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The teams are out! Marquinhos leads out PSG with the European Cup in his arms. Cristian Romero heads the line for Spurs carrying the Europa League trophy. Both teams are in their first-choice garb: PSG in blue and red, Spurs in lilywhite. We’ll be off in a couple of minutes.

Pre-match postbag. “The stereotype of the Brazilian player is a hyper-skilled player who uses incredible dazzling talents to leave defenders grasping at air as they are left in the dust. As an Everton die-hard I loved Richarlison because he was so physical, such a bull, more English than Brazilian. The times he saved Everton from relegation with brutish, bloody-minded animal ferocity will always be loved by many Everton diehards” – Mary Waltz

The DC takeover is, first and foremost, an attempt to deflect from the Epstein case. But that’s not all that’s going on

In a dangerous new escalation of his authoritarian rule, Donald Trump has placed the police of Washington DC under federal control and announced that he will deploy the national guard to the country’s capital. According to the president, crime in the city is “out of control” – no matter that crime numbers are down significantly, including for violent crimes. But, of course, this power grab is not really about facts, it is about distraction and perception, and a chance to reconnect and refocus his base.

Like all the other outrageous things Trump has been doing in the last weeks, the DC takeover is, first and foremost, an attempt to deflect from the Jeffrey Epstein case. As previously demonstrated by his demand to rename the NFL team to the (racist) Washington Redskins, his attacks on the Wall Street Journal, or his calls to prosecute former president Barack Obama (“Barack Hussein Obama. Have you heard of him?”) that he will do anything to get the Epstein case out of the political and public debate.

Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, and author of The Far Right Today

After the club’s two previous attempts to sign the forward, Ruben Amorim will be hoping they have found the real deal

It has, for a while, appeared to be destiny. Benjamin Sesko’s arrival at Manchester United was third time lucky for last season’s Europa League finalists, having attempted to make a deal for the Slovenia striker when he was leaving Domžale in 2019 and again when he agreed to fly the Red Bull Salzburg nest in 2022, eventually joining up with RB Leipzig a year down the line.

Now United have their still-only-22-year-old man and if Sesko has been feted in the inner circles of European football since his mid-teens, one could suggest the wait has not only be worthwhile but that it could work in favour of Ruben Amorim as he attempts to author a dramatic uptick in the fortunes of the English game’s premier fallen giant.

Veteran actor played antagonist in Sam Raimi’s acclaimed horror hit and appeared in The Young and the Restless

Lorna Raver, who played Mrs Ganush in Sam Raimi’s hit horror Drag Me to Hell, has died at the age of 81.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, her death was included in the “in memoriam” section of the Screen Actors Guild’s summer magazine. She died in May.

President’s comments come as White House takes credit for dozens of arrests as part of campaign to fight ‘crime crisis’ city’s leaders say doesn’t exist

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Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would ask Congress for “long-term” control of Washington DC’s police department and signaled he expected other Democratic-led cities to change their laws in response to his deployment of national guard troops and federal agents into the capital.

The president’s comments came as the White House took credit for dozens of arrests overnight in Washington as part of Trump’s campaign to fight a “crime crisis”, which the city’s leaders say does not exist.

Exclusive: Chancellor focuses on investment and planning rules as she dismisses talk of tax rises as ‘speculation’

• Rachel Reeves: Labour has fixed the foundations – now we must build a stronger economy for a renewed Britain

Rachel Reeves has promised to use her autumn budget to prioritise fixing Britain’s dismal record on productivity as she sought to downplay mounting tax speculation with a focus on economic growth.

Setting out her priorities for the budget for the first time, the chancellor said tackling the efficiency of the economy through higher investment and a fresh assault on planning rules would form the backbone of her tax and spending plans.

Brazilian president’s comments come amid US attempts to pressure judges in coup trial against Trump ally Bolsonaro

The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has hit back at Donald Trump’s campaign against the South American country’s judiciary, claiming the US president would be put on trial in Brazil had the January 6 US Capitol attacks taken place there.

Trump has triggered what some experts call the greatest ever diplomatic rupture between the US and Brazil by slapping 50% tariffs on Brazilian imports and sanctioning a supreme court judge in an attempt to help his far-right ally, ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, avoid prison for allegedly trying to stage a coup after he lost the 2022 election to Lula.

US president also says he would push for three-way summit with Volodymyr Zelenskyy if Alaska meeting goes well

Vladimir Putin will face “very severe consequences” if he does not agree a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine at his summit with Donald Trump in Alaska, the US president said on Wednesday.

Speaking after a call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders, including Britain’s Keir Starmer, Trump also suggested he would push for a second summit if his meeting with Putin goes well – this time including his Ukrainian counterpart.

Emmanuel Macron writes to Cameroonian president with findings of joint commission on country’s colonial past

France has acknowledged its role in decades of violent repression of independence movements in Cameroon, the latest stage in a slow process of reckoning with its brutal colonial past.

In a letter to the Cameroonian president, Paul Biya, dated 30 July, Emmanuel Macron said it was “up to me today to assume the role and responsibility of France in these events”.

In Songs from the Hole, a man convicted of murder when he was a teenager finds healing in music during his sentence

In 2014, a sergeant at a California state prison sent James “JJ’88” Jacobs, who was 25 at the time, to “the hole” – solitary confinement in a 6-by-6 cell. One bunk, one strip of a window. Jacobs had already been incarcerated for a decade by then; at 15, he was given a double life sentence for second-degree murder. Alone in the hole, Jacobs thought, as he always did, about the most devastating month of his life, April 2004: on the 16th, he shot and killed a fellow teenager outside a nightclub in his home town of Long Beach, California. Three days later, another young man shot and killed his beloved older brother Victor. For years, Jacobs was caught in a terrible cycle of grief – for what he had done, for what had been done to him.

In the hole, Jacobs would lie on the floor, eyes closed, and imagine his life outside prison. He’d make beats by pounding on his bunk or chest. A talented singer and rapper, he began to compose songs on notebook paper, along with treatments for imagined music videos. His lyrics that grappled with healing and reckoning – how to maintain self-worth in the face of devastating interpersonal and systemic violence, how to reconcile the worst thing you’ve ever done with your dignity as a human being. The prison kept Jacobs in the hole for 2.5 months – far longer than the 15 days the United Nations recognizes as torture. “Being in here, death always feels imminent,” Jacobs says in a recorded prison phone call at the beginning of the remarkable new documentary Songs from the Hole. “I have to manufacture hope. And the way I manufacture hope is by writing music.”

District judge said the grant funding suspensions violated an earlier June preliminary injunction

A US judge on Tuesday ordered Donald Trump’s administration to restore a part of the federal grant funding that it recently suspended for the University of California, Los Angeles.

US district judge Rita Lin in San Francisco ruled that the grant funding suspensions violated an earlier June preliminary injunction where she ordered the National Science Foundation to restore dozens of grants that it had terminated at the University of California.

About 800 national guard troops will be deployed in the nation’s capital because, according to the president: ‘Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs’

A key chapter in the fascist playbook has always been to convince the public that it is living in such a state of mortal danger and unbridled chaos that the only chance of survival is to cede individual rights to the determined will of the Dear Leader. That’s why fascist leaders have constantly demanded that their populations venerate all violence performed in the service of the state and revere the apparatuses of state violence, such as police forces and the military. In this scenario, state violence is not only necessary for the nation’s survival. State violence is understood as even beautiful, something the public can and must believe in.

Buying into state violence this way produces something historian Robert Paxton has called a “mobilizing passion”. In his book The Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton described how “the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will” is produced and then mobilized by fascists by creating “a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of traditional solutions”. In other words, there’s always a grave, existential threat lurking around every corner, and only fascist violence can restore order to a lawless world. To the fascist, as Umberto Eco once put it, “life is a permanent war”.

Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York

USS Higgins and USS Cincinnati sailed near Scarborough Shoal after Chinese tried to drive away Philippine vessel

The US has briefly deployed two warships in a disputed South China Sea shoal where two Chinese ships collided earlier in the week while trying to drive away a smaller Philippine ship in a high-seas accident that raised alarms about maritime safety.

Both China and the Philippines claim Scarborough Shoal and other outcroppings in the South China Sea. Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also lay overlapping claims in the contested waters.

Under Joseph Humire, the thinktank tracked alleged crimes by the Venezuelan gang in the US. A non-profit found multiple false entries

A senior official appointed to the defense department led a thinktank that promoted fake news about the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, according to InSight Crime, a non-profit analyzing organized crime.

Joseph Humire was appointed this summer to be the head of policy focusing on the western hemisphere within the office of the under secretary of defense for policy. He was previously the executive director of a conservative thinktank focused on global security. Humire’s appointment comes as the Trump administration is ramping up its aggressive strategy against organized crime in Latin America and the Venezuelan government, which it accuses of working with TdA.

The German chancellor’s high-wire statesmanship on Ukraine has done little to alleviate his domestic woes

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Friedrich Merz hosted the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on Wednesday as a weakened leader 100 days into his term, with his attempts to rally western support for Kyiv and wrangle Donald Trump failing to silence his domestic critics.

The German chancellor took the initiative for Wednesday’s lightning round of telephone conferences bringing in EU leaders, Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance. Zelenskyy’s surprise arrival in Berlin to sit in on the calls underlined Merz’s starring role in the diplomatic efforts.

The rivalry between the regions who claim to have invented it is more heated than ever – and should it be 8cm or 31cm long?

Name: Bratwurst.

Age: It depends.

• Surfer rode waves daily for over 40 years straight

• Streak reached 14,642 consecutive surfing days

• Guinness record-holder dies at age 77 in California

Dale Webster, the Northern California surfer who paddled out every day for more than 40 years, has died at the age of 77. News of his death was shared on social media by friends and fellow surfers. No cause of death was given.

Known as Daily Dale and Daily Wavester, Webster holds a Guinness world record for the longest streak of consecutive days surfed: an extraordinary 14,642, a stretch that began in 1975 and ended in 2015. His feat required him to surf at least three waves a day, rain or shine, in sickness or in health, through frigid Pacific waters and the shark-rich lineup off Sonoma County.

Canada’s largest airline expects full shutdown as workers protests over claims of ‘poverty wages’ and unpaid labour

Canada’s largest airline has started cancelling flights during the peak summer travel season ahead of a strike by more than 10,000 flight attendants over what they say are “poverty wages” and unpaid labour for work when planes are not in the air.

Air Canada said it would start suspending flights on Thursday ahead of full shutdown on Saturday after the flagship carrier and the union representing the flight attendants failed to resolve a months-long dispute over pay and working conditions.

Government aims to teach 22,000 people, including children as young as eight, how to build and operate drones

Children in Lithuania are to be taught how to build and operate drones as part of the small Baltic country’s efforts to build capacity to deal with any future threat from Russia.

In a joint initiative by the defence and education ministries, the government said on Tuesday it hoped to teach more than 22,000 people, including schoolchildren, drone skills as part of an attempt to “expand civil resistance training”.

After IceBlock’s launch in April, Kristi Noem attacked developer Joshua Aaron and his wife was fired from the DoJ. The attention has only led to more raids being reported

For many undocumented immigrants living in the US, the constant threat of Ice raids has turned their homes into prisons. Leaving the house to go to work, school, buy groceries or the doctor’s office all carry unthinkable risks.

It’s a problem that Joshua Aaron wanted to tackle. A former indie musician (he played bass in 2000s buzz band The Rosenbergs and later fronted his own group Stealing Heather) turned app entrepreneur, he set about making an app that could spot Ice and alert people, the same way drivers let other drivers know about traffic stops on Waze.

Young people are drawn in by the promise of a ‘no-distractions’ zone, rereleases of old classics and music documentaries by global artists

A new generation of film lovers is helping to drive an increase in cinema attendance across the UK. As the industry slowly recovers from the decline of audiences during the pandemic – there were 126.5m admissions in 2024 compared with 176.1m in 2019, the rise in younger people returning to cinema may be due to a newfound love for film developed during the lockdown years. Although figures are yet to be restored to pre-pandemic levels, admission rates are continuing to increase, and it is younger audiences in particular who are showing significant enthusiasm, with figures from the Cinema Advertising Association suggesting that under-35s make up 50% of cinemagoers across the board.

This is a proportion, which includes all cinemas including mainstream multiplexes, has held steady over the last few years but the effect appears particularly marked on the independent cinema circuit. Curzon, which operates 16 venues across the UK, reports there has been a clear shift over the past six years in young people overtaking older audiences. In 2019, the biggest age demographic of Curzon attendees was 65+, followed by 55-64. In 2025, however, the dominant age group is 25-34 – rising from 16% in 2019 to 31% in 2025 – followed by 18-25 (growing from 17% to 24% over the same period).

Hashem Abedi charged over incident in which four prison officers were injured at a maximum security prison in April

The brother of the Manchester Arena bomber has been charged with three counts of attempted murder after prison officers were injured at a maximum security prison.

The charges follow an investigation by counter-terror police into an attack at HMP Frankland in Durham on 12 April.

In the run-up to this week’s deadly attacks, stories linking Palestinian reporters to Hamas gained currency. What followed seemed inevitable

What is the role of journalism when Palestinian reporters are treated as criminals and left to die? Last October, I spoke with the journalist Hossam Shabat. He described families packing what little they had left in northern Gaza as Israel began implementing its “generals’ plan”. Six months later, Shabat was dead – killed by Israel, accused of being a Hamas operative.

Israel does not try to hide these killings. Instead, it often smears its victims in advance – branding journalists as “terrorists”, accusations that are rarely substantiated. These labels serve a clear cause: to strip reporters of their civilian status and make their killing appear morally acceptable. Journalists are not legitimate targets. Killing them is a war crime.

Hanno Hauenstein is a Berlin-based journalist and author. He worked as a senior editor in Berliner Zeitung’s culture department, specialising in contemporary art and politics

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