On Wednesday evening in Paris, a powerful and moving opening to the 17th summer Paralympic Games culminated in a sun-drenched parade through central Paris, a stark contrast to the sodden Olympics opener a month earlier.

But as with the Olympics, which the French public passionately embraced once they got under way, I expect the Paralympics will similarly ignite. In the summer of 2012, it was when I overheard a group of ticketholders, pints in hand, discussing the tactics of David Weir with the fervour they would normally reserve for a free kick in a promising position, that I knew the Paralympics had broken into new territory.

It has been a mixed bag in terms of progress for the movement since, with the spectator-less Tokyo Games in 2021 a particular challenge in terms of taking Paralympic sport mainstream. Our aim at the Guardian is to try to help build that audience, during the Games and beyond.

As with the Olympics, our sports team will be live blogging throughout the Games and do sign up for our Paris 2024 daily briefing, which is packed with pointers to the big events. I can’t wait to watch more of the brutal sport of wheelchair rugby and I’m looking forward to seeing if ParalympicsGB’s wheelchair racing superstar Hannah Cockroft can make it four golds in a row in the T34 100m. Everything you need to follow the action can be found on our Paris 2024 homepage.

As at every Games one key debate will be the extent to which a sporting event can, or even should, be expected to change society. One such topic is accessibility: Paris’s Metro is still woefully inaccessible to wheelchair users. Things aren’t much better elsewhere, a point made starkly in the UK this week when ParalympicsGB legend Tanni Grey-Thompson was forced to drag herself off a train in one of London’s biggest stations.

Grey-Thompson, alongside journalist and disability activist Lucy Webster, was interviewed by Archie Bland for an excellent issue of our daily First Edition newsletter on Thursday. The pair were fascinating on how Paralympians have previously been framed as “superhuman” and thus seen as fundamentally different and lamented the focus on Paralympians “overcoming” adversity through sport – something Grey-Thompson derided as “inspiration porn”.

Ade Adepitan, a TV presenter and former GB wheelchair basketball player, is writing for us throughout the Games. In his first column, Ade also highlighted the irony of the ever-growing success of the Paralympics: “Progress on the field has served only to highlight the lack of change in the ordinary lives of disabled people.”

Grey-Thompson’s experience is a clear case in point. And the onus is on all of us to help drive that change. But in terms of elite level sport, for the next week or so there’s only one thing to focus on: some of the greatest athletes on the planet going for gold.

As Ukraine continues its attempt to change the narrative of the war with Russia by mounting an incursion into the Kursk region, Dan Sabbagh and photographer Julia Kochetova visited the eastern front, where Russian troops are continuing their costly and brutal advance. In the mining city of Pokrovsk, once considered the safest place in the Donbas, they found residents packing their bags and preparing to flee as the sound of the guns comes ever closer.

Rebecca Ratcliffe travelled to the epicentre of one of the most underreported – and potentially dangerous – flashpoints on Earth. On Thitu Island, in the South China Sea, Rebecca met members of a small Philippine fishing community facing down the might of China.

Keir Starmer tried to prepare Britons for tax rises in the government’s October budget with the message that things will get worse before they get better – Larry Elliott asked if talking down the UK economy risks being a self-defeating exercise. John Crace was on excellent form dissecting the doom-fest.

After Robert F Kennedy Jr abandoned his presidential bid and endorsed Donald Trump, Adam Gabbatt looked back on an endlessly bizarre campaign and what his decision means for Trump and Harris, in our US election newsletter, The Stakes.

As Germany’s regional elections approach, the Long read carried a revealing profile of Björn Höcke, the head of the AfD’s most radical faction, whose critics accuse him of using language that echoes the Third Reich. A court case put that question to the test. Alex Dziadosz attended the trial in an attempt to make sense of the man dragging Germany to the far right.

Katie Thornton’s in-depth feature on south Louisiana’s fast disappearing land and rising sea levels, told the incredible story of Windell Curole, who defied the US federal government to build a vast levee to protect his community from deadly flood waters. It’s a fascinating history of human and environmental intervention on the Mississippi, with striking photos and drone footage from Thalía Juárez.

In a week when Donald Trump shared deepfake images that claimed he’d been endorsed by Taylor Swift, Yuval Noah Harari warned about the divisive dangers of AI in an exclusive extract from his new book Nexus, while investigative reporter Ariel Bogle looked at how a banned Australian promoter of cancer “cures” was hijacked by generative AI technology.

The much-anticipated return of Oasis prompted celebrations, plaudits, a dash for tickets – and some dissenting voices. Our panel of writers gave their views on what made them great and Alexis Petridis wrote a smart piece on why they still matter … while Simon Price was uncompromising on behalf of those who remain underwhelmed.

We ran a beautiful photo essay from Ollie Tikare, which recounted his positive and inclusive experience at the Notting Hill carnival in London, underlining how the event epitomises the success of Britain’s multiculturalism, while Neha Gohil and Lanre Bakare wrote about the renewed importance of the festival since far-right riots earlier this month.

Following the death of the former England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson, Paul Hayward and Simon Hattenstone (who interviewed him only a few weeks ago for our Saturday magazine) paid their own tributes to a much-loved sporting figure.

I love The Guide newsletter every week, and I particularly enjoyed this guest edition from Rachel Aroesti on whether we’ve reached peak poptimism. If you want to have your finger on the cultural pulse, then sign up here.

One more thing …Like his other tour de force novels on the sport’s defining moments, The Damned United and Red or Dead, Munichs by David Peace is about much more than football. And just as his Red Riding quartet of Yorkshire noir thrillers and his definitive miner’s strike novel GB84 have stayed with me for years, so his gripping re-rendering of the impact of the Munich air disaster deserves to resonate far beyond those with an interest in what happens on the pitch.

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On Saturday Pavel Durov was arrested by French authorities as he disembarked from his private jet in Paris on his way from Azerbaijan. Chris Stokel-Walker explains the implications of Durov’s arrest.

The Guardian’s crosswords and Wordiply are here to keep you entertained throughout the weekend.