After seven days in charge, how is the new UK PM doing? Send your questions to our columnist Polly Toynbee about Andy Burnham and his new government, his policy announcements so far, and what he needs to be doing next. Polly is online answering your questions now.

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

SonOfTheDesert asks: Given that nothing in this world ever turns out quite as intended, and that good intentions in politics are always hit by unforeseen misfortune, which of the commitments that Burnham has made so far do you think is most likely to fall by the wayside between now and 2029?

Polly says:

I think I will answer your question the other way round, if you don’t mind. Which of his good intentions will he keep? There may be a lot of wishful thinking involved in my answer, because I am making the most of this no doubt brief time of hope and optimism.

By the time of the next election he will have devolved power and created more mayors to cover every area to make sure it reaches everywhere. Unfortunately this does not much engage the public, who are pretty clueless on who does what anyway. It won’t always have good results, as Reform run many councils: governments lose local power the longer they are in office. But there may be a magic in his Manchesterism that ignites a new enthusiasm for the local: people might actually bother voting for their councils when they see it makes a real difference who wins.

It’s not the communications that changed, it’s the great communicator. It’s not the words, it’s the sentiment and determination behind them. Keir Starmer’s dull delivery didn’t matter: the lack of underlying passion and purpose did.

Briefing? It will go on, forever. Because you never know who that mystery “senior source” is, it can never be challenged or chased down. The PM can storm about it, but the 24-hour hungry media will flam up what the door man said, for lack of anything else. Or plain make it up sometimes ( Never the Guardian, only the hostile media).

If you thought he was just a shady rule-dodging reprobate, the Fifa boss’s latest 15-page Instagram rant might make you think again

I hope you have found time to enjoy Fifa president Gianni Infantino’s 15-page Instagram meltdown about his World Cup. The last time I saw this many defiant words, they were inked on someone sitting cross-legged on the floor of a Salvadoran supermax prison.

Infantino has been clapping back at his haters – putting them on blast, in the parlance of our times – and on this evidence seems mesmerisingly close to picking out a Chicano script font and getting STILL I RISE needled across his corporate clavicles. Right next to the ones reading THROUGH THE FIRE, UNBREAKABLE and BUILT DIFFERENT.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Marina Hyde’s new book, What a Time to be Alive!, is out in September (Guardian Faber Publishing, £20). To support the Guardian, order your signed copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Now 30, Holland is back as the vexed webslinger in a sometimes shocking, occasionally sluggish new instalment opposite his Odyssey castmate

Just a few weeks ago, Tom Holland was telling us that his role as Telemachus in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey was his “last chance to play a boy”. Well, Holland is back as the supposedly scrappy, gawky, arachnid young superhero Spider-Man. Not Spider-Boy admittedly, and these days Holland is actually a chunkier and more stacked Spidey than previously, flexing some pretty serious biceps. He is maturing in the role. But is the role maturing with him?

The point is that this film is a reset. At the end of the last movie Spider-Man: No Way Home, courtesy of Dr Strange’s colossal psychic powers – which might have come in handy in this episode incidentally, part of the narrative-universe inconsistency that you just have to overlook – Peter Parker was able to erase everyone’s knowledge that he is, in fact, Spider-Man, and that includes his goofy best friend Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon) and more to the point, the love of his life MJ (Zendaya).

The new breed of camera-equipped streetlights has the potential to fight crime and track down missing persons. Or will it just take Britain one step closer to a surveillance state?

How would you feel if your neighbourhood lamp-posts could recognise your number plate, and also your face? Maybe you wouldn’t mind, given how long we’ve had automatic number plate recognition and CCTV. What about if that lamp-post could power itself through its own solar panels, and perhaps find another use for any extra power generated – that would be good, right? This is what Conflow Power Group (CPG) in Warwickshire claims for its iLamps, the first of their kind in the UK.

What if lamp-posts had the potential to incorporate new AI capability – gait analysis, suspicious behaviours – that you haven’t even heard of? This is what the organisation Big Brother Watch worries about. And what if the home secretary had explicitly said she believed in a “panopticon state” – that is, a state that could watch you at all times (as Shabana Mahmood already has) – and what if she still had a job when the lamp-post eyes got their updates? Or what if the next home secretary was even keener on hyper-surveillance (hard to imagine), and the street apparatus was already in place? What about all the data this would harvest – who would own it?

It’s a bit of a mystery why it takes Odysseus so long to get home if he’s not shacking up with Calypso and others ...

I did not walk into Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey intending to pick holes. If there was zero sexual chemistry between Odysseus and Circe, who was I to say that’s not how it went in the poem? I was most likely thinking of a feminist retelling (Madeline Miller’s novel Circe), rather than Homer, anyway.

Nevertheless, even allowing for metaphor and whatnot, even factoring in that Circe’s passion for Odysseus is (almost?) definitely a rumination on the double standards of godliness, in which the guy gods are allowed to sleep with whichever mortals they please, but the lady ones are not supposed to (I don’t think?), I am sure something happened.

Holly Dyson’s addiction led to extreme pain, hospital trips and thousands of pounds’ worth of debt. Here is how she recovered

Holly Dyson’s last alcoholic drink was a can of cider to manage her withdrawal symptoms, which she had in her dad’s car on the way to rehab on 2 May 2023. She’d barely eaten in two weeks. Instead, she spent her last few days at home in the north-west of England vomiting blood into the toilet bowl and lying in bed twitching, feeling unbearably nauseous. Her hand hovered over the numbers 999 on her phone, ready to call an ambulance. At 26 years old, Dyson’s body was shutting down.

About a week earlier, a doctor had given her six months to live. For the past few years, her drinking had spiralled out of control. Her liver was “deranged”, the doctor said. To Dyson, it felt like “a bowling ball” – weighing her down so much that she would have to use “two hands to lift my body up out of bed because my liver felt so heavy and swollen.” Her face was also swollen and she was unrecognisable from the sporty young woman she had once been.

Man already serving life for killing his cellmate while awaiting trial also murdered and dismembered his friends Claudio Aquilino and Daniel Coleman

On a spring day last year, James Desborough marched up to Cornwall’s county hall in Truro and began bombarding the offices with dozens of eggs stolen from a supermarket.

It was a drug and drink-addled protest at his plight – homeless, jobless and generally angry at the world. He expected to be arrested and messaged a friend: “If I’m going to get nicked, might as well round the charges up.”

Deaths expected as Kumamoto shaken by 6.8-magnitude quake, knocking out power and damaging buildings

A 6.8-magnitude earthquake has shaken south Japan, leaving at least 50 people injured. Some are trapped and presumed dead inside a shopping mall.

The earthquake hit the Kumamoto prefecture on the southern Kyushu island late on Tuesday afternoon, knocking out power to thousands of homes and damaging roads, bridges and buildings.

Shadow minister says there was no warning and ‘it looked and sounded like deliberate intimidation’

• Conservative MP accuses French navy of firing shots near him in Channel

It is not just the Russians firing on Brits in the English Channel; Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, has accused a French warship of firing “warning shots” near him while he was on a boat in the Channel monitoring small boat crossings.

In a post on social media, he says:

On the channel today monitoring illegal migrant crossings … as I was being interviewed by the BBC just now a French warship approached close and fired 17 live rounds behind us. There was no notice or training exercise in place. Felt like warning shots or attempted intimidation

On the crisis in prison places, this has been a long time coming. We did some things, as I said [see 10.11am], it wasn’t enough, and I’m sorry about that.

But I can’t fix the past, but what I can do is come up with solutions for now, and for tomorrow.

This was something which we were doing in government. We had plans to rent prison places, just like Sweden has done with Estonia, so that we didn’t have to just release these sorts of violent criminals early. We could have put them in other countries.

If everybody says ‘no prison near me’, we won’t get these [prison places] built, so this is something the public can help with … We cannot say ‘no’ to every potential site for a prison.

Exclusive: Work and pensions secretary echoes Andy Burnham as he unveils funds to stop families in England losing benefits

• UK politics live – latest updates

Young people will be expected to engage with new support to seek work, Pat McFadden has said, as he unveiled funds to stop families losing benefits when teenagers take up apprenticeships.

Speaking to the Guardian, the work and pensions secretary echoed the comments of Andy Burnham when he suggested that access to support would be conditional on young people properly participating in the support that would be provided.