182 people onboard and plunged 16,625 feet (5,067 metres) in just over 30 seconds.