This drama about dancers could have been as fun as Fame in tutus. Instead, it is a jarring, cringe-inducing mess. Wait till you see Simon Callow as an evil billionaire!

At first, Étoile looks as if it’s shaping up to be Fame in pointe shoes. One character even knowingly quotes the “This is where you start paying, in sweat” speech. This would be fine – great, even, because who didn’t love the quintessential 80s series about the high-energy kids from New York City’s High School of the Performing Legwarmers? The problem is that, as the new venture from Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs Maisel creators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino progresses, it doesn’t seem to be sure what it is. Apart from Whimsical with a capital W, an attitude that rarely works out well for anyone.

The setup is simple. Two dance companies – Le Ballet National in Paris and the Metropolitan Ballet Theater in New York City – are struggling after Covid and assorted other modern pressures such as anti-elitist attitudes and everybody’s terrible attention spans. So what if they swapped their top dancers and choreographers and launched a huge publicity campaign about it so everyone abandoned YouTube and became interested in ballet instead?

Mark Cohen’s photographs of his daily walks in New York show the world viewed from the height of a child – revealing fresh threats, thrills and perspectives

The horrifying planning bill, which rips up environmental protections, was drafted with CEOs in mind. We know because Keir Starmer told us

Those of us who try to defend wildlife are horribly familiar with bad laws. But we’ve never seen anything like this. The government’s planning and infrastructure bill is the worst assault on England’s ecosystems in living memory. It erases decades of environmental protections , including legislation we inherited from the EU, which even the Tories promised to uphold.

The rules defending wildlife and habitats from unscrupulous developers are weak enough already , which is partly why, as Labour reminded us in its manifesto , Britain is “one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world”. But this bill will make it much, much worse.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

The UK’s first national trail was established to help secure a right to roam. To mark its anniversary, our writer takes on a particularly wild section

High on the ridges of the Pennines, somewhere between the waters of Malham Tarn in the Yorkshire Dales and Kirk Yetholm in the Scottish Borders, a 31-year-old woman stands amid a group of mainly male walkers. She’s wearing bell-bottom jeans, a fitted long-sleeve top and an Alice band to keep her hair out of her face in the prevailing westerly wind. Her name is Joyce Neville and the year is 1952. She’s in the middle of a walk along a proposed national trail – the Pennine Way

Joyce had seen an advert for this self-described “Pioneer Walk” in the Sunday newspapers a few months earlier. It was placed by the writer and campaigner Tom Stephenson who was requesting “accomplished walkers, fit and over 18” to take part in a 15-day hike on the “long green trail” he was suggesting be created in Britain (inspired by the US’s 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail). Few women wore jeans back then, according to Joyce’s notes (which were passed on to me by Paddy Dillon, author of Cicerone’s Walking the Pennine Way guidebook), and the whole trip cost just £25.

Booming fintech company reveals ‘Karma’ initiative to improve working culture as its profits more than double

Revolut has been tracking staff behaviour, granting or docking points on an internal “Karma” system that is feeding into the UK bank’s decisions on bonus payouts.

The practice was detailed in Revolut’s annual report, which showed that profits had more than doubled last year, jumping 148% to £1bn in 2024. That increase was due to a rise in subscriptions, and revenues from its wealth and crypto trading divisions.

Gilmour, Waters, Wright and Mason are space rock whippets in the burning Italian sun in this outrageously indulgent yet vivid and beguiling music documentary

Here they are: Pink Floyd in 1971, amazingly young, amazingly thin, like four space-rock whippets standing mysteriously on their hind legs in the burning Italian sun. Dave Gilmour, Roger Waters, Richard Wright and Nick Mason are performing “live at Pompeii” in this mesmerically peculiar and outrageously indulgent music documentary from film-maker Adrian Maben, now on rerelease over half a century later, available on freakily large Imax screens undreamt of in the 70s. The music and the atmosphere are an irresistible fan-madeleine for those who can remember referring to them solemnly as “the Floyd” (ahem).

The band are shown performing live in Pompeii’s ancient Roman amphitheatre in the late afternoon, but not to an audience as you might assume, but weirdly and almost haughtily alone. The banks of amplifiers are pounding out the music just to the ancient stones and pillars and to the film crew facing them (and to the crew filming them from behind), who like most of the band are shown shirtless in the sweating heat. (No one worried about sunscreen in 1971.) Maben’s vision was avowedly inspired by his experience as a young traveller searching frantically for a lost passport in this very amphitheatre, as well as by Wilhelm Jensen’s novella Gradiva , much admired by Freud, in which a German archaeologist in Pompeii has a sunstricken hallucinatory glimpse of a woman who lived thousands of years before.

India has reportedly summoned the top diplomat from Pakistan’s embassy to give notice that all defence advisers in its mission are persona non grata

India has summoned Pakistan’s top diplomat in New Delhi, local media reported on Thursday, a day after it announced measures to downgrade ties with Islamabad over a deadly militant attack in Kashmir .

A day after suspected militants killed 26 men at a tourist destination in Kashmir – in the worst attack on civilians in the country in nearly two decades – Indian foreign secretary Vikram Misri said there was cross-border involvement in the attack and that New Delhi would suspend a six-decade old river-sharing treaty, as well as close the only land crossing between the neighbours.

Victims include fans rushing to buy tickets at well over face value, data collected by Lloyds Banking Group suggests

Oasis fans have collectively lost more than £2m to scams since tickets for its reunion tour went on sale last year, a major bank has estimated.

Lloyds Banking Group based the calculation on the volume of fraud reports made by its own customers. Oasis fans make up more than half (56%) of all reported concert ticket scams so far this year, according to Lloyds’ data, losing £436 on average.

Expectations that the Fed will cut short-term interest rates and falling consumer confidence could indicate what is ahead

Imagine you are sailing a ship through dense fog, looking out for land. Your lookout spots species of birds typically found offshore. It now seems likely that you are approaching land, but it is impossible to know for sure until you see the coastline. If a US recession is land, the “birds” are already swooping into view. But these sightings offer no guarantees of what lies ahead, only probabilities.

An inverted yield curve, when the long-term interest rate falls to or below the short-term rate, is commonly considered to be a predictor of recession. The 10-year bond rate did fall below the three-month Treasury rate in March, although the two are now at about the same level. In any case, the yield curve does not actually tell us much. It simply reflects financial market expectations that the US Federal Reserve might cut short-term interest rates in the future, which in turn reflects expectations that economic activity might falter.