Burnham has nothing to hide as he prepares to meet president he once called poisonous. It may actually win him more respect

It makes a pleasant change. Not so long ago, Keir Starmer was falling over himself in his efforts to keep things sweet with Donald Trump. Offering the US president a second state visit within minutes of meeting him. Everyone knows you should never put out on the first date: it only makes the other person think you’re a pushover. Sure enough, The Donald banked the marching bands and the Windsor silver service, made polite conversation for three days and then went back to trash-talking him.

Yet still, Starmer just sat there and took it. As if one word of criticism would be too much. Wittering on about the “special relationship” as if Trump gave a moment’s thought to the UK before he did anything. The rest of us wouldn’t have put money on the US president even being able to locate Britain on a map. It was only latterly, when The Donald chose to bomb Iran, that the penny finally dropped for Keir. And even then he looked pained by the apparent betrayal, as he resisted the calls of Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage to join in the war.

The actor on which star he’d devour first on a lifeboat, why he prefers pigeons to dogs and how Trainspotting put the Scottish accent on the map

You’re stranded on a lifeboat with Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, Peter Mullan, James Cosmo, Keith Allen and Irvine Welsh. Who do you eat first? DarkAnaemicI77
I suppose you have to think about who’s the healthiest and has looked after their body best. I reckon Ewan would be a wee bit too chewy, and Irvine a wee bit pickled. I’ll go for Kevin McKidd because he’s been out in LA for 20 years, eating good food.

Did you really not like Zippy the West Highland terrier who played Wee Jock in Hamish Macbeth? Campbell97

Across six decades, the late country singer and pop culture icon turned self‑presentation into a flamboyant art form

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Dolly Parton may have had a record 25 US country No 1 singles, released 66 studio albums and earned six Golden Globe nominations, among many other achievements, but the Tennessee-born star also had an incredible number of fashion moments. “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap”, she famously quipped when asked about her style. As we bid her farewell, six Guardian writers reflect on their favourite Dolly looks.

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The pioneering Japanese artist talked openly about how her mental health and neurodivergence informed her creativity, paving the way for the likes of Turner prize winner Nnena Kalu

Yayoi Kusama – who has died at the age of 97 – was 10 when she first started experiencing vivid hallucinations consisting of visual and aural disturbances, which she described as “flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots”. A drawing from 1939, of a woman in a kimono assumed to be her mother, shows her obliterated by those dots; they would become Kusama’s artistic obsession. She hallucinated flowers, too. “I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe”, she once said, when asked about that recurring motif. “I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness.”

For Kusama, art making was a means of survival. “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live”, she said in a 2012 interview. In so doing, she became one of the most acclaimed and admired contemporary artists, staging happenings and influencing the pop art movement as a pioneering figure in the New York avant garde. Her exhibitions and major retrospectives draw huge crowds. In 2022, due to enormous public demand, Tate Modern in London extended her Infinity Mirror Rooms show for a whole extra year (it ended up running until 2024).

The actor fully embraced his physical talents and outsized personality with a line in theatrical baddies teetering deliciously on the edge of serious and silly

• Tim Curry, star of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Stephen King’s It, dies aged 80
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As Dr Frank-N-Furter, the gender-nonconforming alien mad scientist who presides over Richard O’Brien’s glam rock musical, admits two innocents to his gothic castle and induces them into all sorts of delicious naughtiness, Curry is so thrillingly liberated as to seem a menace. An irresistibly appealing menace. Apparently able to arch both eyebrows and curl his lips in every direction all at once, Curry wraps his mouth around the double-entendres and belts out the lyrics with lip-smacking relish, and fully fleshes out this avatar of sexual confidence. The film earned one of the original cult fandoms, the stage musical endures and many other actors have pulled on Frank’s corset and high heels – but the role indelibly and for ever belongs to Curry.

Our buildings are monuments to extraction and extreme emissions. But what if we turned from destructive concrete to timber?

• Last chance to buy the summer issue of The Long Read magazine, now with 15% off. Click here to order

I travelled to Oslo in the early autumn. It felt like arriving into the future. Or, at least, a fragment of a possible future. I drove north in the quiet digital bubble of my electric rental car. In 2024, Norway became the first country in the world where electric cars outnumbered petrol cars.

A smooth, pristine motorway unfolded between farmlands and low hillsides of dense green forest. Long tunnels carried the route up above the banks of Lake Mjøsa, Norway’s largest lake. After a little more than an hour, the road curved downward to run parallel to the lakeshore.

Flash floods have killed at least 359 people while homes and infrastructure have been swept away

• Nepal-Tibet flash flood – latest updates

• What caused the flash flood in Nepal and Tibet?

The international community was scrambling to get aid into flood-stricken parts of Nepal and Tibet on Thursday as authorities warned that a lake ⁠formed at the ⁠site ⁠where the ​deadly torrents occurred ⁠was rising and ⁠at risk ​of ‌bursting.

The catastrophic flash floods that hit Nepal and Tibet on Wednesday, thundering down valleys and obliterating entire villages, killed at least 359 people and left more than 1,300 missing.

Moscow threatens retaliation after Andy Burnham says UK will help Ukraine start producing long-range missiles

Russia has said it could retaliate against the UK for its support of Kyiv by striking military targets inside and outside Ukraine, amid reports that the director of the CIA warned the Kremlin against attacking Nato during a secretive visit this week.

Andy Burnham, Britain’s prime minister, said on Monday the UK would allow Kyiv access to classified technology to start ⁠its own production of Storm Shadow ​long-range ​cruise missiles. France has also agreed to supply missile technology. Maria ⁠Zakharova, Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, said on Thursday Britain and France were “playing ⁠with ​fire”.

Bosnian Serb commander responsible for Srebrenica massacre dies in prison while serving life sentence for genocide

From the archive:

• Fourteen years a fugitive: the hunt for the Butcher of Bosnia

• Ratko Mladić will die in jail. But go to Bosnia: you’ll see that he won

Ratko Mladić, the infamous Serbian general who was serving a life sentence for genocide committed during the Bosnian war, has died in prison in The Hague.

Mladić had been one of the main architects of the policy of ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war. He was convicted of genocide for orchestrating the 1995 killing of at least 8,000 Muslims in the UN-designated “safe area” Srebrenica, the worst massacre in Europe since the second world war.

Labour’s Andy McDonald says gangs ‘clearly featuring’ in a series of incidents and police are underfunded

Five MPs on Teesside have called on the government to provide more help to local police and fire services after a week in which nine people have died in two incidents.

The MPs said the communities they represented should get the “strongest possible backing from the government”.