• News and buildup to the day’s football action

• Premier League things to look out for

The opening Premier League fixture of the weekend is at the Emirates, where Arsenal meet Nottingham Forest, managed by their old friend Ange Postecoglou. They need a win to get back on track after a frustrating defeat at Anfield before the international break.

Depending on your perspective, Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta comments at yesterday’s press conference to:

Manage expectations ahead of a fourth consecutive second-place finish

Speak an undeniable truth so why are you getting on his back about it

Carefully position Arsenal as a team who are fighting against the odds, knowing how central that approach was to the success of George Graham and Arsene Wenger’s sides.

Answering a question on the hoof without calculation or forethought.

Portugal star will hand Gianni Infantino the perfect publicity coup if he does play in America for the first time in more than 10 years, having already begun cosying up to Donald Trump

Is it still safe to stage the World Cup in the United States? After more headline evidence this week of the extreme nature of American gun violence, some may conclude that the answer is no. Nine months out from the opening game, it is now almost impossible to ignore this. But believe it or not statistics suggest more than 300 people will have been shot in America last Wednesday alone.

The same number will also be shot on Friday, Saturday, every day next week, and every day of World Cup year. On average 127 of these unnamed, largely non-famous people not called things such as the superstar influencer Charlie Kirk will die each day. Within this, youth gun deaths will be both alarmingly high and a register of social injustice: a disproportionate 46% of all young people shot will be black.

Sarah Hunter and Lou Meadows pinpoint when it all clicked for Red Roses ahead of their World Cup quarter-final

Earning the right to win each game may be the Red Roses’ mantra at this Rugby World Cup but making history on home soil is the goal Sarah Hunter and Lou Meadows are working to orchestrate. England’s assistant coaches describe themselves as complementary, bringing diverse experience that creates a “good blend” alongside the forwards coach, Louis Deacon, and the head coach, John Mitchell, with the Red Roses unbeaten under the New Zealander’s tenure.

In a hotel meeting room on the outskirts of Bristol as England enter the business end of the tournament, Hunter and Meadows explain how the coaching setup offers “different lenses” for tactics and planning. The duo have brought a sharp, strategic edge to the hosts’ defence and attack and for 40 minutes they range over a series of topics, including picking in which game this England side have come closest to perfection.

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• Fast-finishing Australia lose to Los Pumas 28-26 in Sydney

• Wallabies pay price for conceding 13 penalties to Argentina’s five

With their backs to the wall again after an error strewn hour had left them 18 points behind, the Wallabies looked forlornly to the Allianz Stadium grandstands and saw Rugby Australia boss Phil Waugh sitting with John Howard. Surely this was the omen they needed to emulate the former Prime Minister’s famous “Lazarus with a triple-bypass” comeback.

Joe Schmidt’s side have a reputation for rising from the ashes with last-gasp victories. They beat England in November with a last-play roll of the dice and they shocked Argentina last week with a try in overtime. Today, in another rousing fightback before 41,912 in Sydney, they clawed their way back to trail 28-26 with seconds left on the clock.

• Two-time major winner records highest PGA Tour Champions hole score

• US golfer finds water seven times on par-5 12th at Sanford International

John Daly made it into the PGA Tour Champions record book Friday for the wrong reason. The two-time major champion took a 19 on the par-5 12th hole at the Sanford International.

Daly also broke his personal record by one shot, after he took an 18 on the par-5 sixth hole in the 1998 Bay Hill Invitational when he hit 3-wood into the water six straight times.

Feminism exposed the ubiquity of child abuse, rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence – and helped fight that culture

I was there. I kept the receipts. I remember how normalized the sexual exploitation of teenage girls and even tweens by adult men was, how it showed up in movies, in the tales of rock stars and “baby groupies”, in counterculture and mainstream culture, how normalized rape, exploitation, grooming, objectification, commodification was.

The last Woody Allen movie I ever saw was Manhattan, in which he cast himself as more or less himself, a dweeb in his mid-40s, dating a high school student played by Mariel Hemingway. She was my age, 17, and I was only too familiar with creeps, and the movie creeped me out, even though it was only long afterward that I read that she said he was at the time pressuring her to get sexually involved with him in real life.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology

Educational bodies from Europe to South America are boycotting Israeli institutions, though Universities UK said it did not support the action

A growing number of universities, academic institutions and scholarly bodies around the world are cutting links with Israeli academia amid claims that it is complicit in the Israeli government’s actions towards Palestinians.

According to Gaza’s health ministry, more than 63,000 people have been killed in the territory – the majority of them civilians – with the true toll likely far higher. UN-backed experts have confirmed parts of Gaza, much of which has been reduced to rubble, are now in a “man-made” famine.

I was afraid to be near people for two-and-a-half years, but then I got a chance to meet the band I loved – and the experience changed everything

I have always had a degree of health anxiety, but when Covid hit, it really spiked. At home with the family, I made sure we washed all our food and even then I didn’t feel safe eating it. I would bring in the post and then be worried about touching the front door. I’d shower for ages, trying to wash the virus away.

I’m a journalist, so before the anxiety set in I was a pretty outgoing and adaptable person. But from the start of lockdown until September 2022, I didn’t go anywhere indoors other than home or the hospital. I didn’t even walk down a street for a year and a half, for fear of passing too close to someone.

In this week’s newsletter: Live performances offering authentic human connection are drawing crowds to the stage, as AI-driven drivel worms its way into other creative industries

Last year, more than 37 million people settled their behinds into the red-velvet upholstery, plastic chairs or wooden “I’ll only tolerate this because it’s the Globe” benches of a theatre. West End attendance has reportedly grown by 11% and regional audiences have increased by 4% since 2019 – pretty impressive amid a cost of living crisis and after a pandemic that had us all locked in our houses.

The increase in attendance can be chalked up to all sorts of reasons: the post-Covid return of tourists to the UK, schemes offering more reasonably priced tickets, and big films such as Wicked leaving people wondering what that Defying Gravity note sounds like live. But I’d throw another contender into the mix: the rise of AI.

As coming-of-age drama nears its end, part of its appeal is nostalgia for the noughties shows viewers grew up with

It was billed as a show for teenagers, but you would be hard pressed to find a millennial woman who has not watched – and become mildly obsessed with – The Summer I Turned Pretty.

The coming-of-age drama, based on Jenny Han’s novel trilogy of the same name, has quietly grown into a global phenomenon for Prime Video. The first two episodes of its third and final season drew 25 million viewers, triple the audience of its debut.

My novel explores the consequences of extreme longevity. Meanwhile, Putin and Xi are pondering immortality in real life

I was in bed scrolling on my phone when I read the headline: Hot mic catches Xi and Putin discussing organ transplants and immortality. It took me a long time to get to sleep after that. Not yet, I thought. I pride myself on my prescience, but I wasn’t ready for the future I had imagined to arrive so soon.

Since 2017, I’ve been thinking about the implications of longevity research, sketching out possible futures – the shifts in society, the complications and subcultures. This year I published the result of my thought experiment, Who Wants to Live Forever, a speculative literary novel. It follows Yuki and Sam, a couple at a crossroads at the same time that a new drug, called Yareta – which extends the human lifespan by 200 years and preserves youth – becomes available. Sam takes it, Yuki doesn’t, and the novel follows the fallout as the world changes around them. The story ends in 2039. Naively, considering the billions being poured into longevity research by the likes of Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos and Bryan Johnson (subject of this year’s Netflix documentary Don’t Die), I thought that was how long it might take for my fiction to become reality.

Hanna Thomas Uose is a writer and strategist. She is the author of Who Wants to Live Forever

From Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers to rollers, tunnellers and dwellers, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 Which German state sent its own team to the 1952 Olympics?
2 Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece is what story-telling genre’s all-time bestseller?
3 Which halogen is widely used as an antiseptic?
4 Which band was formed by Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers?
5 What type of beetles are categorised as rollers, tunnellers or dwellers?
6 Who sits on the Woolsack?
7 Nicknamed the “big hoose”, what is Scotland’s largest prison?
8 Who appeared in both film versions of West Side Story?
What links:
9 Australia; Canada; Eastern Caribbean; Jamaica; New Zealand; US?
10 Northern; southern; Masai; reticulated?
11 Dorothy Ashby; Alice Coltrane; Brandee Younger; Amanda Whiting?
12 Korea, 1945; Vietnam, 1954; Aldi supermarket, 1960?
13 John Hannah; Ken Stott; Richard Rankin?
14 Castello; Cannaregio; Dorsoduro; San Marco; San Polo; Santa Croce?
15 Awesome (Nile civilisation); Vicious (Norse raiders); Terrible (1485-1603); Gorgeous (1714-1830)?

In statement Friday, Erika Kirk says ‘evildoers responsible for my husband’s assassination have no idea what they have done’

• Trump declines to call for unity after Charlie Kirk killing in stunning move

Erika Kirk, the widow of rightwing activist and provocateur Charlie Kirk, said in a statement Friday evening that her late husband’s message and mission will be “stronger, bolder, louder and greater than ever” and that her “cries will echo around the world like a battle cry”.

“I loved knowing one of his mottos was ‘never surrender’,” she said of her late husband. “We’ll never surrender.”

As Swiss glaciers melt at an ever-faster rate, new species move in and flourish, but entire ecosystems and an alpine culture can be lost

• Photographs by Nicholas JR White

From the slopes behind the village of Ernen, it is possible to see the gouge where the Fiesch glacier once tumbled towards the valley in the Bernese Alps. The curved finger of ice, rumpled like tissue, cuts between high buttresses of granite and gneiss. Now it has melted out of sight.

People here once feared the monstrous ice streams, describing them as devils, but now they dread their disappearance. Like other glaciers in the Alps and globally, the Fiesch is melting at ever-increasing rates. More than ice is lost when the giants disappear: cultures, societies and entire ecosystems are braided around the glaciers.

The Aletsch glacier viewed from Moosfluh, looking towards the Olmenhorn and Eggishorn peaks

With his government mired in scandal, an operation to dethrone Starmer is now under way

There has been a joke going around Labour MPs over the past week about three envelopes in Soviet Russia. “Whenever you run into trouble, open them in order,” the instructions go. Envelope one says: “Blame your predecessor.” So he does – and it works. The party officials are satisfied. A year later, problems arise again. He opens envelope two. It says: “Restructure the organisation.”

He does a big reshuffle, changes some titles, and again buys himself some time. Finally, another crisis comes. He opens envelope three. It says: “Prepare three envelopes.”

The oedipal thriller with Robin Wright raises the household temperature to nail-biting, while Jade Thirlwall goes solo with groove. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

Here in metal-mad Finland, I see the 50-year-old genre is still in rude health – and helping people see the light in dark times

• Mike Watson is a media and art theorist and educator born in the UK and based in Finland

In June, I travelled to Helsinki to see Iron Maiden. I live in Finland and so know well that the country is heavy metal mad. It boasts more metal bands per capita than any other country in the world. Metal has long been the nation’s unofficial flagship cultural pursuit, with bands (called things such as Nightwish, Apocalyptica and Amorphis) acting as ambassadors where few other cultural figures have broken through abroad. But I still wasn’t prepared for what I saw.

The gig was preceded by a gathering of the “Crazy Finns” – a ragbag of Finnish Maiden fanatics who have followed the band on tour for two decades. The fan group celebrated their 20th anniversary with a concert pre-party featuring Dennis Stratton, who played on the band’s self-titled debut in 1980. As Stratton performed an acoustic version of Prowler, backed by local musician Henri Seger, the tears started to flow – predominantly from the men in the audience. At this point I realised one of the main reasons for metal’s popularity in a country where the inhabitants are famously emotionally restrained – it offers a rare outlet for collective expression. I won’t forget the sight of these macho, taciturn Finnish men united in their tears and their denims, the instantly recognisable uniform of the metal fanbase worldwide.

Mike Watson is a media and art theorist and educator based in Finland. He is the author of Hungry Ghosts in the Machine: Digital Capitalism and the Search for Self. He is co-editing a compendium of essays What’s Left of Metal? with David Burke

I thought I had found someone, but my wife wants to know if he’s any good – and if he’s ever killed anyone

The quote we receive from the roofer seems surprisingly reasonable, although it’s possible that in anticipation of the quote I was simply letting my paranoia run wild. The truth is, I had no idea how much a new flat roof should, or could, cost.

But my wife wasn’t home when the roofer came round, climbed out on the roof, and said: “That’s really bad.” She didn’t hear his wholly convincing explanation of what was wrong, and what must be done to put it right. She was not impressed by my version of those explanations. And she probably hadn’t worked herself up into expecting a quote at double the price. In any case, she has reservations.

He was the young, gay, mixed-race leader labelled a ‘badass’ by Matt Damon who unexpectedly quit. He talks about the ‘likability’ of rightwing populists – and his fears for the future of politics

Leo Varadkar suggests we do the ­interview at his house in Dublin. It’s unusual for ­politicians to invite you into their home, but Ireland is famous for its hospitality. The house looks impressively humble – a tiny, ­unprepossessing terrace. A woman answers. “Hi,” I say. “Does the taoiseach live here? “No,” she says.

I start to panic. Our interview is due to start in two minutes.

Martha, 30, an analyst, meets Jack, 26, a primary school teacher

What were you hoping for?
A fun evening, a free meal, a story and the fun of appearing in the Guardian. But deep down, to meet someone that I really want to be with.

Researchers say social media myths drive ‘nocebo effect’ of side-effects that are real but psychological in origin

Social media misinformation about the contraceptive pill is encouraging women to view it so negatively that many give it up, a study has found.

Researchers have identified myths spread on TikTok and other social media platforms as a key driver of users suffering side-effects that are real but psychological in origin. It is called the “nocebo effect”, the opposite of the better-known placebo effect.

An expectation at the outset that the pill will be harmful.

Low confidence in how medicines are developed.

A belief that medicines are overused and harmful.

A belief that they are sensitive to medicines.

Exclusive: A third of those polled do not tell bosses about use of tools and half think AI threatens the social structure

It is the work shortcut that dare not speak its name. A third of people do not tell their bosses about their use of AI tools amid fears their ability will be questioned if they do.

Research for the Guardian has revealed that only 13% of UK adults openly discuss their use of AI with senior staff at work and close to half think of it as a tool to help people who are not very good at their jobs to get by.