Fairyland is a bittersweet film about a girl brought up by her gay father in a blizzard of glitter and feather boas in 1970s San Francisco. Its makers discuss its resonance, its tragedies – and their own boho childhoods

When Sofia Coppola logs on to our video call, her friend and fellow film-maker Andrew Durham – whose directorial debut, Fairyland, she has produced – is telling me about being nine or 10 years old, and accidentally outing his father as gay.

“Have you heard this story, Sofia?” he asks breezily from Los Angeles. “About Pietro? The Italian guy that my dad was maybe having an affair with when we lived in England?” At home in New York, Coppola furrows her brow. “Uh, yeah. A long time ago, I think. I forgot …”

No one’s name appears in the Epstein files more than that of Lesley Groff, his assistant. Reading through the thousands of emails, a troubling question arises: what did she know?

Jonathan Whitcomb, attorney for Lesley Groff, 5 June 2020

“She did not know.”

FBI interview with Lesley Groff, 24 September 2021

Groff met with a headhunter, and he told her that “there was a job to organize one man’s life. This man was EPSTEIN, a Manhattan socialite. GROFF had never heard of EPSTEIN before this.”

Interview with Lesley Groff in the New York Times, 5 February 2005

“It comes down to the bond. I know what he is thinking and I know when I need to be fast. It’s a nice roll we are on.”

Some argue that quitting the platform formerly known as Twitter cedes the space to malign actors. But it’s an open sewer, beyond redemption

You can read the Tottenham striker Richarlison launching a defiant broadside at the newly crowned champions. “Next season, we will compete for the title,” he says. “Arsenal won’t be winning it again for the next 22 years.” You can read the outgoing Manchester City manager, Pep Guardiola, throwing shade at his Arsenal counterpart, Mikel Arteta. You can see the Liverpool full-back Andy Robertson warning his coach, Arne Slot, that “things have got to change if he wants to stay”. You can see the television pundit and former Manchester United player Gary Neville deriding the club’s playmaker Bruno Fernandes as a “stat-padding talisman” who pales in comparison with the City legend Kevin De Bruyne.

Incendiary stuff, and huge if true. Also, as it turns out, huge if not true. On a regular Monday morning on the world’s 15th-most-popular social media platform, these were just a few of the football-related tweets doing big numbers, getting shared and discussed and punted up the X algorithm to be discussed even more. That none of them were actually real quotes was the most minor of inconveniences. After all, when the whole point of the site is simply to argue over things, to relitigate existing beefs and reinforce existing prejudices, does it even matter if they were real or not?

Jonathan Liew is a Guardian columnist

The WasteBar food truck hopes the eye-catching deal will change people’s attitude to waste in the Netherlands

Using cigarette butts to buy buttery Dutch pancakes? That is the deal one food truck is offering at festivals in the Netherlands as a way to get people thinking about litter.

Cigarette butts are the most common form of plastic waste in the world, with more than 4.5tn butts produced every year. In the Netherlands the estimated figure is in the hundreds of millions.

Volunteers head to Dorset countryside to restore the figure, but increasing heat means techniques have had to be adapted

For centuries, the custodians of the Cerne Giant have clambered up the dizzyingly steep hill every decade or so to rechalk the outline, making sure the hulking figure can be seen far and wide across the rolling Dorset countryside.

But the painstaking job, which involves hacking out the grubby old chalk by hand and packing in fresh, felt all the more urgent this week because effects put down to the climate emergency are making the giant a little duller and perhaps a touch more fragile.

Investigators are still searching for what caused the recent deaths of a mother and her calf, but conservationists say the animal’s shrinking habitat may be the first place to look

The two elephants were found dead in the Indonesian province of Bengkulu, in an area of “production forest” in southern Sumatra. The mother and her calf were lying side by side with their tusks still intact.

Unlikely to be poachers, the cause of their deaths – and that of a tiger nearby – at the end of April is still being investigated but conservationists say this is not an isolated case. It is estimated that seven wild elephants have died in Bengkulu since 2018.

Government-commissioned report on young people not in employment, education or training warns ‘we have neither a system or a plan to deal with it’

• Young people in the UK: how has the search for work been for you?

Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, is introducing Alan Milburn.

He says Milburn’s report is “really important and powerful”.

I could see in the first few weeks after being appointed as the secretary of state what was happening, both in human and in financial terms, [in terms of youth unemployment].

And I knew that we had to get properly under the bonnet of this problem, because there’s a lot more thing than one thing happening here …

US president said ally would be at risk if it did not ‘behave just like everybody else’

Hezbollah has claimed dozens of drone and rocket attacks that it said targeted Israeli troops in southern Lebanon and northern Israel.

The group said it launched several attacks on Israeli soldiers and tanks that crossed the Litani river into the town of Zawtar al-Sharqiyah near Nabatieh, as close-range fighting continues.

Industry figures warn of national security risk and call for ministers to address impact of extreme weather, inflation and Iran war

Britain is “sleepwalking into a food crisis” caused by extreme weather, inflation and the impacts of the Iran war – and the government is failing to take the threat seriously, food experts have said.

Farmers are facing severe strain from the current heatwave following a dry spring, with many crops likely to yield less as temperatures rise beyond their tolerance. Livestock are also suffering heat stress and there is a rising risk of wildfires. Economic losses are likely to be measured in the hundreds of millions of pounds.

Vetting of former UK ambassador to Washington warned of ties to senior figures in China, Russia and Israel

A former head of MI6 has said it would have been “totally impossible” for the Foreign Office to put in place mitigations to manage Peter Mandelson’s associations with senior figures in China, Russia and Israel when he was the UK’s ambassador to the US.

On Wednesday, the Guardian revealed some of the concerns that contributed to security officials recommending that Mandelson be denied developed vetting clearance in early 2025.