Chidiac had a quick post-warm-up chat with Paramount, she says she didn’t really have benchmarks for herself coming back into the squad.
I wanted to come in as myself as much as possible. Coming off a strong season with Victory, I want to implement that with the team and take any opportunity I can get.
[Slovenia] are a brave team on an attack and counter-attack side, but we will definitely bring it to them.
In his first comments since the ceasefire, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the US ‘gained no achievement’ when it joined the war with Israel against Tehran
Israel’s national security minister called for a “complete halt” of humanitarian aid to Gaza on Thursday, claiming that Hamas is taking control of the supplied goods and food.
Itamar Ben-Gvir says that he will “demand” Benjamin Netanyahu put a new vote to the country’s cabinet on the issue of the introduction of aid to Gaza.
The humanitarian aid currently entering Gaza is an absolute disgrace. What is needed in Gaza is not a temporary halt to the “humanitarian” aid, but a complete halt to it.
When I warned and warned, and unfortunately the only one who voted a month and a half ago against the introduction of the aid, it was clear to me that it would give oxygen to Hamas.
With all due respect and gratitude to the president of the United States, he’s not supposed to intervene in a legal process of an independent state.
I hope and suppose that this is a reward he (Trump) is giving him (Netanyahu) because he is planning to pressure him on Gaza and force, to force him into a hostage deal that will end the war.
The director of the now Amazon-controlled 007 franchise can do action spectacle with art and integrity – the question now is who will he want to wear the tux …
At last. Something. Something has emerged from the vast opaque corporate entity that is Amazon Prime, which swallowed up the James Bond brand from Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli – the latter being reportedly discontented (though presumably very much richer).
White smoke has emerged from the funnel marked “director” – though still nothing from the funnel marked “star” – and it’s a really big hitter. Denis Villeneuve is the Canadian film-maker who gave us the excellent science-fiction movies Arrival, Blade Runner 2049 and Dune Parts One and Two, and has demonstrated a real flair for big-budget action thrillers in Sicario and Prisoners, with plenty of the ambient sexiness in hardware and spectacle. (Perhaps Villeneuve will now get the ultimate corporate blessing of being a last-minute wedding guest at the Bezos wedding in Venice this weekend, precisely the sort of event that tends to feature as a Bond film opening scene, to be disrupted by helicopter attack, explosion, kidnapping etc. Mr Bezos himself needs a white persian cat on his lap to stroke.)
Campaign group say piece responds to tech billionaires’ ‘dangerous’ mission to make humans interplanetary
In the psychedelic south-east corner of the Glastonbury festival site a rocket has been built to carry Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos on a one-way journey to Mars.
The construction is not a hallucinatory vision but a installation designed by the political campaign group Led By Donkeys in collaboration with Block9, an area of Worthy Farm known for its immersive stage designs and diverse music genres.
There was no surprise when Cooper Flagg was taken at No 1, but there were some interesting decisions – good and bad – at other points on Wednesday night
Cooper Flagg and Nico Harrison
The biggest winners of the 2025 NBA draft are Cooper Flagg and Dallas general manager Nico Harrison. Beyond the prestige and financial rewards of being the top pick, Flagg won draft night because he avoided going to a rebuilding team, where it could have taken years to gain playoff experience.
The Brazilian is seen as one of tennis’ brightest rising stars and will make his Wimbledon main draw debut next week
When the 18-year-old Brazilian Joao Fonseca beat the world No 9 at the time, Andrey Rublev, in this year’s Australian Open first round the hype machine went into overdrive. Here was the next big thing, a man who could bridge the gap to the world’s top two, Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz. When he went out in round two, questions were asked about the wisdom in talking up a man appearing in his first grand slam draw.
One month later, Fonseca proved he has the mental strength and resolve to match his undoubted talent. Facing Argentina’s Mariano Navone in the quarter-finals in Buenos Aires, in front of a hostile home crowd, he saved two match points and then went all the way to win his first ATP Tour title. He handled the occasion brilliantly, loving every minute. The hype is real.
More people will die due to White House’s plans to slash nearly $2.7bn from National Cancer Institute, workers warn
More patients may die as a result of plans drawn up by the Trump administration to cut billions of dollars from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), veteran federal government workers and experts have warned.
Nearly $2.7bn would be cut from the agency, which is the largest funder of cancer research in the world – a decline of 37.2% from the previous year – under a budget proposal for 2026, in the latest effort to cut staff and funding.
Wine snobs may turn up their noses at the very idea, but some red wines really do benefit from a good chilling
Last week’s column was a casual toe-dip into the lido of summer-centric drinks writing. I write these columns just over two weeks in advance, so I need Met Office/clairvoyant weather prediction skills to work out what it is we’re likely to be drinking by the time the column comes out. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and declare that summer will be here when you read this. No, don’t look out of the window. Keep looking at your phone screen, and imagine the sun’s beating down outside. That calls for a chilled red, right?
The types of red wine that fare best when chilled are those that are fruity, youthful and not too tannic. The punching down or pumping over of a wine can extract tannins from the skins, pips and stalks. Often confused with the mouth-puckering effect of acidity, the best way I can describe the sensation of tannins is it’s a bit like when you drink the last dregs of a cup of green tea: it tastes all stemmy and dry, and you can feel where you’ve been biting the inside of your cheeks.
Richard Gerald Jordan, a 79-year-old veteran, was sentenced to death in 1976 for killing a bank loan officer’s wife
The longest-serving person on Mississippi’s death row was executed Wednesday, nearly five decades after he kidnapped and killed a bank loan officer’s wife in a violent ransom scheme.
Richard Gerald Jordan, a 79-year-old Vietnam veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder whose final appeals were denied without comment by the US supreme court, was sentenced to death in 1976 for killing and kidnapping Edwina Marter. He died by lethal injection at the Mississippi state penitentiary in Parchman.
Archer played first red-ball match in four years this week
England have fast-tracked Jofra Archer into their squad to face India in the second Test at Edgbaston next week. The 30-year-old fast bowler returns to the Test setup for the first time since February 2021 after successfully coming through his first red-ball match for 1,501 days in Sussex’s match at Durham this week.
Hungary left-back signs five-year deal with champions
Liverpool’s spending for new season passes £200m-mark
Liverpool have pushed their summer spending to £170m after completing the signing of Milos Kerkez for £40m from Bournemouth. The left-back follows the arrivals of Bayer Leverkusen’s Jeremie Frimpong and Florian Wirtz at the Premier League champions.
Arne Slot promised he would add “extra weapons” to build on last season’s title success and the head coach’s summer recruitment may not be over. Liverpool have worked quickly to secure the trio’s signature as Slot aims to replicate domestic form in the Champions League, where they went out at the last 16 stage. Giorgi Mamardashvili will also be part of Slot’s revamped squad. The goalkeeper will move to Anfield on 1 July from Valencia, lifting transfer expenditure to almost £200m.
Almeida theatre, London Rebecca Frecknall’s usually bold directorial hand seems stilled in a glacially paced revival co-starring Michael Shannon and David Threlfall
Rebecca Frecknall has given some surprising spins to the American canon with her refreshing and untraditional revivals. The surprise in the director’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s final play is that it is served up straight.
Frecknall has stepped back to let the play do the speaking but this faithfulness lays bare the datedness of the drama, which creaks with age at times. The production itself seems imbalanced too: glacial in pace, it stretches across three hours, not gathering enough intensity and chugging anti-climactically to its end.
Following the announcement of a sequel to Spaceballs, we assess the film-maker’s funniest movies, from the Hitchcock spoof High Anxiety to the impeccable Young Frankenstein
“It’s good to be the king.” Brooks mixes sight gags, dad jokes and Borscht Belt standup in historical vignettes from the stone age to the French Revolution. Results are hit and miss, and the ancient Rome segment goes on for ever, but the tasteless Torquemada musical number is a scream.
Biotech companies say genetically modified plants give higher yields and reduce pesticide use. But in rural communities, questions are growing over who really benefits – and the threat to native varieties
On a hillside farm in San Lorenzo, in the mountains of Colombia’s southern Nariño department, Aura Alina Domínguez presses maize seeds into the damp soil. Around her, farmers Alberto Gómez, José Castillo and Javier Castillo arrive with their selected seeds, stored in shigras – hand-woven shoulder bags – as has been done for generations.
In San Lorenzo, they call themselves “seed guardians” for their role in protecting this living heritage and passing it down the generations. “Each seed carries our grandparents’ story,” says Domínguez, arranging the dried cobs that hang from her rafters.
For a superpower, toppling foreign governments is not so hard to do. Getting the outcome you want is
The ceasefire between Iran and Israel might still hold, but if not, the United States might double down on its weekend strikes and seek the overthrow of the Iranian regime. Donald Trump threatened this in comments and tweets earlier, and top officials such as Marco Rubio have said they wouldn’t mind it if it happened. Israeli leaders are openly in favor. If the US goes down this road, it will not be for the first time.
In the last 80 years, Washington has overthrown many regimes. For a superpower, toppling foreign governments is not so hard to do. Getting the outcome you want is. This makes regime change as dangerous as it is seductive, as past US attempts clearly show.
Carlos Nobre, who has fought for decades to save the rainforest, says up to 70% of it could be lost if a tipping point is reached
For more than three decades, Brazilian climate scientist Carlos Nobre has warned that deforestation of the Amazon could push this globally important ecosystem past the point of no return. Working first at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research and more recently at the University of São Paulo, he is a global authority on tropical forests and how they could be restored. In this interview, he explains the triple threat posed by the climate crisis, agribusiness and organised crime.
The world champions’ squad contains two Ballon d’Or winners and a place in the final is the minimum requirement
This article is part of the Guardian’sEuro 2025 Experts’ Network, a cooperation between some of the best media organisations from the 16 countries who qualified. theguardian.com is running previews from two teams each day in the run-up to the tournament kicking off on 2 July.
Keir Starmer has confirmed Downing Street is offering concessions to rebel Labour MPs to get his welfare bill over the line.
The prime minister told the Commons he wanted “values of fairness” to underpin the legislation so the government could “get this right” on fixing the broken benefits system.
The dollar has fallen to a three-year low following a report that Donald Trump is considering bringing forward the announcement of his choice to succeed the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell.
The US president has repeatedly clashed with Powell, accusing the central bank chief of being too slow to cut interest rates, calling him “very dumb” in his latest broadside on Tuesday.
Sons of Liam Gallagher and Bobby Gillespie model designs that are at once conceptual enough for Paris catwalk – and seriously desirable
Over 10 years designing for her Wales Bonner label, Grace Wales Bonner has dressed discerning celebrities from Jude Bellingham to Letitia Wright.
For the Met Gala in May, she created outfits for Lewis Hamilton, FKA twigs and Jeff Goldblum. But for her show in Paris on a sweltering Wednesday evening, there was a shift to a new generation on the catwalk.
Mamdani’s popularity represents the total collapse of a Democratic party establishment
The surprise electoral success of Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist running to be mayor of New York, most prominent city on Earth, is a political earthquake. The breadth and scope of his performance were predicted by no polls, no prognosticators, none of the wise men. The ramifications of this upset will be felt for years, across the US and the developed world.
In the end, it wasn’t even close. Mamdani’s widespread appeal represents the total collapse of a Democratic party establishment that had weathered Donald Trump’s first term with rhetorical resistance, and fumbled the beginning of the second with triangulating appeasement. This year, the favorability of the Democratic party has collapsed to record lows, not because of the popularity of the Trump administration or the Republican party, but because of its unpopularity with its own voters. Chuck Schumer caving to the president on an unpopular and devastating Republican spending bill was the last straw for many. The Democratic party and the resistance to Trump had been severed for the first time.
Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign
Whatever I turn my hand to, I leave behind a chaotic mess. If tidiness is next to godliness, there’s no hope for me
Gardening, I’ve realised, is easy. It’s clearing up afterwards that takes all the effort. This is true of many things, from cooking to relationships. Doing them is one thing; sorting the mess out afterwards is another.
Planting stuff is a doddle. Planting the right things in the right place is less straightforward. But both are easier than the clear-up. I’ve learned this the hard way, by working like an ox all day, only to leave the place looking as if a team of oxen has been driven through it. I had thought that pruning trees, fighting hedges, pulling up brambles and obsessively weeding counted as tidying. In this I was mistaken, because cutting, hacking and digging count as tidying only if you, well, tidy up after yourself. Leaving stricken branches and weeds where they lie creates more mess. Obvious really, but at some level I must have been thinking that all that browning vegetation would sort itself out by means of decay and decomposition. Or birds would take it away and build nests. Not so.
We’re interested to hear from owners of luxury Airbnb-style rentals how business has been, and from guests why they opted to book a stay at a private luxury property
High-quality finishes, amenities such as pools, saunas, snooker tables and firepits, or a prime location: luxury Airbnb-style rentals are on the rise, amid a skyrocketing demand for holiday stays at exclusive and often very large properties that can cost thousands per night.
We’re interested to hear from both owners of luxury short-term rentals and from guests who have booked stays at them.
European Council will also discuss broader enlargement policy of European Union towards the western Balkans
Ireland’s Martin also continues on the US trade situation:
“I do genuinely detect an atmosphere that’s focused on getting a deal, both on the US side and on the European Union side, and that’s where our focus in Ireland is.
Actually getting a deal is important for certainty so that we know the landscape out ahead of us and that industry knows the landscape ahead of it, so that we can protect jobs, which is our number one priority.”
‘We want to see reform implemented with Labour values of fairness,’ the PM says
In his final answer Starmer explained how he thought government and business should work together.
A true partnership is not two people or two bodies trying to do the same thing. It’s two people or bodies realising they bring different things to the table.
Government shouldn’t try to run businesses. It’s done that in the past and it doesn’t work particularly well.
Big summer bets such as F1 and The Smurfs are using stars like Rihanna and Tate McRae to appeal to a wider audience
Posters for the Brad Pitt Formula One race car drama advertise it, with a heavy dose of cheese, as F1 the Movie. But maybe the Spaceballs-like distinction is necessary, given the existence of F1 the Album, a soundtrack nearly as starry as the movie it accompanies. Maybe starrier: Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem, Kerry Condon and Shea Whigham probably can’t overpower the combination of Don Toliver, Doja Cat, Tate McRae, Ed Sheeran, Rosé, Dom Dolla and Chris Stapleton. This isn’t the only recent compilation to bring back the very early-to-mid-2000s moniker of “the Album”; Twisters: the Album, a 29-track country compilation, reached the Billboard top 10 in the US last summer. Rihanna, a massive pop star who hasn’t released an album in almost a decade, put out her first new song in ages on a little record called Smurfs Movie Soundtrack (Music From & Inspired By). (She plays Smurfette in the new cartoon.) Soundtracks, those mainstays of mall CD stores, are back – in streaming and vinyl form.
For decades, the idea of pop music soundtrack albums needing a comeback would have been deeply strange; they’ve been a presence more or less since the late 1960s new Hollywood inflection point of The Graduate, with its foregrounded Simon & Garfunkel hits and written-for-the-film Mrs Robinson. But by the late 2000s, soundtrack albums were perfectly engineered to go down with the music industry ship. For much of the 1990s, the industry did their best to steer music buyers away from cheap, easily attainable singles by often holding them from standalone release and forcing the purchase of a $19 CD for anyone who wanted a copy of a hit song. Soundtracks offered further scarcity, imprisoning non-album tracks that might have once served as B-sides on cheap 7in singles. Hardcore fans might be willing to fork over their money for a particularly good or rare one, getting exposure to some like-minded artists in the bargain. Popular ones could even inspire their own sequels.
Gaza City’s main high street has been destroyed but Palestinian memories of life before the ongoing Israeli assault survive. As those in Gaza face bombing, starvation and miserable living conditions, here’s how they try to hold both the past and the present in their minds
Before it was bombed into a long grey line of rubble and dust cutting across Gaza City, Omar al-Mukhtar street was full of life – shoppers in the day, friends and families on evening outings after dark.
Running from east to west through the city, this artery road is home to some of Gaza’s most significant landmarks.
From Lisbon to Amsterdam, housing policy has led to haves and have-nots. But, as our new series uncovers, it doesn’t have to be this way
Housing is as personal an issue as it gets. Homes are where we take refuge from the outside world, express ourselves, build relationships and families. To buy or rent a house is to project your aspirations and dreams on to bricks and mortar – can we see ourselves sitting outside in the sunshine on that patio? It can also be a deeply frustrating process – can we afford that house? For more and more of us, the answer is no.
Experienced at such an individual level, it’s easy to think that rising costs are a problem particular to your community, city or country. But unaffordable house prices and rents are a continent-wide issue. According to the European Parliament, from 2015 to 2023, in absolute terms, house prices in the EU rose by just under 50% on average. From 2010 to 2022, rents rose by 18%.
Kirsty Major is a deputy Opinion editor for the Guardian
Generative AI is causing new and unusual problems for developers as players become more sensitive to the use of artificially generated ‘slop’ images
In April, game developer Stamina Zero achieved what should have been a marketing slam-dunk: the launch trailer for the studio’s game Little Droid was published on PlayStation’s official YouTube channel. The response was a surprise for the developer. The game looks interesting, people wrote in the comments, but was “ruined” by AI art. But the game’s cover art, used as the thumbnail for the YouTube video, was in fact made by a real person, according to developer Lana Ro. “We know the artist, we’ve seen her work, so such a negative reaction was unexpected for us, and at first we didn’t know how to respond or how to feel,” Ro said. “We were confused.”
It’s not wrong for people to be worried about AI use in video games – in fact, it’s good to be sceptical, and ensure that the media you support aligns with your values. Common arguments against generative AI relate to environmental impact, art theft and just general quality, and video game developers are grappling with how generative AI will impact their jobs. But the unexpected problem is that the backlash against generative AI is now hurting even those who don’t use it. “I would rather people be overly cautious than not,” veteran game developer and Chessplus digital director Josh Caratelli said. “But being collateral damage does suck.”
Government move to regulate textile imports aims to curb clothing dumps in the Atacama and boost circular economy
In a dusty corner of the Atacama Desert, the driest non-polar region on Earth, mounds of used clothes are scattered across the sand, where they sit, bleached and tattered, under the sun.
As the sea mist drifts over a high coastal plateau above the city of Iquique in Chile’s far north, the breeze rustles plastic bags bursting with second-hand clothing.
After realising how much I interrupted other people, I decided I needed to make a drastic change. Here’s how starting to listen changed my relationships – and made me happier
I like to talk as much as the next man – and men like to talk. A now-famous study by the University of California, Santa Barbara, noted that, in a series of recorded public conversations between men and women, 48 interruptions occurred, 46 of which came from men. The 2024 Women in the Workplace survey by McKinsey found that nearly 40% of women experienced being interrupted or spoken over “more than others” at work, against 20% of men.
Men in public spaces, according to research, talk more than women, talk over women, and talk down to women, contributing to the rise of gender neologisms such as manologuing, bropropriating and mansplaining. So, aware that men tend to dominate and disrupt, aware that the world at large feels unbearably loud, aware that I, too, often add to that noise, I decided to learn to keep my mouth shut – starting in the general hellscape of social media.
This Catalonian tale of a botched pact with the devil has the demonic excess of a Hieronymus Bosch painting
Margarida is trapped in Mas Clavell, a farmhouse in the Catalonian mountains, with Bernadeta. Bernadeta is dying in an annoying way, with “deep, raspy snores”. Margarida herself has been dead for some time. Rather than ascend to heaven, she has been “dragged downstairs by the ghastly, insufferable women of the house”. Irene Solà’s teeming third novel, I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, follows these women, both dead and alive, as they prepare for a party. They cook and scrub, tell stories and make fart jokes. The novel begins at dawn and ends at night, but the historical era jumps around without warning. Now the viceroy’s men are arriving on horseback. Now a teenager is calling everyone a “dumbass”. Now local women are fleeing from Nazi soldiers. Characters shape-shift as much as the timeline. A he-goat becomes a bull, then a cat, then “an unusually long, skinny man with the toes of a rooster”. Now the viceroy’s men are demons, dragging Margarida into a “sea of blood”.
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness references Mrs Dalloway, and shares the modernist interest in formal experimentation and action that unfolds over a single day. Instead of tracking interior sensation, Solà presents a seemingly inexhaustible slew of bodily description, held together by the opaque, vindictive logic of a folk tale. There are wonderful lists: of the different kinds of shit on the mountain, of cheese-making equipment, of body parts fondled by hands in the dark. I read the book twice in quick succession and every time I opened it, I found something to savour. The prose has the demonic excess of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
Shell has said it has “no intention” of making an offer for the rival fossil fuel company BP after speculation it had been planning a £60bn takeover, ruling out a formal approach for the next six months.
In an official statement to markets on Thursday, the company doubled down on the previous day’s denials that it was planning a bid, after media reports that it was in early talks with its competitor to create a £200bn UK oil supermajor.
Irish hooker joins eight other debutants in matchday 23
Northampton’s Pollock to add back-row dynamism
Eight Ireland players have been selected in the British & Irish Lions starting XV to face Western Force in the first fixture of the squad’s Australia tour on Saturday. The Leinster hooker Dan Sheehan will lead out the team on his Lions debut with eight more first-time Lions featuring in the matchday 23 and 20-year-old Henry Pollock handed a start at number eight.
Sheehan will be among those making his Lions debut alongside his club-mates Garry Ringrose, James Lowe, Joe McCarthy and Josh van der Flier. The bench contains another four newcomers in the shape of England’s Ollie Chessum and Will Stuart, Scotland’s Huw Jones and Ireland’s Andrew Porter.
Every artist dreams of playing the world’s greatest festival, but what’s it actually like? Artists returning this year, including Fatboy Slim and Self Esteem, look back at their first shows
You can tell it’s 1984 by my shirt. I’d just played the Jobs for a Change festival, in the middle of London, easy to get to by tube. But Glastonbury was like being on an island. You had to deal with the weather, the food and the toilets. It was also mainly populated by Bristolians. I performed once solo, but also got up on the Pyramid stage with [country and western singer] Hank Wangford to do (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66. The original Pyramid was made from corrugated iron and doubled as a cowshed. I remember it being swampy backstage. There were no bars, you had to bring in your own beer. Keith Allen and [Scottish poet] Jock Scott blagged their way in, pretending to be a Belgian film crew, and sold cans of Red Stripe for 50p.
Writers accused Facebook owner of breach over using books without permission to train its AI system
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has won the backing of a judge in a copyright lawsuit brought by a group of authors, in the second legal victory for the US artificial intelligence industry this week.
The writers, who included Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, had argued that the Facebook owner had breached copyright law by using their books without permission to train its AI system.
The Navigators are hopeful of reaching the knockout stage for the first time but recent form has tempered expectations
This article is part of the Guardian’sEuro 2025 Experts’ Network, a cooperation between some of the best media organisations from the 16 countries who qualified. theguardian.com is running previews from two teams each day in the run-up to the tournament kicking off on 2 July.
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