Prime minister reveals defence spending plans and says UK must be fastest military innovator in Nato

Here is the clip of Keir Starmer in his Today programme interview refusing to say when the government will raise defence spending to 3% of GDP.

In an interview with the Times published on Saturday John Healey, the defence secretary, said that he had “no doubt” that Britain would reach the 3% target by 2034 – ie, before the end of the next parliament. Yesterday he described this as an “ambition”.

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© Photograph: Andy Buchanan/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Andy Buchanan/AFP/Getty Images

• Updates as the Matildas send off Tom Sermanni at GIO Stadium

• Any thoughts? Get in touch on email or on Bluesky @martinpegan

1 min: The Matildas win the ball back immediately from the kick off and Clare Wheeler makes a scything run toward the corner flag. The midfielder is brought to ground and goes searching for a free kick but referee Supiree Testhomya points for a goal kick.

Peeeeeeeeeeeeep!

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© Photograph: Cameron Spencer/Getty Images

© Photograph: Cameron Spencer/Getty Images

“I’m just going to say it’s a damn shame they don’t have anything else better to do," she said. "I hope they get a life."

• Fourth-round matches continue at Roland Garros

• Email Niall with your thoughts on the action

On Lenglen, Andreeva also sees off break points to lead Kastakina 4-3, the first set still on serve. An intriguing clash of styles in that match already.

Broken again and 5-0 down, Alexandrova begins to get something together as Gauff serves for the set – but five break points come and go, and the American eventually seals the bagel despite some first-serve issues.

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© Photograph: Thibault Camus/AP

© Photograph: Thibault Camus/AP

After more than three years of war, Russia and Ukraine are engaged in direct and public talks to end the fighting, but their positions remain far apart.

© Thomas Peter/Reuters

Amid an ongoing family rift with Brooklyn’s famous parents, the couple has brought together a high-profile legal team to help manage their public image.

Read on to see if your birth chart holds the destined power of the unusual.

Russian shelling and air attacks kill five near Zaporizhzhia before second round of peace talks in Istanbul

When Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago, he demanded that Ukraine renounce joining Nato, sharply cut its army, and “protect” Russian language and culture to keep the country in Moscow’s orbit.

He since has also demanded that Kyiv withdraw its forces from the four regions Moscow illegally annexed in September 2022 but never fully occupied — Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

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© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Putin had Christo Grozev in his sights. Grozev was way ahead of him.

© Bulent Kilic/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Funding cuts are harming domestic violence programs.

Democrats accused President Trump of decimating the Forest Service ahead of wildfire season, but USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins says the agency is "lean" and "effective."

PSG left little doubt as to who the best team in this season’s Champions League was, but there was individual brilliance on plenty of other squads

Gianluigi Donnarumma (Paris Saint-Germain)

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© Composite: Guardian Picture Desk

© Composite: Guardian Picture Desk

I tried bleaching my hair; I tried dyeing it pink, blue and purple. Then, at the age of 18, I finally discovered the real me

My hair has always been my pride and joy. Hairdressers would fawn over how long and thick it was. It was glossy, healthy and an unremarkable shade of light brown. But it never really felt like “me”. As a teen I dyed it purple, pink, red, blue or all four, trying to find the magic shade that would make sense.

Until disaster struck. When I was 18, I damaged my hair so badly with bleach that no colour would stick to it. After I spent two weeks as peroxide Barbie, my hairdresser saved what she could of my hair by dyeing it back to its natural mousy brown colour and chopping a good 14 inches off into a blunt bob. Much to her dismay, again bored with brown I bleached it a week later. It seemed I was in a permanent identity crisis that only a box of bleach could fix.

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© Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

© Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

The next in our series of writers highlighting their go-to comfort picks is a look back to 1974’s rousing disaster classic

Among the many reasons I’m long overdue for therapy would be that I consider a feature about a bunch of people trapped in a burning skyscraper as a feelgood movie. But there it is: the stunning effects (which hold up to this day), the sprawling, larger-than-life cast and accompanying who-will-make-it-to-the-end? suspense, the earnest, cheeseball dialogue – whenever I feel anxious or down, something about The Towering Inferno offers solace.

The most obvious reason boils down to one thing: nostalgia. My parents were film enthusiasts who would usually take us to a movie every week. And this was no ordinary experience: The Towering Inferno was the crown jewel in the 1970s disaster cycle, disdained by many critics for being trashy (while acknowledging it was entertaining trash). It was the talk of the schoolyard: whose parents were cool enough to actually take their kids to see this big-screen spectacle? Thus it was one of my primal filmgoing experiences: it accompanies fond memories of my parents treating us to something that felt as exhilarating as the circus.

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© Photograph: Moviestore/REX Shutterstock

© Photograph: Moviestore/REX Shutterstock

Late night hosts Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers haven't addressed the new book shedding light on the cover-up of former President Joe Biden's cognitive decline.

Seattle faces criticism for its handling of Christian worshipers' rights, with the Trump administration considering an intervention to protect First Amendment freedoms.

"Duck Dynasty" revival features Willie Robertson's semi-retirement and search for a new CEO. The original show premiered in 2012 and ended five years later.

Democrats once led pop culture, but now Trump connects with influencers like UFC stars and podcasters. Democrats need fresh strategies to engage young voters.

Drug-induced liver injury cases are increasing, with common medications and supplements posing hidden dangers, especially for vulnerable populations.

Planned Parenthood's celebrity-backed campaign faces backlash as critics highlight declining health services and increased political spending.

Victory of radical-right candidate could seriously destabilise the coalition government of pro-EU prime minister Donald Tusk

• Europe live – latest updates

The victory margin of the nationalist Karol Nawrocki in Poland’s presidential elections may have been wafer-thin, but it marks a huge upheaval in the country’s political landscape whose impact will be felt not just in Warsaw but across the EU.

Backed by the previous ruling conservative Law & Justice (PiS) party and, openly, by Donald Trump’s Maga movement, Nawrocki, a radical-right historian, defeated his liberal rival, the capital’s mayor, Rafał Trzaskowski, by 50.89% to 49.11%.

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© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Gardiner appeared on Season 2 of the hit BBC show "Race Across the World" alongside his mother in March 2020.

China criticized U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for his "vilified" remarks in which he said the Asian country poses a legitimate threat in the Indo-Pacific.

SASKATOON, Sask. — Prime Minister Mark Carney will meet with premiers in Saskatoon today to discuss efforts to knock down trade barriers and fast-track projects deemed as benefiting the national interest. Read More

According to royal experts, Kate Middleton has become more confident as a key player in the House of Windsor, making her the most popular member of the British royal family.

In Serbian artist Iva Radivojević’s third feature – part memoir, part drama – a girl tries to recall her exiled past as a personal loss melds with the start of the Yugoslavian war

Hovering between memoir, docu-essay and drama, Serbian artist Iva Radivojević’s third feature opens with a phone call that changes everything. Eleven-year-old Lana (a proxy for Radivojević, played by Natalija Ilinčić) receives the news that her grandfather has died; home alone, she is told by the speaker to communicate that to her mother. The Bakelite clock on the wall says it is precisely 10.36am on a Friday in 1992, “when the country of X was still a country”.

Friday 10.36am 1992 becomes a point and a rift in time, through which the historical erupts into the personal; a more intimate companion piece, perhaps, to the 2006 Romanian new wave classic 12.08 East of Bucharest. The news of Lana’s grandfather’s death melds with the start of the Yugoslavian war (perhaps the two events are linked, as he was a retired colonel). Suitcases are packed; Lana, in her memory always wearing a pink Nike shell suit, is driven by her father to the airport, presumably to emigrate. With these dramatised fragments – as well as ones of everyday Serbian life – threaded together in a third-person narration later revealed to be hers, Lana seems to be reconstructing her own exiled past.

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© Photograph: Publicity image

© Photograph: Publicity image

A new book explores the impact of birth order, but how we measure up against our brothers and sisters can be complex

A new book about sibling relationships, The Family Dynamic by Susan Dominus, examines how things like birth order and the specific achievements of your siblings affect a person’s life trajectory. As such, some of my favourite research is back in the public eye: the studies that suggest that I, as the eldest of three children, am the cleverest.

I’m kidding. I don’t actually think this is true in my own sibling group, but sure, I’ll take it, and say so in the national press: I’m smarter than you guys, science confirms. I am very interested in siblings and their influences, though. So much so that I wrote my first novel about a brother-sister relationship. Siblings shape you in ways that are less deliberate than parents, which means their influence is less discussed, though just as important. That said, birth order has remained a public fascination, with parents agonising over whether a middle child is overlooked or eldest is overburdened.

Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist

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© Photograph: handout/Handout

© Photograph: handout/Handout

Women campaign against needle-sharing and ‘bluetoothing’ in African state with one of the world’s highest rates of HIV

Pontso Tumisi remembers seeing crystal meth for the first time in her daughter’s bedroom several years ago. When her daughter said the crystals were bath salts, she believed her. Now, she regrets that naivety.

Tumisi says a lack of knowledge about drugs among parents and guardians has allowed many children’s use of dangerous substances to go undetected.

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© Photograph: Silence Charumbira

© Photograph: Silence Charumbira

Kansas City business owners are having to take matters into their own hands after they say the city isn't doing enough to combat crime.

A former FBI official says the Department of Justice's decision to hit two Sinaloa cartel members with terrorism-related charges marks a significant shift in strategy.

Reddit users are debating some airline baggage policies after a passenger's complaint about the inconsistent enforcement of carry-on rules on a flight from Atlanta.

Six illegal immigrant suspects, ages 13-21, charged in South Carolina mom's murder. Texts reveal lack of remorse by suspects who should have never been in the U.S., former AG says.

Today’s fluff is back in action

The Rumour Mill is back in action, filtering absolutely nothing from the gossipmongers and pumping it straight into your eyes. To heighten the excitement, there is not one but two transfer windows this summer. You lucky lot.

Matheus Cunha’s £62.5m move from Wolves has ignited what is to be a busy off-season for Ruben Amorim as he attempts to turn the Manchester United behemoth around. It could become somewhat more complicated if Bruno Fernandes decides he wants to test himself in jump ship to the Saudi Premier League with Al-Hilal. If that does become the case, one bit of tittle-tattle doing the rounds is that Amorim will return to his former employers to sign Pedro Gonçalves, who once had a gloriously forgettable spell at Wolves.

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© Photograph: Eurasia Sport Images/Getty Images

© Photograph: Eurasia Sport Images/Getty Images

(Rough Trade)
Jarvis Cocker and the band’s first album in 24 years delivers a refreshing take on middle age, with all the the skewed observation and joyful melodic flourishes of old

Time has been particularly kind to Pulp. As Jarvis Cocker points out on Spike Island, the lead single from their first album in 24 years, their 2002 split went largely unlamented: they had already succeeded in considerably reducing the size of their audience with 1998’s claustrophobic album This Is Hardcore and 2001’s Scott Walker-produced We Love Life. An ostensibly valedictory greatest hits album spent a single week in the lower reaches of the Top 75. And the year after their demise, John Harris’s Britpop history The Last Party noted tartly that Pulp’s music had “rather dated”. “The universe shrugged, then moved on,” sings Cocker, which is a perhaps more poetic reiteration of what he said at the time: the greatest hits album was “a real silent fart” and “nobody was that arsed, evidently”.

But subsequent years significantly burnished their memory. It was frequently noted that, besides the Manic Street Preachers’ A Design for Life, Common People was the only significant hit of the Britpop years that might be described as a protest song, a bulwark against the accusation that the era had nothing more substantial to offer than flag-waving and faux-gorblimey. At a time when ostensibly “alternative” rock bands had seemed suddenly desperate for mainstream acceptance, Pulp had become huge by sticking up for outsiders and weirdos. Mis-Shapes, for example, hymned the kinds of people one suspected some of Oasis’s fans would have happily thumped.

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© Photograph: Tom Jackson

© Photograph: Tom Jackson

Rightwing candidate secures rare victory for Maga movement in Europe

A California teen had to be rescued by a specialized team after becoming trapped in an abandoned mine shaft trying to save the family dogs that had already fallen in.

How did an ancient poet and painter who died in obscurity come to obsess everyone from Oscar Wilde to David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, Derek Jarman and David Bowie? The writer of a new book explains his glorious allure

William Blake may be known for seeing angels up in trees, for writing the alternative national anthem Jerusalem, and for his emblematic poem The Tyger. But his story is far more subversive and far queerer than cosy fables allow. It’s why Oscar Wilde hung a Blake nude on his college room wall. It’s why Blake became a lyric in a Pet Shop Boys song. And it’s why David Hockney is showing a Blake-inspired painting at his current exhibition in Paris.

When I lived in the East End of London, I’d walk over Blake’s grave in Bunhill Fields every day. It felt sort of disrespectful. Perhaps that’s why he has haunted me ever since. Years later, while trying to write a book about another artist, I got ill and very low. Suddenly, echoing one of his own visions, Blake came to me and said: “Well, how about it?” I felt I had to make amends for treading on his dreams. I’ve met many artists – Andy Warhol, Lucian Freud, Derek Jarman – but it is Blake whose hand I would love to have held and whose magical spirit I summon up in my new book. He even gave me my title: William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. (A friend has since pointed out that the title sounds suspiciously like a 1970s album by a certain starman from Mars).

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© Photograph: Penta Springs Limited/Alamy

© Photograph: Penta Springs Limited/Alamy

Many people take collagen powders and pills in the hope of looking younger for longer, but there are better ways to improve your chances

Collagen is one of the body’s building blocks. Made up of amino acids absorbed from the protein we eat, there are more than 20 subtypes found everywhere – from our bones and muscles to organs. Types I, II, and III are the most common in skin, cartilage and connective tissue, helping with strength and elasticity.

In recent years collagen has become known as the protein that keeps the skin on our face young-looking, with collagen powders and pills promising to slow signs of ageing – but is there any truth in those claims?

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© Illustration: Edith Pritchett

© Illustration: Edith Pritchett

Del Toro and Carapaz became distracted by each other, allowing the Lancastrian to claim a second Grand Tour

The Mexican standoff is a much-loved cinematic device, but the stalemate beloved of western movie script writers has rarely, if ever, decided one of cycling’s Grand Tours. The 2025 Giro d’Italia was the exception, appositely as the biggest loser was an actual Mexican, Isaac del Toro, with the unassuming Lancastrian Simon Yates the two-wheeled equivalent of the bandit who skips off with the loot, while two other bandits – in this case Richard Carapaz and Del Toro – stare each other down waiting for the other man to blink.

Yates’s second career Grand Tour win, forged on the Colle delle Finestre on Saturday afternoon in a peerless display of courage and cunning, and sealed 24 hours later in the streets of Rome, will go down in cycling’s annals as one of the most improbable heists the sport has witnessed.

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© Photograph: Dario Belingheri/Getty Images

© Photograph: Dario Belingheri/Getty Images

Dear Abby advises a woman dealing with a difficult ex.