The Australian could leave after Spurs win the Europa League, while United may stick with their coach after winning nothing

Erik ten Hag has gone, but his shadow looms over English football still. The mistake was understandable enough: high on the euphoria of beating Manchester City in the FA Cup final, Manchester United renewed his contract. Three months into the new season, more than £180m spent on summer transfers, Ten Hag was dismissed with United 14th in the table on 11 points from nine games.

The sporting director, Dan Ashworth, and various members of Ten Hag’s backroom staff also left, at a total cost of £14.5m. Or, to put it another way, keeping Ten Hag cost United £200m and in effect undermined this season. Nobody wants to be caught in the Ten Hag trap.

• Championship leader will start race from 10th on grid
• Oscar Piastri qualfies second with George Russell third

Already struggling for confidence in his car the world championship leader, Lando Norris, suffered another serious blow to his title ambitions, crashing out in qualifying for the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. His Red Bull rival Max Verstappen claimed pole position, one-hundredth of a second clear of Norris’s teammate, Oscar Piastri.

McLaren and, indeed, Norris had looked strong all weekend, but on the first of the final runs in Q3 at the Jeddah circuit he took too much kerb through turns 4-5 and 6 and it spat him out into the wall, taking a nasty hit on the front. He was unhurt but declared himself an “idiot” when speaking to his team. The session was red-flagged and Norris will start from 10th on Sunday, his title lead hanging by the slenderest of threads and his self-belief perhaps once more undermined.

Nobody seems to have told Aston Villa the season is winding down. At a boisterous, increasingly gleeful Villa Park Unai Emery’s side moved up to sixth in the Premier League with a relentless dismantling of Newcastle, who simply fell away in the second half, conceding three goals in the final 20 minutes of a chastening 4-1 defeat.

Newcastle remain in third and fought hard in the opening hour, after which life just seemed to catch up with them, Villa’s squad depth apparent as Emery shuffled his attacking substitutes with notable precision.

• England 59-7 Scotland
• Twickenham finale will decide destination of title

England felled Scotland in a devastating manner to set up a grand slam decider against France in the Women’s Six Nations as they bid for their seventh successive title. The 59-7 victory was the team’s 33rd consecutive win in the tournament.

England were heavy favourites heading into the match as Scotland have never beaten the Red Roses in the tournament, with their last win across all competitions against their rivals coming in 1999.

The energy secretary has accused Reform UK’s leader of peddling dangerous falsehoods about renewable power

• Tories and Reform use the steel crisis to knock clean energy. They’re wrong: it will secure all our futures

Ed Miliband has torn into Nigel Farage and the Tories for peddling dangerous “nonsense and lies” by suggesting the UK’s net zero target is responsible for destroying Britain’s businesses, including its steel industry.

Cabinet ministers are determined to fight back against the way Reform UK and the Conservatives have unceremoniously lambasted the climate crisis agenda for what they believe are nakedly political reasons before important local elections next month.

Xiao’s fine start against Matthew Selt serves notice of China’s strong presence at the Crucible this year

There are few sports as synonymous with one place as snooker is with Sheffield. For two weeks every year, this city becomes the beating heart of the sport, with supporters from across the globe descending upon South Yorkshire – but this year there is a distinct feel of significant change on the horizon.

That is not to suggest that the future of the World Snooker Championship at the Crucible is any more under threat than usual: there have been almost annual murmurings about the event being moved from its spiritual home, though there is hope a new deal can be agreed to keep it here beyond the end of the current deal in 2027. It is more on the baize this year where there is the potential for a seismic shift.

Thousands gather in Parliament Square in a show of unity after supreme court judgment

After last week’s supreme court decision, activists had been worried that trans people might become fearful of going out in public in case they were abused.

They weren’t afraid in London on Saturday. Thousands of trans and non-binary people thronged Parliament Square, alongside families and supporters, waving baby blue, white and pink flags to demonstrate their anger at the judges’ ruling.

• Premier League updates from the 5.30pm BST kick-off
• Live scoreboard | League tables | And you can email Scott

McGinn tries to release Watkins down the left. Tonali comes across to put a stop to his gallop. But Tonali’s clearance only goes to Tielemans, who immediately returns it down the inside-left channel to Watkins. He shoots. A deflection off Schar sends the ball into the bottom left, past the wrong-footed, and rooted, Pope. What a start!

Newcastle get the ball rolling. They’re kicking towards the Holte End in this first half.

• Live updates from the battle for pole in Saudi Arabia
• You can drop Billy an email | Sign up for the Recap

Piastri goes fastest, just edging Norris’s time with a lap of 1:28.026.

Russell, Tsunoda and Antonelli also set decent opening times.

Pete Townshend welcomes musician back into band after disagreement over his playing at Royal Albert Hall gig

Zak Starkey has been reinstated as The Who’s drummer just days after parting company with the band.

The group announced earlier this week that Starkey, the band’s drummer since 1996, was leaving over a disagreement about his playing at a Royal Albert Hall gig last month.

• Lewandowski injury mars Barça’s comeback victory
• McTominay strikes as Napoli keep pressure on Inter

Barcelona fought back from 3-1 down to beat Celta Vigo 4-3 in a rollercoaster encounter, with a stoppage-time penalty by Raphinha extending their lead over Real Madrid at the top of La Liga to seven points.

Barcelona took the lead in the 12th minute through Ferran Torres but conceded an equaliser three minutes later when Wojciech Szczesny misread a cross and allowed Borja Iglesias to score. The Spanish forward then stunned the home fans when he scored two more goals in the second half, twice racing through to beat the keeper on his way to a hat-trick.

Former president spoke at commemoration for the 168 people who died in the 1995 attack by far-right extremist

Bill Clinton called on Americans to put aside “whose resentments matter most” and issued a defense of government employees as he returned to Oklahoma City on Saturday for a remembrance service for the 30th anniversary of the deadliest homegrown terrorist attack in US history.

“If our lives are going to be dominated by efforts to dominate people we disagree with, we’re going to put the 250-year-old march toward a more perfect union at risk,” he said. “None of us would ever get much done. Believe me, we’ve all got something to be mad about.”

The American author on the follow-up to her bestselling debut Such a Fun Age, why she loves characters you want to shake, and reading 160 novels for the Booker prize

When Arizona-raised novelist Kiley Reid, 37, debuted five years ago with Such a Fun Age, she attained the kind of commercial and critical success that can jinx a second book, even landing a spot on the 2020 Booker longlist. Instead, Come and Get It – which is published in paperback next month – fulfils the promise, pursuing some of the themes of that first work while also daring to be boldly different.

The story unfolds at the University of Arkansas, where wealth, class and race shape the yearnings and anxieties of a group of students and one equally flawed visiting professor. Reid, who has been teaching at the University of Michigan, is currently preparing to move to the Netherlands with her husband and young daughter. She is also on the judging panel for this year’s Booker prize.

Free trade is smashed to pieces, while just a couple of chicks he fancies are spared

• You can buy a copy of this cartoon

Palestinians pushed into new misery as supplies of food, fuel and medicine run out in seven-week siege

Gaza has been pushed to new depths of despair, civilians, medics and humanitarian workers say, by the unprecedented seven-week-long Israeli military blockade that has cut off all aid to the strip.

The siege has left the Palestinian territory facing conditions unmatched in severity since the beginning of the war as residents grapple with sweeping new evacuation orders, the renewed bombing of civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, and the exhaustion of food, fuel for generators and medical supplies.

If green policy is going to survive the culture wars, it needs a new pitch – cleaner air, cheaper bills and healthier cities

For a decade, green activists in Britain have been congratulating themselves on their luck. Unlike in many countries in Europe, where motorists, farmers and rightwing groups have been driving anti-climate action, the UK has long enjoyed a comfortable political consensus on the subject. But conditions for a greenlash are assembling.

Most Britons still say they support climate efforts, but the price of decarbonising may at last be about to hit our wallets. Meanwhile, the Conservative party has come a long way since it sported a little green oak tree as its logo. Last month, Kemi Badenoch declared a full culture war against net zero, which she said couldn’t be achieved “without a serious drop in our living standards or by bankrupting us”.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk

The Premier League trophy Manchester City have proudly held for the past four years will be soon heading to one side of Stanley Park, but having exploded to life late against Everton they seized control of their Champions League destiny on the other. Nico O’Reilly and Mateo Kovacic sealed a win that even Pep Guardiola may not have seen coming to keep City on course for a 15th successive season among the European elite.

A goalless draw appeared the most likely outcome for much of a pedestrian contest, but a late surge, shaped by the contrasting impact of substitutes, allowed City to dominate and secure a ninth consecutive win here. Aston Villa’s visit to the Etihad Stadium on Tuesday represents a hugely significant moment in a troubled season for Guardiola and his team.

English-speaking minority refugees caught up in clashes between the military and separatists are stranded in neighbouring country

Amid the sound of children excitedly practising a drama for a forthcoming performance, a yam seller calls to passers by with discounts for their wares. Outside a closed graphic design shop overlooking them from a small hill, Solange Ndonga Tibesa tells the story of being uprooted from her homeland in north-west Cameroon.

In June 2019 she and other travellers were abducted with her three-month-old baby by secessionists, who accused them of supporting the military. Their captors repeatedly hit them with butts of their guns, keeping them in a forest without food or water.

Public toilets are rarely thought of fondly – that is unless you’re talking about those in Tokyo’s Shibuya district. Commissioned in 2019, creatives including renowned architects Shigeru Ban and the late Fumihiko Maki designed 17 beautiful, functional, meticulously clean public toilets, some of which featured in Wim Wenders’s 2023 film Perfect Days. Hong Kong-based photographer Ulana Switucha came across the toilets, each unique, while working on a project about Japanese architecture in 2023, and went back to photograph them the following year. “These structures are works of art,” she says. “They shine as beacons in their urban setting and demonstrate that public design can go beyond functionality to represent cultural and artistic value.”

• Ulana Switucha is the winner of the architecture and design category of the Sony world photography awards 2025

High-end bar with Middle East-style nut filling is rationed in shops as price of raw kernels surges

Product promotion on TikTok is now powerful enough to influence the vast agricultural economies of the US and Iran – at least when it comes to the consumption of high-end confectionery.

A chocolate bar stuffed with a creamy green pistachio filling has become incredibly popular after a series of video clips shared on the social media site. The first bit of footage praising the taste of the expensive so-called “Dubai chocolate” was posted at the end of 2023 and has now been viewed more than 120m times, to say nothing of the many follow-up videos.

Kremlin proclaimed a temporary ceasefire, but Russian artillery fire is continuing, according to Ukrainian president

• Ukrainian survivors speak after Russian attack on Sumy

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Russian artillery fire is continuing in Ukraine despite the Kremlin’s proclamation of an Easter ceasefire.

“As of now, according to the commander-in-chief reports, Russian assault operations continue on several frontline sectors, and Russian artillery fire has not subsided,” the Ukrainian president posted on X. “Therefore, there is no trust in words coming from Moscow.”

The Catholic church has taken the first steps to canonise the architect of Barcelona’s extraordinary Sagrada Família

I don’t understand the processes by which people become saints, but the case for the canonisation of the great Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, now progressing with the blessing of the pope, seems strong. He was devout – he tried to go without food for 40 days in emulation of Jesus Christ, until a bishop friend talked him out of likely death. The unprecedented phantasmagoria that he designed in stone, iron and ceramic could be called miracles. He even suffered a form of martyrdom, being hit by a tram while apparently deep in thought about his most famous work, the church of Sagrada Família. It’s not quite the same as a burning at the stake or a fusillade of arrows or the other grisly ends of ancient saints, but has its own significance. Gaudí’s mission was to find spiritual meaning in a world transformed by industry and machines, of which the fatal tram might be considered a representative.

Neverending calls to automated customer service lines aren’t just frustrating – new research suggests they may be quietly radicalising as well

Question: what are the eight most annoying words in the English language? Answer: “Your call is important to us … please hold.” But when you have turned into a gibbering wreck after 10 minutes of your valuable time have ticked away – intermittently punctuated by assurances that, while your tormentor is “experiencing high call volumes at the moment”, nevertheless your call is still important to him/her/it – you can take comfort in the thought that you are not alone. In fact, you belong to the majority of sentient beings in an industrial society like ours.

Thanks to a useful piece of market research, we now have an idea of the numbers of victims of this industrial practice – at least in the UK. A survey commissioned by the New Britain Project thinktank found that the average Briton spends between 28 and 41 minutes every week coping with inefficient customer service systems, and that nearly four-fifths of them are frustrated by “the wasted time, the unnecessary friction, and the quiet resignation that has become part of daily interactions with both public and private services”.

A 1960s house has been brought back to its former glory, with a contemporary twist

It feels as if time has stopped, frozen in the swinging 1960s, as you pass through the pristine gate that opens on to this enchanting lakefront building. The lake in question is the magical and wild Mergozzo, tiny, utterly charming and yet still rarely visited by tourists.

The house was built in 1963. Its equally fascinating current owner, Hilary Belle Walker, has American roots – San Francisco is her hometown, but she moved to Italy at the age of 23.

Agencies protecting coal miners from hazards such as ‘black lung’ among those gutted by government cuts

The Trump administration’s efforts to expand coal mining while simultaneously imposing deep cuts to agencies tasked with ensuring miner health and safety has left some advocates “dumbfounded”.

Agencies that protect coal miners from serious occupational hazards, including the condition best known as “black lung”, have been among those affected by major government cuts imposed by the White House and the unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) run by the billionaire Elon Musk.

More and more men are being sucked into parts of the internet that circulate misogynist content, leaving their families to deal with the wreckage

Samantha thought of her partner as the most progressive man she had ever had a relationship with. Her Swedish boyfriend seemed, to her, more feminist than many British men she had dated.

“I never had to ask him to clear up,” she says. “All our labour was shared. He had done therapy. He was happy to talk about his emotions.”

• Follow live updates from Saturday afternoon’s games
• Live scores | League tables | Sign up to Football Daily

West Ham (4-2-3-1) Areola; Coufal, Todibo, Kilman, Emerson Palmieri; Soler, Ward-Prowse; Bowen, Lucas Paqueta, Kudus; Fullkrug.
Subs: Fabianski, Cresswell, Mavropanos, Luis Guilherme, Rodriguez,
Soucek, Ferguson, Irving, Scarles.

Southampton (3-5-2) Ramsdale; Harwood-Bellis, Bednarek, Stephens; Walker-Peters, Downes, Fernandes, Ugochukwu, Manning; Onuachu, Sulemana.
Subs: McCarthy, Aribo, Smallbone, Stewart, Bree, Wood-Gordon, Archer, Dibling, Welington.

• Red Roses roll on to grand slam decider against France
• You can email Luke | And sign up to get The Breakdown

Holly Aitchison, wearing No 10 for England, kicks off.

The teams are out on the pitch in Leicester. Now for the anthems. A welcome blast of “Flower of Scotland” … and now Mitchell, in the stands, joins in with a rendition of “God Save the King”. Oliver Packer, Marlie’s son, is one of the mascots.

US vice-president, who is a Catholic convert, discusses immigration and international wars with secretary of state

The US vice-president, JD Vance, had “an exchange of opinions” with the Vatican’s secretary of state over current international conflicts and immigration when they met on Saturday, the Vatican has said.

The Vatican issued a statement after Vance, a Catholic convert, met Cardinal Pietro Parolin and the foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Gallagher. There was no indication he met Pope Francis, who has resumed some official duties during his recovery from pneumonia.

This most curious of Aberdeen seasons will end in Scottish football’s showpiece occasion. Time will tell whether this outcome proves fatal for the Hearts manager Neil Critchley, who has a damaging habit of falling on the wrong side of fine margins. Celtic or St Johnstone lie in wait for Aberdeen on 24 May. Jimmy Thelin’s team opened the campaign by going 16 unbeaten. A 12-game stretch where they could not win was to follow. The Scottish Cup final will round off their 2024-25.

Oday Dabbagh was Aberdeen’s hero, scoring the odd goal in three with less than two minutes of extra time remaining. Hearts played the entire second half with 10 men following Michael Steinwender’s red card. They were later reduced to nine after Cammy Devlin collected a second yellow. Hearts were sturdy and stuffy enough but, like so often this season, lacked punch.

Alla Shyrshonkova was on a bus when Russian missiles hit the city. Now a toy bear and hippo mark the spot where 35 people, including two children, were killed

Last weekend, Alla Shyrshonkova got on the 62 bus on a journey to her cottage near the Ukrainian city of Sumy. It was a warm spring day. “I thought I’d sit with friends, have some tea. Birds were singing. The weather was beautiful. It was so nice,” she recalled.

“The bus was packed. There wasn’t a single free seat. People were standing. Some were going to church for Palm Sunday. There were families with children.”

The progressive Democrat from Queens is the son of a famous film-maker and poised to take on frontrunner Andrew Cuomo

Can a 33-year-old cricket-playing socialist, who wants to freeze rent, make city transport free and once aspired to be a rapper win an already turbulent election to become the next mayor of New York?

Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist and state assembly ­member in Queens, has been the surprise package in the Democratic primary and is now poised to take on the frontrunner in the race, ex-state governor Andrew Cuomo, who is mounting a political comeback after being forced from office in the face of a series of sexual harassment claims.

Analysts trace a link between financial security and a troubling, increasingly devil-may-care, attitude to political risk

Steve Coogan wants ­people to see his new film, The Penguin Lessons, and think about how they might be living in a wealthy cocoon, disengaged from the world.

The film’s central character – a Briton teaching expat children in Argentina – rescues a penguin and tries to help local people persecuted by the rightwing government. Re-enacting a true story, Coogan is showing how it’s possible to be involved in local communities even when the protagonist is an outsider.

Brothers had hoped resentencing hearing would pave way for immediate release – but judge orders pause until May

The Menendez brothers have spent years waiting for another day in court and a chance to prove that they should be freed after serving over three decades in prison for the 1989 slayings of their parents.

This week it appeared their time was perhaps finally coming – a judge was set to review their request for a resentencing and determine whether they have been rehabilitated. Their attorney, Mark Geragos, planned to ask the Los Angeles county judge Michael Jesic to reduce Erik and Lyle Menendez’s charges to manslaughter, which would allow them to be released from prison immediately.

Michael B Jordan stars as twin 1930s mobsters in the Black Panther director’s phenomenal-looking, blues-infused supernatural tale

In Black Panther (2018) and its sequel, Wakanda Forever (2022), Ryan Coogler directed two of Marvel’s most satisfying and textured recent movies. His 2015 Rocky spin-off Creed represents the gold standard when it comes to franchise-wrangling, honouring the original series yet standing up and fighting its own corner as a distinct movie. If anyone has earned the chance to make a passion project, it’s Coogler. But who knew that this would result in something as wild, untrammelled and thrillingly unpredictable as Sinners? Starring Michael B Jordan in the dual role of 1930s gangster twins Smoke (surly, threatening) and Stack (charming, reckless), it’s a sweltering, sexy southern gothic horror, a blues-infused vampire flick in which the music flows as freely as the blood.

The brothers leave Chicago with the kind of cash that usually comes with a body count. Back in their Mississippi homeland, they team up with a young cousin, aspiring bluesman Sammie (Miles Caton, an impressive newcomer with deep, rich bourbon-soaked voice). The plan: to open a Black-owned juke joint under the noses of the Ku Klux Klan. But it turns out that an even greater evil awaits them.

In UK and Irish cinemas

The German scientist on her new book arguing that inequality, wealth and sexism are making the climate crisis worse – and what we need to do about it

Friederike Otto is a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London. She is also the co-founder of the World Weather Attribution initiative, which seeks to determine the influence of global warming on intensity and likelihood of an extreme weather event. The project also examines how factors such as ill-suited architecture and poverty exacerbate heatwaves, hurricanes, floods and wildfires. This is the theme of her second book, Climate Injustice: Why We Need to Fight Global Inequality to Combat Climate Change.

The thesis of your book is that the climate crisis is a symptom of global inequality and injustice. That will be quite topsy-turvy to some people, who think global heating is caused by the amount of carbon that we are putting into the atmosphere.
Yes, of course, if you just stick to the physics, then the warming is caused by the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, but the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is caused by the burning of fossil fuels. And it is also the case that those who benefit from the burning of fossil fuels are the few already wealthy people who have stakes in or own the companies themselves. The vast majority of people do not benefit. The American dream is social mobility, not burning fossil fuels.

Native seed demand far outpaces supply for the state’s ambitious conservation plan. This group combs the landscape to address the deficit

Deep in California’s agricultural heartland, Haleigh Holgate marched through the expansive wildflower-dotted plains of the San Luis national wildlife refuge complex in search of something precious.

She surveyed the native grasses and flowering plants that painted the Central valley landscape in almost blinding swaths of yellow. Her objective on that sweltering spring day was to gather materials pivotal to California’s ambitious environmental agenda – seeds.

In-cab digital signalling was tested last week as part of a project to secure the future of main-line locomotives

About 500 steam trains run across the UK each year, from Penzance in the south to Inverness in the north, ­transporting tens of thousands of passengers to a bygone age, ­bringing joy to the faces of enthusiasts and bemusing commuters.

But the future of main line steam operations could be under threat unless the traditional fire-breathing machines can be fitted with pioneering modern technology.

It was an afternoon of missed ­opportunities for Arsenal as they fell to defeat in the first leg of their Women’s Champions League semi-final. Melchie Dumornay’s late winner silenced the 40,000-strong crowd after Mariona Caldentey’s penalty had ­cancelled out Kadidiatou Diani’s opener for the visitors.

Arsenal’s manager, Renee Slegers, maintained belief in her side’s ­ability to turn the tie around after they recovered from an ­impressive first-half performance from the visitors.

Bases in Norfolk, Devon and Hampshire face MoD investigation over possible leaching of dangerous PFAS into environment

Three UK military bases have been marked for investigation over fears they may be leaking toxic “forever chemicals” into drinking water sources and important environmental sites.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) will investigate RAF Marham in Norfolk, RM Chivenor in Devon and AAC Middle Wallop in Hampshire after concerns they may be leaching toxic PFAS chemicals into their surroundings. The sites were identified using a new PFAS risk screening tool developed by the Environment Agency (EA) designed to locate and prioritise pollution threats.