The new breed of camera-equipped streetlights has the potential to fight crime and track down missing persons. Or will it just take Britain one step closer to a surveillance state?

How would you feel if your neighbourhood lamp-posts could recognise your number plate, and also your face? Maybe you wouldn’t mind, given how long we’ve had automatic number plate recognition and CCTV. What about if that lamp-post could power itself through its own solar panels, and perhaps find another use for any extra power generated – that would be good, right? This is what Conflow Power Group (CPG) in Warwickshire claims for its iLamps, the first of their kind in the UK.

What if lamp-posts had the potential to incorporate new AI capability – gait analysis, suspicious behaviours – that you haven’t even heard of? This is what the organisation Big Brother Watch worries about. And what if the home secretary had explicitly said she believed in a “panopticon state” – that is, a state that could watch you at all times (as Shabana Mahmood already has) – and what if she still had a job when the lamp-post eyes got their updates? Or what if the next home secretary was even keener on hyper-surveillance (hard to imagine), and the street apparatus was already in place? What about all the data this would harvest – who would own it?

After seven days in charge, how is the new UK PM doing? Send your questions to our columnist Polly Toynbee about Andy Burnham and his new government, his policy announcements so far, and what he needs to be doing next. She’ll be taking your questions from 2pm (BST).

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Andy Burnham has been prime minister of the UK for a week, during which time he has announced a slew of policies as he makes his start on shaping Labour’s narrative for the next three years in government.

From re-introducing a £2 cap on bus fares in England (and providing funding for the devolved governments to follow suit), via a VAT cut to energy bills, to confirming a 20% cut in business rates for hard-pressed hospitality firms such as small live music venues and pubs, Burnham has attempted to demonstrate that he knows cost of living pressures need to be addressed.

Activists under threat from Beijing are facing strange difficulties with UK immigration. Our safety must not be traded for warmer relations with China

• Nathan Law is a pro-democracy activist and former legislator from Hong Kong. He is currently a political refugee in the UK

As authoritarian countries such as Russia, China and Iran are more active in engaging in long-arm strategies to silence their critics in the UK, transnational repression is garnering more attention. It is right that the Metropolitan police and other British law enforcement agencies have specific units and mechanisms to counter it. But it takes more than just confronting this long-distance repression to make political dissidents of these authoritarian countries feel safe in the UK, and the UK government is not living up to expectations.

The threat is real. Members of the Hongkonger community have received threats from the Chinese regime – some have had threatening letters, some people were deepfaked into sexual content, some even had families questioned and arrested back home. With the level of this targeting linked to the deterioration of Hong Kong politics, many have utilised the humanitarian pathway enabled by the previous government to relocate.

Holly Dyson’s addiction led to extreme pain, hospital trips and thousands of pounds’ worth of debt. Here is how she recovered

Holly Dyson’s last alcoholic drink was a can of cider to manage her withdrawal symptoms, which she had in her dad’s car on the way to rehab on 2 May 2023. She’d barely eaten in two weeks. Instead, she spent her last few days at home in the north-west of England vomiting blood into the toilet bowl and lying in bed twitching, feeling unbearably nauseous. Her hand hovered over the numbers 999 on her phone, ready to call an ambulance. At 26 years old, Dyson’s body was shutting down.

About a week earlier, a doctor had given her six months to live. For the past few years, her drinking had spiralled out of control. Her liver was “deranged”, the doctor said. To Dyson, it felt like “a bowling ball” – weighing her down so much that she would have to use “two hands to lift my body up out of bed because my liver felt so heavy and swollen.” Her face was also swollen and she was unrecognisable from the sporty young woman she had once been.

Esperanto had always seemed to me like an idealistic movement that had failed. So why was its annual congress so vibrant and full of young people?

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One day, as a 16-year-old in the late 2000s, I received an AOL instant message from my friend Kenyon. He wanted to know whether I had heard of Esperanto, the universal language. Kenyon was several years older than me, and something of a mentor. Like me, he was a musician – he engineered my teenage band’s first record – but unlike me, he had a head full of trivia that made him the confidently nerdy star of any Saturday-night gathering of outcasts. His pitch: Esperanto was invented in the late 19th century by a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist named LL Zamenhof, who aimed to create a language so irresistibly easy to learn that it would be adopted as a shared second tongue by people the world over. From a position of mutual understanding, world peace would surely follow. Yes, the language had been around for well over 100 years and, yes, universal fellowship had yet to be achieved. But the internet had inaugurated a new era of global connectivity, and users could learn through an abundance of online classes. Perhaps we were on the verge of an Esperanto renaissance. Kenyon had been practising for a few years and was practically flua.

As a typical adolescent, I was in the midst of my own social awakening. I had begun to travel the US playing music, relying on nothing but the hospitality of friends of friends of friends. I was finding communion and what felt like boundless possibility in mass bike rides and sweaty dance parties in derelict churches. I was also dabbling in the world of hitchhiking and freight-train-hopping, visiting new places by exploiting the only slightly off-limits mechanisms of our industrialised society. Goods needed to move, and I could move with them, thanks to the kindness of those who showed me the ropes just because I wanted to learn. Esperanto seemed comparable: another disparate social club with a baked-in rejection of the forces, writ large and ill-defined, that sought to divide us. But even then, its goals felt redundant: the internet had already given me new tools to communicate across distance and difference. Simple as it might be to learn the language, why bother?

It’s a bit of a mystery why it takes Odysseus so long to get home if he’s not shacking up with Calypso and others ...

I did not walk into Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey intending to pick holes. If there was zero sexual chemistry between Odysseus and Circe, who was I to say that’s not how it went in the poem? I was most likely thinking of a feminist retelling (Madeline Miller’s novel Circe), rather than Homer, anyway.

Nevertheless, even allowing for metaphor and whatnot, even factoring in that Circe’s passion for Odysseus is (almost?) definitely a rumination on the double standards of godliness, in which the guy gods are allowed to sleep with whichever mortals they please, but the lady ones are not supposed to (I don’t think?), I am sure something happened.

Emmanuel Macron warns that ‘we have to hold out’ as fires burn near city; Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez warns of ‘difficult hours’ ahead

• France and Spain race to contain huge wildfires before fresh heatwave begins

Joe Pinner and Jane Clinton

Tourists caught up in the wildfires spoke to us about their experiences.

“My main memory is how bizarre it was to watch people enjoying holidays on the beach while a major catastrophe was unfolding in full view, not far away. Is this how the world ends?”

The Conservative party leader said that Labour’s plan allows for too many serious offenders to be freed early

Reform UK has issued its response to Andy Burnham’s proposal for more localised, vocational education. It is in the form of a statement from Suella Braverman, the former Tory home secretary who is now Reform’s education spokesperson. She is a bit more positive about it than her old party. (See 9.16am.) She says:

Reform UK has long argued that Britain needs a technical and vocational renaissance alongside a genuine skills revolution.

For too long, the philosopher has been valued more than the plumber. We welcome any effort to rebalance the scales, but we’ve been here before. Successive prime ministers have promised parity of esteem and failed to deliver.

Spot the difference: “A new ‘T-level’ system, which overhauls how technical education is taught and administered, aims to put the courses on an equal footing with academic work,” announced in Philip Hammond’s 2017 budget … “We need finally to do what we always promise we will — to elevate practical and technical qualifications, so that we recognize their immense value to society and to the individual,” Boris Johnson, 2019 … “Technical education is not given the respect it deserves but today, I am changing all of that, pulling one of the biggest levers we have to change the direction of our country,” Rishi Sunak in 2023 as he announced plans for a British baccalaureate … “While you will never hear me denigrate the aspiration to go to university, I don’t think the way we currently measure success in education — that ambition to get 50 per cent of kids to uni — I don’t think that’s right for our times,” Keir Starmer, 2025 … “That’s why today we’re putting technical education back where it belongs — not as a second thought, but as a first choice,” Andy Burnham, 2026.

The home secretary [Shabana Mahmood] has brought forward a very rigorous plan in relation to this, and let’s remember, the numbers can fluctuate but overall boat crossings are down, down quite significantly year on year. So that does suggest that the plan is working.

The public wants to see control being exerted, and while we’ve made progress, there is more to do, and I recognise that completely.

But the trend is down, and the number of people being removed is up, so the figures are pointing in a better direction. But there is much more to do.

Suffolk police ceded investigation into James Loubeau to the US military, leading to court martial acquittal

A US airman accused of a “spree” of rapes and sexual assaults in England, drugging some women and breaking into the homes of others, was able to avoid British justice after local police handed over part of the case to the American military.

Two British women went to Suffolk police in August 2019 to allege that James Loubeau and another US airman had drugged and raped them after they met in a nightclub in Bury St Edmunds, a local market town.

At least 1,500 protest after six men on drug-related charges put in solitary confinement before possible execution

Prisoners at Iran’s largest jail have sewn their lips shut as hundreds of prisoners joined a mass hunger strike amid a surge in executions over drug offences and charges linked to anti-government protests.

The hunger strike, involving at least 1,500 death row prisoners at Ghezel Hesar prison near Tehran, began two weeks ago after six men convicted on drug-related charges were transferred to solitary confinement before their possible execution, according to Iranian rights groups.