Drugs, drink and dancing made Bez famous. Thirty-five years on, has he really swapped it all for filtered water, intermittent fasting and walks with the dogs?

Bez has both shoelaces undone and it’s making me nervous. Out walking his dogs, we’re up and over barbed wire, across streams and over gates. We bash through brambles and skid down slopes. I’m becoming fixated on the perilously trailing laces of his trainers and why he hasn’t tripped over them. Can he be such a thrill-seeker that a dog walk can be turned into an hour of jeopardy?

Of course he can. This is Bez, anarchic maraca-shaker, party person, the man Shaun Ryder, his Happy Mondays bandmate and partner in crime, says is a bad influence. Bez, whose real name is Mark Berry, has been in more scrapes than seems possible for one person. A small sample: knocking his teeth out in a motorbike crash at the age of 16, threatened with a gun when he and Ryder were trying to buy crack in New York, kidnapped and held hostage during another drug deal, smashing his body up in another motorbike crash in 1999 and then getting MRSA in hospital and ending up in a coma for a month.

A toxic debate over anti-Zionism leaves the Green leader looking like a passenger in the movement that carried him to the top

When Donald Trump calls someone a socialist he is not using the word in the same way that, say, Zohran Mamdani does. The mayor of New York espouses democratic socialism as a mission of equitable distribution of wealth and opportunity. The US president says socialism only pretends to be democratic “because it sounds so nice”; that “it’s really communism you’re talking about” and that people such as Mamdani pose “the biggest threat to our nation … since its founding”.

People who despise an idea, seeing it as the manifestation of everything wicked, cannot be expected to define it accurately. As with the radical right and socialism, so it is with the left and Zionism.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

After a phenomenal decade-long run, the Cursed Child two-parter is being pruned. Will it still work? Our writer swishes her cloak, levitates her luggage – and hops aboard the streamlined Hogwarts Express

‘Silencio!” Two dozen tank-topped and T-shirted figures fall quiet, and look expectantly at movement director Nuno Silva. “If you’ve got a cloak, accio it now …” With that summoning charm cast, broomsticks are stowed, wands holstered, suitcases grabbed.

The Harry Potter and the Cursed Child rehearsal room – a creaky church hall whose Victorian wall clock gives a serendipitously Hogwarts flavour – is a near-permanent bustle of activity. A sound technician quickly re-sets cues on her laptop, a costume designer helps an actor into a suspiciously long pair of gloves. Associate director Nicola Samer is quietly running notes with a couple of the leads while the rest of the company preps for the next scene.

Conflict between UN-recognised government and Iran-backed Houthis has impacts far beyond country’s borders

Yemen has been plunged into a civil war that has extended to one of the world’s most vital maritime choke points and to Saudi Arabian oil sites.

Beldina Odenyo was on the verge of stardom when she took her own life in 2021. In this beautiful documentary, her grief-stricken sister Leah attempts to finish her album – and her journey will make you cry again and again

In 2021, the Kenyan-Scottish singer-songwriter Beldina Odenyo was on the brink of major stardom. That October, aged 31, she headlined a gig at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, delivering an instantly legendary performance; barefoot, cloaked and bone-shaking in its intensity. Everyone in that concert hall knew they were witnessing something extraordinary that night. Two weeks later, Odenyo took her own life.

This tender and grief-stricken documentary, which opens a year after her death, is directed with remarkable care by Louise Lockwood. What emerges is a sensitively drawn portrait of a visionary artist haunted by trauma, formed through her teenage video diaries, the words of those who loved her, the handful of exquisite songs she left behind – kept in a folder on her hard drive named “passable demos” – and the determination of her older sister, Leah McAleer, to keep her astonishing voice alive. A deeply painful venture that she understands is itself a product of her insurmountable grief.

‘It’s a Britannia Shield’ announcement proves no one does farcical improv better than the Conservative leader

Just another day in Crapland. It’s amazing what you can get used to. You can’t say the Tories haven’t put a lot of thought into their party conference. It takes some programming skill to make every day even more dismal than the last. You come expecting very little and get even less.

Schopenhauer would be in dreamland. The very act of being has never felt so inconsequential. Yet there’s something very comforting about this. You leave the Birmingham theme park attraction feeling better about yourself than when you arrived. Who knew abject failure could be so much fun? You find yourself congratulating some members on being able to dress themselves. A curious hybrid of an endangered species and care in the community?

Exclusive: Officials working on further radical changes that would change how much energy companies could charge customers

John Healey is planning a major intervention to cut energy bills for poorer households in this month’s budget, after ministers became alarmed at forecasts that show bills rising by hundreds of pounds in January.

The chancellor is working on plans to spend more than £1bn to help energy consumers, the bulk of which is likely to go towards increasing the discount given to households on certain benefits.

Minister says they could not see parties cooperating, while official says coalition should be formally ruled out

Senior Labour party figures said it was very unlikely their party would cooperate with the Greens in the future after they adopted a policy treating Zionism as a form of racism.

One Labour minister said they could not foresee how the two parties could work together, while a government official said Labour should formally rule out a future coalition or other arrangement.

Jaafar Ashtiyeh was covering violence against olive farmers when settlers set upon him with the butts of their rifles

Armed Israeli settlers beat a photographer in the presence of Israeli soldiers, hospitalising him, as he covered worsening settler violence against olive farmers in the occupied West Bank.

Jaafar Ashtiyeh, a 58-year-old veteran photographer for Agence France-Presse in Palestine, was assaulted by a group of settlers, who beat him with the butts of their rifles, despite him being marked as press. He was assaulted in view of about a dozen armed Israeli soldiers.

The prisoner received two doses of pentobarbital as authorities tried to put her to death on 30 September

Christa Pike, a Tennessee prisoner who survived the state’s attempt to execute her, is awake and speaking as she receives treatment at a hospital, her attorneys said on Tuesday.

Pike, 50, survived two doses of pentobarbital, a sedative, as Tennessee officials attempted to put her to death last Wednesday in a case that shocked many in America and created headlines around the world. She was set to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.