Acts such as Article 3 are drawing inspiration from their culture and meeting a big appetite for Indigenous-focused club nights

“We both live in maybe the most impractical place if you want to be a successful DJ,” laughs Alice Marie Jektevik, one half of Article 3, a Sámi female DJ collective. Jektevik, 36, and her collaborator, Petra Laiti, 30, reside in a rural village in the far north-east of Norway.

But living in Sápmi – the region across northern parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia traditionally lived in by Sámi people – has proven to be central to their success, providing the inspiration for much of their work.

Labour promised ‘ambitious reforms’, but it was fixing things that were not broken. And the moral: focus on what matters and stop making stupid mistakes

What were they thinking? Labour inherited the worst of everything, including prisons beyond breaking point, court backlogs as bad as NHS waiting lists, children cast into exceptional destitution, the National Grid unable to cope with demand, reservoirs unbuilt while sewage poured into rivers, high debt, no money and deep public distrust in politics. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves were honest about what they found.

So what on earth can have seized them, within months of taking over, to decide this was a good time for a gigantic English council re-disorganisation? Angela Rayner, who was in charge of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government at the time, kicked it off in December 2024. But why, when councils are near-bankrupt and crippled by the ballooning costs of social care and provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities?

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
On Monday 30 April, ahead of the May elections, join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much threat Labour faces from both the Green party and Reform, and whether Keir Starmer can survive as party leader
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Google, Anthropic and OpenAI bosses to mingle with global south leaders wrestling for control over technology

Silicon Valley tech billionaires will land in Delhi this week for an AI summit hosted by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, where leaders of the global south will wrestle for control over the fast-developing technology.

During the week-long AI Impact Summit, attended by thousands of tech executives, government officials and AI safety experts, tech companies valued at trillions of dollars will rub along with leaders of countries such as Kenya and Indonesia, where average wages dip well below $1,000 a month.

In 1999, Heather Preen contracted E coli on the beach. Two weeks later she died. Now, as a new Channel 4 show dramatises the scandal, her mother, Julie Maughan, explains why she is still looking for someone to take responsibility

When Julie Maughan was invited to help with a factual drama that would focus on the illegal dumping of raw sewage by water companies, she had to think hard. In some ways, it felt 25 years too late. In 1999, Maughan’s eight-year-old daughter, Heather Preen, had contracted the pathogen E coli O157 on a Devon beach and died within a fortnight. Maughan’s marriage hadn’t survived the grief – she separated from Heather’s father, Mark Preen, a builder, who later took his own life. “I’ve always said it was like a bomb had gone off under our family,” says Maughan. “This little girl, just playing, doing her nutty stuff on an English beach. And that was the price.” Yet there had been no outrage, few questions raised and no clear answers. “Why weren’t people looking into this? It felt as if Heather didn’t matter. Over time, it felt as if she’d been forgotten.” All these years later, Maughan wasn’t sure if she could revisit it. “I didn’t know if I could go back into that world,” she says. “But I’m glad I have.”

The result, Dirty Business, a three-part Channel 4 factual drama, is aiming to spark the same anger over pollution that ITV’s Mr Bates Vs the Post Office did for the Horizon scandal. Jumping between timelines, using actors as well as “real people” and with actual footage of scummy rivers and beaches dotted with toilet paper, sanitary towels and dead fish, it shows how raw sewage dumps have become standard policy for England’s water companies. Jason Watkins and David Thewlis play “sewage sleuths” Peter Hammond and Ash Smith, Cotswolds neighbours who, over time, watched their local river turn from clear and teeming with nature to dense grey and devoid of life. Hammond is a retired professor of computational biology, Smith a retired detective, and together, they used hidden cameras, freedom of information requests and AI models to uncover sewage dumps on an industrial scale.

Driver reportedly checked with base and was told to continue when GPS directed van on to Essex mudflats

People thought they were looking at an AI image: an Amazon delivery van half-submerged at the mouth of the Thames estuary where it meets the North Sea. “I thought someone had just knocked up a photograph,” says local guide Kevin Brown about first seeing it online.

It turned out the image was genuine, and it proliferated. There was something delightfully primordial about it – such a dominant sight of modern street life, just out there on the mud, vulnerable and surrounded by nothingness. Banter followed, images of an Amazon package floating in sea water: Amazon has made your delivery.

Reform UK leader snaps at reporters as he tries to maintain control over announcement of shadow cabinet

Meet the Fockers. The shadow cabinet from hell. Rejects, losers and deadbeats. A freak show. A tribute act.

Reform have often been called a one-man band. The Nigel Farage party. So to counter this narrative, Nige took over Church House in Westminster and turned it into a tacky gameshow set. A remake of The Weakest Link. All to parade his new top team. The lucky men and women whose one job is to try not to fall out with one another in the next few years. No chance.

Figures from Aviva also show number of homes being built in risky areas is rising

One in nine new homes in England built between 2022 and 2024 were constructed in areas that could now be at risk of flooding, according to new data.

The figures show the number of homes being built in risky areas is on the rise – a previous analysis showed that between 2013 and 2022, one in 13 new homes were in potential flooding zones.

National Crime Agency says rise in child sexual abuse being driven by technology and online forums

Child sexual abuse in the UK is soaring, police have said, with 1,000 paedophile suspects being arrested each month and the number of children being rescued from harm rising by 50% in the last five years.

The National Crime Agency said the growth in offending across the UK was driven by technology and linked to the radicalisation of offenders in online forums, encouraging people to view images of child sexual abuse by reassuring them it was normal.

‘Shocking’ data shows the climate crisis and invasive mosquitos mean chikungunya could spread in 29 countries

An excruciatingly painful tropical disease called chikungunya can now be transmitted by mosquitoes across most of Europe, a study has found.

Higher temperatures due to the climate crisis mean infections are now possible for more than six months of the year in Spain, Greece and other southern European countries, and for two months a year in south-east England. Continuing global heating means it is only a matter of time before the disease expands further northwards, the scientists said.

Moves come after Gordon Brown’s claim that files show that US sex offender used Stansted airport in Essex to ‘fly in girls’

British police have expanded their interest in the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s links to Britain, by admitting for the first time they are looking at claims he used dozens of private flights into UK airports to traffic women.

It comes after former prime minister Gordon Brown said that documents about Epstein released in the US showed in “graphic detail” how the disgraced financier, with links to high-profile people including the former Prince Andrew, was able to use Stansted airport in Essex to “fly in girls from Latvia, Lithuania and Russia”.

India’s promise is undeniable, yet political dysfunction and empty rhetoric continue to undermine its long-term prospects. The absence of reliable statistics, lagging innovation, and worsening air quality all point to institutional decay that only sustained, coordinated national action can reverse.

Across the Global South, one of the biggest challenges is not just to build more infrastructure, but to build it right. Without institutional capacity and financial depth, the increasingly popular public-private-partnership model can backfire, creating a vicious spiral of debt, delays, and disillusionment.

With a rock-solid parliamentary majority, as well as the backing of the military and judiciary, the royalist-conservative Bhumjaithai Party is poised to spend its full four-year term governing in the service of establishment interests. But that does not mean it will all be smooth sailing ahead.

In a country as large and diverse as the United States, expanding economic opportunity cannot and should not depend on volatile federal policies. A framework of directed improvisation that aligns federal and state priorities with local capacities offers a promising way to promote broad-based development.

The United States’ unique economic advantages – deep financial markets, a strong institutional framework, and the world's dominant reserve currency – should not be mistaken for invincibility. In fact, markets are already pricing US policy uncertainty the same way they price that of countries that do not have a reserve currency.

While US Vice President JD Vance used his remarks to the Munich Security Conference last year to hector and insult European leaders, Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemed more eager to flatter. And yet, America’s top diplomat merely confirmed that the transatlantic divide has become massive – and is still widening.

As the post-Cold War era recedes, a more regional and competitive order is reasserting itself. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that larger powers would seek to shape their immediate surroundings – not only out of ambition, but also because they face constraints farther afield.

The federal cap on credit-card interest rates that US President Donald Trump has proposed would, in theory, prevent issuers from gouging customers. But not everyone agrees that this would be good for Americans, especially lower-income households that are often the most desperate for credit.

While anyone familiar with past technological hype cycles can see that today’s predominantly young technologists are overly optimistic about AI’s potential benefits, mainstream economists seem to suffer from tunnel vision of a different sort. If recent history is any guide, that should worry us all.

Over the past decade, India has built the world’s largest real-time payments system. By using public infrastructure to expand financial inclusion, it offers a model for other developing countries that want to modernize payments without being dependent on a few multinational corporations.