Once a year, Dutch kids, parents and teachers take part in a walking festival, heading out for four nights in a single week to explore their neighbourhoods, exercise and make friends. It’s a tradition that seems to be genuinely transformative

I shouldn’t have been surprised that the rain didn’t stop the Dutch kids. All day it had been thunderstorming, and the forecast didn’t look so great for the evening. And yet at 5pm, hundreds of kids started arriving – many by bike – with their parents to Amsterdam’s Westerpark, a beloved city park that caters to a more residential area of the capital. Today, it functions as a starting point: volunteers coordinate registration, and groups of children gather, decked out in raincoats and eager to embark on either a 5km or a 10km excursion around the surrounding neighbourhoods.

It’s the second night of Avondvierdaagse (which literally means “four-day evening walk”) , organised by a group of neighbourhood volunteers. It’s not a race, but if children complete every night, they get medals, a bouquet of flowers and, if they’re lucky, a lot of sweets. It’s not just Amsterdam; across villages, towns and cities in the Netherlands, hundreds of thousands of Dutch people are doing the same: every year, kids spend four evenings in early summer exploring their neighbourhoods with their school friends and parents as part of the Week van de Avond4daagse. Some places had celebrated earlier; others were walking the following week. A variation of the tradition has even made its way to Suriname, one of the Dutch former colonies. There are also four-day cycling and swimming events. According to the Royal Dutch Walking Association (KWbN), which helps coordinate the events, half a million people take part every year, in 700 locations across the country, powered by tens of thousands of volunteers.

I’ve met many hardcore, violent fans, but the hostage-negotiating, cocaine-smuggling, Marxist-Leninist Alessandro Casolari still stood out

I had heard the name Alessandro Casolari on and off for years. From 2016 onwards, when I was researching my book on Italy’s ultras – a cross between English football hooligans and Hells Angels – the nickname “Caso” kept coming up. In the late 80s and early 90s, he had led the ultras in Ferrara, whose football club is known as Spal.

A red-brick city in northern Italy between Bologna and Venice, Ferrara has always felt sidelined, languishing in a marshy land of fog and floods. I used to go there quite often, drawn by its festivals and famous writers and film directors. A few years ago, when I started writing another book, about the Po River, I hung out there again, but I never bumped into Caso.

This crunchy, spicy wonder has made a fortune for its Chinese creator – and inspired hundreds of British-Asian versions. Time to get tasting …

Walk down the specialist aisle in most British supermarkets and you will find a red jar with the kindly face of a middle-aged Chinese woman staring back at you. Branded Lao Gan Ma, meaning “old godmother”, these jars contain chilli crisp – a spicy, crunchy and moreish umami condiment that has made made hundreds of millions for Tao Huabi, the woman on the label. Doused over steaming dumplings, fried eggs, noodles and even ice-cream, Lao Gan Ma’s chilli crisp has become a social media sensation in recent years and has spawned a thriving cottage industry of independent chilli crisp producers in the UK.

“It’s such a convenient shortcut to flavour when you use it as a condiment,” says Fuchsia Dunlop, an expert in Chinese cuisine. “Every Asian cuisine has a form of chilli oil, but China and Lao Gan Ma invented chilli crisp and now the western world is more interested in authentic flavours, thanks partly to social media.” People, she says, want to have their own taste of that authenticity. “It’s far more exciting than a bottle of ketchup!”

The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, has announced a social media ban for under-16s, as part of an online safety drive that aims to go even further than the world’s first ban, introduced by Australia last year. Many parents have welcomed the proposals, but scientists have pointed to the lack of strong evidence for the efficacy of bans, and some campaigners have argued that the proposal allows social media companies to avoid making meaningful changes on their platforms. Ian Sample is joined by co-host Madeleine Finlay to explore what the evidence indicates about the harms of social media and the impact of banning it outright

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It fell to Robert Jenrick to announce his party’s plans to lift white British people from the bottom of the pile

Now is not a good time to be a white Brit born in this country. Nigel Farage is clear about this. So much so that he wrote a 6,000 word Substack piece about it at the weekend. Or rather someone did. Possibly an intern who had been told to channel their inner Nige.

Or maybe, if Matt Goodwin was involved, ChatGPT helped out. “Write me an essay in the style of an even more deranged Rupert Lowe.” Don’t hold back. Go for it. The UK is unrecognisable. Foreigners everywhere. It’s time that black and disabled people started paying reparations to white people. For all the benefits they have taken off us.

From thousands of lives lost to an economic shock likely to plunge millions into poverty, the world is paying dearly

It would be hard to find a human on Earth unaffected by the US-Israel war against Iran. Several thousand have been killed. Millions are paying more each day in steeper food prices or at the petrol pump, and as inflation eats away at the value of their earnings.

For many, the final bill has not yet come, but it will eventually. They will pay for the long-term damage caused by the biggest threat of all to the global economy: uncertainty.

G7 told ‘we will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes’, with Russia’s finance networks and shadow fleet targeted

Keir Starmer has vowed to “choke off” Russian revenue with further sanctions and to provide hundreds of millions of pounds worth of energy support for Ukraine, as he met world leaders in France for the G7.

After a torrid political week at home, the British prime minister sought to put himself on the front foot on the international stage at the meeting of the group of seven, which kicked off on Monday in the French spa town of Évian-les-Bains, on the shore of Lake Geneva.

US president says strait of Hormuz will be open from Friday but questions remain over waterway fees and Israeli breaches of ceasefire in Lebanon

• Tallying the global cost of the US-Israel war against Iran

Donald Trump has declared that the strait of Hormuz will be “completely open” from Friday, as western leaders gathering at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains battled to prevent the fragile US deal with Iran from almost immediately unravelling.

“The deal’s all signed. And the strait ⁠is already partially opened,” Trump said as he arrived at the summit in France, but Israeli breaches of the ceasefire in Lebanon and Iran’s claims about its right to charge fees in the crucial waterway revealed the agreement’s many loose ends.

Proscription of direct action group has led to more than 700 people being charged under Terrorism Act

Protesters arrested for allegedly supporting Palestine Action have expressed anger at the court of appeal’s decision that the ban on the direct action group was lawful.

On Monday, five judges overturned the high court’s February ruling that proscription was unlawful, meaning that more than 3,000 people who have been arrested under the Terrorism Act since proscription, more than 700 of whom have been charged, could now face prosecution.

Exclusive: Commons motion calls for code of practice to be blocked amid concerns over impact on transgender people

A number of Labour MPs are increasingly doubtful that the guidance on how organisations should implement the supreme court ruling on sex as it applies in the Equality Act is workable in the real world, with some predicting it will unleash a wave of competing legal claims.

A total of 135 MPs, 69 of them from Labour, have signed a Commons motion calling for the code of practice drafted by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, approved last month, to be blocked, primarily because of worries about its impact on transgender people.