Senate postpones Clayton's confirmation hearing after Trump upends plans

The Senate canceled Jay Clayton's confirmation hearing on Wednesday after President Trump's move to delay the installation of the new intelligence chief.

Trump sabotages Senate bid to fast-track Clayton as DNI, committee scuttles hearing

Any delay, and continuation of acting DNI Bill Pulte in the role, is likely to endanger the reauthorization of a key U.S. intelligence authority.

Tropical Storm Arthur is the first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season

Forecasters say Arthur could generate life-threatening flash floods along the northern Gulf Coast. But it is not expected to strengthen further.

"The most famous judge in America, for a while," on highs and lows of a Trump trial

In an exclusive interview with CBS News, retired Justice Arthur Engoron reflected on the highs and lows of the 2023 Trump civil fraud trial.

Greetings from Maputo, Mozambique's capital, shaped by a modernist architecture

An impromptu tour of Mozambique's capital city reveals a unique imprint left by architect Amâncio "Pancho" Guedes.

JetBlue to reduce Newark, LaGuardia footprint as it forges ahead in Fort Lauderdale

JetBlue is planning to cut crew bases at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey and New York's LaGuardia Airport.

Royal Ascot 2026: day two horse racing updates – live

Updates from second day of the royal meeting
Day one report on controversial clash | Mail Tony

Oddschecker market movers

Alta Regina (2.30pm) - 4/1 from 7/1

Cathedral (3.40pm) - 11/2 from 10/1

Jagged Edge (5.00pm) - 7/1 from 12/1

Portugal v DR Congo: World Cup 2026 – live

⚽️ Kick-off: 12pm local time/1pm EDT/6pm BST/3am AEST
⚽️ Player guide | Bracketology | Golden Boot | Mail Daniel

I’m glad Portugal have played a proper winger, not Félix, who now looks destined not to fulfil the potential he had at 19, when Atlético Madrid paid £113m for him. Neto has pace, the ability to go both ways, and offers more out of possession than Leão, so the selection makes sense, another quick player to offset Ronaldo’s lack of speed.

DRC, meanwhile, move to a five at the back. I'm a little surprised Noah Sadiki has left out, but the three picked ahead of him have earned their spots.

Jay Clayton’s nomination hearing canceled after Trump directs him not to appear – US politics live

Tom Cotton, chair of committee tasked with confirming Trump’s national intelligence pick, earlier said hearing would go ahead after Trump derailed confirmation process

• Trump derails confirmation process for Jay Clayton as US intelligence chief

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Donald Trump also denied (again) that the memorandum of understanding includes a $300bn fund for Iran, and denied that he had asked the Gulf states to commit funding.

“It’s false,” Trump told reporters as he sat alongside Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. “You can invest if you want. What am I going to do, say no one is ever allowed to invest? We’re not investing, we’re not putting up 10 cents and people can decide to do it. That’s up to them.”

In short, what it does is it opens the strait of Hormuz immediately … It also provides a framework whereby if the Iranians give us what we need – on stopping the funding of terrorism, on no longer pursuing a nuclear weapon – then they can get some benefits, be re-invited into the world economy.

England v New Zealand: second men’s Test, day one – live

• Test starts 30 minutes late due to morning rain

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If the blazer fits… Joe Root tosses the coin and Tom Latham calls… incorrectly. A cheer goes up around the Oval as Root confirms he’s going to unleash his green pace attack.

“I want to make first use of this surface. I think it’s a great opportunity for our attack to get out there and carry on the great work we did last week” he says.

Donald Trump speaks at G7 summit after Macron hails ‘real progress’ on Ukraine – Europe live

The US president earlier hailed Macron’s ‘beautiful job’ in hosting summit, after greeting leaders with the words ‘I’m the boss’ at morning session

Rutte says the adjustment in the US pledge to the Nato Force Model is “not primarily about where forces and assets are currently, but about who would do what if our defence plans were activated.”

He says historically the model was “overly reliant” on the US.

“You will likely have seen news adjusting its contributions to the Nato force model. In some cases, this has been cast as a problem, as the US pulling away from its allies, but that is not the reality. The US has made clear that it is committed to Nato.

That commitment comes with an expectation that allies will more fairly share the responsibility for our security here in Europe.”

Keir Starmer signals he would give Andy Burnham a cabinet job

PM says Greater Manchester mayor is ‘huge asset’ who can play big part in Labour government if he wins byelection

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer has indicated he would give Andy Burnham a cabinet job, describing him as a “huge asset”, as he attempted to head off a challenge to his leadership that is expected to come after the Makerfield byelection on Thursday.

Allies of Burnham said the Greater Manchester mayor would not be interested in serving under Starmer if he returned to Westminster.

Booksmaxxing: how reading became sexy

‘Reading is having a moment,’ according to Tinder. But do its users actually appreciate books, or just talk about them to get dates?

Name: Booksmaxxing.

Age: The next big thing.

Mother of Cape Verde star Vozinha will secure visa to attend World Cup in US

• US House leader Jeffries says fees have been waived

• ‘No mother should miss the chance to watch their child’

• Goalkeeper fueled shock goalless draw with Spain

The mother of Cape Verde goalkeeper Vozinha will be able to receive a visa to enter the United States and watch her son play at the World Cup after cost issues prevented her from attending their historic draw against Spain earlier this week, US House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries announced Wednesday.

Cape Verde was named by the US government on a list of countries whose citizens must post a returnable bond of $15,000 (£11,200) to travel to the United States, in addition to a visa fee. The Trump administration last month dropped the requirement for World Cup ticket holders, but by that point the high costs had ruled out the trip for Ana Candida Evora, the mother of Cape Verde’s 40-year-old goalkeeper.

‘I get a gold star when I go to the gym’: the adults using sticker charts for motivation

From doing chores to staying away from exes, some adults are buying sticker charts to help stick to their goals

• Tell us: is it OK to date a friend’s ex? We want to hear from you

There is a sticker chart on the kitchen cupboard in the Gray family home in Birmingham, England – the two Gray children, aged four and 10, get excited when it’s time to add another gold star. But they aren’t being rewarded for brushing their teeth or learning their spellings; this is someone else’s chart entirely.

“They know that mommy gets a gold star when she goes to the gym,” says Bek Gray, a 33-year-old healthcare professional who has been using sticker charts to motivate herself for one and a half years.

Scheffler faces mighty Shinnecock test in bid to claim career slam with US Open victory

World No 1 has chance to join Rory McIlroy in exclusive club – but windswept course requires patience

Shinnecock Hills is a study in restraint and attrition that has spent more than a century bringing the world’s finest golfers to heel. When the US Open returns here for a sixth time on Thursday, the current crop will once again face a rugged coastal masterpiece where calamity lurks around every corner and mistakes are punished with uncommon severity.

The William Flynn-designed layout, one of the United States Golf Association’s five founding clubs, is a 7,440-yard track of rare beauty and menace revered as one of the purest tests in championship golf. Three distinct clusters of holes form a rough triangle across the property, exposing players to shifting winds from different directions throughout the round. With gusts forecast to exceed 40mph at times, even players who know Shinnecock well acknowledge that controlling trajectory and accepting adversity will be every bit as important as making birdies.

Watch Live: Trump holds news conference to end G7 summit in France

President Trump is holding a news conference to wrap up the Group of Seven summit in France.

What to expect as Kevin Warsh leads his first Fed interest rate meeting

New Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh is stepping in at a critical juncture for the U.S. economy, with inflation at its highest level in more than three years.

Trump trusts Fed Chair Kevin Warsh. It matters for more than interest rates

New Fed Chair Kevin Warsh is expected to hold interest rates steady this week, but President Donald Trump’s trust gives him room to pursue longer-term changes.

Social Security faces looming benefit cuts. Can the program be saved?

Social Security checks could see a 22% cut in 2032 unless Congress takes steps to shore up the program. Here are 5 ideas for fixing it.

Kash Patel accused of directing $1m to ‘slush fund’ to pay bonuses to loyalist agents

Congressman Jamie Raskin alleges FBI director authorized substantial recurring payments to agents in his inner circle

FBI director Kash Patel has been accused of directing more than $1m in taxpayer-funded bonus payments to a small circle of loyalist agents as part of a “personal slush fund” that may have violated federal law.

Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking member of the House of Representatives judiciary committee, alleged Patel had authorized substantial recurring payments to agents in his inner circle and security detail.

Suspect in custody after deadly shooting at Wilmington Hospital

A suspect was taken into custody in Philadelphia in connection with the shooting at Wilmington Hospital that left a 19-year-old dead and another injured.

Survivors of violence could see debt erased as N.Y. law goes into effect

A new law in New York makes it the eighth state to provide a path for coerced debt relief for survivors of domestic violence.

Borthwick keen to rest Itoje but injuries may force England rethink

• Giving captain the summer off ‘would be the right thing to do’

• Van Rensburg set for England debut despite Test ineligibility

Steve Borthwick will rest the England captain Maro Itoje this summer unless injury strikes in the second row over the weekend.

Itoje is set to be stood down for next month’s Tests against South Africa, Fiji and Argentina following a year that saw him lead the British & Irish Lions to a series victory against Australia, play in the autumn and Six Nations campaigns and mourn the death of his mother.

Fed Chair Warsh expected to withhold 'dot' from central bank's interest rate outlook

The central bank's Federal Open Market Committee is set to release its quarterly update of where individual officials expect interest rates to head.

Tropical Storm Arthur forms off Texas Gulf Coast

Tropical Storm Arthur, the first named storm of the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season, formed Wednesday off the Gulf Coast of Texas.

Cross purposes: how the England flag got caught in a tug-of-war between rightwing nationalists and football fans

Last summer the St George’s cross was co-opted by anti-immigrant groups. Now, as the World Cup begins, some communities are reclaiming it as a symbol of a very different sort of pride

As I drove into London with my daughter a week ago, we passed a roadside pub festooned with dozens of England flags. Our eyes met in recognition: we were in one of those areas, we assumed. In the eyes of many, St George’s cross flags have become a kind of territorial marker in the English landscape, signifying a certain kind of identity, a certain kind of politics, not necessarily welcoming to all. As we got closer, though, we realised the pub was actually preparing for the start of the World Cup. Flags of other nations were also on display. We laughed at our mistake and relaxed a bit.

It’s a feeling many Britons might have experienced. We’re gearing up for a summer of both exciting international football and ugly far-right protests and riots, as recent events in Belfast and Southampton have shown. The England flag will be a prominent fixture of both – great news for flag sellers, but a confusing and anxious time for the rest of us. How did England’s national symbol come to evoke such mixed feelings and carry such contradictory meanings? Are we really at the stage of “good flags” and “bad flags”? What are we supposed to think when we see an England flag?

Ancient DNA provides evidence of earliest known plague outbreak

Discovery in Siberia suggests bacterium from raw marmots devastated hunter-gatherer tribes about 5,500 years ago

The earliest evidence for an outbreak of plague has been uncovered at late stone age cemeteries in south-eastern Siberia where dozens of hunter-gatherers and their children were buried.

Ancient DNA collected from the remains suggests the disease tore through the sparse communities in devastating waves that began about 5,500 years ago, at least two centuries after the bacterium responsible, Yersinia pestis, first emerged.

Honeybees make specialised ‘baby food’ to give larvae balanced diet, study says

Researchers also discover bees can adjust their diets when pollen sources do not provide healthy level of nutrients

Honeybees blend a special “baby food” to give their larvae a balanced diet, with adult bees also able to regulate their feeding to avoid overconsuming certain nutrients, according to a study.

Researchers have discovered that bees can adjust how much they eat when pollen sources do not provide them with the ideal balance of essential amino acids, the essential building blocks of protein that animals cannot make for themselves and must obtain from their diet.

SpaceX stock sinks 5%, losing momentum after a multiday rally

Elon Musk's space and AI company has seen its stock surge since its blockbuster IPO on Friday.

I am an only child, and so is my son. And we are not weirdos | Polly Hudson

Selfish, lonely, maladjusted – the prejudices against only children persist, as well as of their parents for just having one child. But we are an army on the rise

Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me ... must be a saying thought up by somebody extremely privileged. For everyone else, words wound, and there are certain groups that are seemingly, bafflingly, forever considered fair game. No matter how PC the world becomes, they’re immune from progress, and it apparently remains permissible to make comments, assumptions and jokes about them, and to attach outdated stereotypical attributes. Only children aren’t unique in having to tolerate this, of course, and they won’t enjoy that. After all, they don’t like sharing anything, do they?

Badoom-tish! Hilarious, no? Well, no, not to me. I am an only child with an only child, so colour me double-offended. Actually, not offended – bored. As anybody would be, hearing the same tired, lazy “gags” over and over again.

From penalties to Pavarotti and Beckham to Bruckner: classical music and football are closer than you might think

As the World Cup gets underway, we look at the music that has soundtracked the beautiful game – and the composers who have loved it

France ’98, when Scotland last faced Morocco at a World Cup – as they do this Friday – and lost a crucial game three-nil. (John McGinn’s winner against Haiti in Boston on Sunday rewrites all the recent records and sets the team on a path to almost certain glory this time around. Obviously.)

But you could have read the runes of Scottish doom in that World Cup by the tunes that Scotland fans had in their ears. Scotland’s song that year was Del Amitri’s masterpiece of melancholy, Don’t Come Home Too Soon, the most downbeat, honest, and lyrical World Cup song ever written – alas, the team didnae listen. And there was the BBC’s World Cup titles for 1998: Fauré’s Pavane, which lifted the moodometer from melancholic all the way to apathetic. (Not that England did much better, despite the surreal street party of Vindaloo, Engerland’s unofficial anthem, and the self-satisfaction of Three Lions, they went out in the round of 16, after David Beckham’s red-card against Argentina.)

Carvana’s new vehicle strategy turns dealership into ‘playground,’ test-drive center with sales all online

But don't expect Carvana to sell you a vehicle at one of its seven Stellantis stores, marking a stark contrast from typical franchised dealers.

Why does the often maligned Caribbean obeah tradition endure?

The practice, which merges pre-Abrahamic African religion, Christianity, and indigenous Caribbean features, has been stigmatised in the region

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Babus, Fakis, Sangomas – these are a few of the names of spiritual or mystical healers and practitioners found all across the African continent. A version of the tradition they follow, obeah, made its way to the Caribbean among enslaved populations, from West Africa. Today, obeah endures, despite colonialism and the adoption of Christianity across much of the Caribbean.

This week, I spoke to our Caribbean correspondent, Natricia Duncan, about the tradition, and a new Jamaican film that highlights aspects of obeah. Our conversation revealed to me that obeah, something I knew very little about, was in fact uncannily familiar.

Ex-health worker cautioned after Kate’s medical notes offered for financial gain

Information commissioner issues formal caution after London private hospital treating royal reported breach

A former healthcare worker at a private hospital in London has been formally cautioned by the UK privacy and data watchdog over the deliberate misuse of the Princess of Wales’s private medical records and offering to disclose them for financial gain.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) launched a criminal investigation into the unlawful obtaining and disclosure of medical information to a third party without the consent of the data controller after the London Clinic reported a breach in March 2024.

Fears for Xbox as it puts its developers on the chopping block once again

After the billion-dollar company’s leaders sent staff a memo saying the brand had ‘over-extended’, game studios may be in the firing line

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In March 2000, Bill Gates stood onstage at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and, to a packed crowd, officially announced the company’s long-anticipated video game console. “We want Xbox to be the platform of choice for the best and most creative game developers in the world,” he told attenders – and that was indeed the intention of the small, dedicated team who put together the blueprints of that first machine.

The Xbox landscape seems very different 25 years later. Last week, mere days after a bullish summer showcase full of Gears of War revivals and promises of a renewed focus on Xbox’s gaming strengths, new CEO, Asha Sharma, and chief content officer, Matt Booty, wrote a memo to Xbox staff inviting them to brace for “hard truths”. “Excluding Activision Blizzard King, over the past five years, we have spent over $20bn on ongoing investments in our content, platform and hardware subsidy, but our annual revenue has declined nearly half a billion during that time. Going forward, this cannot continue,” it read.

Okra up north: how a forgotten heirloom travelled the African diaspora to Toronto

Okra holds a special place in many African-descended communities, and a Canadian farmer with Jamaican roots is growing a very old variety

When Nicole Austin was growing up in Oshawa, Canada, her Jamaican family couldn’t find the foods they enjoyed back on the island. No callaloo, garden eggs or okra. Austin’s grandmother grew certain things in her backyard, but only if she had the necessary seeds.

“It’s often small-scale farmers, farmers of color, Black farmers that make sure that these foods that are culturally significant to us are available, that we grow them, that we share them,” Austin said. “It wasn’t until I’m in these spaces now that I realized how important the place is of farmers of color and Black farmers to make sure that these food histories are maintained and celebrated and shared.”

Vance says text of U.S.-Iran deal will be released Friday "at the latest"

Vice President JD Vance said on "CBS Monrings" that the Trump administration wants "to tell the American people what's in this deal."

Pakistan ends 'luxury tax' on menstrual products, contraceptives. Will prices drop?

In Pakistan, taxes on menstrual products can add up. Activists have long worked to change this. Now a new budget wipes out the 18% sales tax. But questions remain about the impact on prices.

‘We don’t want world war three’: yacht couple call for calm after Russian warning shots

British retirees Jane and Alan Kelvey say they do not want incident in Channel to stop them enjoying their sailing trip

• UK politics live – latest updates

A British woman on a yacht in the Channel near which a Russian warship fired warning shots has told how she does not want the incident to be blown out of proportion, saying: “We don’t want world war three to start because of this.”

Jane Kelvey, 69, and her husband, Alan, 70, were on their yacht, Bright Future, travelling from the south coast of England towards France on Tuesday when they came into close contact with the Admiral Grigorovich, a 409ft (125-metre) Russian frigate.

AI arts and gold-mining in mud: photos of the day – Wednesday

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

Football Daily | Football’s greatest showman shows Mbappé and Haaland who’s boss

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The GWC has barely had time to unpack its suitcase and already the goals are flying in like overenthusiastic airline baggage. Stadiums are full, scoreboards are busy and, most importantly, football’s three marquee attractions decided that now would be a good time to remind everyone why they dominate highlight reels, sponsorship campaigns and social media algorithms.

First we have Football Daily on the weekend, and now we have Tuuka Tomperi stating in yesterday’s letters: ‘Football Daily is the best newsletter in the world, by far!’ The first I can pass off as GWC Fever, but the second is inexplicable and means I will be visiting my general practitioner as soon as the group stage is over” – Alex Bull.

Before kick-off on Sunday I was pessimistic about having to slog through three Curaçao matches in the GWC. But, after seeing them torn apart by Germany, 7-1, I can safely say that it’s just like watching Brazil. 2014-era Brazil, but still” – R Reisman.

You could argue that Vozinha is actually better than Pat Jennings (yesterday’s Football Daily). Vozinha’s given first name is Josimar, after the Brazilian defender who was a star of Mexico ‘86. That Josimar not only played in the game against Northern Ireland (and Jennings) that you referenced, he scored the second Brazilian goal, with a shot from way out on the right touchline if I remember correctly. Surely that’s conclusive proof that a Josimar is better than a Jennings?” – Richard O’Hagan.

The late music legend Cesaria Évora had a voice that reached the ends of the earth. She was from the same town in Cape Verde as the goalkeeper Vozinha, whose nickname is Portuguese for ‘little voice’. That little voice produced a massive roar heard around the world” – Peter Oh.

I wanted to add my Roy Hattersley recollection (yesterday’s Football Daily letters). His column was my favourite part of the Guardian, bar none. The man wrote exquisitely, so I was delighted to bump into him at Priestfield before a Gillingham v Sheffield Wednesday game about 25 years ago. He was polite and charming for our brief chat and responded with ‘I hope not’ when I bid him adieu, having said ‘may the better team win’. Wednesday duly lost to my beloved Gills. RIP Roy” – Martin Griffiths.

This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions.

Rising temperatures may increase flood risk through river ‘whiplash’, study finds

Sudden shifts from wet to dry weather, or vice versa, may foil typical drought- and flood-prevention measures

Rising temperatures may trigger a dangerous increase in “hydroclimatic whiplash” in rivers that would make traditional approaches to flood and drought planning insufficient, a study has found.

As temperatures rise owing to the worsening climate crisis, rivers will experience increasingly rapid transitions between heavy downpours and long dry spells – called hydroclimatic whiplash events – because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, intensifying rainfall extremes.

Taiwan says Chinese pressure over the island is the "new normal"

Taiwan's Foreign Ministry on Tuesday said the scholars' passports and mobile phones were confiscated, and they were detained in Mombasa for more than 20 hours before being allowed to leave the country.

Midsummer morris dancers and their mysterious goat Caprihorn: Hollie Fernando’s best portrait

‘I wanted to celebrate the women who are reinventing morris dancing. They took me to a pub and gave me a pickled egg mashed up in a packet of crisps. I felt like I’d entered a magical world’

Morris used to be a very male-dominated sport, but in 1975 the Morris Federation was created specifically to allow women to join sides. An older organisation, the Morris Ring, didn’t allow teams with women to be members until 2018, yet today women account for more than half of Britain’s Morris dancers. As soon as I heard about Boss Morris, the all-female side in this picture, I wanted to shoot a portrait of them. I was keen to celebrate the evolution of this traditional form of dance by focusing on young women who are both honouring and reinventing it.

When they appeared on stage at the Brits with the band Wet Leg, who I was working with at the time, I thought, “It’s meant to be! If I don’t do it now, someone else will.” It was really hard to pin the group down, as there are so many of them, but as we discussed ideas they all got excited by the idea of doing a summer solstice shoot on Rodborough Common during one of their practice evenings. It’s a great location – an amazing hilly green space right on their doorstep in Stroud.

Protesters to rally against World Cup sponsor Hyundai before Mexico game

• Focus on business dealings with mining company

• Guadalajara rally to highlight fate of ‘disappeared’

Hyundai will be targeted by protesters at a rally before the group A game between Mexico and South Korea in Guadalajara on Thursday, due to the World Cup sponsor’s business dealings with the South American mining company Ternium.

A 2025 report from environmental group Mighty Earth criticised Hyundai’s involvement in what they described as a “dirty steel supply chain”, as the South Korean motor company is a major buyer of iron ore from Ternium for use in steel production. Ternium has faced repeated criticisms for its destructive environmental impact and corporate governance policies from campaign groups, as well as its alleged links to the disappearance of two Mexican activists.

Andy Murray backs Jack Draper for Wimbledon return: ‘He’s bloody good’

• British hope on the rise again after injury setbacks

• Murray working as former top 10 player’s advisor

Sir Andy Murray has issued a bullish bulletin on the fitness and ability of Jack Draper before Wimbledon, revealing that he has been practising on court most days and hailing his tennis as “bloody good”.

Draper has plummeted to No 113 in the world due to a series of injuries, having been ranked fourth last year, and has not played since the Barcelona Open in April. But Murray, who has been working with the British player for the last month at the LTA’s National Tennis Centre as an adviser and temporary coach, believes that his body is now on the mend.

‘Petrol on the fire’: Sikhs in UK reconsider Reform support over response to Henry Nowak murder

Recent success among Sikh voters in doubt after party’s proposed kirpan ban adds to sense of racist scapegoating

“There’s a genuine battle going on between Reform UK and Labour for Sikh voters,” says Dabinderjit Singh, of the Sikh Federation.

Until the case of Henry Nowak, the 18-year-old stabbed to death by Vickrum Digwa, a British Sikh, hit headlines across the country, traditional support for Labour among British Sikhs was slumping, while support for Reform was rising from a low base. But now the fledgling alliance between some British Sikhs and the populist right is facing its toughest test.

Construction equipment multinationals may be aiding Israeli war crimes, experts say

Images show Israeli military using six companies’ bulldozers and excavators to demolish south Lebanon villages

Human rights experts have alleged that six multinational construction equipment conglomerates may be aiding and abetting war crimes by supplying excavators and bulldozers to Israel, after photos and videos showed the Israeli military using their equipment to demolish villages in south Lebanon.

The Guardian geolocated and verified images showing the Israeli military using excavators made by six companies – Caterpillar, Volvo, Hyundai, Doosan, Hitachi and Komatsu – to destroy homes, public utilities, shops and other structures across southern Lebanon.

Israel has levelled entire villages inside the “yellow line”, a 608 sq km area occupied by Israel along the Lebanese-Israeli border. At least 46 villages in south Lebanon have suffered heavy damage, most of it caused by demolitions carried out after the 17 April Lebanon-Israel ceasefire, according to a satellite analysis by Bellingcat.

Potential first Atlantic tropical cyclone of the year develops in the Gulf

Forecasters say the potential first tropical cyclone of the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season could develop into a fully formed storm on Wednesday and bring life-threatening flash flooding.

Does Ousmane Dembélé fit in a France attack led by Mbappé and Olise?

Didier Deschamps has an awkward question to answer: should he drop the Ballon d’Or holder?

By Get French Football News

“If I start playing just to prove all of my critics wrong and to shut them up, I think I’d have to keep playing until I was 80,” said Kylian Mbappé as he wrote his name in the history books, surpassing Olivier Giroud as France’s all-time top scorer. He insists that his 57th and 58th goals for the national team – which secured a 3-1 win over Senegal in their World Cup opener – were not about “revenge”. But they were at least a response.

Mbappé is not someone who does all his talking on the pitch. Speaking before Euro 2024, he referred to himself in the third person as he announced his opposition to far-right politicians. “Kylian Mbappé is against extreme views and against ideas that divide people,” he said two years ago. I want to be proud to represent France. I don’t want to represent a country that doesn’t correspond to my values, or our values.”

‘Period tax’ on sanitary products to be abolished, says Pakistan minister

Campaigners welcome announcement cutting levies on menstrual health items, but say their work to end period poverty is ‘far from over’

Pakistan plans to abolish “period tax”, in a victory for young campaigners who had taken the government to court over the charges.

Finance minister Muhammad Aurangzeb announced that sanitary towels and related items were “daily necessities that are indispensable for women’s health, dignity and full participation in social activities”, and said he intended to remove the sales tax.

Veteran fights to prevent wife's deportation: "I'm begging my own country"

Retired staff sergeant Wilmer Trujillo, who served roughly 20 years in the U.S. Army and the Texas National Guard, is asking ICE to release his wife of six years.

Milan tram drivers accused of sharing CCTV images of female passengers’ thighs and breasts

Drivers suspended as prosecutors investigate claims they exchanged vulgar WhatApps on images hacked from IT system

A group of tram drivers in Milan have been suspended from their jobs amid an investigation into a WhatsApp group in which they allegedly exchanged sexist and vulgar comments about images of female passengers.

Milan prosecutors placed at least one employee of ATM, the city’s public transport firm, under investigation on Tuesday for allegedly accessing an IT system without authorisation and for hacking a CCTV system to obtain images of female passengers.

Australia power past Bangladesh in Women’s World T20 mismatch

• Australia win by nine wickets after being set 79 to win

• Romp in Leeds underlines disparity in resources

It was never expected to be a close one. Australia versus Bangladesh features one of the greatest disparities of resources in women’s international cricket. Still, having hosted Australia for a full series as recently as 2024, and with the recent fast starts of opening bat Juairiya Ferdous, and the intensity of opening pace bowler Marufa Akter, and the developing batting of Shorna Akter and Sharmin Akhter Supta, and the full suite of spin variety under the spiky leadership of Nigar Sultana Joty, there was reason to hope that Bangladesh might continue their development with a competitive performance.

Nothing of the sort, unfortunately, eventuated at the T20 World Cup in Leeds, as Australia notched a win in the north that supercharged their net run rate. Joty won the toss and batted, saying that she wanted to back her top order to be aggressive, only for the Powerplay to go diametrically in the other direction. A cautious opening over facing Megan Schutt, the swing bowler back in the side after Ash Gardner’s rolled ankle created space for the batting order to be shuffled up, was followed by Dilara Akter’s angled hoick across a straight ball from seamer Kim Garth that took off-stump.

Heavy rain creates treacherous conditions in South, Gulf Coast: "Definitely makes you worried"

Heavy rain on Tuesday hammered parts of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, creating dangerous conditions and leaving drivers stranded. Jason Allen reports.

1 person killed, 5 rescued after small plane crashes on busy Texas highway

A small plane crashed on a busy highway in Texas on Tuesday and caught on fire. People jumped into action to help those on board escape. One person was killed, police say. Lilia Luciano reports.

Alex Pereira blasts Ciryl Gane for ‘illegal shots’ during White House UFC fight

• Brazilian star said he took blows to the back of the head

• Pereira calls on Dana White to remove referee Herb Dean

Mixed martial arts star Alex Pereira of Brazil has accused Frenchman Ciryl Gane of landing multiple “illegal shots” during their fight for the interim UFC heavyweight title at the White House.

Gane finished off Pereira in the second round to win the title on Sunday after sending him stumbling with a right jab followed by a hammer fist. The referee then stopped the fight 1min 27sec into the round after a left to the chin.

I’m a 14-year-old trans athlete. No one should face the vicious attacks I have faced | Lina Haaga

People understand gender differently, and I was taught to respect all ideas. But the vitriol I recently experienced was not a healthy debate

For as long as I can remember, I have known I am a girl. That certainty is as instinctive as knowing I am right-handed. It is difficult to explain to someone who has never been transgender or loved someone who is, but I have never lived this way to gain an advantage or take something from someone else. I live this way to honor what I know is true.

I transitioned at four years old. By sixth grade, my identity was public. I grew used to the double takes, the questions, the quiet skepticism. Most of it did not bother me. Curiosity, even when clumsy, is human. People understand gender differently, and I was taught to respect all ideas, just as I hope others respect mine.

Lina Haaga is a transgender student athlete

US public still favours action on climate change despite Trump’s fossil fuel drive

Two-thirds of Americans say they are worried about climate but level of media coverage does not reflect this

US political and media discourse has drifted away from the climate crisis amid a frontal assault by Donald Trump upon policies to limit global heating and the president’s pugnacious demands to “drill, baby, drill” for more oil and gas.

Yet while elite attention on climate has waned, even among some previously vocal Democrats who have wound back on criticism of the fossil fuels that are overheating our planet, the American public remains concerned about the climate crisis and continues to favour action to deal with it, according to experts and polling.

How to turn yoghurt pot scrapings into a marinade for fried chicken – recipe | Waste not

An almost-empty container can be a vessel for food alchemy

Using an almost-empty yoghurt pot to marinate meat and vegetables is one of my favourite ways to prepare dinner. It’s a really simple and tidy way to marinate food that not only saves on the washing-up, it also turns a few yoghurt scrapings that might otherwise be destined for the drain into a flavour-enhancing, tenderising, waste-saving hack.

Dramatic rescue efforts after fiery small plane crash in Texas kills 1

A business jet with six on board crashed on a Laredo, Texas, highway and caught fire, killing one person and causing chaos as passersby frantically tried to save those inside.

Disclosure Day is great. But Spielberg overestimates our capacity for empathy

Spielberg’s sci-fi blockbuster starring Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor may be spectacular, but it misjudges how much humans are prepared to tolerate abuse of groups we see as ‘other’

Steven Spielberg has converted his longstanding fascination with the possible existence of aliens into considerable commercial and critical success and now, 49 years after Close Encounters and 44 after ET, the film-maker has returned to the subject for the sci-fi spectacular Disclosure Day.

The film follows cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) and weather presenter Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) as they become state-secret whistleblowers, working with Hugo (Colman Domingo) to expose nearly eight decades’ worth of evidence that the US government has known about extraterrestrial life.

To fridge or not to fridge: tell us your views

What should and shouldn’t be kept in the fridge can provoke debate. We want to hear about your non-negotiables

What items should or shouldn’t be kept in the fridge can divide opinions but the Guardian has asked some experts – it seems bread and olive oil do not benefit from being in the fridge but red wine can taste great chilled.

Now we want to hear from you. What items do you keep in the fridge? Does this differ from your partner, family or friends? Let us know.

Survivors speak up to help convict man of murder, sexual assault

David Pearce was convicted of first-degree murder for the deaths of Christy Giles and Hilda Marcela Cabrales after a night of partying in Los Angeles. He was also found guilty of raping seven other women who came forward to testify at his trial.

How location sharing helped police catch a serial rapist-turned-killer

The mother of murdered model Christy Giles pleads for others to share their locations. She says the technology helped police catch David Pearce, who murdered Giles and her friend, architect Hilda Marcela Cabrales.

Senate postpones confirmation hearing for intel chief after Trump's call to delay

Senators wanted to fast track President Trump's pick for Director of National Intelligence. But Trump now says he wants to delay until they pass voting legislation that already failed in the Senate.

Trump to face questions at G7 press conference. And, Tuesday's primary results

Trump has touted his tentative agreement with Iran at the G7 summit. Today, he is expected to field questions at a press conference as the summit wraps up. And, a look at Tuesday's primary election results.

Danny Röhl leaves Rangers and looks set to be replaced by Derek McInnes

• Röhl departs for RB Salzburg by mutual consent

• McInnes linked with move to Ibrox from Hearts

Rangers have confirmed the departure of Danny Röhl to RB Salzburg by mutual agreement.

Röhl, who replaced Russell Martin as head coach in October last year, will take charge of the Austrian Bundesliga side after a seven-figure compensation package was agreed between the clubs. The performance manager Sascha Lense and first-team analyst Tristan Steiner will also depart Ibrox.

‘I don’t want Europe to fail the way Turkey did’: Ece Temelkuran on fascism, death threats and life in exile

Ten years after she was forced to leave her friends and family, the Turkish journalist feels the importance of home more keenly than ever. And she believes it is at the heart of many of the world’s conflicts

One summer’s evening in 2022, the Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran found herself in a doctor’s office in Hamburg, Germany, lying flat on a stretcher with an IV drip in her arm. After six intense years of work and travel, her body was in revolt. “I now know that I need to talk,” she writes in her latest book, Nation of Strangers, which was shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s prize for nonfiction. “I fear that not speaking will make me really sick. And when homeless, you cannot afford to get sick.”

In fact, she had not been silent in the preceding years: she had published two well-received books, How To Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Fascism (2019) and Together: A Manifesto Against a Heartless World (2021). She had spoken her warnings in public, too, on stages all across the west, saying: this is what happened to us in Turkey – make sure it doesn’t happen to you, too. And she is not technically homeless; she lives in Berlin. But by “speaking” and by “home”, Temelkuran means something specific yet vast. Nation of Strangers posits that the idea of home, and the emotions that idea contains, is one of the dominant political forces of our time.

Why farmers see Colombia’s knife-edge election as a battle for the Amazon’s future

Many small-scale landowners now include conservation measures alongside everyday farming. But progress is precarious, and the threat of guerrilla violence and poverty remain whichever candidate wins

Like most people settling in the area, Pablo Peña was seeking to escape violence and make a living from a patch of land when he moved to Guaviare in central Colombia. While his life has been strongly marked by conflict and deforestation, more than 30 years on he now focuses on community work and conservation.

Peña first visited Guaviare during his mandatory military service. Years later, in 1994, he settled down to farm in Guaviare’s Calamar, a town in a remote corner of the Amazon.

‘A neoliberal nightmare’: my ride on the Vegas Loop – Elon Musk’s answer to traffic jams

Ten years ago, after complaining that traffic was ‘driving him nuts’, Musk’s Boring Company began building underground tunnels to ease congestion on the roads. Did he overpromise and underdeliver?

It’s another blindingly bright day in Las Vegas but I’m 30ft underground and strapped in for a rocket ride to the future. Actually, it’s a Tesla ride to the future, and not a self-driving one. And it’s pretty slow – my driver tells me the speed limit down here is 30mph. It’s also pretty short: the journey is over in a matter of minutes. In fact, the Vegas Loop is a pretty underwhelming experience: a brief trundle down a white-walled tunnel only slightly larger than the vehicle itself, lined by strips of LEDs that change colour every few seconds, in an attempt to inject some Vegas glitz. I’d been hoping to ask other Loop-riders what they made of the experience, but … there aren’t any. I’m the only person here.

This is not the futuristic transport solution Elon Musk originally promised. When he first announced this innovative technology in 2017, it was accompanied by sci-fi visuals showing a car pulling over from the street traffic on to an elevator platform, which then descended into a network of tunnels and whizzed along on an “electric skate” at 200km/h (124mph). “There’s no real limit to how many levels of tunnel you can have … so you can alleviate any arbitrary level of urban congestion,” Musk said. A few months earlier, with characteristic edgelordly nonchalance, Musk had announced on Twitter: “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging …” Followed shortly after by: “I am actually going to do this.” He did, and he named it the Boring Company.

‘The night before I dreamt about my ACL’: Everton’s Aurora Galli on the long way back from injury | Moving the Goalposts

This week’s newsletter spends a day with the Italy midfielder as she continues to battle her way back to a peak physical condition

“It was accepting that I couldn’t play football because it was my life. It was everything that I knew.” For Everton’s Aurora Galli, the past 20 months have been anything but straightforward. Her return from a serious knee injury has been difficult, one beset with obstacles before, ultimately, a long-awaited comeback.

It was September 2024, 83 minutes and three seconds into the first game of the Women’s Super League season to be exact, when Galli went down in agony. Everton were losing 4-0 to Brighton and, in her eagerness to salvage something for her team, the midfielder attempted to challenge for the ball when her standing leg buckled. As expected, it was confirmed that she had ruptured an anterior cruciate ligament.

This is an extract from our free email about women’s football, Moving the Goalposts. To get the full edition, visit this page and follow the instructions. Moving the Goalposts will be sent out once a week, on Wednesdays, in the close season but will be back on Tuesdays and Thursdays from September.

‘That’s when the shark fins appeared’: your horrifying holidays – from natural disasters to missile threats

With Two Weeks in August and the return of The Four Seasons, TV dramas about nightmare getaways are having a moment. Here are Guardian readers’ tales of their own

In early 1969, my parents booked a holiday in Belfast for one week and a bed and breakfast in Dublin for one week. When we arrived at our Belfast destination, The Elsinore Hotel, there wasn’t another car in the parking lot and the hotel was empty except for the aged husband and wife owners. Being 12 years old, I didn’t think too much at the time about the quiet, empty place but the owners invited the whole family down to the dining room every evening and we enjoyed some great meals. Lots of pictures of JFK and the pope adorned many of the hotel walls and being a Catholic family ourselves, the hosts made a big fuss of us.

Lululemon apologises after Japanese drum row at Great Wall yoga event

Online uproar follows Canadian brand’s use of taiko drum at sponsored festival held to celebrate Chinese culture

The activewear brand Lululemon has apologised after a promotional event held on the Great Wall of China appeared to mistakenly feature a Japanese drum, prompting an uproar.

The Canadian-headquartered company, known for its upmarket leggings, has been growing rapidly in China and arranged for a yoga festival to take place in late May on a section of the wall near Beijing.

Will it take a ‘Chernobyl-scale disaster’ for us to regulate AI? | Stuart Russell

Unsafe AI systems are leading to cyber weapons of mass destruction

• Stuart Russell is a computer scientist known for his contributions to AI and a new Guardian US columnist

The AI company Anthropic has been making major headlines recently. Its trillion-dollar IPO plan and its blood feud with secretary of defense Pete Hegseth have attracted much attention, but two other events may be even more consequential.

In early June, the company posted an article describing early signs of recursive self-improvement (RSI), a process in which an AI system devises ways to increase its own intelligence, leading to a greater ability to improve itself, and so on.

Stuart Russell is a distinguished professor of computer science at University of California, Berkeley, the president of the International Association for Safe and Ethical Artificial Intelligence and a Guardian US columnist

Your Fault: London review – British-set remake of Spanish step-sibling romance lacks passion or fizz

A second helping of the English-language adaptation of Mercedes Ron’s trilogy sustains little chemistry between its supposedly besotted lead characters

Here is Amazon Prime’s sequel to its hit My Fault: London. If you’re new to the franchise back-story, it started with a bestselling trilogy of romance novels by Spanish author Mercedes Ron (who self-published the first one). It’s a tale of the forbidden love between step-siblings Noah and her smouldering bad boy step-brother Nick. The books have been adapted into a trilogy of Spanish-language films, the second of which is remade here with absolutely no sense of fun or humour. A couple of its good-looking actors give performances with frozen, startled expressions, like they’ve been kidnapped from the set of an advert for luxury five-star holidays.

It picks up from the previous movie, with Noah (Asha Banks) and Nick (Matthew Broome) now in a full-blown relationship. Nick insists on keeping it a secret from their parents, who were recently married; he’s worried what his overbearing billionaire dad (Ray Fearon) will say if he finds out. Noah reluctantly agrees, and leaves home to study at Oxford, where she meets nice, sensible second-year student Michael (Joel Nankervis). “We’re just friends,” Noah says. Nick has turned his back on illegal drag-racing and is working for his dad, alongside posh blond tech start-up founder Sophia (Louisa Binder). “Just colleagues,” insists Nick.

'Rejected': How federal prisons stonewall grievances and deny care for years

People who go to prison keep one important right — to file a grievance over their treatment: from abuse to denied medical care. But in the vast majority of cases, those efforts go nowhere, according to an analysis of federal data by The Marshall Project and NPR.

Rapper Mystikal sentenced to 20 years in prison for third-degree rape

The Louisiana musician has now been sentenced, having pleaded guilty to the charge in March

The rapper Mystikal has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for third-degree rape.

In March, the US musician born Michael Tyler pleaded guilty to the charge, having originally been charged with the more severe first-degree rape, along with simple robbery, domestic abuse battery and false imprisonment.

‘Addiction is proof there is a devil. Recovery is proof there is a God’: Irish rockers Bleech 9:3 on struggle, sobriety and their stunning debut

After two friends sponsored each other in Alcoholics Anonymous, they started making music. As they gear up for a summer of 40 festivals, the band tell their harrowing yet uplifting story

On stage in a Camden pub, Barry Quinlan, frontman of Irish rockers Bleech 9:3, shares the intensity of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. He hunches and jerks around the mic stand and his eyes bore a hole in the back wall as jubilant teenagers expand and contract in a circle pit. The gig in mid-May has the same I-was-there energy as early Arctic Monkeys or Fontaines DC shows; with major labels signing Bleech 9:3 on both sides of the Atlantic, dozens of festival dates this summer and a wildly impressive, impassioned five-song debut EP, the band will soon be playing much bigger rooms than this.

But when I meet Barry and his three bandmates earlier on that day, there’s none of that twitchy energy. Bleech 9:3 bring calm to a meeting room in their management company’s offices as staff bustle around outside. That stillness is hard-earned: Barry and guitarist Sam Duffy are each other’s sponsor for Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Quinlan smiles: “It’s an anonymous programme, so we’ll say ‘alleged sponsor’.”

Seven-year-old Abdiqadir was hit in a US airstrike. Without a $750 operation, he may lose his ability to walk

Abdiqadir Salah was pierced by shrapnel in a bombing that killed 12 in Somalia. But as the US denies civilians were hurt they face no hope of compensation

Read more: Killed walking home from school: why did Somali children become targets of US drone strikes?

A seven-year-old boy who was riddled with shrapnel during a deadly US airstrike in Somalia faces losing his ability to walk unless he has a £750 emergency operation.

But Abdiqadir Salah’s family cannot afford the surgery and the US – which refuses to admit that any civilians were killed or injured during its attack six months ago – appears unwilling to pay compensation to those affected by airstrikes in Somalia.

Fashion goes pop! How Yves Saint Laurent created photography magic – in pictures

Yves Saint Laurent saw the power of photography to push boundaries and take risks that had an impact in the fashion world and beyond. The new exhibition Yves Saint Laurent and Photography, at New York’s International Center of Photography, includes nearly 300 iconic photographs and archival objects with images by artists including Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Irving Penn, Andy Warhol and others. Pairing photographs with contact sheets, campaign materials, magazines and personal images, the exhibit shows the vital role images played in legacy of the Yves Saint Laurent brand

Want to start a business? AI can help, business owners say

AI is slashing the cost of starting and running a business. "Everything has decreased in cost and increased in speed," one entrepreneur said.

With Iran deal, Trump told ships to 'start your engines.' That's not happening yet

Iran's control of the Strait of Hormuz inflicted global pain during the months-long conflict with the U.S. and Israel. A tentative deal is in place, but questions remain about the key waterway.

El Niño is here, so what does it mean?

An El Niño has formed amid the warmer-than-normal waters in the tropical Pacific. Now it's a question of how intense the phenomenon will be and where effects like heat and drought will strike.

Collapse by Édouard Louis review – coming to terms with a brother’s death

In the latest autofictional instalment of his family saga, the French writer makes sense of his sibling’s violent homophobia and short life

At 33, the French writer Édouard Louis has already seen all seven of his slim novels translated into English. In his breakout debut, The End of Eddy (2017), and again in Change (2024), he wrote about being the promising child of a poor family, the bullied gay son who became a bestselling author. Several of his other books have offered sympathetic sociological portraits of his parents: a father destroyed by physical labour, a victim of French healthcare and housing subsidy cutbacks, and a mother who, after raising numerous children in poverty, fled first Louis’s father and then, in Monique Escapes, published earlier this year, his abusive successor. Now, in Collapse, translated by novelist Tash Aw, Louis describes his eldest brother’s death, at 38, from complications relating to alcoholism.

“I felt nothing at the announcement of the death of my brother,” he begins; “not sadness or despair or joy or pleasure.” The reasons for his coldness soon become clear. His brother was violently homophobic. His drinking at one point prevented Louis from sleeping ahead of a crucial exam. After The End of Eddy came out, his brother went looking for him with a baseball bat. So when Louis talks with his mother and sister about how to pay for his brother’s funeral and admits, “yes, I would have let him be buried like a dog”, we understand why.

UK social media ban ‘likely to cause £1.3bn drop’ in digital advertising spend

TV streamers and family shows set to benefit as brands cease marketing to teenagers on sites such as YouTube

• Analysis: impact of social media ban in UK hinges on how firm it is

Brands are expected to cut more than £1bn of digital advertising spending due to the UK’s ban on social media for under-16s, with streaming services tipped to benefit as advertisers try to reach large audiences of teenagers.

The ban, due to come into force early next year, will leave UK advertisers scrambling to reassess marketing plans as millions of under-16s effectively disappear as a demographic that can be marketed to on platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube.

I Will Find You review – seen one maddeningly watchable Harlan Coben adaptation? You’ve seen them all

Severance’s Britt Lower stars in Netflix’s latest lot of cobblers. It’s an eight-part saga of fists and mumbling, with a script made from Play-Doh

A lever groans, a pipe judders and thunk; another length of premium-grade bunkum is extruded from the Harlan Coben Industrial Adaptation Complex™. This particular emission – an eight-part assemblage of fists and mumbling entitled I Will Find You – is the 13th of Coben’s novels to have been processed by Netflix as part of a 14-book deal. Which means – the pulse quickens – there is now just one more to go. On Netflix, at least. The author’s ongoing deal with Amazon suggests we could be trapped in an ever-spiralling cycle of preposterous thrillers for eternity. May God have mercy on our souls.

Helpfully, Netflix has titled its cluster of adaptations “The Harlan Coben Collection”, which makes them sound like the type of ceramic figurines advertised at the back of Sunday supplements: Regency belles, say, or dogs dressed as fictional detectives. Stun your family by collecting them all! Alternatively, watch just one – any one – of these adaptations and relax in the knowledge that you have now in effect seen them all, and thus need never again subject yourself to the sight of hitherto respectable actors remaining straight-faced while delivering lines of the “The past never changes. Until one day it does” genus.

Lost for years, the music of The Tiger Who Came to Tea author’s mother is heard again

Descendants of Julia Kerr gather for recital at Einstein’s summer house near Berlin where revived opera was set

Albert Einstein throws a party at his lakeside house at which he presents to his guests his latest invention: a time machine.

So opens the opera Chronoplan, started in the late 1920s by the composer Julia Kerr, who took the score with her when she fled Nazi Germany with her family in early 1933, its planned premiere having been halted following Hitler’s takeover.

Cactus Pears review – tender and subtle story of forbidden love and a poignant awakening in India

The strictures of family and class stand between two young men and their humble dreams of happiness in an assured directorial debut from Rohan Kanawade

Here is a really impressive directorial debut from Mumbai film-maker Rohan Kanawade: tender, subtle, candid, scrupulously observed. It is a story of forbidden and unacknowledged love, or maybe semi-forbidden and semi-unacknowledged, and an emotional flowering that reveals the oppressive importance of family, status and class.

Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) is a 30-year-old Mumbai call-centre worker who must return to his remote home village when his father dies, where he is expected to stay for the full 10-day mourning period, an absence for which he must grovellingly apologise to his boss over the phone. His dad’s final words, incidentally, were that he wanted his wife Suman (Jayshri Jagtap) to cook him a really nice meal, and the poignancy of that request is cleverly revealed by Kanawade in the later scene in which Anand’s elderly, blind grandfather reminisces about why he agreed to marry the lowly and uneducated Suman in the first place.

Cycling in the tracks of Britain’s camping pioneers from Oxford to Surrey

Britain’s Camping and Caravanning Club started as a cycle camping club 125 years ago. I cycle from its birthplace to one of its oldest campsites to see if its free-wheeling spirit survives

Skylarks call out a cascading trill as I pedal between the pink and white hawthorn blossoms that make my path look like a May Day parade. I’m on the outskirts of Oxford, a city I thought I knew well, yet as I follow the National Cycle Route 57 on the e-bike I’d picked up in Jericho, it feels as though I’ve discovered a secret passageway.

This year the Camping and Caravanning Club (CCC) turns 125 – and I’m celebrating with a 60-mile cycling and camping trip, leaving from the city where the organisation was born and heading to Walton-on-Thames to stay at one of the oldest campsites in the CCC network.

Morbid by Saul Justin Newman review – why everything you think you know about longevity is wrong

Is Japan really full of centenarians? And what about ‘blue zones’? A brilliant skewering of ageing secrets and lies

There is a special place in hell reserved for doctors who trade on their authority, status and medical training to monetise public fear and gullibility. Every time I scroll past a qualified physician touting elixirs that promise youthful vigour, cellulite-free thighs or gut microbiome makeovers, I want to poke their fraudulent eyes out. At best, these charlatans have chosen lining their pockets over helping others. At worst, as in the case of the Covid deniers and anti-vaxxers, they are actively dangerous – something I witnessed first-hand on hospital wards in 2021 as unvaccinated patients succumbed to the disease.

Nowhere is human hope monetised more ruthlessly by medical grifters than in the anti-ageing industry. Our inescapable fate – decrepitude and death – makes us ripe for exploitation. Who doesn’t want to pop a pill or hook themselves up to an IV infusion that, for only £99.99 a month, will magically stave off the moment you turn into your grandparents? In Morbid, debut author Saul Justin Newman, a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Institute of Population Ageing, sets out to topple the whole, sordid house of cards. His central argument is that our fear of frailty and dying has “created an opening for all manner of skullduggery in the science of ageing”, an area of research which is rife, he argues, with “misleading claims, mistaken assumptions, and outright chicanery. The world’s oldest man is a fake, hundreds of thousands of the world’s oldest people are actually dead, and five decades of research on human longevity is moot.”

‘I don’t like being stuck in an office’: the young people helping plant a ring of trees around London

London Tree Ring project aims to create corridors of plant and animal life around the city to strengthen its biodiversity

Harry Ewing is heaping branches and foliage from the forest floor on to a dead hedge, reinforcing the protective circle around his newly planted trees in Hadley Wood, north London. He is in a glade created by a fallen oak that was previously overrun with thick bramble.

“I feel very happy – the trees are growing already. It’s really nice seeing it when it starts,” says Ewing.

A moment that changed me: A WhatsApp message about a little-known sport made me an unlikely celebrity in Japan

I’d always wanted to represent my country at something, so when I learned about Mölkky, I got a team together

It was December 2023 and I was searching in the attic for Christmas decorations when my phone pinged. I pulled it out of my pocket and found a WhatsApp message from my son who was backpacking in Australia. The message read, simply: “You might want to take a look at this” – it was accompanied by a short video clip.

The footage was grainy – it was night-time somewhere in Queensland and the streetlights weren’t the brightest – but I could make out Louis and his travel companion Asher throwing what looked like a rolling pin at a collection of numbered wooden skittles.

The Belfast riots, Palestine Action protests. What is terrorism now – and why the hypocrisy? | George Monbiot

The right is obsessed with ‘two-tier policing’. This is indeed a two-tier government – but the real victims are progressives

“If you are targeting people on the basis of the colour of their skin,” the Northern Ireland secretary, Hilary Benn, asked last week, “how else can you describe them? That is racist thuggery.” It is. But there is another way of describing the actions of the rioters burning people out of their homes in Belfast, though ministers somehow cannot bring themselves to say it. Terrorism.

The violence there clearly meets the government’s definition: “the use or threat” of actions designed to “intimidate the public” for the purpose of “advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause”. Among these actions are “serious violence against a person” and “serious damage to property”. I happen to believe that the property clause blurs the issue. But either way, in what possible world do the Belfast attacks not fit the definition?

Fashion tycoon Bernard Arnault accused of stranglehold over French business press

Arnault’s addition of leading weekly to stable of publications raises concerns about media ownership in France

He is known as the “wolf in cashmere” – the owner of the world’s biggest luxury group whose brands including Louis Vuitton, Dior and Tiffany have made him one of the world’s richest people.

But Bernard Arnault, a close friend of Donald Trump, is under fire from journalists’ unions in France for buying up almost all the country’s business and economic press.

A lemony loaf, a stir-fry and a cheeseboard pickle: Ravinder Bhogal’s courgette recipes

Three ways with summer’s versatile vegetable: as a simple meal, a deliciously moist loaf and a South Asian achaar to spice up any cheese sandwich

Courgettes don’t have to be boring, thanks to their shapeshifting magic. Shave with a vegetable peeler, douse in olive oil and lemon juice and eat raw, or spiralise for noodles. Alternatively, grill until blackened, scoop out the creamy innards, and fold into tahini for a smoky dip. Courgettes are irresistible grated and turned into fritters, deep-fried or cut into thick rounds and roasted on a high heat so they caramelise, but don’t turn to mush. Finally, you can pickle them to enjoy their sunny flavour in the gloomier months.

Ghana to advance reparatory justice at first major gathering since landmark UN resolution

Heads of state and participants from more than 80 countries at three-day event in Accra to pursue actionable commitments to reconciliation and restitution

Ghana is hosting a conference to advance the continent’s push for reparatory justice after the adoption of the landmark United Nations (UN) resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans as the gravest crime against humanity.

Heads of state and government, ministers, civil society representatives, historians, researchers and legal experts representing more than 80 countries are converging in the capital, Accra, for the three-day event, billed Next Steps, which starts on Wednesday. It is the first major gathering on the issue since the resolution was adopted.

They were forced into marriage and abused. Now women facing exploitation in China have a glimmer of hope

Female activists are working in the shadows to find and support vulnerable women they fear are being failed by authorities

Last summer, Xiaocao, a softly spoken woman in her 40s, received a tip-off that in Lüliang, a small city in China’s Shanxi province, vulnerable women were being forced into marriages. Along with another volunteer, she wanted to investigate.

After leaving Beijing, the two volunteers travelled south for hours, on trains and in rental cars. A few villages turned out to be dead ends. But on the final day of their trip, the women stopped in a county where they’d heard about a woman with learning disabilities who was “married” to two brothers. Soon, they found her.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup schedule and how to watch

With 104 World Cup games being played in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, it's like "a Super Bowl every single day for five weeks," U.S. team captain Tim Ream told CBS News.