Something to give sustenance while we’re missing Jackson Irvine, thanks to Dave Squires.
Another player not featuring for the Socceroos is Nectarios Triantis. The Sunderland midfielder withdrew from the squad at the last minute as he weighs up whether to change his allegiance and turn out for Greece.
We had him in the squad for the camp, and on the day that he was supposed to travel he informed us that he’s not coming in.
He just said he’s got a lot of things on at the moment, a lot on his mind in terms of what he wants to do. We have to respect that, and we’ll see what happens.
US defence secretary says there is ‘near consensus’ on 5% defence spending commitment for Nato member states
UK trade secretary Jonathan Reynolds has also called for reforms of the WTO including changes to the much-criticised dispute resolutions system which can also take years to settle disputes between trading nations.
“We do recognise that reforming and repositioning the WTO so that it can respond more effectively to the challenges of today is the only way to safeguard long term stability and growth tomorrow.
Israel has recovered the bodies of two Israeli-American hostages who were killed and abducted in Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the remains of Judih Weinstein, 70, and Gad Haggai, 72, both of whom had Israeli and US citizenship, were returned to Israel by the army and the Shin Bet internal security agency after an overnight operation in southern Gaza.
Their deaths had been announced in December 2023. “My beautiful parents have been freed. We have certainty,” their daughter, Iris Haggai Liniado, wrote in a Facebook post. She thanked the Israeli military, the FBI and the Israeli and US governments and called for the release of all the remaining hostages.
The Israeli military said in a statement that Judih Weinstein and Gad Haggai were murdered by gunmen when they attacked Kibbutz Nir Oz on 7 October 2023.
The Israeli military said in a statement that Judih Weinstein and Gad Haggai were murdered by gunmen when they attacked Kibbutz Nir Oz on 7 October 2023.
It’s the first major console launch in five years, so is it worth forking out for? From new tech to add-ons, our guide will help you decide
Since its announcement in January, anticipation has been building for the Nintendo Switch 2 – the followup to the gaming titan’s most successful home console, the 150m-selling Nintendo Switch. Major console launches are rarer than they used to be; this is the first since 2020, when Sony’s PlayStation 5 hit shelves. Whether you’re weighing up a purchase or just wondering what all the fuss is about, here’s everything you need to know.
Questions on general knowledge and topical trivia, plus a few jokes, every Thursday. How will you fare?
One of these days, like an exciting curveball, the Thursday quiz is going to end up appearing on a Wednesday or a Friday, just to keep everybody on their toes. But not this week. It is definitely Thursday, and this is definitely an increasingly weirdly niche quiz about topical news, general knowledge, and pop culture, which is excited today to lean into genuine newsy questions about Sparks and Doctor Who. There are no prizes, sadly, as the Thursday quiz operates on the most shoestring of budgets, but we hope you have fun and will let us know how you get on in the comments.
The administration has touted its efforts against illegal immigration. But what sets his actions apart is his crusade against those in the US legally
The Donald Trump administration has billed itself as taking unprecedented steps to crack down on illegal immigration. While the total number of deportations has yet to surge, it may happen soon. The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, supports suspending habeas corpus to speed up deportations, and the border czar, Tom Homan, has suggested blatantly ignoring court orders. Private companies are also lining up to cash in on mass deportations.
Nonetheless, Trump’s approach so far to immigration deemed illegal has not differed much from what Barack Obama and Joe Biden did. So why does everything feel different?
Daniel Mendiola is a professor of Latin American history and migration studies at Vassar College.
I can’t explain what was going through my mind my when I splashed out on them. But I’ve spent three years trying to make amends
One day in my late teens I found a pair of jeans that fitted me nicely. This was at the newly opened Merry Hill shopping centre in the Black Country. The jeans were an odd colour but I liked the cut of my jib in them. This was until I told a schoolfriend I’d bought some mustard-coloured jeans. “What kind of mustard?” he asked. “Not English, surely?”
I’m afraid they were. But I stuck with them, resolving to wash the colour issue away. Sadly, thanks to the ferocity of the laundering, soon after I’d got them from English mustard down to dijon, they fell apart, bringing the whole unhappy episode to an end.
A Hungarian law banning content about LGBTQ+ people from schools and primetime TV has been found to violate basic human rights and freedom of expression by a senior legal scholar at the European court of justice.
The non-binding opinion from the court’s advocate general, Tamara Ćapeta, issued on Thursday, represents a comprehensive demolition of the arguments made by the Hungarian government defending its so-called childprotection law, passed in 2021.
With the distraction of actual football finally over, the football fans among us are finally able to focus on what this is all really about: whether James Trafford will leave Burnley for Newcastle.
The 22-year-old burst on to the scene when leaving Manchester City as the third most-expensive British goalkeeper in history, despite never having played in the Championship, never mind the Premier League. Newcastle tried to buy him last summer, but in true football is the winner style, instead sold Elliot Anderson to Nottingham Forest and took the Greek keeper Odysseas Vlachodimos in part exchange, thus helping satisfy PSR concerns. But now they’re back with a vengeance!
Parliament votes to enact punishment after hours of fraught debate including attitudes towards Māori culture
New Zealand legislators have voted to enact record parliamentary suspensions for three MPs who performed a Māori haka to protest against a controversial proposed law.
Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke received a seven-day ban and the leaders of her political party, Te Pāti Māori (the Māori party), Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi, were barred for 21 days. Three days had previously been the longest ban for a New Zealand MP.
I spent far too many years lonely and angry, thanks to schoolmates who called me ‘weird’ and bosses who dismissed me as ‘hysterical’. But was it my sexuality that put their backs up – or the autism I am still coming to terms with?
My earliest memory is of feeling different. I’m gay, and grew up in the 1980s, in a tough, working-class town in the north of England at the height of the Aids crisis. My gayness was obvious in the way I walked and talked. I was bullied at school, called a “poof”, “pansy” and “fairy”; other children did impressions of me with their wrists limp. I experienced physical violence, too. I was shoved, kicked, my head was slammed against the wall. I was punched in the face more than once.
But it wasn’t just my sexuality that set me apart. I was “weird”. I had a rigid attachment to routine and was terribly shy, sometimes freezing in social situations. I needed to be on my own for long periods; not easy when you’re in a family of five and share a bedroom with your brother. I was obsessive, channelling this at first into the Star Wars films, then the Narnia novels and, as I got older, Madonna. Lots of kids have short-lived interests but mine were intense: I’d collect facts and statistics about Madonna, memorise the chart positions of her singles, then reel them off to anyone who would listen. If anyone criticised her, I took it as a personal attack and would be distraught.
A Madrid exhibition of work by the celebrated comic book artist Paco Roca marks 50 years since the death of Franco
The map of Paco Roca’s mind, a landscape of memory and loss, unfolds across the walls of an exhibition hall in Madrid, inviting visitors to acquaint themselves with the bittersweet geographies that have shaped the work of one of Spain’s best-known graphic artists.
Donald Trump’s newly signed travel ban contains an exemption that could apply to players, staff or associated families with clubs participating in the 2025 Club World Cup, 2026 Fifa World Cup or the 2028 Olympics.
The US president has signed a sweeping order banning travel from 12 countries and restricting travel from seven others, reviving and expanding the travel bans from his first term.
Eighty-year-old singer has another health setback, following cancelled concerts earlier this year
Rod Stewart has cancelled two concerts this week while he recovers from a bout of flu.
As he considers one of the biggest gigs of his life later this month, playing to what is likely to be more than 100,000 people at Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage, Stewart cancelled performances at the Colosseum theatre in Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas.
Cooke, who ran the Royal Court for several years, will succeed Rupert Goold at the illustrious London venue in 2026
Dominic Cooke has been appointed as the new artistic director of the Almeida theatre in London, succeeding Rupert Goold in 2026.
Cooke ran the Royal Court for several years and is an in-demand director with recent hits in the West End and at the National Theatre. “Twelve years after leaving the Royal Court, I couldn’t be more excited to be returning as an artistic director and to be taking the reins of this unique theatre,” he said. He described Goold’s Almeida as “a beacon of quality and innovation” and added: “I’m hugely grateful to him and his team to be handed an organisation in such good health. I look forward to building on this legacy and to future adventures in this magical space.”
Former Southampton coach beats Davide Ancelotti to job
Appointment part of major changes by new US owners
Rangers have confirmed the appointment of Russell Martin as the club’s new head coach. The 39-year-old former MK Dons, Swansea and Southampton boss has signed a three-year contract. He will be joined at Ibrox by the assistant head coach Matt Gill and performance coach Rhys Owen.
Martin guided Southampton to promotion to the Premier League last year, but was sacked in December after one win from their first 16 games. Rangers finished last season under the caretaker management of the former captain Barry Ferguson, having dismissed Philippe Clement in February.
Planemaker seals $1.1bn agreement to avoid prosecution over two crashes that killed 346 people
Boeing has agreed to pay $1.1bn (£812m) to avoid prosecution over two plane crashes that killed 346 people, in a deal that a lawyer for 16 families of the victims has described as “morally repugnant”.
The plane manufacturer has secured a deal – agreed in principle last month – with the US Department of Justice (DoJ), which includes paying $444.5m to the families of those who died in the crashes of 737 Max jetliners in 2018 and 2019.
Three years ago, British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian indigenous defender Bruno Pereira vanished while on a reporting trip near Brazil’s remote Javari valley. The Guardian’s Latin America correspondent, Tom Phillips, investigates what happened in the first episode of a new six-part investigative podcast series
UK trade secretary Jonathan Reynolds has also called for reforms of the WTO, including changes to the much criticised dispute resolutions system which can also take years to settle disputes between trading nations.
Reynolds told the EuropeanPolicyCentre security conference in Brussels:
“We do recognise that reforming and repositioning the WTO so that it can respond more effectively to the challenges of today is the only way to safeguard long term stability and growth tomorrow.
“Our eyes are fixed on greater flexibility in decision making, greater openness in the east of plurilaterals and building a fully functioning dispute settlement system,”
“the trees that survive the storms aren’t the tallest. They’re the ones whose roots are intertwined with their lives.
“Just in the past two days, during the OECD trade ministerial [summit] the message was clear and unequivocal – deep reform of the World Trade Organisation is long overdue and urgently needed to match today’s realities.”
“We negotiate. We do not isolate. We do not leave the table… trade agreements are more than transactions. They are upgrades that empower our partners, helping them grow with us and creating a cycle of shared prosperity.”
Israeli PM says bodies of Judih Weinstein and Gad Haggai returned to Israel after special operation
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday the bodies of two Israelis killed in Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack and held in Gaza had been returned to Israel.
Netanyahu said the remains of Judih Weinstein Haggai and Gad Haggai were recovered and returned to Israel in a special operation by the army and the Shin Bet internal security agency. According to the Associated Press (AP). He said in a statement:
Together with all the citizens of Israel, my wife and I extend our heartfelt condolences to the dear families. Our hearts ache for the most terrible loss. May their memory be blessed.
A US- and Israeli-backed group operating aid sites in Gaza pushed back the reopening of its facilites set for Thursday, as the Israeli army warned that roads leading to distribution centres were “considered combat zones”. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) closed its aid distribution centres after a string of deadly incidents near sites it operates that drew sharp condemnation from the United Nations.
Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli strikes killed at least 10 people in the battered Palestinian territory on Thursday as the military keeps up an intensified offensive. “Ten martyrs so far resulting from Israeli strikes since dawn,” agency spokesperson Mahmud Bassal told AFP, adding that they had targeted an area where displaced civilians were sheltering in the southern city of Khan Younis and houses in Gaza City and the central town of Deir el-Balah.
UN security council members criticised the US on Wednesday after it vetoed a resolution calling for a ceasefire and unrestricted humanitarian access in Gaza, which Washington said undermined ongoing diplomacy. “Today, the United States sent a strong message by vetoing a counterproductive UN security council resolution on Gaza targeting Israel,” secretary of state Marco Rubio said in a statement after Wednesday’s 14 to 1 vote.
Israeli bombardment on Wednesday killed at least 48 people across the Gaza Strip, including 14 in a single strike on a tent sheltering displaced people, the civil defence agency said. A day earlier, the civil defence and the International Committee of the Red Cross said 27 people were killed when Israeli troops opened fire near a GHF site in southern Gaza. The military said the incident was under investigation.
Will it be Oklahoma City or Indiana? Our contributors pick the winner, key players and dark horses before the season’s grand finale tips off Thursday night
The Thunder’s path to victory is to continue to be the most fearsome defensive unit we’ve seen in recent years. They play an uber-aggressive, hyper-switchable form of defense that has suffocated opponents all year long. It means they give up a lot of fouls, but they also get away with a bunch and force turnovers more than anyone else in the league. Keep that up and, with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander getting his customary 32 points a night, they won’t be stopped. Ryan Baldi
A majority of my age group agreed with a recent supreme court ruling – among 18- to 24-year-olds, the reverse was true. I believe the key lies in our respective life stages
Differing attitudes to women’s and transgender rights activism are often said to be generational. One poll, published a month on from the supreme court ruling that the legal definition of “woman” in the Equality Act is based on biological sex, found 63% supportive of the ruling and 18% opposed. But younger people were far more likely to be in the latter camp, with 53% of 18- to 24-year-olds disagreeing with the judgment. In my age group, 50-64, the figure was just 13%. Such results echo earlier polls.
As with any attempt to link a demographic with a point of view, there are plenty of exceptions. Last month Lady Hale, the octogenarian former president of the supreme court, became one of them when she argued that the ruling had been misinterpreted, telling a literary festival she had met doctors “who said there is no such thing as biological sex”.
Susanna Rustin is a social affairs journalist and the author of Sexed: A History of British Feminism
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The Scottish influence inspired title winners in Naples, Inter blew up and Claudio Ranieri enjoyed his Roman return
The season has barely ended and already it is clear Serie A will look very different next term. Five of the league’s top 10 sides have parted ways with their managers and a sixth, Claudio Ranieri, is moving upstairs at Roma. More changes may soon follow, with Igor Tudor’s future at Juventus uncertain and Como’s Cesc Fàbregas drawing attention from bigger clubs – including the runners-up, Inter, who need a replacement for Simone Inzaghi.
Could we equal the turnover of last summer, when 14 out of 20 teams got a new coach? It’s not impossible, especially with several lower-half teams and their tacticians still exploring the options available.
Wales midfielder feels ready to return from a knee injury and is looking for a club
“It’s been like snakes and ladders,” says the midfielder Joe Morrell, detailing how a hellish 16 months has proved the most difficult duel of his career. An innocuous click in his left knee, a setback in the gym while on holiday in Miami and the onset of arthrofibrosis – a condition where scar tissue builds between joints – and suddenly 492 days have passed since his last appearance, for Portsmouth in a League One match at Oxford.
He had just celebrated his 100th game for the club en route to the Championship. “People are probably quite confused and think I have disappeared. Everyone forgets about you.”
Three years after the deaths of the British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian activist Bruno Pereira, the Guardian joined the Indigenous peoples continuing their dangerous and often gruelling work to protect the rainforest
Photographs by João Laet
Tataco grimaces and braces for impact as his canoe hurtles towards the banks of Brazil’s Jordan River into a blizzard of branches, vines and leaves. In the bow of the boat, his Indigenous comrade, Damë Matis, shields his face with his arms as he is swallowed by the vegetation, twigs gouging his muscular shoulders.
“Get down! Get down!” Tataco yells, battling to control the vessel before its occupants are skewered by the lance-like boughs jutting out from the shore.
He called art ‘fart’ and hated talking about his work, but a rare retrospective offers the chance to celebrate the radical visions of the 20th-century British painter
On any objective reading, Edward Burra occupies a distinguished place in the history of 20th-century British art. His work, especially his watercolours of demi-monde life in interwar Paris and New York, is a distinct and vivid record of the times. His paintings are held in major institutions – as is his extensive archive, which is housed at Tate Britain in London.
And yet he remains “one of the great known unknowns of modern British art”, according to Thomas Kennedy, the curator of a new retrospective show at Tate Britain. It is being held more than half a century on from Burra’s last show at the Tate in 1973, three years before he died aged 71. There are lots of reasons for Burra’s “unknown” status, explains Kennedy. “He worked alone, and not being part of a defined group doesn’t help to place an artist. But probably more important is the fact he absolutely hated talking about his work.” Kennedy cites some excruciating documentary footage (also from the early 1970s) illustrating Burra’s painful reluctance to engage with questions about art. “He just hated that stuff and would call art ‘fart’ and things like that. Apparently, he walked through that Tate show as if wearing blinkers, not looking at the work and just wanting to get it over with.”
New Zealand’s former prime minister is a refreshingly informal narrator of her remarkable rise and fall
Jacinda Ardern was the future, once. New Zealand’s prime minister captured the world’s imagination with her empathetic leadership, her desire to prioritise the nation’s happiness rather than just its GDP, and her bold but deeply human approach to the early stages of the pandemic (though her “zero Covid” strategy of sealing borders to keep death rates low came back to bite her). She governed differently, resigned differently – famously saying in 2023 that she just didn’t have “enough in the tank” to fight another election – and has now written a strikingly different kind of political memoir. It opens with her sitting on the toilet clutching a pregnancy test at the height of negotiations over forming a coalition government, wondering how to tell the nation that their probable new prime minister will need maternity leave.
Ardern is a disarmingly likable, warm and funny narrator, as gloriously informal on the page as she seems in person. A policeman’s daughter, raised within the Mormon church in a rural community down on its luck, she paints a vivid picture of herself as conscientious, anxious, and never really sure she was good enough for the job. In her telling at least, she became an MP almost by accident and wound up leading her party in her 30s thanks mostly to a “grinding sense of responsibility”. (Since it’s frankly impossible to believe that anyone could float this gently to the top of British politics, presumably New Zealand’s parliament is less piranha infested).
Exclusive: Excitement is higher elsewhere, in global split that seems to mirror level of trust in government regulation
People in English-speaking countries including the UK, US, Australia and Canada are more nervous about the rise of artificial intelligence than those in the largest EU economies, where excitement over its spread is higher, new research suggests.
A global split over what has been dubbed “the wonder and worry” of AI appears to correlate with widely divergent levels of trust in governments to regulate the fast-developing technology.
Nearly three years after accepting a UK scholarship, Bassem Abudagga has watched Gaza’s horrors close in on his relatives, and British bureaucracy fail to help
The silence of the early hours was unbearable, perhaps worse than on any night since 7 October 2023. Bassem Abudagga paced around his flat in Manchester waiting desperately for an answer. He knew from a WhatsApp group of 800 relatives, set up by his extended family in Gaza, that houses near where his wife and two young children were holed up to the west of Khan Younis were being hit by Israeli missiles. His wife, Marim, was not picking up.
“Every single minute, I am with them 24 hours a day and night. When there is any risk, I keep in contact all the time with them online,” he says. “It depends on the connections, sometimes they are very bad. Even when I am sleeping I keep the notifications very loud and I keep just waking up when one goes off. When they are at risk they just text me. It is very exhausting because they feel that if I am in touch with them it is like a hope, they just hold it. I cannot sleep if there is a bombardment.”
The city once neglected its most famous son. But this summer visitors can immerse themselves in a major new exhibition and see the artist’s restored studio, home and the landscapes that inspired him
Paul Cezanne is everywhere in Aix-en-Provence: there are streets named after him as well as a school, a cinema and even a sandwich (a version of traditional pan bagnat but with goat’s cheese instead of tuna). And from late June, the whole city will go Cezanne mad, as the painter’s atelier, north of the centre, and the family home to the west reopen after an eight-year restoration.
But during Cezanne’s lifetime, and for years after his death in 1906, Aix seemed at pains to ignore the artist later called the “father of modern art”. When his widow, Hortense, offered several paintings to the city’s main Musée Granet, director Henri Pontier declared that Cezanne paintings would enter the gallery only over his dead body.
Oilers erase 3-1 deficit in Stanley Cup final rematch
Skinner makes 29 saves in win; Game 2 on Friday
Leon Draisaitl scored a power-play goal 19:29 into overtime, fueling the host Edmonton Oilers to a 4-3 comeback victory over the Florida Panthers on Wednesday in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup final.
Edmonton erased a 3-1 deficit in regulation and made Florida pay for Tomas Nosek’s delay-of-game penalty late in overtime.
Investigation will fuel GOP campaign to discredit ex-president and undo pardons and orders issued at end of his term
Donald Trump has ordered an investigation into Joe Biden’s actions as president, alleging top aides masked his predecessor’s “cognitive decline”.
The investigation will build on a Republican-led campaign already under way to discredit the former president and overturn some of his executive actions, including pardons and federal rules issued towards the end of his term in office.
Should we believe the warning that AI is about to upend the jobs market? Chris Stokel-Walker reports
Over the weekend, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, arguably Open AI’s greatest rival, issued a stark warning. He claimed that AI’s rapid advancement could lead to the disappearance of half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years, as well as 10-20% unemployment levels in the United States by the end of the decade.
“Everyone I’ve talked to has said this technological change looks different. It looks faster, it looks harder to adapt to … We’re not going to prevent it just by saying everything’s going to be OK.”
World Cup captain’s withdrawal is an important wake-up call, and leaves serious questions for coach Sarina Wiegman
Millie Bright’s decision to withdraw from selection for the European Championship this summer, partly to look after her mental health, is one of the most courageous acts an England player has made and might yet prove to have just as powerful an impact off the pitch as her performances have had on it.
Going to a major tournament for your country is every player’s dream and therefore for Bright, who captained England in the 2023 World Cup final, to bravely risk criticism and sacrifice that opportunity because she has the self-awareness to know that – in her words – “the fans deserve more” than what she can offer is sad for the Lionesses, but it should also serve two higher purposes.
Exclusive: Asaad al-Nasasra told PRCS he heard Israeli troops shoot first responders while they were clinging to life
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society has detailed the harrowing account of one of its paramedics, who told the organisation he heard Israeli troops shoot first responders while they were still clinging to life.
Asaad al-Nasasra, 47, was one of two first responders to survive the 23 March attack on a convoy of emergency vehicles in which 15 other medics and rescue workers were killed.
UK watchdog has had 40 reports relating to pregnancies in people using drugs such as Ozempic and Mounjaro
Women using weight-loss drugs have been urged to use effective contraception after dozens have reported becoming pregnant while taking the medication.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has issued its first alert to the UK public regarding contraception and weight-loss medications after it received 40 reports relating to pregnancies while using drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro.
Exclusive: Melbourne team demonstrates way to make the virus visible within white blood cells, paving the way to fully clear it from the body
A cure for HIV could be a step closer after researchers found a new way to force the virus out of hiding inside human cells.
The virus’s ability to conceal itself inside certain white blood cells has been one of the main challenges for scientists looking for a cure. It means there is a reservoir of the HIV in the body, capable of reactivation, that neither the immune system nor drugs can tackle.
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