Once central to rural life, cafe-bistros are closing in the face of depopulation and falling alcohol consumption, but campaigners are seeking new ways forward

It is just past noon on a midweek day, and already every table at Au Bon Acceuil cafe-bistro in the northern Burgundy village of Saint-Martin-sur-Ouanne is taken.

The three-course lunch menu today – including a choice of a hefty chunk of steak with chips or a meaty lasagne – is just €18, but villagers are not only here for the food.

Even in adulthood, the place where you grew up never really leaves you. Could paying a return visit help six writers understand its power?

Thousands of miles of new power lines are needed to deliver climate targets and energy security, but bills will rise in the short term and opponents are mobilising

Britain is embarking on one of the largest overhauls of its electricity grid in generations – a megaproject in which five times more infrastructure will be built by 2030 than was constructed during the previous three decades.

Tens of billions of pounds are being spent on new pylons, subsea cables and converter stations to connect a growing fleet of wind and solar farms and carry clean power to where it is needed.

Government insiders say the new PM is unleashing an ‘earthquake’ to clean up the system. But Iraqis have heard it all before

The gates of the Green Zone in Baghdad are made of five-metre-high armoured steel, reinforced with horizontal girders, and strung between concrete pillars and anti-blast walls. Police water cannon trucks are stationed nearby, along with armoured personnel carriers and squads of heavily armed soldiers.

At the first sign of street protests – over failing electricity, unemployment or, more recently, the US-Israeli attacks on Iran – the gates are shut. X-shaped vehicle barriers, made from welded iron beams and mounted on wheels, sit ready at the roadside alongside coils of razor wire; both are slid across the street, sealing off the sprawling neighbourhood, home to the presidential palace, parliament, the prime minister’s office, the massive fortress-like US embassy, and other institutions, including the homes of scores of politicians and members of parliament.

The weekly linen laundry bills alone must make the accountants weep

Rosina is a serene, heavenly-white neighbourhood Italian restaurant just off Wandsworth Common, on the same stretch as the much-celebrated Chez Bruce. It is Adam Byatt’s fifth place – he’s probably best known for Trinity, his Michelin-starred restaurant up the road in Clapham – and, lately, his very good, recipe-driven YouTube channel ran a Road to Rosina series in which he visits suppliers, eats pasta with nonnas and learns peak tiramisu skills from a woman called Pina (more of her tiramisu later). If any neighbourhood can stomach an achingly civilised, Emilia Romagna-influenced, candlelit trattoria where the cloakroom tags are actual Amalfi Coast pebbles engraved with numbers, it is Wandsworth Common, land of the hedge fund/interior design power couple who wouldn’t think twice about sipping a basil gimlet with a plate of melon with culatello di Zibello or gnocco fritto with mortadella. Bella Italia in Bolton this is not.

Rosina’s cocktail bar leans on art deco shapes, with a pale, marble-topped counter and walls covered in David Steen portraits. There’s a small second bar area for those bridging the gap between light dinner and semi-serious drinking, and a larger, linen-tableclothed area for the restaurant proper, with a back room for private dining. Rosina’s intimacy is an optical illusion: the place is as big as a tennis court, and the weekly linen laundry bills alone must make the accountants weep.

Plenitude Arena, Paris
Dion wiped away tears and belted out the notes, giving an astounding performance despite her diagnosis of stiff person syndrome

In 2022, when Céline Dion shared that she had been diagnosed with a rare incurable neurological disorder called stiff person syndrome (SPS), there was no guarantee that the 58-year-old would ever tour again. Her condition, which resulted in muscle spasms so strong that it left her with broken ribs, had made it impossible to perform, and in a 2024 documentary, I Am: Céline Dion, fans saw how the disease had constricted her once seemingly infallible voice. Through it all, though, Dion was resolute that she would one day return to the stage. “If I can’t run, I’ll walk. If I can’t walk, I’ll crawl,” she said in the film. “But I won’t stop.”

Thankfully at the opening night of her sold out five-week residency in Paris, her first full-length concerts in six years, no crawling is needed: Céline Dion is back. She glides on to the stage in a black dress, an enormous diamond necklace clasped around her throat, and launches into On ne change pas. There are tears almost immediately: she struggles through the second verse, her voice cracking as she begins to cry. By the time the strum of Destin has kicked in, though, that emotion is replaced with sheer elation. “I made a promise to be back on stage. Singing for you. Singing for me,” she says. “Singing for life.”

Party’s economic spokesperson says donations are a ‘breakthrough moment’ as Labour’s Angela Rayner warns of possible retrospective action

• Christopher Harborne matches £36m Reform donation of Ben Delo

• Analysis: Donations of £72m make Reform’s prospects both rosier and riskier

Over on Sky, Conservative Tom Tugendhat was asked if the Tories were “rattled” by the money going into Reform.

He says he “welcomes people supporting political activity” in a democracy- at this point, Sky’s Rachel Johnson cuts in – “even crypto billionaires who live in Thailand?” (referring to Harbourne).

In a social media post, Dario Amodei proposed a plan including third-party evaluations of AI systems

The CEO of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic issued a new appeal on Saturday for the AI industry to “slow down” and offered a three-part plan for doing so, saying that his company would “unilaterally” commit to the first of the steps.

In a post on social media, Dario Amodei shared a link to an essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier in which he laid out how Anthropic would provide “third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training”.

Women say they are too fearful to pursue criminal prosecution of rapes, for fear of having their claims refused

Female asylum seekers are reporting rapes and sexual assaults by British men but many say they are too fearful to pursue criminal prosecutions.

Their voices are rarely heard but some have spoken to the Guardian at a time when the far right is intensifying tropes about endemic rape of English women and girls by “fighting age” male asylum seekers.

Rhun ap Iorwerth, the first non-Labour Senedd leader, questions Westminster’s willingness to relinquish powers

Andy Burnham has to be serious about devolution and understand that Wales is a nation and “not a region in England”, according to the country’s first minister.

Rhun ap Iorwerth, who is the first non-Labour leader of the Senedd since devolution, told the Guardian that while he was encouraged by initial discussions with the new UK prime minister, he was wary about Burnham being captured by a consensus Westminster view against relinquishing further powers.