Musical history is littered with cases like the failed $100m suit against the singer, and they risk stifling pop music

Leave Ed Sheeran alone. Four words I never expected to write, but we live in very strange times.

Cards on the table: I’m no fan of his music, but that’s neither here nor there when it comes to making sense of the recently concluded epic battle over alleged copyright infringement. To catch you up to speed: on 20 June 2014, Sheeran released his second studio album X, a worldwide chart-topper. On 24 September 2014, he released the third single from it, Thinking Out Loud, a standard love song about vowing eternal devotion, which was another worldwide chart-topper. In between, that July, BBC Radio 1Xtra announced its Power List of the most important figures in black and urban music, which, to much derision, placed the very white Sheeran at the top . This was nothing new: Sheeran had already received four nominations for a Mobo Award. And, at least according to the owners of Marvin Gaye’s 1973 bedroom ballad Let’s Get It On, Thinking Out Loud was indeed music of black origin.

Simon Price is a music journalist and author

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A summer of photography gets under way in the capital, featuring more than 80 contemporary and historical exhibitions

PhotoEspaña , Spain’s premier festival of photography, has opened in Madrid and other locations across the country including Barcelona, Santander and Zaragoza. The capital is hosting more than 80 contemporary and historical exhibitions in a range of venues that include the grounds of the Royal Palace, the Prado, a former water tower and an old sawmill.

Top left: Adelita: She Was Not Only Brave She Was Beautiful, 2023. Top right: Adelita: I Would Follow Her by Ground and Sea, 2023. Above: Toward a History of African American Women on New Spain’s Far Northern Frontier, 2023. Photographs: Ayana V Jackson/Mariane Ibrahim.

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It’s the penultimate episode of the Brink’s-Mat series, which concludes on Monday. Plus, things are about to get explosive in The Handmaid’s Tale. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC One

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Thirty years after the last film in The Naked Gun crime-spoof comedy franchise, we're finally getting a new installment, The Naked Gun , described as a "legacy sequel." And it's Liam Neeson stepping into Leslie Nielsen's fumbling shoes, playing that character's son. Judging by the official trailer, Neeson is up to the task, showcasing his screwball comedy chops.

(Some spoilers for the first three films in the franchise below.)

The original Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! debuted in 1988, with Leslie Nielsen starring as Detective Frank Drebin, trying to foil an assassination attempt on Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to the US. It proved successful enough to launch two sequels. Naked Gun 2-1/2: The Smell of Fear (1991) found Drebin battling an evil plan to kidnap a prominent nuclear scientist. Naked Gun 33-1/3: The Final Insult (1994) found Drebin coming out of retirement and going undercover to take down a crime syndicate planning to blow up the Academy Awards.

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Palazzo Maffei in Verona contacts police after visitors cause Van Gogh’s Chair to buckle while posing for photos

An Italian museum has contacted the police after two clumsy tourists almost wrecked a work of art while posing for photos.

Video footage released by Palazzo Maffei in Verona showed the hapless pair photographing each other pretending to sit on a crystal-covered chair made by the artist Nicola Bolla – described by the museum as an “extremely fragile” work.

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In Pushers, the comedian and actor plays a disabled woman from Yorkshire who turns to crime after her benefits are cut. She talks about beating trolls, ‘inhumane’ Labour – and her love of gravy

‘No,” says Rosie Jones with a laugh. “I have never done any drug-related illegal activity, believe it or not. But I respect your attempt to try to get me to reveal I am an underground drug-dealer. Sorry – not the world I live in!”

We’re having this conversation because Pushers, the comedian and actor’s new series about a disabled woman who turns to drug-dealing when her benefits are stopped, kicks off this week on Channel 4. Jones wrote the script and stars as the main character, Emily. How much of it is influenced by her own life? There are, undoubtedly, similarities. “From the very beginning,” Jones says, referring to when she originally came up with the idea, back in 2018, “we knew my character would be northern, working class and disabled.” That was important for two reasons: firstly, Jones’s favourite sitcoms growing up all featured “gritty” northern characters; and secondly, those sitcoms lacked any representation of disability.

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From John Lennon’s takedown of Paul McCartney to the Libertines’ Can’t Stand Me Now, songs by straight men about falling out with their friends were strangely romantic to me

When I was a teenager, in the late 00s in central Scotland, being gay was something I experienced as painful made me feel overwrought. This didn’t match the depiction of gayness I encountered in mainstream culture at the time, which was mostly very cheerful. Almost all of the gay men on my radar were comedians – figures such as Graham Norton and Alan Carr, both of whom I found funny and still admire today, but who were too easy-going and unpretentious to satisfy my desire to see myself as a tortured poet.

When I got to university, I found the representation I was looking for – solemn and beautiful – in writers such as Edmund White and James Baldwin, but earlier in my teenage years I had to make do with what was available: romanticising being gay through songs about straight men falling out with their platonic friends.

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The Man’s Best Friend image has reopened a debate: sex-positive feminism or soft porn for the male gaze?

Please join me for a quick game of “is this sex-positive feminism or just a lazy repackaging of the patriarchy”? Today’s protagonist is Sabrina Carpenter, a pop star whose music videos have got a Brooklyn priest demoted and might have played a small role in getting the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, indicted .

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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Police received nearly 700 false ‘collision’ 999 calls from Leicestershire heavy metal event last year

When hundreds of 999 calls came in from fans at the Download festival two years ago, the emergency services must have thought a disaster was unfolding at the three-day heavy metal gig in Leicestershire.

In fact, the calls were made automatically from smartwatches and other devices worn by fans because “the tech assumed that people in moshpits had been in a collision”, according to Leicestershire police.

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