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Five years on, the regime’s chokehold has left Afghan women with almost nothing, but many are still bravely fighting for their freedom

The Taliban did not just ban women from schools, impose the burqa and outlaw smartphones. The Taliban built a system that enslaves nearly half the country’s population, or according to outdated statistics: 21,701,532 women and girls.

In general, the Taliban’s system runs on laws that get changed, forgotten or scrapped as needed to oppress women, such as the abolition of the minimum marriage-age law, which made the only “legitimate” criterion for a girl’s marriage that she has reached puberty or in other words, that she is “fit for consummation”.

The essence of cycling is to keep moving, but London’s chaotic roads often make this difficult. My solution: fewer, not more rules

I plead guilty. I have loved and used the streets of London all my life, as a cyclist, driver and pedestrian. Touch wood, I have done so without accident, blemish or insurance claim. Yet now I find myself perpetually on the wrong side of the law. Regulation has become bureaucratic and chaotic.

When I try to drive at the authorised speed of 20mph on many through roads, I am hooted at and overtaken by vans, cars, coaches and buses. And when I sit dutifully on my bike at a traffic light, I am jostled by swarms of cyclists riding through on red, furious at being treated as if they were car drivers.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

Decade-long study finds stark gender difference in outcomes of people with heart disease

Millions of men with heart disease have a higher risk of developing and dying from cancer, according to a decades-long study.

The biggest drivers behind male cases were smoking, obesity and drinking too much alcohol, researchers said, with the link most pronounced in lung and oesophageal cancers.

Pacific fleet launched missile drills near what Moscow calls the Kuril Islands but Japan regards as its Northern Territories

Japan has criticised missile tests carried out by Russia’s navy around the disputed islands visited by Vladimir Putin last week amid continuing tensions between the two countries.

Russia’s Pacific fleet said on Thursday that it had fired Bastion surface-to-ship missiles from Etorofu, the largest island in the disputed archipelago, simulating an attack on enemy vessels, hitting all of its targets approximately 300km away.

Pacific fleet launched missile drills near what Moscow calls the Kuril Islands but Japan regards as its Northern Territories

Japan has criticised missile tests carried out by Russia’s navy around the disputed islands visited by Vladimir Putin last week amid continuing tensions between the two countries.

Russia’s Pacific fleet said on Thursday that it had fired Bastion surface-to-ship missiles from Etorofu, the largest island in the disputed archipelago, simulating an attack on enemy vessels, hitting all of its targets approximately 300km away.

Задал ИИ-поиску один и тот же вопрос про мастера на дом три раза подряд, ничего не меняя: первый ответ назвал 9 компаний, второй 12, третий 7, а во всех трёх попытках совпали пять названий из пятнадцати. По одному запросу первая и третья попытки не пересеклись вообще ни одним сайтом. Это значит, что отчёт «вас упоминают в 20% ответов», снятый одной попыткой, может целиком состоять из случайности — и рост до 25% через месяц тоже. Внутри: как я сам на этом попался и публично отзываю свою цифру из прошлой статьи, что при таком разбросе всё-таки измеряется надёжно, три вопроса подрядчику до оплаты и проверка своими руками за десять минут и ноль рублей.

Jenny Ware, member of inquiry that recommended wagering advertising ban, says ‘public health crisis’ demands stronger response from major parties

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The former Liberal MP Jenny Ware has condemned her one-time Coalition colleagues for backing Labor’s gambling legislation, claiming “vulnerable Australians have been let down”, as the parliament failed to back a full ban on wagering ads.

Ware, a member of the Peta Murphy-led inquiry in 2023 that recommended entirely ending wagering advertising and inducements, called gambling a public health crisis that demanded a much stronger response from both sides of politics.

Traverse theatre, Edinburgh
Malaika Kegode delivers a supernatural story about the strange disappearance of a maudlin folk singer

Playwright and performer Malaika Kegode tops and tails this show for Theatre Royal Plymouth with a message about the allure of storytelling. In a festival city bursting at the seams with stories, it is an unnecessary observation. A more important question is about which stories we choose to tell, which resonate and which pass us by. Why, for example, did Kegode want to write a story – and it is a story rather than a play – about the strange disappearance of a maudlin folk singer?

She focuses on the subsequent investigation by Meles Costas, an under-qualified true-crime podcaster, living in the shadow of a high-achieving and terminally ill mother. And she laces her story with gothic fairytale imagery: folk songs with dark-magic properties, human-to-animal transmutation and a hint of witchcraft.

At Traverse theatre, Edinburgh, until 30 August; Theatre Royal Plymouth, 2–5 September; Bristol Old Vic, 8–12 September

All our Edinburgh festival reviews

As his new film Bitter Christmas is released, the legendary Spanish director turns his fire on Donald Trump, Will Smith, Netflix – and himself

Black sunglasses indoors and a tufty cloud of cotton-wool hair: it can only be Pedro Almodóvar, bourgeois arthouse darling nonpareil and master of everything from screwball romps (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) to clammy thrillers (Live Flesh, The Skin I Live In) – and sumptuous melodramas such as his 24th film, Bitter Christmas, a cautionary tale about the perils of autofiction.

We are sitting in the library of a London hotel and Almodóvar is dressed in a thin black windcheater, grey trousers and white trainers; add a whistle on a string and he could pass for a PE teacher. The 76-year-old director may have won more than 60 awards including two Oscars, five Baftas and six Goyas but when the shades come off today, he looks momentarily sorry for himself. He has been deaf in one ear since childhood, he tells me, and now the other one is giving up the ghost. In addition, a nasty stye has turned his left eye a gluey purple. Might he have picked it up while swimming? “I do swim almost every day because I have a pool,” he sighs. Never can those words have sounded so sorrowful.

Despite stars Leslie Mann, Anna Faris and Isla Fisher and the writers behind The Hangover, this tale of friends at a luxury hotel is a dud

Jon Lucas and Scott Moore are the screenwriters who struck gold nearly 20 years ago with The Hangover, a brilliant stag-weekend nightmare comedy about what happens in Vegas, which sadly spawned a terrible (though lucrative) franchise. Now, as writers and directors, they have tried turning it around and making a movie about how middle-aged women behave on a longed-for spa weekend at a luxury-porn hotel. The result is a comedy without gags, a comedy which, for all the strenuous high-jinks, is afraid to be flippant or mean or, indeed, funny in any way.

Leslie Mann plays a hotshot lawyer called Jane who can’t make room in her life for romance; Anna Faris is goofy Sophie, PA to a rich asshole; Michelle Buteau is outspoken badass Coco, angry at her ex-husband dating again; and Isla Fisher is landed with the stridently unfunny role of Mel, a wild child who makes the other three nervous, but whose life-affirming no-filter honesty is going to break everyone’s emotional logjam and sort out their lives. As for Jane, it looks as if the hotel’s super-hot super-sensitive yoga teacher, Kai (Adam Demos), is going to hook up with her.

With less than three months to go until the midterms, voters are thinking about grocery prices, the Iran war – and datacentres.

This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to the historian Jill Lepore about how this latest AI backlash could influence those all-important elections in November. Are we seeing the beginning of the end of the ‘artificial state’?

Listen to the Today In Focus episode on the plans for a new datacentre in London’s Brick Lane

Read Jill Lepore’s Long Read here

Watch Jonathan Freedland on our new Politics Weekly YouTube channel

Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com

It was clear it was broken. I could feel the bones grinding together as the paramedics strapped me to a gurney

Growing up in Utah, I was so active that my parents nicknamed me “The Blur”. My older siblings introduced me to rock climbing while I was still at primary school. By the time I was 15, I was hauling myself up cliff faces.

One summer’s day in 2014, when I was 17, my friends and I went paddleboarding on a lake. My friend Trevor and I decided to climb one of the rocky boulders overlooking the water, and jump in.

Chester zoo resident, 23, ‘back to her usual feisty self’ after electrochemotherapy for tumour in her jaw

A 15ft (4.5-metre) python is believed to be the first snake in the world to be given a pioneering, life-saving cancer treatment normally used on humans.

The 50kg reticulated python, named Jodie Foster after the Hollywood star, has just turned 23 and lives at Chester zoo. Keepers first became concerned that she may be unwell when she began eating less and spending more time inactive in her habitat.

Value of banknotes in circulation rises from €1tn in 2016 to €1.6tn in 2026 as people advised to keep stash of cash

The number of banknotes in circulation in the EU is increasing despite widespread smartphone payments, new data shows, with wildfires ripping through parts of Europe fuelling demand for an emergency stash of cash.

While cash plays second fiddle to contactless payments in many cities across Europe, the amount in circulation is actually going up, Philip Lane, the chief economist of the European Central Bank (ECB), said at the MacGill summer school conference in Ireland.

Chester zoo resident, 23, ‘back to her usual feisty self’ after electrochemotherapy for tumour in her jaw

A 15ft (4.5-metre) python is believed to be the first snake in the world to be given a pioneering, life-saving cancer treatment normally used on humans.

The 50kg reticulated python, named Jodie Foster after the Hollywood star, has just turned 23 and lives at Chester zoo. Keepers first became concerned that she may be unwell when she began eating less and spending more time inactive in her habitat.

Value of banknotes in circulation rises from €1tn in 2016 to €1.6tn in 2026 as people advised to keep stash of cash

The number of banknotes in circulation in the EU is increasing despite widespread smartphone payments, new data shows, with wildfires ripping through parts of Europe fuelling demand for an emergency stash of cash.

While cash plays second fiddle to contactless payments in many cities across Europe, the amount in circulation is actually going up, Philip Lane, the chief economist of the European Central Bank (ECB), said at the MacGill summer school conference in Ireland.

Man, 32, charged with six counts of rape, stalking and assault after woman was allegedly attacked in Brookfield

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Queensland police say a man accused of raping and assaulting a young woman, who was taking a morning bushwalk, has been arrested after he returned to the crime scene in his vehicle later that evening.

A woman, aged in her 20s, was walking in the semi-rural Brisbane suburb of Brookfield about 6.30am on Thursday when she was allegedly stopped by the man and sexually assaulted. She told police her attacker fled on foot.

UK Foreign Office condemns use of national security law to convict activists Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung

Two Hong Kong activists who organised annual vigils marking China’s deadly Tiananmen crackdown in 1989 have been found guilty of “incitement to subversion” in one of the most high-profile cases in Hong Kong since Beijing imposed its national security law in 2020.

Lee Cheuk-yan, 69, and Chow Hang-tung, 41, “incited other persons to organise, plan, commit or participate in acts by unlawful means with a view to subverting the state power”, a press summary handed out to reporters said. The defendants each face a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail, with sentencing expected at a later date.