Home secretary says both issues are being addressed as ‘one in, one out’ pilot scheme with France begins

Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has defended her decision to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist group.

The decision has been widely criticised and a demonstration against the move is planned for this weekend.

The proscribing process is based on very extensive security advice and security assessments to me as home secretary, which I have to take immensely seriously. That security assessment looks at the violent attacks, injuries, attacks on national security infrastructure, and also includes assessment and some really troubling information that refers to future attack planning as well. That’s the basis on which this organisation has been proscribed.

And let’s be clear, this is a narrow organisation. This is not about protesting about Palestine, which huge numbers of people lawfully do.

Today’s fluff is hoping to close a deal

With less than a month remaining in the summer transfer window, deals that have been bubbling away for weeks will suddenly hit a boiling point as clubs, players and agents scramble to get moves finalised.

Newcastle, for one, are getting impatient. They are reportedly expecting a high-stakes bidding war for RB Leipzig’s Benjamin Sesko, upping their offer to an eye-watering £69.7m plus add-ons, which is closer to matching Leipzig’s valuation of the Slovenian. Manchester United are lurking in the shadows with sources suggesting they do not need to sell anyone to make a move despite their intentions to offload Jadon Sancho, Alejandro Garnacho, Antony and Tyrell Malacia. Eddie Howe’s side will be desperate to secure the striker’s signature despite Alexander Isak being expected to return to training, with the Swede’s head everywhere but Tyneside.

The Israeli prime minister’s meeting comes as local media reports he is inclining towards expanding the offensive and even seizing entire territory

The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) says one of its volunteers in Khan Younis, Abdel Majeed Adnan Salamah, was killed by Israeli forces as he searched for food in Gaza.

In a post on X, the PRCS wrote:

Since the start of the war, Abdel Majeed worked tirelessly with PRCS ambulance teams, risking his life to rescue the wounded and injured.

Two days ago, he left in search of food in the so-called the “US-Israeli aid zone” west of Rafah.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

Newsflash: The UK’s financial regulator has decided to fine former star fund manager Neil Woodford and his investment management company nearly £46m, over the collapse of his popular equity fund.

The Financial Conduct Authority says it has decided to fine Woodford £5,888,800 and ban him from holding senior manager roles and managing funds for retail investors.

‘Being a leader in financial services comes with responsibilities as well as profile. Mr Woodford simply doesn’t accept he had any role in managing the liquidity of the fund.

The very minimum investors should expect is those managing their money make sensible decisions and take their senior role seriously. Neither Neil Woodford nor Woodford Investment Management did so, putting at risk the money people had entrusted them with.’

Zelenskyy urges US and EU to fast-track sanctions and secondary tariffs a day before Trump’s envoy is expected in Moscow

EU trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič told journalists that he remained in contact with his US counterparts, commerce secretary Howard Lutnick and trade representatives Jamieson Greer, as their talks on the implementation of the EU-US deal “continue in a constructive spirit.”

More to come on this.

A new exhibition at the Whitney looks back at a varied selection of works that tell the story of America across eight tumultuous decades

With “Untitled” (America), The Whitney celebrates 10 years in its new space and offers visitors a statement on what the museum is all about. Combing the institution’s archives, it brings together 80 years of American art, from the turn of the century up through the 1980s.

As art historian and Whitney chief curator, Kim Conaty, was hard at work curating “Untitled” (America), she envisioned the Whitney as a place of refuge and nourishment for artists who have furnished new ways of seeing and new historical narratives. “When I think of the very brave work of artists over decades,” she said via video interview. “I’m excited by how it’s possible for us now through their work to see the questions they have put forth, the histories they have made visible. We need to give our support to those artists who have done that hard thinking and helped reveal or made visible our history and helped us see new futures.”

With the start of the regular season almost in sight, we take a tour of the league’s most compelling plots

Leave it to Jerry Jones to stink up the most optimistic time of year. The Cowboys owner has once again fumbled a contract negotiation with one of his stars. Despite fellow 2021 draftees Penei Sewell, Patrick Surtain II and Ja’Marr Chase signing long-term extensions, the Cowboys have allowed talks with Parsons to drag on.

The president has an awful lot to say about tariffs – but what about what he doesn’t say?

Donald Trump’s words and actions rarely align perfectly. If you watch carefully, what he doesn’t say can be just as telling as what he does.

“Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods,” he told the nation ahead of his re-election. The US president declared on 2 April would “forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn”, only to pause tariffs a week later.

He played one of the most horrible characters in TV history, found his feet as an actor in his 40s and is now a Marvel supervillain. He discusses shame, typecasting and how he appeared in three Harry Potter films without ever saying a line

How do you portray Galactus, a gigantic, amoral, immortal superbeing who thrives by draining planets of their energy? If you’re making a film of any part of Marvel’s Fantastic Four journey, your best bet is probably to depict him as a cloud. That’s what happened in 2007, and even though fans complained about it a bit, it solved a lot of problems.

Matt Shakman, director of the new The Fantastic Four: First Steps, cast Ralph Ineson, who still sounds faintly surprised by the move. “I’ve been working for a long time,” he says. His first role was a small part in Spender, the Jimmy Nail vehicle, in 1991, and he’s in a similar mould to Nail: tall with a handsome, rough-hewn face, a guy who looks as if he knows how to do guy stuff.

Don’t be overly cautious when watering Rhipsalis – to thrive it needs regular hydration and good drainage

What’s the problem?
My mistletoe cactus (Rhipsalis) thrived for more than five years, but recently started to brown, with strands falling off. I repotted it into a slightly larger pot with no drainage holes and a layer of gravel at the bottom, but it continues to decline despite weekly watering. How can I save my plant?

Diagnosis
Your mistletoe cactus probably isn’t getting sufficient hydration. Cautious watering can lead to soil that is superficially damp but remains dry at a deeper level. This often manifests as browning stems, shrivelling and segments dropping off as the plant becomes stressed due to a lack of moisture at the roots.

After a winding career path, Abou Ali now faces the pressure of being a designated player for one of the league’s best teams

As soon as I stepped on the field on the King Abdullah II Stadium in southeast Amman in June, Wessam Abou Ali stepped off. Palestine had just had their dreams of the 2026 World Cup ended by a last-minute Oman penalty that was as soft as they come. While some players in white fell to their knees or collapsed crying into the arms of coaching staff, the 26-year-old, with scrunched-up shorts, exited stage left to head to the United States and the global stage of the Club World Cup with Egypt’s Al-Ahly, after impressing so much on the African and Asian one.

Now, after this busiest of summers, the Danish-born star has signed for Columbus Crew – a No 9 for one of MLS’s best teams in need of one, and one who takes up one of the team’s allotment of designated player spots, to boot.

US president claims Britain’s largest carmaker is ‘in absolute turmoil’ and criticises firm’s rebrand

• Business live – latest updates

Donald Trump has attacked Jaguar Land Rover’s divisive rebranding strategy, hours after Britain’s largest carmaker announced its new boss.

Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that the auto company, owned by India’s Tata Motors, was “in absolute turmoil” and claimed that the “CEO resigned in disgrace”.

Dr Graeme Groom has visited Gaza 40 times and says he has never before witnessed such trauma, hunger and bravery from Palestinian colleagues

Every day between 4am and 6am, Graeme Groom, an orthopaedic surgeon from London, would be woken by a dawn chorus of bombs and missiles. And so began another 24 hours at the Nasser hospital in Gaza, the largest functioning hospital in the territory. Shortly after 8am, the first patients would be wheeled into the operating theatres.

Groom and his orthopaedic and plastic surgery colleagues saw on average 20 patients a day: one-third children, one-third women, then men of all ages, their limbs mangled by bombs and guns.

Former presenter of BBC’s The Repair Shop will appear in court next week, West Mercia police said

The TV presenter Jay Blades has been charged with two counts of rape, police have said, and will appear in court next week.

In a statement, West Mercia police said: “Jason Blades, 55, of Claverley in Shropshire, has been charged with two counts of rape. He is due to appear at Telford magistrates court on 13 August 2025.”

We’re looking for people in the US and UK who are struggling to get a date, who would be happy for us to follow them as they try to meet someone

In a new video series, The Guardian will be exploring the realities of dating for younger people in the US and UK.

We are particularly interested in hearing from those who are struggling to get a date, who would be happy for us to follow them as they try to meet someone. You can register your interest by telling us about yourself below.

• Broadcaster will now show all of men’s winter tour

• Tests added to white-ball deals in NZ and Sri Lanka

England’s attempt to regain the Ashes this winter will be broadcast live in the UK by TNT Sports. After agreeing a one-year deal with Cricket Australia over the weekend TNT now has the rights for all of England’s winter tours, as the broadcaster had deals in place to cover white-ball series in New Zealand and Sri Lanka either side of the Ashes.

TNT’s predecessor, BT Sport, bought the rights for the past two Ashes tours so the new deal may be inauspicious for Ben Stokes’s side as their viewers have not seen England win a single game. England have lost 13 of the past 15 Tests they have played in Australia, which shows the size of the task for the touring side this winter.

A spirited skewering of the idea that things can only get better takes us from the Book of Genesis to neoliberalism

Everything is in decline, argues the geographer Samuel Miller McDonald. Democracy and free speech are in freefall. Inequality is soaring, with the 1% scooping up ever-larger shares of global wealth. These days, the US has a Gini coefficient – the most common international measurement of inequality – on a par with slave-owning Ancient Rome. Maternal mortality rates for American millennials are three times higher than those of their parents’ generation – and this in the world’s richest society.

Global life expectancy is falling. So, too, are food standards. Outside a few bourgeois sourdough enclaves, real bread has vanished. In its place we get mass-produced, spongy, tasteless “pseudo-bread” – as Guy Debord lamented in The Encyclopedia of Nuisances. In an earlier age, there would have been bread riots. Now? Just muted indigestion.

After 12 years together, she told me how many people she had slept with before we met. It has made it harder for me to accept how rarely we have sex

I’ve been with my wife for 12 years. She recently admitted she has had many more sexual partners than me, more than 50 for sure, but it could be 100. She has only had a couple of long-term relationships. I didn’t think the number bothered me: I didn’t know her then, it was before we got together and we can’t change the past. However, we hardly ever have sex (only once every three to four months) and her sex drive dropped off a cliff after our first child was born almost 10 years ago. She says it’s the stress of children but I can’t help feeling she just doesn’t find me attractive any more. Rightly or wrongly, I now feel upset that she was willing to have sex with so many people before me but doesn’t want to have sex with me.

When a partner’s libido drops, it is very common for the other to assume that the partner no longer feels the same attraction as before, but this is often not the case. It is very likely that your wife is finding it hard to summon sexual feelings generally because she does not feel like a sexual being herself. To experience desire for another person, you must feel sexually confident in yourself.

Pamela Stephenson Connolly is a US-based psychotherapist who specialises in treating sexual disorders.

If you would like advice from Pamela on sexual matters, send us a brief description of your concerns to private.lives@theguardian.com (please don’t send attachments). Each week, Pamela chooses one problem to answer, which will be published online. She regrets that she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions.

No love lost between clubs separated by a bridge who will tussle for Scandinavian pride and to advance in Europe

Every day, tens of thousands of people are thought to commute across the 8km bridge between Malmö and Copenhagen. The name of the bridge – Öresund if you’re Swedish or Øresund if you’re Danish – is one of only a few things that divide the people of the two cities. Another one is football.

After Malmö beat Latvia’s RFS in a Champions League qualifier last week their winger Jens Stryger Larsen, who has more than 50 Denmark caps, led the club’s supporters in a vociferous chorus of “We hate Copenhagen” – the identity of their third-round opponents no secret, the draw already made.

After 90% loss of global sunflower sea star population in 10 years, researchers hope decline can now be tackled

A decade after the onset of a sea star wasting disease (SSWD) epidemic considered the largest ever documented in the wild, researchers have identified the microbial culprit responsible: a strain of the bacterium Vibrio pectenicida.

In 10 years, the bacterium has ravaged sunflower sea stars (Pycnopodia helianthoides), a large sea star or starfish, along the western coast of North America, with a loss of 5.8 billion since 2013 – or 90% of the total global population. The sunflower sea star is on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list of critically endangered species.

Police officer was concerned ex-army chief, a Teledyne adviser, sought to have ‘input’ into factory attack investigation

A member of the House of Lords urged ministers to crack down on Palestine Action at the request of a US defence company that employs him as an adviser.

Richard Dannatt, a former head of the British army, wrote privately to two separate Home Office ministers asking them to address the “threat” posed by the group after its activists targeted a factory in 2022.

This brilliantly over-the-top comedy about an unworldly heckler explores art and authenticity – being tripped up by it is part of the fun

As TonyInterruptor begins, musician Sasha Keyes is in the middle of an improvised trumpet solo. A man stands up in the audience and says, “Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?” He points at Sasha and adds, “You especially.” Soon a video of the episode appears online, with a companion clip of Sasha’s vitriolic reaction: “Some random fucking nobody … some dick-weed, small-town TonyInterruptor.”

Given the times we live in, this naturally leads to Sasha’s trial by social media for artistic fraudulence and abusive conduct. But the shockwaves soon extend to everyone adjacent to the event: Fi Kinebuchi, the self-styled “Queen of Strings”, who was playing with Sasha at the time; India Shore, the teenager who posted the first video; India’s father, Lambert, an architecture professor with a secret crush on Fi Kinebuchi; his wife Mallory, who divides her time between parenting her daughter, Gunn, who has special needs, and venting intellectual spleen; and even to TonyInterruptor himself, real name John Lincoln Braithwaite, an otherworldly outsider whose “main occupation – his duty, even – is to observe and assess the falling and the catching of light”.

Azita Gandjei’s mesmerising black and white photos capture the point at which the boundaries between people and nature dissolve

Bloomberg journalist Olivia Carville follows a small legal outfit as it takes Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies to task for endangering young users

“Tweens are herd animals” and have “an addicts’ narrative”, according to internal documents revealed by a Facebook whistleblower to congress, making clear the levels of cynicism and obfuscation the company operates with in its quest to hook young people to its platform. Bad though that is, it’s not the worst example in this lucidly laid out and often harrowing indictment of social media’s ruthlessness; that would be the proliferation of drug dealers on Snapchat, which the company seems to have to some extent turned a blind eye to in the scramble to expand its user base.

Based on the investigative work of Bloomberg journalist Olivia Carville, this film covers the attempts of minnow legal outfit Social Media Victims Law Center to net the sharks of Silicon Valley. It represents a host of families who have suffered heartbreaking losses due to unpoliced extreme online content: children and teenagers who fatally copied auto-asphyxiation or pro-suicide videos, ones who killed themselves after falling victim to sextortionists, or who overdosed after buying off-prescription meds from predatory dealers. The battle here is to overcome section 230, a get-out clause in the 1996 Telecommunication Act that gives social media companies immunity for third-party-generated content. Of course, Mark Zuckerberg was still slurping Slush Puppies back then.