The movement towards simple, Christian living can be a yearning for order in a chaotic age. It’s also alarmingly retrograde

A cool evening air was descending on the 25-acre farmstead, blowing across the pond, around the barn, through the apple orchard and into the windows of Mike and Jenny Thomas’s two-century-old, red brick farmhouse.

The dinner hour had come. Edith, five, and George, three, enthusiastically rang a bell hanging near the kitchen door, sending metallic peals back into the early dusk.

Lay the groundwork by prioritising fences, composting and paving – and worry about the plants later

One of the questions I’m often asked when I speak at events usually comes from someone – perhaps half of a couple – who seems wide-eyed with optimism and overwhelm. “We’ve just moved into a new house and it has this garden,” they’ll begin. They don’t know what to do with it; where should they start?

Invariably, I tell them to ignore the traditional advice of waiting for a year to see what comes up. Granted, you may dig up some ancient bulbs, like these grape hyacinths, but it’s your garden now and these risks are yours to take.

Anthony Tata, Trump’s undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, files defamation lawsuit in Florida

A senior Pentagon official in Donald Trump’s administration had a months-long extramarital affair with a woman claiming to be “the internet’s most notorious astrologer” – and claims in a defamation lawsuit filed in Florida that she cyberstalked him and his wife after they split up.

Court papers in Palm Beach county allege that Amy Tripp, known as Starheal to her tens of thousands of social media followers, was so upset by the end of the relationship that she repeatedly threatened and harassed the victim, identified as Anthony Tata, who assumed office as the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness in July.

Climate.gov, which went dark this summer, set to be revived by volunteers as climate.us with expanded mission

Earlier this summer, access to climate.gov – one of the most widely used portals of climate information on the internet – was thwarted by the Trump administration, and its production team was fired in the process.

The website offered years’ worth of accessibly written material on climate science. The site is technically still online but has been intentionally buried by the team of political appointees who now run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Therapists say they are seeing negative impacts of people increasingly turning to AI chatbots for help

Vulnerable people turning to AI chatbots instead of professional therapists for mental health support could be “sliding into a dangerous abyss”, psychotherapists have warned.

Psychotherapists and psychiatristssaid they were increasingly seeing negative impacts of AI chatbots being used for mental health, such as fostering emotional dependence, exacerbating anxiety symptoms, self-diagnosis, or amplifying delusional thought patterns, dark thoughts and suicide ideation.