The star was just eight when his friend was stabbed. Decades on, he’s ready to talk about that day – how it shaped him, and how, as he becomes a father himself, it will shape him as a dad

“I feel a bit nervous,” confesses John Boyega, as he sits down in front of the camera. “Speaking about it could possibly help. I haven’t revisited this in a long time. Yeah, my heart is just beating.” The Attack the Block and Star Wars actor is talking in the opening scene of a new BBC Two documentary about the killing of 10-year-old schoolboy Damilola Taylor.

On 27 November 2000, Damilola was stabbed in the leg with a broken bottle and left to die in a concrete stairwell, attacked as he walked home from an after-school club at Peckham library in south London. It took six years and three separate trials at the Old Bailey, costing a total of £16m, to secure a manslaughter conviction. His death shocked the nation not only because he was so young, but because all the suspects were also children. Boyega was one of the last people to see Damilola alive. The pair had enjoyed a close friendship since Damilola’s move to the UK from Nigeria in August of that year.

The whole point of going to Claridge’s in the first place is to sweep in through the grand main hotel entrance

Dante Mayfair, inside Claridge’s on Brook Street in London, has been created, the hotel’s management says, to become “the living room of Mayfair”. It’s a charming idea: pop in, have a cuppa or a bowl of pappardelle bolognese, or lie about on the fancy sofas wearing elasticated tracksuit bottoms and slurping soft-serve with s’mores. No, sorry, I’ve gone too far: it’s nowhere near that informal.

Still, like many well-used living rooms, this one has been rearranged, redecorated and repurposed many times over the years. I’ve eaten fancy-schmancy Simon Rogan dinners here when it was Fera, as well as his table experience at Aulis during which venture capitalist “foodies” bored the pants off me over a 12-course meal in the kitchen itself. I’ve stared unmoved at Daniel Humm’s New York-style pomp at the short-lived Davies and Brook, and have visited several times since Claridge’s took matters in-house in the shape of a rather anonymous ye olde British brasserie.

Neighbours say crowds drawn by TikTok to Fabel Friet are clogging the picturesque canal street and attracting litter, gulls and rats

People living in one of Amsterdam’s most exclusive neighbourhoods have taken the city to court for licensing a chip shop that has gone viral on TikTok.

On busy days, the queue for Fabel Friet on Runstraat stretches across a bridge on the Keizersgracht – one of Amsterdam’s most famous canals – a court was told last week. The narrow street itself is crowded by tourists waiting for their orders seven days a week. And loitering with intent – on parked cars, on the street itself, and on steps and porches – gulls wait to swoop.

A Ukrainian publishing boom sparked by the 2022 invasion is now under threat from the force and frequency of Russian attacks

On a Saturday morning in August, Viktor Kruglov, the co-founder and chief executive of the publisher Ranok, was at his headquarters in Kharkiv – the eastern Ukrainian city that, along with Kyiv, is the centre of the country’s publishing and printing industry. Built 15 years ago on the site of a former bread factory, the footprint of the premises is about 10,000 sq metres (107,640ft). Books were stacked 12 metres high on rank after rank of shelves.

Kruglov, along with five senior colleagues, were on the warehouse floor to discuss the approaching school year. The warehouse was holding 628,000 new schoolbooks. “It was the high season of distribution,” he said, “so we were checking all our processes: how to do it more successfully, how to do it in time.”

While I suspect my husband and some of my friends would make excellent Traitors, my poker face is worse than Richard E Grant’s – as I learned when I played the game

Yes, yes, it’s achieved the impossible: brought back watercooler terrestrial TV, united the UK’s viewing habits, healed our divided nation. But more importantly, The Celebrity Traitors has given us a lens through which to look at life. Currently, the only conversation worth having is what you think you, whoever you’re talking to, and all your friends and family members would be like as contestants on the show. It’s a quick-smart way to evaluate society, a new shorthand. Describe a stranger as having “Faithful energy” and there are surely about two humans on these islands who wouldn’t understand exactly what you mean.

Can you handle the truth, though? It was a poignant moment on my journey of self-acceptance when I was forced to acknowledge that I’d be terrible as both a Traitor and a Faithful. However, confronted with most of the people who know me best being absolutely certain, laughing through tears at the idea of any other outcome, there was no getting away from it. The accusation was levelled that I would jump out of my skin and squeal if my shoulder was touched at the initial roundtable, meaning my Traitorhood would be over before it had begun, which was futile to deny. I suggested I might try to make the squeal seem like a double bluff – which was met with further amusement. Apparently my poker face is even less convincing than I thought. I’d make Richard E Grant look like a slick covert operator.

Learning to be one human among many has always been a little lonely and discombobulating. But young people around the world are lonelier than ever. Why?

In September, a Reddit user identifying themselves as a 25-year-old man turned to the r/ForeverAlone subreddit with a question: How do you deal with touch starvation? “It’s becoming obvious to me that I’ll probably be alone forever,” he wrote. He used to be worried about missing out on sex, but now he just misses hugs. Cuddles.

“I don’t have many friends and none with that kind of physical relationship. I don’t really hug family either anymore. Some days, I feel so desperate for a hug with someone I love.”

Critics say scrapping of plans, which aimed to increase judge-alone trials to deliver swifter justice, leaves court system and victims vulnerable

Ministers have scrapped plans that would have slashed the number of jury trials in England and Wales and replaced them with a judge sitting alone.

The proposals had sparked a fierce backlash from lawyers, who have welcomed the U-turn. But the victims’ commissioner expressed concern about the abandonment of measures drawn up by the then justice secretary, David Lammy, under Keir Starmer’s government, to tackle the record backlog in the courts.

Labour wants to make sure mayors and council chiefs in England can be held to account for extra revenues devolved to them

Ministers are mulling over how to ensure that England’s regional leaders do not misuse their newfound spending muscle, as Whitehall prepares to devolve more revenue to local levels.

Ideas under consideration include a new select committee in Westminster, enhanced reporting rules and a new audit body focused on local and regional government.

Britain under pressure to put tariffs on cheap Chinese vehicle imports ahead of protectionist trade measures

Britain’s car industry is grappling with a “difficult trade-off” between China and Europe, as manufacturers struggle to balance the benefits of both markets ahead of looming trade measures that could restrict UK exports to the EU.

The UK is an outlier in choosing not to put import taxes on Chinese vehicles, even as the US has shut them out almost entirely, and the EU imposes duties of up to 45%.

FOI request shows wildfire risk scheme scrapped, as survey highlights many fire services lack proper protective gear

The government quietly scrapped plans to prepare the countryside in England for wildfires, it has been revealed. This was despite new data showing fire crews do not have the proper protective gear to tackle them.

This summer has been a potent reminder of the scale of the threat posed by the climate crisis, with the UK experiencing record-breaking wildfires after punishingly hot and dry weather turned large parts of the countryside into a tinderbox.