Black Panther made him a megastar, but in private the actor and his wife Simone Ledward Boseman were dealing with his terminal cancer diagnosis. In a rare interview, she talks about the shock of losing him, and how a revival of one of his plays has helped her heal

Simone Ledward Boseman is reflecting on the five years that have passed since the death of her husband, actor and writer Chadwick Boseman. “The edges of grief get less sharp over time,” she says. “Five years definitely feels like a marker. I’ve had to gradually figure out how I talk about Chad. What do I want to share, and what do I feel comfortable sharing? Can I find something that I might want to share in the midst of something I don’t want to share?” We meet on a video call across time zones – it’s 9am in California, where she lives. “Except for my mom, I’m not talking to anybody before 10am,” she laughs. She’s made an exception to give a rare interview ahead of the UK premiere of her late husband’s play Deep Azure, which is currently in previews in London at Shakespeare’s Globe.

When Boseman’s death was announced at the end of August 2020, the shock reverberated across the globe. He was devastatingly young – only 43 – and the world was just getting to know him. The release of the movie Black Panther two years earlier, in which he played the eponymous character also known as T’Challa, had skyrocketed his fame. Before then, he had been a successful Hollywood actor. Now? He was a global megastar – the first Black superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The news was doubly shocking because the family had not previously revealed that he had been suffering with colorectal cancer.

You need to check where you stand legally, but I fear you’re being taken advantage of and will have to ask her to leave

In spring 2022, my husband and I were lucky enough to sell our house for a profit and, with help from my parents, bought a much bigger home. At the time, my friend was going through a tough time, so I asked if she would like to move in with us and our two children. There was no written agreement, but the plan was that she would either quit her job and retrain, or save for her own place and move out in six months to a year. She pays us £350 a month, which goes towards energy bills, bar a three-month period when she wasn’t working. I also gave her money towards taking a course.

She hasn’t retrained, got a new job or saved for a new place. And she doesn’t have the money to move out. I feel trapped and resent all I have to do as a working mum while she’s here, but that’s compounded by guilt as I know I’m very privileged to have a big house and a well-paid job. I hate that she sees me at my worst (rowing with my husband/sorting out arguments between the kids) and I feel as if I’m constantly keeping my emotions in check around her. Our friendship feels warped into a parent-child dynamic.

The real risk for American broadcasters is not that dissent will be visible. It is that audiences will start assuming anything they do not show is being hidden

The modern Olympics sell themselves on a simple premise: the whole world, watching the same moment, at the same time. On Friday night in Milan, that illusion fractured in real time.

When Team USA entered the San Siro during the parade of nations, the speed skater Erin Jackson led the delegation into a wall of cheers. Moments later, when cameras cut to US vice-president JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance, large sections of the crowd responded with boos. Not subtle ones, but audible and sustained ones. Canadian viewers heard them. Journalists seated in the press tribunes in the upper deck, myself included, clearly heard them. But as I quickly realized from a groupchat with friends back home, American viewers watching NBC did not.

It’s refreshing, groundbreaking and absolutely piles up the gags. The return of this Glaswegian sitcom is very welcome indeed

The second series of Dinosaur opens on the Isle of Wight – a mere seven-hour drive and ferry ride away from our heroine’s beloved Glasgow. Oh dear. Nina (Ashley Storrie) is eight months into a dig, the job she took at the end of series one, and despite discovering a metazoic dung beetle and getting pally with a big American fella called Clayton who is so charming he can call her “Scotland” and get away with it, she’s homesick.

She is missing Lee, her almost-sort-of boyfriend who used to make her morning coffee outside the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, where she worked in the palaeontology department (not with the dirty grave robbers over in antiquities). She is missing watching The Real Housewives with her sister, Evie, their takeaway Tuesdays and walks around the “wee dodgy parks in case we uncover a homicide”. She’s all set to go home when she is asked to stay on another year. Will she choose her precious old rocks, or head to the exact midpoint between the Isle of Wight and Glasgow to reunite with Lee? So begins the madcap rush (in a very slow buggy) to a park bench in Knutsford, and the happy return of this hilarious, heartwarming and covertly groundbreaking sitcom.

It’s chilling to watch as Trump and Netanyahu adopt the methods of regimes their countries once condemned

• Janine di Giovanni is a war correspondent and the executive director of The Reckoning Project, a war crimes unit in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza

In Syria, where I worked during the years of Bashar al-Assad’s terror, people were often taken away to torture cells before dawn by masked men. The timing was deliberate. It disoriented them at their most vulnerable, ensuring the torture to come would be even more agonising. The testimonies I recorded from survivors almost always contained the same phrase: “The morning they came for me.” One young woman, shattered by rape and violence, later told me that her life had split in two – before and after the masked men came for her.

In Iraq, those who spoke against Saddam Hussein – even abroad, even casually – were punished in cruel ways by a vengeful leader determined to crush any hint of dissent.

Janine di Giovanni is a war correspondent and the executive director of The Reckoning Project, a war crimes unit in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza. She is the author of The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria.

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Almost 1m UK households are hooked up to heat networks. None had protection from poor service or price hikes … until last month

‘If I could move, I would – to a place without a heat network. But I can’t while this debt is hanging over me,” says Anja Georgiou.

The mother lives with her family in a rented flat in the River Gardens development in Greenwich in south-east London where, three years ago, residents were shocked to be presented with a surprise £200,000 bill for heating and hot water.

Pressure grows on Keir Starmer as Labour peer reported to have received payment worth three months’ salary when he quit in September

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A cabinet minister has called for Peter Mandelson to hand back the payout he received after quitting as ambassador to the US last year, as pressure increased on the prime minister to quit for having appointed him in the first place.

Pat McFadden, the welfare secretary, said on Sunday he thought the Labour peer should give back his Foreign Office payout, which is reported to be as much as £55,000. The Foreign Office is understood to be reviewing the payment.

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Alpine skiiing: Breezy Johnson goes top, for USA. Had a twist in the air off one of the early jumps, had to battle to land it, but then comes through with a sizzling run on the rest of the course, improving on her training run time by a second and a half.

Alpine skiing: It’s a gorgeous day out there, blue sky. We’ve had five skiers so far, Ariane Raedler of Austria is leading on 1:37:20, the Italian Brignone and three Swiss skiers following her. Janine Schmitt and Jasmine Flury both almost stacked, but recovered it, terrifying at that speed. Malorie Blanc went first and had a clean run, 1:38:77.

Exit polls point to public endorsement of new prime minister, after day hit by blizzards and freezing conditions

Japan’s conservative governing party is on course to dramatically strengthen its grip on power after exit polls predicted a landslide victory in Sunday’s lower house elections.

The Liberal Democratic party (LDP) was projected to win between 274 and 328 seats out of a total of 465, according to an exit poll by the public broadcaster NHK, well above the 233 it needed to regain the majority it lost in 2024. Combined with seats secured by its junior coalition partner, the Japan Innovation party, the parties could win between 302 and 366 seats, NHK added.

Man in his 60s ‘arrested and handed over to Russia’ after fleeing to UAE, according to media reports

Authorities in Dubai have arrested and handed over to Russia a man suspected of shooting and wounding a senior officer in Russia’s intelligence services, according to Moscow’s security service.

The announcement on Sunday came two days after a gunman shot Lt Gen Vladimir Alekseyev three times on the stairwell of his Moscow apartment, leaving him in a critical condition.