In many countries, dating seems to be on the decline, with many young people either dating less, or finding it harder to have meaningful relationships. In 2024, one in five of South Korea's 52 million citizens were living alone. In the third episode of our series, reporter Haeryun Kang is in Seoul on a journey to find out what’s stopping people from coupling up.

With food and medicine already scarce, emergency services, bakeries and water supplies are increasingly being pushed to the brink

Palestinians in Gaza already grappling with limited supplies of food and medicine face new threats to their day-to-day existence: shortages of engine oil, spare parts and gas. The knock-on effects are impacting everything from bread production to water supplies and emergency response efforts, producing one fresh crisis after another.

Over the weekend, the main hospital in central Gaza warned of an imminent health disaster as its electrical generators failed.

What we must learn from the murders of Henry Nowak in Southampton and Barnaby Webber in Nottingham is that kneejerk assumptions either way are dangerous

Emma Webber brought one of her son’s old T-shirts to the hearings into how he died. Holding on to Barney’s clothes is comforting, as is sometimes sleeping in his bed. He was only 19, a student walking home at night with his friend Grace O’Malley-Kumar, when both were fatally stabbed by a paranoid schizophrenic recently discharged from hospital who wasn’t taking his medication.

Valdo Calocane went on to kill 65-year-old school caretaker Ian Coates and gravely injure three others that night before being caught. The T-shirt is still here but Barney is not, as his mother said in a video this week offering her sympathies to the parents of 18-year-old Henry Nowak, the Southampton student who died in handcuffs at the feet of police who failed to realise he was the victim not the aggressor in an attack they had been falsely told was racist.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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The movie adaptation of Gary Owen’s acclaimed play Iphigenia in Splott, Effi o Blaenau, is released this month. Here, its director and crew explain why they relocated the film to a post-industrial mining town – and refused to make it in English

The one-woman play Iphigenia in Splott was first performed in 2015. Eleven years on, Gary Owen’s reworking of Greek tragedy, transplanted to working-class Splott in Cardiff, has earned its place as a modern classic. It reimagines the mythological heroine Iphigenia as Effie, a young woman filling her days drinking vodka out of a mug in her dressing gown. The play is about poverty and social inequality, closures and cuts, services scraped to the bone by austerity. Its most recent five-star Guardian review in 2022 advised: “Everyone should see this.”

One person who did was Leisa Gwenllian, a final-year drama student from north Wales. “I was on the front row with my mate,” says Gwenllian, 24, drinking mint tea in a London hotel. “I can remember thinking: wow! A Welsh woman with a strong Cardiff accent on the stage at the Lyric [in Hammersmith, London], that’s what it’s all about.” At the Oxford School of Drama, Gwenllian was mainly studying the classics alongside people with different accents and backgrounds from her own. “To see yourself on stage is really powerful.”

Full of handcrafted care and the rootsy soul of her country origins, this gently elated song is a reminder of what fans love about Swift … and the film series

Taylor Swift does not fear a challenge. She’s broken records then broken those records; taken Grammy snubs as a sign she just has to work harder; mounted probably the most physically exhausting tour of all time. But in writing a song for Toy Story’s cowgirl Jessie, she’s set herself a deranged task: how could anyone outdo Randy Newman’s devastating When She Loved Me, Jessie’s song about being abandoned by her owner, Emily, from Toy Story 2?

Newman’s songs for the Disney Pixar series are some of the greatest film soundtrack work of all time, and Swift knows it. In a post about her song, she acknowledged the “incomparable” Newman: “You created the Toy Story musical world, and we are lucky to get to live in it.” Her own ventures into soundtrack work have never had much staying power (beyond Zayn collab I Don’t Wanna Live Forever from Fifty Shades Darker).

Fifty years ago this week, the Sex Pistols played their first Manchester gig – and upended pop culture. But what was 1976 really like before punk arrived? From swing bands to ‘spaghetti rock’, we discover a lost history

In January 1976, the cover of the NME didn’t feature an artist, but a photo of a room damaged by an IRA bomb: there had been a string of terrorist attacks in London the previous year. The headline: “Is rock’n’roll ready for 1976 … Is 1976 ready for rock’n’roll?”

In the accompanying feature, writer Mick Farren was to be found complaining vociferously about the state of music. Audiences are “prepared to tolerate just about anything”. Rock has “lost its guts” and “is on an unalterable course to a neo-Las Vegas”, because artists are “totally insulated from the real world” and thus making music that “seems so damned irrelevant to real life”. Farren reiterated these points in June in a piece titled The Titanic Sails at Dawn, by which point it was obvious that some new artists completely agreed with him.

Report into royal property affairs reveals disgraced ex-prince generated private income from Windsor Royal Lodge

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor received private income from subletting three cottages on his Windsor Royal Lodge estate while paying a “peppercorn rent” to the crown estate, a report into royal property arrangements has revealed.

The National Audit Office (NAO) review also shows that King Charles pays an “adjusted” rent from his private Duchy of Lancaster income, below open market value, for his disgraced brother’s non-working royal daughters, princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, to live in royal palaces.

State department warns of ‘ideological conditioning’ in social media post offering condolences to student’s family

The US state department has criticised “two-tiered policing” in Britain in a social media post offering condolences to the family of the murder victim Henry Nowak, in a thinly veiled rebuke of the UK government.

The 18-year-old student’s murder has been claimed by some as evidence of two-tier policing in the UK – the argument that some groups of people are dealt with more harshly than others for ideological reasons.

Mother, who thought daughter was being examined by GP, says girl began to bleed and scream in pain after device inserted

A five-year-old was left traumatised, bleeding and in severe pain after a physician associate wrongly prescribed her a vaginal pessary, according to a damning report by the health ombudsman.

The parliamentary and health service ombudsman said there were “multiple failures” in the care of the girl, who saw a physician associate (PA) at a GP practice in the East Midlands after complaining of itching and vaginal discharge.

Exclusive: Greater Manchester mayor sets out his priorities before Makerfield byelection – and what might happen after the vote

Andy Burnham has signalled he would begin transforming England’s broken social care system this year if he became prime minister, accusing Westminster of “flinching away” from tackling difficult policy problems.

The Greater Manchester mayor said politicians must be willing to take on “the weight of the system” that stood in the way of radical change, as he began to set out his prospectus for government if he won the Makerfield byelection.

Said Labour should be a broad church with more government ministers from the left of the party, but Jeremy Corbyn should not be allowed back in.

Signalled there would be no snap election if he replaced Keir Starmer, but defended himself from criticism over a shadow leadership campaign.

Defended his comments that politicians should not be “in hock” to the bond markets, and denied he was boxing himself in by sticking to Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules.

Argued it would be a mistake to rerun the Brexit referendum but that he wanted the UK to rejoin the EU in his lifetime.

Praised Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, for “facing up” to the big issues on immigration.