When your heart is breaking, and you are leaving the home where you and your ex were once so happy, it is hard to fight for the sofa you spent a fortune on. Then you find yourself in an empty flat, with nothing to sit on

When wandering around Ikea arm-in-arm, most newly cohabiting couples are too excited about their new sofa, or Billy bookcase, or the enormous house plant they are about to wrestle into an Uber, to think too deeply about what might happen to those items were their relationship to sour. But at a time when many young couples can’t afford to buy property or have children, furniture can end up being the only thing to fight over at the end of a relationship. And, as the cost of living rises, having to replace furniture after a breakup can have a huge impact on people’s finances.

“It took me a couple of years to recover financially,” says Becca of her 2022 breakup. The 35-year-old, who is based in Leeds, had been in a relationship for about a year when her then-girlfriend invited her to move in to her house. At the time, Becca was renting her own flat, which was “amazing: big garden, really bright and lovely”, she says. But being what she describes as “young, stupid and in love”, she left that behind to move in with her partner. Becca reluctantly agreed to get rid of all the furniture she had bought for her flat, since her girlfriend didn’t want any of it in her place.

Sirin Kale on the BBC Panorama investigation into Married at First Sight UK

Is it possible to make dating reality TV shows safe for their participants?

A BBC panorama investigation recently reported that two women alleged they were raped by their on-screen “husbands” during the filming of Married at First Sight UK. They have not been named. A third woman, who agreed to be identified, Shona Manderson, accused her on-screen husband of subjecting her to a non-consensual sex act. All the men deny the allegations.

Their influence is evident in every corner of society, the imperial family owns some, and Tokyo even has its own ‘cat town’

Feline features stare out from the covers of umpteen novels, they have an officially designated day devoted to their mystique and popularity, and have outnumbered dogs as pets for a decade.

The influence of cats is evident across every corner of Japanese society, with a recent report crediting them with generating an expected ¥3tn ($18.8bn) in value to the Japanese economy this year – a phenomenon dubbed “catnomics”.

Now in residence at the Madrid Prado, the author talks about its dark, inspirational Goyas, the clandestine nature of her writing – and why she finally wrote about her jailed then posthumously exonerated father

It is a bright, chilly spring morning in Madrid, and the Museo del Prado doesn’t open to the public for another hour. Without the crowds, the museum is amorphous and eerily silent. A pale light pools in the corners and casts long shadows around the paintings, as if the figures inside them have slipped quietly into the room. It is here that I meet the French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani, who has spent the past two weeks using the space as inspiration for her work.

With quick strides, Slimani leads us to a basement gallery housing some of her favourite works: Francisco Goya’s dark and haunting Black Paintings, created later in life when the Spanish artist had adopted a particularly bleak outlook on humanity. Among them are Saturn Devouring His Son, a violent depiction of the god biting into his own child; The Fates, with its three ominous figures spinning the thread of life; and Witches’ Sabbath (The Great He-Goat), in which the devil appears as a goat presiding over a coven.

Researchers racing to document Oceania’s last tropical glaciers found the remaining ‘eternal snow’ in Indonesia’s West Papua region has lost almost all its ice

• Mapping the last glaciers in Oceania – in pictures

An expedition to document the end days of the last tropical glaciers in Oceania has revealed sombre footage of “planetary destruction on fast-forward”.

The once-mighty ice sheets on Puncak Jaya, a mountain surrounded by dense rainforests in West Papua, Indonesia, have survived beyond projections they would disappear by 2026 but have shrunk to a fraction of their original size.

Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Prospero is reimagined as a conductor in this superbly orchestrated version of Shakespeare’s tragicomedy

Kenneth Branagh is said to have played 35 Shakespearean parts, albeit back in the day. Seeing him speaking in verse these days is something of an event, all the more so when he is making a return to the Royal Shakespeare Company after more than 30 years to take on, for the first time, Shakespeare’s magician, deposed duke and tyrant occupier. Even the king turned up for it some days ago.

Branagh’s Prospero initially follows in the vein of his fast and feverish King Lear, performed in the West End in 2023. He seems to be speeding through the part rather than inhabiting it, too puckish, almost larky, rather underwhelming. It is the show itself that casts its spell through its enchanting sights, sounds and ensemble accomplishments. Richard Eyre, directing his first Shakespeare play at Stratford, does a stupendous job of bringing an overt sense of performance to the production.

In highly unusual intervention, ex-PM says his party’s ‘almost infinite capacity for self-delusion’ makes it likely to lose next election

• Analysis: Tony Blair’s essay on Labour failings gets full marks for being unhelpful

Tony Blair has accused Keir Starmer, Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting of putting Labour’s future at risk by abandoning the centre ground, warning that the party’s “almost infinite capacity for self-delusion” means it is likely to lose the next election.

In a scathing 5,700-word attack on the prime minister and his would-be successors published on Tuesday night, Blair argued for the government to crack down on welfare spending, abandon restrictions on oil and gas and smooth relations with Donald Trump.

Conflict and cuts in funding have left World Food Programme ‘taking from the hungry to feed the starving’

The continuing US-Israel war on Iran has compounded other global disasters to drive record numbers of people into hunger at a time when funding to combat famine has fallen dramatically, the head of the UN World Food Programme has said.

The WFP says 363 million people around the world are now at risk of acute hunger, 45 million of them as a result of conflict in the Middle East and the consequent oil price spike.

Exclusive: Nursing and Midwifery Council admits it did not carry out checks on professionals who broke the law

Nurses and midwives who should have been banned from treating patients have practised over the last 12 years because of “potentially dangerous” failings by a medical regulator.

The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) has admitted that its “completely and utterly unacceptable” mistakes meant it failed to protect the public from about 15 professionals whom it should have banned from ever working in healthcare in the UK because they had broken the law.

Prisons inspectorate finds almost 100 children each year are remanded to custody only to be bailed or moved

Children are witnessing extreme violence including stabbings while being unnecessarily held in custody awaiting trial or sentencing, the England and Wales watchdog has found.

Despite professional expectations they would be managed safely in the community, a report by HM Inspectorate of Prisons has concluded that almost 100 children each year are remanded to custody only to be bailed or moved to local authority accommodation less than two weeks later.