Climate summit in Brazil needs to find way to stop global heating accelerating amid stark divisions

“It broke my heart.” Surangel Whipps, president of the tiny Pacific nation of Palau, was sitting in the front row of the UN’s general assembly in New York when Donald Trump made a long and rambling speech, his first to the UN since his re-election, on 23 September.

Whipps was prepared for fury and bombast from the US president, but what followed was shocking. Trump’s rant on the climate crisis – a “green scam”, “the greatest con job ever perpetrated”, “predictions made by stupid people” – was an unprecedented attack on science and global action from a major world leader.

Daily swims, power naps and five meals a day – not tips from the latest hit wellbeing podcast, but longstanding traditions that have kept generations healthy in Iceland, Ukraine, France and more …

Iceland: swimming pool culture

My new favourite restaurant

Until last week, Punk Royale was easily the strangest restaurant I’ve been to all year. “We’re all wacky here!” cried those Copenhagen punks with pans, as covered in my review here a month or so ago. But they’ve already been usurped by a spot in a repurposed office block less than half a mile away.

The fabulously bizarre Lilibet’s opened her doors with little or no fanfare in mid-September, beckoning us into her world of strange. Behold the antique fireplaces, the floral chairs and wallpaper, the multitude of gilt-framed, 18th-century French paintings, the pretty etched glassware, the monogrammed napkins, the tall dinner candles. Lilibet’s has about it the air of how the palace of Versailles would look if its designers (in Lilibet’s case Russell Sage Studio) had been allowed really to let their hair down. The restaurant, by Ross Shonhan, ex-Nobu executive chef and founder of the Bone Daddies ramen chain, is named after our beloved Queen Elizabeth II, God rest her mortal soul. Apparently, our former monarch was born in this very building on 21 April 1926, when the site was still a Mayfair townhouse.

Parenthood can seem an impossible dream for many, and online sperm donor groups offer a solution, but they can be a murky world

A man going by the name “Rod Kissme” claims to have “very strong sperm”. It may seem like an eccentric boast for a Facebook profile page, but then this is no mundane corner of the internet. The group where Rod and other men advertise themselves is a community where women and couples come, in many cases, to fulfil a lifelong dream: parenthood.

There is a growing number of online sperm donor groups on social media. They offer people the chance of parenting children in an unregulated, dangerous but surprisingly straightforward way.

Last week, 7,000 people – including Tom Cruise – descended on the West Sussex town for an event that divides local opinion

In the nearly 30 years that Diane Juchau has lived in East Grinstead, not many days live as long in the memory as the day she saw Tom Cruise on the high street. “I saw him a couple of years ago walking past Iceland,” she said.

It may seem like a once-in-a-lifetime anecdote but, this week, Cruise was back – and, when the purpose for his visit was revealed, the chance sighting of the Mission: Impossible star in a West Sussex town makes a lot more sense.

Lynne Besant met Paul as a teenager. After 40 years apart, she discovered she still had feelings for him

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

In the mid-60s, my family followed my father’s work to a caravan park in Gladstone, central Queensland. He worked in construction and the sprawling transient accommodation for the hundreds of families who’d relocated to build an aluminium plant became our home. I was going on 16 and sulking about having to change schools, again. Then I met Paul.

Back in those days people made their own fun. We often had huge parties at the caravan park, and Paul, an apprentice electrician, would volunteer to rig up the lighting.

Two-minute silence held at 11am GMT, with commemorations also taking place across the UK, including in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast

The Prince of Wales, dressed in Royal Air Force uniform in the rank of Wing Commander, saluted after laying his wreath at the Cenotaph.

He was followed by the Duke of Edinburgh, with wreaths also laid on behalf of the Duke of Kent and the Princess Royal.

Special report: Uniserve was paid £1.4bn for Covid contracts that included supply of £178.5m in never-used equipment

When Mrs Justice Cockerill handed down her judgment in the high court against PPE Medpro, the company linked to the Conservative peer Michelle Mone, for supplying unsafe personal protective equipment during the Covid crisis, her findings were a landmark in a five-year saga that cast the opaque world of government deal-making into stark light.

PPE Medpro was ordered to refund the full £122m that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) paid for unusable gowns in the summer of 2020, as Boris Johnson’s government scrambled to refill the UK’s depleted stocks.

Exclusive: report by Stand.earth says subsidiary of power plant received truckloads of whole logs at biomass pellet sites

Drax power plant has continued to burn 250-year-old trees sourced from some of Canada’s oldest forests despite growing scrutiny of its sustainability claims, forestry experts say.

A new report suggests it is “highly likely” that Britain’s biggest power plant sourced some wood from ecologically valuable forests as recently as this summer. Drax, Britain’s single biggest source of carbon emissions, has received billions of pounds in subsidies from burning biomass derived largely from wood.

Exclusive: Leading ecologists say warnings over threat to wildlife have been ignored in drive to build 1.5m new homes

The scale of lobbying of ministers by developers on Labour’s landmark planning changes, which seek to rip up environmental rules to boost growth, can be exposed as campaigners make last-ditch attempts to secure protections for nature.

The government published its planning and infrastructure bill in March. Before and after the bill’s publication the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and housing minister Matthew Pennycook have met dozens of developers in numerous meetings. The body representing professional ecologists, meanwhile, has not met one minister despite requests to do so.