UK schools are coming under pressure to remove titles from their shelves. It’s not coming from the place you might think

For all its talk of free speech, the Trump administration seems remarkably comfortable with censorship. Earlier this year, children studying at Pentagon schools (serving US military families) were prevented from accessing libraries for a week while officials reviewed their shelves for titles that might be “related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics”. Trump’s presidency has injected new energy into the book-banning movement that has been simmering for years on the US right. You might think that censoring school libraries would be totally unimaginable in Britain. You’d be wrong.

I worked as a librarian for 10 years, and now I teach on the library and information studies master’s programme at UCL. After the pandemic, I began noticing signs of an eerily similar trend. It erupted in the spring of 2022, when a Catholic school in Croydon invited Simon James Green , a prominent gay children’s author, to give a talk. The US anti-LGBT website Catholic Truth ran a campaign encouraging readers to contact the school and protest against the event (one reader said, somewhat implausibly, that Green’s visit to the school was “100% as much of an issue as the ongoing war in Ukraine”). The commission responsible for the school released a statement suggesting the event should be cancelled, teachers went on strike, and the story reached the national press .

Alison Hicks is a lecturer in library and information studies at UCL

The dangers young people face online are all too clear. But the solution is pragmatism, not prohibition

The latest hit Netflix show has surpassed 100m views and cracked the top five of the platform’s all-time biggest English-language series – without CGI monsters, ornate gowns or Jenna Ortega. Instead, Adolescence is a four-episode limited series about a 13-year-old British boy accused of stabbing his female classmate to death. And as the story unfolds, the pernicious influence of cyberbullying and social media radicalization on the main character comes into focus.

The show has sparked conversations about the much-discussed male loneliness epidemic and the pervasive influence of hypermasculine online personalities. It has set off public debate from India to Australia to the United States about how we raise boys in an era when social media increasingly serves as an endless trough of misogynist messaging. In the UK, where the series became the first streaming show to top the country’s TV ratings, it has stirred intense conversations on news panels and in parliament. Even the prime minister jumped into the fray after watching the show with his teenage children.

In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988, chat on 988lifeline.org , or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie . In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of the Nation, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and she has contributed to the Washington Post , the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times

We’ve rounded up espresso machines for every budget and skill level, from the cheapest manual models to high-end assisted marvels

• The best coffee machines for your home: your morning brew made easy

More espresso, less depresso. To be clear, these weren’t the words of Angelo Moriondo, the Italian inventor who patented the first espresso machine in 1884, but it’s nice to imagine that he shared the sentiment. Without him, and the inventors that refined his creation, our daily lives – the sour-faced commutes and sunny weekend strolls – would be all the poorer.

Espresso forms the bedrock of many coffee staples – the latte, the cappuccino, the flat white, the americano – but making the perfect shot, or just a rather good one, is a thrillingly contentious topic. Millions of hours of YouTube videos have been dedicated to the craft, and the associated Reddit threads may one day form a voluminous historical artefact.

Best manual espresso machine overall:
Lelit Anna PL41TEM
_{£509.95 at Amazon}

Best budget espresso machine:
De’Longhi Stilosa EC230
_{£89 at Amazon}

Best for temperature control on a budget:
ProCook espresso machine
_{£199 at ProCook}

Best if you can afford it:
Sage Dual Boiler
_{£1,249.95 at Sage}

Best assisted espresso machine overall:
Ninja Luxe Cafe Premier
_{£499 at John Lewis}

Best assisted machine for beginners:
Sage Bambino Plus
_{£349 at John Lewis}

Best high-end assisted espresso machine:
Sage Oracle Jet
_{£1,699 at John Lewis}

• Manchester United goalkeeper back in goal on Thursday
• ‘We need to improve every position. Keeper is the same’

Ruben Amorim will reinstate André Onana for Manchester United’s Europa League quarter-final second leg against Lyon but admits a new goalkeeper may be signed in the summer because “every position” will be evaluated.

Amorim rested Onana and selected Altay Bayindir for Sunday’s 4-1 defeat by Newcastle at St James’ Park after the Cameroonian was culpable for Lyon’s goals in last week’s 2-2 draw in the opening leg. However, the head coach will start Onana in Thursday’s return at Old Trafford as United seek to progress to a semi-final against Rangers or Athletic Bilbao.

The book-posting operations have had a huge market impact, but will publishing their own titles cost them their serendipitous magic?

Book subscription services are magic. A few clicks of a form and a bunch of new books , selected by talented curators, turn up at your door – often with collectible perks such as special cover designs and art. In a world saturated by choice and trends, not only is the choosing done for you, but you’ll often have a less conventional, better rounded and precious bookshelf collection to show for it.

This is presumably why there’s a strong appetite for such services: UK fantasy subscription box FairyLoot has 569,000 followers on Instagram alone, and many bookshops have started sending out their own boxes.

• Ju beats Tan 6½–2½ to claim fifth world chess title
• 34-year-old Chinese grandmaster wins €300,000

Ju Wenjun has once again proven herself the undisputed queen of the chessboard.

On Wednesday in Chongqing, the 34-year-old Chinese grandmaster clinched the 2025 Fide Women’s World Championship, defeating compatriot and longtime rival Tan Zhongyi by a commanding score of 6½–2½. With the victory, Ju becomes only the fourth woman in history to win the title five times, joining a storied class that includes Vera Menchik, Nona Gaprindashvili and Maia Chiburdanidze.

Verónica Abad claims Daniel Noboa, her former running mate, used state power to tilt the vote

Ecuador ’s vice-president, Verónica Abad, has accused the country’s president – her former running mate Daniel Noboa – of “violating the democratic code” by using the state apparatus to gain an advantage over the other candidates in the country’s runoff election.

In Sunday’s vote, the rightwing incumbent defeated the leftist Luisa González by a considerable margin after narrowly beating her in the first round.

Although Abad said she did not support the opposition’s claim that electoral fraud occurred during the vote, she argued that the election was unfair because Noboa refused to step down from office while running – as required by the constitution.

Carl Cowling says there is ‘no logic’ in why there would be inflation as east Asian suppliers seek alternatives to the US

Donald Trump’s tariff war is more likely to lead to price cuts than inflation for many retailers in the UK, according to the boss of WH Smith, as east Asian suppliers seek alternatives to the US.

Many economists including those at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have suggested that increased barriers to trade could fuel inflationary pressures across the globe.

As a new book skewers Spotify’s effect on music, two Guardian music writers spent a week assessing the limits of living with and without it

Laura Snapes, deputy music editor I was set the task of not listening to Spotify for a week, but Alexis, your task was much worse: only listening to Spotify-created playlists, and the songs it suggested to you based on your listening history. How did that go?

Alexis Petridis, chief rock and pop critic One day in the car I just listened to nothing instead of facing it again. When it plays me songs I like, it’s not what I want to hear at that moment. That’s not to say the music it was recommending wasn’t good. One morning it played Schizophrenia by Sonic Youth. I love that song but I didn’t want to hear it then. It played me Billie Holliday’s Riffin’ the Scotch followed by My Bloody Valentine, which clearly demonstrates the great breadth of my music taste – but just because I like it all doesn’t mean I want to hear it all together. I didn’t like that it was untouched by human hands. I always think that the amazing thing about a record collection is that it doesn’t make sense to anybody other than you. And yet when it’s presented like that, I find it really jarring and difficult – it’s all over the place.