It was, we were told, a case of sudden infant death syndrome interrupted. What followed would transform my understanding of parenting, disability and the breadth of what makes a meaningful life

I look back at the last day of our old life with a kind of wonder now: the million summer freedoms, the complacency of our ease.

I watched the cricket with Max on my knee. Friends came to visit, and Ruth fed Max while we talked about our new neighbourhood among piles of books and packing boxes. Max gurgled regally as I changed one of his famous nappies. I organised our phone chargers and put his birth certificate carefully in a drawer with our passports and the mortgage statement. Then I hung a picture in what would soon be his room: a print from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, of a little boy sailing bravely across the ocean, with “Max” emblazoned on the prow of his ship. I stood back and admired it, feeling all three of us to be limitless, and wondering what would happen next.

For years, Alexa has been our on-call vet, DJ, teacher, parent, therapist and whipping boy. What secrets would the data reveal?

She is always listening. She is unfailingly polite. She is often obtuse. She is sometimes helpful. She frequently frustrates. She isn’t great with bashment artists. Or grime. Or drum’n’bass. She needs to be spoken to slowly and clearly, as you’d talk to an aged relative with diminished faculties. She doesn’t like French accents.

‘“Alexa, how long do wasps live for?”

A high court dispute over a south London park shows the limits of private interests encroaching on public space

A grassy south London oasis erupted into a turf war this week. From Monday, visitors to Brockwell Park would have seen calling cards left by both sides. The provocation? A sturdy 3-metre-high boundary fence, encircling large swathes of the 50-hectare (125-acre) stretch that has been designated for music festivals this summer. Daubed on the structure were signs of discord: graffitied messages in stark white lettering. “You fucked our park,” read one. “We fucked your wall.”

Brockwell is now the hottest front in a conflict that has started to rear its head in the capital every summer. A week ago, it made the front pages in the form of a bombshell high court ruling against Lambeth council. The authority responsible for the park lost a case brought by Protect Brockwell Park (PBP), a group of local residents and park users who argued that the council had not obtained the proper planning permissions for the back-to-back run of events scheduled to take place behind the boundary fence.

Moya Lothian-McLean is associate editor at Mill Media

The British comedian and actor on encouraging hecklers, why Will Ferrell deserves an Oscar and his love for Kylie Minogue

In your first memoir, My Favourite People and Me, you picked Kylie Minogue as one of your favourite people – but added that you stopped loving her when I Should Be So Lucky came out. To make this a question: how dare you?

Ah, Kylie. She’s completely adored everywhere she goes, and I adore her as well. I fell for her when she was Charlene in Neighbours – I was a student studying drama in the 80s and the only drama that any of us cared about was Neighbours. Australian girls were the pin-ups for everybody in England.

A Guardian investigation revealed how hundreds of thousands of people were plunged into debt – and some criminalised – for looking after their loved ones

One February afternoon in 2016, Sir Robert Devereux, at the time the most powerful official in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), was stopped by a junior colleague as he walked through the car park of a civil service office in Preston, Lancashire. Was he aware, the worker asked, about the problems with carer’s allowance?

Devereux, on a flying visit to the DWP outpost, asked for details and promised to look into it. A few days later, Devereux’s office received a long and detailed note, complete with 80 anonymised case studies, setting out how years of shortcomings in the administration of the carer’s allowance benefit had wasted millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money and inflicted untold hardship and misery on thousands of unpaid carers.

Jesse Watters’ list is so bizarre, it has me agreeing with Ted Cruz – and Watters’ show helps shape US politics

Tim Burchett, a Republican representative, would like you to know that he is not a straw man. No sir. Speaking to Fox News on Thursday, the Tennessee lawmaker explained that he is a red-blooded American male who does not “drink out of a straw” because “that’s what the women in my house do”. And no self-respecting man wants to be like the women in their house, do they? Yuck.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Exclusive: The Guardian and Liberty Investigates find police in England and Wales believe expansion is likely after 4.7m faces scanned in 2024

• Valuable tool or cause for alarm? Facial ID quietly becoming part of police’s arsenal

Police believe live facial recognition cameras may become “commonplace” in England and Wales, according to internal documents, with the number of faces scanned having doubled to nearly 5m in the last year.

A joint investigation by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates highlights the speed at which the technology is becoming a staple of British policing.

Police forces scanned nearly 4.7m faces with live facial recognition cameras last year – more than twice as many as in 2023. Live facial recognition vans were deployed at least 256 times in 2024, according to official deployment records, up from 63 the year before.

A roving unit of 10 live facial recognition vans that can be sent anywhere in the country will be made available within days – increasing national capacity. Eight police forces have deployed the technology. The Met has four vans.

Police forces have considered fixed infrastructure creating a “zone of safety” by covering the West End of London with a network of live facial recognition cameras. Met officials said this remained a possibility.

Forces almost doubled the number of retrospective facial recognition searches made last year using the police national database (PND) from 138,720 in 2023 to 252,798. The PND contains custody mug shots, millions of which have been found to be stored unlawfully of people who have never been charged with or convicted of an offence.

More than 1,000 facial recognition searches using the UK passport database were carried out in the last two years, and officers are increasingly searching for matches on the Home Office immigration database, with requests up last year, to 110. Officials have concluded that using the passport database for facial recognition is “not high risk” and “is not controversial”, according to internal documents.

The Home Office is now working with the police to establish a new national facial recognition system, known as strategic facial matcher. The platform will be capable of searching a range of databases including custody images and immigration records.

Councils will get powers to impose ‘delayed home penalty’ under latest government proposals

Developers face tens of thousands of pounds in fines if they slow down housebuilding under new powers being granted to councils to help deliver 1.5m homes.

Under government proposals, housebuilders will need to commit to a timeframe for construction before they are granted planning permission, and deliver annual reports on their progress. Those who repeatedly fail to build or sit on land could be fined with a “delayed homes penalty” or blocked from future planning permission by councils.

Campaigner calls compensation schemes ‘quasi-kangaroo courts’ after final offer made in response to his appeal

Sir Alan Bates, who led the 20-year campaign for justice for post office operators over the Horizon scandal, has revealed he has been handed a “take it or leave it” compensation offer of less than half his original claim.

The 70-year-old, who was knighted last year, has accused the government of presiding over a “quasi-kangaroo court” system for the compensation.

Dr Alaa al-Najjar was on duty at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis when she received her children’s bodies

An Israeli airstrike on Gaza hit the home of a doctor, killing nine of her 10 children while she was on duty at her hospital.

Dr Alaa al-Najjar, a paediatric specialist at al-Tahrir hospital within the Nasser medical complex, was treating victims of ongoing Israeli attacks across the Palestinian territory on Friday when she received the bodies of nine of her children killed by a strike in Khan Younis. The eldest of the children was 12.