Coroners in Mendocino county in northern California working to identify remains as state’s wildfires intensify

Officials have found human remains in a burned-out home in Mendocino county, California, marking the first death in the state’s 2024 wildfire season.

The local coroner’s office is working to identify the body, but it may be that of a 66-year-old woman whose family reported her missing. The California department of forestry and fire protection, known as Cal Fire, confirmed the discovery of the remains on Friday.

California wildfires have burned five times the average area this year, officials say

‘Like an oven’: death at US women’s prison amid heatwave sparks cries for help

US wildfire season has arrived. Here’s why it could be an explosive summer

Guests arrive at the extravagant wedding of power couple Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant

• Ambani wedding: after months of celebrations, the ‘Windsors of India’ finally set to marry

Readers respond to Michael Aylwin’s article about his wife’s dementia

I am not ashamed to say that I wept while reading Michael Aylwin’s article (‘It comes for your very soul’: how Alzheimer’s undid my dazzling, creative wife in her 40s’, 9 July). He has articulated so many of the feelings and experiences that my wife and I have encountered across the more than 10 years since her diagnosis.

She too feared Alzheimer’s – her mother having died of the condition four years after diagnosis. Reaching the decision to place my wife in a care home, 58 years after making those wedding vows in church, tore me apart, and still does, even though family and social workers were insisting such a move was long overdue.

Robert Hardy, Mandy Lane and Rita Hawes respond to an article on hands-off Norwegian parenting, talking of the freedom they had during childhood in Britain decades ago

Re Andy Welch’s article on “Norwegian parenting” (How to be a Norwegian parent: let your kids roam free, stay home alone, have fun – and fail, 11 July), such willingness to allow children freedom was a feature of British life for many of us born five decades ago or more. I was not particularly unusual being put on to a bus at the age of five with a luggage label pinned to my coat for a five-hour journey to my grandparents’ house.

When there, my grandmother, who ran a seaside boarding house, would take me down to the beach in the morning with sixpence for the Punch and Judy show, and the instruction to be at the pier gate when both the clock hands were at the top of the clock. This was the era of the Moors murders, and child abduction was a public fear.

The director of Annie Hall, and Duvall’s co-stars in Time Bandits and Roxanne, reflect on working with the actor, who died yesterday aged 75

• ‘Duvall was a sublime and subversive screen presence’
• Shelley Duvall – a life in pictures

Woody Allen, writer, director, co-star, Annie Hall (1977)

Readers on the mammoth task facing the new prisons minister to reform the criminal justice system

As a former criminal justice practitioner, member of a probation board and now chair of a charity offering employment and training to prisoners in prisons and upon release, I have to echo the relief expressed by others at the appointment of James Timpson as prisons minister (Editorial, 9 July).

For too long, prison policy has run scared of the rightwing press, promoting a punitive ideology that has led to overcrowding and a lack of rehabilitation and education, and promoting the rhetoric that such things are rewards for criminality. What has been ignored is the evidence that shows this is an ineffective and expensive strategy. For most offenders, community sentences that provide mentoring and supervision are better at reducing recidivism rates.

Ruth Rising remembers seeing her father crying at the kitchen table after witnessing children being dug out of the remains of the destroyed school in Wales

Reading Gaynor Madgwick’s experience of the Aberfan disaster of October 1966 brought back memories of my father sitting at our kitchen table crying after returning from Aberfan on the evening of the disaster (A noise like thunder – then my classroom went black. How I lost my brother, sister and stability to the Aberfan disaster, 10 July). I was seven and my brother 12.

My father, who was a lecturer in civil engineering at Swansea University, had been asked some time during the morning of 21 October to join the investigation team. During the afternoon, and I think the following day, he was seeing children of my age being dug out of the remains of the primary school. It was a sight that he was never to forget.

We want to hear from NHS patients about whether they feel they have been listened to sufficiently when raising safety concerns

NHS patients raising safety concerns are too often “gaslighted” and “fobbed off”, according to England’s patient safety commissioner, who added that women in some cases had had legitimate fears dismissed.

We would like to speak to NHS patients about their experiences of receiving medical care. Have you had occasions were you felt your concerns were ignored? When did it happen? What took place and were there consequences?

PM says UK is back playing leading role on world stage at conclusion of Nato’s 75th anniversary summit

He would take candid snaps on the New York subway while pretending to adjust his camera. Now, a new monograph aims to bring the photographer’s work to a wider audience

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