I know we’re off to a bad start when Jean refuses to board a tube train bound for central London. She plants herself on the platform and will not be moved. In the end I have to pick her up and carry her – squirming in protest and heavy – over the threshold. When the doors slide shut the woman standing next to me in the packed carriage asks if my dog has ever been on a train before.

“No,” I say. “Can you tell?”

“How far are you going?” she says.

“Canary Wharf,” I say, “where we change trains, and then … ” The look of concern – or possibly scorn – on the woman’s face is such that I don’t finish my sentence: and then we’re going to the cinema.

To be honest, I’d rank pet-friendly film-going pretty low on my list of needs. Taking your dog to the cinema strikes me as a bizarre and counterintuitive bit of entitlement. I go to the cinema to get away from my dog.

Dog-friendly screenings first appeared in Britain a decade ago and have been spreading steadily since the end of Covid restrictions. Greenwich Picturehouse in south-east London, where we’re heading, schedules dogs-allowed showings for Sunday mornings, when people are already out with their pets. But why?

“It’s a community thing,” says deputy manager Mike Miles. “It gives people a chance to meet up with their dogs, and come and chill out. For us it’s about providing that experience. And obviously we get to look at the cute dogs as they come in and make a fuss of them.”

I won’t lie: the idea filled me with such dread that I rang up ahead of time for some reassurance. How did it work? Did I need to buy a ticket for my dog, next to me?

“It’s unallocated seating, just choose a seat when you arrive,” the customer service representative said. “And you don’t need to book one for the dog.”

This summer, the photographer Irina Werning, who is from Argentina, wanted to spend a month focused on a very British story. “It had to be dogs,” she says. To her, dog-friendly cinema represents a level of canine indulgence you just don’t see in other countries. “There are 18 cinemas that offer this just in London,” she says, “and more across the UK. I think there is one in Paris.”

Some cinemas restrict dogs to the floor, but the Picturehouse chain allows them on the seats, as long as you use one of the fleece blankets provided. On dog days they restrict sales to half capacity to make sure there’s plenty of space. They also lower the volume of the film slightly and keep the house lights dimly lit, making this not unlike the baby-friendly or “relaxed” screenings cinemas often schedule for autistic people or those with dementia. It opens up film-going to people who might not otherwise have access to it, and is an opportunity to fill cinema seats on an early weekend morning.

Werning spent August photographing dog-friendly screenings, often shooting on her knees to capture the dogs’ perspective. To minimise disruption, she took pictures only in the 15 minutes before the film started and the 15 minutes after it finished. In between, she took a seat and waited. “I saw The Fantastic Four twice, Jurassic Park twice,” she says. “I saw Superman … ”

My dog and I, frazzled after our journey, arrive in good time for the 11am showing of The Fantastic Four: First Steps. There are dogs and owners outside, waiting to be let in. Because we are both still mildly hysterical, we keep a respectful distance until the doors open.

“It’s our first time,” I say to the woman on the refreshment stand.

“Exciting!” she says. I shrug.

“She knows nothing of the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” I say. I don’t say: neither do I.

Picturehouse launched dog-friendly screenings in 2017 and half their sites regularly hold them; here in Greenwich they do one or two a month.

“The next one is The Materialists,” says the man checking tickets.

“Oh, great,” I say.

We walk in as the adverts are beginning. There are about 15 dogs in the room, and I pick two seats as distant from anyone else as possible – fourth row, far right aisle. But the place is filling up; there will be about 30 dogs by the end – mostly poodle crosses and sleepy lurchers. As I predicted, my dog is beside herself: she can’t believe she’s in a room full of dogs, without a ball in sight. I pat the seat beside me and she climbs on to it. Leaning in close, I speak to her in the quiet but commanding tone I plan to adopt for the next two hours.

“I should warn you,” I say, “there might not be any dogs in this film.”

It’s a question I’ve been asking myself: is dog-friendly cinema just for the owners? Do the dogs get anything out of going, apart from not being left home alone?

“It’s for the humans, obviously,” Miles says. “If it’s got a dog in it, great, that’s cute. But you’re bringing your dog along more for the socialising aspect of being around other dogs and doing something new. It’s fun to put a dog-themed film on now and again, but we do find they sell the least tickets, because people are just like: why would I want to come and watch Beethoven?”

But according to Werning, a dog angle can make a real difference. “Superman has a lot of scenes with dogs and people were going wild,” she says. “The dogs were all barking and people were laughing like an orchestra together, looking at each other and enjoying it.”

Just before the lights go down in Greenwich, a couple with a tiny lapdog sit down behind us. Jean, a labrador cross, immediately tries to bound over the seats to introduce herself. The little dog growls. I grip the lead tightly. I want to explain to the couple that they have chosen their seats poorly; that my dog’s interactions with other dogs – especially tiny, hostile dogs – are characterised by a kind of doomed optimism. She will not give up trying to be friends just because the other dog hates her. Unless one of us moves, I want to say, we are in for a long afternoon.

But the film has started and, for the moment at least, it’s blowing my dog’s mind. The opening montage of the Fantastic Four’s past heroics is probably the biggest, strangest thing she has ever seen. She sits bolt upright, her eyes darting all over the screen: explosions, music, people shouting. We’re both gripped, and neither of us has the slightest idea what’s going on.

The dog remains rapt for almost a full minute before turning to look at me in perplexity, and whining softly.

“The woman and the stretchy one are married,” I say. “That’s all I know.”

Jean wheels round and sticks her snout between our seat backs. The little dog behind growls. I pull on the lead. Jean jumps off the seat and prowls around under my feet. The other dogs are silent and still. It’s actually one of the best behaved cinema audiences I have ever seen. There is an occasional yap from the back – perhaps three in all – but that’s it. It occurs to me that all these dogs have been to the cinema before. It feels as if Jean and I are the only ones not following the plot.

Half an hour in, I produce a dog treat, unintentionally letting the dog see that I’ve brought the whole packet with me. For 15 minutes Jean is entirely fixated on my rucksack, until the treats are gone. Then she curls up in her seat and falls asleep. A little later, so do I.

As I’m drifting off, I think: this must be what dog-friendly cinema is all about – a chance for you and your pet to sit in the dark together and sleep through loud noises. Then again, we could do this at home. We often do. Why pay to take your dog to the movies?

“Lots of people I asked why they brought their dogs said: because it’s cheaper than daycare,” Werning says. “And I’m like, what? You leave your dog in daycare every time you leave your house? And they said yes, because the dogs suffer. This, I think, is also something our generation is carrying, this overprotection of pets.”

I am woken by a sharp constriction in my left ankle – the lead is wrapped once round my leg and the dog is in the aisle, trying to get to a lurcher one row up and six seats over. The lurcher has some kind of soft toy, and Jean wants it. I try to calm her down, to coax her back to her seat, but she’s having none of it. After a blissful five-minute nap I’m suddenly back to wondering: what’s the worst thing that could happen, and is it about to?

“There are occasions where dogs don’t get on with each other, little tiffs, shall we say,” Miles tells me later. “But we’ve never had to break anything up, which is good. It’s enough dealing with humans.”

Jean will not retake her seat, or settle anywhere else. At about the hour and 10 minute mark, with my arms aching from holding the lead, I decide we both need a break from the film. I take the dog into the empty lobby, where we sit for a moment to collect ourselves.

“Did you notice that the big stone guy was cousin Richie from The Bear?” I say. The dog stares up at me with a look of boundless urgency, and I decide we are never going to find out how The Fantastic Four ends.

Marmaduke

The Conservative party will aim to “maximise extraction” of oil and gas in the North Sea if it wins power, Kemi Badenoch is expected to announce.

Badenoch will use a speech in Aberdeen in the coming days to set out her plans to extract as much oil and gas as possible instead of shifting away from fossil fuels, the Sunday Telegraph reported.

She will announce the Tories plan to overhaul the North Sea Transition Authority, which oversees the issuing of licences, dropping the word transition and replacing its 12-page mandate with a simple order to extract the maximum possible amount of fossil fuel.

Badenoch said Britain “cannot afford not to be doing everything to get hydrocarbons out the ground” to boost growth.

She said: “We are in the absurd situation where our country is leaving vital resources untapped while neighbours such as Norway extract them from the same seabed.

“Britain has already decarbonised more than every other major economy since 1990, yet we face some of the highest energy prices in the developed world.

“This is not sustainable and it cannot continue. That is why I am calling time on this unilateral act of economic disarmament and Labour’s impossible ideology of net zero by 2050.

“So, a future Conservative government will scrap all mandates for the North Sea beyond maximising extraction.

“It is time that common sense, economic growth and our national interest came first, and only the Conservatives will deliver that. We are going to get all our oil and gas out of the North Sea.”

Last month, the energy and net zero secretary, Ed Miliband, accused the Conservatives of being “anti-science” by abandoning a political consensus on net zero.

In the first of what is promised to be an annual “state of the climate” report, the Labour MP set out the findings of a Met Office-led study that detailed how the UK was already hotter and wetter, and faced a greater number of extreme weather events.

Miliband quoted the former prime minister Theresa May, who put net zero targets into law in 2019 and had argued that the real climate zealots were “populists who offer only easy answers to complex questions”. He added: “I couldn’t put it better myself.”

The agency that oversees Voice of America and other government-funded international broadcasters is eliminating jobs for more than 500 employees, a Trump administration official said. The move could ratchet up a months-long legal challenge over the news outlets’ fate.

Kari Lake, acting CEO of the US Agency for Global Media, announced the latest round of job cuts late Friday, one day after a federal judge blocked her from removing Michael Abramowitz as VOA director.

US district judge Royce Lamberth had ruled separately that the Republican administration had failed to show how it was complying with his orders to restore VOA’s operations. His order Monday gave the administration “one final opportunity, short of a contempt trial” to demonstrate its compliance. He ordered Lake to sit for a deposition by lawyers for agency employees by 15 September.

On Thursday, Lamberth said Abramowitz could not be removed without the approval of the majority of the International Broadcasting Advisory Board. Firing Abramowitz would be “plainly contrary to law”, according to Lamberth, who was nominated to the bench by Ronald Reagan.

Lake posted a statement on social media that said her agency had initiated a reduction in force, or RIF, eliminating 532 jobs for full-time government employees. She said the agency “will continue to fulfill its statutory mission after this RIF– and will likely improve its ability to function”.

“I look forward to taking additional steps in the coming months to improve the functioning of a very broken agency and make sure America’s voice is heard abroad where it matters most,” she wrote.

A group of agency employees who sued to block VOA’s elimination said Lake’s move would give their colleagues 30 days until their pay and benefits end.

“We find Lake’s continued attacks on our agency abhorrent,” they said in a statement. “We are looking forward to her deposition to hear whether her plan to dismantle VOA was done with the rigorous review process that Congress requires. So far we have not seen any evidence of that.”

They added: “We will continue to fight for what we believe to be our rights under the law.”

In June, layoff notices were sent to more than 600 agency employees. Abramowitz was placed on administrative leave along with almost the entire VOA staff. He was told he would be fired effective 31 August.

The administration said in a court filing Thursday that it planned to send RIF notices to 486 employees of VOA and 46 other agency employees but intended to retain 158 agency employees and 108 VOA employees. The filing said the global media agency had 137 “active employees” and 62 other employees on administrative leave while VOA had 86 active employees and 512 others on administrative leave.

The agency also houses Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Martí, which beams Spanish-language news into Cuba. The networks, which together reach an estimated 427 million people, date to the cold war and are part of a network of government-funded organizations trying to extend US influence and combat authoritarianism.

In March, Abramowitz warned that Trump’s attempts to dismantle the VOA would be a “self-inflicted blow” to American national security, saying: “If America pulls off the playing field and cedes it to our adversaries, then they’re going to be telling the narratives that people around the world are going to be hearing, and that can’t be good for America … They’re going to be hearing an anti-America narrative. We need to fight that with truth.”

He added: “The major challenge for the United States in general is this global information war in which countries like China and Russia are essentially really having our lunch. … So, I really feel that we need an organization that is accurate, unbiased, objective, and that tells the truth about America to the rest of the world in the languages that they understand.”

This week, Trump also moved to remove union protections from a handful of federal employees, including those from the VOA.

In response, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the nation’s largest trade union of public employees, said: “AFSCME members who fulfill the Congressionally mandated mission to broadcast Voice of America around the globe shine the beacon of freedom on the most oppressive of regimes. Now, because they have been fighting to keep Voice of America’s mission alive, their own voice on the job has been stripped from them. AFSCME will fight this illegal action in court.”

Earlier this year, foreign staff at US-backed media outlets voiced concerns over their safety following Trump’s shuttering of the global media agencies.

Speaking to the Guardian in March, Jaewoo Park, a journalist for Radio Free Asia, said: “We have many co-workers in different services, several of whom came here and sought asylum visas. If their own government knew they worked for RFA [Radio Free Asia] and they went back to their own country, their lives would be at risk.”

“Authoritarian governments have praised what Trump is doing right now … In Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, there were people who fought for freedom and democracy, and they came to work at RFA. It’s very risky for them. Their lives are in danger if Radio Free Asia doesn’t exist,” he added.