UN calls for end to ‘bloodshed’ which has claimed at least 638 lives since Sunday, according to Syrian Observatory for Human Rights
Armed tribes supported by Syria’s Islamist-led government clashed with Druze fighters in the community’s Sweida heartland on Friday, a day after the army withdrew under Israeli bombardment and diplomatic pressure.
The United Nations called for an end to the “bloodshed” and demanded an “independent” investigation of the violence, which has claimed at least 638 lives since Sunday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).
The president is reportedly ‘on a warpath’ over a story in the Wall Street Journal – controlled by Trump’s top media ally
For days before the Wall Street Journal published its story about Donald Trump’s salacious friendship with Jeffrey Epstein on Thursday, the president was frantically working the phones.
He reportedly put pressure on the paper’s top editor, Emma Tucker, and even Rupert Murdoch, who controls the paper’s business side, claiming that the alleged facts behind the story were nothing but a hoax, and threatening to sue the paper if it forged ahead.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
Deborah Mason, 65, who had moniker ‘Queen Bee’, and seven members of her network sentenced to total of 106.5 years
A family-run organised crime group, orchestrated by a 65-year-old described by police as a “gangster granny”, has been sentenced for dealing drugs with a street value of £80m across the UK.
Deborah Mason, who had the moniker “Queen Bee”, and seven other members of the gang, were sentenced at Woolwich crown court in London on Friday for their involvement in supplying nearly a tonne of cocaine over seven months.
Talk is of a possible clean sweep for tourists but the onus is on Australia to make one or two Lions eat their confident words
Whatever unfolds over the next three Saturdays this British & Irish Lions series will resonate more than its predecessor. Simply to see visiting fans in red jerseys wandering down Queen Street in central Brisbane is to be thankful the whole enterprise has a beating heart once again, in contrast to South Africa four years ago when a Covid-disrupted, spectator-free experience sapped everyone’s spirits.
Because a Lions tour is nothing without a human element, enticed back every four years by the fabled steepness of the challenge. “This is our Everest, boys,” growled Jim Telfer back in 1997 and, as usual, the master coach was right. On only three occasions in the past 50 years has a Lions squad returned home triumphant and, for now, a series win remains the holy grail for the professional egg chasers of England, Ireland, Scotland and, if selected, Wales.
Centre-back’s ordeal against Sweden was damaging but sketchy press and midfield failings need to be addressed before Italy semi-final
Jess Carter glumly accepted her warm-down top, the pallid commiserations of Arjan Veurink and a seat on the England bench. In truth she had been fortunate to see 70 minutes of this quarter-final, and for all the nightmarish apparitions of the first half perhaps the last few minutes were the loneliest of all. Marooned at the back, 30 yards behind the rest of the team while England forced set pieces and pushed for a route back into the game: a last line of defence that had proved to be very little defence at all.
Esme Morgan would replace her to add some extra heft and the entire system would need to be rejigged to a back three. Carter would watch the excruciating last hour from a seated position, reflecting bleakly on the sort of performance that scars international careers, perhaps even defines them. “You’re feeling nothing and everything at the same time,” she said afterwards. “It’s a turbulent experience. I feel like it’s the first time I’ve smiled since the game.”
Lionesses overturned deficit to win on penalties in Zurich
Reigning champions will face Italy for place in final
England supporters in Zurich were recovering on Friday from the drama of the Euro 2025 penalty shootout win against Sweden, with one speaking of “absolute madness in the stands” as the team came from two goals down.
England’s official allocation of 2,099 tickets at the Stadion Letzigrund was sold out but there were about another 10,000 England fans in the stadium, including Louisa Holden-Morris, from Crewe, who was attending her 13th match at this tournament. She told the Guardian she could scarcely watch the penalties.
Police commissioner says there has been intelligence of formation of organised crime syndicate intent on havoc
Trinidad and Tobago has declared its second state of emergency this year amid “grave concerns” about a coordinated threat from organised crime gangs inside and outside the country’s prisons.
Announcing the decision on Friday, the commissioner of police, Allister Guevarro, said his force had received intelligence the day before that the gangs had “formed themselves into … an organised crime syndicate” and were intent on wreaking havoc and planning assassinations, robberies and kidnappings.
Long-acting contraceptives will not be sent abroad to women in need, a move costing US taxpayers $167,000
The Trump administration has decided to destroy $9.7m worth of contraceptives rather than send them abroad to women in need.
A state department spokesperson confirmed that the decision had been made – a move that will cost US taxpayers $167,000. The contraceptives are primarily long-acting, such as IUDs and birth controlimplants, and were almost certainly intended for women in Africa, according to two senior congressional aides, one of whom visited a warehouse in Belgium that housed the contraceptives. It is not clear to the aides whether the destruction has already been carried out, but said they had been told that it was set to occur by the end of July.
We know it’s an important quarter-final, and we’re focused on what we need to do. The team is ready, we have a clear plan to attack Switzerland and defend against their fast transitions. We’re eager for the match to begin. We know we’ll be playing away with a crowd supporting Switzerland, but we’re focused on our work and preparation. The players will have their minds on the game plan, and that will help us compete.
Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, combat training in Ukraine, wildfires in France and Iga Swiatek at Wimbledon: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists
Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing
Angela Rayner has urged Labour colleagues to “step up” and make the case for why the party should be in power as the government attempts to draw a line under a tumultuous first year in office and shift towards a more upbeat approach.
The deputy prime minister urged Labour MPs to focus on the party’s achievements over the last 12 months rather than always thinking about failures, saying they should all be “message carriers” for what had been done well.
Nearly 100 lawmakers claim the agency’s recent actions put veterans’ healthcare at risk. Department of Veterans Affairs chief says ‘no one is being discriminated against at VA’
The US Department of Veterans Affairs has enthusiastically joined Donald Trump’s war on DEI – demanding that staffers report colleagues who engage in diversity initiatives, banning LGBTQ+ pride flags from VA hospitals and shuttering an office investigating why Black veterans are more likely to have their mental health disability claims rejected.
Last week, the VA secretary, Doug Collins, tweeted that “VA is now squarely focused on Veterans – not out-of-touch, woke causes such as DEI and gender dysphoria treatments.”
Ukrainian seeks to unify the heavyweight division again at Wembley on Saturday before putting family time first
Boxing, as Oleksandr Usyk knows, gets everyone in the end. It is a harsh and pitiless business and earlier this week, at the end of a long afternoon answering the same old questions in front of a line of television cameras, Usyk sat down with a small group of familiar faces who have written about him for years. During his last assignment for the day he opened up a little more as he spoke about the sacrifices boxing demands.
He told us how much he wanted to see his wife, Yekaterina, as she had just flown into London and they would be reunited that evening. Three months had passed, in a gruelling training camp, since they had been together and Usyk spoke about missing her and their four children.
If Israel’s prime minister accepts a ceasefire deal soon, it will only be because the timing suits him. He, like his country, will face a reckoning
Will the war in Gaza last for ever? It’s not a wholly rhetorical question. There are days when I fear that the death and devastation that has gone on for 650 days will never stop, that it will eventually settle into a constant, low-level attritional war inside the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict – a war within a war – that becomes a background hum to world affairs, the way the Troubles in Northern Ireland endured for 30 years. In this same nightmare, incidentally, I see Benjamin Netanyahu, who has already sat in Israel’s prime ministerial chair for nearly 18 years, on and off, staying put for another 18 years or more, ruling the country until he is 100.
Israelis don’t want either of those things to happen. Polls show that only a minority trust Netanyahu, while an overwhelming majority – about 74% – want this terrible war to end. As the leader of one of the ultra-orthodox, or Haredi, parties that this week quit Netanyahu’s ruling coalition – over the government’s failure to pass a bill permanently exempting Haredi youth from military service – recently put it: “I don’t understand what we are fighting for there … I don’t understand what the need is.”
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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Foreign secretary says two agents were involved in planting spyware on a device used by poisoning victim Yulia Skripal
The UK has exposed 18 Russian spies and their units responsible for cyber-attacks in Britain and hacking one of the victims of the Salisbury poisonings, David Lammy, the foreign secretary, has said.
Announcing individual sanctions, Lammy said Russia had targeted media, telecoms providers, political and democratic institutions and energy infrastructure in the UK in recent years.
The US president is struggling to close down speculation about the case that those close to him have promoted
Donald Trump has thrived on conspiracy theories – “birtherist” lies that Barack Obama was born outside the US; the lunacies of the Q-Anon movement; false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. All centred on the idea that the “deep state” was lying to, and thus cheating, ordinary people. Mr Trump was their tribune.
It’s hard not to feel schadenfreude now that he’s at the sharp end of a theory that he at times encouraged and allies eagerly pushed: claims that the prison death of the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein might not be suicide after all, and that wealthy and well-connected associates were trying to hush up connections to the financier. Mr Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised that “truckloads” of documents would help reveal the truth and claimed that a client list was “sitting on my desk right now”.
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Three deputies who were killed were members of department’s arson explosives detail, according to sheriff
An explosion at a law enforcement training facility in Los Angeles has killed three people with the county sheriff’s department in the largest loss of life for the agency since 1857, the sheriff said on Friday morning.
The three deputies who were killed were members of the department’s arson explosives detail said Robert Luna, the sheriff, at a press conference. Authorities were still working to notify relatives of the deceased, he said, and details on the circumstances around the explosion were limited.
Threat of rain and absences of Hodgkinson, Hassan and Ingebrigtsen are blows but record tilts will enthrall fans
One of the major issues athletics faces is the relative lack of importance that the overwhelming majority of events hold. It is one of the reasons why Michael Johnson’s Grand Slam Track is yet to catch alight: the pay is great for the athletes, but a win or loss counts for little in the overall scheme of a season or career.
The much-maligned Diamond League has fought against such (ir)relevance throughout its existence. In such a context, it is a notable achievement that the London leg of athletics’ premier season-long competition is a 60,000 sellout for what could turn out to be a thunderstorm-threatened Saturday afternoon.
Mikel Arteta’s latest signing from Chelsea is a driven individual, confident in his ability, according to his fitness coach
If Noni Madueke finds time to head to Marbella for his annual personal pre-season training camp this summer, you probably won’t find Arsenal’s new signing frequenting any of the Spanish seaside city’s glamorous hangouts. “His peers are all partying – they’re at the beach clubs and stuff like that,” says the winger’s fitness coach, Saul Isaksson-Hurst. “But he’s turning up every day. Even I’m telling him: ‘You need one rest day, a couple of days.’ But Noni is so driven. He understands the importance of working hard – the more you put in, the more you get out. The reality is that he wants to do more.”
Madueke was spotted letting his hair down with Jadon Sancho at the Wireless festival in north London’s Finsbury Park last weekend, which was understandable given the week he had. Having been used sparingly by Enzo Maresca during Chelsea’s first five games at the Club World Cup, the 23-year-old flew back from the US last Friday, before the final, after an agreement was struck for him to become the sixth player Mikel Arteta has signed from Stamford Bridge since the Spaniard became the Arsenal manager in late 2019. Kepa Arrizabalaga trod the same path at the start of this month.
A breathless Jonas Vingegaard slumped exhaustedly over his bike on another baking Pyrenean afternoon, after Tadej Pogacar inflicted a further crushing defeat in the mountain time trial to the altiport at Peyragudes.
The second time trial in the 2025 Tour was expected to further confirm Pogacar’s supremacy over the peloton and so it proved, as the defending champion extended his lead to over four minutes with his fourth stage win in this year’s race and the 21st Tour stage of his career.
Experts say this year has produced the fewest new hit songs in US history – and it might signal the end of a singular seasonal smash
A spectre is haunting America – the spectre of Shaboozey.
Despite it coming out in April 2024, Shaboozey’s huge hit A Bar Song (Tipsy) is still, billions of streams later, at No 5 on this week’s Billboard chart. Its country-tinged refrain of “everybody at the bar gettin’ tipsy,” an interpolation from J-Kwon 2004 hit Tipsy, has stuck around well past closing time.
When the chips were down against Sweden, the right-back scored, scrapped and strapped her way to a semi-final spot
Lucy Bronze pinned up a picture of herself after the 2019 Women’s World Cup bronze-medal match against Sweden, which England lost 2-1, for her teammates to see on a wall in the team hotel where players and staff share inspirational images. She was, in her words, “absolutely exhausted” in it, hairband round her neck, shirt crumpled, hair awry, the physical, emotional and mental pain of the preceding 90 minutes visible.
That photo represents so much to Bronze, England’s stalwart right-back who no one has come close to replacing and likely never will. “I will give anything and I will give everything when I play in an England shirt,” she says of the image of her at her most broken. “I wanted all the girls to know that that’s my why. My why is to give everything for this team because I just love playing for England so much.”
I scoured longevity research on wellbeing – and the deeper I dug, the more I recognized a profound underlying pattern
Anyone who says “age is just a number” has not reached the high numbers. Ageing is not easy, and “forever young” is not a plan. Regardless of how many burpees you can do or protein smoothies you chug, the passing of time brings challenges. Roles that you relished change, words on menus seem to shrink, necks sag, diagnoses arise.
On the other hand, ageing is not the downhill slide that people believe it is. A multibillion-dollar anti-ageing industry profits when you feel awful about yourself and fear ageing like the plague. The tragedy of ageing is not that we will all grow old and die, but that ageing has been made unnecessarily, and at times excruciatingly, painful and humiliating. Ageing does not have to be this way.
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