“Wimbledon or Lord’s – the excitement is the same, right?” begins Krishnamoorthy V. “This is a match for India to lose. The problem with such low targets is often mental rather than logic or capability. The total is something that Pant alone can knock off, but throw in a full house, Lord’s, the second-innings score of England, a clever captain and nerves, and it is not as open and shut as it appears. I personally want the Indian team to win as they can close the discussions on Kohli and Sharma forever, but I sense that Stoke’ sleeve could be full of aces.”
The pitch has also started misbehaving. Skiddy bowlers tend to do well at Lord’s, so I agree Stokes, who bowled well last evening, could have a crucial role to play today, but with the ball as much as with his captaincy. I imagine he’ll stay on after completing his unfinished over, and it’ll be Carse from the other end, as Archer looked a bit tired yesterday.
US president says Bongino ‘sounded terrific’ when he spoke to him about uproar over how Justice Department handled inquiry in Epstein death
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We begin with news that president Donald Trump said on Sunday he spoke to deputy FBI director Dan Bongino to try to calm an uproar over how the Justice Department handled the probe into the death of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his alleged clientele, Reuters reported.
King Charles has invited Donald Trump for an unprecedented second state visit in September, scheduling the trip for three days when parliament is not sitting and removing the possibility of the US president addressing parliament. The visit is a coup for the White House, with Trump becoming the first elected politician in modern history to be granted two state visits, after his earlier one in 2019.
However, the US president received a frostier reception when he made an appearance at the Club World Cup final in New Jersey on Sunday. Trump was booed and jeered by the crowd during the national anthem before the match and again while presenting the trophy to Chelsea alongside Fifa president Gianni Infantino.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has called on the EU to “defend European interests resolutely” after Trump threatened to impose 30% tariffs on nearly all imports from the EU. It came as the EU moved to de-escalate tensions after the blunt move by Trump on Saturday. The bloc declared a further pause on €21bn of retaliatory tariffs until 1 August, dovetailing with the US president’s new deal deadline.
On Monday, in an extraordinary show of force, a convoy of federal agents descended upon Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park. Chaperones from a summer camp hurried children indoors, as protesters and media rushed to the scene. City leaders denounced the spectacle as a “political stunt” designed to terrorize Angelenos who have been reckoning with a relentless onslaught of immigration raids that began in early June.
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said on Sunday that Trump wants to have the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) “remade” instead of eradicated entirely. In a new interview on Sunday with NBC, Noem defended the Trump administration’s response to the deadly Texas floods that have killed at least 120 people, saying: “I think the president recognizes that Fema should not exist the way that it always has been. It needs to be redeployed in a new way, and that’s what we did during this response.”
Rosie O’Donnell has shrugged off a threat from Trump to revoke her US citizenship on the grounds that she is “a threat to humanity”. The New York-born actor and comedian said on Sunday that she was the latest in a long list of artists, activists and celebrities to be threatened by the US president.
A new Senate committee report on the attempted assassination of Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, described the events as a “cascade of preventable failures” and called for more severe disciplinary action to be taken with the Secret Service in the future. In the 31-page, highly critical findings released on Sunday, the Senate homeland security and governmental affairs committee lamented the mishandling of communications around the rally and said Trump was denied extra security on the day.
Kevin Hassett, the White House economic adviser, said Trump has seen some trade deal offers and thinks they need to be better, adding that the president will proceed with threatened tariffs on Mexico and the EU if they don’t improve.
The number of days with temperatures 5°C above the 1961-1990 average has doubled for the most recent decade 2015-2024 compared to 1961-1990. For 8°C above average the number has trebled and for 10°C it has quadrupled. This shows how the hottest days we experience in the UK have increased in frequency dramatically in just a few decades.
EU ministers meet for urgent talks after US president threatens 30% tariffs on bloc
Meanwhile in Paris, France’s annual Bastille Day military parade is under way in all its pomp and colour, this year featuring more than 240 vehicles, 100 planes and helicopters and 5,600 troops marching down the cobblestones of the Champs-Elysées.
Besides providing the excuse for a nationwide party to mark the 1789 storming of the Bastille fortress and prison, the parade is also a display of French military force – which, in an increasingly uncertain world, Emmanuel Macron aims to increase.
Investigation verifies allegations of inappropriate sexual language and one incident of unwelcome physical contact
A report on the behaviour of Gregg Wallace has substantiated 45 allegations made against the former BBC presenter, including claims of inappropriate sexual language and one incident of unwelcome physical contact.
A seven-month investigation into a series of allegations against the MasterChef presenter covered 83 allegations against him, with more than half substantiated by the investigation team.
The latest in our series of writers recommending comfort watches is a tribute to 1996’s charming restaurant-set comedy drama
“Life is meals,” observed the novelist James Salter. Big Night, Stanley Tucci’s spirited and sumptuous indie from 1996, is a film about one big meal that asks a few big questions about life, including: What is the cost of the American dream? What does food allow us to say to each other that words can’t? And what right does Marc Anthony, of all people, have to deliver one of the most charming non-speaking performances in any movie since the silent era?
Big Night follows two Italian immigrants who run a failing restaurant in 1950s New Jersey. Ambitious, high-strung Secondo (Tucci, practically hirsute) is the manager, while his brother Primo (Tony Shalhoub) is the madman in the kitchen, a purist who derides the local clientele as philistines and has begun to doubt the wisdom of coming to the US in the first place.
Minecraft and other creative games are becoming recognised as powerful means of self-expression and mental health support, including for traumatised Ukrainian refugees
Oleksii Sukhorukov’s son was 12 when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. For months, the family existed in a state of trauma and disarray: Sukhorukov was forced to give up his work in the entertainment industry, which had included virtual reality and video games; they became isolated from friends and relatives. But amid the chaos, his boy had one outlet: Minecraft. Whatever was happening outside, he’d boot up Mojang’s block-building video game and escape.
“After 24 February 2022, I began to see the game in a completely different light,” says Sukhorukov. I discovered that Ukrainian children were playing together online; some living under Russian occupation, others in government-controlled areas of the country that were the targets of regular missile attacks; some had already become refugees. And yet they were still able to play together, support one another, and build their own world. Isn’t that amazing? I wanted to learn more about how video games can be used for good.”
A science journalist delves deep into our sometimes fraught relationship with these intelligent animals
‘There is no creature born, even among the greater apes, which more resembles a human baby in its ways and its cries than a baby grey seal,” wrote the ecologist Frank Fraser Darling in 1939. Seals’ large eyes, the five digits of their flippers, their lanugo – the soft down with which they (and sometimes we) are born – all erode the mental barriers we erect between ourselves and our marine cousins. According to Faroese legend, there are even seals, known as selkies, that can shed their skins, assume human form and live undetected among us.
The selkie myth is just one that appears in the Maine-based science writer Alix Morris’s compelling book, which explores seals’ fraught relationship with culture, the economy and our imaginations. She charts the varied and conflicting ways in which we conceive of these creatures: as reviled competitors for fish, magnets for great white sharks, or defenceless human children who “weep” when distressed.
Katie Taylor’s decisive victory over Amanda Serrano at MSG on Friday capped a watershed night for Most Valuable Promotions, who are betting big on women’s boxing
On Friday night, 11 July, Katie Taylor earned the clear-cut win that had eluded her in two previous victories by controversial decision over Amanda Serrano. Fighting before a sold-out crowd of 19,721 on the first all-women’s boxing card ever at Madison Square Garden, Taylor outboxed her longtime rival and solidified her status as one of the greatest women boxers of all time.
The evening was a celebration of women’s boxing and also marked a significant step forward for Most Valuable Promotions (Jake Paul’s promotional company), which orchestrated, produced and marketed the event.
Alejandro Garnacho wants to leave Manchester United but is not too eager on moving to the Saudi Premier League, even if it means teaming up with Cristiano Ronaldo. Al-Nassr approached the Argentina winger to suggest a change of scene and a massive wage but Garnacho wants to play in Europe. The same reportedly goes for his United colleague Marcus Rashford, with the England forward waiting for Barcelona to make a bid.
One United winger finally getting to leave permanently is Jadon Sancho, who has joined Juventus for £17.3m, only £60m or so less than they paid for him four years ago.
Getting fit can be more difficult as you grow older, but a few tweaks to aerobic and resistance training can have a positive impact and reduce the risk of disease
‘Your muscles become less responsive to exercise with age,” says Professor Leigh Breen, an expert in skeletal muscle physiology and metabolism at Birmingham University. “It’s not as easy to gain muscle and strength as when you were younger.”
But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort. “The idea that exercise becomes pointless past a certain age is simply wrong,” he says. “Everyone responds to structured exercise. You may not build as much visible muscle, but strength, cardiovascular health, brain function and protection against non-transmittable disease all improve.”
We have warned the government repeatedly: the response has been pathetic. Britain has a duty to act morally, and stop supporting this genocide
Dr Natalie Roberts is the executive director of Médecins Sans Frontières UK
Our colleague Abdullah Hammad was killed last week by Israeli forces as he waited to collect flour from an aid truck in Khan Younis. He is the 12th Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) colleague to have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. The Israeli-US food distribution scheme forces people in Gaza to choose between starvation and risking their life for minimal supplies. With more than 500 people killed and nearly 4,000 wounded while seeking food, this scheme has had the effect of luring desperate people in with aid, only for them to be slaughteredby the Israeli armed forces.
This is part of the genocide that is being committed in Gaza. And the UK government is complicit.
Dr Natalie Roberts is the executive director of Médecins Sans Frontières UK
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.
Time to sign out of your Work Bag, sling a straw basket bag over your shoulder and feel your pulse slow down
Is there any point putting an out of office on your emails when you go on holiday any more? “I won’t have access to emails.” Yeah, right. Sorry, you aren’t fooling anyone: no one goes on holiday without their phone in 2025. Your office know perfectly well that if you don’t answer emails, they can still reach you by text or direct message. Even, theoretically, by actually calling you, although obviously that won’t happen because that’s another thing that no one does in 2025. Tweak your out of office message as much as you like – you might as well stick your fingers in your ears.
No, the best way to set your brain to holiday mode is by signing out of your Work Bag. Swapping the bag you take on your daily commute for a free-and-easy alternative is more effective as a psychological gear change than logging out of your emails. In day-to-day life, I change handbags as rarely as possible, the potential for leaving keys in an inside pocket and getting locked out being just too real. But when you get home after work and you aren’t going back for a week or two, there is something very pleasing about marking that moment by throwing away leaky pens, marvelling at how you managed to accumulate 14 hairbands, and then shaking the bag over the bin and feeling disproportionately thrilled when a pound coin falls out. Stashing the bag – with your office pass inside – is very out of sight and out of mind.
Carolina Wilga says she spent 11 nights in outback after leaving van in ‘state of confusion’
Carolina Wilga hit her head in a car crash and left her vehicle in a “state of confusion” before going missing in the Western Australian outback for 11 nights, the German backpacker has revealed.
In the 26-year-old’s first statement since flagging down a local woman, Tania, in a passing car on Friday afternoon, Wilga explained the series of events that led to her disappearance.
Irishman explains the emotion of winning Claret Jug at Portrush in 2019 after the ‘toughest 24 hours of my sporting life’
The gable end of a house on Causeway Street in Portrush delivers a reminder of Shane Lowry’s Open triumph in 2019. The fantastic mural not only depicts Lowry with the Claret Jug in hand, but how Ireland, whether north or south, unites behind its sportspeople. Lingering memories from six years ago recall Lowry stretching away from the field towards the end of round three. He was in an unassailable position.
The subsequent epic, week-long celebrations are another key reference point; the new Open champion showed the sporting world how to party and it fuelled a misconception, a tired cliche of the bearded, drinking Irishman.
The Velvet Sundown released two albums before admitting their music, images and backstory were created by AI
They went viral, amassing more than 1m streams on Spotify in a matter of weeks, but it later emerged that hot new band the Velvet Sundown were AI-generated – right down to their music, promotional images and backstory.
The episode has triggered a debate about authenticity, with music industry insiders saying streaming sites should be legally obliged to tag music created by AI-generated acts so consumers can make informed decisions about what they are listening to.
‘The gaffer put a great gameplan out,’ says forward
Palmer scored twice and set up Blues’ third in win
Cole Palmer said that Enzo Maresca is building something special after Chelsea produced a stunning performance to beat Paris Saint-Germain 3-0 in the first final of Fifa’s expanded Club World Cup.
Palmer was in astonishing form at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, scoring two brilliant goals and setting up João Pedro to make it 3-0 by half‑time. Chelsea were underdogs going into their clash with the European champions but they were set up brilliantly by Maresca, whose young side will go into next season with incredible belief after being crowned world champions.
Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, as Andrew Bailey insists: “I think the path [for interest rates] is down”.
A Bank of England interest rate cut next month is looking more likely, according to the latest city pricing.
The money markets are indicating there’s now an 85% chance that the Bank cuts interest rates at its next meeting on 7 August, up from 76% at the end of last week.
Friday’s disappointing GDP figures, combined with these weak jobs figures boost the case for the Bank of England to cut interest rates in August. The central bank’s governor Andrew Bailey told The Times ‘slack’ was opening up in the labour market, and he believes ‘the path is downward’ for interest rates.
All eyes are on Wednesday’s inflation report with CPI expected to remain at remain around 3.4% in June, roughly unchanged for the third consecutive month.”
Three decades on from the author’s breakthrough debut, why are we still trapped in the Trainspotting moment?
It has been more than 30 years since Irvine Welsh published Trainspotting. To put that in perspective, it’s as distant to readers today as Catch-22 or To Kill a Mockingbird would have been in 1993. If you are anything like me, that doesn’t feel quite right. Because even at such a historical remove, there remains something undeniably resonant, something curiously current, about Welsh’s wiry, demotic, scabrous debut.
In part, this is explained by the sheer scale of Trainspotting’s success. It was one of those genuinely rare literary events, wherein a critically acclaimed, stylistically adventurous book catches the cultural zeitgeist to such a degree that it also becomes a commercial sensation, going on to sell over a million copies. Its cultural salience was further compounded by Danny Boyle’s cinematic adaptation, one of the highest-grossing UK films of all time, a visual intervention that seemed to crystallise the aesthetics of Britpop – high velocity, high audacity, high nostalgia.
Where his family once farmed on a wild fringe of the Lycian shoreline, one man has built his dream retreat
Aged seven or eight, planting onions on his father’s land above Kabak Bay, Fatih Canözü saw his first foreigner. Before the road came in 1980, his village on the jagged coast of south-west Turkey’s Lycia region was extremely remote, isolated by steep valleys and mountains plunging into the sea. It took his family two days to get to the city of Fethiye on winding donkey tracks, to sell their apricots, vegetables and honey at the market. Despite his shock at seeing the outside world intrude for the first time, Canözü remembers thinking even then that tourism was the future.
Four decades on and having trained as a chef, Canözü has not only built a restaurant and 14 tourist cabins in Kabak, he has married a foreigner too: a former Middle East correspondent from England, who came here to research a novel and ended up falling in love. Now they are raising their family on this wild fringe of Anatolia’s Turquoise Coast, a region that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founding father of the Republic of Turkey, is said to have called the most beautiful in the country.
Winner of the Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award, the South African documentary photographer and filmmaker focuses her photo essay on daily life inside a former public hospital that has been occupied since 2017 by more than 1,500 people resisting displacement
Brace yourself for the staggering tale of Travis, who has both real and bot wives. Plus, the wickedly gossipy duo of Graham Norton and Maria McErlane are back
This staggering tale of people falling in love with AI chatbots is baffling, tragic and terrifying. It’s full of jaw-dropping moments, as hosts Hannah Maguire and Suruthi Bala speak to Travis who “married” a bot despite already having a real-life spouse. There’s also the vulnerable teenager whose “companion” spurs him on to an attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II (which ends with him being charged with treason). Alexi Duggins Wondery+, episodes weekly
A new architectural guidebook was written as a love letter to the Ukrainian city – then Russia started bombing it. How will this home to Tetris-like offices and daring curved cinemas be rebuilt?
When the Derzhprom building erupted on to the Kharkiv skyline in the 1920s, it must have seemed like an impossibly futuristic vision. Standing like a gleaming white concrete castle, it curves around the circular plaza of Freedom Square in the city’s centre.
Built as the state industry headquarters of what was then the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, it looks like a three-dimensional game of Tetris, a mighty nest of chunky oblong forms stacked, rotated and interlocked to form a colossal administrative pile. Striding across three city blocks, and towering almost 60m high, it was the tallest office building in Europe for several years, its humungous floor plates connected high up in the air by thrilling sci-fi skybridges. It was far ahead of its time, prefiguring the brawny brutalist complexes that emerged in western Europe and the US half a century later.
Researchers in Europe found everyday plastics, especially farmers’ baler twine, being used by the birds as a building material and entangling their young. It is a problem that affects other species too, say experts in the US, UK and Argentina
On a late spring morning in the farmlands of southern Portugal, Dr Marta Acácio set her ladder against a tree and began to climb. Four metres up, she reached the giant white stork nest that was her goal. She knew from telescopic camera shots there was a healthy looking chick inside – and now she wanted to ring it.
But when Acácio, an ecologist from University of Montpellier in France, tried to scoop up the chick, it would not come away: it was tethered to the nest by a piece of plastic baler twine. She turned the chick over and recoiled: its belly was a mass of maggots.
Connexion
