Presence at Cenotaph and Festival of Remembrance mark her first consecutive days of engagements since start of year

The Princess of Wales will attend two remembrance events this weekend, Buckingham Palace has said, as she gradually returns to public duties after her treatment for cancer.

Catherine will join the Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph and the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall alongside King Charles and the Prince of Wales to honour the nation’s war dead.

Delhi high court told government notification prohibiting import of 1988 novel ‘untraceable’

Writing to the then Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, in October 1988, Salman Rushdie lamented that Indian democracy had become “a laughing stock” after the government placed a ban on importing his contentious novel The Satanic Verses.

Now 36 years later, the author may have the last laugh as the ban looks set to be lifted after the Indian government failed to locate the original order.

Malvern Theatres, Great Malvern
The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment combine virtuosity with a practised nonchalance to soothe our age’s anxieties

On a day that seemed to herald a new age of anxiety, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment offered consolation in the form of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. Before embarking on their series entitled Bach, the Universe and Everything, they are taking the Brandenburgs on tour and while the Malvern didn’t quite get the full complement of six – No 1 was missing – this was still a huge lift to the spirits, Bach’s essential rhythmic vitality somehow representing resilience.

The Malvern theatres, once a ballroom, is not the obvious place for baroque repertoire, but with a wooden panelled screen in front of the black curtains allowing the acoustic to work well enough, the various combinations of soloists – each concerto different in instrumentation with the harpsichord at the core – and the OAE’s directness of communication, with each other and with the audience, created a warm rapport.

At times it felt like the three parties thought they were governing three completely different countries

Germany’s coalition government, which collapsed in dramatic fashion on Wednesday night after almost three years in power, was always an odd throuple.

A pact between three parties with three quite different histories and different priorities, it was made up of two outfits that have traditionally located themselves on the left of the political spectrum – the Social Democratic party (SPD) and the Greens – and one, the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), that had until then been a loyal junior partner to the conservatives.

Susan McGowan took two doses of tirzepatide, under Mounjaro brand, before she died in North Lanarkshire

A weight-loss drug recently approved for use on the NHS contributed to the death of a 58-year-old nurse from North Lanarkshire, according to a report.

Susan McGowan took two low-dose injections of tirzepatide, under the Mounjaro brand, over the space of a fortnight before she died on 4 September, the BBC reported .

The virtuoso jazz guitarist has worked with a string of legends, winning 20 Grammys in the process. He speaks on his beginnings as a jazz trumpeter, and still striving to improve at 70

Pat Metheny is pretty much everywhere. For the past four decades, the 70-year-old guitarist has been crisscrossing the globe, playing an average of 150 shows a year. Instantly recognisable thanks to his wild mop of hair and the custom three-necked, 42-string guitar he wields on stage, Metheny has released more than 50 albums, won 20 Grammys and collaborated with David Bowie and Joni Mitchell, as well as free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman and bass legend Jaco Pastorius. When we speak, he is 160 dates into a solo tour and fighting with patchy wifi in a hotel in Nancy, France, that aptly leaves an image of a guitar with hundreds of strings on screen rather than his signature plumage.

While he meticulously keeps written records of each show to improve on his performance, Metheny is widely considered a master improviser and virtuoso, pioneering an intricate, harmonic style that is as dextrous as it is melodic. Between shows and travel as his current tour kicked off, Metheny recorded 13 solo compositions that make up his latest release, MoonDial. Spanning the intimacy of Chick Corea cover You’re Everything to a downtempo reworking of his 2012 composition This Belongs to You and the instantly recognisable melody of the Beatles’ Here, There and Everywhere, it feels like Metheny at his most tenderly introspective.

The Democrats must learn to speak to voters who don’t believe in the politics of old and aren’t interested in returning to it

The ever-splenetic HL Mencken once wrote that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard”. He was no liberal, but it’s a line many Democrats today would be taken with. On Tuesday, the first wave of election postmortems have lamented, the American people took the full measure of Donald Trump ⁠– oaf, cheat, bigot and fascist ⁠– and re-elected him under no illusions, in full cognizance of what another Trump term would mean for the country.

One can quibble with this just a bit: there’s a lot that emerged over the course of this campaign that most voters probably didn’t know much about, from a plan to invade Mexico that Trump may well have forgotten himself to late breaking news on the depth of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Still, frustrated Democrats are directionally correct here on the whole. Trump won this election fairly, squarely and soundly as a well-known quantity ⁠– a former president and the most widely discussed man in the world, who will return to the White House in his 10th year at the center of American life.

Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist

We’re now into the Persephone Days, with fewer than 10 hours of sunlight – a time when rocket loses some flavour, but kale and carrots grow sweeter

For those of us in the northern hemisphere winter has arrived. And perhaps more importantly for the plant world, we are also entering into our Persephone Days.

This phrase (named after the Greek goddess of spring, who was abducted by Hades and whose mother, Demeter, goddess of agriculture, withheld plant growth until she was returned) describes the period of time when there are fewer than 10 hours of sunlight in the day (mid-November to early January in the UK, depending on where you are in the country). It’s the point at which most plants cease to grow.

The party, increasingly divorced from workers, leaned too much on an activist base instead of a voting base

I turned on MSNBC after the election results came in and this, verbatim, was the commentary I heard: “This really was a historic, flawlessly run campaign. She had Queen Latifah [who] never endorses anyone! She had every prominent celebrity voice, she had the Taylor Swifties , she had the Beyhive. You could not run a better campaign in that short period of time.” Democrats , it seems, are already blaming their defeat this week on a host of contingent factors and not on their own shortcomings.

It’s, of course, true that inflation has hurt incumbents across the world. But that doesn’t mean that there was nothing that Joe Biden could have done to address the problem. He could have rolled out anti-price-gouging measures early, pushed taxes on corporate super profits and more. Through well-designed legislation and the right messaging, inflation could have been both mitigated and explained. That’s what president Andrés Manuel López Obrador offered his supporters in Mexico and his governing coalition enjoyed commanding support.