The ticketing system has changed this year, so here are some pro tips to bagging yours during the annual rush

Maybe you missed out this year and had everyone going on about how great it was and how Coldplay, actually, really put on a spectacle even if you don’t like their music. Or you did go, and need something to get you through the winter with your sense of joie de vivre intact. Whatever your reason, today marks the first opportunity to bag yourself Glastonbury tickets – here’s a few tips to improve your chances, whether this year or next.

Have you reduced your recoil, picked the best perks and maxxed out your XP gains? If you’re not sure … you’re in the right place

Let me guess: you recently bought Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 , strayed into the multiplayer mode and now you’re being mercilessly pummelled by hundreds of teenagers with suggestive usernames? Don’t worry, that’s perfectly normal. Call of Duty has always been the arcade twitchfest of the online shooter scene, but Black Ops 6 has a whole new feel thanks to its omni-movement system, which lets you dive, roll and sprint in every direction. And the weapons have all been completely redesigned. It is, as Olivia Rodrigo put it, brutal out there.

So I asked two excellent pro players – Ethan “Fifakill” Pink and Liam “Jukeyz” James – for their tips. Instead of laughing and pointing at me, they agreed.

Company close to technical default on some of its debt, underlining UK industry’s precarious state

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Southern Water’s debt has been downgraded to junk status by the credit rating agency Moody’s in a decision that underlines the precarious state of the UK water industry.

Moody’s said Southern’s “history of material operational and financial under-performance” could imperil its plan, announced last month, to borrow £4bn from investors .

Country closes 137-year legal loophole, becoming one of 12 in Latin America and the Caribbean to entirely ban marriage for minors

Colombian lawmakers have approved a bill to eradicate child marriage in the South American country after 17 years of campaigning by advocacy groups and eight failed attempts to push legislation through the house and senate.

After five hours of heated, drawn-out debate on Wednesday evening, lawmakers approved the proposed legislation, dubbed They are Girls, Not Wives, which prohibits the marriage of anyone under the age of 18.

Course set to be taught by controversial British ‘anti-woke’ media commentator Andrew Doyle

New College of Florida reinstated a course on “wokeness” taught by controversial British media personality and culture warrior Andrew Doyle to its catalog, after appearing to remove it from an earlier version, amid an ongoing furore over the university’s transformation into a more conservative institution.

The course was also restored to an internal enrollment system but without Doyle’s name attached, according to students with access to the system. The moves followed criticism of the course online and local media reports on Tuesday night.

In new memoir Citizen, Clinton acknowledges he has not directly apologized to Lewinsky over White House affair

Bill Clinton, the former US president, has written of his “frustration” at being questioned about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky while acknowledging that he has never apologized to her directly.

Clinton became embroiled in one of the biggest political scandals in history when it emerged in 1998 that he had a sexual relationship with the then 22-year-old Lewinsky. The president, who initially lied before apologizing, was impeached by the House of Representatives but acquitted by the Senate.

Months after devastating rains displaced 420,000 people in Rio Grande do Sul, an unusual consensus has formed around the need for a faster transition to renewables

Beside a narrow canal that runs through the outskirts of Porto Alegre in southern Brazil , a row of wooden houses with makeshift fences lean among piles of debris and power poles tangled in sagging wires. From the dirt road, Alexandra Marina Romero, 27, gazes at the aftermath of a disaster. “There used to be a church here,” she says. “Now it’s all gone.”

In May, a devastating flood ravaged her neighbourhood, leaving a trail of chaos and triggering a humanitarian crisis . “What we went through was horrific. The water took over everything,” says Romero, a supermarket assistant who migrated to Brazil from Venezuela in 2018.

I wanted to learn more about my mother. But when her half-brother that I knew nothing about got in touch, I was faced with an agonising decision

I’m sitting in my great-aunt’s retirement home on the outskirts of Detroit, Michigan. It’s not yet October, but for reasons I don’t quite understand the home is throwing a Thanksgiving dinner for residents and guests. I join my great-aunt June and the other octogenarians piling up their paper plates at the buffet. Then we sit at trestle tables lined with tiny pumpkins, while framed photos of the recently deceased sit on top of the grand piano, seemingly looking our way.

The early holiday celebrations weren’t the only surprise when I arrived in Michigan. I was there to research a book I was writing about the history of the women’s movement, but also about my mother, whose life story echoes the rise and fall of second-wave feminism. In 1974, a year after Roe v Wade passed, my 22-year-old mother travelled from Essex, England to New York City and took a Greyhound bus across the country to visit June, who was then living in Omaha, Nebraska. At that time, my mum’s life, as it was for so many women of the era, was full of promise. She was the first in the family to go to university, coming of age alongside the revolutionary ideas of the 1960s. I wanted to learn from June who my mum was when everything still seemed possible. I was on this journey as a journalist and as a daughter; in each of these roles, I wanted to know everything.

Marisa Bate is a journalist, author and former Guardian reporter

For its 13th season, the investigative titan explores the complicated story of Keiko. Plus: five of the best podcasts to dip into

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It’s 90s week in podcast land! Or at least you’d think so, judging by the nostalgic homages to kids’ entertainment from decades gone by. There’s an entire series devoted to fictional purple dinosaur Barney, plus investigative news heavyweights Serial Productions offer up a literal deep dive into a vital subject: what happened to the whale from Free Willy?

In slightly more extreme retro nostalgia, there’s also Audible’s starry new Agatha Christie adaptation, with Game of Thrones’s Peter Dinklage playing Poirot in Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. He’s joined by Himesh Patel, as Hastings, and Harriet Walter. Does the fact that they’ve started at the very beginning of Christie’s canon mean they’re planning to do every single book? We certainly wouldn’t object.