From tales of giant tortoises trampling tents to almost getting shot, this is a relentlessly entertaining documentary about one of David Attenborough’s greatest pieces of TV

Life on Earth has a good claim for the top spot in any list of the best British TV shows of all time. A giant leap forward from previous wildlife programmes, it gave us the David Attenborough epic as we now know it: every expansive, expensive, dazzlingly informative BBC nature series since has used a template that Life on Earth created. It’s a classic, a landmark, a totem of the creative power the Beeb once had. It’s now 50 years since it went into production, and it’s Attenborough’s 100th birthday this week. As TV anniversaries go, this is a weighty one.

You might worry that a retrospective film about Life on Earth could be an hour of solemn awe and hushed reverence. What you actually get from Making Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure is a relentlessly entertaining cavalcade of top-drawer anecdotes, more like the sort of gossipy celebration that might commemorate the making of Jaws or Star Wars. Victoria Bobin’s rollicking film is the story of a giant pop-culture moment, a gang of mates remembering how they sensed conditions were right to create a blockbuster masterpiece – if they were willing to flirt with failure and even death to get there.

Insiders portray defense secretary as increasingly isolated after officers with impeccable reputations forced out

Since Donald Trump’s first term, they have been viewed comfortingly as the “adults in the room,” a last line of defense against the impulsive whims of a president with access to the nuclear codes.

Now – after an unprecedented wave of firings that has been compared by some to Stalin’s purges – the Pentagon top brass no longer seem like such a reliable bulwark.

Jamie Oliver’s head of restaurants is optimistic about new recipe of smaller site, slimmed-down menu and no burgers

When Jamie’s Italian crashed and burned in 2019, with the company in £83m of debt and causing 1,000 job losses, no one imagined the celebrity chef would try again.

But seven years later, Jamie Oliver has opened a flagship site under the same name in Leicester Square in central London, and believes he has a new recipe for success: a smaller restaurant with a slimmed-down menu, which features cheaper cuts of meat and no burgers.

During dark times, we must stand by our Jewish neighbours as generations of Londoners have done before us

• Sadiq Khan is the mayor of London

Jewish people are living in fear – a fear that has been building for years but has become acute in recent weeks. It now seeps into every part of daily life: the school run, a walk down the high street, a meal in a restaurant, attending synagogue on Shabbat.

Jewish friends and colleagues have spoken to me about how they now find themselves looking over their shoulder in public and worrying about their children wearing religious symbols. This is heartbreaking. It is utterly unacceptable that Jewish people are having to live like this.

Sadiq Khan is the mayor of London

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Island’s tourism industry been hit hard by severe US pressure – but some say foreigners should still visit

Leslie Simon and Marc Bender had arrived in Havana for a 10-day holiday, despite their president’s repeated threats of military action against Cuba.

The two retired union lawyers from Los Angeles flew in via Miami sporting badges reading “ICE OUT!” and shared a somewhat negative opinion of the US’s past.

Can a sentence affect the course of your life? Five authors reveal the interactions that transformed the way they saw themselves – and the world

When I was 14, I had to start a new school. I wasn’t great at starting new schools, even though I had done so quite a few times – once for my dad’s work, once because I wasn’t fitting in at my primary school and once because my parents didn’t like the teachers. Of course, 14 is possibly the most awkward of all the ages to start a new anything. Anyway, it was halfway through the first term at the new school in Newark, Nottinghamshire, and I was taken aside by my history teacher, Mr Philips, at the end of a lesson. He didn’t like me very much. To be fair, I was probably hard to like, from a teacher’s perspective. I had trouble concentrating, I stared out of windows, I clowned around. However, it is difficult to explain the shock to my self-conscious teenage soul when he told me, “I think it would be a good idea for you to join a special needs class.” Now, for context, the year was 1989, and in my state comprehensive at that time the idea of being “special needs” was akin to being given a leprosy bell or being marked with a cross for the plague. It was a binary system. You were either “normal” or you were “special needs”. To make matters worse, I was told that another teacher – my art teacher – had come to a similar assessment.

Downing Street begins fightback against predictions of imminent challenge to Keir Starmer

Labour MPs are calling for a close to the “endless drama” of leadership speculation, as Downing Street begins a fightback against predictions of an imminent challenge to Keir Starmer.

Some backbenchers warned that repeated briefings about how and when the prime minister could be toppled were putting off voters, who similarly had disliked the Conservatives’ repeated shuffling of leaders when in power.

Exclusive: Biometrics commissioners say face-scanning not as effective as claimed and new laws needed to regulate use

• How does live facial recognition work and how many police forces use it?

• Guilty until proven innocent: shoppers falsely identified by facial recognition

Britain’s biometrics watchdogs have warned that national oversight of AI-powered face scanning to catch criminals is lagging far behind the technology’s rapid growth.

With the Metropolitan police almost doubling the number of faces they scan in London over the past 12 months and a rising use of the technology by retailers in the UK, Prof William Webster, the biometrics commissioner for England and Wales, said the “slow pace of legislation was trying to catch up with the real world” and “the horse had gone before the cart”.

An independent audit of the Met’s use of facial recognition technology (FRT) has been indefinitely postponed after the police requested delays.

Polling shows 57% of people believe the systems are “another step towards turning the UK into a surveillance society”.

A whistleblower claimed shop-based face-scanning systems had sometimes been misused by shop or security staff “maliciously” adding members of the public to watchlists.

Spokesperson calls former New York City mayor ‘a fighter’ but does not say cause of his hospitalization

Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City, has been hospitalised and is in a “critical but stable condition”, his spokesperson said on Sunday evening.

Ted Goodman, the spokesperson, posted on social media: “Mayor Giuliani is a fighter who has faced every challenge in his life with unwavering strength, and he’s fighting with that same level of strength as we speak. We do ask that you join us in prayer for America’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani.”

Dutch husband and wife and third unidentified person reported to have died, with three further people taken ill

A suspected outbreak of the rare hantavirus infection on a cruise ship in the Atlantic Ocean killed three people – including an elderly married couple – and sickened at least three others, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and South Africa’s health department said on Sunday.

The WHO said an investigation was under way but that at least one case of hantavirus had been confirmed. One of the patients was in intensive care in a South African hospital, the UN’s health agency said in a statement to the Associated Press, and the WHO was working with authorities to evacuate two others with symptoms from the ship.