An Irish missionary and three-year-old child are among eight people taken by gunmen who stormed the place

Ireland’s foreign ministry has called on Haitian authorities to ensure “everything is done” to secure the release of a group of people, including an Irish missionary and a three-year-old child, taken by gunmen who stormed a local orphanage.

Simon Harris, the Irish foreign minister, spoke with his Haitian counterpart overnight, the government said in a statement, during which they agreed to stay in touch on their work to ensure the group is released, including missionary Gena Heraty who oversees the orphanage.

Godfather film-maker, 86, reportedly under observation after mild cardiac arrhythmia before scheduled operation

Francis Ford Coppola, the veteran American Italian film-maker behind The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, has been hospitalised in Rome, according to reports in the local media.

Coppola, 86, was admitted to Policlinico Tor Vergata, a public hospital, on Tuesday morning for an operation related to heart issues that had been long scheduled, Corriere della Sera reported. But he suffered a mild cardiac arrhythmia before the operation and doctors placed him under observation, Corriere added.

Federal Emergency Management Agency says city will receive $64m less this year from its urban area security fund

The Trump administration said it would cut terrorism prevention funding for New York City, according to a grant notice posted days after a gunman killed four people inside a Manhattan skyscraper.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) stated in a grant notice posted on Friday that New York City would receive $64m less this year from its urban area security fund. The amount was listed in a single line of an 80-page Fema notice on the grant program.

John Cornyn ramps us gerrymandering showdown between lawmakers and Trump administration seeking GOP seats

The US senator John Cornyn of Texas has asked the FBI to aid Texas law enforcement in locating and arresting Democrats who left the state to forestall a plan sought by Donald Trump to aggressively redraw the state’s congressional map in a way that could help Republicans keep their House majority after the 2026 midterm elections.

The senator’s request is a significant escalation in the fast-moving showdown that could set up a confrontation between the blue state leaders shielding the Democratic state lawmakers and the Trump administration. Earlier on Tuesday, Texas Democrats denied a legislative quorum for the second day in a row by scattering across the country, with many decamping to Chicago, Illinois, where the Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, has vowed to protect them.

Screenwriters from Writers Guild of America, also including David Simon and Celine Song, call out president’s ‘authoritarian assault’ on free speech

More than 2,300 members of the Writers Guild of America, including Spike Lee and Adam McKay, have signed an open letter decrying the actions of Donald Trump’s administration that represent “an unprecedented, authoritarian assault” on free speech.

The letter, a combined effort from the WGA East and West branches, cites the US president’s “baseless lawsuits” against news organizations that have “published stories he does not like and leveraged them into payoffs”. It specifically references Paramount’s decision to pay Trump $16m to settle a “meritless lawsuit” about a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. The letter notes that Trump “retaliated against publications reporting factually on the White House and threatened broadcasters’ licenses”, and has repeatedly called for the cancellation of programs that criticize him.

Directed by Wake in Fright filmmaker Ted Kotcheff, the 1982 ‘vetsploitation’ flick is brutal, destructive and tragic – just like the world that men created

It was the early 80s, and Sylvester Stallone was on a roll. After years of making ends meet with bit parts, background artist work and pornography, he wrote and starred in Rocky in 1976, breaking into mainstream success. Before long he had carved out a new niche, writing, directing, and acting himself into stardom with a string of tough-guy movies including two hugely successful Rocky sequels.

Then came Rambo. The character is peak 80s Stallone, a byword for pure testosterone. An absurd, improbably muscular slab of ham with a headband and an M60 machine gun, spraying bullets at racial caricatures in a jungle or a desert somewhere.

The Euphoria and Anyone But You star has one of the most promising careers within young Hollywood but controversy has stuck to her

Almost exactly three years ago, in July 2022, the actor Sydney Sweeney gave an interview to the Hollywood Reporter that was refreshingly frank about finances.

At the time, Sweeney was 24, fresh off the contentious buzz of Euphoria’s second season, and undeniably on the up in Hollywood as one of gen Z’s very few in-demand actors. And yet, as she told the magazine, she did not have the money to cover even a six-month break from the industry. Unlike some of her Euphoria peers, Sweeney is not a nepo baby; she was raised middle-class in northern Idaho and Spokane, Washington, and began working as a child actor at 13. She acted continuously throughout her teens – on Criminal Minds and Grey’s Anatomy, then small roles on prestige projects like Sharp Objects, The Handmaid’s Tale and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – because there was no fallback cushion. “I don’t have someone supporting me, I don’t have anyone I can turn to, to pay my bills or call for help,” she said.

• Case against Uefa demotion to be heard by Cas on Friday

• Club’s first Conference League fixture set for 21 August

Oliver Glasner has said he is confident Crystal Palace will win their appeal at the court of arbitration for sport this week and be reinstated to play in the Europa League.

Palace are seeking to overturn Uefa’s decision to demote them to the Conference League for breaking multiclub ownership rules, with the appeal to take place in Lausanne on Friday. The decision is expected to be revealed by Cas on Monday, the day after Glasner’s FA Cup holders face the Premier League champions Liverpool in the Community Shield at Wembley.

England’s batting lineup looks settled for the trip to Australia, but their fast-bowling stocks were stretched against India and the captain can help ease the burden

The England-India epic that ended up like two weary prizefighters trading blows will live long in the memory – a 2‑2 classic for which the players on both sides deserve immense credit. Not that Mohammed Siraj, still hitting 90mph on the speed gun on the 25th day, showed weariness. If anything, he could well hold the key to solving the world’s energy problems.

Plaudits in particular go to three men who stepped up bravely when other sports would have simply subbed them off: Shoaib Bashir bowled with a broken left hand at Lord’s; Rishabh Pant batted with a broken foot at Old Trafford; and then Chris Woakes, Horatio Nelson armed with a Gray-Nicolls, followed him in folklore at the Oval. Don’t be fooled by the white flannels and the stoppages for tea – Test cricket is a brutal sport.

Poor safety practices, lack of oversight and toxic workplace blamed for implosion in which five people died

Inadequate safety practices, deliberate efforts to avoid oversight and a “toxic workplace culture” were among the factors that led to the 2023 implosion of the Titan submersible, the US Coast Guard has said in a damning report that described the disaster as a “preventable tragedy”.

The submersible was on a commercial voyage to explore the wreck of the Titanic when it disappeared in the Atlantic, leading to the deaths of all five people on board. The ensuing search captured headlines around the world for days as it evolved from a potential rescue mission to a recovery operation.

Video of man lighting cigarette from Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris was widely shared on social media

A French minister has said she is taking legal action against an unidentified man who was filmed lighting a cigarette from a memorial flame at a major Paris war monument.

The video of a man stooping to light a cigarette from the fire at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe, before walking calmly away watched by tourists, caused indignation when it was widely shared on social media.

From an AI spending wave to Palantir’s deepening ties with the US government, tech’s power is expanding – but for many women, safety online is further out of reach

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. This week, tech companies are spending amounts of money that stretch the limits of the imagination. Donald Trump’s administration is spending more money with data analytics and surveillance firm Palantir. And women on both sides of the Pacific face the extreme difficulty of keeping intimate moments private online.

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A summer without a sporting director and failure to keep Alexander Isak happy has left the club with an almost dysfunctional feel

“If you want to understand Newcastle you first need to understand its place in the world – that is, a very long way from anywhere. The next major city is Leeds, two hours drive to the south … London feels very far away.”

If Eddie Howe can only hope his prospective signings do not stumble across the Rough Guides introduction to England’s northern cities, Newcastle’s manager may also reflect that it was not supposed to be like this.

At the behest of Donald Trump, the state is pushing to restructure congressional maps to add as many as five seats for Republicans

At the insistence of Donald Trump, Republicans in Texas are pushing ahead with an effort to redraw their congressional map to pick up as many as five additional Republican seats.

The decision has set off a cascading legal battle. State lawmakers have fled Texas as part of an effort to stop Republicans from passing the map. Democrats in other states have said they will retaliate, setting the stage for a nasty and prolonged redistricting tit-for-tat that could last for years.

Carmaker and CEO accused of securities fraud and hiding significant risk posed by company’s self-driving vehicles

Tesla shareholders sued Elon Musk and the electric vehicle maker for allegedly concealing the significant risk posed by company’s self-driving vehicles.

The proposed class-action suit, which accuses Musk and Tesla of securities fraud, was filed on Monday night. Tesla conducted its first public test of its self-driving taxis in late June near the company’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. That test showed the vehicles speeding, braking suddenly, driving over a curb, entering the wrong lane and dropping off passengers in the middle of multilane roads. The National Highway Transit Safety Administration (NHTSA), the main transportation regulator in the US, is investigating the Robotaxi’s pilot test.

Lee Claydon, who died after reportedly falling from upper tier at Wembley Stadium, remembered as ‘lovely bloke’

The father of a “lifelong” Oasis fan who fell to his death at the band’s concert at Wembley Stadium has said his whole family is devastated.

Lee Claydon, 45, a landscape gardener from Bournemouth, Dorset, died on Saturday after reportedly falling from an upper tier at the stadium.

Statue of Albert Pike, a Confederate general, will return to Washington DC, National Parks Service says

A statue of a general in the Confederate army that was toppled and set on fire during social justice protests in 2020 in Washington DC will be reinstated, the National Park Service (NPS) has announced.

The bronze statue depicting Albert Pike is being restored, the Park Service said in a statement on Monday, sharing a photo of the statue undergoing cleaning to remove corrosion and paint prior to repairs, with a view to reinstalling it by October.

Labour’s cautious fixes for immigration and asylum policy face a toxic public mood shaped by fear, falsehoods and far-right provocation

In politics, numbers rarely speak for themselves. They must be framed and interpreted. They are often weaponised. In Britain’s increasingly toxic debate over asylum and migration, the question isn’t just how many asylum seekers arrive on small boats. It’s what those numbers are made to represent – and why polls suggest a large proportion of the public now believes things that are simply untrue.

Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has staked her political credibility on restoring a sense of grip over the asylum system: reducing the backlog by processing cases, accelerating returns of those with no legal claim to stay and launching an as yet small-scale “one in, one out” returns deal with France. In balancing operational realism with symbolic reassurance, Ms Cooper walks a knife-edge between policy and perception.

Delegates at UN treaty talks must not allow negotiations to be derailed again by fossil fuel interests

Plastic pollution has reached the most remote and inaccessible parts of our beleaguered planet. It has been found in Greenland’s ice cap, near the summit of Mount Everest, and in the deepest depths of the western Pacific Ocean. Nature programmes have sounded the alarm over a human-made crisis that has become an environmental scourge and a serious threat to our health. Yet global production of plastics is on course to triple to more than a billion tonnes a year by 2060, after increasing by more than 200 times over the past 75 years.

This gloomy backdrop should inject a sense of urgency into UN-convened talks in Switzerland this week, aimed at agreeing a binding global plastics treaty. In 2022, when 173 countries committed to work towards such an accord, there was widespread relief that at last a multilateral route was to be taken towards solving a quintessentially global problem. Sadly, as delegates gather in Geneva, there are reasons to be fearful.

The Guardian joins a Jordanian military airdrop for a rare chance to observe a landscape devastated by Israel’s offensive

Seen from the air, Gaza looks like the ruins of an ancient civilisation, brought to light after centuries of darkness. A patchwork of concrete shapes and shattered walls, neighbourhoods scattered with craters, rubble and roads that lead nowhere. The remnants of cities wiped out.

But here, there has been no natural disaster and no slow passage of time.

Members of Jordan’s military stand among pallets of aid about to be dropped on Gaza

Instead of giving definitive answers to personal challenges the chatbot will help people reflect on a problem

ChatGPT will not tell people to break up with their partner and will encourage users to take breaks from long chatbot sessions, under new changes to the artificial intelligence tool.

OpenAI, ChatGPT’s developer, said the chatbot would stop giving definitive answers to personal challenges and would instead help people to mull over problems such as potential breakups.

Deal follows deportations to South Sudan and Eswatini despite concerns about international law breaches

The Rwandan government has said it would accept up to 250 migrants from the US under a deal agreed with Washington but gave no details on who could be included.

The Trump administration’s deportation drive has included negotiating arrangements to send people to third countries, among them South Sudan and Eswatini.

Large-scale search and rescue operation under way after at least four people killed in Himalayan region

A torrent of mud from a flash flood has smashed into a town in India’s Himalayan region, tearing down a mountain valley before demolishing buildings and killing at least four people, with about 100 others missing.

Videos broadcast on Indian media showed a terrifying surge of muddy water sweeping away blocks of flats in the tourist region of Dharali in Uttarakhand state.

Black Sabbath frontman also suffered from coronary artery disease and Parkinson’s disease, according to the document

Ozzy Osbourne, the Black Sabbath frontman and a defining figure of British heavy metal, died of cardiac arrest and also suffered from coronary artery disease and Parkinson’s disease, according to a death certificate filed by his daughter and obtained by the Sun and the New York Times on Tuesday.

The death certificate, which was reportedly filed at a registry in London by Aimée Osbourne, one of Ozzy Osbourne’s daughters, reportedly lists the official cause of death as “(a) Out of hospital cardiac arrest (b) Acute myocardial infarction (c) Coronary artery disease and Parkinson’s disease with autonomic dysfunction (Joint Causes)”.