Billionaire appears to have been asked to pressure friend to return to China to help pursue out-of-favour official

The Chinese regime enlisted Jack Ma, the billionaire co-founder of Alibaba, in an intimidation campaign to press a businessman to help in the purge of a top official, documents seen by the Guardian suggest.

The businessman, who can be named only as “H” for fear of reprisals against his family still in China, faced a series of threats from the Chinese state, in an attempt to get him to return home from France, where he was living. They included a barrage of phone calls, the arrest of his sister, and the issuing of a red notice, an international alert, through Interpol.

Exclusive: Documents indicate government gave embassy contact details while arms factory protest was investigated

The UK government shared contact details of counter-terrorism police and prosecutors with the Israeli embassy during an investigation into protests at an arms factory, official documents suggest, raising concerns about foreign interference.

An email was sent on 9 September last year by the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) to Daniela Grudsky Ekstein, Israel’s deputy ambassador to the UK, with the subject matter “CPS/SO15 [Crown Prosecution Service/counterterrorism police] contact details”.

Cash-strapped councils are running out of money to deal with rising numbers of people without permanent homes

• ‘The room has started cracking’: concern at condition of stopgap housing in England

Across England, more families than ever are being squeezed into temporary accommodation – hotels, bed and breakfasts and short-let flats that were never intended to be permanent homes.

Cash-strapped councils are running out of options to deal with the rising number of people housed in temporary lodgings, while some private landlords are pocketing millions of pounds.

In a bar in Bali, Ashley King was given a lethal drink. A day later, she realised she was going blind. She thought all her dreams were over – but the reality proved very different

The last night of Ashley King’s holiday shouldn’t have been especially memorable. It was 30 August 2011, and she and her best friend, Krista, went out barhopping in the tourist town of Kuta in southern Bali, as they had done many times before. King and Krista are from Calgary in Canada, and had decided to spend a year travelling after their high school graduation. They planned to explore the island of Bali, but King’s credit cards were stolen and Krista ran out of money, so they were stuck in Kuta, a party district.

In one of the swankier bars on the strip, King was given a fruity vodka cocktail in a reusable plastic bottle, so she could dance without spilling it. She was drunk, she says, but not notably so. After nursing their hangovers the next day, she and Krista went to the airport at midnight: King was travelling to New Zealand for the rugby World Cup, and Krista to Australia.

Exclusive: Cost to taxpayer expected to jump to £3.9bn with 206,000 children in temporary accommodation, says Shelter

More than 200,000 children will be living in short-term emergency accommodation in England to keep them off the streets by the end of this parliament, according to projections by the housing charity Shelter.

The analysis shows that 206,000 children will be living in temporary accommodation by 2029 – a 26% increase over five years – while the cost to the taxpayer is set to rise by 71% to £3.9bn a year.

Artists created an AI ‘minister of latecomers’, who encourages people to compensate for years lost, and a tool calculating exactly how late to turn up

Changes to France’s pension system have been a hot potato for French presidents for decades, bringing disgruntled people on to the streets, leading to civil unrest and nationwide strikes that have brought the country to a standstill.

Two years ago, in the face of bitter opposition, Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, passed a law raising the general retirement age from 62 to 64 and the issue appeared to have been put to bed.

More than 130 women and children who fled Haiti to seek healthcare rounded up in hospitals and sent back

Pregnant women and new mothers are being rounded up in hospitals in the Dominican Republic and deported back to Haiti as part of what observers say is an openly cruel, racist and misogynist government policy.

More than 130 Haitian women and children were removed on the first day of a new crackdown on undocumented migrants last week targeting the Caribbean country’s main public hospitals. Dominican authorities said 48 were pregnant, 39 were new mothers and 48 were children . Local media reported that one woman was deported while in labour .

Eurocentric assumptions and bullying resource-grabs are justified causes of outrage in the global south

Donald Trump has disrupted the global economy with his disastrous tariff wars and appears hell-bent on gutting transatlantic relations. I am hoping he has also unwittingly injected new life into the EU’s struggle to wean itself off overreliance on Washington.

A vast network of trade and aid agreements connects the EU with more than 70 countries. The union could become an important standalone global actor and even thrive in a multipolar world. But it must first shed its Eurocentric worldviews, complacent policymaking and double standards .

Shada Islam is a Brussels-based commentator on EU affairs. She runs New Horizons Project, a strategy, analysis and advisory company

The US playwright and anglophile behind much-revived comedies has a flair for crime and is following a crowd-pleasing Murder on the Orient Express with Death on the Nile

If you ever face a quiz question about the most performed theatre writers in the world, likely to have a play on somewhere every day, William Shakespeare, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Agatha Christie are all reliable answers but a fourth may surprise you: Ken Ludwig. He also has intriguing connections with the other three.

The popularity that made the American wealthy enough to have donated £1m to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is partly due – apart from his own much-revived comedies, Lend Me a Tenor (1986) and Moon Over Buffalo (1995) – to Christie. Ludwig’s 2017 adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express has had hundreds of productions and is currently touring the UK. We meet when he is in London for a workshop on a second Hercule Poirot adaptation, Death on the Nile, which premieres in September.