​She faced racist bullying as a child – then pigeonholing as an artist. Now following up a hit debut album championed by the A-list, the Croydon singer-songwriter says she finally understands who she really is

In October 2017, Rachel Chinouriri had her first panic attack. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. She’d just landed her first major gig as a professional musician, supporting Celeste at the London members’ club Laylow. Out of nowhere, she began to spiral. “I don’t know what happened,” she says. “I just started having a mental breakdown.” Her manager told her to go home, try again next time. But that only made things worse. “I started feeling like I was wasting everyone’s time,” she says. “I started feeling ashamed.” It would be better, she decided, to go on stage and sing, “half crying”.

Tears were already a familiar response to Chinouriri’s performance anxiety: the first time she sang in front of her classmates at the Brit school – the performing arts institution that trained Adele, Amy Winehouse and more – she burst into sobs afterwards. A rather inconvenient habit for an aspiring pop star, but at least she front-loaded the humiliation at the start of her career. “That was a big milestone for me,” she says of the Celeste show. “The fact that I could stand up there completely embarrassed, with people looking at me like, ‘Don’t really know what’s up with this girl’, but I still got through it and everything was fine.” The experience taught her that the catastrophic scenarios in her head rarely come to pass. “I’d given myself this pressure of, ‘This is the music industry. If they think I’m rubbish, I’m never gonna perform again.’” Chinouriri rolls her eyes at herself.

Campaigners worry politicians will have moved on by time of elections in which Marine Le Pen is expected to challenge

As dozens of forest wildfires burned across France this week amid the summer’s fourth brutal heatwave and increasing air pollution, some wondered whether voters’ first-hand experience of the climate emergency would change the political debate ahead of next year’s presidential election.

The Green leader, Marine Tondelier, who cut short a tour of France on medical advice that at seven months pregnant she should avoid breathing smoke-filled air in the south-west near a huge wildfire in Gironde, said the political class still had its head in the sand.

The global assault on our freedoms is coming ever closer to home. Just look at the sinister prosecution of UK lawyer Rajiv Menon

No more resistance in the US. The era of human rights is over, and dissent is once more forbidden. This is what certain billionaires and their concierges want, and this is the model they’re also seeking to project across the world. If we fail to resist, if our new prime minister is as weak and suggestible as the last one, this is what we will get. In fact, we are halfway there already.

Why? Because successive governments in the UK have succumbed to a global campaign to cancel our fundamental freedoms, a campaign led by oligarchs and corporations, the media they own and the junktanks they fund. A campaign that has become definitional for the second Trump presidency.

Across the country, workers are fearful about the impact of AI on their livelihoods in an increasingly fragile labour market

On the tree-lined streets of Wuhan, where cars jostle for space with mopeds and cargo trucks, the malfunctioning of a new type of vehicle has recently been causing chaos on the city’s roads.

In March, several cars from a fleet of driverless taxis stopped abruptly in the streets. The “system malfunction” left distressed riders stranded for hours. The robotaxis, known as Apollo Go and powered by artificial intelligence (AI), were taken off Wuhan’s streets for months for investigations.

I worked with children for years, so the noise doesn’t bother me. You know you’ve done a good job if they’re quiet on the way home

I’ve been a bus driver for 25 years. Before that, I worked in engineering sales and was on the road a lot, but it became impractical once I had young children. I took my kids to soft play centres and I thought: “I could run a place like this.” I opened my own centre in a Victorian shopping arcade in Otley, West Yorkshire, in 1995. It was great as my daughters could come with me. Then, a customer told me about play buses – vehicles converted into soft play centres with slides, ball pits and climbing frames. I liked the idea.

I went to an exhibition to look at some and bought a doubledecker that had already been converted. My uncle drove it home, because I couldn’t. I had to learn quickly as it was parked outside my house. It had no power steering and a ratchet handbrake. I threw up during my first lesson because I was so scared, but driving it soon became second nature. I passed my test within six months.

A zero-waste shop set up by a district council provides plastic-free products at affordable prices in a country that gets through 164m sachets a day

Just after classes finish for the day in Malabon City, in the Philippines, a corner shop begins to fill. Mothers arrive with their children, handing over empty bottles to be refilled with soy sauce and cooking oil. Plastic tubs that previously held ice-cream or biscuits are weighed and filled with flour or sugar. The kids get some sweets and banana chips bagged in brown kraft paper.

This store, Tingi Tindahan, offers a different experience from other small independent shops in the country. It retains the accessibility of micro-retail, colloquially known as tingi, while reintroducing reuse and refill methods instead of selling products in sachets and plastic packaging that too quickly becomes discarded waste.

US president’s Board of Peace hails ‘critical step’, but responses of Israeli and Hamas officials suggest disagreements remain

• Middle East crisis – live updates

• What is Trump’s Board of Peace and who is involved?

Donald Trump has said a deal has been reached for Hamas to disarm and for Israel to withdraw its forces from Gaza, however briefings from both sides exposed disputes over its implementation that could prove difficult to overcome.

“This agreement is a critical step towards Gaza finally being governed by a new Palestinian government that will work closely with the Board of Peace to help the Palestinian people,” Trump said in a social media post.

Exclusive: Electoral Commission urged to look into donations made by mother of convicted fraudster

• Revealed: George Cottrell transferred $2m to his mother days before her donations to Reform UK

Labour has accused Reform UK of being “up to its neck in sleaze” as it called on the Electoral Commission to urgently investigate substantial donations made to the party by the mother of a convicted fraudster.

Bridget Phillipson, Labour’s new chair, called on the commission to examine whether any rules had been broken, after revelations in the Guardian that George Cottrell transferred more than $2m to his mother in the days before her donations to the party in 2024.

More than 100 firefighters remain at scene after Dunwich Heath blaze spread across 150 hectares and forced evacuations

Fire crews tackling a large wildfire burning for more than 24 hours near Britain’s biggest nuclear power station have said the situation is “stabilising”.

More than 100 firefighters have been battling the blaze in Dunwich Heath, near Leiston on the Suffolk coast, since Wednesday evening.

Both MPs have had the parliamentary whip restored following separate independent disciplinary processes

MPs Diane Abbott and Joani Reid have been readmitted into Labour and had the parliamentary whip restored, just under two weeks into Andy Burnham’s premiership.

The party confirmed that this followed separate independent disciplinary processes, although Labour said the leadership played no role in either decision.