The new Data (Use and Access) Act, which criminalises intimate image abuse, is a huge victory won fast in a space where progress is often glacially slow

For Jodie*, watching the conviction of her best friend, and knowing she helped secure it, felt at first like a kind of victory. It was certainly more than most survivors of deepfake image-based abuse could expect.

They had met as students and bonded over their shared love of music. In the years since graduation, he’d also become her support system, the friend she reached for each time she learned that her images and personal details had been posted online without her consent. Jodie’s pictures, along with her real name and correct bio, were used on many platforms for fake dating profiles, then adverts for sex work, then posted on to Reddit and other online forums with invitations to deepfake them into pornography. The results ended up on porn sites. All this continued for almost two years, until Jodie finally worked out who was doing it — her best friend – identified more of his victims, compiled 60 pages of evidence, and presented it to police. She had to try two police stations, having been told at the first that no crime had been committed. Ultimately he admitted to 15 charges of “sending messages that were grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing nature” and received a 20-week prison sentence, suspended for two years.

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food and the basic they scrimp on? Gok Wan talks Christmas shopping, regretful buys and coleslaw in the Filter’s new column

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Gok Wan is a multi-award-winning UK television presenter, designer, stylist, in-demand DJ, cook and author. His first TV series for Channel 4, How to Look Good Naked, catapulted him into the public eye and paved the way for a further seven series.

He presents weekly on ITV’s This Morning and is the co-host of Magic FM Breakfast alongside Harriet Scott. Gok is an ambassador for JD Williams and the voice of two animated characters in Luo Bao Bei, which airs globally.

Aitana Bonmatí has been voted the best female player on the planet by our panel of 127 experts ahead of Mariona Caldentey and Alessia Russo

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Touted as a cure for everything from wrinkles to autism, the treatment has been hyped by Robert F Kennedy Jr and various celebrities. Experts say it needs to be regulated

• Warning: this article contains distressing content

It was the kind of cold, damp morning that makes it hard to get out of bed, much less get a child out the door. The sun had not even risen when five-year-old Thomas Cooper and his mother, Annie Cooper, arrived for an appointment on 31 January at the Oxford Center in Troy, a northern suburb of Detroit, Michigan.

Thomas was an exuberant child with a button nose and pinchable cheeks – a little kid who loved running fast, playing Minecraft and watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, according to a GoFundMe set up by his family. He had just received money in a special red envelope for lunar new year, and he planned to spend it later that day with his little brother. But first, he was going to receive hyperbaric oxygen therapy for his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and sleep apnea.

Terry Ball – renowned shoe salesman, friend to former mafiosi – has vowed to spend his remaining years finding ways to cheat authorities he feels have cheated him. His greatest ruse? A tax-dodging snail empire

It is a drizzly October afternoon and I am sitting in a rural Lancashire pub drinking pints of Moretti with London’s leading snail farmer and a convicted member of the Naples mafia. We’re discussing the best way to stop a mollusc orgy.

The farmer, a 79-year-old former shoe salesman called Terry Ball who has made and lost multiple fortunes, has been cheerfully telling me in great detail for several hours about how he was inspired by former Conservative minister Michael Gove to use snails to cheat local councils out of tens of millions of pounds in taxes.

The imposing concrete buildings that defined British postwar architecture held a vision of the future – but many fell into disrepair. A new book finds the finest examples

Reform leader claims he has had letters of support over racism allegations, but that those letters also described some of his comments as offensive

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, said that in Essex county council elections were postponed. He said district councils were being replaced with a new “pretty amorphous unitary authority”. Because of that, the area also needed “a clear elected figure”, a mayor, he said.

Fahnbulleh said the government wanted to create strong, unitary councils. He said that would be a difficult concept for Reform UK to understand, “given the absolute shambles that we’re seeing in the councils that they control”.

The government had a moral and a legal obligation to honour its side of the bargain

‘Overwhelming’ evidence that Russian state planned attack on ex-spy Sergei Skripal that led to Sturgess’s death in 2018, says chair

Vladimir Putin is “morally responsible” for the death of a British woman killed after she sprayed herself with a nerve agent smuggled into the UK by Russian agents to assassinate a former spy, an inquiry has concluded.

Lord Hughes, the chair of the inquiry, said the assassination attempt on the former spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in March 2018 must have been authorised by the Russian president.

Lord Evans of Watford and other directors of investment firm deny claims made in lawsuits they say are ‘meritless’

A peer suspended by the House of Lords for breaking lobbying rules is now facing claims that he received at least $1m (£760,000) from an allegedly corrupt deal.

Lord Evans of Watford, a longtime Labour peer, was found last week by the House of Lords watchdog to have broken its rules four times after undercover reporting by the Guardian, and will be suspended for five months.

• Second Test, day one: England 325-9

• Starc has 6-71 but Root and Archer add 61* for 10th wicket

It was one of the most intense opening days to a Test match in recent memory. The Gabba was like a cauldron, the air as thick as soup, and with the pink ball zipping around for Mitchell Starc as he continued his bulldozing start to the series, the pressure on England felt relentless.

And yet at 8.38pm local time all this melted away as Joe Root tickled Scott Boland fine for four to seal his 40th Test century and – far more notably – his first on Australian soil at the 30th time of asking. Root insisted this tour was never about addressing the gap in his otherwise stellar CV but, even with a cheeky shrug upon doing so, the sense of relief was palpable.