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Jamie Varley and co-accused John McGowan-Fazakerley were in process of adopting 13-month-old Preston Davey

A secondary school teacher has appeared in court accused of the sexual assault and murder of a 13-month-old baby boy he was adopting.

Jamie Varley, 36, who was a head of year at a school in Blackpool, is also accused of a number of counts of assault, cruelty and taking and distributing indecent images relating to Preston Davey.

Varley was in the process of adopting Preston along with the co-accused John McGowan-Fazakerley, 31. Both men appeared in court on Friday, nearly two years after police were called to Blackpool Victoria hospital, where the one-year-old died on 27 July 2023.

Preston was taken into care by Oldham council six days after he was born, theBlackpool Gazettereported. After spending some time in foster care, a court order allowed him to be placed for adoption and he was moved to Blackpool on 3 April 2023. He died barely three months later.

Varley spoke only to confirm his identity during the five-minute hearing at Lancaster magistrates court. The defendant is also accused of one count of manslaughter, two counts of assault by penetration of a child, five counts of child cruelty, one count of inflicting grievous bodily harm and one count of sexual assault of a child.

He is further accused of 10 counts of taking indecent photographs of a child, one count of distributing indecent photographs of a child, two counts of possessing indecent pseudo-images of a child and one count of possession of an extreme pornographic image.

Varley was teaching at South Shore academy, run by the Cidari multi-academy trust in Blackpool, when he was arrested in 2023. School records show that at various times he was head of years 9, 10 and 11.

In a statement, the trust said: “Our thoughts are with the family of Preston Davey and all those affected by this case.”

It said South Shore academy was run by Bright Futures Education Trust at the time of Varley’s arrest and he was immediately suspended while the police investigation was under way.

His suspension continued when the academy was later transferred to Cidari Multi Academy Trust. “During this time he has not been permitted on to, or attended, school premises, or been permitted to contact pupils or colleagues.”

The trust said senior leaders and specialist staff had been providing support to colleagues and pupils at the academy on Friday. It added: “Following the decision to charge Mr Varley, and the nature of those charges, Cidari is now considering its position in relation to Mr Varley’s employment.

“This will be done in consultation with other agencies and within the relevant legislation and statutory.”

McGowan-Fazakerley is charged with allowing the death of a child, two counts of child cruelty and one of sexual assault of a child. The defendant confirmed his identity and was also remanded into custody.

All the charges for both men, spanning March to July 2023, relate to Preston. Both men, from Grimsargh, near Preston, will appear at Preston crown court on Monday.

Exclusive: Lidiane Vieira Frazão, a black woman from Rio, was repeatedly denied appropriate treatment as President Bolsonaro downplayed the pandemic, lawsuit says

In the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic, Lidiane Vieira Frazão, 35, was expecting her second child but, even at 40 weeks pregnant, she was unable to obtain a doctor’s note to start her maternity leave.

Her job as a funeral agent – at times handling the bodies of people who had died from the virus – was on the long list of “essential services” that could not be suspended during lockdown, according to a decree issued by Brazil’s then-president,Jair Bolsonaro.

Frazão was finally granted leave only days before giving birth, but she only received care at the second hospital she tried and, despite showing symptoms such as a runny nose and racing heart, her family say she was never tested for Covid-19.

The birth went well, but Frazão returned home still struggling to breathe. She sought help at another hospital, but was only given oxygen after waiting for 10 hours.

Soon after, she fell into a coma. Twenty-two days after giving birth, she died.

Now, five years later, her family has filed what is believed to be the first legal action against the Brazilian state over a maternal death linked to Covid-19. Although all the hospitals named in the lawsuit are federally funded, the case is being brought against the municipal government of Rio, which is responsible for managing the facilities.

“One thing that stayed with me was a video, months after my sister’s death, showing the president [Bolsonaro]mocking people who were short of breath,” said Frazão’s sister, Érika, 37. “That really hurt because my sister arrived at the hospital exactly like that.”

Her family argues that Frazão – whose two sons are now 16 and five – died due to negligence, malpractice and mistreatment at the state-run hospitals where she sought care.

“She told me she was mistreated at the hospital”, said her mother, Eny, 69, who is raising her two grandsons along with the children’s father.

Eny still remembers how lovingly her daughter planned for the second pregnancy. “When she wasn’t working, she’d lie right here on this sofa, in this very spot, talking to him in her belly,” said her mother, sitting in the family home in a bucolic corner of Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone.

A group of lawyers, researchers and activists supporting the lawsuit argue that the case is emblematic of a series of problems that, at one point during the pandemic, made Brazil the world leader in maternal deaths,accounting for 80% of the total.

Often, the women struggled to get treatment, said anthropologistDébora Diniz, a professor at the University of Brasília and one of those behind the lawsuit. “They’d arrive at a maternity ward and the doctor would say, ‘You have Covid-19, go to a hospital.’ Then at the hospital, another doctor would say, ‘You’re pregnant, go to the maternity ward.’”

Diniz coordinates a group at the universitythat carried out aqualitative studyto understand why so many maternal deaths were occurring in Brazil. The reasons included delays in Covid-19 testing and a reluctance to admit patients, as happened with Frazão.

The researcher believes Frazão’s death was also the result of “denialism” by the then-president Bolsonaro, who activelyopposed vaccines, social distancingand lockdowns,while mocking victimsand promotingineffective treatments like hydroxychloroquine.

Diniz says that the Bolsonaro administration also failed to “establish specific policies” for pregnant women, who were already known to be more vulnerable. “It failed her and all the other women in the same situation,” said the anthropologist.

The lawsuit seeks compensation and a lifelong pension for her family, as well as formal recognition of the state’s responsibility for her death.

The researchers and lawyers commissioned a gynaecologist and obstetrician to conduct an expert review of what happened to her.

The list of alleged failings is extensive, and began as early as her prenatal care, when Frazão was reportedly never identified as having a high-risk pregnancy.

According to the victim’s family, there was also a racial element, as Frazão was a black woman.

“If my daughter were white, this wouldn’t have happened to her,” said her mother, Eny.

Immediately after giving birth, Frazão complained of shortness of breath, but doctors at the hospital reportedly dismissed it as “anxiety” and told her to see a psychiatrist.

“That’s racism,” said her sister Érika. “Black women are always treated as if we don’t feel pain or are seen as nervous or unstable.”

In the lawsuit, they argue that Frazão was also a victim of “obstetric racism” and the systemic mistreatment of Black women within Brazil’s public healthcare system.

During the pandemic, most of the maternal deaths were among black women; to this day, Afro-Brazilian women facetwice the risk of dyingduring pregnancy, childbirth or postpartum compared with white women.

“There are protocols, and doctors are trained to deal with everything that happened to her – but when the patient is a black woman, all of that is ignored,” said Mariane Marçal, assistant project coordinator atCriola, the other organisation supporting the case.

In 2011, Brazil became thefirst government to be condemnedby an international conventional body – the United Nation’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women – for a preventable maternal death.

Alyne Pimentel Teixeira, 28, who was also black, died six months into her pregnancy after seeking medical care and being sent home with only a prescription but no tests.

“If Brazil had fulfilled the obligations set out in that ruling, Frazão would not have died,” said Mônica Sacramento, programme coordinator at Criola.

Rio’s city government said the events took place under the previous mayor, that “the teams involved have since been changed,” and that it would cooperate with the judiciary to “help clarify the case.”

Frazão’s eldest sister, Mônika Frazão, 54, hopes the case will bring about change in Brazil.

“We want the state to acknowledge that it failed us, that it failed her and her children … It might be wishful thinking, but we hope this means others won’t have to go through the same pain we did,” she said.

Veteran composer’s work is everywhere, but generation who grew up admiring him say he has never been out of touch

WhenAndrew Lloyd Webberwalked on stage to collect the Tony award for best musical revival for Sunset Boulevard, it was the first time in 30 years he had been recognised by the American Theatre Wing.

The Jamie Lloyd-directed revival was the star of the show atAmerican theatre’s big nightlast Sunday with its three wins signifying a return to prominence for the veteran composer.

But this wasn’t just about one hit show starring a former Pussycat Doll.

Look around theatreland on either side of the Atlantic and Lord Lloyd Webber’s fingerprints are everywhere: a successful revival of Starlight Express (in the unlikely environs of Wembley); a forthcoming outing for Jesus Christ Superstar; Lloyd Webber himself is directing Evita (starring Rachel Zegler) in London, there is a new musical called The Illusionist in the works, and cryptic messages announcing the return of Phantom of the Opera have sprung up around New York.

Arguably, we have reached peak Lloyd Webber five decades after his work was first performed on stage.

Critics have been lining up to declare that British theatre’s biggest name is “hot again”. But those close to him aren’t calling it a comeback.

“I don’t think he ever went away,” said the West End producer Michael Harrison, whojoined forceswith Lloyd Webber in late 2022. “The big hits like Phantom continue in London; you can go and see Cats in Australia or Germany, and his work extends to Asia.

“I think all that’s happened recently is that he has been very open to let new creatives look at his work,” Harrison added. “So when Jamie Lloyd comes along and says: ‘I’ve got this idea to do Sunset Boulevard with Nicole Scherzinger’, he embraces it rather than puts up barriers and says: ‘The shows must always be as they were 20 years ago’. He’s very open to let people give new interpretations.”

At the Tonys, Lloyd Webber spoke of how impressed he was with Lloyd’s “radical” reinterpretation of Sunset Boulevard “With all those older shows, it’s great when somebody comes to you with a new idea of how to do it,” he said.

Luke Sheppardis a millennial director who grew up listening to Lloyd Webber and is the creative forcebehind the revival of Starlight Express. He said the composer was open to adding new elements to the show and was willing to write new songs. Certain songs (deemed “old fashioned”) were dropped from Sunset altogether.

Sheppard said: “Andrew let us explore some quite big ideas, like having a child on stage so that we really saw it through a young person’s imagination. We created new characters, Andrew wrote us some new songs, and we did a lot of gender flipping with different characters as well to really kind of expand those storylines.

“The generosity and the openness that Andrew showed as a very successful composer producer, allowing us to explore, that was really quite amazing.”

Harrison said if you looked at Lloyd Webber’s early career there was already a mould-breaking tendency at work. “People talk about immersive theatre being a new thing. Well, Cats was in an old TV studio: your seats revolved as the show began, or there was the complete transformation of the Apollo Victoria into a railway track for Starlight Express,” he said.

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“Even before that there were the Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar concept albums; he was launching shows through music,” Harrison added. “He’s always been a forward thinker and a little bit ahead of his time.”

Lloyd is another director who grew up on the musicals of his new creative partner. Face tattoos and slick, sexy stagings aren’t historically part of the Lloyd Webber package but Lloyd has added them all to the mix, and in so doing added a quality not usually associated with Lloyd Webber: coolness.

Sheppard said: “I’m a musical theatre kid, so for me, he’s always been cool. There’s something quite rock’n’roll about Andrew, his songs capture the sound of the music at the time. You think about some of the stuff in Starlight Express, particularly the song AC/DC, which Electra sings. It was really revolutionary, that sound, when it first came out.”

Lloyd Webber’s revival isn’t just based on his classic work. The Illusionist is loosely based on the 2006 film of the same name that starred Edward Norton as a persecuted magician.

Lloyd Webber’s previous Tony came for his original adaptation of Sunset Boulevard in 1995. Despite the long wait between wins, the current crop of revivals and new work suggest it’s a good bet it won’t take quite as long next time.

Companies hail ‘historic partnership’ to bring ‘massive investment’ but details of agreement remain unclear

Donald Trump on Friday signed an executive order paving the way for a Nippon Steel investment in US Steel, so long as the Japanese company complies with a “national security agreement” submitted by the federal government.

Trump’s order did not detail the terms of the national security agreement. But US Steel and Nippon Steel said in a joint statement that the agreement stipulates that approximately $11bn in new investments will be made by 2028 and includes giving the US government a “golden share” – essentially veto power to ensure the country’s national security interests are protected.

“We thank President Trump and his administration for their bold leadership and strong support for our historic partnership,” the two companies said. “This partnership will bring a massive investment that will support our communities and families for generations to come. We look forward to putting our commitments into action to make American steelmaking and manufacturing great again.”

The companies have completed a Department of Justice review and received all necessary regulatory approvals, the statement said.

“The partnership is expected to be finalized promptly,” the statement said.

The companies offered few details on how the golden share would work and what investments would be made.

Trump said Thursday that he would as president have “total control” of what US Steel did as part of the investment.

Trump said then that the deal would preserve “51% ownership by Americans”. The Japan-based steelmaker had been offering nearly $15bn to purchase the Pittsburgh-based US Steel in a merger that had been delayed on national security concerns starting during Joe Biden’s presidency. Trump opposed the purchase while campaigning for the White House, yet he expressed optimism in working out an arrangement once in office.

“We have a golden share, which I control,” said Trump, although it was unclear what he meant by suggesting that the federal government would determine what US Steel does as a company.

Trump added that he was “a little concerned” about what presidents other than him would do with their golden share, “but that gives you total control”.

Still, Nippon Steel has never said it was backing off its bid to buy and control US Steel as a wholly owned subsidiary.

The proposed merger had been under review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, during the Trump and Biden administrations.

The order signed Friday by Trump said the CFIUS review provided “credible evidence” that Nippon Steel “might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States”, but such risks might be “adequately mitigated” by approving the proposed national security agreement.

The order does not detail the perceived national security risk and only provides a timeline for the national security agreement. The White House declined to provide details on the terms of the agreement.

The order said the draft agreement was submitted to US Steel and Nippon Steel on Friday. The two companies must successfully execute the agreement as decided by the treasury department and other federal agencies that are part CFIUS by the closing date of the transaction.

Trump reserves the authority to issue further actions regarding the investment as part of the order he signed on Friday.

Politicians must analyse the forces behind mob unrest, but not in terms that make excuses for it

Areputation for political violence is one reason Northern Ireland has historically attracted fewer immigrants than the rest of the UK. In that context, increasing diversity could be read as a measure of progress; a peace dividend after the Troubles. That isn’t how it has felt to families cowering in fear of racist mobs this week. The riotsstartedin Ballymena, ostensibly triggered by the arrest of two boys, reported to be of Romanian origin, accused of sexually assaulting a teenage girl. A community vigil mutated into a racist rampage. Masked thugs targeted the local migrant population. When police came to quell the pogrom,officerswere attacked with bricks, fireworks, petrol bombs. There was contagion. Windows were smashed and a fire started at a leisure centre in nearby Larne that had been used as a temporary refuge for those fleeing the Ballymena violence. There were outbreaks of disorder in other towns.

Leaders from across Northern Ireland’s political spectrum have condemned the violence. But on theunionistside in particular, there has also been much leavening of opprobrium with reference to “legitimate” underlying grievances. Judiciously expressed, the complaint is that migration has been poorly managed, putting a strain on local services. In its more pungent iteration, it is the insinuation that new arrivals get preferential treatment, especially regarding housing.

On thestreet, that degenerates into a miasma of hatred – a generalised accusation of parasitism and criminality imported by the foreigners. Rumour and disinformation, propagated online, accelerates collective movement through the gears from inchoate frustration to vigilante rampage.

Northern Ireland is the least diverse part of the UK. Immigrants make up about 3.4% of the population, compared with 18.3% in England and Wales, and 12.9% in Scotland. But that comparison belies relatively rapid and concentrated demographic change in places such as Ballymena. And while sectarian violence is no longer endemic, the Troubles cast a shadow of intercommunal suspicion that makes it harder for outsiders to integrate. There is also a developed infrastructure of far-right extremism that evolved through close ties to loyalist paramilitaries.

Those are distinct Northern Irish inflections on a problem that is far from unique to the region. The escalation from a single spark to a conflagration of violent bigotry is grimly familiar from theriotingthat erupted across the UK last summer. Then it was the murder of three young girls inSouthportthat became the pretext for a malevolent carnival of xenophobic rage. Then, too, it was possible to excavate a kernel of socioeconomic grievance from the ashes.

It is always worth tracking the underlying forces that lead to public disorder. But that analysis can also be used to sanitise and normalise the kind of political rhetoric that makesscapegoats of migrantsand inflames the grievances it purports to address. There is no justifiable pathway from a complaint about inadequate public service provision and fear of crime to terrorising innocent people, destroying public amenities and attacking the police.

There areplacesacross the UK where deprivation and social alienation, simmering for years, can be mobilised as racist violence. There is a line between acknowledging the social conditions that make such a danger possible and narrating those conditions in ways that make violence more likely. The boundary is not hard to see, which brings all the more shame on the politicians who routinely cross it.

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The recklessness of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and the incoherence of Donald Trump’s deepen the crisis in the Middle East

US presidents who thought they could easily restrainBenjamin Netanyahuhave quickly learned their lesson. “Who’s the fucking superpower?” Bill Clintonreportedly explodedafter his first meeting with the Israeli prime minister.

Did Donald Trumpmake the same mistake? The state departmentquickly declaredthat thedevastating overnight Israeli attack on Iran– which killedkey military commanders and nuclear scientistsas well as striking its missile capacity and a nuclear enrichment site – was unilateral. Mr Trump had reportedly urged Mr Netanyahu to hold off in a call on Monday, pending US talks with Iran over its nuclear programmedue this weekend. The suspicion is that Israel feared that a deal might be reached and wanted to strike first. But Israeli officials havebriefedthat they had a secret green light from the US, with Mr Trump only claiming to oppose it.

Iran, reeling from the attack but afraid of looking too weak to retaliate, isunlikely to believethat the US did not acquiesce to the offensive, if unenthusiastically. It might suit it better to pretend otherwise – in the short term, it is not clear what ability it has to hit back at Israel, never mind taking on the US. But Mr Trump has made that hard bythreatening“even more brutal attacks” ahead, urging Iran to “make a deal, before there’s nothing left” and claiming that “we knew everything”. Whether Israel really convinced Mr Trump that this was the way to cut a deal, or he is offering a post-hoc justification after being outflanked by Mr Netanyahu, may no longer matter.

Israel has become increasingly and dangerously confident of its ability to reshape the Middle East without pushing it over the brink. It believes that its previous pummellings of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran’s air defences have created a brief opportunity to destroy the existential threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme before it is too late. Russia is not about to ride to Tehran’s rescue, and whileGulf states don’t want instability, they are not distraught to see an old rival weakened.

But not least in the reckoning is surely that Mr Netanyahu, who survives politically through military action, onlynarrowly survived a Knesset votethis week. The government also faces mounting international condemnation over its war crimes in Gaza – though the US and others allow those crimes to continue. It is destroying the nation’s international reputation, yet may bolster domestic support through this campaign.

The obvious question is the future of a key Iranian enrichment site deep underground at Fordo, which many believe Israel could not destroy without US “bunker busters”. If Israel believes that taking out personnel and some infrastructure is sufficient to preclude Iran’s nuclear threat, that is a huge and perilous gamble. This attack may well trigger a rush to full nuclear-armed status by Tehran – and ultimately others – and risks spurringmore desperate measuresin the meantime. Surely more likely is that Israel hopes to draw in Washington, by persuading it that Iran is a paper tiger or baiting Tehran into attacking US targets.

“My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” Mr Trump claimed in his inaugural speech. Yet on Friday he said was not concerned about a regional war breaking out due to Israel’s strikes. Few will feel so sanguine. The current incoherence and incomprehensibility ofUS foreign policyfuels instability and risks drawing adversaries towards fateful miscalculations.

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Imagining how the media would cover the troops in Los Angeles or the detention of a sitting senator is a useful exercise

At times the gesture can seem like a cliche, but I like to imagine, for the sake of perspective, how political developments in the United States would be covered by the media if they were happening in any other country. I imagine that Thursday’s events inLos Angelesmight be spoken of like this:

A prominent opposition leader was attacked by regime security forces on Thursday in the presence of the national security tsar, as he voiced opposition to the federal military occupation of the US’s second-largest city following street demonstrations against the regime’s mass deportation efforts.

Alex Padilla, a senator from California, was pushed against a wall,removed from the room, and then tackled to the ground and handcuffed, reportedly by Secret Service and FBI agents, at a press conference in LA byDonald Trump’s homeland security secretary,Kristi Noem. He was trying to ask a question about the deployment of marines and national guard forces to LA in his capacity as Angelenos’ elected representative. Padilla, the son of Mexican immigrants, was later released; Noem, speaking to reporters after the incident, said both that she knew the senator and that agents tackled and detained him because neither she nor they knew who he was. In a video of the attack, Padilla can be heard identifying himself as a senator as Noem’s security forces begin to grab and shove him.

Seconds later, after he has been pushed out of the room, Padilla can be heard yelling to the men attacking him: “Hands off!” The video cuts out after a man steps in front of the camera to block the shot, and tells the person filming, “there is no recording allowed here, per FBI rights,” something of an odd statement to make at a press conference. Several federal court decisions have upheld the right to record law enforcement.

The violence toward a sitting senator is yet another escalation of the administration’s dramatic assertions of extra-constitutional authority, and another item in their ongoing assertion of the illegitimacy of dissent, even from elected leaders. In responding with violence toward the senator’s question, Noem, her security forces and by extension theTrump administrationmore broadly, are signaling that they will treat opposition, even from elected officials, as insubordination.

They do not see senators as equals to be negotiated with or spoken to in good faith, because they do not believe that any of the people’s representatives – and certainly not a Democrat – has any authority that they need to respect. Padilla, like the people of Los Angeles and the people of the United States, was not treated by theTrump administrationas a citizen, but as a subject.

The attack on Padilla by security forces, and the viralvideoof him being tackled to the ground and handcuffed by armed men, has threatened to overshadow the content of Noem’s press conference, which underscored in rhetoric this same sense of absolute authority and contempt for dissent that the attack on the senator demonstrated with action.

Noem was inLos Angelesto tout the administration’s military escalation against citizens there, who have taken to the streets as part of a growing protest movement against Trump’s mass deportation scheme, which has led to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (Ice) kidnapping of many Angelenos and left families, colleagues, neighbors and friends bereft of their beloved community members.

The protests have been largely peaceful – Ice and police have initiated violence against some demonstrators – but the Trump administration has taken them as an opportunity to crush dissent with force. The deployment of the California national guard – in violation of a law that requires the administration to secure cooperation from the governor – and the transfer of 700 marines to the city has marked a new willingness of the Trump administration to use military force against citizens who oppose its policies.

But to the Trump administration, the Americans who have taken to the streets to voice their opposition to Trump policies are no Americans at all. “We are not going away,” Noem said of the military occupation of Los Angeles. “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists.” By this, she meant the Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, and California governor, Gavin Newsom, who are not socialists but Democrats.

The term – “liberate” – evokes the US’s imperialist adventures abroad, in which such rhetoric was used to provide rhetorical cover for the toppling of foreign regimes, many of them democratically elected. The people’s elected representatives – be it Newsom or Bass or Padilla – are not figures they need to be “liberated” from. That is, not unless you consider the only legitimate “people” to be Trump supporters, and the only legitimate governance to be Republican governance.

Trump, as he expands his authoritarian ambitions and uses more and more violence to pursue them, has made his own will into the sum total of “the will of the people”. All those other people – the ones marching in the streets, and trying to stop the kidnappings of their neighbors – don’t count.

A few hours after Noem’s goons attacked Padilla, a federal district court judge ordered the Trump administration to relinquish control over the California national guard, agreeing with California that the guard had been illegally seized when Trump assumed control of the armed units without Newsom’s consent. “That’s the difference between a constitutional government and King George,” said district judge Charles Breyer in a hearing on the case earlier that day. “It’s not that the leader can simply say something and then it becomes it.”

The judge was pointing to the constitutional order, to the rule of law, to the guarantees, once taken for granted, that the president has limits on his power. He gave the Trump administration about 18 hours to hand control of the national guard back to the state of California. It was not immediately clear whether they would comply. Hours later, an appeals courtplaced a temporary blockon Breyer’s order, returning control of the California national guard to Trump. So much for us having a “law and order” president.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

The glossy perfection of millennial content gave way to something that felt more ‘real’. But that was a mirage – and brands quickly caught on

Eugene Healey is a brand strategy consultant, educator and creator

Authenticity is the great mirage of the modern age. Its promise – to live unmediated, in full accordance with our values and beliefs – feels like the ideal we’re always reaching for before it vanishes beyond the horizon. And ironically, the more we try to prove we’re authentic online, the more we seem to accelerate its disappearance.

As Generations Z and Alpha joined social media, they responded to the cultural demand for perfection with chaos – raw, unfiltered, deliberately messy content. The curated feed of flatlays gave way to the sloppy photo dump; the finstas; the bedrotting. Finally, our real lives represented on screen. Finally, something real.

Except that this quickly became another role to be performed, a generation-defining content genre that has itself become subject to more and more extreme performances – filming oneself balling into the camera, extreme overshares, breakdowns in public. Vulnerability-as-aesthetic, where what began as a rejection of perfection has become its own form of perfectionism – the flawless execution of being flawed.

To understand why authenticity is impossible, first we need to understand what social media has done to us. It’s turned personal identity into performance art – and in doing so, has transformed us all into brands (I should know, I’m a brand consultant).

The modern experience is one of constantly being perceived.We view ourselves in the third person, as an entity to be managed. How will this action make me look? How can my lived experience be something I can capture?

This isn’t limited to chronic social media users. Panoptic surveillance, whether state or private, makes us intensely conscious that every public action is potentially recorded, screenshotted and data-harvested. All the world’s a stage – and we’re all method actors who never break character.

Authenticity simply can’t survive this environment of constant performance – we become alienated from our own actions when every moment is filtered through the question of how it will be received.Social mediaaccelerates this process of negation.

Ever-attuned to the unmet desires of our society, the marketing world has itself been through several iterations of packaging and selling authenticity over the past 15 years. Post the great financial crisis, our efforts to be “real and relatable” saw us shrugging off polished corporate messaging to ape the awkward-earnest tone of millennial-era entertainment such as Garden State or Girls. Brands such as Airbnb championed a Simon Sinek-personified approach – driven by a deeper purpose and appealing to a common underlying humanity.

Like many aspects of millennial culture, this authenticityhas now been sufficiently roasted for its naive and cloying self-importance,but replaced by something arguably worse.

Today’s brand “authenticity” means co-opting the gen Z performance of being “raw and unfiltered”. Go into any viralTikTokvideo and observe this peculiar modern dystopia: a legion of brands colonising the comment section, all speaking to one another in the same sardonic, self-aware, fourth-wall breaking, chronically online tone. The irony is, of course, that there is nothing less authentic than multinationals with billions of dollars in market capitalisation pretending to be jaded teenagers, yet here we are.

If we want authenticity, we’ll need to unwind our culture of surveillance – to create spaces where actions aren’t immediately documented, dissected and distributed. But that feels like trying to uninvent the printing press. The infrastructure of observation has become so fundamental to how we live and work that opting out more or less means retreating from modern society altogether.

So what we actually need, especially for our youth, is an unmaking of expectation – the suffocating demand that they ruthlessly optimise and curate every element of their lives for public presentation just to access a fraction of the economic prosperity their parents enjoyed. Because we’ve created a world where turning yourself into a brand isn’t a lifestyle choice but a survival strategy, particularly as AI puts a blowtorch to the remaining areas of knowledge work that once promised middle-class security.

The internet has fundamentally altered the conditions under which genuine self-expression can exist. The solution isn’t to perform authenticity harder, but to recognise and jealously guard the remaining places where real authenticity might still be possible: in unrecorded conversations, in private moments, in closed networks that haven’t yet been colonised by the attention economy.

Ironically, admitting we can’t be authentic online might be the closest thing to honesty we have left.

Eugene Healey is a brand strategy consultant, educator and creator

Israel has eliminated many of the brains behind Tehran’s nuclear programme. But don’t expect the regime to back down

This is a war 30 years in the making.Benjamin Netanyahuwas talking about the threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb back in the 1990s and he has scarcely let up since. For decades he has believed that a nuclear Iran would represent the one truly existential threat to Israel and that military force is the only sure way to prevent it. Several times during the many years in which Netanyahu has sat in the prime minister’s chair, an all-out strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities has been weighed up, debated and planned for. In the early hours of this morning, it finally happened.

Netanyahu will be pleased with the early results, including theelimination of key Iranian military commanders and nuclear scientists. But the ultimate consequences could look very different. By his actions, he may only have accelerated the very danger he has feared for so long.

It’s not hard to see why Israel’s PM struck and struck now. The motive remains the same as it ever was, with Netanyahu’s statement overnight invoking the darkest chapter in Jewish history to insist thatIsraelwould never allow itself to be vulnerable to a “nuclear holocaust”. But the timing was down, in part, to the fact that the Iranian regime is in a state of strategic weakness.

Its power in the region long rested on the allies and proxies it could call on, forming a “ring of fire” around the Israeli enemy: the Assad regime in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen, to say nothing of pro-Iranian militias in Iraq. Now Assad is gone and Syria’s new leader, embraced by Donald Trump, is looking to Washington rather than Tehran. As for the three Hs, the Houthis have reached anagreement with the US; Hezbollah is leaderless and still reeling fromlast year’s Israeli onslaught, leaving the Iraqi militias who once co-ordinated with it weakened in turn; and Hamas has seen Israel wipe out its leadership and all but destroy Gaza. More directly, Israel’s response to Iran’s missile and drone strikes on the country in April and October of 2024 left Iran’s air defence system crippled. If the best time to kick a man is when he’s down, now, concluded Israel’s war planners, was the time to move.

As for this specific moment, there was a helpful bit of context, if not exactly a pretext, provided by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). On Thursday the nuclear watchdog found Iran inviolation of its non-proliferation obligationsfor the first time in almost 20 years.

And, as always with Netanyahu, domestic politics played a part: on Wednesday he warded off a threat to his coalition by warning one unhappy smaller party that the Iranian threat meant thatnow was not the timefor a dissolution and early elections.

What may have loomed especially large in Netanyahu’s calculations was the meeting scheduled for Sunday in Oman between Trump’s personal envoy, Steve Witkoff, and his Iranian counterpart, their sixth such encounter. Did the Israeli PM fear a breakthrough in those talks that would have seen Trump agree a deal much like the one signed by the Obama administration a decade ago, an arrangement that would have allowed Iran to keep enriching uranium in a way acceptable to the US but unacceptable to Israel? Netanyahumanaged to persuade Trumpin 2018 to break from the Obama-era agreement, helped by the fact Trump likes nothing more thanto dismantle the legacy of a predecessor. But a revived deal with Trump’s signature on it? That had to be prevented by whatever means necessary.

On this reading, Netanyahu has just defied the will of his biggest patron, the US, and done it brazenly. Supporting that view is the pointed statement by the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, that Israel’s action was“unilateral”and that “We are not involved in strikes against Iran.” That would certainly fit with Trump’s own words just a few hours before Israel’s assault had begun. “I’d love to avoid a conflict,” the president said, explaining that the US and Iran were “fairly close” to making a deal. “As long as I think there is an agreement I don’t want [the Israelis] going in because I think that would blow it.”

And yet, look at what Trump said next. “It might help it actually,” he mused, hinting that an Israeli attack could concentrate the Iranians’ minds in negotiations, nudging them towards saying yes rather than no. And note how Trump has reacted to the Israeli assault once it got under way.

“I think it’s been excellent,”he told ABC News on Friday morning. “We gave [the Iranians] a chance and they didn’t take it. They got hit hard, very hard … And there’s more to come. A lot more.”

Perhaps that’s all front, Trump preferring to save face – and claim credit – than to admit Israel defied his wishes. But we know how Trump talks when he thinks he’s been disrespected. And so far there’s been no sign of that. Coupled with Trump’s promise to defend Israel from Iranian retaliation, it adds to the possibility that the Oman talks may even have been a pre-agreed ruse to hoodwink Tehran, that theUS is no mere observer of this war and that it could get drawn further into it.

Which brings us to the question that matters more than either the motive or timing of this Israeli action: is it wise? Some will look at the region and think Israel has miscalculated, that some of the Arab states which quietly came to its aid against Iran a year ago will be reluctant to do that now. That may be to mistake public anger for private satisfaction. As the Economist’s Middle East correspondentputs it, “plenty of people in the Middle East are happy to see Iran hit … Lebanese, Syrians, Yemenis who suffered for years because of the Islamic republic are glad to see it bloodied.”

Others will note that the attack may have been spectacular, especially in its elimination of several key individuals, but that, if its ultimate aim is the prevention of an Iranian bomb, it is still bound to fail. The IAEAg has confirmed that the Natanz site was hit, but analysts explain that the business end of that installation is so deep in the ground, it is beyond the reach of conventional Israeli firepower. The same goes for the site atFordow, concealed inside a mountain. It would require US “bunker-buster” bombs to hit those, and even they might not be able to do it.

But there is a less concrete reason why Operation Rising Lion might ultimately prove futile. Surely Iran’s hardliners will now become more, not less, determined to acquire a nuclear weapon. They will have learned what might be called the North Korea lesson. After the Iraq war, Libya opted to abandon its nuclear programme. Not many years later, the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, was dead in a ditch. Ukraine too gave up its nuclear bombs, only to be invaded by its neighbour.Meanwhile, the dictator dynasty in Pyongyang made the opposite move: they held on to their nukes, and no one has ever laid a finger on them.

That logic is bleak but compelling and seems to be hardening in Tehran. Witness today’sstatement from the Iranian governmentthat “The world now better understands Iran’s insistence on the right to enrichment, nuclear technology and missile power.” That sounds like doubling down.

Even if the Iranians are somehow thwarted, the lesson will not be lost on the neighbourhood. Saudi Arabia and Turkey will not want to place themselves in Israel’s crosshairs by pursuing a nuclear programme, but nor will they want to be Libya or Ukraine. Despite the risks, they might conclude that it’s better to be North Korea. A nuclear weapon will only become more desirable. And a tinderbox region that is already the most unstable in the world will become more dangerous still.

So yes, Netanyahu can look forward to fighting the next Israeli election as the man who humbled Israel’s archenemy. It will play well. But with this move he may well have brought the nightmare prospect of a nuclear Middle East one step closer. That’s a peril for his country – and the world.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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