“Wimbledon or Lord’s – the excitement is the same, right?” begins Krishnamoorthy V. “This is a match for India to lose. The problem with such low targets is often mental rather than logic or capability. The total is something that Pant alone can knock off, but throw in a full house, Lord’s, the second-innings score of England, a clever captain and nerves, and it is not as open and shut as it appears. I personally want the Indian team to win as they can close the discussions on Kohli and Sharma forever, but I sense that Stoke’ sleeve could be full of aces.”
The pitch has also started misbehaving. Skiddy bowlers tend to do well at Lord’s, so I agree Stokes, who bowled well last evening, could have a crucial role to play today, but with the ball as much as with his captaincy. I imagine he’ll stay on after completing his unfinished over, and it’ll be Carse from the other end, as Archer looked a bit tired yesterday.
US president says Bongino ‘sounded terrific’ when he spoke to him about uproar over how Justice Department handled inquiry in Epstein death
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We begin with news that president Donald Trump said on Sunday he spoke to deputy FBI director Dan Bongino to try to calm an uproar over how the Justice Department handled the probe into the death of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his alleged clientele, Reuters reported.
King Charles has invited Donald Trump for an unprecedented second state visit in September, scheduling the trip for three days when parliament is not sitting and removing the possibility of the US president addressing parliament. The visit is a coup for the White House, with Trump becoming the first elected politician in modern history to be granted two state visits, after his earlier one in 2019.
However, the US president received a frostier reception when he made an appearance at the Club World Cup final in New Jersey on Sunday. Trump was booed and jeered by the crowd during the national anthem before the match and again while presenting the trophy to Chelsea alongside Fifa president Gianni Infantino.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has called on the EU to “defend European interests resolutely” after Trump threatened to impose 30% tariffs on nearly all imports from the EU. It came as the EU moved to de-escalate tensions after the blunt move by Trump on Saturday. The bloc declared a further pause on €21bn of retaliatory tariffs until 1 August, dovetailing with the US president’s new deal deadline.
On Monday, in an extraordinary show of force, a convoy of federal agents descended upon Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park. Chaperones from a summer camp hurried children indoors, as protesters and media rushed to the scene. City leaders denounced the spectacle as a “political stunt” designed to terrorize Angelenos who have been reckoning with a relentless onslaught of immigration raids that began in early June.
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said on Sunday that Trump wants to have the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) “remade” instead of eradicated entirely. In a new interview on Sunday with NBC, Noem defended the Trump administration’s response to the deadly Texas floods that have killed at least 120 people, saying: “I think the president recognizes that Fema should not exist the way that it always has been. It needs to be redeployed in a new way, and that’s what we did during this response.”
Rosie O’Donnell has shrugged off a threat from Trump to revoke her US citizenship on the grounds that she is “a threat to humanity”. The New York-born actor and comedian said on Sunday that she was the latest in a long list of artists, activists and celebrities to be threatened by the US president.
A new Senate committee report on the attempted assassination of Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, described the events as a “cascade of preventable failures” and called for more severe disciplinary action to be taken with the Secret Service in the future. In the 31-page, highly critical findings released on Sunday, the Senate homeland security and governmental affairs committee lamented the mishandling of communications around the rally and said Trump was denied extra security on the day.
Kevin Hassett, the White House economic adviser, said Trump has seen some trade deal offers and thinks they need to be better, adding that the president will proceed with threatened tariffs on Mexico and the EU if they don’t improve.
The number of days with temperatures 5°C above the 1961-1990 average has doubled for the most recent decade 2015-2024 compared to 1961-1990. For 8°C above average the number has trebled and for 10°C it has quadrupled. This shows how the hottest days we experience in the UK have increased in frequency dramatically in just a few decades.
EU ministers meet for urgent talks after US president threatens 30% tariffs on bloc
Meanwhile in Paris, France’s annual Bastille Day military parade is under way in all its pomp and colour, this year featuring more than 240 vehicles, 100 planes and helicopters and 5,600 troops marching down the cobblestones of the Champs-Elysées.
Besides providing the excuse for a nationwide party to mark the 1789 storming of the Bastille fortress and prison, the parade is also a display of French military force – which, in an increasingly uncertain world, Emmanuel Macron aims to increase.
Investigation verifies allegations of inappropriate sexual language and one incident of unwelcome physical contact
A report on the behaviour of Gregg Wallace has substantiated 45 allegations made against the former BBC presenter, including claims of inappropriate sexual language and one incident of unwelcome physical contact.
A seven-month investigation into a series of allegations against the MasterChef presenter covered 83 allegations against him, with more than half substantiated by the investigation team.
U.S. government needs to adopt commercial technology and AI solutions to address backlogs, improve efficiency and maintain edge against tech-focused adversaries
Proposed FEMA reform would speed up disaster funding, provide technical assistance to small towns, and protect pre-disaster mitigation funds nationwide
Experts explain that chronic lateness may be caused by time blindness, a condition affecting time perception that is commonly associated with ADHD and other disorders.
The latest in our series of writers recommending comfort watches is a tribute to 1996’s charming restaurant-set comedy drama
“Life is meals,” observed the novelist James Salter. Big Night, Stanley Tucci’s spirited and sumptuous indie from 1996, is a film about one big meal that asks a few big questions about life, including: What is the cost of the American dream? What does food allow us to say to each other that words can’t? And what right does Marc Anthony, of all people, have to deliver one of the most charming non-speaking performances in any movie since the silent era?
Big Night follows two Italian immigrants who run a failing restaurant in 1950s New Jersey. Ambitious, high-strung Secondo (Tucci, practically hirsute) is the manager, while his brother Primo (Tony Shalhoub) is the madman in the kitchen, a purist who derides the local clientele as philistines and has begun to doubt the wisdom of coming to the US in the first place.
Minecraft and other creative games are becoming recognised as powerful means of self-expression and mental health support, including for traumatised Ukrainian refugees
Oleksii Sukhorukov’s son was 12 when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. For months, the family existed in a state of trauma and disarray: Sukhorukov was forced to give up his work in the entertainment industry, which had included virtual reality and video games; they became isolated from friends and relatives. But amid the chaos, his boy had one outlet: Minecraft. Whatever was happening outside, he’d boot up Mojang’s block-building video game and escape.
“After 24 February 2022, I began to see the game in a completely different light,” says Sukhorukov. I discovered that Ukrainian children were playing together online; some living under Russian occupation, others in government-controlled areas of the country that were the targets of regular missile attacks; some had already become refugees. And yet they were still able to play together, support one another, and build their own world. Isn’t that amazing? I wanted to learn more about how video games can be used for good.”
Backstreet Boys' Brian Littrell takes legal action against Walton County authorities over their alleged failure to protect his private beach property rights from daily trespassers.
Under the plan, other NATO countries would buy U.S.-made arms, then give them to Ukraine to defend itself against Russia. NATO’s secretary general was set to meet Mr. Trump on Monday.
A science journalist delves deep into our sometimes fraught relationship with these intelligent animals
‘There is no creature born, even among the greater apes, which more resembles a human baby in its ways and its cries than a baby grey seal,” wrote the ecologist Frank Fraser Darling in 1939. Seals’ large eyes, the five digits of their flippers, their lanugo – the soft down with which they (and sometimes we) are born – all erode the mental barriers we erect between ourselves and our marine cousins. According to Faroese legend, there are even seals, known as selkies, that can shed their skins, assume human form and live undetected among us.
The selkie myth is just one that appears in the Maine-based science writer Alix Morris’s compelling book, which explores seals’ fraught relationship with culture, the economy and our imaginations. She charts the varied and conflicting ways in which we conceive of these creatures: as reviled competitors for fish, magnets for great white sharks, or defenceless human children who “weep” when distressed.
British archaeologists recently helped uncover multistory buildings from the ancient Egyptian city Imet in the Nile Delta, revealing tower houses from the Ptolemaic Period.
A border security expert said the large number of Chinese illegal immigrants who crossed the southern border during the Biden administration poses a national security risk.
Celebrity legal wins for Diddy, Kevin Spacey and Johnny Depp show the #MeToo movement has become a 'wrecking ball' on the legal system as juries favor well-known defendants.
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