He helped bring dance music to the mainstream, was a staple of the 90s Ibiza scene and at 65 still DJs on Radio 1. But all those hours in the club have come at a cost. Here, he talks survival, selling out and why he’s secretly quite shy

‘I’m of an era, really, where nobody ever got old,” says Pete Tong with a smile. Certainly not in the rave scene. “When you start, you never think you’re going to be doing it for that long. But then, equally, you don’t think it’s going to only be for, like, two years or 10 years. You just don’t think about it.” The dawn of dance music in the 80s was far too exciting to worry about when the party might end – and there is no sign it is about to. Tong is still presenting his BBC Radio 1 dance music show 35 years later, as well as running a record label. Last year, he says, he had more gigs than he has for ages.

Tong, who is 65, was talking to fellow DJ and longtime friend Carl Cox (63) about it the other day. “We’re just so blessed and lucky to still be doing it – being able to play music to people and doing what we loved as kids.”

Age-verification systems require collecting sensitive data to support the biometric information. In no time, the internet will become a fully surveilled digital panopticon

Over the past year, more than two dozen countries around the world have proposed bans on social media use for vast swathes of their public. These laws, often proposed under the guise of “child safety”, are ushering in an era of mass surveillance and widespread censorship, contributing to what scholars have called a “global free speech recession”.

Last year, Australia became the first country to ban anyone under the age of 16 from accessing social media. The move emboldened other countries around the world to quickly follow suit. Germany’s ruling party announced it was backing a social media ban. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, called for a ban on social media for under-15s. In the UK, Keir Starmer has sought to enact sweeping social media bans. Greece, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Japan have also pursued similar online identity verification laws.

Taylor Lorenz is a technology journalist who writes the newsletter User Mag and is the author of the bestselling book Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet

Kicking off this year’s series in which our writers advocate for one Academy Award nominee, our chief critic on why the Brazilian drama-thriller is the most audacious and fully realised film in the race

As ever, this year’s Oscars have their half-dozen or so favourites and frontrunners, some truly outstanding movies among them. But the one that has stayed in my mind is a knight’s move away from the talking-point consensus: an amazingly sophisticated, wayward and garrulous film from Brazil, a film about love and fatherhood, tyranny and resistance, and coming to terms with the past. It is digressive and droll and yet in its final act escalates stunningly from lugubrious mystery to cold-sweat tension and violence.

When the best picture Oscar is announced, my heart would sing to see its husband-and-wife producers Emilie Lesclaux and Kleber Mendonça Filho go on stage to accept it for their drama-thriller The Secret Agent. Directed by Mendonça Filho, it’s a movie made with effortless style and touched with pure cinematic inspiration. The opening scene alone, with its queasy black-comic unease, is itself a kind of masterpiece. It is like Antonioni’s The Passenger mixed with Leone and Peckinpah and a pulp shocker by Elmore Leonard. Yet it has a kind of novelistic, episodic quality – a cool, discursive self-awareness. You might call it a little miracle, although at near-epic length (2hrs 40mins), it’s actually a very big miracle.

Insect taxonomist Art Borkent has described and named more than 300 species of midges but fears his field of science is dying out, despite millions of insects, fungi and other organisms waiting to be discovered

Once Art Borkent starts speaking about biting midges, he rarely pauses for breath. Holding up a picture of a gnat trapped in amber from the time of the dinosaurs, the 72-year-old taxonomist explains that there are more than 6,000 ceratopogonidae species known to science. He has described and named more than 300 midges, mostly from his favourite family of flies. Some specialise in sucking blood from mammals, reptiles, other insects and even fish, often using the CO₂ from their host’s breath to locate their target, he says. Tens of thousands remain a mystery to science, waiting to be discovered.

But to Borkent’s knowledge, nobody will continue his life’s work of identifying and studying this group of flies once he has gone.

Famed for having a child’s drawing of a family carved into her back, the photographer has devoted her life to queer America, from endurance swimmers to drag artists to her son in a tutu. Now she’s finally getting a major UK show

There is no direct reference to Trump’s America in Catherine Opie’s To Be Seen, the US photographer’s first large museum exhibition in Britain, featuring key works going back to the 1990s. Mythic and personal, the images depict the American landscape and American family. Above all, they are concerned with the 64-year-old’s career-long interest in the representation of gay, lesbian and queer Americans missing from mainstream art history. Most of the photos were taken long before the Trump presidencies and yet, browsing the show, it feels like a powerful rebuke to the current administration – so much so that it brings on a mood of almost hysterical relief.

For 27 years, Opie taught photography at the University of California, Los Angeles, and would tell her students that it was part of the mission of the serious artist to show “an example in a public space of what it is to be brave”. So it is with To Be Seen, which features some of Opie’s most famous and bravest works, from her portraits of friends to denizens of LA’s 1990s leather dyke scene: the iconic, androgynous Pig Pen, a friend who appears in a series of shots, looking coolly at the camera, daring the viewer to define them; her Being and Having series, an early challenge to gender norms featuring 13 butch lesbians posing in stick-on, Halloween-grade facial hair, in an absurdist performance of masculinity; and Dyke, in which Opie’s friend Steakhouse – speaking of brave – poses with her back to the camera, the word “dyke” tattooed in large ornate script across the back of her neck.

On tour of returns centre, home secretary says ‘legitimate grievances’ have to be acknowledged as part of ‘responsible’ politics

• Refugee status to be temporary as Shabana Mahmood rips up rules on UK asylum

The UK home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, and Danish immigration officials strode through the bleak and chilly Sjælsmark returns centre, a former military barracks used to house men and women who have no right to remain in the country. Followed by photographers, reporters and civil servants, Mahmood was told of the strict conditions in which hundreds of people live after asylum and right to remain appeals are rejected and before many are sent to other countries.

Sjælsmark, about 20 miles north of Copenhagen, is at the sharp end of an asylum system set up by Denmark’s left-leaning Social Democrat government to deter claimants. As well as those facing swift deportations, refugees are given temporary permission to stay and will later be told to leave if their countries of origin are deemed safe.

Israeli military says fighting Iran-backed Hezbollah could take ‘many’ more days; US crew bailed out safely after crash-landing, says Kuwait

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Bahrain has said that one person was killed by shrapnel from an intercepted missile. The death of a foreign worker at Salman Industrial City, working on a boat there, marks the kingdom’s first reported fatality in the war.

Bahrain, home to the US navy’s 5th fleet, said it intercepted 61 missiles and 34 attack drones launched against it. It said some shrapnel had gotten through, striking buildings and the naval base.

Foreign secretary confirms strike on Akrotiri base but says it ‘simply not true’ the UK is being dragged into an Iraq-style conflict

• ‘Simply not true’ UK is being dragged into Iraq-style conflict, says foreign secretary

After an unmanned drone struck the RAF Akrotiri base in Cyprus overnight – and two more drones heading toward the base were struck down on Monday – Greece will send two frigates and two F-16 fighter jets to Cyprus “to contribute to its defence against the threats it faces,” said Greek defence minister Nikos Dendias, who will also travel to Cyprus tomorrow.

For the latest on Europe’s response to US-Israel war on Iran, follow The Guardian’s live coverage here.

Fears that decision to strike could be open-ended as Trump comes under pressure to spell out his vision for the country

• US-Israel war on Iran – latest updates

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Donald Trump is under pressure to spell out his vision for Iran amid the ongoing attacks on the country and reports of the first American casualties since the launch of unprovoked US and Israeli military strikes.

Trump’s critics are demanding that the White House provide greater clarity about what comes next. Opponents and analysts say the lack of a clear plan outlined so far has created a danger of the US being sucked into a long-lasting conflict of the sort that Trump repeatedly vowed to avoid.

Yvette Cooper says plans under consideration to evacuate about 300,000 Britons from Middle East amid Iran war

• US-Israel war on Iran – live updates

It is “simply not true” that the UK is being dragged into another Iraq-style conflict in the Middle East, Yvette Cooper has said, after an RAF base in Cyprus was struck by an Iranian drone.

The attack was part of a barrage of strikes by Tehran around the Middle East after a US-Israeli attack on Saturday that killed the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The UK foreign secretary confirmed ministers were considering possible plans to evacuate about 300,000 Britons from the region.