Towering over a low-income area of Chicago, and wrapped in a speech that’s hard to decipher, this controversial monolith feels like a menacing sci-fi HQ. Is it a monument – or a mausoleum?

The Egyptians had their pyramids. The Anglo-Saxons had their barrows. And the Americans have their presidential libraries – the chief difference being that the leaders the US venerates are usually still alive at the opening.

Lacking a royal family or a state religion, the US presidency has swelled to fill the void, transforming over the decades into a national personality cult, complete with its own secular temples to these powerful men. The latest pharaonic edifice is about to open on Chicago’s south side, where it looms on the skyline as a towering totem to the 44th president, Barack Obama. He might have seemed humble in office, but in his post-presidential, Netflix-producing afterlife, Obama has erected the largest, costliest and most audacious complex of them all. Behold the $850m Obamalisk – or, as it sometimes feels morbidly like, the Obamausoleum.

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Pork is an underrated barbecue meat, and this taste of Thailand pairs perfectly with a fiery mango salad

I tend to start grilling food the second I catch a glimpse of the sun. After all, even if the temperature drops or the clouds threaten, I can always resort to my griddle pan indoors. Pork is an underrated meat for the barbecue, and a slow-cooked shoulder or loin is a wonderful thing. When I’m short on time, however, I often go for mince: it’s reasonably priced and has enough fat for a deliciously juicy skewer. Here, I’ve infused it with Thai seasonings that take me back to the heady experience of eating grilled street food in Bangkok. A feisty mango salad and some rice on the side are all you need for a feast.

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Austerity has benefitted bond traders but impoverished British society and led to the rise of populism. Is it right that we carry on adhering to their interests?

Should politics always be dominated by economics? Should questions about how governments and voters pay for things – whether by earnings, taxes or borrowing – be settled before we consider the wider consequences?

In an anxious capitalist democracy such as Britain, with a modern history of patchy economic success and intermittent but recurring crises over public debt, the answer may seem obvious: governments and voters always need to behave in ways that fit with the market forces that shape our economy.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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Since April 2023, Sudan’s women and girls have been subjected to systematic rape and sexual torture. Specialised support and justice for them is key to the country’s recovery and future

In a village in South Darfur, I met a young girl about my daughter’s age – six or seven years old – who touched my hand and said: “I was taken by the Janjaweed.” This was more than 20 years ago, during the first Darfur crisis, and at the time, that was the term women and girls used as we struggled to articulate the scale of violence against civilians, especially sexual violence.

I saw my daughter in that little girl, and I saw myself in her mother. It was my first encounter with conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) in Sudan.

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Hogshaw, Derbyshire: We’re up to 27 spotted orchids in our garden, and every one is a miracle

When we moved to this house, we didn’t need the encouragement of No Mow May – the ecological campaign advocating restraint in the garden. Our old lawnmower was designed to tackle your average handkerchief and leaving nine-tenths of the new place uncut was a matter of necessity as much as self-control.

The highlight of last year’s non-labouring efforts addressed directly the whole meaning of no-mow gardening. Who knows what lies hidden in a uniform shorn expanse, unless it is allowed to express itself? A slender pink flower among the green swathe turned out to be a spotted orchid, the commonest, most widespread of our 54 UK species. With this as a search image, I eventually climbed to 16 spikes last year. That alone felt like a triumph.

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In less than a decade, surrounded by screens, I lost my ability to read some of the best books ever written. But, inspired by the Guardian’s 100 best novels list, I was determined to get it back

It is a privilege to be surrounded by books. My parents hail from the literary working class, a subsection of society that believes great works lead to a richer life. Reading for them was an inverted form of class snobbery. My dad could read as well as anyone. He’d prove it on package holidays, sitting on the balcony the entire time, head bowed, cigarette in hand, flicking through the pages of Jane Austen or Herman Melville. The only difference between my old man and an old Etonian was the drudgery of employment. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: work is the bane of the reading class.

As for my own reading life, my mum wore me down, shouting “Read a book!” any time I dared say I was bored. I soon capitulated. I was nudged towards the classics, defined by Italo Calvino as books people say they should “reread” because they’ve either read them or do not want to admit they have not. In my late teens and 20s, I worked my way through the greats. I fell in love with a woman called George and thought Middlemarch was magic. I was a smart lad, prone to bad decisions, unsure of my place in the world. It is perhaps no surprise that I identified with Dorothea.

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Son and stepson of Cameroon’s Paul Biya are seen as main contenders to be vice-president

Since taking power in Cameroon 44 years ago, Paul Biya has done without a vice-president. In 1972, a decade before he first won the presidency, the role had been scrapped as the central African country transitioned from a federal to unitary state.

Now, at the age of 93, people close to the world’s oldest head of state appear to have had a change of heart, and – according to their critics – they have one thing on their mind: the creation of a dynastic system that would transfer power to his son or his stepson.

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For tens of thousands of years, these Palaeolithic artworks were unseen. When they were rediscovered, onlookers marvelled at their vivid beauty. One of the world’s leading experts took me up close

The aurochs, the mammoth and the steppe bison are long extinct, but their painted likenesses still look relatively fresh across the walls and roofs of Altamira. Or so said Diego Garate Maidagan, who is one of the very few humans allowed to enter that exalted cave in northern Spain.

I met Garate last summer in a small Basque village called Gautegiz Arteaga. A professor of prehistory and Palaeolithic art at the University of Cantabria, he told me he’d been inside Altamira as recently as the week before, furthering his lifelong investigations of the prep work, tools and methodologies developed by early Homo sapiens painters.

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In Scandinavia and the Baltic region, citizens are signing up to do their bit as non-combatants. Other Nato allies should take heed

Wars, these days, target digital infrastructure as well as military installations. The very fact that large chunks of daily life can be knocked out without a single shot being fired is the reason Russia seems interested in doing exactly that. It is, for example, already dangerously interfering with aviation and shipping around the Baltic Sea.

Imagine the impact of larger, more successful cyber-attacks on our modern lives. Ordinary citizens would have to survive without texting, banking apps, public transportation and most modern office work. The government, though, would need to keep operating. In an offline world, the logistics of running a country would require many people. Some of these people, Sweden suggests, could ride motorcycles.

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It takes a brave person to write about a gang of 20-somethings navigating life and love in neighbouring Manhattan apartments. Sadly this is not an instant classic – it’s a slice of schmaltzy pudding flopping on to a plate

More than three decades after Friends launched, it is still a brave writer who puts out a show about a gaggle of twentysomethings learning to navigate life and love in a brace of unfeasibly palatial apartments in Manhattan. Brave or, perhaps, foolish.

The new sitcom from Mindy Kaling (who began her writing and acting career on the US version of The Office and most recently created high school comedy Never Have I Ever and university sitcom The Sex Lives of College Girls) gives us five rather than six friends split between two apartments across a hallway. Two of them are people of colour rather than maintaining the Kauffman-Cranes’ now infamously melanin-free approach to city life, but the keen eye can still trace the ancestry. The ear may have more trouble. Kaling’s scripts try hard but rarely shine, let alone dazzle as the Friends’ dialogue almost unfailingly did.

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Karen Holmes lost a son to cancer, then her home in Yorkshire to a fire; the house is now refurbished but its meaning has gone

Karen Holmes is sitting in her newly renovated lounge in a house she has lived in for 28 years, but she cannot live here now. She cannot leave, either.

The house looks good. Better than good, people tell her. There are new walls, new floors, new windows. French doors where there used to be a window.

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Social

We onderbreken de wekelijkse cyclus voor een belanghebbende nieuwsupdate in het Slavische theater: de Russen hebben vannacht met een van de grootste aanvallen sinds het begin van de oorlog dood & verderf gezaaid in Oekraïne. Na een nacht knallen zeker 9 doden en 105 gewonden, zo communiceert het ontvangende land. In de hoofdstad Kiev zijn meerdere burgerflats geraakt: een gebouw van 9 verdiepingen deels ingestort, een gebouw van 24 verdiepingen geraakt met brand op de 4de en 5de etage, een gebouw van 15 verdiepingen geraakt, enzovoorts. Op beeld is te zien hoe de raketten komen binnenwaaien. Volgens burgemeester Klitschko liggen er her en der mogelijk nog mensen onder het puin. Burgers hebben weer de hele nacht in het metrostation gehangen. Zal hier wel weer een Rode Lijn-demonstratie worden, nietwaar?

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DEN HAAG (ANP) - Het dagelijks leven in Nederland is in mei 3,5 procent duurder geworden dan een jaar eerder, meldt het Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS) op basis van een snelle raming. De inflatie is daarmee verder gestegen ten opzichte van de 2,8 procent in april.

Door de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten, die eind februari begon, zijn de olie- en gasprijzen in de afgelopen drie maanden hard gestegen. Economen vrezen dat bij een langdurig conflict in het Midden-Oosten de inflatie verder kan oplopen door hogere energieprijzen. In februari, voor het conflict, bedroeg de inflatie nog 2,4 procent.

De prijzen van energie en motorbrandstoffen stegen in mei met 9,9 procent, na een stijging van 7,9 procent in april. Voedingsmiddelen, dranken en tabak werden 0,4 procent duurder, na een prijsstijging van 1,5 procent in april. De prijzen in de dienstensector stegen met 4,7 procent, na een toename van 3,6 procent een maand eerder. Industriële goederen werden 0,7 procent duurder, na een stijging van 0,3 procent in april.

Seizoensinvloeden

In vergelijking met april stegen de prijzen voor consumenten in mei met 0,1 procent. Het CBS plaatst daar wel een kanttekening bij. De tijdelijke seizoensinvloeden kunnen hier groot zijn, bijvoorbeeld bij kleding die in de uitverkoop wordt gedaan. Die afprijzingen zijn geen blijvende prijsdaling.

Op basis van de Europese meetmethode bedroeg de inflatie in Nederland vorige maand 3,4 procent, tegen 2,5 procent in april. Bij de binnen de Europese Unie afgesproken methode wordt geen rekening gehouden met de kosten voor het wonen in de eigen woning. Bij de Nederlandse methode tellen die wel mee.

Eurozone

Later in de ochtend komt het Europese statistiekbureau Eurostat met voorlopige cijfers over de consumentenprijzen in de eurozone in mei. In april liep de inflatie in het eurogebied op naar 3 procent, van 2,6 procent in maart. In februari, voor de Iranoorlog, bedroeg de inflatie nog 1,9 procent.

Economen verwachten dat de inflatie in de eurozone in mei verder is gestegen tot 3,2 procent. De inflatie ligt ruim boven de doelstelling van de Europese Centrale Bank (ECB). Die mikt erop dat de prijzen rond de 2 procent stijgen. De ECB vergadert volgende week over de rente en zal dan naar verwachting de leenkosten verhogen om de inflatie te bestrijden.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Steeds meer gemeenten ontwikkelen eigen hitteplannen, met maatregelen om kwetsbare mensen te beschermen tegen de gevolgen van hoge temperaturen. Het Rode Kruis en het Klimaatverbond becijferen dat het aantal gemeenten dat een hitteplan heeft, of aan het maken is, afgelopen jaar is gestegen van 90 naar 128. Ze noemen dat "een stap in de goede richting", maar vinden dat iedere gemeente zo'n plan zou moeten hebben.

"De zomers in Nederland worden steeds heter en het is belangrijk dat mensen, vooral degenen met een kwetsbare gezondheid of mensen die buiten werken, goed zijn beschermd tijdens periodes van hitte", stellen het Rode Kruis en het Klimaatverbond, een vereniging van onder meer gemeenten en provincies die zich bezighoudt met klimaatbeleid.

Onder kwetsbare groepen vallen bijvoorbeeld ouderen, kleine kinderen, zwangeren, mensen met fysieke of mentale aandoeningen en dak- en thuislozen. "Vooral voor deze groepen kan hitte leiden tot ernstige gezondheidsklachten of zelfs fataal zijn. Dit wordt nog vaak onderschat", stellen de organisaties.

Permanente maatregelen

"Het is belangrijk dat gemeenten in tijden van extreme hitte er zijn voor mensen in kwetsbare posities, zoals alleenstaande ouderen", zegt Rode Kruis-directeur Harm Goossens. Hij voegt eraan toe dat gemeenten ook permanente maatregelen kunnen nemen, zoals het creëren van koele plekken of het aanleggen van vaste watertappunten, die alle inwoners kunnen helpen af te koelen.

In totaal telt Nederland 342 gemeenten, waarvan er dus 214 nog geen lokaal hitteplan hebben of momenteel ontwikkelen. Het Rode Kruis en het Klimaatverbond hopen dat zij alsnog zullen volgen.

Iedere werknemer in Nederland heeft recht op ten minste het wettelijk minimumloon. Er zijn echter situaties waarin niet vastgesteld kan worden of dit loon ook daadwerkelijk is betaald.  Dit komt met name bij arbeidsmigranten voor. Er komt daarom een wet die regelt dat werknemers in dat geval alsnog het minimumloon krijgen. Ook is het voortaan de werkgever die dan moet bewijzen dat het minimumloon wel is betaald. In plaats van dat de werknemer of de Arbeidsinspectie moet bewijzen dat er sprake is van onderbetaling. Dit schrijft minister Vijlbrief van Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid in een brief aan de Tweede Kamer.

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