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.

Five years ago, she’d have been doing feminist stunts – but times change and Sydney has captured the zeitgeist. She might flog that to you too

“SORRY FOR HAVING GREAT TITS AND CORRECT OPINIONS.” Not my words, readers (although, having said that …), but the words of a sweatshirt worn across the aforementioned acclaimed rack of Sydney Sweeney last year, shortly after some madly overheated controversy or other involving the Euphoria/Anyone But You star. I forget which controversy. Like Marvel movies, too many Sydney Sweeney controversies were made, and they all seemed to connect to each other in ways no one but the truly initiated could understand, so now only the saddos turn out for each and every one.

You might dimly be aware there’s another one going on at the moment, following Sydney’s participation in an American Eagle denim advert – a fashion retail event which obviously spiralled into some fatuous blue jeans/red state flame-war that has seen deranged TikTokers claim something about “eugenics”, the president trouser-rubbingly decide he likes Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle shares climb 23% in a week. Tell me the US will still be Earth’s dominant superpower in 30 years because I simply DON’T want to hear anything else. This is the behaviour of a culture with legs. (And a perfect ass, sorry if you can’t handle it.)

Hank, Peggy and the gang are back in a changed America. It’s nuanced, subtly political, poignant TV – and there’s never been a better time for its focus on tolerance

It’s been 15 years since we last enjoyed the company of Hank and Peggy Hill. Barack Obama had just entered the White House, Hank was a younger man with an exciting adventure ahead of him and all was, if not quite well with the world, certainly at least explicable. But now? Season 14 of this revived, beloved animated sitcom is upon us, feeling anachronistic yet also oddly timely. It’s like reconnecting with a group of old friends and realising that, while they are much as they always were, the context in which you now see them has altered beyond all recognition.

Playing slightly against cartoon convention, the Hills’ lives have moved on. Unlike, for example, the ageless Simpsons, everyone is visibly older. In the intervening years, the propane industry has taken Hank and Peggy to Saudi Arabia. As we rejoin them, they are on the plane home. Hank has been in the toilet for hours because, as Peggy sees fit to inform the other passengers, “he now has the urethra of a seven-year-old”. When they touch down in Texas, Hank kisses the ground. But will he recognise the place?

Poll after poll shows most voters think leaving the EU has been a failure. Closer ties with Europe would bring huge rewards

Brexit isn’t working, and the British people know it. Poll after poll, including that unveiled this weekend by More In Common for the Sunday Times, shows that people are feeling the terrible damage caused by the deal forced upon us by Boris Johnson, Kemi Badenoch and the rest of the Conservative party, and want something different. The latest shows less than a third of Britons would vote to leave the EU if a referendum were repeated. There’s no doubt that fundamental change is needed. There’s no doubt the public will is there to make it happen. The question is: will Keir Starmer seize the moment and deliver it?

There are big prizes on offer if he does. Giving our economy the boost it desperately needs, pulling it out of the cycle of low growth and high debt that the Conservatives plunged us into. Helping to raise more funding to lift our NHS and other public services off their knees. And, crucially, showing people that there is a better, more hopeful way forward than the nasty, nonsensical “solutions” they hear from Nigel Farage and his fellow snake-oil salespeople on the right.

Ed Davey is the leader of the Liberal Democrats and MP for Kingston and Surbiton

The body-swap comedy continues and while Lindsay Lohan puts in a serviceable appearance it’s her co-star who makes this zany update a treat

No one could be gamer or goofier than Jamie Lee Curtis in this latest twist in the Freaky Friday body-swap franchise; she finds some distinctly likable form, plays broad comedy to the hilt and pretty much carries the movie – with the help of some nice supporting cameo turns – when her co-star Lindsay Lohan isn’t exactly nailing the laughs. And it should be said that as an essay in alternative existences and parallel realities, this film and Curtis’s starring role are far more interesting than the bafflingly overrated Oscar-winner Everything Everywhere All at Once.

The preceding film, from 2003, had Curtis and Lohan as a quarrelling mother and daughter who swap bodies due to the hilarious magical otherness of Chinese fortune cookies. (In 2025, the new version is a bit culturally lairy of gags like that.) It is based on Mary Rodgers’s 1972 novel, first filmed in 1976 with Jodie Foster as the daughter, a formidably precocious young star who was in those days considered to be already body-swapped into fierce adulthood. The publicity for this film promises legacy cameos and when one teen character talks about her French boyfriend, many FF fans will have been excitably wondering if this French boyfriend has a French-speaking mom played by a certain French-speaking star?

He played one of the most horrible characters in TV history, found his feet as an actor in his 40s and is now a Marvel supervillain. He discusses shame, typecasting and how he appeared in three Harry Potter films without ever saying a line

How do you portray Galactus, a gigantic, amoral, immortal superbeing who thrives by draining planets of their energy? If you’re making a film of any part of Marvel’s Fantastic Four journey, your best bet is probably to depict him as a cloud. That’s what happened in 2007, and even though fans complained about it a bit, it solved a lot of problems.

Matt Shakman, director of the new The Fantastic Four: First Steps, cast Ralph Ineson, who still sounds faintly surprised by the move. “I’ve been working for a long time,” he says. His first role was a small part in Spender, the Jimmy Nail vehicle, in 1991, and he’s in a similar mould to Nail: tall with a handsome, rough-hewn face, a guy who looks as if he knows how to do guy stuff.

Exclusive: Possible arrests at protests against Palestine Action ban and asylum hotels likely to stretch prisons

Prison bosses will make room for a possible influx of arrested demonstrators this weekend amid concerns that some jails are close to full, the head of the national governors’ body has revealed.

Police have threatened to make hundreds of arrests if a planned protest in London this weekend over the proscription of Palestine Action goes ahead. There are also at least eight planned demonstrations outside hotels housing asylum seekers.

Officials said prime minister was planning offensive to fully occupy Gaza, but resistance reveals splits in government

An Israeli security cabinet meeting, which had been expected to discuss Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for the “full occupation” of Gaza, has been postponed amid mounting tensions over whether the plan is feasible.

Amid a stalling of ceasefire negotiations with Hamas, Israeli officials had briefed local and international media that the prime minister was considering an expansive offensive, aimed at taking full control of the Palestinian territory after 22 months of war against the militant group Hamas.

Man, who had a false identity and had never worked in a hospital before, left Ruth Szymankiewicz unwatched despite her vulnerability

A support worker with a false identity who left a vulnerable 14-year-old girl unwatched in a secure psychiatric ward during his first shift had never worked in a hospital before, the teenager’s inquest has heard.

Following the death of Ruth Szymankiewicz, police found the support worker had “stolen” the false identity, had a fake passport and was able to get the shift at the hospital through an agency after brief training.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

New York Times reports on letters by Ehud Barak, Woody Allen and others written for Epstein’s 63rd birthday

The long-running scandal surrounding the disgraced late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein broadened on Tuesday after the New York Times published a trove of previously unseen letters to Epstein from numerous powerful figures as well as unseen photographs from inside his Manhattan mansion.

The letters, written to Epstein by a number of high-profile individuals, were reportedly compiled as a birthday gift for Epstein’s 63rd birthday in 2016. Their publication comes amid intense speculation around Donald Trump’s ties to Epstein, who was found dead in a New York jail in 2019 and had long cultivated a celebrity social circle of the rich and powerful.