Movie Week saw Delta Goodrem top the leaderboard, with Lacey Turner and Graeme “Dogfather” Hall just behind. But which box office flop will suffer this year’s first elimination?

Roll the traditional movie-themed VT. A Top Gun spoof this time. I feel the need. The need for speed.

Salt or sugar your popcorn. Switch your phones to silent. Pop open that “sharing” box of Maltesers. We’re about to go live to Elstree Studios…

Learning to be one human among many has always been a little lonely and discombobulating. But young people around the world are lonelier than ever. Why?

In September, a Reddit user identifying themselves as a 25-year-old man turned to the r/ForeverAlone subreddit with a question: How do you deal with touch starvation? “It’s becoming obvious to me that I’ll probably be alone forever,” he wrote. He used to be worried about missing out on sex, but now he just misses hugs. Cuddles.

“I don’t have many friends and none with that kind of physical relationship. I don’t really hug family either anymore. Some days, I feel so desperate for a hug with someone I love.”

No, I don’t want to go for a girl walk before my girl dinner with my girl mates: I am a grown woman who walks and eats and votes – and, patriarchy, I am on to you

This morning, after waking up with my girl cats, I made myself a cup of girl coffee then got stuck into some girl work. I took a break to lift some girl weights, then sent some more girl emails. Finally, after my girl dinner, it was time to get some sleep ahead of another long, hard day of being a girl.

I know what you’re thinking: why is this woman so insistent on gendering her unremarkable activities, and infantilising herself when she is clearly an adult? It’s a fair question. Since the pandemic, when “hot girl walks” followed Megan Thee Stallion’s 2019 song Hot Girl Summer to become one of the first big TikTok trends, this framing has become dismayingly ubiquitous, in person and online.

Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist

He’s the titan of TV who revived a flatlined Doctor Who and turned British queer life into jaw-dropping drama. But the screenwriter’s groundbreaking writing has sometimes made him a target of hate – from homophobes and Whovians alike

• ‘Goodbye Whoniverse. God, that was fun!’: Read an exclusive extract from Davies’s memoir

Russell T Davies is a man who prefers to look on the bright side. That time he was gay-bashed by a gang of bus conductors? “People have been beaten up far worse than me, that was just a bit of a thumping in the street.” When the production schedule of his dystopian drama Years and Years forced him back to work within days of his husband’s death? “Writing was a nice escape.” Even a story about his “tough” father branding him “yesterday’s man” after his initial departure as showrunner on Doctor Who concludes with a cheerful: “I knew I wasn’t.” It’s easy to see how he’s earned a reputation as the most affable man in TV, if not the world. So why has he taken to keeping a kitchen knife by his front door, “ready to use”?

“I’m called a paedophile and a groomer online by people like [Father Ted creator and anti-trans activist] Graham Linehan, and now people believe what they read. People believe it when they’re told the Earth is flat,” he says. His support for trans rights has resulted in years of death threats and “groomer” smears, which he used to brush off. “But the online world is becoming the real world. People have worked out my address, and one person turned up at my house. If you believe a paedophile lives here, it’s not the maddest thing in the world to come and get me. I’ve been saying for years that our rights are paper-thin, and here we are. What scares me is that I can’t see an end to it. Nothing is going to unseat these tech barons – it will require some sort of revolution to stop them. So for the first time in history, hatred is being monetised by an algorithm.”

As the university and local police defend their treatment of the alleged perpetrators, women decry a familiar story

Student safety advocates in the US call the start of the fall semester at universities “the red zone”. Fraternities, sororities and off-campus bars throw parties welcoming students back to school. It’s supposed to be fun, but it can also be dangerous: more than 50% of sexual assaults that occur at colleges happen during that six- to 10-week period.

It was mid-October of 2024, during the red zone and just before a deluge of Halloween celebrations, when, a former Cornell University student says, she was gang-raped by a group of fraternity brothers. Recent attention on these allegations sparked widespread outrage this week, reviving a contentious national debate about how authorities respond to allegations of sexual assault on US college campuses.

Green party debate over the motion ‘Zionism is racism’ comes amid renewed arguments over the meaning and history of a contested term

Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green party, has said he is an anti-Zionist. As his party conference prepares to debate a motion that “Zionism is racism”, what precisely is Zionism and what is the history of the claim that it is racist?

Exclusive: Shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith told party members last year he had discussed making further savings if they win next election

The Conservatives are planning to make sweeping cuts beyond the £47bn announced last year if they win the next election, according to leaked comments by the shadow chancellor.

Speaking last year when he was shadow business secretary, Andrew Griffith told Conservative members he and fellow shadow cabinet ministers had discussed making further cuts in “every part of government”.

David Robinson joins other insiders in urging industry to take more care over rapidly developing technology

A safety leader at OpenAI has quit the company, warning that its culture was broken and that AI firms were not “being nearly careful enough” about developing the technology.

David Robinson, who led the writing of safety reports that accompanied the ChatGPT developer’s product releases, explained his resignation in an essay headlined, “I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken”.

Mariann Budde gained national attention for calling on US president to consider immigrants and LGBTQ+ people

Rev Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington DC who gained national attention when she called on Donald Trump to “have mercy” on the country’s immigrants and LGBTQ+ community after his second inauguration, is resigning.

Budde shared in her resignation letter that she will be leaving her post on 3 June 2028 after the consecration and ordination of the new diocesan bishop.

Frank Strada leaving position as state launches independent investigation into what went wrong

Tennessee’s top prison official is stepping down in the aftermath of the failed execution of death row prisoner Christa Pike, the state’s governor Bill Lee announced Saturday.

Frank Strada, the department of correction commissioner, will leave his position later in October as the state launches an independent investigation into what went wrong during Wednesday’s botched execution of Pike, according to Lee.