His on-pitch triumphs (and off-pitch scandals), her turn as Wagatha Christie … for years, the football power couple have made headlines, despite efforts to keep their lives private. So why are they now about to reveal all on screen?

“If you’d said to me 10 years ago, ‘You’re going to be doing a TV show about the family’, I would have said, ‘No chance’,” Wayne Rooney says. Few would have disagreed. After all, he and his wife Coleen had spent their adult lifetime running away from the public gaze. And not very successfully, at that.

Wayne, a wonderful footballer with the strength of a bull and agility of an acrobat, was often back-page news. He scored 253 goals for Manchester United (overtaking Bobby Charlton’s record), 53 for England (the record until Harry Kane surpassed him in 2023), is still England’s youngest goal scorer (17 years and 317 days), won five Premier League titles, was twice young player of the year and was voted player of the year by both his peers and football journalists in 2009/10.

Moment of reckoning for ‘Mr Nice Guy’ of music, who embraced Macklemore’s political cred only for pro-Palestine rapper to be dropped under pressure from billionaire

Ed Sheeran has long been known as the “Mr Nice Guy” of music. His is an unthreatening kind of pop stardom; he looks and talks like the bloke who might be standing behind you in a pub, rather than someone selling out stadiums. He champions other artists, he celebrates different cultures. His songs are about love, heartbreak and friendship. People get engaged at his concerts.

But this week, one of the most successful musicians in the world faced the biggest controversy of his career, and found himself dragged into exactly the kind of political row he has spent his career avoiding.

A wave of tourists and visitors has changed the character of the Seoul neighbourhood I live in and helped create a place that no longer feels like home

In 2021, I was asked by Time Out to nominate a Seoul neighbourhood for its annual list of the world’s coolest. I didn’t think much of it and put forward the one I live in, Jongno 3-ga, in the old centre of the city. Somehow, it got ranked third.

This week, the same area was named the coolest neighbourhood in the world. I should be pleased, but instead, I’m devastated.

David (left), 34, a children’s doctor, meets Dec, 31, a culture and sex writer

What were you hoping for?
A sweet-hearted madman who would make me belly laugh.

Spend time on the ground and you see how high the stakes are for next month’s contest – for Israelis and Palestinians alike

Candidates always say it, but this time it’s true. When Israel goes to the polls on 27 October, it really will be the most important election in the country’s history – and not just for Israelis. I saw that for myself this last week, in a visit that served as a sharp reminder of both what is at stake – and the role of those watching from afar.

More than one voter I spoke to voiced the fear that, if the coalition headed by Benjamin Netanyahu is returned to power next month, 27 October will not merely be Israel’s most important election: it will be its last. They were not referring to the absence of democracy in the occupied territory of the West Bank – which we’ll come to – but rather to Israel’s internationally recognised, pre-1967 borders: what you might call Israel-proper. There, the last four years have seen a sustained assault on the machinery of liberal democracy by the most rightwing government since Israel’s establishment in 1948 – a committed, focused attempt to remove the checks and restraints on its own power, installing instead a kind of elective dictatorship.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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The domestic goddess is about to be let loose in the Bake Off tent. Nigella Lawson and Paul Hollywood spill the beans about bonding over dirty martinis, ‘Professor Precision’ – and why they call themselves the Salty Gang

Like the Cleopatra of cake, new Great British Bake Off judge Nigella Lawson reclines on a chaise longue throughout our interview, gently fanning herself. Fellow judge Paul Hollywood chuckles from a nearby armchair. “She’d sit like this between takes in the tent,” he says indulgently. “Reading a book and sipping a coffee while someone fed her grapes.” “Peeled grapes,” specifies Lawson with a grin.

After Prue Leith stepped down from soggy bottom-spotting duties in January – on the unarguable basis that “I’m 86, for goodness sake!” – there was widespread jubilation when Lawson was announced as her replacement. The arrival of the domestic goddess has created serious buzz around Bake Off’s upcoming series. A contest that was at risk of growing stale has become essential viewing again, thanks to the velvet-voiced, spatula-licking doyenne of culinary TV.

Exclusive: Official UK security assessment found Microsoft cloud platform storing files was at potential risk from hostile hackers

Vast troves of highly sensitive police data are lying on Microsoft cloud platforms which an official UK security assessment deemed to be vulnerable to “compromise” by foreign actors and the US government, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

The files include criminal records, victim statements, internal emails and sensitive information held by more than 40 police forces across the UK.

The agreement would allow the US to expand its military presence, while Denmark and Greenland say it preserves their sovereignty and right to self-determination

Donald Trump announced on Friday that the US had struck an Arctic security pact with the leaders of Denmark and Greenland, after threatening for much of his second term to annex the semi-autonomous Danish territory by force.

The full scope of the deal Trump described as “very important, historic, and special” was not immediately clear. But soon after his announcement in a post on Truth Social, the leaders of Denmark and Greenland issued statements indicating the deal would be signed by the three governments on the sidelines of the United Nations general assembly in New York City next week.

Exclusive: In her first media interview since fleeing Russia, Rita Flores describes her three years of being run by the FSB

First came the blackmail and death threats to secure cooperation, then came a series of tasks, each more sinister than the last: to inform on fellow activists, to elicit personal information from protest-minded artists and – eventually – to help with a plot to kidnap and murder a Kremlin enemy.

That is how Rita Flores, a 29-year-old Russian artist, activist and former member of the Pussy Riot collective, described her recruitment and three-year handling by officers from Russia’s FSB security service, a cooperation she only broke when she fled the country last month.

President has overseen an unprecedented restriction of access for major news media since start of second term

• US politics live – latest updates

In his latest attack on the US constitution’s first amendment and the press, Donald Trump abruptly announced that he is banning outlets CNN, MS Now and Politico from the White House over their coverage.

In a post on his Truth Social platform on Friday, the US president said he was expelling the news outlets “effective immediately” over what he called their “constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” and threatened that bans for others outlets could follow.