Sotheby’s sale of Piprahwa gems, excavated after burial with Buddha’s remains, denounced as perpetuating colonial violence

Buddhist academics and monastic leaders have condemned an auction of ancient Indian gem relics which they said were widely considered to be imbued with the presence of the Buddha.

The auction of the Piprahwa gems will take place in Hong Kong next week. Sotheby’s listing describes them as being “of unparalleled religious, archaeological and historical importance” and many Buddhists considered them to be corporeal remains , which had been desecrated by a British colonial landowner.

Their tech may have been primitive, but for 80s schoolchildren of a certain kind they had a glamour to equal any modern iPhone

Over the last couple of weeks I have been tidying our attic, and while the general aim has been to prevent its contents from collapsing through the ceiling, I have a side-mission. My most valued possession when I was twelve was a Casio GD-8 Car Race watch – a digital timepiece that included a built-in racing game on its tiny monochrome LCD display. Two big buttons on the front let you steer left and right to avoid incoming vehicles and your aim was to stay alive as long as possible. I lost count of the number of times it was confiscated by teachers at my school. I used to lend it to the hardest boys in the year, thereby guaranteeing me protection against bullies. As a socially inept nerd, this was invaluable to my survival. I’m pretty sure I still have the watch somewhere, and my determination to find it has been augmented by a recent discovery: these things are valuable now.

Casio started making digital watches in the mid-1970s, using technology it had developed in the calculator market to compete on price, but as the decade drew to a close, the market became saturated and the company started to explore new ways to entice buyers. Speaking to Polygon in 2015 , Yuichi Masuda, senior executive managing officer and Casio board member, explained, “Casio went back to its original thinking when it first entered the watch market; that is, ‘a watch is not a mere tool to tell the time.’ We started talking about a multifunction [approach], time display plus other things, such as telephone number memory and music alarms.”

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Ideas of migration and self-discovery inspire the latest album from Hong and her imaginative band, entwined with harmonies and delicate effects

Drummer/composer Sun-Mi Hong didn’t get to where she is now without a struggle for independence. She was born in Incheon, South Korea, to a conservative family and earmarked for a teacher’s life, but her teenage dream was to become a drummer. At 19, as the only woman in a not-overly respectful percussion class, she got wind of the Amsterdam Conservatorium’s jazz course, moved to Europe and met her band of skilful soulmates. Her evolving music leans towards a European chamber-jazzy sound with occasional American hints of Wayne Shorter, Paul Motian, or Ambrose Akinmusire. The Dutch jazz scene has feted her: the latest of its accolades, the Paul Acket award for an “extraordinary contribution to jazz”, will be presented to Hong at the big-time North Sea jazz festival this July.

This album continues her series inspired by ideas of migration and self-discovery. The band’s signature sound of closely entwining brass and woodwind harmonies open the two-part title track: tenor saxophonist Nicolò Ricci and Scottish trumpeter Alistair Payne are improvisers of elegant shape and balance, and delicate thematic tone-painters, too. Quiet abstraction unveils the second section, before canny slow-burn pianist Chaerin Im’s piano ostinato and Hong’s surging percussion ignite a crescendo: Hong often favours free-swinging Elvin Jones-like grooves in which the core of the beat roams all over the kit. Soft horn sighs, cymbal flickers, and Italian bassist Alessandro Fongaro’s fast flutters colour the plaintive Escapism, Toddler’s Eye is a springy folk-dance and the suite A Never-Wilting Petal confirms this imaginative band’s talents for balancing storytelling with on-the-fly musical adventures.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

A professor’s quest to make sense of her eco-anxiety takes her from her ancestral village in China to Cop 26 and beyond

Eco-anxiety is not an official medical diagnosis, but everyone knows what it means. The American Psychological Association defines it as “the chronic fear of environmental cataclysm that comes from observing the seemingly irrevocable impact of climate change and the associated concern for one’s future and that of next generations”. Fear of the future, an ache for the past, the present awash with disquiet: into this turmoil Alice Mah’s new book appears like a little red boat, keeping hope afloat against all odds.

Mah is a professor of urban and environmental studies at the University of Glasgow as well as an activist passionately concerned with pollution, ecological breakdown and climate justice. Her previous books, Petrochemical Planet and Plastic Unlimited , catalogued the catastrophic impacts of the petrochemical industry on the natural and human world. In Red Pockets, the trauma is personal.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge gives us an oddball love letter to the charming creatures, while Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman jump on their motorbikes and head out on the open road for another grand tour

Phoebe Waller-Bridge ’s post-Fleabag career has been somewhat eccentric and this two-part documentary, which she narrates and executive produces, is another left turn. It’s essentially an oddball love letter to the octopus – with its powers of transformation, bizarre mating habits and general air of underwater alien strangeness. But the series soon transcends its ostensible subject matter and becomes an exploration of some of the people who have devoted their lives to the celebration, study and preservation of these charismatic creatures. These include environmentalists, scientists ... and 30 Rock star Tracy Morgan, who is charmingly and volubly obsessed with them.
Prime Video, from Thursday 8 May

Heavy metal’s godfathers are preparing a star-studded farewell – but will Ozzy Osbourne, after ‘horrendous’ surgery, be well enough to perform? In their first interview for two decades, the original lineup talk about their hopes and fears for rock’s ultimate gig

On a video call from his home in Los Angeles, Ozzy Osbourne is struggling to recall the exact details of recent years, ones he calls “the worst of my life”. “How many surgeries have I had?” he wonders aloud. “I’ve got more fucking metal in me than a scrap merchants.”

The trouble began in earnest in early 2019, when he was midway through what his wife and manager Sharon had firmly told him was his farewell tour. For one thing, both of them had been working constantly since their teens; for another, Ozzy had been diagnosed with a form of Parkinson’s disease, after years of insisting an intermittent numbness in one of his legs was the result of a drinking binge (or rather its aftermath, during which he says he didn’t move for two days). The tour was going well, but then he caught pneumonia, twice. “And then I had an infection. I’m still on antibiotics to be honest with you, I had a thing put in the vein in my arm to feed in IV shots of them.” Six years later, “I’ve still got it on – it comes out this week, with a bit of luck. Antibiotics knock the hell out of you.”

Krapp’s Last Tape, in which an old man rummages through recordings of his younger self, is back for two star-powered revivals. This haunting play invites actors and audiences to reconnect with their past

I am a Krapp collector. Since my late teens I’ve returned time and again to Samuel Beckett’s brief but monumental one-act play in which a purple-nosed, “wearish old man” spools through reels of memoir recorded each year on his birthday. Although performed by a single actor, Krapp’s Last Tape is not quite a monologue. It becomes a kind of dialogue between the 69-year-old Krapp and his recorded 39-year-old self, who in turn reflects on how he behaved in his late 20s.

It is, then, a tale of three Krapps. I’ve sailed past two of those ages: next stop, 69! Beckett’s play has endured partly because it bottles the nature of regret – it asks us all to consider what could have happened if we had made other choices in our lives, how things might have turned out differently. Two current productions – starring Gary Oldman at York Theatre Royal and Stephen Rea at the Barbican in London – not only invite audiences to consider such questions but also give the actors a rare opportunity to reconnect with their past.

Guz Khan’s last dive into Birmingham’s criminal underbelly is both hard-hitting drama and as delightfully puerile as ever. You won’t stop laughing … even if you can’t fully follow along

Do not come to the new series of Man Like Mobeen cold. What started out in 2017 as a relatively straightforward sitcom about three twentysomething friends who kept inadvertently grazing the criminal underbelly of their corner of inner-city Birmingham is now a violent, convoluted gangster thriller – one whose fifth and final season involves a promised assassination, the Turkish mafia, an Irish mobster, a prison doctor who is really the evil daughter of a drug kingpin, a kidnapped sister, millions in unlaundered cash and a tea shop. The action will be practically incomprehensible to the uninitiated – and pretty hard to follow even for the faithful.

Is it worth starting from the beginning? That depends. On the one hand, Man Like Mobeen does feel like an objectively valuable comic enterprise. Creator and star Guz Khan – who left his teaching job after going viral on YouTube as Mobeen, a mouthy Brummie Muslim and the prototype for this sitcom’s titular protagonist (one video saw him outraged at an apparently racist dinosaur in 2015’s Jurassic World) – is a natural clown, and uses his funny bones to power a series that immerses us in a community rarely seen on screen. As a depiction of a specific kind of British Muslim experience – working class, Midlands based – Man Like Mobeen is refreshingly rambunctious and gratifyingly uncompromising. All good sitcoms have their own vernacular; this one has the self-assurance to literally speak a different language: characters tend to slip into Urdu and Punjabi without translation. Meanwhile, racism and Islamophobia are turned into running jokes by combining irreverence with a tireless dedication to rubbishing stereotypes.