The myth of the American west meets the energy of riot grrrl in Justine Kurland’s photographs of free-spirited teenage girls

In 1997, Justine Kurland, then a fine arts student at Yale University, went in search of teenage girls to photograph. At a time of increasing conformity and commercialised ideas of beauty, the girls she had in mind were free-spirited and wild-haired; making dens and hanging out in woods, messing about in rivers, smoking in parking lots, lost in languid afternoons, careless not only of the male gaze but any onlookers at all.

Kurland started out on her quest in New Haven’s semi-industrial hinterland before travelling further afield over the next five years on a mazy road trip; if the girls were on the margins, then she would be too. She loosely choreographed the groups of teenagers that she found, but mostly invited the girls into a promising setting and let them do their thing. She took this photograph of four girls in an abandoned car in the millennium year, and called it Shipwrecked. The girls she chose invariably understood the idea of the pictures. “I can always spot people,” she has said. “It’s, like, really one of my superpowers. I can always tell which teenage girls would love living in the woods with their friends.”

Jaston Khosa was one of 600,000 men from African countries who fought for Britain. He was quietly buried on VE Day after a life of abject poverty

In a crowded, Zambian slum on VE Day, a family gathered to bury one of the last veterans of Britain’s colonial army. Jaston Khosa of the Northern Rhodesia Regiment was laid to rest on the day the world commemorated the end of the war in which he fought.

The 95-year-old great-grandfather was among 600,000 Africans who fought for the British during World War Two, on battlefields across their own continent as well as Asia and the Middle East. Although their service has largely been forgotten, the mobilisation of this huge army from Britain’s colonies triggered the largest single movement of African men overseas since the slave trade.

A loving touch will get seedlings ready to plant

As spring turns to summer, gardeners everywhere will be itching to plant the seedlings and cuttings they’ve been raising indoors out in the garden. However, particularly for newbies, the effects of this transition from the cosseted conditions of a warm windowsill to the great outdoors can be a significant hurdle.

The reason why this switch is tricky is that plants have the amazing ability to adapt their anatomy to shield themselves from environmental threats, however they are only triggered to do so when stimulated by the threat itself. Indoors, plants enjoy stable temperatures, limited air movement and much lower light levels (as window glass filters out UVB rays). This means they tend to direct most of their energies into growing, instead of investing in these defences.

And they’re off! The baby peas and beans are out on their own. But will they survive?

Sleep restless, anxiety dreams, and if there wasn’t enough to be concerned about I am worrying about our baby beans and peas.

It is often like this in spring. The responsibility, it comes with the shorter nights and longer light, maybe I have more time on my hands. I have saved two hours a day on travelling and I only work a few miles’ walk from home. This extra time has now become a trip to the plot, or perhaps pottering on the terrace. A more intimate gardening relationship cemented in the spring mornings. Deepened, more dependent.

Author Dan Richards, who has travelled to the ‘ends of the earth’, says he is now applying similar coping skills to being alone and indoors for weeks

You join me overlooking an empty Edinburgh crossroads, an indoorsman considering my new neck of the woods. Near-empty buses roll down Dundas Street and shush across the junction in the haar (fog). In this brave moot world – a month of Christmas mornings so far – I watch lone joggers and mothers with children, and wave at good dogs. I write to my friends. I check in by phone. “Yes,” I say, several times a week, “Edinburgh’s very nice. Quiet.”

Two years ago, I spent several months travelling for a book, seeking out solitude and remote locations – strange to think now. I visited wild places on the edge – frozen Soviet ghost towns, Mars missions in the Utah desert, shrines perched high on Japanese mountains – as well as spartan structures whose wildness emanated from within, such as Simon Starling’s metamorphic installation Shedboatshed, the writing “Wendy houses” of Roald Dahl and Tove Jansson, and Roger Deakin’s Suffolk shepherd’s hut.

Dave Burd brings a lightly fictionalised tale of his comedy rap career in a new sitcom. Plus: The Fantastical Factory of Curious Craft. Here’s what to watch this evening

Rise of spy chief to premier comes as Iran struggles to maintain momentum months after killing of powerful general

In late February, six weeks after the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani was killed by a US drone, a candidate for Iraq’s vacant premiership was nervously preparing for an interview that would secure him the role.

Mustafa al-Kadhimi’s rise from intelligence chief to the seat of national power had been unorthodox, as was the journey he had just made – from Baghdad, where high-stakes appointments like his had mostly been made over the past decade.

The museums of Europe have begun reopening their doors to art lovers desperate to see old favourites and new works

I am cursing my bad luck not to be stuck in lockdown in the Prado. A friend wishes she had stowed away in a closet before they bolted the doors of the National Gallery. Others would give anything for a week in the Rijksmuseum, a day in the Uffizi, an hour with Rembrandt or Vermeer, even just a few minutes with a Samuel Palmer moonscape in the Ashmolean or a Turner sunrise at Tate Britain. Museums are places of the heart.

We see art in time and place; we cannot see it otherwise. Of course there are other whereabouts of the works we most long to set eyes on again, during this evil pandemic: the cave paintings at Chaumet in France, Fra Angelico’s Annunciation in a Florentine monastery, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty coiled in the glistening waters of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. These were all chosen in an unofficial and entirely self-selecting Twitter survey (mine), along with Leonardo’s The Last Supper and James Turrell’s Deer Shelter Skyspace, framing the blue heavens above Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

The highest rates of Covid-19 casualties are in countries run by know-nothing populists

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All of a sudden, and after years of bluffing, conservatives are warning of the dangers of jumping to hasty conclusions. Before I go any further, I must therefore say our newly scrupulous masters have a point. The league tables of national Covid-19 death figures are not the last word on the crisis, and may look different in a few weeks. That’s that done, then. Everybody happy? Good. Let’s get on with it.

In the world as it is, rather than as it may be, a shameful fact is undeniable. The highest Covid-19 casualties are in the US and the UK, where the mendacities of the populist right have deformed society. It turns out that being governed by Anglo-Saxon conservatives is a threat to the health of nations. Their rule kills the old and blights the futures of the young. To understand their ineptitude, think of how conservatism turned into a know-nothing culture in the past decade, and ask what Donald Trump and Boris Johnson would be doing in an alternative universe where they never came close to power.

Sincerity is an increasingly rare commodity among our leaders, but sombre addresses by the Queen and Germany’s president had it in spades

Public suspicion is often aroused by the neat use of rhetoric, or by hearing a clever trick of speech. It is understandable that a stylish phrase or a persuasive analogy from the mouth of an authority figure should be met with caution.

Many are now also wary of the comparisons with the Second World War that are lobbed at the population each week by politicians, for the globe is not waging a military campaign or fighting a battle, there is no violent human enemy to defeat. Instead, we are all engaged in a unique and sustained mass experiment in protection and survival.

Research finds that both male and female judges are more likely to employ female clerks if they have worked with women

Discrimination over jobs is bad. Bad for those discriminated against, and bad for society, as talent is wasted and divisions sown.

Women reaching senior leadership positions in organisations is generally a sign of success for gender equality – but it can also lead to increased equality elsewhere. That is the important finding from new research on the (not famously diverse) world of judges. The study looks at the hiring of law clerks by senior judges in the US.

Two players and a photographer remember what it was like to face Castilla at an empty Upton Park in 1980

At half-time West Ham’s former chairman Len Cearns was sent on a futile mission by his fellow directors. They wanted him to go down to the home dressing room to ask John Lyall if there was any way his team could possibly remember that the foul language being used in the heat of battle was floating away from the pitch, rattling around the empty terraces and causing some discomfort for the people sitting in the posh seats.

“There was a lot of swearing going on in the game,” Alvin Martin says as he recalls West Ham hosting a European tie behind closed doors in the autumn of 1980. “You don’t realise it. You’re communicating in a factory way.”

Marcus Arbery Sr says Ahmaud’s death at the hands of two white men, while he was out for a run, was an act of racism

Marcus Arbery Sr says his son was just like him, fit and athletic.

Related: ‘Every stone will be uncovered’: how Georgia officials failed the Ahmaud Arbery case

Acclaimed photographers from around the world share a single image reflecting on their experience of the coronavirus outbreak

Minneapolis, Minnesota

A recently discovered document sheds new light on the wartime leader’s ‘iron curtain’ address

It was a speech that electrified the world, one that coined a phrase that was to characterise the political era that followed the second world war. But its content could have been very different, reveals a document freshly unearthed by a historian researching the life of Winston Churchill.

On 5 March 1946 in Fulton, Missouri, before a huge crowd which included the US president, Harry Truman, Britain’s wartime leader issued a famous description of the political division that was opening across Europe between the Soviet-dominated Communist east and the western democracies. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” Churchill declared, “an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”

Follow the science, they say… So here are 12 new ‘observations’ about life in a post-pandemic world

Apologies in advance: this column will be distressing to scientists (including those in my own family, but thankfully none of them read what I write).

The rules of the physical world seem to be abandoning us. The virus acts like no other pathogen. Two metres is entirely subjective now, expanding and contracting to meet our needs. Time is non-Newtonian, like the cornflour you’ve probably resorted to if you have small children to entertain, stiff and fluid at once. Numbers are basically meaningless: in pandemic maths, a figure such as 413 deaths – the one released on the day I am writing, an unthinkable catastrophe at another time – is encouraging, a cause for some optimism.

Ministers’ shambolic briefings expose a terrifying lack of competence

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‘In spite of the sunny bank holiday, it is vitally important that we continue to abide by the current restrictions: stay home, protect the NHS and save lives.” That was the message delivered by the environment secretary, George Eustice, at Friday afternoon’s press conference. Yet just the day before, most newspapers were emblazoned with excited headlines foretelling a significant relaxation of social distancing restrictions, based on briefing from government sources: “Lockdown freedom beckons”, “First steps to freedom from Monday” and “Stay home advice to be scrapped”.

Despite the critical importance of clear public messaging to any public health strategy, the government’s communications have been marred by mixed messages throughout this deadly pandemic. Its core message, asking the public to stay at home to protect the NHS and save lives, has been very effective, but this has consistently been undermined by ministers and advisers inaccurately briefing the press that there is about to be a shift in policy. Before the Easter weekend, reports appeared that ministers thought that the public had been too obedient in following the lockdown, and that a relaxation was imminent. The same happened before this bank holiday weekend, forcing the government to clarify that there was no change in restrictions and that people must continue to abide by the law.

Twenty-six of the new coronavirus cases were domestically transmitted, including 14 in Seoul

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South Korea has reported 34 new coronavirus cases, the highest daily number in a month, after a small outbreak emerged around a slew of nightclubs that a confirmed patient had visited.

Of the new cases announced on Sunday, 26 were domestically transmitted infections and eight were imported cases, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) said.

Still resilient after taking tough and early action, Greece can now look forward to a summer tourist season beginning in July

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When Pavlos Pandelides realised the coronavirus pandemic was moving west, he bought a plane ticket and flew from Athens to London. He then drove north to Nottingham to collect his daughter, a student at the city’s university, before returning with her the next day to Greece. An ardent admirer of all things British, the businessman had absolutely no doubt that what he was doing was right. “The British are fighters but I could see they were underestimating this,” he said.

While Covid-19 was tearing through northern Italy, Boris Johnson was still faltering, with his government showing worrying signs of complacency. There was, said Pandelides, no time to waste. “It was more than a protective father thing. It was clear they were about to really mess up.”

One boss, Dale Vince of the green energy firm Ecotricity, explains how he will get his 700 staff back to work

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Almost all the desks at Ecotricity’s headquarters in Stroud are empty. Pot plants, cards and personal photos are the only signs of the hundreds of employees at the green-energy firm who used to file in and out of the building in the Cotswold town every day.

Like most office-based employers, the firm’s founder, Dale Vince, sent virtually all of his 700-strong workforce home at the start of the lockdown in March. Now he is considering how to bring some of them back in anticipation of government guidance for reopening non-essential businesses.

People can contribute to projects that aim to leave a map of the national mood and allow future historians a glimpse of 24 hours in a pandemic

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“I have underlying health conditions, including asthma,” writes a frightened 40-year-old woman , shortly before Sunday’s news of whether the lockdown will be eased. “I’m terrified to leave the house, even for exercise, but I’m not sick enough to be ‘extremely vulnerable’. Covid-19 could quite probably kill me.”

The anonymous contributor is part of a project called Covid-19 and Me, run jointly by the Young Foundation and the Open University, two of a number of organisations which are asking thousands of men and women of all ages, ethnicities, incomes, beliefs and backgrounds across Britain to keep diaries, complete questionnaires and be interviewed by their peers. They want to know what it is like, at an everyday level, to live through a global pandemic, to create an ongoing “weather map of public feeling”.

Employers face a logistical nightmare as staff return

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Temperature tests, taped-off lifts and potential spikes in harassment complaints are all being examined by British businesses as they prepare for a slow and staggered return to work.

Companies have already been scrambling for legal and practical advice as they prepare for the realities of managing workplaces during the Covid-19 crisis. However, there are already major concerns that workers are unclear about what to do if they are being put at risk, while industry figures also warn that the mental health impacts of returning to a new “alien environment” are not being prioritised.

As hundreds of test kits claim to offer accurate results on previous Covid-19 infection, scientists around the world are working hard to assess their accuracy

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At the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, Marion Koopmans and a team of scientists are going throught the laborious process of verifying antibody tests for Covid-19. Over the last two months, dozens of prospective tests have hit the market, and with many governments wanting to feed the results of large-scale testing into their decisions whether to end lockdowns, biological tests have rarely carried such weight.

Most of the tests are enthusiastically marketed, boasting of their ability to accurately detect whether someone has previously been infected with the Sars-CoV-2 virus. The painstaking job of proving whether the tests do what they say has fallen to a worldwide network of 12 independent centres, of which Koopmans’s team is one.

"I totally support your mask policy," a comment on Costco's Facebook said. "It is small minded individuals who don't understand the reason for it."

Laura Fuchs is capturing New Yorkers who are trying to stay positive in the midst of the pandemic.

South Korea was once a Covid-19 hotspot but used technology and testing to avoid a total lockdown.

What a pleasant story to read! We’re all familiar with the entirely fictional story of Lord of the Flies, in which ship-wrecked boys revert to the natural savagery of all humans and set up a brutal regime and start oppressing and killing each other. It makes for a good story, I guess. Except that similar […]

Willy Thuan is a French photographer who started to travel the world early and never stopped until he settled in Thailand in 1994. Then for the past 25 years, his passion for photography has taken him to every corner of Thailand. He has been a Phuket blogger since January 2011. 

One day, during a casual lunch with friends on the Bangtao beach in Phuket, he saw this baby elephant walking towards the water and with the instincts of an experienced photographer, he started taking photos. 

On his blog, he recalls that day: "I saw a small elephant walking alone toward the water and I, of course, thought he would stop there and wait. But no, once approaching the sea, he just started to run faster and rammed into the waves like the kid he was! He came in and out several times; his mahout was casually waiting nearby, apparently used to the elephant's behaviour. The elephant suddenly did something hilarious, totally unexpected: he put his head into the sand and pushed himself forward. I happened to carry a 28-300 mm lens on that day, giving me this perspective, and the photo of a lifetime"

Soooo cute! 

Astra Lost in Space anime, Shinkalion film, 2019 Godzilla film, Fly Me to Saitama film, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim game also nominated

My name is Isabella, but I go by "Izzy" for short. I like chewing on my older sister Maddie and destroying her toys, cuddling with all my favorite people, napping, howling along with songs, and eating everything in sight. I'm not the most athletic dog, but I have excellent balancing skills and can walk around on my hind legs like nobody's business.

Hi, my name is Riley! I am full of energy but also enjoy long naps on my front porch. I love to play with pine cones I find on the ground and tear apart newly planted plants. I just learned how to sit! I love treats and I will guarantee you that I can rip apart your shoe in a matter of hours. My guilty pleasure is chewing on wine corks! I am surrounded by many people who love and care for me. I am one very lucky girl.

My name is Kuma. I live in Manhattan. Don't worry, I get a lot of exercise and I make sure my parents keep the home at a balmy 60 degrees! My sister, Chloe, and I wrestle all the time. I also have a girlfriend, Riley, that I snuggle, kiss, and play with. I'm looking forward to winter to play in the snow and pull my sister in a sled. Some of my favorite things are peanut butter, ice cubes, howling, and leaves blowing in the wind.

Hi from Estonia. This is Bjanka. She is very sweet and cheerful. She really likes to dance on her hind legs. Bjanka also loves to play with balls and soft toys.

Charlie is the love of my life. My children are grown and left home and I have been trying to fill the void in my life. I was not sure about an inside dog because I always have dogs that are outside pets. As you can see, I gave it a try and Charlie is the best thing in the the world to fill that empty spot in my heart!