Is the US in a new gilded age of inequality? On a 400-mile journey from a triumphant conservative youth summit to a hastily constructed immigration detention centre, the answer became clearer …

• Anywhere but Washington: fearmongering, mass deportations and self-enrichment – video

The mezzanine floor of the Tampa Convention Center buzzes chaotically with rightwing chatter: conspiracy theories, grievance politics and Christian nationalism. Look in any direction and someone in front of you, washed in sharp studio lights, is drawing a crowd and creating content.

Ahead of me, Russell Brand sits on a white sofa, broadcasting live on the conservative video-streaming service Rumble – his guest is the “alt-right” influencer Jack Posobiec. To the left, along an alleyway lined with small broadcast booths, is the longtime Donald Trump adviser and self-proclaimed “dirty trickster” Roger Stone, who is holding court on a podcast. To the rear, on a large metal scaffold, is Steve Bannon’s War Room channel, busy cutting between live footage of a small protest outside the event and adverts for various Trump-aligned products.

Politics is struggling to cope with the pace of technological change – and that is affecting every single one of us

Returning from holiday, asked where I have been, I want to say “offline”. The more precise answer is France, where the internet is available. But I tried not to use it compulsively because there isn’t much point in getting away from it all if you carry it all with you on a phone and check it every few minutes.

At some point in the past decade or so, the condition of vacation came to be defined more by detachment from the digital realm than departure from home. The break begins not in a departure lounge but with the act of logging off, setting the out-of-office email auto-reply, archiving work-related WhatsApp chats, deleting social media apps.

Four women travel 140m miles across the heavens – only to find their new world in hostile corporate hands. Composer Jennifer Walshe reveals what fed into her epic opera, from low-gravity procreation to Shrek in space

Why write an opera about Mars? Because Mars isn’t just a planet. It’s a philosophy, an ideology. The way humans think about it changes over time, reflecting the unstable mix of assumptions, hopes, dreams and anxieties that define each historical moment.

In 1965, Nasa’s Mariner 4 probe flew past Mars and beamed the first closeup images of the red planet (or of any other planet) back to Earth. Prior to that flight, humans knew the planet only through telescopes, and it was thought that its surface would feature vegetation and that life may have evolved there. Mariner 4 revealed the truth: it was a rocky, cratered place seemingly devoid of life. President Lyndon B Johnson declared that “it may just be that life as we know it, with its humanity, is more unique than many have thought, and we must remember this”. The New York Times went further: “Mars, it now appears, is a desolate world.”

It’s so nice to watch a show that tries this hard to induce chuckles. But there’s also real depth to this gag-packed comedy about two mischief-loving friends reuniting in midlife

The Studio, Seth Rogen’s cosy Hollywood satire which dropped on Apple TV+ earlier this year, features a glut of industry figures cameoing as themselves: Martin Scorsese, Charlize Theron, Zac Efron, Ron Howard, Zoë Kravitz, Nicholas Stoller. Unless you also happen to work in the movie business, that last name probably won’t mean much: in the show Stoller is introduced as a reliable writer of kid-friendly fare – The Muppets, Captain Underpants – who can make a decent job of the IP-driven film (“the Kool-Aid movie”) that Rogen’s studio head, Matt Remick, has been forced to pursue.

In real life, Stoller did indeed write those films. Yet he’s also a key figure in the later years of the Judd Apatow-abetted Frat Pack era, responsible for a number of box office hits including Sex Tape, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him to the Greek and Neighbors, which starred Rogen and Rose Byrne as a couple warring with the fraternity next door. Pairing lowbrow farce with zingy dialogue and hapless beta male protagonists, these were out-and-out comedies made at a time when the genre occupied a significant slice of the cinematic zeitgeist.

It’s a traveller’s worst nightmare so try to reduce the chances of it happening at all … and, if it does, how (hopefully) you can retrieve it

It’s every traveller’s worst nightmare: you arrive at your destination, but your luggage doesn’t. Whether it’s due to a mishandled transfer, or a sneaky suitcase thief in the arrivals hall, lost luggage can quickly turn a holiday into a stressful ordeal. Here’s what to do if yours doesn’t turn up.

Report your luggage as missing

All baggage is managed by the airlines from check-in to arrival. So once you are sure your luggage has not arrived, report it as missing at your airline’s desk in the baggage reclaim hall (this is sometimes operated by a third-party ground handler). If there is no one at the desk, call your airline instead.

File what’s known as a property irregularity report (PIR) before you leave the airport. This official document is used to report incidents involving damaged, lost or delayed baggage. It serves as a record of the incident and is essential for initiating claims and tracking the status of the baggage.

To complete the PIR, you will need to provide: the details on your baggage claim tag (attached to your boarding pass or passport); your flight number and travel itinerary; a detailed description of your luggage; contact details; and a delivery address for where you are staying.

The airline will give you a reference number. Keep it safe as you will need this if you end up making a compensation or insurance claim. You can also input the reference number into the WorldTracer website, which provides up-to-date information on the status of lost baggage.

Meanwhile, the airline will use the information on the PIR to locate your luggage (hopefully).

Nasal sprays, injections and sunbeds – for many people, the yearning for a tan now outweighs the risks. But why?

Hannah Clark got her first spray tan for her school prom and has never looked back. “I’m not proud of it, but I have used sunbeds,” says the 29-year-old graphic designer from Plymouth. Her goal is “that glow you get when coming back from holiday. You know, when you walk around and people say: ‘Oh, you look really healthy.’ It’s that feeling I’m chasing.”

Clark is far from alone. On TikTok and Instagram, posts with the hashtag “sunbed” number more than 500,000. Last year, a survey from skin cancer charity Melanoma Focus found that 28% of UK adults use sunbeds, but this rose to 43% among those aged 18 to 25. This new generation of younger tanning obsessives will go to extreme lengths to darken their skin. Some track the UV index – the level of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation – and deliberately sit in the sun at the most dangerous times of day. Others use unregulated nasal tanning sprays and injections, which rely on a chemical to darken the skin.

The Guardian joins a Jordanian military airdrop for a rare chance to observe a landscape devastated by Israel’s offensive

Seen from the air, Gaza looks like the ruins of an ancient civilisation, brought to light after centuries of darkness. A patchwork of concrete shapes and shattered walls, neighbourhoods scattered with craters, rubble and roads that lead nowhere. The remnants of cities wiped out.

But here, there has been no natural disaster and no slow passage of time.

Members of Jordan’s military stand among pallets of aid about to be dropped on Gaza

NIESR suggests a rise of 5p in the pound on basic and higher rate of income tax would fill the budget gap

Rachel Reeves will need to raise taxes to close a government spending gap that is on course to reach more than £40bn after a slowdown in economic growth and higher-than-expected inflation, according to a leading thinktank.

In a blow to Labour’s hopes of balancing the books without breaking manifesto commitments ruling out personal tax rises, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) said a number of factors would knock off course the chancellor’s plans to stay within Whitehall spending limits.

More than 100 million ‘novel entity’ chemicals are in circulation, with health impact not widely recognised

Chemical pollution is “a threat to the thriving of humans and nature of a similar order as climate change” but decades behind global heating in terms of public awareness and action, a report has warned.

The industrial economy has created more than 100 million “novel entities”, or chemicals not found in nature, with somewhere between 40,000 and 350,000 in commercial use and production, the report says. But the environmental and human health effects of this widespread contamination of the biosphere are not widely appreciated, in spite of a growing body of evidence linking chemical toxicity with effects ranging from ADHD to infertility to cancer.

On 80th anniversary of atomic bombing, Kazumi Matsui urges younger people to recognise ‘inhumane’ consequences of nuclear weapons as a deterrent

The mayor of Hiroshima has led calls for the world’s most powerful countries to abandon nuclear deterrence, at a ceremony to mark 80 years since the city was destroyed by an American atomic bomb.

As residents, survivors and representatives from 120 countries gathered at the city’s peace memorial park on Wednesday morning, Kazumi Matsui warned that the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East had contributed to a growing acceptance of nuclear weapons.