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Susan Buckner, the actress known for her role as Patty Simcox in the 1978 movie musical hit Grease, died on Thursday at the age of 72.

In a statement to the Guardian, Buckner’s publicist confirmed Buckner’s passing. A cause of death has not been publicized.

Samantha Mansfield, Buckner’s daughter, described her mother as “magic” and a “lighting rode of a mother”, in a statement.

“She was magic. She was my best friend. And I will miss her every day. I was lucky I had such a lighting rod of a mother and now I have her as an angel,” she said.

At 25, Buckner was cast as the spirited cheerleader Patty Simcox in Grease, which starred John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.

Buckner quickly became an audience favorite given her character’s perky cheers: “Do the splits, give a yell! … Show a little spirit for old Rydell!”

After appearing in Grease, Buckner also acted in several television shows, including The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, The Love Boat, and BJ and the Bear. She also co-starred in the ABC series When the Whistle Blows which ran for one season.

Buckner later stepped away from acting to raise her two children. She directed several theatrical productions at the Pinecrest elementary school in Florida and worked as fitness instructor for nearly a decade, according to Buckner’s publicist.

Born on 28 January 1952 in Seattle, Washington, Buckner was crowned Miss Washington in 1971, representing the state in the nationwide pageant the following year.

She pursued music and songwriting, performing in Dean Martin’s Golddiggers signing group, the all-girl group Fantasy and the musical duo Buckner and Pratt.

Buckner also performed as a dancer and synchronized swimmer on The Brady Bunch Variety Hour.

Buckner is survived by her two children, Adam Josephs and Samantha; her four grandchildren; her sister Linda; her daughter-in-law Noel Josephs; her son-in-law Adam Mansfield and Buckner’s longtime partner Al.

Hundreds of Washington DC police, some deploying pepper spray, cleared a pro-Palestinian encampment at George Washington university early Wednesday, in the latest clash between law enforcement and protesting students to sweep the US.

The GW Hatchet student paper reported that at least a dozen people had been arrested as the impromptu tent village was dismantled in University Yard. The Metropolitan police department said the arrests had been made for “assault of a police officer” and “unlawful entry”.

The George Washington confrontation follows the clearing of the protest encampment at the University of Chicago on Tuesday. A large police contingent was sent in to remove tents in the university’s Quad, after the school authorities said that negotiations with students had broken down.

Since campus protests first erupted three weeks ago at Columbia University in New York City and spread rapidly across the country, there have been at least 2,600 arrests on 50 campuses, according to the Associated Press.

At George Washington, tension rose on Tuesday night after protesters left the university encampment and marched to the home of the institution’s president, Ellen Granberg. The local TV station Fox 5 reported that they were chanting, “Granberg, Granberg, you can’t hide, you’re complicit in genocide”.

University authorities said in a statement following the removal of the encampment that the protest had “evolved into an unlawful activity, with participants in direct violation of multiple university policies and city regulations”. On Sunday, Granberg went further, claiming the protest had been taken over by outsiders and accusing the demonstrators of a raft of illegal and provocative acts.

“When protesters overrun barriers established to protect the community, vandalize a university statue and flag, surround and intimidate GW students with antisemitic images and hateful rhetoric, chase people out of a public yard based on their perceived beliefs, and ignore, degrade, and push GW Police Officers and university maintenance staff, the protest ceases to be peaceful or productive,” Granberg said.

Student protesters have called her account of events “deeply misleading” and countered that Granberg had repeatedly refused to meet with them and discuss their demands. They include disclosure by the university of all its investments and endowments, and divestment from academic partnerships in Israel.

One question looming over the volatile events at George Washington was why the DC police took so long to remove the encampment following days of requests by the university authorities to do so. On Friday the police chief and mayor of DC ordered police officers who had been assembling to dismantle the tents to stand down, saying they were worried about being seen to act against peaceful protesters, the Washington Post reported.

The mayor, Muriel Bowser, and the police chief, Pamela Smith, were set to answer questions from US Congress members on Wednesday about why they failed to respond to the university’s request to clear the campus until now.

I hate getting dressed up. Watching the Met Gala red carpet makes my legs go all itchy. As a child, getting dressed up entailed putting on trousers which had wool in them. And wool made me itch like hell. They’d be the same trousers I’d been forced into the last time I’d been dragged off, in an ecstasy of discomfort, to the wedding of a distant cousin. Alterations would be necessary. I’d stand there while my mum faffed away with pins, ignoring my wails of protest. They are PICKY, I would bleat. Even thinking about wool makes me itch like hell. Wool is my hell. In Room 101, all they’d have to do is put me in a tight-fitting, 100% wool boilersuit and their work would be done.

Eventually, perhaps embarrassed by a child behaving as if he had fleas, action was taken. Silk linings were sewn into the cursed, itchy, picky, scratchy trousers to shield my little legs from the misery. This helped, but only up to a point. Merely knowing the wool was there made me itch. This Little Lord Fauntleroy, covertly clad in silk, would still move gingerly, aching for the moment he could take the bloody things off.

And I’ve not grown out of this. My suit trousers remain lined with silk, as I remain severely averse to dressing up. As I got older, other alterations became necessary. It wasn’t about lengthening the legs as they, unlike my waistline, had stopped growing. As some formal event loomed, I’d dread the moment it came to fastening the trousers. Yep, too tight again. More disappointment in myself. More faff.

There was always some issue. I can’t wear a dinner jacket without looking like a doorman. If I appear anywhere in a bow tie, other guests will start giving me ticket stubs or asking me the way to the toilet. How much easier it is to go out looking like an unmade bed. I must get the picture of me that goes next to my name in the Guardian retaken. I don’t look smart like that. It’s not the real me.

Many years ago, noting my shambolic appearance, some TV producers packed me off, kicking and screaming, to appear on a programme called Style Challenge. This involved being restyled before appearing in front of a live audience in a new outfit. A big mirror was swung around so the subjects could see themselves in the new garb for the first time. Naturally, ignoring my protests, they put me in woollen trousers. Unlined. Misery. But this wasn’t the biggest problem, far from it.

I’d been wondering how they achieved the element of surprise when the guests saw themselves on stage in the big mirror. Surely they knew what they were wearing? It turned out that while the stylists tried different looks on me, I’d be blindfolded. So there I was, in my dressing room, wearing nothing but a blindfold and underpants, while two young women dressed and undressed me.

At one point, with no outfit satisfactory and the recording imminent, they ran off to fetch some more stuff. I took the opportunity to remove the blindfold and go for a wee. Gentlemen reading this will be aware of a risk associated with a quick wee. Yes, standing there waiting for the stylists’ imminent return, I was horrified to see – and I’m sorry to be so coarse as to share this – a small damp patch on my grey briefs.

Panicking, in a desperate attempt to dry the damp patch before the stylists returned, I pressed myself up against a radiator on the wall. And this was the sight which confronted these poor women when they suddenly burst back into the room carrying bundles of fresh clothes. I stared at them. They stared at me. My mouth opened and closed, but nothing came out. I couldn’t even pretend I was looking out of a window because the radiator was on a blank wall. And neither could I present the wet patch on my pants by way of explanation, as by now my pants were dry.

Broken, wordless with shame, I re-donned the blindfold so at least I didn’t have to see their appalled faces. The rest of that day is a blank. I don’t even remember the woolly trousers itching. God, I hate getting dressed up.

Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist

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It is fascinating to be playing games made by developers who have been raised on 3D games – and Crow Country’s affectionate referencing of Silent Hill is a prime example of this. A survival horror game about the dark secrets lurking within and beneath an abandoned theme park, it is also a gorgeous homage to landmark games of the past.

The look of the game is breathtaking: the thick, grainy patina over the screen gives the impression of playing on a CRT monitor in somebody’s dimly lit bedroom in 1997. The chunky polygonal figure of the protagonist, the mysterious Mara Forest, serves a stark contrast against the set and landscape, which give the impression of the lush pre-rendered backgrounds of Final Fantasy VII. However, these environments are not static in the way of their predecessors, but fully and delightfully interactive – this is a game made with real attention to detail, and clear passion for the particular period of game design. It is a sublime treat to look at, and to listen to, the sound design perfectly in keeping with the aesthetic, adding even more tension to the already grungy, bleak world we must navigate.

There are two modes of play on offer at the title screen – survival, or exploration. I chose the explore mode initially, which gave me about 10 engrossing hours of gameplay. Without the grotesque, Cronenbergian beasts that roam the park, the game still holds up as a chilling adventure throughout a constantly decaying theme park universe. When a player exits a room and returns to it later, they may find it littered with corpses and bloody text on the walls. At a certain point, torrential rain begins. The lights eventually go out. The environment is truly alive, and rammed with tricky puzzles that may seem oblique at first but are highly satisfying to decode.

After completing this mode, I embarked on the bloodier route – faced with the guests and other grotesque creatures of the park, the horror was suitably heightened. The combat is straightforward – shoot or run, and the game thoughtfully offers a set of control options for the gunplay so that players can choose their approach. The creatures’ origins are deeply tragic and strange – but with or without their presence, the game offers great suspense. Even if you know you have elected a route where Mara won’t get harmed, there is still the sense that there is something terrible lurking around every corner. This game is something of a corridor horror, and as we tunnel our way behind and below the park, things only get worse.

The mystery of Crow Country was far richer than I had anticipated: the story is very completely drawn, and isn’t without a little levity and playfulness in the face of the darkness. I found the final sequences really bold – committed to the strange and unsettling all the way through, it certainly sticks the landing. Crow Country is far more than a pastiche of the giants of the PS1 era – it is a real triumph in and of itself.

Adults need to revisit their history lessons to learn where their “blind spots” are after schools failed to thoroughly teach them about colonialism and empire, according to a leading history teacher.

This is the aim of a new book, The History Lessons, by the award-winning teacher Shalina Patel, which spotlights the historical figures and stories left out of the textbooks – in particular those of women and people of colour – to challenge entrenched narratives.

“It’s good history to shed light on as many stories as you can, especially those which have been forgotten and to question why; why is it that certain figures or narratives have been accepted as mainstream understandings of these periods of time,” she said.

“That is my call to arms in the book, to get people to think: why is it that some of these people have been forgotten?”

Patel said she felt most anxious writing the chapters set during the British empire, especially the “dark areas” that were uncomfortable to talk about.

“I was really aware that so many adults say that’s the area of history they feel least confident about because they didn’t learn it at school. Lots learned about Britain’s role in the abolition of slavery, but not its role in the transatlantic slave trade. That’s seen as an American story. People are really aware now of where their blind spots are,” she said.

The relevance of the debate over the legacy of colonial history and racial privilege was evident in recent remarks made by the business and trade secretary, Kemi Badenoch. She told an audience in the City that it would be wrong to attribute the UK’s wealth and economic success to the empire rather than the birth of democracy and the Industrial Revolution.

Patel, citing Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors book and how it has “completely changed how so many of us view that period” as an example, said: “History’s really exciting, because how we view history is changing all the time. People are asking questions they weren’t asking before. So many brilliant historians are uncovering those [forgotten] histories.”

Patel first became interested in hidden histories when she discovered the story of Sophia Duleep Singh, an Indian suffragette who was “a bit of a celebrity at the time”, yet isn’t included in mainstream teaching about the movement.

As a south Asian woman, she was fascinated to learn “there was a suffragette that looked more like me”, and she has found that students in the diverse inner London school she works in “really love learning about her”.

With the support of her department, this prompted her to do further research into “so many fascinating people who have just been forgotten in history”. This included showing students the Indian soldiers who fought alongside the “tommies in the trenches” in the second world war, and the Chinese labourers who worked on tanks.

“We started taking those classic school contexts and thinking who else was there, what other unfamiliar stories can we tell from familiar contexts,” she said.

This drive led to Patel winning a National Teaching award in 2018 for a lesson she had taught on Noor Inayat Khan, a British spy stationed in France during the second world war who was killed by the Nazis. She set up a popular Instagram account, @thehistorycorridor, as well as consulting for schools across the country looking to decolonise their curriculums.

When the opportunity to write a book arrived, Patel seized it – but this time she wanted to write for adults.

“I wanted to teach the lessons I teach my students to an adult audience who maybe did like history, but don’t necessarily do anything with it, or people who really didn’t like history because maybe it didn’t resonate. I hope it’s a gateway for people to delve into specific aspects of history,” she said.

The book, which is intended to be accessible and non-academic, breaks down large periods of time into smaller chunks, with each containing the story of a person whose experience sheds light on the era.

To introduce this approach more widely in schools, Patel thinks that history teachers need to be given the time and resources to explore hidden histories and develop their subject knowledge, for instance by working with university lecturers.

“What would be brilliant would be having training out there for teachers, having time for that. A network with teachers to share the stories they’re teaching to students would be really powerful.

“The more funding that can go into resources teachers can access, more textbooks, online resources, would really help. The other thing would be for these stories to be embedded into exam specifications as well, demonstrating to our students that they are valued and important,” she said.

The History Lessons by Shalina Patel is out on 9 May (Icon Books).

Hidden histories: the figures left out of the textbooks

Dorothy Lawrence
An English journalist who was desperate to report from the frontlines of the first world war, but was refused the posting by her editors on the grounds of her gender. She took matters into her own hands by posing as a male soldier and journeying to the Somme.

But her health took a turn for the worse in the trenches, forcing her to reveal her gender after 10 days, out of fear that if she needed medical attention those who helped her would be punished. She was arrested and interrogated, suspected of being a spy or a prostitute before being sent home under agreement not to write about her experiences.

Patel has used the notes Lawrence kept from the war to tell her story.

The Ivory Bangle Lady
Patel’s book opens with the Ivory Bangle Lady, a skeleton thought to be of a high-status woman from Roman York uncovered in 1901.

Researchers have analysed her facial features, the chemical signature of the food and drink she consumed, and the evidence from the burial site to determine she was likely to have been wealthy and of north African descent.

Her remains, dated to the second half of the fourth century, were found with jet and elephant ivory bracelets, earrings, pendants, beads, a blue glass jug and a glass mirror.

Nur Jahan
Patel says that one of the historical contexts that people do not know a huge amount about is how Britain took over India. She tells this story by teaching her students about Mughal India, which was the ruling power at the time of British colonisation.

She spotlights Nur Jahan, a 17th-century Mughal empress who is thought to have been the real power behind the throne, rather than her opium and alcohol-addicted husband. As well as receiving the rare honour for a woman of having coinage struck in her name, she was famed for her tiger-slaying abilities.

Sophia Duleep Singh
An Indian princess and goddaughter to Queen Victoria, Sophia Duleep Singh fought for women’s voting rights in the UK. She was part of a delegation of 300 suffragettes who marched to parliament in 1910, and was among the 119 arrested after police beat the protesters in a day that has come to be known as “Black Friday”.

Although she was considered a celebrity in the UK at the time, she remains a little-known figure in India, the country of her ancestry.

Patel described her as “very fashionable and stylish”, and she often featured in pictures with her prize-winning pomeranian dogs.

Noor Inayat Khan
Also known as Nora Baker, she was a British spy stationed in France during the second world war who was betrayed, captured and killed by the Nazis.

Under the codename Madeleine she became the first female wireless operator to be sent from the UK into occupied France to aid the French resistance during the second world war.

While house prices have steadied in the first part of 2024, home ownership remains out of reach for many as the average cost of renting continues to increase. This has prompted some to find different ways to get onto the housing ladder.

We would like to hear from home owners who bought their house with one or more friends. Why did you choose to pool your resources? What are the pros and cons of sharing your property with someone who is not a significant other? Tell us all about it below.

Sky Sports plans to broadcast football during the 3pm Saturday slot as it gets set to increase its live sports coverage by 50% from next season.

As Sky insisted it “takes seriously” the responsibility of minimising disruption for match-going fans, it announced that every game in the opening weekend of the English Football League season would be broadcast live, including those scheduled to start at traditional kick-off times.

As part of a new £935m deal with the EFL, Sky is to show 1,000 lower-league fixtures in the 2024-25 season, with a commitment to featuring every one of the 72 clubs live on 20 occasions. Coverage of the season will begin and end with a full round of fixtures, with the traditional Saturday blackout set to be avoided because Premier League sides will not be playing at the same time.

Viewers will be able to choose from all fixtures by using an expanded streaming service, known as Sky Sports +, which will have the capability to show up to 100 live events at once. For match-going fans, Sky pledged to pull forward the dates by which it makes its game selections, promising that every live fixture preceding the FA Cup third round would be selected before the season begins, and games up to March decided by November.

The managing director of Sky Sports, Jonathan Licht, said the EFL coverage on the weekend of 10-11 August would be “a huge moment for football fans across the country”, promising a step change in coverage for lower-league clubs and no increase in cost for Sky subscribers.

Licht also insisted that Sky was not dismissive of the needs of match-going fans, for whom shifting kick-off times are a source of frustration. “Despite what some think we take the responsibility seriously,” Licht said. “We would confidently say that we select matches in a timely way, and that there is something of a black hole where we don’t see the discussion with safety officials, police and other competitions. That is getting more complicated and is taking more time. We will work to give as much notice as possible to fans.”

In a typical EFL weekend from next season Sky will show 10 live matches, with five from the Championship, and five from Leagues One and Two combined. Sky will also show midweek match rounds in their entirety, with distinct commentary teams for each match. The expansion in coverage will extend to the Premier League from 2025-26, with 100 extra matches added to Sky’s output, meaning it will broadcast a minimum of 215 live top-flight games.

Britain’s “old boys’ club” suffered a blow last night. The Garrick Club – an exclusive gentlemen’s club in central London and relic of some 19th-century fantasy of male dominance – voted to allow women to become members for the first time in almost 200 years. About 60% of the votes were in favour.

In the 21st century, there is simply no legitimate justification for the exclusion of women. There actually never was. That the Garrick Club’s exclusionary policy has been so robustly defended in recent weeks speaks to a profound misogyny alive and well in Britain. What would including women do to the refined, rarefied air of the club? Contaminate it with our chit-chat? Our nagging? Would our feminine charms prove too much of a distraction?

The refrain of “nothing to see here” is all too familiar to so many women. It’s not a work meeting, it’s just a couple of holes at the golf course. It’s just blowing off steam. It’s just a couple of drinks with the guys. We didn’t think you would want to come. But it’s not plausible to say that work doesn’t happen in spaces like the Garrick, and that these aren’t places where, even loosely, critical decisions are made. Clubs like the Garrick are built for soft networking, the sidebar conversations where real power coalesces, uninterrupted by pesky women. A sense that you belong among its exclusive cohort is in and of itself a means of sustaining male power.

The proof is in the revelation of the names of about 60 of the Garrick’s most influential members. Senior civil servants, politicians, the head of MI6 (who subsequently resigned from the club), even King Charles. These men quite literally reign over the most powerful institutions of our country, places where women are consistently underrepresented and underserved. Rhetorically, they are committed to driving equality. Some of them tweet on International Women’s Day. But these commitments ring very hollow when you realise that men in power choose to spend their spare time in a club that was founded in 1831, and has scarcely changed since.

We also have to consider what we lose when we keep women at the door. Do the 40% of Garrick members who voted against allowing women in believe that only men make worthy contributions to arts, politics, culture? These men would do well to consider what we miss out on when we fail to recognise women as equal contributors and thinkers, with the right and ability to converse, share ideas and shape culture. What might the world look like if women were treated as true equals in these conversations?

The question will be asked about women-only spaces. If men-only clubs must permit women, what of women’s clubs? But there is a key difference. Men gathering in influential places to the exclusion of women is profoundly status quo. They’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. When senior politicians and policymakers take lunch together at the Garrick, they are reinforcing power structures that have existed for centuries. There are plenty of women-only spaces that will continue to exclude men, but they do so to resist power, not to hoard it. (For the record, the Fawcett Society welcomes and encourages our male allies to join us).

Last night’s vote may be a step in the right direction, but of course there are still plenty of reasons for discomfort. The Garrick remains an elite club where only a chosen few are invited, and even fewer can afford membership. That’s a conversation that we must have. But it’s important that a majority of members have accepted that to continue to exclude women is harmful and self-defeating. Now the real work begins of actively including a diversity of women. And Garrick members, new and old, need to ask themselves what they are doing to share and distribute power fairly – not guard it among their own.

A Boeing cargo plane has been forced to land at Istanbul airport without its front landing gear, in the latest setback for the embattled planemaker.

Nobody was hurt in the incident, in a flight operated by the delivery company FedEx, according to Turkey’s transport ministry.

The Boeing 767 aircraft, flying from Paris Charles de Gaulle airport on Wednesday, informed the traffic control tower at Istanbul airport that its landing gear had failed to open and it landed with guidance from the tower, the ministry sai.

Emergency services were standing by for the landing. The ministry did not give a reason for the landing gear’s failure and said its teams were conducting examinations at the scene as part of an investigation.

Video of the incident shows the plane’s back wheels touching down, followed by its fuselage, with sparks and smoke streaming from its underside. The plane then skids to a halt, remaining on the runway.

The runway has been temporarily closed to air traffic, but traffic on the other runways at the airport was continuing without interruption, the airport operator IGA said.

The incident comes at a time when Boeing’s safety record is under intense scrutiny, after a string of crises and safety issues.

Boeing on Tuesday said it had informed regulators about possible failures to carry out mandatory safety inspections on its 787 Dreamliner planes. The US regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration, said it was “investigating whether Boeing completed the inspections and whether company employees may have falsified aircraft records”.

It followed separate allegations by a whistleblowing engineer that Boeing took shortcuts to reduce production bottlenecks while making the 787.

The US manufacturer pledged this year to turn around its safety culture after a door panel blew out of an Alaska Airlines 737 Max plane in mid-air in January.

Boeing had been trying to ramp up production of the 737 Max, its bestselling model, to move beyond the crisis triggered by two deadly crashes in 2018 and 2019. 737 Max planes were grounded worldwide for the best part of two years.

FedEx was approached for comment on Wednesday’s incident. Boeing declined to comment.