The N-Dubz and X Factor star’s career went into freefall after an elaborate sting by the Sun on Sunday, and she’s still campaigning for tougher press regulation. But will it work?

Late last year, Tulisa Contostavlos took a good look at her life. Her relationship had come to an end and she found herself in her late 30s (she’s 38 now), wondering what next. “I started thinking about all the things I’d never done,” she says. At 20, life had got weird – Contostavlos was in the successful hip-hop group N-Dubz and became an adult just as the fame and money started coming in. By 24, she was a judge on the Saturday night TV show X Factor. If that hadn’t happened, she thinks she might have become an archaeologist – she’s obsessed with ancient history. And so last year she went travelling, to Egypt to see the pyramids, and to Peru to visit Machu Picchu.

There were other, bigger changes. She gave up smoking and started having therapy for the first time. Contostavlos sat down, she says, and “I wrote a list of what my ‘greatest self’ looked like – where she’d go, how she thought, how she felt, the things she would do. I started implementing every single thing on that list and I found through doing that, you just become her – it is actually that simple. It just takes effort and discipline.” Her greatest self, she says, “is a person of action, and she turns lemons into lemon cake”. It got her thinking about the criminal trial that left her career in freefall. “I was like, right, let’s try to do something.”

As climate disaster stares us in the face, the radical right says ‘Embrace the Mediterranean life’. Embrace death, more like it

Can’t you leftists understand? Mass death is good for you. Reject the woke love of life! Welcome civilisational collapse! Watch it all burn, then dance in the ashes! This, roughly speaking, is how the dismissal of climate action is now being justified: the argument has shifted from science denial to outright nihilism.

The new incendiary spirit is exemplified by that serial arsonist Allister Heath, editor of the Sunday Telegraph. In a column in the Daily Telegraph last week, originally titled “Britain can’t stop climate change. Scrap net zero and embrace Mediterranean life”, he argued that “climate change is real” but “the war against global warming has been lost”.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Growing up in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, romance was frowned upon – as was much of my Uyghur culture. But one day, exploring a strange house, I found a gateway to both worlds

Many people have a book that changes their life. For me and my wife, one book in particular changed our destinies for ever. We have been in love since we were teenagers, and today we are happily married – all because I accidentally discovered a forbidden novel in someone else’s house.

It was a hot summer’s evening in 2009, in Kumul, Xinjiang. I was 16 and my father insisted I accompany him to visit a distant relative, where they would spend hours chatting about the old days and feasting as if they hadn’t eaten in years. As the well-behaved teenager I tried to be, I sat politely, nodding at their stories and pretending to absorb their “life lessons”, attempting to hide my boredom. The living room, with its small windows and bright lighting, was unbearable.

Cameroon’s 93-year-old president has not been seen for many weeks. The Guardian’s Eromo Egbejule and Giovanni Wanneh tell Annie Kelly how the country is managing without its leader, and why Cameroonians still have hope for the next chapter

Paul Biya has been the president of Cameroon since 1982. But the 93-year-old has a habit of disappearing. This week, a government spokesperson was forced to declare Biya is in fact alive and will return “soon”. All because he’s been in Switzerland for 59 days and Cameroonians haven’t heard from him.

So who is actually running one of central Africa’s largest economies? Why can’t Cameroonians talk publicly about their president’s health? And what’s the succession plan?

This evening service from London to Crewe is hot, sweaty and heaving with people, many having to stand or sit in the gangways

The 5.46pm train from London Euston to Crewe is the low point of Nikhil Patel’s week. “I’ve never gotten a seat. I always stand up even when I get here early,” says the 22-year-old, struggling to keep his balance while the gangway underneath sways from side to side.

Painfully for Patel, who is commuting back and forth to the capital for a computer science internship, it’s the first leg of a three-hour journey home to Walsall. He grabs the back of a chair to remain steady but says he’s just thankful that the train has left on time – and that it’s even on the move at all.

Humans are the only animals whose faces redden with embarrassment. Should we see that as an affliction, or as a blessing?

‘Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions,” Charles Darwin once wrote, and he wasn’t wrong. Though certain species of bird pinken up as a means of communication, and uakari monkeys have red faces when in good health, we seem to be the only animal that flushes as a sign of embarrassment.

“It’s a very truthful signal,” says Prof Sophie Scott, the director of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. “It’s not fakeable, and there aren’t many things that humans do that fall into that category. You can’t blush on command.”

Exclusive: New health secretary promises root-and-branch reform after damning maternity scandals

Women should not feel pressurised into experiencing an “ideal birth”, the new health secretary, Yvette Cooper, has said, promising a root-and-branch reform of standards after several damning maternity scandals.

Cooper, who returns to the department 27 years after she was the minister for public health under Tony Blair, said maternity and child health would be a major focus in the role, where she will also be expected to implement significant reforms to social care.

Air raid alerts last for more than an hour as Moscow inflicts another heavy bombardment on Ukraine’s capital

Russian strikes in and around Kyiv killed at least 14 people, ⁠injured 27 and ⁠damaged warehouses, ​emergency service officials said. Some reports put the death toll at 15.

Air raid alerts lasted for more than an hour as Moscow’s forces continued a series of deadly heavy attacks on the Ukrainian capital. The military administration said seven sites were hit in an assault that began on Wednesday after midnight.

Iran conflict windfall over three months reignites calls for companies ‘cashing in on human misery’ to pay for environmental damage

Eight of the biggest oil companies amassed profits of more than $90bn (£67bn) in just three months as the Iran conflict sent energy prices soaring and the emissions-fuelled climate crisis caused deadly heatwaves.

The windfall war profits have reignited calls for oil and gas supermajors such as Saudi Aramco and BP to pay for the environmental damage caused by “cashing in on human misery” and fund a rapid transition to renewable energy.

Luciana Berger says Joshua Bonehill-Paine should have no role in public life because of ‘his racism and his view of women’

A former MP has urged the Tory leader to drop an election candidate who was previously jailed for a campaign of antisemitic abuse against her.

Kemi Badenoch on Tuesday defended the Conservative party’s selection of Joshua Bonehill-Paine, a former neo-Nazi, insisting she believes in “second chances”.