Universal credit to rise faster than inflation, benefit hurdles eased, extra help for children and young people … I bet you had no idea

It’s the good this government does that can make you hold your head in your hands and sigh. Ask people what they think of Labour policy on benefits and they will probably talk of seizing the winter fuel allowance from freezing pensioners. Or that £5bn snatched from disabled people, until Labour’s own MPs prevented it. These were the signifiers that set the wrong tone early on. Late, far too late, abolishing the two-child limit has not made the same impression on public perceptions, despite the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) this week reporting it as being behind what could be the greatest ever fall in child poverty in a parliament.

The government fails to herald its progress in reversing the worst the Tories did to benefits. Why? I’m not sure if it is ineptitude or a political decision not to trumpet its many progressive policies.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Retail accounts for 5% of the UK economy – but its visibility gives it an outsize influence on public perception

Up and down Britain there are boarded-up shops. Banks and department stores have been replaced by vape shops, barbers and bookmakers. Shoplifting is at a record high, local services cut, and public frustration is mounting.

Politically, high street decline is perfect campaign fodder for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

Under Donald Trump, the White House has filled its social media with memes, wishcasting, nostalgia and deepfakes. Here’s what you need to know to navigate the trolling

It started with an image of Trump as a king mocked up on a fake Time magazine cover. Since then it’s developed into a full-blown phenomenon, one academics are calling “slopaganda” – an unholy alliance of easily available AI tools and political messaging. “Shitposting”, the publishing of deliberately crude, offensive content online to provoke a reaction, has reached the level of “institutional shitposting”, according to Know Your Meme’s editor Don Caldwell. This is trolling as official government communication. And nobody is more skilled at it than the Trump administration – a government that has not only allowed the AI industry all the regulative freedom it desires, but has embraced the technology for its own in-house purposes. Here are 10 of the most significant fake images the White House has put out so far.

Miqdaad Versi, Shaista Aziz, Aamna Mohdin and Nosheen Iqbal on the rise of the far right and growing Islamophobia in the UK

The far right is on the rise and much of its messaging is explicitly Islamophobic. In 2024 anti-Muslim hate crimes in England and Wales doubled. Meanwhile, the government has stated that it cannot even agree on a definition of what Islamophobia is.

How does all this make British Muslims feel? Miqdaad Versi, Shaista Aziz and the Guardian’s community affairs reporter Aamna Mohdin talk to Nosheen Iqbal about what’s changed.

Mothers on social media are advocating a tough, no-nonsense approach to parenting. Does this teach children important lessons – or just make them feel isolated and ashamed?

A couple of weeks ago, a video posted on TikTok by Paige Carter, a mother in Florida, went viral. Carter explained that she had thrown her daughter’s iPad out of the window when she had been misbehaving on the way to school, and she films herself retrieving the tablet, now with a cracked screen. The video has been watched 4.9m times, and Carter was congratulated in the comments, with one person writing “Learning Fafo at an early age: top tier parenting.” Welcome to the parenting trend that doesn’t seem to be disappearing: “Fuck around and find out.”

In another video, when a small child announces he is going to leave home, his mother says “see ya”, shuts the front door behind him, and turns off the outside light – then opens the door to him screaming and pounding to be let back in (it has been liked 1.5m times). He had learned, said his mother, “the meaning of Fafo”.

Decisions outsourced, chatbots for friends, the natural world an afterthought: Silicon Valley is giving us life void of connection. There is a way out – but it’s going to take collective effort

Summer after summer, I used to descend into a creek that had carved a deep bed shaded by trees and lined with blackberry bushes whose long thorny canes arced down from the banks, dripping with sprays of fruit. Down in that creek, I’d spend hours picking until I had a few gallons of berries, until my hands and wrists were covered in scratches from the thorns and stained purple from the juice, until the tranquillity of that place had soaked into me.

PM says trip to China has put relationship in stronger place, but possible return visit angers British critics

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Keir Starmer has taken a major step towards rapprochement with China, opening the door to a UK visit from Xi Jinping in a move that drew immediate anger from British critics of Beijing.

During the first visit by a British prime minister to China in eight years – a period which Starmer described as an “ice age” – he said talks with the Chinese president had left the bilateral relationship in a stronger place.

Exclusive: Branch of Iranian software company TSIT, which makes Gap Messenger, is registered in Sussex

The creators of a messaging app accused of handing user data to the Iranian regime live on a windswept hill in a British coastal town, the Guardian can reveal.

Hadi and Mahdi Anjidani are the cofounders of TS Information Technology, established in 2010 and now registered at the address of a tax accountancy in Shoreham-by-Sea in West Sussex. It is the UK branch of an Iranian software corporation, Towse’e Saman Information Technology (TSIT).

Report into actions of Yaser Jabbar from 2017 to 2022 says 36 of the patients suffered severe harm under his care

Nearly 100 children were harmed by a Great Ormond Street surgeon, according to an independent review.

Great Ormond Street hospital (Gosh) conducted an independent review of nearly 800 patients treated by the consultant orthopaedic surgeon Yaser Jabbar between 2017 and 2022, who specialised in limb lengthening and reconstruction.

Leo Ross was stabbed to death by stranger as he walked home from school in January last year

A teenager has pleaded guilty to murdering a 12-year-old Birmingham boy, Leo Ross, by stabbing him in the stomach during a random attack in parkland.

Leo died after being taken to hospital from a riverside path in Shire Country Park, Hall Green, Birmingham, on 21 January last year.