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Yes, there is a way to gracefully address that you've been walking around with spinach in your teeth. Here are tactics to quickly defuse your most embarrassing, cringe-inducing moments.

The director’s more-is-more approach to the 1986 sequel gave us seat-edge action and an indelible performance from a rule-breaking Sigourney Weaver

James Cameron loves tough female characters. That seems like a given now, after three Avatars and two particularly muscular arms belonging to Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2. Even the lushly romantic Titanic is about a supportive, sweet-natured boyfriend lending his love the extra smidge of strength she needs to live a rich and iconoclastic life without him, until she’s freely chucking diamonds into the sea at 100 years of age. But in Cameron’s 1984 de facto feature debut The Terminator (after a Piranha sequel that he attempted to disown), T2’s Hamilton is stalked and appropriately terrified by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s slasher-like killer robot. She’s a great character who gets majorly pumped up for the sequel in 1991. By then, Cameron had plenty of practice: he had already written and directed Aliens, maybe the best pumped-up sequel ever made, which turns 40 this week.

Ellen Ripley, introduced as the warrant officer onboard the ship Nostromo in Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror picture Alien, is already a great character by the end of that film. But while the anecdote about James Cameron pitching a sequel by appending a dollar-sign to Alien’s title, concisely showing what a simple pluralization could do, has perhaps overtaken the buffing up of Ellen Ripley in the most-circulated lore about this movie, she’s really the first subject of Cameron’s great plussing. Without betraying the simplicity and resilience of her character in the first film, Cameron reintroduced Ripley as a survivor, landing on Earth almost 60 years after the events of the earlier film. (In a deleted scene restored in the film’s longer special edition, Ripley even learns that her daughter has died in the interim – as an adult, given that Ripley was in cryosleep for decades.)

The singer on struggling with the English weather, a secret celebrity crush, and her terror of tinned spaghetti

Born in Sydney, Australia, to an Italian father and Australian mother, Natalie Imbruglia, 51, joined the cast of Neighbours at the age of 17. In 1997, she released her debut album, Left of the Middle, which gave her the global hit single Torn. She releases her seventh studio album, Algorithm, on 4 September. She lives in Oxfordshire with her son.

What is your greatest fear?
As an Italian, tinned spaghetti. As a child, I was once served it at someone’s house. It was quite frightening.

Annual lectures will discuss work of writer and campaigner who ‘revitalised the anti-slavery cause’ in Britain

He was one of the most important figures of his time, an author, orator and American statesman who was born enslaved. But some of the most important years in the civil rights leader Frederick Douglass’s life were spent in Britain.

This month marks the 180th anniversary of a series of lectures Douglass gave in Manchester, speaking at venues across the region.

Less than a month after hailing a ceasefire, Trump resumed strikes on Iran, a move experts warn could prolong the war and hurt Republicans before the midterms

For half a century, Donald Trump has performed a public high-wire act based on high-stakes risks and shattering time-honored norms to get what he wants.

The approach has paid off handsomely, helping him survive multiple bankruptcies to reach billionaire status and numerous legal and political scandals to be elected US president twice.

The writer of cult hit If Women Rose Rooted is on a mission to bring folklore to modern readers. She talks about confronting her fears, communing with nature – and the power that comes with age

Like many of the wise women in her books, Sharon Blackie lives miles from anyone. Hers is the only house on the road winding through a valley deep in the Yorkshire Dales. The River Eden runs along the bottom of her garden, which overlooks the ruins of a castle built, as legend has it, by King Arthur’s father. The writer shares this romantic idyll with three border collies, six sheep, nine hens and her husband, David Knowles, a former RAF Tornado pilot.

It seems an appropriate setting for an author who is on a mission to bring fairytales to modern readers. Blackie runs spiritual retreats and workshops at the nearby Broughton Sanctuary and publishes a popular Substack called The Art of Enchantment. Her books, including word-of-mouth hits such as If Women Rose Rooted and Hagitude, are a beguiling mix of memoir, mythology and eco-feminism – manifestos for a better way of living.

Falling pupil numbers have left ‘unique’ London school facing an uncertain future, but its supporters have ambitious plans

Sandwiched between a strip club, a West End theatre and a pub might not be the most obvious location for a school but Soho Parish C of E primary has thrived for decades among the colourful charms of inner London.

But in an area that once had 16 schools, Soho Parish is the last remaining and its time may soon be up, a victim of the post-Covid downturn and falling pupil numbers that are forecast to close hundreds of primary schools across England.

⚽ World Cup latest on final weekend of tournament
⚽ England’s exit was not just about Tuchel
⚽ Email us | Archive: Argentina v Spain in 1966

I’m still getting my head around the 2007 photo of Lionel Messi, 19, bathing Lamine Yamal, four months, for a Unicef calendar shoot.

Sid Lowe has done some digging to find out how it all came out …

The photograph was taken around Christmas 2007. Sport newspaper was putting together a charity calendar on behalf of Barcelona and Unicef, a studio set up in the away dressing room at the Camp Nou. Each player had a month and appeared with a child. Ronaldinho, the star, was July. Messi was January. Lamine Yamal was four months old. His mum, Sheila, had put him into a draw to take part. Monfort got the idea the night before when bathing his daughter, taking a plastic tub and a rubber duck with him. Although the baby was tiny and Messi was timid, with Sheila’s help he got a shot he was happy with.

The fifth in a special series of World Cup 2026-themed collages made for the Guardian by the celebrated satirist

England’s coach said ball possession is not in the team’s DNA – it’s an opinion that should disqualify him from the job

How we talked. On late-night news shows, disembodied heads above a rolling yellow banner. On planes and trains, at bus stops and flower shops and kids’ birthday parties, trying desperately to connect the ennui of the now with the vividness of the later, trying on some level to anticipate the feelings, the blood surge, the heart rush. At the sinks in the office toilets, jerthinktheylldoit, theyactuallymighty’know, shake-shake, and your devastating analysis of the Rice-Anderson-Mainoo triple pivot gets lost in the noise of the hand-dryer.

Two years of this. Countless millions sunk on tickets, hotels, Ubers, shirts, pizzas, flags, the hours spent on Google Maps trying to locate somewhere to eat after 11pm in Riga, the endless psychodrama over Jude Bellingham and whether he should have been left at home or not (turns out, not). How we bled and sweated over this, over the minor details of the journey, over whether Danny Welbeck had done enough to earn a place in the squad or not (turns out, not). All pointing towards the moment on Wednesday evening when England are 1-0 up in a World Cup semi-final against Argentina and your entire happiness rests on whether a bunch of millionaire footballers and a millionaire German coach can keep their shit together for 40 minutes, or not.

The Arsenal midfielder talks about how Luis de la Fuente has created a team built on respect and how they plan to beat Argentina in the World Cup final

The night before the biggest day of their lives, the Spain players who were about to win the 2010 World Cup gathered in the Da Vinci Hotel in Sandton, just north of Johannesburg, drank hot chocolate, ate chocolate croissants and talked. The night before the biggest day of their lives, the Spain players seeking to emulate them 16 years later will gather in the MC Montclair in New Jersey and talk too, but there won’t be any chocolate this time. Some rituals are not to be repeated.

“I think the nutritionists killed that one for us!” Mikel Merino says, hopping off the bus, freshly tuned up for the final, and heading into a tactics room at the Melanie Lane training ground, where Spain’s penultimate day of preparation is about to begin. “We used to do the Cola Cao and cakes in the under-19s and under-21s, copying the seniors, but not any more. Everyone has their own routine, but the main thing is to normalise it all: just another game, doing something we know how to do, that we’ve done since we were five years old and that we love. Treat it like something to be enjoyed, another day in our lives.”

Former tube network cleaner says tribunal vindicated his health concerns, including about asbestos, that could affect public

A London Underground worker who was unfairly sacked after whistleblowing about his concerns over exposure to asbestos and other toxic dust has said he wants all tube passengers to know about the potential hazards his case has revealed.

Micky Steeds, a former professional boxer from Aveley in Essex, started working for London Underground in 2018 cleaning up decades of dust from vents, lift shafts and inverts – confined channels underneath station platforms for cabling.

From dealing with Trump to easing cost of living, the incoming prime minister is mulling his approach to contentious issues

When Labour was preparing for power in 2024, Keir Starmer’s then chief of staff, Sue Gray, compiled what one Labour official called her “shit list” – a dossier of immediate fires the government would have to put out.

Gray is back, advising Starmer’s successor, Andy Burnham, in an unofficial capacity. And yet again, she is advising an incoming prime minister on how to deal with a number of immediate political problems that will need solving in his first few weeks.

Former tube network cleaner says tribunal vindicated his health concerns, including about asbestos, that could affect public

A London Underground worker who was unfairly sacked after whistleblowing about his concerns over exposure to asbestos and other toxic dust has said he wants all tube passengers to know about the potential hazards his case has revealed.

Micky Steeds, a former professional boxer from Aveley in Essex, started working for London Underground in 2018 cleaning up decades of dust from vents, lift shafts and inverts – confined channels underneath station platforms for cabling.

CEO’s pay packet surges to £791,000 as union says public ‘sick of obscene pay’ and bosses ‘feathering own nests’

Wessex Water awarded its chief executive an above-inflation pay increase even as the company was banned from paying bonuses because of sewage spills, it has emerged.

Ruth Jefferson received a 14% base salary increase in October, from £590,000 to £670,000, before other benefits, according to accounts published this month. It was far above the 3.5% given to workers, and put her pay at 18 times that of the company’s median employee.