After attaining comfort and a shift in the culture, high heels have returned – for some a symbol of retrogressive femininity, for others a protest

I mean, it sounds mad now. I know this even as I write, it sounds impossible, like a weird lie you tell kids to show them how good they have it, but listen: in the late 1990s and early 2000s when I worked in a fancy underwear shop, I had to wear heels that were at least 3in high every day, no sitting down allowed. And then, and then , in my leisure time, instead of easing myself into, say, a bath of Uggs, I also wore a heel. “Eva,” I hear you say, “Did somebody hurt you? I hope you have someone to talk to.” But – it was normal. It was normal! I wore a spike-heeled boot, a massive platform, or sometimes for comfort, as a treat, a 1940s mule.

It was about fashion, yes, but it was also about growing up, and about authority, and about swagger. Also, I lived at the top of a very steep hill and the angle of a heel was sometimes helpful when walking home. Heels have never been about just one thing. Their meaning, pain and politics, move and merge.

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This Easter feast that’s made for sharing is how the Greeks celebrate the new season

Spring in Greece is all about Easter, a time for family, tradition and lots of good food. Today’s recipes bring those celebrations to the dining table with slow-roasted lamb seasoned with Greek flavours of oregano and garlic, and paired with a crisp fennel and herb salad that celebrates the new season’s bounty. It’s a meal that’s just made for sharing – and for toasting the end of a long winter.

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Foreign secretary calls Hong Kong’s denial of entry for Wera Hobhouse ‘deeply concerning’ after she flew there to visit her newborn grandson

Foreign secretary David Lammy said he was deeply concerned after a British politician was denied entry to Hong Kong, and that he would urgently raise the issue with Chinese authorities.

Wera Hobhouse was denied entry to Hong Kong on Thursday for a personal trip to visit her son, who has lived there since 2019, and new grandson.

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Condemning them as ‘sectarian’ is only adding to the clamour that they have no place in the west

A poll suggests that most British Muslims identify more with their faith than with their nation . The head of the Saudi-backed Muslim World League counsels British Muslims to talk less about Gaza and more about domestic issues. Labour MP Tahir Ali is criticised for campaigning for a new airport in Mirpur in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir; he claims the criticisms have led to “Islamophobic” attacks . After push-back, the BBC changes a headline describing converts to Islam as “reverts” , a term some Muslims use to suggest that Islam is the natural state of humankind.

Just a taster of debates about British Muslims over the past week. At the heart of each of these controversies is the question of how Muslims should relate to western societies, and western societies relate to them. For some, the answer is easy. On the one side, many claim Islam to be incompatible with western values and that allowing Muslims to settle here has led to what they regard as the degeneration of western societies. On the other are those who insist there is no issue, and those who raise concerns are bigots. Both are wrong. There are issues about Muslims and integration that need discussing, but those issues are rarely as presented in these debates.

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• Trump and all the president’s men feted at UFC card
• Volkanovski claims featherweight belt at UFC 314

US president Donald Trump entered to a standing ovation and cheers from a crowd of thousands attending a UFC event on Saturday night, shaking hands with supporters against a backdrop of fans waving his trademark Maga hats.

Just as Trump entered, he greeted podcast host Joe Rogan, who sat to the right of the president. On the other side of Trump sat Elon Musk, billionaire and chief of the Department of Government Efficiency. Trump, who accented his dark suit with a bright yellow tie, pumped his fist in the air, prompting cheers to strains of Taking Care of Business.

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Concerns that Kim Leadbeater’s proposed legislation is ‘flawed and dangerous’ are being overlooked

Last month, ITV News reported on the case of 51-year-old Anne, who travelled to a Swiss assisted suicide clinic to end her own life after her only son died. The first her family knew of it was when they received the goodbye letters Anne had posted them from Switzerland . It follows another case from 2023, when 47-year-old Alastair Hamilton went to the same Swiss clinic after telling his mother he was going on holiday. He had been suffering from stomach problems but had no diagnosed illness . There are similar cases of individuals being prescribed lethal drugs in Canada without the knowledge of their families , to their profound distress.

If MPs in Britain vote to legalise assisted dying next month, the same could happen. Eligibility would be more limited than in Switzerland or Canada, to people diagnosed with a terminal illness where a doctor believes they probably have fewer than six months to live. That’s more subjective than it might sound: in Oregon, for example, doctors have interpreted terminal illness to include malnutrition from eating disorders, and the assisted dying bill’s sponsor, Kim Leadbeater, rejected amendments backed by eating disorder charities to prevent this happening here. Having learning difficulties or a mental illness, feeling depressed or suicidal, or alcohol misuse that might impair judgment would not preclude someone from seeking a medically assisted death . There would be no obligation on assisted suicide providers to notify families their relative is about to die, and no route for relatives to raise concerns about coercion.

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Nearly 6,000 victims of modern slavery chose not to be referred for help last year, new data shows

Thousands of trafficking victims have rejected the government’s support, many due to fear of the authorities or of being deported, lawyers have said.

Nearly 6,000 trafficking victims rejected support from the government’s National Referral Mechanism (NRM) for victims of modern slavery last year, according to data based on research from the British Institute for International and Comparative Law and the Human Trafficking Foundation at the University of Oxford. Researchers found a range of reasons for this among respondents, including fear of traffickers, receiving support elsewhere, wanting to put things of being trafficked behind them and being reluctant to engage with UK authorities.

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Guardian readers say they have been hit hard by the US-inspired trade war, with some having lost tens of thousands from their pots

Fraser, 63, a retiree from Essex, had been planning to leave his £140,000 pension pot invested in stocks and shares, only cashing out monthly gains to tide him over financially to state pension age.

“I was trying to only take the cream off the top, anything above £140,000. Every month in recent years, I’ve taken between £2,500 and £3,000 out to live off it. Then, at 67, I could have bought a decent annuity. It was fine, until the tariffs on Trump’s ‘­liberation day’ .”

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For her classic series At Twelve, the American photographer created a collective portrait of adolescent girls, including world-weary Olivia pictured in her yard

You can see a whole world – submerged, waiting, ready to burst forth – in the face of any adolescent girl. In Sally Mann ’s At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women , she captures this special, unstable time of life. In this image, a plaited-haired girl sits in a chair, head in hand like a world-weary grownup. This is Olivia, “with that ruined prayer in her eyes”, as Mann describes her. In the background, a phalanx of dark trousers hangs from two washing lines that cut across the image and lead our gaze towards her grandmother, who dangles the now-empty plastic laundry basket over one shoulder.

“This is just half the day’s laundry,” Mann tells us in a loose narrative that runs through a reissue of the well-known 1988 publication by the artist notorious for capturing girls on the threshold of womanhood with unnerving perspicacity. The youthful gamines, locals of Mann’s own back yard of Rockbridge County, Virginia, are by turns funny, glamorous, knowing, evasive, worried, rich, poor, babyish, frighteningly mature – all of the complexities we know girlhood and its projections to hold, but sometimes find difficult to be hold.

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