The Guardian News

• Burnham should also declare City hospitality, party says

• PM said he would be concerned if owners forced to sell

Andy Burnham is facing calls from the Liberal Democrats to publish details of all his meetings with Manchester City’s owners, the Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), and declare all hospitality he has accepted at the Etihad Stadium.

The prime minister was widely criticised this week for saying he would be “really concerned” if ADUG were forced to sell City after being found guilty of breaching the Premier League’s financial regulations, which led to Downing Street issuing two clarifications of his position on Thursday.

Refugees from third countries are being sent to Equatorial Guinea, where they are often sent back to the very countries they fled

For nearly a year, the Hotel Bamy in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, has been Adam’s prison. He is confined alone to a hotel room, under constant watch by the security officers and soldiers of a notoriously oppressive regime who control his movements. Not long ago, they barged into his room, handcuffed and beat him, and warned him not to tell anyone. There is no cell to point to, no charges or formal sentence, and nothing on paper to document his plight.

Adam, 26, has chosen not to share his real name or even his country of origin out of fear for his safety. He fled indefinite, forced military conscription in his home country after enduring abuse during his military service.

Club was a ‘shambles’ before takeover by boyhood Wakefield fan Matt Ellis – and on Saturday they face Warrington for the title

Last one out of Wakefield on Saturday, turn off the lights. Some 965 days ago, this story began on a field in Siddal on the outskirts of Halifax with just a few hundred people there to see it: this weekend, one of rugby league’s grand old clubs will be the headline attraction in front of more than 70,000 supporters when Trinity face Warrington in their maiden Super League Grand Final.

It is a rise so rapid it almost defies belief but to understand it, you must appreciate where this club were in the food chain even just a few short years ago. It was late 2023 when boyhood Wakefield Trinity fan Matt Ellis completed a takeover of the club; £10m worth of investment later, the results are clear to see on and off the field.

From stag and hen dos to luxury weekends, fans are spending big to create their own version of the hit show

On Thursday night, the singer-songwriter James Blunt, Love Island host Maya Jama and mathematician Hannah Fry were among the 21 Celebrity Traitors returning to UK screens for another round of deceit and detective work. Famously, contestants do not stay at Ardross Castle in the Scottish Highlands during filming, and the venue is not a hotel, so fans cannot book their own overnight stays without hiring the entire Ross-shire estate. But that has not stopped people from trying to recreate their own versions.

The show’s surging popularity has been accompanied by a bonanza in Traitors-style events across the UK. From stag and hen dos to castle conspiracy weekends, event companies now host year-round imitations for fans looking to recreate the drama of the candle-lit roundtable. The show is also proving to be a boom for the owners of Britain’s crumbling castles – with wealthy fans even hiring them out for their own private events.

As LeBron James and other NBA stars wholeheartedly embrace the murk of betting and prediction markets, the San Antonio Spurs’ 22-year-old cornerstone has drawn a refreshing line

If the song from LeBron James’s agonizing Polymarket ad is as stuck in your head as mine thanks to the commercial playing during every YouTube video and HBO show (all I wanted to do was rewatch The Leftovers), let Victor Wembanyama be your antidote. At the Spurs’ practice on Thursday, San Antonio Express-News columnist Mike Finger asked Wembanyama if he would ever partner with a sports betting firm. It couldn’t have been easier for the 22-year-old to say yes. The NBA displays ads for both FanDuel and DraftKings, in addition to hawking betting odds on its broadcasts. Until the streaming service met its end a few months ago, plenty of NBA games streamed exclusively on FanDuel Sports Network. Then there are Wembanyama’s legendary peers: James is the new face of Polymarket; Kevin Durant reads FanDuel odds and invests in Kalshi; Giannis Antetokounmpo is a Kalshi shareholder.

“Absolutely not,” Wembanyama said instead. “I will never do that. Honestly, I think it’s very sad to see some players promote it. Everybody does whatever they want, but without me.”

• Savage leaves Forest Green to take League One role

• ‘Excitement is the word I can use,’ say MacAnthony

Robbie Savage has been confirmed as the new manager of League One strugglers Peterborough.

Savage has left his role at National League side Forest Green Rovers and signed a long-term contract at Posh, who are currently second from bottom and sacked Luke Williams last month. His appointment marks his first Football League role since retiring as a player in 2011, and Savage said he is relishing the opportunity to prove any doubters wrong.

He won a Bafta while only a teen, and now he’s the lead in a creepy sitcom adapted by Alan Partridge’s writers. Ahead of The Reluctant Vampire, he talks mates, mums who write him letters – and his love of David Brent

Only when absolutely badgered will Lenny Rush admit that the title role of The Reluctant Vampire, Val, was written for him: “Shane Allen, the executive producer, loved the books when he was young, and he was the exec on Am I Being Unreasonable?. So yes, the scripts were written with me in mind. I’m so happy they were so good. I’d have felt awful if they said ‘We’ve written this for you’ and …” he trails off, pulling a face of exquisite pained courtesy.

Rush likens the show to The Naked Gun and Airplane!, and it has the writing team behind Alan Partridge, so can conjure awkwardness out of thin air. But it also taps into a comic tradition that goes even further back: a delight in the ridiculous, people talking to bats and gargoyles, invisible women interjecting by surprise, a surrealism whose comedy comes from the audacity of acting it with such commitment. “In my opinion,” says Rush, “sometimes things are labelled as a family show but they’re aimed at kids. I really do get the feeling that The Reluctant Vampire is for everyone.”

The double Olympic champion insists a knighthood wouldn’t change his life, still trains on Christmas Day and explains why he got a video game and Seb Coe didn’t

‘When you’re a kid, you think you can be Superman,” says Daley Thompson, as he gazes back to the era when he was track and field’s ultimate man of steel. “As you grow up, life kind of knocks those edges off you. But that never happened to me. I’ve always gone where I was aiming. I’ve been the luckiest bloke in the world.”

Luckiest? Hardly. During the 1980s, Thompson powered to two Olympic decathlon gold medals, broke the world record four times and remained unbeaten for nine extraordinary years. Along the way, self-doubt, like his opponents, was conquered and vanquished. That wasn’t luck, it was talent and unyielding willpower.

It is simply wrong for the British Museum to hoard what doesn’t belong to Britain. Let the squabbling end and the sculptures be returned to Greece

For the Bayeux tapestry to return to France would be a scandal. It is British, probably made in Canterbury by British women, and displays one of the greatest events in British history. The tapestry certainly does not belong in Normandy. It is right that it is now on British soil in the British Museum. Its display is so brief that the herd of visitors desperate to catch a glimpse of the medieval artwork must be jostled to keep moving, as if watching Shakespeare’s Henry V on fast-forward. So let’s keep it. Everybody knows possession is nine-tenths of the law. We can call it a long-term loan.

I am joking, of course. This is largely what I assume the British Museum is worried might happen if it lent the precious Elgin, or Parthenon, marbles to Athens. In the Guardian last month, the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, argued that the status of the Bayeux tapestry is parallel to that of the Parthenon marbles. “Both were conceived as single works, intended to be seen and understood as a whole,” he wrote, arguing it was time for the marbles to be reunited.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

Micro aircraft used to help guide birds to Spanish stopover as part of efforts to create sustaining migratory population

Fifteen new birds have joined a growing flock of bald ibises in northern Spain, guided there by human migration guides in micro aircraft who helped them along the route.

The birds are part of the growing European flock of the northern bald ibis (Geronticus eremita), the charismatic and frankly extraordinary bird that had been extinct on the continent for 300 years.

City on edge as police comb home of Raymond Horsch, pornographer who died last year, in grisly case involving disturbing pictures and film

A dilapidated house, burned out above the second story, may hold clues to dark tales and – potentially – the darkest of endings as the FBI and police in Philadelphia try to unpick what took place at 417 West Chew Avenue for more than three decades.

Last week, homicide investigators shifted their focus from examining an archive of a million photographs and film recovered from what is known locally as the “house of horrors” to excavating what is in or under the home of Raymond “RC” Horsch, a career criminal, local artist, author and snuff photographer who died last year aged 82, and his son Eugene, 44.

The singer’s hit 2015 single Girls Like Girls was her breakthrough moment and also the first time she felt confident in her sexuality. Now she has directed a film based on the song – a love letter to her 17-year-old self

A lot of Hayley Kiyoko’s teenage summers were spent waiting, bored and pining, as she sat at the computer willing her crush to message her back on AOL instant messenger. Like Coley, the 17-year-old protagonist of Girls Like Girls, the film the pop star has co-written and directed, Kiyoko fell hard for a girl who “put me through my own heartbreak and haunted me for a long time”, she says.

Although the 35-year-old singer became known by fans as “lesbian Jesus” following the release of her breakthrough single Girls Like Girls in 2015 (the film is an extended version of the story first told in the song’s music video), feeling comfortable in her sexuality didn’t actually come until after its release. Her gay identity was, at the time, the topic she was “the most scared of writing about”, and the song’s confident refrain “Girls like girls like boys do, nothing new” came from wanting to “manifest feeling confident”.

A warming, comforting, spiced drink that’s ideal for autumn, and pairs brilliantly with a slice of carrot cake

The move into autumn proper leads our taste buds to crave warmth and comfort in equal measure. And what could be more warming and comforting than a spiced vodka and citrus cocktail spiced with nut liqueur? Slice of carrot cake optional.

Bruce Dorfling, bar manager, Palé Hall, Bala, Gwynedd, Wales

Group says trading was helped by airing of Netflix documentary and opening of its 100th outlet

• Business live – latest updates

The UK arm of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants empire remained in the red last year despite sales topping £100m for the first time after a string of openings in a London tower.

The celebrity chef’s UK business, which has 34 outlets including the Savoy Grill, Pétrus and several Lucky Cat restaurants, narrowed losses to £5.8m from £9.4m the year before. Sales rose 3% to almost £101m.

As frontman of Venom, Conrad Lant made an impact on metal to rival Black Sabbath, inspiring a whole new subgenre with his diabolical grandstanding, unruly spirit and heretic noise

• Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant, frontman of UK heavy metal band Venom, dies aged 63

When Venom’s first blasts of ungodly racket emanated from Newcastle upon Tyne in the late 1970s, metal was enduring its awkward adolescence. Black Sabbath and Deep Purple had respectively slipped down the charts and broken up, and young guns Iron Maiden and Judas Priest were years away from reaching their commercial heights. Frontman Conrad “Cronos” Lant decided that the genre had become “lame”.

“There could only be one new way to do this,” he recalled to Guitar World in 2008. “For metal bands to get some fucking balls again.”

Royal Opera House, London
Evgeny Titov’s brutal and powerful new staging of Wagner’s final opera explains as little as possible. Christian Gerhaher is a compelling and wild-eyed Amfortas and Jakub Hrůša and the Royal Opera’s orchestra are superb

Grail, wound, spear: some of the narrative trappings of Wagner’s final opera are immediately recognisable as symbolic. Others – woman, saviour, chastity, seduction, suffering, death – are harder to pin down, lodged in the half-light between the literal and the metaphorical. Wagner’s score is his most beguilingly luminous; its critics have pored over the work’s commitment to racial purity, its misogyny, its religiosity. The question that Evgeny Titov’s debut production for the Royal Opera poses is whether we really believe in the story Parsifal tells – the fall, the curse, the redemption through purity – and what it means if we want to.

Titov’s staging explains as little as possible. In Etienne Pluss’s sets, the grail realm is an underground bunker hewn from monumental stone blocks that trundle slowly around the stage. There are CCTV screens and a grimy washroom where Amfortas – the fallen King – is scrubbed down by Grail Knights in breathing apparatus. Costume designer Esther Bialas has the Knights in anoraks. Kundry (the virgin-whore dichotomy incarnate) wears black leathers at first, virginal white later. In a rare moment of literal-mindedness, Titov has Parsifal arrive holding the swan he has shot, which twitches gawkily until the orchestra heralds its demise.

These graphics explain what the Democrats would need to do to flip the Senate and House of Representatives

A turning point in Donald Trump’s second term will soon arrive. On 3 November, voters across the US will decide whether to keep the president’s Republican allies in control of Congress, or return Democrats to the majority.

Many indicators of voter sentiment suggest the Democrats are favored to take back control of the House of Representatives, and potentially the Senate. Winning either would be a significant victory for the party and give it the power to block Trump’s legislative agenda and more aggressively investigate his administration.

Series opener had 3m more viewers than last year to see Claudia Winkleman select the first batch of traitors

Almost 3 million more viewers tuned in to the new series of Celebrity Traitors than for its previous debut episode, confirming its status as one of the few television shows capable of attracting the nation on to the sofa.

More than half of the audience watching TV at that time chose to witness the new cast of celebrities enter the show’s famous castle and observe the presenter, Claudia Winkleman, select the first batch of traitors.

Have you been watching football, chess, cricket, rugby, motor racing, hockey, boxing, table tennis and horse racing?

Swoon at immaculate impressionism, ’ave it large with 90s Brit art and fashion and head to the beach with Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse – all in your weekly dispatch

Renoir and Love
Joyful and sumptuous, yet realist and raw, Renoir’s impressionist paintings glow in this immaculate exhibition.
• National Gallery, London, from 3 October until 31 January