He’d been waiting about a decade to make his latest dash for freedom, and he grasped the opportunity like a pro

A reader writes, asking how I can let my tortoise roam free in my back garden. She’d like to do the same with her adopted tortoise, but is worried it will escape.

I explain that my garden is bounded by high brick walls, safely sealing the tortoise in, but that I too am consumed by fear that he will escape. He’s very good at hiding, and this always strikes me as a strategy: wait until they think you’ve already gone, and their guard will drop.

Familia Torres has been making wine in Catalonia since 1870, but says it may have to move to higher altitudes in 30 years’ time

A leading European winemaker has warned it may have to abandon its ancestral lands in Catalonia in 30 years’ time because climate change could make traditional growing areas too dry and hot.

Familia Torres is already installing irrigation at its vineyards in Spain and California and is planting vines on land at higher altitudes as it tries to adapt to more extreme conditions.

The orthodontist’s strange mouth exercises are beloved by incels seeking a manlier shape – and a fast-growing TikTok trend in classrooms around the world. So why has he been struck off the dentists’ register?

In a two-storey house in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, Dr Mike Mew perches on an ergonomic kneeling chair in front of two vast computer monitors, a microphone and three dazzling studio lights mounted on a rig, a vision mixing console and a studio camera complete with Autocue. Behind him, on a white shelf, is an enormous plastic mouth with perfectly aligned teeth.

Among stacks of files on the shelves below the oversized mouth, there are board games, a crystal-making kit, a pottery craft set – unwelcome reminders that this is not actually a dental clinic but a family home. The toys will need to be covered up before Mew’s new plans can be put into action. “The final thing for me to do is to go to Ikea and buy some white boxes,” he tells me. “Then I can sit here and I can change the world.”

William, 24, a business development manager, meets Lucy, 25, a doctor

What were you hoping for?
An evening with someone fun, full of character and full of conversations.

After a week of bruising criticism, the PM will show what he really stands for when he signs a pivotal agreement with Brussels

Keir Starmer has had to grow a thicker skin over the past few years, but there are times when critics can still get under it. One such moment came this week, when he replied to a question about whether there was “any belief he holds which survives a week in Downing Street” by snapping back : “Yes, the belief that she talks rubbish.”

He probably knows it wasn’t a great response, not least because the MP who provoked this flash of tetchiness, Plaid Cymru’s Liz Saville Roberts, is far from being the most deserving recipient. By way of explanation, if not justification, it’s worth pointing out that Starmer’s emotions were already pretty raw this week after a suspected arson attack on his family home in north London. And he was also frustrated that his announcement of proposals for lowering immigration numbers had been interpreted as dancing to Nigel Farage’s divisive tune, or even a deliberate echo of the overtly racist one played by Enoch Powell half a century ago.

Tom Baldwin is a journalist and former senior adviser to the Labour party. He is the author of Keir Starmer: The Biography

Benito Skinner goes to college in Overcompensating and The Boss is at his Trump-lambasting best. Here’s the pick of this week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

Medications such as Ozempic have transformed obesity treatment and are now leading a healthcare revolution

Obesity was once medicine’s Cinderella subject with some questioning whether the condition should even be viewed as a biological disorder. But the arrival of a new class of appetite-suppressing drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy has transformed obesity treatment into the most scientifically exciting and commercially lucrative area of healthcare.

These drugs lead to dramatic weight loss, are shifting perceptions and, according to a series of results announced at the European Congress on Obesity (ECO) in Málaga this week, promise health benefits that extend far beyond weight management.

Sunday’s election could threaten the country’s place in Europe if Russia’s dark arts and historical amnesia win the day

Somewhere in my attic, among my rather extensive Polly Pocket and Barbie dolls collection, there’s a poster by the Romanian caricaturist Mihai Stănescu gathering dust. Truth be told it isn’t mine, it’s my mother’s. She passed it on to me a while ago and it spent most of my early adulthood taped to my bedroom door. On one line the poster reads “Before: EU – RO – PA”, with the RO dropping out. Beneath it: “After 22 December 1989 : EUROPA” with the RO restored: Romania finally a part of Europe again.

Stănescu was one of the few caricaturists who dared to make subversive work mocking the Ceaușescu regime. He was under constant surveillance but his drawings encapsulated the hope many harboured for a democratic Romania. A Romania turned westwards. This same hope sustained the 1989 revolution. One of the best known placards held up by protesters in December 1989 read: “ Copiii noștri vor fi liberi ”. (Our children will be free.)

The age of impunity is over for male violence against women, say campaigners after the actor was found guilty of sexual assault

When Gérard Depardieu, one of France’s biggest cinema stars, was placed on the sex offender register this week after being found guilty of sexually assaulting two women on a film set in 2021, it was a historic moment for the #MeToo movement in the country.

“It was a message to all men in power that they are answerable to the courts and can be convicted,” said Catherine Le Magueresse, who represented the European Association Against Violence Towards Women at Work (AVFT) at the trial. “The message is: watch out, the impunity is over.”