We can’t control what happens to us – only how we react to it. And when we help others we are reminded that we are more than our suffering

• Making sense of it is a column about spirituality and how it can be used to navigate everyday life

My dad, Max, is in his early 60s. More than 15 years ago he was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s disease. Since then his illness has progressed, affecting his mobility and making ordinary tasks, like walking, increasingly difficult.

My dad is softly spoken and endlessly kind but beneath his gentle exterior is a steely determination. Perhaps this comes from being the son of a sole survivor of the Holocaust. Growing up he was taught that people don’t get to choose the hardships life places before us but we can choose how we react to these challenges.

Nomi Kaltmann is an Australian lawyer and journalist. She is a proud member of Melbourne’s Jewish community

In his new book The Brain Cliff, Dr Norman Swan outlines the science of brain ageing and strategies for staving off cognitive decline

You write that instead of fearing cognitive decline, “changing the way you think about the brain cliff can literally change the way you think and remember”. How?

Dr Norman Swan: There are three things you need to know which are not widely known.

Our US friends may pity Europeans for our low salaries, high taxes and dependence on public transport – but they’re forgetting the really important stuff …

I’m sorry to break this to you, but you may be “Europoor”. This is, apparently, what proud American patriots (the kind who describe themselves in those terms on their flag-forward X profiles anyway) are calling us Europeans, mocking us for our low salaries, high taxes and dependence on public transport.

GB news presenter Tom Harwood declared this dig “entirely accurate”, but is it? Well, sort of. US post-pandemic GDP growth is more than double that of the eurozone (15.6% compared with 7.2%; the UK is even worse on 6.3%). As for wages, once you adjust for national differences in the cost of essentials such as housing, food and services, the US average is $86,977 compared with the UK’s $66,299, Germany’s $76,286 and France’s $60,483, according to the OECD. A Sunday Telegraph investigation of the “Europoor” question highlighted astronomically powerful growth of the US tech sector supercharged by AI, making it easy to raise and make big money unencumbered by “old world” regulation and taxation. “We don’t want to be like what Europe has become,” said the Republican pollster Brent Buchanan.

Sector has avoided issue because of stigma fears, expert warns ahead of closure of Nottingham attacks inquiry

Mental health organisations have “failed to acknowledge” the risk of violence from a minority of people with severe mental illnesses, the chief executive of Mind has said ahead of the closure of the inquiry into the Nottingham attacks.

Dr Sarah Hughes, who has led mental health charity Mind for four years and has worked in the sector for almost four decades, said charities had shied away from addressing the risk of violence due to the fact it had increased the stigma and harassment around people with mental health conditions.

Healthy middle-aged people deemed to be at higher risk of developing condition among those eligible to participate

People without memory loss will be offered an experimental Alzheimer’s drug that could stop the development of the condition before dementia symptoms emerge.

Healthy middle-aged people deemed to have a higher risk of developing the condition will be eligible to participate in the trial, which is being run by an NHS trust as part of an international clinical trial aiming to prevent dementia.

Activists are calling on the state attorney general to take action against hospitals that have ended gender-affirming care programs after Trump retook office

A group of trans activists from across Massachusetts brought their needles, hormone gels, pills and sharps containers to Boston on Wednesday to send a message to state attorney general Andrea Campbell.

Organizers with the youth-led group Protect Trans Futures (PTF) took their hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in the lobby of her office building, then occupied the space, refusing to leave without a commitment to protect civil rights for trans kids.

Social media, mental health problems, the pandemic and financial instability all contribute to the phenomenon

On Tess Lavanda’s YouTube channel there is one video with substantially more views than the rest: it is titled “I don’t have any friends” and has been watched more than half a million times since she posted it a month ago.

Over on Instagram she has posted dozens of reels with titles like “I turned 22 alone”, “Living alone in London” and “Feeling alone this summer is OK”, each garnering thousands of views and hundreds of comments, many from people feeling the same way.

Officials decline to confirm whether death was one of two announced last week as Lancaster county outbreak grows

A six-week-old child in Pennsylvania died from measles, the Lancaster county coroner has determined, following two measles-related deaths in the county last week.

The determination comes as Lancaster county faces a growing measles outbreak.

Murder trial underscores how misunderstood postpartum illness is to experts and the general public, advocates say

Kristina Delaney was five months postpartum when her husband saw something was very, very wrong. It was a Friday afternoon, and her husband had gone outside to make a phone call – concerned about his wife’s “hyperactive” speech.

When he returned, she was rocking their two children in her arms, and said: “‘Please save us, please save our family,’” said Delaney. “And I thought Jesus was returning.”

Study finds just one drink per day could raise risk of disease with impacts extending far beyond liver cancer

Alcohol-related cancer deaths in the US have more than doubled over three decades, with new research showing that just one drink per day could raise cancer risk and that the impacts extend far beyond liver cancer.

Researchers at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, analyzed more than three decades of Global Burden of Disease data. Their study, published in August in the Lancet Regional Health, found that annual cancer deaths attributed to alcohol climbed from 11,361 in 1990 to 23,126 in 2023.

My friend Nicola Close, who has died aged 75 of cancer, was a public health leader who made a major contribution to the field as chief executive of the Association of Directors of Public Health (ADPH). Starting as its sole employee in 2007, she built an influential organisation currently employing 19 people.

This became especially evident during the Covid-19 pandemic, when directors of public health, whose role includes providing local leadership and implementing national guidance, were thrust into the spotlight. To support members to work more effectively, and strengthen communication between central government and local communities, Nicola helped break down barriers to data sharing, and secure regular meetings between directors of public health and UK chief medical officers. In 2025 she was made MBE for services to public health.

The pressure to self-optimise at the start of the new school year can lead to disappointment and burnout. Instead, here are seven ways to slow things down and reap the benefits

It is a hangover from our school days that September can feel like a time for getting back to the grind. As in January, there is a sense that we should return as better workers, partners, friends and parents. This sense is even stronger now a culture of optimisation – has taken over – evidenced by the fad for adding “maxx” to everything. Yet that can lead to disappointment and burnout, which Mental Health UK reports up to 91% of adults were at risk from over a recent 12-month period.

One antidote to this drive is to embrace a slower way of living. Rather than always rushing from one activity to the next, we could be enjoying life.

High food prices are affecting everyone right now, but it turns out they are affecting some people way more than others. Josh Toussaint-Strauss looks at the grocery price situation and official healthy eating advice in different countries to find out how food prices are hitting lower-income households harder and whether it’s even mathematically possible to eat a government-recommended healthy diet

In Brailled It, the tension and stakes of the annual Braille Challenge are brought to the screen by three of the competitors

For the past 26 years, about 22,000 blind and visually impaired schoolchildren from around the world have competed in the Braille Challenge: a literacy test against a loudly ticking clock. It has all the theater of a Model UN competition, all the stakes of a make-or-break standardized exam and young competitors from first grade through high school juggling their own expectations, ambitions and emotions – with a degree of difficulty that is surely unfathomable to most.

Brailled It is a new film that immerses viewers in the ups and downs of the 2024 edition of the Braille Challenge, which saw more than 1,100 students descend on the University of Southern California campus. But instead of Emmy-winning director David Grabias steering a phalanx of camera and sound operators through the scenes, as he has done for past documentary projects on climate change and immigration policy, he strapped cameras to the competitors and left them to their own devices. “Every documentary is a collaboration, and you’re giving agency to your participants,” he says. “But this was: you’re going to go off and make the film, and we’ll help put it together.”

Lance Hammer’s first film in 18 years is a heart-wrenching masterpiece about family, mental decline and sexual consent. He and supporting actor Juliette Binoche discuss how they brought unabashed realism to a condition rarely seen on screen

The first time we see Martin and Leslie, the elderly couple at the centre of Lance Hammer’s wrenching new film, Queen at Sea, they are walking together up a set of stone steps: one of their regular outings, we assume, in days filled with pottering and quiet companionship. They have their backs to us, and we can’t see their destination beyond a bleached sky that fills the top half of the screen. Symbolically, it may be deemed a bit on the nose: two people near the end of their lives, moving gently towards the white light of oblivion. There’s a whiff of sentimentality about it.

But any doubts about this story’s willingness to confront difficult truths are blasted away by the next scene. Leslie’s daughter, Amanda, played by Juliette Binoche, pays a visit to the couple’s house in drizzly, middle-class north London, her teenage daughter in tow. Unable to find her mother and stepfather, she arrives at the bedroom door. Opening it, she finds Martin (Tom Courtenay) on top of Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall), who lies impassively beneath him, the mask of dementia obvious on her face.

New Zealand decision follows Australian approval in 2023 of psychedelics to treat PTSD and treatment-resistant depression

Two psychiatrists in New Zealand won approval on Friday to prescribe pharmaceutical-grade MDMA to people with severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The move by New Zealand’s pharmaceutical regulatory body Medsafe makes the country only the second worldwide to approve the party drug for use in treating PTSD, following Australia in 2023.