Fear, abuse and eroding rights for trans people have created a hostile environment in the US – can they claim asylum in the Netherlands?

• The transgender refugees fleeing the US – podcast

Ter Apel, a small, unassuming Dutch town near the German border, is a place tourists rarely have on their itinerary. There are no lovely old windmills, no cannabis-filled coffee shops and on a recent visit it was far too early for tulip season.

When foreigners end up there, it is for one reason: to claim asylum at the Netherlands’ biggest refugee camp, home to 2,000 desperate people from all around the world.

She started out performing in her living room, charging £1.50 a ticket. Now, having blazed through Love Island and silenced her Strictly haters, the Welsh sensation is really hitting the big time

At the end of last year’s Strictly Come Dancing semi-final, pro dancer Nikita Kuzmin made a tearful appeal to camera, “I speak to the audience at home: guys, just please, please be kind!” His celebrity partner, Love Island winner, Dancing on Ice contestant and musical theatre actor Amber Davies, had been getting a lot of flak online. “You have had so much hate, every single day,” said Kuzmin.

Isn’t it crazy that we have to remind people to be nice to other humans who are just doing their job, I say to Davies, when we meet in a London hotel bar. “I genuinely think it’s getting worse,” says Davies, who has been in the public eye since 2017. “With TikTok, when people jump on a bandwagon, they go for it,” she adds. “But I feel like the nasty comments I was getting [on Strictly] weren’t actually coming from the younger audience, they came from the older audience.”

Vicars, the devout – and some who are desperate – do a lot of praying to get their wishes fulfilled. But it's complicated by lots of dos and don'ts

‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God,” sings Nick Cave in the opening line of his 1997 song, Into My Arms. But Jim Sharma, a football fan who is a devotee of Wolverhampton Wanderers FC, very much does – and who can blame him?

For the detached, the uninformed and nonsports fans, the issue here is that Wolves had a terrible start to the season and, until the other day, looked set to beat Derby County’s unenviable record as the worst-performing team in Premier League history. Then they played my team, West Ham, and had their first taste of victory since April. Wolves 3 West Ham 0.

Ravi Holy is the vicar of Wye in Kent and a standup comedian

Aliens drawn by a 2000AD artist, graphics echoing the Dark Side of the Moon cover, Dennis the Menace fronting bacon and baked bean flavour … we pop open a new 140-page celebration of the weirdest, wildest crisp bags ever

Would you eat a smoky spider flavour Monster Munch? What about a Bovril crisp, cooked up to celebrate the release of Back to the Future? Then there’s hedgehog flavour – and even a Wallace and Gromit corn snack designed to capture the unique taste of moon cheese, which the duo rocketed off to collect in A Grand Day Out.

All these salty, crunchy and perhaps even tasty snacks are celebrated in UK Crisp Packets 1970-2000, a 140-page compendium that delves into the colourful, often strange and occasionally wild world of crisp packet design. The book will come as a heavy hit of nostalgia for many people, featuring various childhood favourites – Chipsticks, Frazzles, Snaps – along with the lesser known and the rare.

As the Booker prize-winning author prepares to publish his final novel at 80, we assess his finest work

Duffy is the first in a series of crime novels about a bisexual private eye that Barnes published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. It came out the same year as Barnes’s debut novel proper, Metroland, but where that took seven years to write, this took 10 days. Not that it shows: this “refreshingly nasty” (as Barnes’s friend Martin Amis put it) crime caper is beguilingly well written, with passages that display all of Barnes’s perception and wit. The plot of reverse blackmail and the shocking climax only add to the fun.
Sample line “Two in the morning is when sounds travel for ever, when a sticky window makes a soft squeak and three Panda cars hear it from miles away.”

This shocking moment is the outcome of a political, institutional and media environment that is not far off Britain’s

There is not much that can still shock about Donald Trump’s second administration. But the killing of Renee Good earlier this month by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, as well as the regular, often violent confrontations that ICE stages on US streets, show so much that is unravelling in plain sight. The rule of law, the freedom to protest, and even the right to walk or drive in the streets safely without being assaulted by the state, seems to exist no longer in the towns and cities where ICE has made its presence felt. The most disturbing aspect of all this is how quickly it has happened. But for a government agency such as ICE to become the powerful paramilitary force that it is, several factors need to be in play first. Only one of them is Donald Trump.

ICE may look as if it came out of nowhere, but the sort of authoritarianism that results in these crackdowns never does. It takes shape slowly, in plain sight, in a way that is clearly traceable over time. First, there needs to be a merging of immigration and security concerns, both institutionally and in the political culture. Established in the wake of 9/11, ICE was part of a government restructuring under President George W Bush. It was granted a large budget, wide investigative powers and a partnership with the FBI’s joint terrorism taskforce. The work of enforcing immigration law became inextricably linked to the business of keeping Americans safe after the largest attack on US soil. That then extended into a wider emphasis, under Barack Obama, beyond those who posed national security threats, and on to immigrants apprehended at the border, gang members and non-citizens convicted of felonies or misdemeanours.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

PM says US tariffs are in no one’s interests – and Greenland row should be resolved through ‘calm discussion’

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Keir Starmer has played down the prospect of retaliatory tariffs on the US, saying they would be the “wrong thing to do”, after Donald Trump threatened them against Nato allies to try to secure Greenland.

The prime minister said US tariffs would damage the British economy and were “in no one’s interests”. The UK would instead prefer to address the issue through “calm discussion” between allies, he added.

A further 75 people hospitalised after two trains collided and derailed near Adamuz in Córdoba province

• Spain train crash – latest updates

At least 39 people have been killed and 12 are in intensive care after two trains collided in southern Spain on Sunday night in what the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, called “a night of deep pain for our country”.

A high-speed Iryo train travelling from Málaga to Madrid derailed near the municipality of Adamuz in Córdoba province at about 7.40pm on Sunday, crossing on to the other track where it hit an oncoming train, Adif, Spain’s rail infrastructure authority, posted on X.

Putin shows no signs of ending Ukraine war and claim adds weight to accusation Trump favours Russian president

The Kremlin has announced that Vladimir Putin has been invited to join Donald Trump’s “board of peace”, set up last week with the intention that it would oversee a ceasefire in Gaza.

The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told journalists on Monday that Russia was seeking to “clarify all the nuances” of the offer with Washington, before giving its response.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde makes last-minute U-turn in submission to hospitals inquiry

Scotland’s largest health board has finally admitted that contaminated water at a Glasgow super-hospital caused serious infections in child cancer patients that were linked to four deaths.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC) made the dramatic U-turn in closing submissions to a long-running inquiry that was launched after deaths linked to infections, including that of 10-year-old Milly Main, who died in August 2017 after contracting an infection as she recovered from leukaemia treatment.