Tehran threat comes as European powers press for vote that could lead to reimposition of UN sanctions
Iran has has said it will soon start releasing information from a treasure trove of Israeli nuclear secrets it claims to have obtained, as European countries push for a vote this week on reimposing UN sanctions on Tehran over its nuclear programme.
The unverified claims by Iranian intelligence of a massive leak of Israeli secrets may be designed to turn the focus away from what Iran argues is its own excessively monitored civil nuclear programme.
Veteran quits team after being stripped of captaincy
Record cap holder cites ‘loss of trust in coach’ Probierz
Robert Lewandowski has quit the Polish national team, saying he will not return to play for his country while the current manager remains in the role. Michal Probierz, who has been in charge of Poland since 2023, replaced Lewandowski as captain with Inter’s Piotr Zielinski on Sunday.
“Taking into account the circumstances and a loss of trust in the coach, I have decided to resign from playing for the Poland national team for as long as he remains in charge,” Lewandowski, 36, wrote on social media. “I hope I will still have another chance to play again for the best fans in the world.”
Tighthead Bealham called up with Furlong also injured
Opoku-Fordjour and George join Portugal training camp
The British & Irish Lions are facing mounting injury problems at tighthead prop with Zander Fagerson ruled out of the tour of Australia amid serious question marks over Tadhg Furlong’s fitness.
Glasgow’s Fagerson has withdrawn from the squad due to a calf injury with the Ireland and Connacht tighthead prop Finlay Bealham added to the 38-man group as a result. Furlong, meanwhile, has not featured for Leinster since the Champions Cup semi-final defeat by Northampton on 3 May and is also battling with a calf injury.
From his so-called ‘Muslim ban’ to slashing DEI measures, the US president has turned taboo behaviour into norms
This month marks exactly 10 years since Donald Trump coasted down an escalator at Trump Tower, declared his run for US president and accused Mexico of sending drugs, criminals and rapists into the homeland. The past decade has been exercise in normalising.
When Trump threatened to terminate Elon Musk’s government contracts, and Musk linked Trump to the child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, all because of a petty clash of egos, people were riveted but unsurprised. Likewise, when Trump ordered a travel ban on a dozen countries, many reacted with a collective shrug: well, of course he did.
Much has been made of the falling out, but Doge’s destruction continues and Musk’s fate is entwined with Trump’s
Thinking about the constant stream of news about Elon Musk, one is tempted to adapt two of the most famous sentences from American literature. William Faulkner wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” What comes to mind about Musk is: “He is not gone forever. He has not even left.”
It is profoundly misleading to frame Musk’s departure this past week as “disappointed reformer quits after finding it impossible to make bureaucracy efficient”, just as it is wrong to think of this week’s rift as “Trump regime changes direction”. After all, Musk’s people are still there; and Musk-ism – understood as the wanton destruction of state capacity and cruel attacks on the poorest – will continue on … what’s the drug appropriate to mention here? Steroids? Not least, Trump’s and Musk’s fates remain entwined.
Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University
Designer brands such as Always Pan and Caraway are booming – but safety experts are raising questions
The cookware industry has entered a golden age, largely driven by the wild success of a new generation of “nontoxic” and “nonstick” designer ceramic pans backed by stars including Selena Gomez, Stanley Tucci and Oprah Winfrey.
But the pans are likely not “nontoxic” some independent testing and research suggests. Nor are they even “ceramic” – at least not in the way the public broadly thinks of ceramics. Now, regulators are investigating some of the pan sellers’ claims.
As a middle-aged woman, I find it hard to identify with Davina McCall and her rock-hard abs. This lot, however …
The cultural juggernaut that is Real Housewivesis coming to London. The capital’s crop of glamorous, monied middle-aged women with short fuses will apparently include the wonderfully named Panthea Parker, someone known as “The Longest Legs in Belgravia” (Amanda Cronin), and a Chelsea baker called Nessie Welschinger.
It sounds like appointment viewing, but I feel it incumbent on me to ask: is Real Housewives a Good Thing? Gloria Steinem doesn’t think so. “They present women as rich, pampered, dependent and hateful towards each other,” she said in 2021. Other commentators, however, have pointed to the visibility the franchise offers a relatively underexposed demographic; the weighty themes sometimes covered, amid the froth; and the fact that, belying the reductive title, most of the “housewives” are successful, confident, professional people (albeit with a taste for drama).
Afghan fathers, brothers and husbands are under pressure to ensure the women in their families observe the country’s repressive laws. Here, men and women across the country explain how it is affecting family bonds
To be a father of daughters in the Taliban’s Afghanistan has become a daily nightmare for Amir. Now, he says, he is more prison guard than loving parent, an unwilling and unpaid enforcer of a system of gender apartheid that he despises yet feels compelled to inflict on his two teenage girls in order to protect them from the Taliban’s rage and reprisals.
Just a few years ago, Amir’s daughters had a life and a future. They went to school, to see friends and moved around their community. Now, he says he would prefer it if his daughters never left the house. He, like many other fathers in Afghanistan, has heard stories about what can happen to young women who find themselves in the crosshairs of the Taliban’s “morality police”.
Suited and booted, Yen turns to role as public prosector cum ass-kicking vigilante as a late-stage career recalibration
Developed by China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate and directed by butt-kicking luminary Donnie Yen, The Prosecutor is a bizarre mashup of courtroom procedural and action flick; it is just as keen on lionising due process and the “shining light” of Chinese justice as it is on reducing civic infrastructure to smithereens in several standout bouts. But Yen, who looks undeniably good in a suit, is more convincing on his habitual fisticuff grounds than the jurisprudential ones.
Yen plays Fok, a one-time hotshot cop who – leaving the force after some over-zealous policing – decides to man the “final gate” of justice and become a public prosecutor. Like a low-carb Perry Mason with years of Brazilian jiu-jitsu behind him, trouble keeps knocking on his door. Suspecting that a young drug smuggler (Mason Yung) whose case he is assigned has pled guilty to get his higher-ups off the hook, Fok starts looking into his slippery lawyer, Au Pak Man (Julian Cheung).
Special forces reportedly launched assault on Russian airfield about 400 miles from Ukrainian border
Ukrainian special forces claim to have damaged two fighter jets in a night-time raid on an airfield deep inside Russia as Kyiv sought to disrupt Vladimir Putin’s steady advances on the frontline.
Rightwinger accused of conspiring against democracy says appearance before supreme court will be ‘worth watching’
Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, will finally find himself in the dock this week, accused of masterminding an armed far-right conspiracy to seize power after losing the 2022 presidential election.
The 70-year-old paratrooper turned populist, who governed from 2019 until 2023, is scheduled to be interrogated by the supreme court as it seeks to untangle what federal police claim was a sprawling three-year plot to vandalize one of the world’s largest democracies.
The practice that helped me to sleep also gave me the clarity to end my marriage, and to begin dating again
In the run-up to Christmas 2018, wobbly with delirium on a station platform packed with partygoers, I nearly fell under a train. Insomnia – not the “I woke at 3am for a bit” type, but the brutalising “I might have dropped off for a fretful 45 minutes at around 6am” kind – will do that to a person.
I have rarely slept well. But this particular stretch of insomnia was, almost literally, a killer. I’d tried every snake oil on the market. A Harley Street hypnotist gave up on me after two sessions. Prescription sleeping pills stopped working. As a last resort, I tried the eight-week NHS cognitive behavioural therapy course for insomnia. It involved a tedious sleep diary, increasing “sleep pressure” by forcing myself to stay up until 2am and strengthening the “bed-sleep connection” by sacrificing my bedtime read. Far from helping, these strategies ramped up my frustration. Then I found one thing that did work – something I had dismissed as the preserve of man buns and pseudo-spiritualists: meditation.
The latest in our series of writers calling attention to their go-to comfort watches is a recommendation of a meaningful 2010 comedy drama
I remember the day anxiety took over my life. I was 12 years old and felt continually, grindingly nervous about everything and nothing. I had spent the morning in the student support office, coming down from a panic attack that had left me pinned to a classroom floor, heart pounding and tears streaming down my face. Over a post-recovery cup of tea and Jaffa Cakes, a pastoral adviser told me that if this was to become a regular occurrence, I would hit burnout by the end of term. The idea stuck.
Within my first few weeks at high school, I was diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder – a condition characterised by excessive and persistent worry, according to the NHS. A perfectionist streak had spiralled into an acute sense of responsibility. I was an overly conscientious student; I felt I had to be better than everyone else and excel at my studies in order to prove my worth. I tried to do as much work as I could, as perfectly as possible, as a way to shore up low self-esteem.
The boss of WPP, Mark Read, has announced he will step down, as the advertising agency, which was once the largest in the world, struggles against the rise of AI and its shares lag at their lowest level in about five years.
Read will leave WPP after more than 30 years, with just under seven spent in the top job. He will stay on as chief executive until the end of the year while the board starts to look for his successor.
Life is turned upside-down by a new arrival, in this weird and charming tale of nature and family – with a guest appearance from the ghost of Robert Louis Stevenson
Often thought of as the northernmost point of the British Isles, the Scottish island Muckle Flugga lies on the outer reaches of the Shetland archipelago. Norse legend has it that this craggy and almost uninhabitable place was created by two warring giants, obsessed with the same mermaid. While throwing boulders at each other, one of the rivalrous giants’ missiles accidentally plopped into the sea: and so the island was born.
A version of this mythic tussle is central to Michael Pedersen’s debut novel. When the narrative opens, delivered in a lively present tense sprinkled with Scots, The Father and his 19-year-old son Ouse are the only residents on the island. The Father mans Muckle’s lighthouse, and is as volatile as the waves he illuminates. A gossip from a neighbouring island describes him as irascible, with “a viper in his throat and … a broken soldier’s thirst for whisky”. Ouse, meanwhile, is “a queer sort” “who sounds as if he’s been sooking helium out of party balloons … always staring off into the distance”. He’s famed in the area for being an “artiste”, a dab hand at needlework with a reputation for producing beautiful handmade textiles.
Each character uses a different method of communication in Adam Wong’s drama, which benefits from the chemistry of its lead performers
An incisive film-maker with a keen eye for contemporary youth culture, Hong Kong director Adam Wong has returned with another sensitive ensemble drama. The film follows three twentysomething friends as they navigate various degrees of deafness. Alan, played by first-time deaf actor Marco Ng, is a cochlear implant (CI) user. He is also an ambassador for the surgery, which can help restore sound perception for those with hearing loss. Wolf (Neo Yau), his childhood friend, is a staunch user and supporter of sign language, which at one point was prohibited in local deaf schools; such institutions prioritised speech training, then believed to work better for hearing-impaired students. Sophie (Chung Suet Ying) is at a crossroads: she is a CI user who cannot sign, but yearns to learn.
It would, of course, be simplistic to portray these different forms of communication as inherently at odds with one another; instead, Wong’s film emphasises that, whether it is CI surgery or sign language, deaf people must be granted the autonomy to make these decisions on their own. Besides posing these thought-provoking questions, Wong also constructs rich inner worlds for these characters, in which deafness is only one thread of a whole tapestry. Wolf’s passion for the sea, for instance, is felt in the smallest of details, such as the ocean-themed trinkets that line his study desk. It’s the kind of visual attention that renders his dismissal from a diving school due to a lack of sign language interpreters even more heartbreaking.
We’d like to hear from gen-Zers about their finances and what their monthly expenses are like
When it comes to finances, gen Z has developed its own language from terms such as “loud budgeting” (not being afraid to say you’re being thrifty) and “doom spending” (mindlessly spending money as a form of self-therapy).
Whether you prefer “soft spending” or “cash stuffing”, we’re interested in finding out more about 18-to-28-year-olds and their finances. How much money do you earn and what are your spending habits like? Do you prefer to save or spend – or a balance of both?
Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
The presence of US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick at today’s talks in London is seen as directly related to China’s export ban on rare earth minerals and permanent magnets, critical in aerospace, military and semi-conductor companies worldwide, my colleague Lisa O’Carroll reports.
After the call between DonaldTrump and XiJinping last week, their first since Trump’s inauguration in January, the US said Xi had agreed to resume shipments of rare earths to the US, breaking the logjam needed for talks to resume.
Around 300 Guard troops have been deployed to LA so far.
President Donald Trump earlier said he would deploy 2,000 California National Guard troops to Los Angeles to respond to immigration protests, despite the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Aston Villa and Manchester United must shift surplus players while Sunderland and Leeds seek extra squad depth
Recruitment was cast as the main reason for the club’s disappointment last season. Mikel Merino playing as an auxiliary centre-forward after Kai Havertz had broken down made that apparent. This will be a summer with a marked difference with Andrea Berta ready to go as the club’s new sporting director. Berta spent 12 years at Atlético Madrid, supplying the players and foundation behind Diego Simeone’s dynasty. Arsenal seek to avoid friction between Arteta dictating as he did previously and Berta wielding the same kind of power that was so effective in Madrid. Benjamin Sesko of RB Leipzig is heavily linked to the striking vacancy with Sporting’s Viktor Gyökeres seen as too costly. Martin Zubimendi is expected to reunite with Merino in Arsenal’s midfield, though Real Madrid may yet turn the midfielder’s head. Kepa Arrizabalaga will come in as a back-up goalkeeper within a squad well set for success but missing the final pieces. John Brewin
Suspension comes as 13m students take four-day gaokao tests for limited spots at country’s universities
Big Chinese tech companies appear to have turned off some AI functions to prevent cheating during the country’s highly competitive university entrance exams.
More than 13.3 million students are sitting the four-day gaokao exams, which began on Saturday and determine if and where students can secure a limited place at university.
Organisation’s former president has no regrets over what was lowest grossing film in US history when released a decade ago
There are movies that bomb at the box office. And then there is the Fifa biopic United Passions, starring Tim Roth, Sam Neill and Gérard Depardieu, which was hit with the cinematic equivalent of a thermonuclear strike when it opened in the US 10 years ago this week.
You might remember the fallout; the fact it took only $918 (£678) in its opening weekend, making it the lowest grossing film in US history at the time, and the stories detailing how two people bought tickets to see it in Philadelphia, and only one in Phoenix, before it was pulled by distributors.
It was after the substitution of the former Liverpool captain that Thomas Tuchel’s side slipped in to individualism
The tendency is always to gloom. How could it not be? Nobody could have sat through England’s 1-0 win over Andorra on Saturday and not felt a profound sense of frustration. Six million years of human evolution has culminated in this? When the England manager shrugs and says he can’t blame the fans for booing, you know it was bad.
Thomas Tuchel was a short-term appointment. He’s not in the post for pathways or development or creating a culture. He’s here to win the World Cup next summer. In the boozy, drowsy somnolence of the RCDE Stadium, that felt a preposterous ambition. Look at England’s rivals.
Feeling energised after a cold dip may just be your body’s shock response –and increased immune cell activity doesn’t always mean fewer infections
‘It’s a long-held belief that taking to the waters is good for your health,” says Mike Tipton, a professor of human and applied physiology at the University of Portsmouth. From Roman frigidariums to Thomas Jefferson’s foot baths, cold immersion has long been seen as curative. But does modern science support the idea that it boosts immunity?
The answer: it’s complicated. While cold water immersion does activate the body, that’s not the same as strengthening the immune system. “When you immerse yourself in cold water, your body undergoes the cold shock response,” says Tipton. “You get rapid breathing, a spike in heart rate and a surge of stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol.” This may explain why people feel more alert or energised after a cold dip. But does it mean you’re less likely to get sick?
Forgive me the indulgence of celebrating ten years of this column. Toot toot!
I began posting biweekly brainteasers at the end of May 2015, originally addressing you folk as “guzzlers” – Guardian puzzlers. The cringy coinage didn’t stick, but the column did, and here we are a decade and 260 columns later.
Today, the Guardian, in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, launches Secure Messaging, a world-first from a media organisation
Today, the Guardian launches a unique new tool for protecting journalistic sources. Secure Messaging is an important new technological innovation that will make it easier for people to share confidential information with us.
Blowing the whistle on wrongdoing has always taken bravery. As threats to journalists around the world increase, so does the need to protect confidential sources. One of the most dramatic global shifts against whistleblower safety comes as part of the Trump administration’s continued assault on the free press.
Frederick Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée to be performed for first time, replacing classics by Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky after fundraising in London
One of the “most English of ballets” will be performed for the first time at the National Opera of Ukraine in Kyiv after a boycott of the classic Russian repertoire, including Swan Lake and the Nutcracker.
Sir Frederick Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée, a celebrated romantic comedy, will be performed to a sell-out audience on Thursday after Ukraine turned away from the works of Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and Prokofiev.
The extraordinarily popular painter of kitsch American scenes struggled with addiction and depression, as this documentary with access to his previously unseen works shows
You won’t find the works of Thomas Kinkade lining the walls of the Museum of Modern Art, yet the painter, who died in 2012, is one of the best-selling artists in history and his paintings hang in tens of millions of American households. Kinkade’s typical subjects – rustic landscapes, sleepy cottages, quaint gazebos – bask in an idyllic calm, a luminous callback to a fabled simpler past. Turning to his unpublished archive, Miranda Yousef’s engrossing documentary portrait unveils the dark shadows that lurked within the self-titled “painter of light”.
Through interviews with family members, close collaborators and critics, as well as Kinkade’s own words, the film traces his meteoric success in the 1980s and 90s. Shunned by the art world, he marketed his works through home-shopping television channels and a network of franchise stores to a ravenous fanbase. The Kinkade name became a brand and his pictures were plastered on to collectible plates, cookie jars and mugs. At its peak, his empire generated more than $100m a year.
An evocative deep dive into the environmental journalist and Brazilian Indigenous defender going missing in the Amazon. Plus, Richard Ayoade teams up with Warwick Davis, while Amber Rudd has some inside info to share …
This six-episode Guardian podcast opens with evocative descriptions of dense Amazonian jungle teeming with macaws, jaguars and howler monkeys. But the pastoral beauty soon gives way to fear, as we hear about the disappearance of environmental journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian Indigenous defender Bruno Pereira in a tale that pits them against the forces that run one of the world’s biggest drug-smuggling routes. This gripping investigation tries to get to the bottom of what happened and, given that it’s hosted by Phillips’s friend, the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent Tom Phillips, does so in a movingly personal manner. Alexi Duggins Episodes weekly, Widely available
Gwen’s talent vastly outshone her brother’s – but both are treated with subtlety in this outstanding dual biography
A young woman sits reading, a pot of tea to hand, her blue dress almost the only colour in a still, sandy room. Gwen John’s painting The Convalescent shows a subdued yet happy moment, for this woman is free to think and feel. That, we see in Judith Mackrell’s outstanding double biography of Gwen and her brother, was her ideal for living: to be at liberty even if that meant existing in deepest solitude.
The quietness of a life spent largely alone in single rooms, reading, drawing, painting and occasionally having wild sex with the sculptor Rodin, is counterpointed in this epic narrative by the crowded, relentless, almost insanely overstimulated life of Augustus John. Lion of the arts in early 20th-century Britain, he was a bigamist, adulterer, father of so many children you lose track (so did he), and an utterly forgettable painter.
As a lifelong singer and a teacher, Jean Walters was used to making a noise. At 67 she found a new way to do it
One sunny August evening, Jean Walters was sitting in her garden in Meltham, West Yorkshire, when the church bells began to ring. She sipped her glass of wine; the evening seemed idyllic. “A quintessential English country garden,” she thought, and posted on Facebook: “Bells ringing, how lovely!”
The next day when the plumber came to fix her toilet, more prosaically, he mentioned that he had seen her post, and being a bellringer himself, gave her the number of the local church’s tower captain. “He said, ‘Come along and try it.’ I did. I loved it. I said to my husband, ‘Did you hear that single bong? That was me.’”
The Liaoning carrier, accompanied by two missile destroyers and a supply ship, entered Japan’s exclusive economic zone before exiting to conduct military drills
A Chinese aircraft carrier group has entered an area of Japan’s territorial waters for the first time, prompting concern in Tokyo over China’s expanding naval reach.
The Liaoning carrier, accompanied by two missile destroyers and a supply ship, entered Japan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) on Saturday evening, Japan’s defence ministry said, before exiting to conduct military drills.
The national guard’s deployment in Los Angeles sets the US on a familiar authoritarian pathway. History shows the results
Now that Donald Trump’s tariffs have been halted, his big, beautiful bill has been stymied, and his multi-billionaire tech bro has turned on him, how does he demonstrate his power?
On Friday morning, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) conductedraids across Los Angeles – including at two Home Depots and a clothing wholesaler – in search of workers who they suspected of being undocumented immigrants.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
Perfect for summer dining, these cooling bowlfuls will quench both appetite and thirst
When the thought of eating hot meals seems unbearable, chilled soups will help you beat the heat. Today’s ones are cooling, nourishing, hydrating and a little more fortifying than the usual chop-and-blitz raw soups such as gazpacho. As much as I love those, sometimes I want something I can get my teeth into; something with the satisfying chew of cold noodles, or a crunchy or herbaceous topping. These are perfect for dining al fresco, or to pour into jars and take along to a picnic.
Vast areas of land are now dominated by one species – purple moor-grass – and good luck with seeing a bird or insect there. How do we revive these habitats?
Deserts are spreading across great tracts of Britain, yet few people seem to have noticed, and fewer still appear to care. It is one of those astonishing situations I keep encountering: in which vast, systemic problems – in this case, I believe, covering thousands of square kilometres – hide in plain sight.
I realise that many people, on reading that first sentence, will suspect I’ve finally flipped. Where, pray, are those rolling sand dunes or sere stony wastes? But there are many kinds of desert, and not all of them are dry. In fact, those spreading across Britain are clustered in the wettest places. Yet they harbour fewer species than some dry deserts do, and are just as hostile to humans. Another useful term is terrestrial dead zones.
Israel’s military took control of a boat trying to deliver food to Palestinians in Gaza in the early hours of Monday morning, and brought its crew of activists including Greta Thunberg to an Israeli port.
The Madleen was making a symbolic attempt to break to the blockade of Gaza and raise awareness of a looming “starvation crisis”.
There’s frustration among researchers that falling pH levels in seas around the globe are not being taken seriously enough, and that until the buildup of CO2 is addressed, the consequences for marine life will be devastating
On a clear day at Plymouth marina you can see across the harbour out past Drake’s Island – named after the city’s most famous son, Francis Drake – to the Channel. It’s quite often possible to see an abundance of marine vessels, from navy ships and passenger ferries to small fishing boats and yachts. What you might not spot from this distance is a large yellow buoy bobbing up and down in the water about six miles off the coast.
This data buoy – L4 – is one of a number belonging to Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML), a research centre in Devon dedicated to marine science. On a pleasantly calm May morning, Prof James Fishwick, PML’s head of marine technology and autonomy, is on top of the buoy checking it for weather and other damage. “This particular buoy is one of the most sophisticated in the world,” he says as he climbs the ladder to the top. “It’s decked out with instruments and sensors able to measure everything from temperature, to salinity, dissolved oxygen, light and acidity levels.”
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