Their movie about marital bed death is this summer’s buzziest, funniest film. Its director and her co-star talk self-loathing, psychosexuality and unexpected eruptions

Earlier this week, Edward Norton took a night flight from Los Angeles to London and felt so dreadful the next day he decided to get a massage. “I hadn’t had one in such a long time,” he says, “and I almost started crying. You’re like: ‘Oh! Ah!’”

He has heard similar sounds from cinemas screening his new movie, The Invite, which is about the devastating impact of marriage on your sex life. “People are almost tearful. They’re like: ‘I haven’t had a good, adult laugh that made me feel seen in a long time.’”

A strategic line of towns and cities are crucial to Ukraine’s defence – and where the war is at its most brutal

A vast cobweb of spent fibre-optic cable is draped over the buildings in the small Ukrainian city of Lyman. Used to control the deadly drones deployed by both Russia and Ukraine, it has accumulated so densely after the years of fighting here that fresh drones struggle to fly through it, rotors tangling in the mass. Birds pluck it out to make their nests.

Beneath the glistening strands, residential blocks are shattered from shellfire as Moscow’s forces still push daily to take a city they briefly occupied until the Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2022, when they were driven out.

Guardian recreates audio landscape of past filled by loud morning symphony before 73m wild birds were lost

Imagine a deafening abundance of birdsong so loud it wakes your children at dawn; the chirrup of house sparrows, the chattering of starlings, the melody of the wren, and the clear high-pitched flute of blackbirds saturating the garden, reverberating around your local park, dominating your neighbourhood from early morning to evening twilight.

So loud is the song of the thrush that the naturalist and ornithologist WH Hudson wrote in 1919 that he was grateful when observing one that it was perched on a tree at a distance from his home, “so that when I woke at half past three or four o’clock, the shrill indefatigable voice came in at the open window, softened by distance and washed by the dewy atmosphere to greater purity”.

After exchanging vows with Travis Kelce, the workaholic pop star probably won’t be staying home to admire the wedding silverware

No speculation is too harebrained when it comes to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding. Are they getting married at the gigantic Madison Square Garden arena? What initially sounded mad is apparently quite true. Will she perform? Will Paul McCartney? All bets are off – and given the level of secrecy, maybe we’ll never actually know what does happen.

Only one recent report has made me go: yeah, as if. Gossip site DeuxMoi claims that Swift recently met 50 country radio execs to pitch an alleged upcoming country album, a return to her roots 20 years after she started in the genre. This strikes me as potentially true: even the world’s biggest pop star will glad-hand when needed, as it usually is in the always-traditional Nashville industry. But the report also claimed the rumoured album – Swift’s 13th, famously her lucky number – would be her last “for a while”, presumably because of her impending nuptials. So much of the discussion around the couple’s wedding is focused on what it will mean for Swift’s job. Will she take a break to “enjoy” marriage? Will it change her ambition? Will her songwriting suffer?

Laura Snapes is the Guardian’s deputy music editor

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Decades after my father’s death, I was still angry about losing him. Finding a good-luck symbol set me on a new path

Sumter, South Carolina, where I grew up, was nicknamed “Murk City”. It’s not all bad, but it has a history of gun violence and crime. I’m a rapper, and a lot of my early inspiration came from my past experiences – overcoming struggles within my home town and grief after the passing of my father.

The 28th anniversary of his death was on 21 May 2023. It was always a tough day, because he died when I was only 11. The anger I had over his loss grew to the point where I couldn’t deal with it and wanted to lash out at those around me.

For all its gloss and elitist governance, football will not bend to the will of a president so eager to demonise and exclude

At 4.38pm on 28 June Donald Trump dropped a Truth. Nothing unusual in that. Trump’s Truth Social feed is relentless and ever-giving.

That same afternoon he also Truthed at 3.58pm, 3.59pm, and twice at 7.42pm, all in the same instantly recognisable, weirdly cartoonish tone, as if a giant maize-based salted snack from a jaunty 1970s TV advert has been pumped full of voodoo and vitamins and propped up behind a lectern to explain geopolitics to the world, but only in the kind of words you might use while arguing with your nine-year-old sister.

NCA says offenders arrange to sexually assault and film victims via online networks with crimes often taking place in trusting relationships

Criminal investigators in the UK say they have uncovered a “truly international network” of organised drug-facilitated sexual assault in which victims are sedated before being raped and sexually assaulted.

The National Crime Agency [NCA] has said online networks, “many as yet unidentified by law enforcement”, were allowing offenders to arrange to rape and abuse victims or arrange for sexual assaults to be filmed.

The Labour MP hinted that he’s open to flexibility for some taxes that could aid high street businesses

Keir Starmer’s decision to cut billions of pounds of infrastructure spending to pay for more defence equipment will end up costing the UK 10,000 jobs, according to an analysis of the government’s own figures.

The prime minister announced this week he was putting an extra £15bn into defence investment to revamp the country’s armed forces and boost British manufacturing.

Exclusive: Findings cast doubt on Keir Starmer’s claims that reallocation of funds to MoD will boost British jobs

Keir Starmer’s decision to cut billions of pounds of infrastructure spending to pay for more defence equipment will end up costing the UK 10,000 jobs, according to an analysis of the government’s own figures.

The prime minister announced this week he was putting an extra £15bn into defence investment to revamp the country’s armed forces and boost British manufacturing.

Huge scale of funeral for supreme leader across five cities is intended to relay message of resistance to rest of the world

In the small hours of Friday the police roadblocks, stalls, posters and army vans were starting to appear across Tehran as millions of Iranians prepared to attend the long-delayed six-day funeral ceremony for Ali Khamenei’s, Iran’s supreme leader for 36 turbulent years.

Khamenei was killed in the opening salvo of the US-Israeli attack on the country in February, and the funeral is intended to be an epic display of personal mourning, national power, resilience and social cohesion. Small groups of mourners carrying flags were gathering along the roads festooned with the red fist, the symbol of the funeral alongside the slogan “We must rise”. At a ceremony dedicated to the families of martyrs, Khamenei’s coffin was displayed.