4 min: Messi involved again, this time latching on to a bouncing ball in midfield, slotting a through ball for Suárez that has just a bit too much on it, allowing Ramos to gather it easily.
2 min: A chance! Already! Lionel Messi finds a spot in the right half-space, and lofts a perfect diagonal ball over the backline to Luis Suárez. Suarez’s attempt is saved, and he is later called offside. An early statement from Miami.
Newly crowned French Open champion Coco Gauff was stunned on her return to action Thursday, losing to Chinese qualifier Wang Xinyu 6-3, 6-3 at the Berlin Open.
The second-ranked Gauff, who won at Roland-Garros less than two weeks ago for her second Grand Slam title, amassed 25 unforced errors and seven double faults in her loss to Wang.
Speaking at a hospital hit by an Iranian missile, the Israeli prime minister invoked ancient Persia as he hinted at a historic mission
It was in the Beersheba, about a thousand kilometers and 2,500 years from Babylon, that Benjamin Netanyahu suggested on Thursday that the time had come for the Jews to repay their ancient debt to Cyrus the Great and bring liberation to Iran.
The Israeli prime minister had just made a tour of Beersheba’s Soroka hospital which a few hours earlier had sustained a direct hit from an Iranian ballistic missile on one of its buildings. It was for that reason the scene of an escape which was already being dubbed miraculous by Israel’s leaders.
Iran has struggled to respond effectively after Israel killed many of its top military commanders
It is a week since Israel began its largest attack ever on Iran, and in conventional military terms it is clear that Tehran is under extreme pressure. Israel has been able to achieve superiority over Iran’s skies at extraordinary speed, within hours of launching its surprise assault. Its military claimed on Monday to have knocked out 120 Iranian air defence systems through a mixture of air and drone strikes, about a third of Tehran’s pre-war total.
In response, Iran’s most effective weapon has been its stock of high-speed ballistic missiles, estimated at about 2,000 by Israel’s Defence Force (IDF) at the outset of hostilities last week. But the heavy targeting by Israel of launch sites in western Iran, in underground bases such as at Kermanshah – coupled with Israel’s grimly effective targeted killing of Iran’s top military commanders – have left Iran struggling to respond militarily and presenting a significant threat.
Flying winger brushes off allegiance jibes and cannot wait for Australia after a testing Lions tour in 2021
Duhan van der Merwe does not want to shake hands. It is not that the hulking Scotland winger is being rude – he is polite to a fault – but after a gruelling gym session the British & Irish Lion has blisters as big as golf balls. A fist bump – a touch daunting given the size of his biceps – must suffice.
Van der Merwe’s war wounds are the first indication that public perception about him can be misleading and there are many to follow in the ensuing half-hour. From an impassioned response to accusations he is a “SpringJock”, to discussing why he runs roughshod over England once a year, Van der Merwe is illuminating company.
Hero of 2006 World Cup was second choice behind Claudio Ranieri and has not had a successful career as manager
Gennaro Gattuso said all the things he was expected to say at his first appearance as Italy manager. He talked about the need to restore enthusiasm to an Azzurri side whose morale has been dented by recent setbacks, as well as that sense of shared purpose that bonded him to teammates in the World Cup-winning side of 2006.
The word he kept coming back to was “family”, insisting: “That’s the most important thing, more than tactics or formations.” His is not a vision of paternalistic authority but of a group close enough to speak hard truths to each other’s faces.
School leaders call for action on adaptation measures as DfE research warns of potential impact of climate crisis
Children in England face prolonged “lost learning” caused by extreme heat and flooding at school, according to research on the potential impact of the climate crisis on education.
It was simple but ruthlessly effective as Trawlerman and William Buick made all the running to win the Gold Cup on Thursday. The Gosden stable’s seven-year-old faced two four-year-old rivals with a touch more class but no experience of racing at two and a half miles and when Buick challenged them to catch him with a quarter of a mile to run, neither Illinois nor Candelari could summon a response.
Candelari was a spent force with half a mile left, while Illinois’s brief effort in the home straight scarcely made an impression on Trawlerman’s lead as he galloped on relentlessly for the line. He had a seven-length advantage at the post and it was seven more back to Dubai Future in third.
Donald Trump has denied a report in the Wall Street Journal that he has approved US plans to attack Iran, saying that the news outlet has “no idea” what his thinking is concerning the Israel-Iran conflict.
The Journal reported late on Wednesday that Trump told senior aides a day earlier that he had approved attack plans but was delaying on giving the final order to see if Tehran would abandon its nuclear program. The report cited three anonymous officials.
Exclusive: On eve of Commons vote, MP says legislators may not get another chance to do ‘the right thing’ for 10 years
The UK is “behind the curve” among progressive nations, the assisted dying bill’s sponsor, Kim Leadbeater, has said on the eve of one of the most consequential votes for social change in England and Wales.
The Labour MP said the circumstances may never be right again to pass such a bill, which would legalise assisted dying in England and Wales for terminally ill people with less than six months to live, subject to approval by two doctors and a panel of experts.
Army chief’s effusive welcome in Washington hints at strategic recalibration amid Middle East turmoil
After years in the diplomatic deep freeze, US-Pakistan ties appear to be quickly thawing, with Donald Trump’s effusive welcome for Pakistan’s army chief, Gen Asim Munir, signalling a possible major reset.
Pakistan’s top-level access in Washington, including a White House lunch for Munir on Wednesday and meetings with top national security officials, has raised Indian eyebrows, especially amid sensitive trade negotiations with the US. India considers the Trump administration to be glossing over Pakistan’s record on terrorism.
The US president promised to keep his country out of conflicts. The Israeli prime minister has other ideas
The maxim that wars are easy to start and hard to end does not appear to be troubling Benjamin Netanyahu. For the Israeli prime minister, conflict is an end as much as a means, extending his political survival. Under international pressure – however belated and insufficient – over the slaughter in Gaza, he launched the attack on Iran. Initially presented as essential to prevent Tehran from the imminent acquisition of a nuclear bomb, a claim running counter to US intelligence, it is increasingly discussed as the path to bringing down the regime. The defence minister, Israel Katz, has said that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “can no longer be allowed to exist”.
Donald Trump has generally seen armed conflict as a trap rather than an escape route. He said that the US would “measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end – and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into”. Yet his failure to achieve the Nobel-worthy peace deals he wants, and Mr Netanyahu’s manoeuvring, appear to have made him keener on US intervention. Israel wants US bunker-busters to attack the underground nuclear facility at Fordow. There is no guarantee that those would succeed. Israel’s regime-ending aspirations further undermine its claim to offer what might be called, in the term infamously used of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a cakewalk. There isn’t a bad plan for the day after; there is no plan.
Police found 57 people allegedly held in fetid conditions in case known as ‘grape harvest of shame’
Three employees of a firm that provided workers to pick grapes for champagne has gone on trial for human trafficking, in one of the biggest labour scandals to hit France’s exclusive sparkling wine industry.
The employees of the firm supplying grape pickers for the champagne harvest in 2023 were charged with human trafficking and exploiting seasonal workers, submitting vulnerable people to undignified housing conditions, and employing foreign nationals without authorisation. The firm itself was also on trial for moral responsibility in the case.
Kim Leadbeater has led a strong campaign, but concerns about the likely impact on vulnerable people remain
The central issue before MPs, as they decide how to vote on the latest version of Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill, is how to value individual autonomy relative to collective responsibility for vulnerable members of society when making regulations around the end of life. Should terminally ill people be allowed to end their lives with medical help? If so, under what safeguards? The question remains ethically, medically and legally complex.
Technological and social changes enabling people to live much longer have created challenges around the resourcing of care and experiences of ageing and dying. There are profound questions about how we manage the final stages of life – and what we owe to those living through them.
Neave Trio (Chandos) Works by Saint-Saëns, Mel Bonis and Sally Beamish’s imaginative reinterpretation of Debussy’s La Mer make for a disparate but rounded programme
Three French works make a disparate but rounded programme on this release from the Neave Trio. Saint-Saëns took years to write his Trio No 2, and the result was a sprawling five-movement work that gets an appropriately wide-ranging and meaty performance here. The first movement roils and surges, the players catching both the push and pull of the restless theme and the brief passage of stillness later on. The slow third movement sings .with wistful nostalgia, and the fourth flows by in a waltz-like whirl pitched somewhere between Chopin and Dvořák. But the second movement, with its obsessively repeated rhythmic motif, perhaps needs a little more imagination to make it work.
The two movements of Mel Bonis’s Soir et Matin, written in 1907, are the opposite way round in atmosphere from how you might expect: Soir (Evening) is soulful, expansive and melodic; Matin (Morning) altogether more strange, impressionistic and beguiling. Finally, there’s something unexpected on a chamber music recital: Debussy’s painterly orchestral showpiece La Mer. Rendering the orchestra’s highly textured writing for a chamber group is no easy task but this version, made by the composer Sally Beamish in 2013, is imaginative and beautifully judged, emerging more like a new work in its own right than a mere arrangement.
PM Pedro Sánchez says he wants a ‘more flexible formula’ that would make target optional or allow Madrid to opt out
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has rejected Nato’s proposal for member states to increase their defence spending to 5% of their GDP, saying the idea would “not only be unreasonable but also counterproductive”.
Sánchez said that he was not seeking to complicate next week’s Nato summit in The Hague, but he wanted there to be a “more flexible formula” that would either make the target optional or allow Spain to opt out.
US-made unmanned vessels will monitor maritime activity as part of trial, amid criticism over closer ties with America
Denmark is deploying floating drones on the Baltic Sea to protect undersea infrastructure and bolster maritime surveillance amid the growing threat of hybrid attacks from Russia.
The arrival of Saildrone, a California-based company, has prompted criticism in Denmark over forging tighter bonds with the US in such a sensitive area as digital security.
Dozens more Palestinians were killed or injured in Gaza as they sought desperately needed aid on Thursday, with reports that Israeli forces close to one distribution point had opened fire, the third such incident in as many days.
More than a hundred people have been reported killed since Monday while either trying to reach aid points or waiting to stop and offload the limited number of UN and commercial trucks entering the devastated territory. There have been about 20 such incidents in the last four weeks.
Benjamin Netanyahu has evoked the spirit of London during the blitz, and pointed to his own family’s sacrifice amid the blood, toil, tears and sweat of his nation: the second postponement of his son’s wedding.
The Israeli prime minister’s remarks, solemnly delivered to the cameras against the backdrop of a missile-struck hospital building in the southern city of Beersheba, set off a howl of derision that echoed around the Hebrew-language internet, at the height of a war that Netanyahu unleashed on Friday.
Leader says LGBTQ+ march in Hungarian capital will go ahead despite Viktor Orbán’s government’s ruling
The mayor of Budapest has vowed to go ahead with the city’s Pride march next weekend, declaring he will “come up with a plan C” even if the police try to impose a government-backed ban.
Hungarian police said on Thursday they were banning the country’s main Pride march from taking place in the capital, citing recent legislation passed by Viktor Orbán’s government that prohibits the promotion of same-sex relationships to under-18s.
City breached rules in nine league matches last season
CEO Soriano excited by global impact of Club World Cup
Manchester City have been fined more than £1m by the Premier League over delayed kick-offs or restarts related to nine matches last season. The league entered into a sanction agreement with the club over the breaches of its rules, which occurred between October and February.
The longest delay was two minutes and 24 seconds before the resumption of the Manchester derby last December. The league said City had accepted and apologised for the breaches, with the fines totalling £1.08m. The club have 14 days to make payment from the execution of the sanction agreement.
With World Cup 2026 on the horizon, the team has been reluctant to weigh in publicly as one of their pillars is politicized
Los Angeles will be in the spotlight during the 2026 World Cup. It’s where the US men’s national team will begin their World Cup campaign, and it’s where they’ll wrap up the group stage. It’s a city in the news lately due to the Trump administration’s deployment of Ice and the national guard, but it’s also a metro area synonymous with diversity. This US men’s national team, more than ever, reflects that diversity.
“It’s not that there’s a record or anything of how many minorities have been on the national team before, but I feel like this has been the most diverse generation of national team,” said center back Chris Richards, who is poised to be a leader along the backline for the US next year.
As more parents dress like their kids – and more children dress like grownups – some are asking if our offspring have become style inspirations … or even accessories
The Princess of Wales and her 10-year-old daughter, Princess Charlotte, seemed to have shared not just a carriage but also outfit notes at trooping the colour last weekend, since they were both wearing neighbouring blues on the colour wheel. They do it a lot, this so-called “mini-me dressing” – via tartans and tiaras, nautical details and nifty colour accents.
She’s not the only one. Kim Kardashian does it with her kids, Beyoncé does it with Blue Ivy. In fact, it tallies with the whole vibe of nepo babies, who are now appearing in the public eye wearing outfits that are sartorial embodiments of the relationships that will privilege them for life.
Jennifer Abbott, 69, found dead with tape over her mouth in Camden flat and police say missing Rolex could be linked to stabbing
A 66-year-old woman has been arrested on suspicion of murder after a film director was found dead at home in north London with tape over her mouth.
The body of Jennifer Abbott, 69, who was known professionally as Sarah Steinberg, was discovered in her Camden flat on 13 June. She was last seen three days earlier, walking her pet corgi nearby.
The Cabaret and Pose star is making his UK directorial debut with Harrison David Rivers’ play about love and activism. We join rehearsals with Omari Douglas and Alexander Lincoln
When Billy Porter talks, people listen. They have no choice. The actor, fresh from a stint as Emcee in the London run of Cabaret, and about to reprise the role on Broadway, speaks in a poised, purposeful, regal fashion. Each word is selected with care and weighed in his hand as if it were an avocado in the fruit and veg aisle, the gaps between words so lengthy that it isn’t always clear when he has finished speaking. Seated around the table in the south London studio where Porter is overseeing rehearsals for This Bitter Earth, which marks his UK directorial debut, are the playwright Harrison David Rivers and the actors Omari Douglas (It’s a Sin) and Alexander Lincoln (Emmerdale). Everyone maintains an attentive silence while Porter is speaking, until there can be no doubt that he has completed his thought.
“The … beautiful … part of this play,” he says, easing his feet out of a pair of marshmallow-soft cream-and-ebony moon boots and nudging them to one side, “is we get to watch two people who love each other try … time … and time … and time … and time again … and they never give up … on themselves … or on love. There is hope … We don’t have to be divided. Having conversations that are complicated is what makes the healing happen … without blame … without shame.”
An unprecedented planetary-scale seismic event caused the earth to vibrate for nine days straight back in 2023, but the reason why was unclear. Scientists initially had more questions than answers, labelling the event an unidentified seismic object and undertook a mammoth scientific collaboration across multiple countries and institutions to get to the bottom of what really happened. Josh Toussaint-Strauss looks into the mystery at the heart of this scientific investigation
Lewis-Skelly to be one of world’s best-paid teenagers
Thomas Partey is at an impasse with Arsenal in talks over a new contract as the midfielder weighs up whether to extend his stay. Partey, whose deal expires at the end of this month, has been offered a deal on slightly reduced terms.
The 32-year-old and his representatives are believed to want a similar pay structure to the one in the contract he signed when he joined from Atlético Madrid in 2020 for £45m, after he played an integral role last season, making 52 appearances.
Two serving officers and one former officer to face hearing after woman was also handcuffed and put in spit hood
Two serving Metropolitan police officers and one former officer will face a gross misconduct hearing after a 90-year-old woman with dementia was targeted with a Taser, the police watchdog said.
The woman was also handcuffed and put in a spit hood during the incident in Peckham, south London, in May 2023, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) said.
Coventry speaks of making ‘right decisions’ in the role
Kirsty Coventry has promised to not let power go to her head when she becomes the first female president of the International Olympic Committee next week.
Her predecessor, Thomas Bach, would always stay in a suite paid for by the IOC at the five-star Lausanne Palace hotel, costing about £2,000 a night, whenever he was in the city. However, the Zimbabwean confirmed her family would not be following suit.
Government strategy includes spending £9bn a year on fixing schools, hospitals, courts and prisons
Ministers have pledged to spend £9bn a year on fixing crumbling schools, hospitals, courts and prisons over the next decade as part of the government’s infrastructure strategy.
Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, set out plans on Thursday to spend a minimum of £725bn over 10 years to boost UK-wide infrastructure and achieve a “national renewal”.
Test captain identifies weakness ahead of India series
He reveals Jofra Archer is pestering him for a Test call
Ben Stokes may have described England’s recent lack of Test action as “a bit odd” but playing just one game in the past six months has given the side space to reconsider their approach before the series against India.
Stokes has won 23 of his 33 games in charge while losing 12 and insisted: “I don’t think it’s arrogant to say that we’ve been good over the last three years.” But with England’s next 10 Tests coming against either India – starting at Headingley on Friday – or Australia they have prepared for potential adversity.
A former music journalist’s exploration of how we listen is informed by her life-changing experience of motherhood
When did you last experience total silence? In Hark, the author Alice Vincent goes to extreme lengths to eradicate noise as she spends time in an anechoic chamber, a heavily soundproofed space designed to swallow up sound waves. There she becomes aware of the noises of her own body, from involuntary swallowing to the soft, high-pitched ringing in her ears. But rather than feel unease, she is “confronted with a comfort I couldn’t have imagined – and a familiarity with quietude I didn’t realise I was living in”.
Hark is a book about listening, being heard and the author’s shifting relationship with sound in the early years of motherhood. While working as a music journalist in her 20s, Vincent had been surrounded by noise. But now, in her 30s and plunged into domesticity, she finds herself craving quiet. She also examines how others experience sound, investigating misophonia, an acute sensitivity to everyday noises; deep listening, a practice that ensures the speaker feels heard; and the concept of “deaf gain”, which turns the notion of “hearing loss” into something positive and empowering.
As his troops slaughter civilians in Gaza, he claims to be standing up for Iranian women’s autonomy. He is far from the first warmonger to do so
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has invoked the Iranian regime’s heinous women’s rights record to justify his heinous war on Iran. This is the man whose genocide of Palestinians in Gaza killed more women and children in its first year than the equivalent period of any other conflict over the past two decades.
“They’ve impoverished you, they’ve given you misery, they’ve given you death, they’ve given you terror, they shoot down your women, leaving this brave, unbelievable woman, Mahsa Amini, to bleed on the sidewalk for not covering her hair,” he told Iranians in an interview with Iran International.
Mona Eltahawy writes the Feminist Giant newsletter. She is the author of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls and Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution
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Orchestre de Paris/Mäkelä (Decca) It may be missing that edge-of-your-seat excitement it had at last summer’s Proms, but Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique is full of colour and impact, and the energy keeps fizzing on Ravel’s La Valse
Klaus Mäkelä and the Orchestre de Paris gave an unforgettable performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique at the BBC Proms last September, the electric atmosphere of which is not quite replicated on this recording, made in Paris a few months later.
It’s all played with consummate skill by an orchestra who are clearly responsive to their conductor’s every move, as they were in Royal Albert Hall, and Mäkelä’s shaping of Berlioz’s music, from the gentle, vibratoless violins at the beginning to the careering witches’ dance of the finale, remains highly coloured and full of impact. Yet it all feels a little clinical; the edge-of-the-seat excitement is missing. Perhaps it has been engineered out: the sound feels over-tweaked, and although the spatial effects at the beginning of the third movement – with the cor anglais duetting with a faraway oboe – come over beautifully, elsewhere it sometimes feels as though we’re being shown exactly what to listen to.
It’s easy to resent being treated better because of how you look, advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith writes. Try to notice who has treated you the same all along
I am a woman who has been fat since I was about eight; I am now in my early 50s. I have been on Ozempic for almost two years. I have lost almost 50 kilos and can now do a whole lot of things that I wasn’t physically able to do before, which is great. But people treat me differently now. I had my work review and I am doing less but got feedback about how much more I am doing. I have been asked if I am looking to date, and even if I am thinking of having a child, both questions I never was asked when I was bigger. I didn’t think people treated me badly before, and still don’t, but now I am seeing that there is a difference. It is not comfortable for me. I am not at risk of putting the weight back on but how do I navigate the difference in how people are treating me?
Eleanor says: A lot of people notice this after losing lots of weight. You get spoken to in a different key. People turn on a switch you didn’t know they had. For some people this feels great. For others it’s unnerving: to feel so newly visible and yet somehow so unseen.
The British composer broke into Hollywood as Yorgos Lanthimos’s go-to guy on Poor Things and more. But his heart remains in Shropshire – the backdrop to his ambitious, grief-stricken latest record
The sun is shining, birds are tweeting and a river gently flows just yards away as Jerskin Fendrix tells me about his love of growing up in Shropshire. “It was so gorgeous and majestic,” he says, sitting in the garden of a friend’s house where he spent a lot of time in his youth. “It was nature, forests and hills and then just normal teenage life. The combination of this numinous, big landscape and getting wasted in a cornfield with your mates listening to Kanye West on a Bluetooth speaker while seeing a massive sunset.”
Such vivid scenes fill his latest album, Once Upon a Time … in Shropshire. The opening track, Beth’s Farm, captures an idyllic scene where animals roam and rural teens party. “I thought it was a really nice symbol of this naive innocence,” he says. “Trying to get across how bucolic and heavenly this was before it starts to get corrupted.”
Screenwriter, whose 1987 collaboration with Bernardo Bertolucci won nine Oscars, was also known for The Passenger directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
Mark Peploe, the Oscar-winning screenwriter who collaborated with some of the greatest names in European film-making including Michelangelo Antonioni and Bernardo Bertolucci, has died aged 82. Peploe’s family told the Guardian he died in Florence, Italy, after a long illness.
Peploe’s prominence centred on the screenplays he wrote for some of the great European directors of the era, notably Italian new wave auteurs Antonioni and Bertolucci. Despite its chequered release history, the 1975 film The Passenger, directed by Antonioni and starring Jack Nicholson, has since been acclaimed as one the decade’s cinematic masterpieces, and Peploe went on to forge a regular partnership with Bertolucci, winning an Oscar in 1988 for best adapted screenplay for The Last Emperor.
The Courtauld, London With works by Alice Adams, Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois, this exhibition revisits a 1966 show of pieces delving into the psychosexual and the human body
Pendulous, scuttling, slapstick, sinister and ribald, Abstract Erotic revisits a moment in 1966 when the young American critic and curator Lucy Lippard brought together the work of three women in New York in a larger show of eight artists at the Fischbach Gallery then on Madison Avenue. It was originally titled Eccentric Abstraction, but the eccentrically abstract isn’t nearly as sexy as the erotic – yet somehow neither title quite fits the strange and compelling sculptures and little objects, drawings and reliefs by Alice Adams, Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois that, even 60 years on, are as alive as ever they were.
Eccentric Abstraction was the first exhibition Lippard had ever curated, and was, she said, “an attempt to blur boundaries, in this case between minimalism and something more sensuous and sensual – that is, in retrospect, something more feminist” – although, at the time, feminism was far from her mind. The exhibition was crucial in the development of the now 88-year-old’s thinking and her subsequent activism.
Candlelight vigil honoring Melissa Hortman and husband at state capitol was attended by Tim Walz and couple’s son
Hundreds gathered at the Minnesota capitol on Wednesday night to honor the state Democratic representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, who were killed at their home on Saturday night in what authorities have described as a “political assassination”.
Some mourners reportedly brought flowers to place in front of this memorial, while others held candles. Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, grew teary at the vigil, and consoled attenders, as a brass band from the Minnesota Orchestra performed, according to the Associated Press.
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