Schickt der Präsident die Einwanderungsbehörde vor die Wahllokale? Lässt er Urnen beschlagnahmen? Die Zwischenwahlen in den USA werden von vielen Befürchtungen begleitet. Womit zu rechnen ist – und womit eher nicht.

Miatta Fahnbulleh says reference to ‘awkward’ interview was meant to be lighthearted and self-deprecating

The energy secretary has been forced to clarify that she backs Shabana Mahmood’s migration policy, after earlier joking that she had not been able to “lie” about supporting a key element of the changes.

Miatta Fahnbulleh made the original remarks to a journalists’ event in Westminster, referring to an “awkward” Sky News interview in which she repeatedly refused to say she was in favour of plans to make foreign workers wait 15 years to get permanent residency.

British authorities were unable to investigate case of Christopher Mooty, who went on to commit another offence

The US military failed to notify British police of an allegation that one of its airmen had been drink-driving in Suffolk, preventing the British authorities from being able to investigate the offence.

The failure broke a longstanding formal agreement with British police that enables the UK to investigate alleged illegality by US military personnel who are stationed in Britain.

As glaciers melt and permafrost thaws, Longyearbyen, on the remote Arctic islands of Svalbard, faces climate-induced problems from tap water to housebuilding to landslides

• Heavy metals make Norwegian village’s tap water toxic

On a rugged mountain plateau of snow-dusted rocks, in the remote archipelago of Svalbard, a glaciologist, Andy Hodson, points out the “ears” of ice, white against the rock, that gave Foxfonna glacier its name, after the arctic fox.

The small glacier, on a mountain 8 miles (15km) outside the Norwegian village of Longyearbyen, is a popular summer hike for tourists who come here seeking the Arctic experience.

Cutting out dead material will make the plant look better without damaging it. But be careful not to slice into the living leaf

The problem
You can really love your plants and still be rewarded with crispy, brown leaf tips. While they won’t kill your plant, they aren’t aesthetically pleasing.

The hack
The tidy-up is simple: cut off the dry, brown parts of the leaf. The plant looks instantly better, and the theory is this does no harm because the tissue is already dead. But the worry is it will hurt the plant or make the browning worse.

After Joss Whedon’s arrival, back in the news with comments from Ben Affleck, the franchise lost a sense of earnest passion that could have sustained a weary DCEU

Nine years after superhero epic Justice League arrived in cinemas, there ought to be very little left to say about how it all went wrong. Zack Snyder shot the film, Joss Whedon substantially rewrote and reshot it, and audiences eventually got to see both men’s versions. Any debate over their relative merits long ago disappeared. Whedon is pretty much cancelled; Snyder has reinvented himself as the writer-director of extremely average ersatz Star Wars movies for Netflix, and an entirely new DC universe is under way that has very little to do with either of them.

To a greater or lesser extent, the world has moved on. But Ben Affleck’s latest comments raise an uncomfortable question about whether Snyder’s departure was ever presented honestly. Speaking to Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Affleck, who played Batman, described the Justice League reshoots as the lowest point of his career, but reserved his strongest criticism for the circumstances of Snyder’s departure. The director stepped away in May 2017, two months after his daughter Autumn killed herself, aged 20, with the public explanation that he needed to be with his family. Affleck, however, alleged that studio Warner Bros had used the tragedy to justify replacing him. “The way in which that was, I thought, used as an excuse was one of the shittiest things I’ve ever seen,” Affleck said. “It was so gross.”

• Five teams level on points after Monaco lose to Lorient

• Real Madrid ease past Sevilla with Mbappé double

Ten-man Lyon held on for a 2-1 comeback victory over Nice to move top of Ligue 1 on Sunday, as previous pacesetters Monaco lost for the first time this season. Five teams are level on 14 points at the top of the table with Lyon heading Paris Saint-Germain, Paris FC, Lille and Monaco on goal difference.

It was a close run affair for Lyon, playing in front of local boy and French cycling prodigy Paul Seixas, following Keito Nakamura’s dismissal 20 minutes from time.

A new Washington DC exhibition examines how Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and more used the Bard’s work to help tell their own stories

“William Shakespeare was a black woman.” In 1985, Maya Angelou spoke these words as part of a keynote speech at a convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

There, she spoke of the role poetry played in her transition from muteness as a child and how she fantasized herself triumphantly delivering Portia’s speech from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in front of her entire community at church. Though she never got the chance to perform that rendition, Angelou acknowledged her desire to deliver that rendition as part of a lifelong kinship with Shakespeare, a connection she continued to seek out throughout her life whenever she needed heartening or solace. In her eyes, Shakespeare wrote his emotionally desolate Sonnet 29 “for” her; how else could he have so aptly described the harsh realities of the Black feminine condition?