It showcased the biggest stars of the day, including Stan Laurel, Harry Houdini, Morecambe and Wise and Shirley Bassey, before becoming a bingo hall, a church and a squat. It was almost turned into flats. What next for Manchester’s forgotten music hall?

It doesn’t look like much from the outside. An inelegant, industrial redbrick block; if you didn’t know, you might guess it’s a biscuit factory. Make that a former biscuit factory, because this is clearly somewhere that was rather than is: entrances are bricked up, drainpipes hang loose, shrubs sprout from crumbling masonry, pigeons come and go from holes in the roof. Pretty much everything within reach of a spray can has been reached; there are tags, Marvel characters, the perhaps surprising news that “God is dead and sheep killed him”.

You know those rocks, though, that look like any old rocks, but when you smash them open they have amazing, sparkling, coloured crystals inside? Amethyst and the like. Well, this building is a bit like them. If you took a wrecking ball to it (and it’s not inconceivable that this will happen), inside you’d find a splendid Edwardian galleried auditorium with gilded rococo plasterwork and plush red velvet seats … albeit covered in pigeon shit.

In the 1980s, Labour-controlled London built 52,000 council homes. During the Tony Blair decade, just 280. It’s brought this local-election catastrophe on itself

Over the week to come, journalists will repeat three things until they, and you, are sick: that local elections fall next Thursday; that the results will decide the fate of Keir Starmer; and that he is set to do badly. But just how badly, and where? Last week, Starmer’s own party dropped a big clue.

The most popular politician in Britain came down from Manchester to spend the whole day campaigning in London. As Andy Burnham went from Haringey to Brixton, he rallied Labour’s footsoldiers. “Don’t go into the last two weeks with your shoulders down,” he told them. “Get your shoulders up.”

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

My country has been under occupation, dogged by corruption and war. Yet even I’ve been bewildered by the way the US seems to be fracturing

• A version of this piece appeared in the Dial under the headline No Common Ground

In 2008, when I was a reporter for a leading Ukrainian TV station, I insisted on following Barack Obama’s campaign for US president. Few Ukrainian media outlets could afford to send a journalist to travel around the US to report on the election; even the newsrooms of those that could took some convincing.

As a media student in 2004, I had spent two months on the streets of Kyiv during the Orange Revolution, where people protested a stolen election and succeeded in defending their vote. The excitement of the fight for freedom and justice, combined with the energy of mass gatherings, was seductive. I recognised a similar momentum in the US during Obama’s campaign and wanted to see how things felt on the ground. As a Ukrainian, I could relate to Obama’s promises to restore respect for human rights and the rule of law, and his desire to mobilise people around the idea of “hope”. It also stood in contrast with what I knew of the US: I had studied foreign news reporting at the time of the US invasion of Iraq and the military’s crimes in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.

He painted sea battles, the labours of Hercules and breathtaking still lifes. But, as a major new exhibition makes clear, it was in his thrilling depictions of the spiritual that the Spanish master showed his true genius

Against an impenetrable black ground, the crucified figure looms pale and shining. There’s almost no colour, beyond the trickle of blood on Christ’s feet from the nails driven through his flesh. His head slumps, and his carefully modelled face is at peace (no agony here). But the most striking part of the picture is surely the loincloth, which folds and crumples and bunches around his midriff – you can imagine passing your hand over it, feeling the linen’s volume and texture. In its original home, the monastery of San Pablo el Real in Seville, the painting was displayed with “little light”, according to the 17th-century Spanish artist and writer, Antonio Palomino. “Everyone who sees it, and does not know it, believes it to be a sculpture.” The paleness of the body, the fabric, must have loomed out of the dark like a vision.

Francisco de Zurbarán, who painted this solitary crucified Christ, is one of the three great artists of the Spanish 17th century. But, unlike his peers Velázquez and Murillo, he has never had a show to himself in the UK – until now, as his work forms the basis of a major exhibition about to open at the National Gallery in London. Compared with his precise contemporary and friend Velázquez (born in 1599, a year after Zurbarán), his work can seem stilled, becalmed. You can see the contrast clearly, in works commemorating Spanish military success that each of them were commissioned to paint for Philip IV of Spain’s new palace, the Palacio del Buen Retiro. Both are now in the Prado. Zurbarán’s The Defence of Cádiz Against the English has the quality of a frieze, as the Spanish generals look down serenely at the sea battle below. Velázquez’s The Surrender of Breda is all drama, encounter: a quicksilver painting that captures time as it flees.

In 1980, two US airmen reported an extraordinary encounter near a military base in the east of England. What really happened?

In 1996, Nick Pope wrote his first book. Open Skies, Closed Minds was a semi-autobiographical examination of well-known UFO cases mixed with his own research. Pope worked at the UK Ministry of Defence for more than two decades, from 1985 to 2006. For three of those years – 1991 to 1994 – he worked on what was known colloquially in the department as “the UFO desk”. The desk’s official name, the Secretariat (Air Staff ) Sec (AS) 2a, was responsible for assessing the defence significance of reported UFO sightings.

To promote the book, Pope appeared on BBC Newsnight. The UK’s flagship news programme was famous for its adversarial interviews that left even the most formidable politicians and intellectuals looking like startled deer. Given the subject matter and the platform, this could have gone horribly wrong, but Pope held his own. “I wasn’t nervous, probably because I’d been media-trained by the MoD,” he says. “The irony was that when I was posted to the UFO desk, I occasionally had to go on television in my role as the department’s subject-matter expert and play down both the phenomena and the true extent of our interest and involvement in the subject.” His interrogator that night was Peter Snow. “What do you believe now that you didn’t believe five years ago?” Snow began.

Reform leader went public after approach from Guardian, but does his claim stack up that money was for his security?

• Nigel Farage was given undisclosed £5m by crypto billionaire in 2024

• Farage referred to standards watchdog over undisclosed £5m gift

Nigel Farage has admitted he received a personal gift of £5m from the Reform UK mega-donor Christopher Harborne shortly before the general election in 2024.

He did not disclose that gift at the time and had made no mention of it since. That is, until Wednesday morning, when the Daily Telegraph published a story in which Farage admitted receiving the money from Harborne – saying it was for his personal security.

‘Absolutely clear’ people are being targeted for being Jewish, says PM as he holds meeting with agencies and ministers

• Golders Green attack – latest updates

Keir Starmer has said the government and criminal justice system must respond to the suspected terrorist attack in Golders Green in “a swift, agile and visible way”, as he convened a meeting in Downing Street on Thursday.

The prime minister said “an attack on our Jewish community is an attack on all of us”, as he called the fight against antisemitism “our fight as well” after Wednesday’s Golders Green attack.

WPP accused of breaching its climate policy after report reveals firm linked to twice as much oil advertising as US rivals

A British advertising conglomerate has helped the oil companies ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP spend an estimated $1.5bn (£1.1bn) on adverts in the US since the 2015 Paris agreement to tackle the climate crisis, a report shows.

London-based WPP was the leading advertising group serving the US’s oil industry over the past decade, according to analysis by the climate investigations platform DeSmog. The figure is nearly twice the respective amounts linked to its US rivals Omnicom and Interpublic Group (IPG), which merged in November.

Consumer insight tracker shows 85% are worried about food prices and a majority think the economy will deteriorate

Three million UK households are being forced to skip meals as consumers resort to drastic measures to deal with rising costs, according to a Which? report published on Thursday.

The conflict in the Middle East and subsequent surge in oil and raw material prices has led to businesses preparing to raise prices, putting more pressure on household finances and hitting consumer confidence.

Bank governor says latest MPC decision is reasonable given unpredictability of events unfolding in the Middle East

• Business live – latest updates

The Bank of England has left interest rates unchanged at 3.75% but warned that the UK should brace for hikes later this year, as “higher inflation is unavoidable” as a result of the war in the Middle East.

The Bank’s rate-setting monetary policy committee (MPC) voted to leave borrowing costs on hold on Thursday, with its nine-member committee split 8-1 in their decision.