In the Warrington suburb of Culcheth, people are hopeful about what one of their own can achieve as the first northern prime minister in half a century. The Guardian's Richard Partington, who also grew up in the quiet suburb halfway between Manchester and Liverpool, gets the thoughts of local people on the new prime minister.

It was a bumper season for Hollywood, almost back to pre-pandemic levels, with Tom Holland blockbusters winning out, but there was still a string of disappointments

As the world continued to burn and temperatures reached worrying highs, most of us decided to take refuge in the cinema this summer. It provided some relief for audiences, but even more so for the industry at large, with the season pushing past the magic $4bn mark to become the biggest since 2019, up 20% from last year. There were the expected hits (Spider-Man never misses), but there were also unprecedented breakouts (we were obsessed with Obsession) and surprise underperformers (are kids Minions-ed out?)

So at the end of a season with epic highs and cavernous lows, what lessons can Hollywood learn?

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A lot of people are highly invested in people moving companies and changing jobs. You do not get this with accountancy or waste management.

In case any players do not get a move today and are desperate to get out of their club, there are options. Not all country’s celebrate deadline day on 1 September, so there is still hope of heading off to Turkey or Portugal.

England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain – 1 September

Argentina, Netherlands - 2 September

Scotland - 3 September

Turkey - 4 September

Russia - 10 September

Brazil - 11 September

Portugal - 15 September

UAE - 28 September

Saudi - 12 October

From Waxahatchee and Florry in the US to Brown Horse and Little Grandad in the UK, a wave of young songwriters are reinvigorating the subgenre’s earnest emotion and twang

‘It’s so important to talk about this before it’s gone,” says Francie Medosch, singer, guitarist and songwriter of the band Florry, “because it’s really a flash in the pan.” The flash she means is a brief moment where it feels as though on both sides of the Atlantic, scores of exciting indie bands are playing something that, without slavish copying, has plainly drawn inspiration from alt-country, the music that emerged in the US in the late 1980s and early 90s, when former punks such as Uncle Tupelo – featuring future Wilco co-founder Jeff Tweedy – and the Bottle Rockets picked up picked up fiddles, banjos and acoustic guitars.

In the UK, Brown Horse and Vegas Water Taxi have the weeping pedal steel, in the former case tied to something very heartland and in the latter paired with a very English indie sensibility. Westside Cowboy and Little Grandad both borrow from the spiky rootsiness of early Wilco, while Wyatt play slacker country rock. Over in the US, where there’s always going to be more of this sort of thing, you can point to the current indie-rock holy trinity of Waxahatchee, Wednesday and MJ Lenderman, plus Florry, Ratboys, Thomas Dollbaum, Fust, SG Goodman, Lily Seabird, Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band and more.

He was Queen’s flamboyant frontman. She was his shy girlfriend, dreaming of marriage until they both realised he preferred men. Thirty-five years after his death, in the week he would have turned 80, Mary Austin talks about their unbreakable bond

There were four silver trunks in Mary Austin’s attic that she packed in the mid-1980s and hadn’t opened since. It was too painful. Almost 40 years on, in 2022, she opened one. It was crammed with lyrics from songs written by Freddie Mercury – Don’t Stop Me Now, Killer Queen, We Are the Champions and, of course, Bohemian Rhapsody. She shut the case. It was still too painful.

“To say I was overwhelmed is an understatement,” she says. “I couldn’t look at the lyrics. I felt as I did when I originally packed them – that they were his personal belongings and I was being offered an opportunity to delve into them, and I couldn’t do that.” Eventually she asked her two sons to sift through the treasures on her behalf.

The retired second-row on his recovery from addiction, depression and incarceration to find a new life as a meditation teacher

“Carefree,” says Ryan Caldwell when I ask him what word is tattooed across his fingers. He looks up from his hands on a rainy morning in Belfast. The former Ireland international, who played the role of enforcer for Ulster, Bath and Exeter, then laughs softly in acknowledgment of that incongruous word.

We have spoken for almost two hours about a wide range of dark and heavy subjects – from his addiction issues and imprisonment to his injury-riddled rugby career and the last big concussion that ended his playing days and sent him plunging into a deeper spiral of suicidal depression.

Former PM announces he will no longer represent Holborn and St Pancras on the day his successor, Andy Burnham, is to give first Commons address as prime minister

My colleague Richard Partington, the Guardian’s senior economics correspondent, grew up, like Andy Burnham, in the Warrington suburb of Culcheth. He has been home to find out what people there are saying about the new PM.

Yesterday, Kemi Badenoch announced a reshuffle, replacing Mel Stride with Andrew Griffith as shadow chancellor and Priti Patel with Tom Tugendhat as shadow foreign secretary.

Campaigners say some care boards in England flouting their legal duty, resulting in ‘cruel’ postcode lottery

Seriously ill children are being denied the chance to die at home because the NHS in many parts of England is flouting its legal duty to provide the care needed to make that happen, critics say.

The widespread failure to provide at-home end-of-life care is forcing children who want to die at home to instead do so in hospital. Campaigners have described it as “cruel”.

Scientists say better early-warning system could have saved lives, as rescue efforts for the 4,500 still missing continue

Nepal last week turned down foreign ​involvement in general search and rescue but said it needed specialised services and advanced technological support in areas such as life-detecting machines, large refrigerators and pre-fabricated bridges.

Aid worth more than $42m has poured into the country and Nepal is now working with experts from other countries to help with rescue operations.

Meteorologists say average mean temperature of 16.5C was made 130 times more likely by climate crisis

This year’s summer was the UK’s hottest on record, according to provisional data, and the Met Office said the season’s mean temperature was made 130 times more likely by the climate crisis.

Record-breaking and back-to-back heatwaves have scorched much of Europe. In England, temperatures peaked at 38.1C (100.1F) at Kew Gardens in London on 13 August, and June had already been confirmed as the country’s hottest since records began in 1884. Scientists have said these heatwaves are only possible because of the climate crisis driven by burning fossil fuels.