Latest updates: prime minister tells Nato conference UK will spend 2.5% of GDP on defence by 2030

• Truss defends plans to cut British army by nearly 10,000 troops

And in another interview Liz Truss refused to endorse Boris Johnsonas claim that atoxic masculinitya helped to explain Vladimir Putinas conduct and that he would not have invaded Ukraine if he were a woman. Asked if she agreed, she told Times Radio:

[Putin is] clearly is capable of very, very evil acts ... I donat pretend that I can conduct a psychological analysis on him, nor do I think itas helpful ...

I think that both women and men are capable of terrible and appalling acts.

All of Ukraine that has been invaded by Russia is illegally occupied. And, ultimately, the Russians need to be pushed out of all of that territory, and certainly what we shouldnat be doing as friends and allies [of Ukraine] ... is implying that there are any trade-offs or any bits of Ukrainian territory that could be traded away or compromised on.

It is realistic, and that is why we are supplying the extra lethal aid weare supplying.

Russian ministry of defence says withdrawal is goodwill gesture to facilitate grain exports, and asks that Ukraine demine its coastal waters

• Ukraine say they have pushed Russian forces from Snake Island
• Putin issues warning to Finland and Sweden after joining Nato
• Nato summit venue in Madrid serves aRussian salada
• At a glance: what we know on day 127 of the invasion

The UKas foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has said that one of the reasons that Russia was able to invade Ukraine was because of underspending on defence in Europe.

Appearing on Sky News, she said:

Iave been very clear that the entire free world, the western alliance, does need to focus more on deterrence. We need to focus more on defence. And what we know is prevention is better than cure.

The lesson that Putin learned from underspending on defence was that he could invade a sovereign nation, and we simply canat let our guard down again, we canat allow that to happen again.

I would say that we need a full range of capabilities to deal with the threats that we face now. Whether those are cyber threats, whether those are land-based threats, naval threats, and we have the balance right. But of course we need to continue to evolve, because weare seeing, you know, we never expected in our lifetimes to see this kind of war on in Europe.

Weave seen the systematic rape of women. Weave seen the attacking of civilians, including at the shopping centre this week. And what we need to make sure is not only are the Ukrainians successful in pushing Russia out of Ukraine, but also that people are held to account for these appalling crimes that have been committed.

Iave not met Vladimir Putin. I do not know the motivations for carrying out this appalling war. All I know is that we have to make it our absolute priority to stop this war, to push Vladimir Putin and the Russian troops out of Ukraine, otherwise we will live in a much less safe Europe.

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The Wimbledon debutant Gray looks to be growing into this a bit, holding serve confidently for 2-1 in the second set. Over on Court 17 Richard Gasquet is a set up against Mackenzie McDonald of the US, taking the opener 6-3.

Fritzas forehand is calling the shots here, and a lovely winner from the back of the court kickstarts the second set. Grayas got some magic in his locker though and executes a stunning deft drop shot while slipping on the grass, which helps him to a morale-boosting hold from 0-30 down.

Minister scraps plans to increase DfE control of academy trusts, derided as aridiculous attempt to centralise power in Whitehalla

• Politics latest a live

Ministers have announced a U-turn on key elements of the governmentas schools bill, scrapping or amending clauses that would have given the Department for Education (DfE) greater control over avirtually every aspecta of academy trusts in England.

The schools bill, launched by Nadhim Zahawi, has run into opposition from Conservative and crossbench peers for giving the education secretary a veto over appointments of school trustees, the power to rescind funding agreements and even determine the length of the school day within each trust.

Landline and broadband customers told to expect disruption as engineers, call centre and shop staff back action

BT staff have voted for their first national strike in 35 years, which is expected to affect customers across the country having broadband services installed or getting faults fixed.

The strike by BT engineers, call centre and shop staff represents the vast majority of its 58,000-strong frontline workforce, and the trade union organising the ballot has said that BT customers can expect disruption to services including repairs, having new phone and internet lines fitted or getting hold of support staff.

Reluctance to give details over handling of Meghan case is astep backwardsa for palace transparency, critics say

Buckingham Palaceas refusal to reveal recommendations made over its handling of bullying allegations against the Duchess of Sussex is a ahuge step backwardsa for palace transparency, critics have said.

Palace officials cited aconfidentialitya and the fact it said no public money was used for the review by an independent legal firm into the royal householdas handling of allegationsa denied by Meghan a that her behaviour left some staff traumatised.

Angharad Williamson, John Cole and a teenager murdered boy after he suffered months of violent abuse

A mother and stepfather have been jailed for life after being found guilty of the murder of five-year-old Logan Mwangi, who died after months of violent abuse and imprisonment in the adungeona of his small, dark bedroom.

Loganas mother, Angharad Williamson, was told she will serve at least 28 years before being considered for parole, while her partner, John Cole, will spend a minimum of 29 years in prison. A 14-year-old youth who was also convicted of Loganas murder was told he will be detained for at least 15 years.

aCourageousa former operators to share interim package amid continued fallout from faulty Horizon system

Former post office operators who helped to uncover the Horizon IT scandal are to receive APS19.5m compensation from the government.

The interim compensation package will be made available by ministers to the eligible members of a group representing postal workers who were the first to take legal action against the Post Office, taking the total compensation made to those wrongly accused of stealing money to about APS30m.

Court sides with Republican states as ruling represents landmark moment in rightwing effort to dismantle aregulatory statea

The US supreme court has sided with Republican-led states to in effect hobble the federal governmentas ability to tackle the climate crisis, in a ruling that will have profound implications for the governmentas overall regulatory power.

In a 6-3 decision that will seriously hinder Americaas ability to stave off disastrous global heating, the supreme court, which became dominated by rightwing justices under the Trump administration, has opted to support a case brought by West Virginia that demands the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) be limited in how it regulates planet-heating gases from the energy sector.

• Culture secretary thought Jonny Wilkinson won league prize
• RFL chief executive refuses to criticise MP over comment

Nadine Dorries, the secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, stunned a rugby league audience by confusing the 13-man game with the rival code.

Speaking in St Helens at the launch of a report into the social impact of the upcoming Rugby League World Cup, Dorries opened her address with a reference to Jonny Wilkinsonas match-winning drop goal for England in unionas 2003 Rugby World Cup.

Former F1 chief calls Russian president afirst-class persona in GMB interview and blames war on Zelenskiy

• Russia-Ukraine war: latest updates

Formula One has sought to distance itself from remarks made by its former chief executive Bernie Ecclestone, who said he would atake a bulleta for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and described him as aa first-class persona.

Ecclestone, who reportedly has been friends with Putin since the introduction of the Russian Grand Prix in 2014, said Russiaas invasion of Ukraine could have been avoided if the latteras president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, had done more.

Winning back vital Black Sea island could weaken any future Russia coastal land attack

• Russia-Ukraine war a live updates

Ukrainian forces have pushed Russian forces from Snake Island, a strategic Black Sea island off the southern coast near the city of Odesa.

Russia portrayed the pullout from Snake Island off the port city of Odesa as a agoodwill gesture.a Ukraineas military said the Russians fled the island in two speedboats following a barrage of Ukrainian artillery and missile strikes.

Hungarian leader was criticised by Xavier Bettel in 2021 for introducing homophobic law

The dozens of invitees were carefully seated along the lengthy table, flanked by columns fashioned out of BagnA"res marble and surrounded by paintings from Spainas Francisco de Goya.

As photos of the Nato dinner at Spainas royal palace filtered out, many were swift to spot what one Spanish news site described as the image of the summit: the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor OrbA!n, seated next to Gauthier Destenay, the first same-sex spouse of a leader of an EU member state.

Dish is staple in Spain but many restaurants have renamed it as a result of war in Ukraine

• Russia-Ukraine war a live updates

As Nato leaders gather in Madrid for a summit playing out in the shadow of Russiaas invasion of Ukraine, the spotlight has landed on a ubiquitous staple found in bars and restaurants across Spain: Russian salad.

International officials and journalists were bemused to find the salad a a combination of potatoes, mayonnaise and vegetables known as ensaladilla Rusa a being sold as apotatoes salad Russian stylea at the summit venue.

Last weekend, On Time festival brought together Kyivas music, art and craft communities to celebrate creativity a and vent the trauma of the Russian invasion

Nestled in a peaceful green dell, hidden beneath a glowing canopy of deciduous woodland, the morning sun shines over the old river port of Kyiv. Shafts of light pour into the courtyard of a bright-red, Soviet-era ribbon factory being artfully repurposed during a time of war.

For over a decade the 19th-century factory buildings on Nyzhnoiurkivska 31 in Podil district have been the go-to place in Kyiv for all-weekend raves and youth subcultures, welcomed by resident nightclubs Closer, Mezzanine and Otela. It all came crashing down when Russia invaded Ukraine and most of the people who worked and socialised here either left for somewhere safe to shelter, joined the army, or started volunteering to help with the war effort. But today is a new dawn for the ribbon factory, with On Time, the countryas first large-scale alternative music and arts event since the invasion five months ago.

Festivalgoers chat in the ribbon factoryas courtyard.

As they play Spursa stadium twice this weekend, we rate the best of the swaggering rock gods, from epic balladry to high-speed juggernauts

Recorded in 1986 and released a year later, this speed metal gem was released as the B-side of the 12in version of Itas So Easy/Mr Brownstone before being lost to antiquity for 31 years. When it resurfaced in 2018, it was still every bit the raspy-voiced hellraiser of yore. The incomprehensible rants, barked hook and ear-splitting solo all make this a slice of classic GnR.

Guardian readers tell their stories to mark the 50th anniversary of the first Pride event in the UK

When Richard French-Lowe first went to Pride in London in 1989, he was too afraid to join the march. As a civil servant and serving territorial army soldier, he kept his sexuality hidden because both organisations regarded gay men as a security risk.

But joining the party in Kennington Park, south London, after the march proved to be a transformative experience for French-Lowe, one of about 30 LGBTQ+ people and allies to respond to a Guardian callout about their memories of UK Pride events, 50 years on from the countryas first march.

Sheas a Labour supporter; he hasnat voted in years. Can a carer and a prison caseworker bond over Jeremy Corbyn, despite disagreeing about the EU?

Danny, 56, Pontypool

Occupation Prison, drug and alcohol caseworker

Episodes are now movie-length and the amount of major characters is out of control. Is it time to start thinking of the sci-fi epic as the new MCU?

The plot of the upcoming two-part Stranger Things finale remains a great mystery. Netflix isnat giving away a single detail; nor, for that matter, are the cast, production team or publicity department. But nature abhors a vacuum so, in lieu of any official details, I will tell you what I want from the season finale. And what I want is a bloodbath.

I mean it. I want the Red Wedding in an ironic period-era baseball cap. I want it to be a cross between the first part of Saving Private Ryan and the last part of The Wild Bunch. When the credits roll on episode nine, I want a maximum of four primary characters still alive.

National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh
William Burkeas skeleton looms over this gripping exhibition showcasing the spooky relics of scienceas thirst for anatomical knowledge a and the horrors this often unleashed

What are tiny corpses, each nestled inside a little wooden coffin, doing in an exhibition about the art and science of anatomy? They are, after all, crudely carved artefacts without any pretensions to medical accuracy. But these exhibits are part of one of the most notorious episodes in the history of anatomy, for they seem to have been made and buried outside Edinburgh as a folk art memorial to the victims of William Burke and William Hare.

Burke and Hare, this exhibition shows with clinical precision, were monsters produced by science. They killed 16 poor, marginalised people in just a few months to provide bodies for the cityas competitive anatomy teachers. Edinburgh was the capital of the Scottish Enlightenment, a centre of medical research and teaching renowned across Europe. One anatomy student at Edinburgh University in the early 1800s was Charles Darwin. His damning verdict on his teacher is recorded here: aDr Munro made his lectures on human anatomy as dull as he was himself, and the subject disgusted me.a

Hidden imports provide economic lifeline to Assad and funds for a Russian oligarch under EU sanctions

In January, a cargo ship flying the Honduran flag disappeared from international tracking systems off the coast of Cyprus. When it reappeared a week later, the Sea Navigator was heading north to Europe. But the ship had not got lost a it had slipped into a Russian-controlled port in Syria to pick up phosphates, a key ingredient for making fertiliser.

Cheap Syrian phosphate exports to Europe have boomed in recent years. Europe has few phosphate reserves of its own and European farmers were already struggling to afford phosphate fertilisers before the war in Ukraine sent prices soaring even higher.

His groundbreaking work on such seminal characters as Judge Dredd, Preacher and Punisher is being celebrated with a posthumous show of his remarkable legacy

There are few artists who exemplify the anarchic, irreverent and anti-authoritarian British take on the comic book the way Steve Dillon does. Born in London and raised in Luton, Dillon died in New York in 2016, at the age of 54, following complications arising from a ruptured appendix. What remans is a remarkable body of work that includes the seminal UK comic magazine Deadline, which he co-founded; his illustrations on a fan-favourite run of Hellblazer, the Alan Moore-created comic that follows British chaos magician John Constantine; and most notably, the critically acclaimed Preacher, which he co-created with famed comics writer Garth Ennis.

First published by the US company DC in 1995, Preacher told the story of Jesse Custer, a small-town minister who is accidentally possessed by the offspring of an angel and a demon, and who goes on the road with his ex-girlfriend and an Irish vampire, searching for a solution to his problem. The comic ran for five years and was followed by a TV series starring Dominic Cooper, on which Dillon was executive producer.

Fifteen questions on general knowledge and topical trivia plus a few jokes every Thursday a how will you fare?

Here comes the Thursday quiz, representing all that is good in the world against a backdrop of unfolding chaos. Fifteen questions that are vaguely topical or general knowledge or generally just a bit weird. There are no prizes, but you can pick up one extra bonus point if you can spot a hidden reference to Doctor Who and mention it in the comments, where wead love to find out how you got on. Enjoy!

The Thursday quiz, No 62

If you do think there has been an egregious error in one of the questions or answers, please feel free to email martin.belam@theguardian.com, but remember, the quiz masteras word is always final, and heas still busy watching Glastonbury sets on iPlayer.

Dominic Raabas attack on the Labour frontbencheras attendance at Glyndebourne says more about our class-ridden approach to culture than it does about her

It wouldnat happen in Germany, and certainly not in Italy. It wouldnat cause as much as a raised eyebrow in the US or even in Russia. Only in Britain would a political leader going to the opera stir a controversy.

The fact that the opera was at a country house in the Sussex countryside, with a black-tie dress code is part of the story, of course. That the politician in question is a Labour figure, a woman and working class probably even more so.

After airstrikes on civilian targets, from a shopping mall to hospitals, Ukraineas allies must use the correct legal definitions

As I write, rescuers are still searching the remains of a shopping centre in the central Ukrainian town of Kremenchuk. There were hundreds of people inside the centre when Russian missiles hit it on Monday. The number of casualties is still unclear, but there are 20 confirmed deaths and tens of unidentified bodies. The mall was miles away from any military target. There could be no other reason to attack it than to spread fear and terror in Ukraine. The Russian military hit it with two missiles, ensuring devastating damage.

G7 countries unanimously condemned those attacks, as they should. But unless the world puts a meaningful political and legal definition to these atrocities, such condemnations will very quickly be forgotten by the general public. The world needs to comprehend that along with a ruthless military operation Russia conducts indiscriminate attacks on non-military targets: this is terrorist activity. We need to distinguish it and qualify it as such.

Andriy Zagorodnyuk is a Chairman of Centre for Defence Strategies and former Minister of Defence of Ukraine

Evidence of the disease in a London sewer shows that without widespread vaccination, no country is immune from its horrors

The finding of a polio virus in repeated sampling from the sewage system in London during 2022 is less of a concern for highly vaccinated communities in the UK, where children are immune to the rare chance of paralysis. However, it is a portent of potential individual catastrophe for families with unvaccinated and undervaccinated children in our capital unless there is urgent action.

In these pandemic times, we shouldnat need much reminding that there are some bad viruses out there, and there always have been. But intervening urgently to control epidemics and outbreaks with vaccines is relatively new. The devastating polio epidemics of the 1940s and 1950s, which left thousands of children paralysed in the UK, were very much in the public eye at the time, with the familiar images of hospitals full of children in coffin-like iron lungs or paralysed children with their legs in callipers.

Prof Sir Andrew Pollard is Director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, University of Oxford

Ekin-Su CA1/4lcA1/4loAlu has stirred up so much drama that she already belongs in the showas hall of fame. Femme fatales like her make Love Island great

Praise be to the reality TV gods. It has only taken two series, a global pandemic and the nation manufacturing the initial acouplingsa in the first week, but Love Island is finally back on form. The last fortnight has had more drama than the entire last two dreary series combined. And its bounce back is in no small part down to the arrival of Ekin-Su CA1/4lcA1/4loAlu, a Turkish actor who must surely moonlight as a Love Island producer, given her unrelenting commitment to causing chaos.

On her slo-mo arrival into the villa in episode 3, Ekin-Su made her intentions clear. aIam not here to make seasonal girlfriends,a she announced to the other women. aIam here to find the love of my life.a Watching her pursue that goal has been dynamite. Night one she was blowing kisses at Luca as he lay in bed with his partner, Gemma. The next morning she grafted the villaas entire male population by making them breakfast. In a few short days she had successfully made a move on Davide. Then before we knew it, she was crawling on all fours across the terrace to orchestrate a secret kiss with newcomer Jay, a move that will undoubtedly remain in the Love Island hall of fame for years to come.

If we want more women with children to become MPs, we need family-friendly policies for parents like me in the Commons

As the Speaker welcomes cats into the chamber, last night his deputy criticised my parenting for bringing my toddler to the voting lobbies. She demanded I hand her over to her instead, despite being a stranger to my child. Such outward hostility towards making parliament family friendly does little to improve the perception that Westminster is out of touch with those it seeks to serve. When 41% of the population think democracy doesnat work, refusing to accept the status quo becomes even more important, not just for equality, but to protect democracy itself.

Todayas news that the procedure committee has decided parents accompanied by babies are forbidden in the House of Commons a in contrast to many other legislatures around the world and previous custom a yet again reinforces the impression Westminster isnat a 21st-century workplace, but a rarefied debating club for the elite. This decision will not affect me. Both my children are now too old to sit quietly so I can speak, but it speaks volumes about how determined some are to send the message that mothers are not welcome unless they pretend their children donat exist.

Stella Creasy is the Labour and Cooperative MP for Walthamstow in London

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com

The PM has been accused of trying to cover up mistakes in the pandemic. Now grieving families like mine will learn the truth

Itas been just over two years since Dad died. Thatas two years of unprocessed grief shelved in the campaign for justice, but finally the public inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic has been launched. For the bereaved, the news brings an enormous sense of relief. The process of learning lessons from the UKas handling of the pandemic has at last been moved out of Boris Johnsonas reach.

Weave weathered two years of distractions: Partygate, the cost of living crisis, no-confidence votes. Families have had to fight every step of the way to make it to this point. Weave threatened two separate judicial reviews, and even been prepared to put ourselves at financial risk to secure this opportunity for justice. Meanwhile, the Conservatives have done everything they can to kick their accountability into the long grass. But now those distractions are irrelevant a with the terms of reference fixed (despite sitting unsigned and gathering dust on Johnsonas desk for six weeks) and the date set, this government can no longer influence the inquiry.

Hannah Brady is spokesperson for the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Campaign

As told to Lucy Pasha-Robinson

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com