​She faced racist bullying as a child – then pigeonholing as an artist. Now following up a hit debut album championed by the A-list, the Croydon singer-songwriter says she finally understands who she really is

In October 2017, Rachel Chinouriri had her first panic attack. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. She’d just landed her first major gig as a professional musician, supporting Celeste at the London members’ club Laylow. Out of nowhere, she began to spiral. “I don’t know what happened,” she says. “I just started having a mental breakdown.” Her manager told her to go home, try again next time. But that only made things worse. “I started feeling like I was wasting everyone’s time,” she says. “I started feeling ashamed.” It would be better, she decided, to go on stage and sing, “half crying”.

Tears were already a familiar response to Chinouriri’s performance anxiety: the first time she sang in front of her classmates at the Brit school – the performing arts institution that trained Adele, Amy Winehouse and more – she burst into sobs afterwards. A rather inconvenient habit for an aspiring pop star, but at least she front-loaded the humiliation at the start of her career. “That was a big milestone for me,” she says of the Celeste show. “The fact that I could stand up there completely embarrassed, with people looking at me like, ‘Don’t really know what’s up with this girl’, but I still got through it and everything was fine.” The experience taught her that the catastrophic scenarios in her head rarely come to pass. “I’d given myself this pressure of, ‘This is the music industry. If they think I’m rubbish, I’m never gonna perform again.’” Chinouriri rolls her eyes at herself.

Campaigners worry politicians will have moved on by time of elections in which Marine Le Pen is expected to challenge

As dozens of forest wildfires burned across France this week amid the summer’s fourth brutal heatwave and increasing air pollution, some wondered whether voters’ first-hand experience of the climate emergency would change the political debate ahead of next year’s presidential election.

The Green leader, Marine Tondelier, who cut short a tour of France on medical advice that at seven months pregnant she should avoid breathing smoke-filled air in the south-west near a huge wildfire in Gironde, said the political class still had its head in the sand.

Across the country, workers are fearful about the impact of AI on their livelihoods in an increasingly fragile labour market

On the tree-lined streets of Wuhan, where cars jostle for space with mopeds and cargo trucks, the malfunctioning of a new type of vehicle has recently been causing chaos on the city’s roads.

In March, several cars from a fleet of driverless taxis stopped abruptly in the streets. The “system malfunction” left distressed riders stranded for hours. The robotaxis, known as Apollo Go and powered by artificial intelligence (AI), were taken off Wuhan’s streets for months for investigations.

Honest Bob was rattled at the idea of joining cross-party talks on social care. Why bother behaving as a serious opposition?

When you’ve lost the trust of GB News, when you’re too deranged, too extreme and too outright mendacious for your biggest fan, then you know you are in trouble. You can almost sense the panic beginning to set in at Reform HQ.

No longer topping the opinion polls. A new prime minister resetting the dial, the public increasingly choosing optimism over grievance. A party mired in financial sleaze. A leader turning into a laughing stock in his head-to-head with a dustbin. It was never meant to be this way for Reform. They thought they were the winners.

To coincide with a new exhibition in London about the Davies brothers, we rate the best of a band who brought a sociologist’s eye to hard rock, gentle pastoralia and so much in between

The quality of Kinks albums declined precipitously from the late 80s: you sensed their hearts weren’t really in it. Even so, Ray Davies couldn’t stop himself writing the occasional gem: from their final studio album Phobia, Scattered is a sweet, sad reflection on the Davies family’s complexities, powered by jangling guitars.

Stop guessing and start probing with our writer’s pick of the top thermometers, including smart Bluetooth and leave-in models

• Readers’ favourite barbecue tips and tricks

While fewer of us are eating meat regularly – I refer you to the rise of “beef days” – if you’re going to cook it, it needs to be done properly. Overcooked beef with the texture of shoe leather, or undercooked poultry with a side of food poisoning, will put off even the most devoted carnivore.

A reliable meat thermometer solves both problems. It takes the guesswork out of cooking, helping you achieve melt-in-the-mouth steak and the best of any cut, with no special skills required.

Exclusive: Electoral Commission urged to look into donations made by mother of convicted fraudster

• Revealed: George Cottrell transferred $2m to his mother days before her donations to Reform UK

Labour has accused Reform UK of being “up to its neck in sleaze” as it called on the Electoral Commission to urgently investigate substantial donations made to the party by the mother of a convicted fraudster.

Bridget Phillipson, Labour’s new chair, called on the commission to examine whether any rules had been broken, after revelations in the Guardian that George Cottrell transferred more than $2m to his mother in the days before her donations to the party in 2024.

US president’s Board of Peace hails ‘critical step’, but responses of Israeli and Hamas officials suggest disagreements remain

• Middle East crisis – live updates

• What is Trump’s Board of Peace and who is involved?

Donald Trump has said a deal has been reached for Hamas to disarm and for Israel to withdraw its forces from Gaza, however briefings from both sides exposed disputes over its implementation that could prove difficult to overcome.

“This agreement is a critical step towards Gaza finally being governed by a new Palestinian government that will work closely with the Board of Peace to help the Palestinian people,” Trump said in a social media post.

Local leaders say plan will transform funding so English regions no longer rely on Whitehall handouts for projects

England’s regional mayors will be able to break out of the “death grip of the Treasury” by borrowing to invest in big projects under “transformational” plans to shift power out of Whitehall.

For the first time, mayors will keep a share of income tax generated in their area from 2028, as well as business rates totalling tens of millions of pounds by April 2027.

Unknown number of people have swum and waded into Spanish enclave that neighbours Morocco

The Spanish government is deploying extra troops and police officers to its north African enclave of Ceuta after thousands of people swam and waded into the tiny territory from neighbouring Morocco in a matter of hours.

Videos shot at Tarajal beach on Thursday showed crowds of people walking around the breakwaters and running on the beach and roads.