Israel says Britain’s decision to exclude it from military weapons showcase is a ‘regrettable act of discrimination’

The UK government has banned Israeli officials from attending the country’s flagship defence event next month.

Israeli industry, including UK subsidiaries of Israeli companies will be able to attend London’s Defence & Security Equipment International (DSEI) show in September but the UK government will not invite representatives of the Israeli government to the major industry event.

The US writer on being switched on to romance by Sally Rooney, the magic of David Mitchell and the joy of Jean-Paul Sartre

My favourite book growing up
Brian Jacques’s Redwall (and all its sequels). All I wanted was to be a squirrel in the Mossflower Woods!

The books that changed me as a teenager
I read China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and The City & the City when I was in college. I had been falling out of love with fantasy – I felt too old for Redwall, and I thought I’d outgrown the genre – but Miéville’s work opened the door to the enormous world of adult fantasy literature that grappled with the problems I was now interested in.

(CMATBaby)
Who else could combine soul, yodelling, Jamie Oliver and Calpol into such charming songs about the messy modern psyche? Only Europe’s best new breakout star

She may unite two of the mid-2020s most pervasive cultural trends – the so-called “green wave” of zeitgeist-dominating Irish actors, authors and musicians; and the irreverent embrace of country music by pop stars such as Beyoncé, Lana Del Rey and Chappell Roan – but you don’t need to spend much time in the company of 29-year-old Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson to realise she’s a total one-off. Who else would come out with a chugging indie earworm called The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, in which an irrational hatred of the celebrity chef and his Shell deli franchise (“That man should not have his face on posters!”) leads her to grasp frantically at slippery observations about social anxiety and her own aesthetic sensibilities? Even the most conventional song on Euro-Country, the cool R&B-pop of Running/Planning, is laden with bonkers lyrics about creating an imaginary boyfriend, ripping his head off and then promising to buy said head a Nintendo and “all the games”.

Thompson – who won instant acclaim in Ireland with her 2022 debut If My Wife New I’d Be Dead, and cemented her status in the UK with its Mercury-nominated follow-up Crazymad, for Me – is not kooky in the manic pixie dream girl sense, or leftfield in an alienating radical way. Instead, she is deeply relatable in her weirdness. On the saccharine soul of Take a Sexy Picture of Me, she captures the formative nature of toxic femininity by recounting an attempt to wax her legs with tape aged nine, while on Ready she’s mired in the message – pedalled by Gwyneth et al – that women must engage in infinite self-perfection at the expense of actual living. In Coronation St, waiting for her life to start, over strummed guitar, she feels like a soap barmaid with no lines. In fact, Corrie gets more than one shout-out on her third album, which is enriched by a jumble of cultural references – Dorian Gray, Veruca Salt, Calpol, Kerry Katona – both a sign of camp humour and a voracious mind seeking to explain and evoke thoughts that exist just beyond the fringes of everyday conversation.

Developer Spooky Doorway is building a detective mystery full of Victorian spiritualism and pagan traditions, creating a lingering sense of dread that is hard to shake

There are two types of horror – one that shocks you into more inventive ways to hide behind a pillow; and the other that creeps under your skin, quietly prickling the back of your neck and haunting you for weeks. The Séance Of Blake Manor falls into that second camp: an atmospheric take on an 1890s Irish murder mystery.

You play Detective Ward, who has been sent to the titular Blake Manor to investigate the disappearance of Evelyn Deane two nights before a seance is due take place. Mystics from across the globe have gathered at the crumbling mansion to converse with the dead on All Hallows’ Eve, but are they really capable of doing what they say they can? And what was that shadowy figure? There’s more than one secret to unravel.

Fed governor Lisa Cook is seeking a temporary restraining order against the president’s attempt to fire her

Donald Trump’s battle to exert control over the Federal Reserve faces a key legal test today, with a governor of the central bank seeking a temporary block on his extraordinary attempt to fire her.

Lisa Cook sued the US president on Thursday, with her lawyers describing his attempt to dismiss her as “unprecedented and illegal”, and based on “pretextual” allegations.