Trump says ‘we took it out’ referring to the operation in international waters, amid US-Caracas tensions

The US military has killed 11 drug traffickers from Venezuela during a “a kinetic strike” in the Caribbean Sea, the US president, Donald Trump, has claimed amid growing tensions between Washington and Caracas.

Trump trailed the announcement during an address at the White House on Tuesday afternoon, telling reporters the US had “just, over the last few minutes, literally shot out … a drug-carrying boat”.

President says national security operations in space will be based in state he won comfortably, reversing Biden decision

Donald Trump made his first public appearance in a week on Tuesday to announce that the US Space Command (Spacecom) headquarters, which is tasked with leading national security operations in space, would be in the Republican stronghold of Alabama.

Flanked by Republican senators and members of Congress at a White House news conference, Trump said Huntsville, Alabama, would be the new location of the space command. The move reverses a Biden administration decision to put the facility at its current temporary headquarters in Democratic-leaning Colorado.

Judge says tech giant can keep world’s most popular browser in ongoing battle over firm being ruled monopoly

Google will not be forced to sell its Chrome browser, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday in the tech giant’s ongoing legal battle over being ruled a monopoly last year.

The company will be barred from certain exclusive deals with device makers and must share data from its search engine with competitors, the judge ruled.

This gripping documentary follows early Premier League footballers who lost it all following investment advice that went wrong. It perfectly captures the melancholy of being an ex-pro

Sympathy for the financial plight of former Premier League footballers, you say? No, wait, hear us out. You might be surprised by this previously untold story. Richard Milway’s documentary, Football’s Financial Shame: The Story of the V11, is a gripping, moving and human enough tale to inspire more than a little fellow feeling.

The V11 may sound like a fictional spy ring from a shonky airport novel but they’re actually a group of retired footballers whose careers spanned the 90s and early 00s. This era-specificity is crucial. They are members of the Premier League’s in-between generation. They’re mid-rankers: household names but it depends on the household. Danny Murphy. Rod Wallace. Brian Deane. Tommy Johnson. Michael Thomas. Craig Short. If you know, you know. And they played at a time when wages were merely brilliant and not yet mind-boggling. At that point in football history, there was still a fragment of connective tissue linking the lives of players and supporters. As Deane puts it, having money meant being able to buy a house and pay off your parents’ mortgage, too.

Government to ban sale of energy drinks with more than 150mg of caffeine, citing concerns over obesity and lack of concentration

Under-16s in England will be banned from buying energy drinks such as Red Bull and Monster because they fuel obesity, cause sleep problems and leave them unable to concentrate.

Health experts, teaching unions and dentists welcomed the ban and said it would boost children and young people’s health. It fulfils a pledge Labour included in its manifesto for last year’s general election.

• Spaniard cruises to emphatic 6-4, 6-2, 6-4 victory

• Alcaraz reaches last four without dropping a set

It took just seven minutes for Carlos Alcaraz to recognise that he was having another one of those days where he could do whatever he wanted with a tennis ball. Up a game point in his opening service game, the Spaniard skipped around the ball from far behind the baseline in his backhand corner and attempted the riskiest shot possible, unleashing a remarkable forehand winner.

This would not be the last time that the Arthur Ashe Stadium crowd collectively gasped at Alcaraz’s greatness as he continued to radiate confidence and calm in New York, moving effortlessly into the semi‑finals with a 6-4, 6-2, 6-4 win against Jiri Lehecka.

Mahdawi was targeted and arrested for deportation due to his activism but the permanent US resident is resuming postgraduate studies

Just more than four months after being arrested, detained and nearly deported by the Trump administration for his activism, Mohsen Mahdawi, the 34-year-old Palestinian student and US permanent resident, returned to Columbia University on Tuesday and vowed to continue speaking out.

“They have failed to silence me, and in fact, now I am more outspoken than before, and I will continue to work for peace and justice. I do this work not for myself alone – I do this for the future of children, whether they are Palestinians or Israelis,” he told the Guardian on Tuesday in his first interview since stepping back on to campus to begin his graduate studies.

• West Ham forward cleared in July of spot-fixing

• Paquetá to have hearing to determine punishment

Lucas Paquetá is poised to receive only a fine after being found guilty of two misconduct charges relating to the spot-fixing allegations he was cleared of in July.

The independent commission that acquitted Paquetá of being deliberately booked to fix betting markets upheld two lesser charges against him of failing to answer questions and provide information to the Football Association’s investigation, with its written reasons for both verdicts due to be published this week.

When things are grim, the promises made by the wellness industry sound very appealing. I worry about how vulnerable this has made me

Ordinarily, I’m a sensible person – at least part-time. A journalist, an asker of questions, a checker of sources. Historically, a big fan of research.

But three years into a debilitating chronic illness, I am willing to try anything to get well. Even things that would have once made me roll my eyes. Chromotherapy, sound baths, mushroom extract. Reiki, leg compression boots, strategic humming.

Trump administration contract with Paragon Solutions gives immigration agency access to one of the most powerful stealth cyberweapons

US immigration agents will have access to one of the world’s most sophisticated hacking tools after a decision by the Trump administration to move ahead with a contract with Paragon Solutions, a company founded in Israel which makes spyware that can be used to hack into any mobile phone – including encrypted applications.

The Department of Homeland Security first entered into a contract with Paragon, now owned by a US firm, in late 2024, under the Biden administration. But the $2m contract was put on hold pending a compliance review to make sure it adhered to an executive order that restricts the US government’s use of spyware, Wired reported at the time.

Venice film festival
Al Pacino, Colman Domingo and Myha’la excel in this gripping take on the events of 1977 when an Indianapolis businessman held his mortgage broker hostage

With terrific chutzpah, black-comic flair and cool, cruel unsentimentality, screenwriter Austin Kolodney and director Gus Van Sant have made a true-crime suspense thriller set in the 1970s, tapping into the spirit of both Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon and Network. Apart from anything else, it is a reminder that in that post-Kennedy, post-Watergate age, plenty of lawless and febrile things happened that would now be considered phenomena purely attributable to social media.

In 1977, an Indianapolis businessman named Tony Kiritsis, with many acquaintances in the police department, kidnapped a mortgage broker named Richard Hall, and tied Hall’s neck with a “dead man’s wire” to his shotgun, which would therefore go off if police sharpshooters tried to kill him. Kiritsis even paraded his victim like this on TV while he read out his demands, a grotesque display in which national TV networks were blandly complicit. Van Sant’s recreation of this extraordinary moment calls to mind the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby in front of police and press.

The juggernaut was captured in one three-month tracking shot, but this summer market told us something deeper – about football and the nation

By the time the clock hit 7.30pm the main presenter on Monday’s Sky Sports Window Slam Countdown looked not just frazzled, but oddly heroic, like a man who has ingested a potentially fatal overdose of late-breaking excitement and is now being encouraged to keep talking in a low, dogged voice about massive deals and unexpected snags just to keep himself awake until the paramedics arrive.

There was something of the Situation Room about the whole tableau, five nobly dishevelled talking heads leaning in around the curved tables, lists of names earnestly reeled off. Eberechi Eze. Randal Kolo Muani. We’re hearing that Coventry has fallen. In the bottom corner of the screen a picture of Marc Guéhi would flash up now and then reproachfully, Guéhi wearing a strange, lost smile as though he has in fact died. And below it all the countdown clock replaced with the simple end‑of‑days message: WINDOW CLOSED.

Defender says Chelsea ‘could have played better’ despite winning the WSL, FA Cup and League Cup last season

So, Naomi Girma, how do you top a treble-winning season? The US international, sitting relaxed on the 3G pitch at Chelsea’s Cobham training ground, bits of the rubber crumb being squeezed between her fingers, does not hesitate before answering.

“We feel like we have another level we can get to,” she says. “It’s not about how we maintain this level but how we continue evolving and keep getting better. Having that mentality is always better than focusing on making sure no one catches us.

World Liberty Financial’s digital token $WLFI fell in price on first day, a year after launch by Trump family and partners

The Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial, put its namesake digital tokens up for sale on Monday, adding some $5bn in paper value to Donald Trump’s family fortune. The token, known as $WLFI, fell in value on Monday in their first day of trading.

The World Liberty tokens were sold to investors after the Trump family and its business partners last year launched the venture, a decentralized finance platform that has also issued a stablecoin, a cryptocurrency meant to maintain a specific price by tying its value to a specific asset.

‘Megaberg’ known as A23a has rapidly disintegrated in warmer warmers and could disappear within weeks

Nearly 40 years after breaking off Antarctica, a colossal iceberg ranked among the oldest and largest ever recorded is finally crumbling apart in warmer waters, and could disappear within weeks.

Earlier this year, the “megaberg” known as A23a weighed a little under a trillion tonnes and was more than twice the size of Greater London, a behemoth unrivalled at the time.

Lawmakers plan pressure campaign for release of Epstein files as victims meet with speaker and oversight committee

• US politics live – latest updates

Congress returned to session on Tuesday, and with it comes a political headache for Donald Trump in the form of renewed attention on the investigation into the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and his death, a subject that the president has sought to avoid in recent weeks.

While the president got a month-long break from the Epstein issue when lawmakers left town for the annual August recess – with the House of Representatives wrapping up a day early because of the controversy over Epstein – the calm will probably end quickly. Representatives from both parties have planned press conferences and legislative maneuvers intended to put pressure on the Trump administration for more transparency over Epstein, whose suicide while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges in 2019 has been the subject of conspiracy theories the president amplified while on the campaign trail.

• Tour de France winner left with a pericardial rupture

• Kooij wins opening stage of 2025 men’s Tour of Britain

Chris Froome sustained a life-threatening injury to his heart in the training crash in France last week that left him in hospital with a broken back and broken ribs. The four-time Tour de France winner also sustained a pericardial rupture, a tear to the sac that surrounds the heart, in the crash.

“It was obviously a lot more serious than some broken bones,” his wife, Michelle Froome, told the Times. “He’s fine, but it’s going to be a long recovery process. He won’t be riding a bike for a while.”

Critics argue ‘shared map’ of Swedish culture is ‘very exclusionary’ and a ‘nationalist education project’

The Gustav Vasa 1541 bible, Pippi Longstocking, Ikea, the right to roam, paternity leave, Sámi joiks, the Nobel prize and works by Ingmar Bergman and August Strindberg all made it into Sweden’s long-awaited, much-criticised proposal for a “cultural canon”.

However, notable omissions from the list of 100 works and references that have formed Sweden’s culture and history – intended, its creators said in Uppsala on Tuesday, to establish a “shared map and compass” for Swedish citizens and new arrivals to Sweden – included Abba and anything from after 1975, a period that has seen Sweden transform into an international, multicultural society.

From Super Pacs fighting regulation to OpenAI’s first wrongful death lawsuit, the AI tech giants are spending big and facing growing scrutiny

Hello, and welcome to TechScape.

A little over two years ago, OpenAI’s founder Sam Altman stood in front of lawmakers at a congressional hearing and asked them for stronger regulations on artificial intelligence. The technology was “risky” and “could cause significant harm to the world”, Altman said, calling for the creation of a new regulatory agency to address AI safety.

Hundred Year Hunger – which has a chorus in Arabic – has been released by the British protest singer to coincide with a humanitarian aid flotilla heading for Gaza

Billy Bragg has released a new original song to show his support for the people of Palestine. The title of Hundred Year Hunger was inspired by a new book of the same name by E Mark Windle about the history of chronic malnutrition and deprivation in Gaza and will raise money for the Amos Trust’s Gaza Appeal.

Writing on Instagram, the British protest singer said that the song “looks at the current famine that Israel has created in Gaza through the lens of a century of enforced food insecurity and malnutrition imposed on the Palestinian people, firstly by British imperialism, then as a weapon of mass displacement by the state of Israel”.

A mass politics of anti-austerity, identity and climate is emerging from the left’s margins. Keir Starmer cannot afford to ignore it

Zack Polanski’s landslide election as leader of the Green party marks a turning point for Britain’s fractured left. Young, rhetorically fluent and unafraid to cloak climate arguments in those about class, Mr Polanski is nothing if not ambitious. He sees his party not as a parliamentary pressure group but as a replacement for Labour itself.

His ascent might have seemed fanciful last July when Labour had just won a thumping majority. Yet Labour languishes in the polls. Sir Keir Starmer’s personal ratings have collapsed. On the extreme right Reform UK now boasts 237,000 members, 870 councillors, and 10 councils under its control. The Greens have more MPs than ever before. And the uneasy leadership team of Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana is preparing to launch a new party to Labour’s left. This is no longer political noise at the margins. This is about the structural failure of leadership at the centre.

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Gaps in access to dentists mirror other health inequalities. And ‘golden hellos’ won’t solve the problem on their own

Disadvantaged primary school pupils at the government’s first wave of new breakfast clubs can expect to be trained in toothbrushing, as well as fed. Data showing that a fifth of all five-year-olds in England have experienced tooth decay persuaded ministers to make improved oral health part of the early years and reception class curriculum. But the prevalence of decay is not evenly spread across the country. And research showing how much worse the situation is for children in deprived areas is in line with other findings about widening health inequalities.

New analysis from the Local Government Association highlights the differing availability of dental care across council areas – a situation sometimes described as a dental divide. It found no specific correlation between the numbers of NHS dentists and young children with tooth decay. But it adds to a body of research showing that people in poorer areas are generally less well provided for. In Middlesbrough, for example, there are just 10 NHS dental practices per 100,000 people, while in wealthy Richmond upon Thames there are 28.

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Daughter of former Nazi official and her husband to be questioned after raid on home failed to find masterpiece

A federal court in Argentina has ordered house arrest for the daughter of a former Nazi official and her husband after a raid failed to locate a painting stolen from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam.

Authorities raided a home in the coastal city of Mar del Plata last week after a Dutch newspaper identified a painting seen in a real estate photo as an Italian masterpiece registered on a database of lost wartime art.