Versatile character actor who gained international star status with standout performances in Jurassic Park and The Piano

• Sam Neill’s final interview

• Neill dies aged 78

• His 20 best performances

• A life in pictures

• ‘A true gentleman’: actors, directors and leaders pay tribute to Neill

• Neill interviewed in 2023, 2024 and 2026

Born in Northern Ireland, raised in New Zealand, adopted by the Australian film industry as one of its own and elevated to Hollywood stardom before he was 50, the actor Sam Neill, who has died aged 78, conveyed a seen-it-all worldliness without ever seeming jaded. With his floppy fringe and amused, rueful eyes, he was a man of decency, humility and wit. “I’m just Mr Triviality, as shallow as my washbasin,” he said. “No deep glacial lakes of profundity here.” The intelligence of many of his performances suggested otherwise.

Though he was never defined by one role, it was a pair of films released in 1993 which promoted him to the A-list and showcased his versatility. In Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Jurassic Park, groundbreaking in its use of computer-generated imagery, he played a palaeontologist who is awestruck to find himself among dinosaurs created from prehistoric DNA. He reprised the role in two of the film’s sequels, Jurassic Park III (2001) and Jurassic World: Dominion (2022).

Prime-minister-in-waiting has been a key figure in overhauls behind the scenes of the game, as well as helping to create the Hillsborough Independent Panel

Picking up the country when it is in a slump of self-doubt is perhaps within Andy Burnham’s reach. And football, close to Burnham’s heart, may provide the template. There have been several occasions in the past 20 years when English football has been in a state of anguish, but a nadir came in 2007, when Burnham made one of his most significant interventions to the national game. If England win the World Cup, expect the prime-minister-in-waiting to take at least a slice of the credit.

England had just lost 3-2 to Croatia at Wembley and failed to qualify for Euro 2008, the game where Steve McClaren was dubbed “the wally with the brolly”, the pouring rain adding to the sense of despair. At Wembley that night Burnham was with James Purnell, now poised to become his chief of staff in No 10, as guests of the Premier League’s then chief executive, Richard Scudamore. Burnham was the minister for culture, media and sport, having succeeded Purnell, who had been moved to the Department for Work and Pensions, this being the early days of Gordon Brown’s Labour premiership.

Tate Modern, London
This exhibition makes nothing of the Cuban-American artist’s controversial death – instead it focuses on the astounding way she left an imprint of herself on the earth using blood, feathers and gunpowder

A huge colour photo of a ruined ancient site greets you outside Ana Mendieta’s engrossing exhibition and it immediately tells you this is going to be different. It’s the kind of thing that seems to belong more to a British Museum show about a lost pre-Columbian civilisation than in the concrete citadel of Tate Modern’s Blavatnik wing. Yet in her imagination, that’s where Mendieta belonged, too. Born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, she was sent to the US when she was 12 to flee the revolution. She felt like an outsider among white Americans. Home, for her, was the past, and she would excavate the very origins of art and mythology.

Mendieta made art from blood, feathers, flowers and sand and in such fresh ways you’d think these primeval substances were new inventions. She literally played with fire, drawing a human figure with gunpowder on the ground or on the trunk of a tree, then setting it alight. The flames leave behind a scorched shadow of a person, like the victims of a nuclear bomb or the dead of Pompeii entombed in ash. Confronted by a row of these burnt ghosts emerging from real tree trunks you almost expect them to speak to you like the shades of the dead.

Five years after the ultra-conservative Islamists retook Afghanistan, students describe male pupils being beaten for minor rule breaches and inexperienced teachers struggling to deliver lessons

Before he leaves for Kabul University each morning, Hashmat* checks his face for the beard he has been ordered to grow. Male students are required to grow their facial hair and wear traditional Afghan clothes and those who fall short are punished. Hashmat says he recently saw a classmate beaten for wearing trousers.

“They look at you before they listen to you. If your appearance is wrong, you are already in trouble before the class begins,” he says.

He beat brain cancer. Now your favourite DJ’s favourite DJ is on a UK tour, armed with experimental techno, Beastie Boys and Taylor Swift

Ten years ago this month, Japanese DJ Yousuke Yukimatsu had an epileptic seizure. When he didn’t show up for a festival booking, organisers got in touch with his friends in Osaka, who found him collapsed at home. He was taken to hospital where doctors diagnosed a brain tumour. “If no one had contacted me, I might have died,” he posted on a crowdfunding platform several months later.

In the black-and-white photograph accompanying the crowdfunder to support his work, Yukimatsu leans his head towards the camera, his buzz cut growing out around a thick ragged scar that curves from his left ear to the top of his hairline: he’d been through two craniotomies, plus extensive chemo and radiation therapy. The illness also left him with a realisation that he needed to make DJing his full-time job; to dedicate himself to his craft and make the world a better place. “If we can keep living [for] tomorrow, if I can encourage people … that’s what I’m always trying to do,” he says now. “The world is getting much worse than the time when techno was born [in the mid 1980s]. Weapons are being developed; it’s getting easier to commit a massacre. In Japan, if a musician speaks about politics, they can be hugely criticised. But I think it’s really important to speak up.”

She has built an unlikely career in mould, maggots and excrement, cleaning for those who most need it. It can take months building trust with a stranger, before she and her boyfriend go in and transform everything

‘There might be a dead bird in the box room. We think it has been there for a couple of years,” says Bea Elton, raising her voice to be heard through her respirator. It is particularly robust, as she has a dust and cat hair allergy. “Not ideal,” in her line of work, the 28-year-old concedes.

Knowing it would be difficult to talk on the job, we spoke before we arrived, struggling into hazmat suits, shoe covers, gloves and masks in the overgrown garden outside the front door. “I refer to myself as a cleaner. I would never refer to myself as a cleanfluencer,” says Elton. The slick videos on her platform, CleanWithBea, which record her transforming homes fallen into extreme dirt, decay and dilapidation, tell a different story. She has more than six million followers across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, who have crowned her a celebrity of this genre, her audience keen to watch the imperfect made perfect in a world that feels increasingly out of control. Yet no matter how many of her polished videos you watch, nothing can prepare you for entering one of the homes she cleans in person.

Officers say decision made after ‘new information and evidence has come to light’

Counter-terrorism police are now leading the investigation into the death of the former MP and Reform spokesperson Ann Widdecombe after “new information and evidence has come to light”, counter-terrorism policing south east said.

Widdecombe’s body was found with “serious injuries” by the ambulance service at her home in Haytor, Devon, at 11.40am on Thursday, Devon and Cornwall police said.

Home Office announces ban on support for Iranian military group in escalation of diplomatic tensions with Tehran

The UK will list Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation, ministers have announced, in a major escalation of the diplomatic tensions with Tehran.

The Home Office said on Monday it would ban support for the IRGC, a central branch of the Iranian military, after years of political division over the issue. The move is equivalent to proscription, though not legally identical.

Extreme heat led to 440 deaths a day during June peak, say scientists, with climate crisis ramping up temperatures

The heatwave that affected England and Wales in June killed about 440 people a day during its three-day peak, scientists have estimated. Across the whole of the June heatwave, plus the one in May, about 2,700 people lost their lives prematurely.

The data starkly illustrates the danger of extreme heat, which is being supercharged by the climate crisis. More than 40% of the people affected would not have died without the 1.4C of human-caused global heating to date, according to the analysis. For comparison, about four people die each day as a result of road traffic collisions and about 35 a day because of alcohol and drug use, according to government statistics.

New Zealand actor built career as dashing romantic leads and charismatic villains across film and television

• Sam Neill’s final interview

• Sam Neill’s 20 best performances

• A life in pictures

• ‘A true gentleman’: actors, directors and leaders pay tribute to Sam Neill

• Obituary

• Neill interviewed in 2023, 2024 and 2026

Sam Neill, the versatile New Zealand actor whose career spanned Oscar winners and blockbusters such as The Piano and Jurassic Park, has died aged 78.

The actor’s death was announced on Monday in a statement shared on his Instagram account. No cause of death was given, but Neill had only recently revealed he was cancer-free after being diagnosed with stage three angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, a type of blood cancer, in 2022.