Trump administration contract with Paragon Solutions gives immigration agency access to one of the most powerful stealth cyberweapons

US immigration agents will have access to one of the world’s most sophisticated hacking tools after a decision by the Trump administration to move ahead with a contract with Paragon Solutions, a company founded in Israel which makes spyware that can be used to hack into any mobile phone – including encrypted applications.

The Department of Homeland Security first entered into a contract with Paragon, now owned by a US firm, in late 2024, under the Biden administration. But the $2m contract was put on hold pending a compliance review to make sure it adhered to an executive order that restricts the US government’s use of spyware, Wired reported at the time.

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Al Pacino, Colman Domingo and Myha’la excel in this gripping take on the events of 1977 when an Indianapolis businessman held his mortgage broker hostage

With terrific chutzpah, black-comic flair and cool, cruel unsentimentality, screenwriter Austin Kolodney and director Gus Van Sant have made a true-crime suspense thriller set in the 1970s, tapping into the spirit of both Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon and Network. Apart from anything else, it is a reminder that in that post-Kennedy, post-Watergate age, plenty of lawless and febrile things happened that would now be considered phenomena purely attributable to social media.

In 1977, an Indianapolis businessman named Tony Kiritsis, with many acquaintances in the police department, kidnapped a mortgage broker named Richard Hall, and tied Hall’s neck with a “dead man’s wire” to his shotgun, which would therefore go off if police sharpshooters tried to kill him. Kiritsis even paraded his victim like this on TV while he read out his demands, a grotesque display in which national TV networks were blandly complicit. Van Sant’s recreation of this extraordinary moment calls to mind the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby in front of police and press.

An emotional, strategic, plot-driven entertainment product was all wrapped up in a single epic three-month tracking shot

By the time the clock hit 7.30pm the main presenter on Monday’s Sky Sports Window Slam Countdown looked not just frazzled, but oddly heroic, like a man who has ingested a potentially fatal overdose of late-breaking excitement and is now being encouraged to keep talking in a low, dogged voice about massive deals and unexpected snags just to keep himself awake until the paramedics arrive.

There was something of the Situation Room about the whole tableau, five nobly dishevelled talking heads leaning in around the curved tables, lists of names earnestly reeled off. Eberechi Eze. Randal Kolo Muani. We’re hearing that Coventry has fallen. In the bottom corner of the screen a picture of Marc Guéhi would flash up now and then reproachfully, Guéhi wearing a strange, lost smile as though he has in fact died. And below it all the countdown clock replaced with the simple end-of-days message: WINDOW CLOSED.

Defender says Chelsea ‘could have played better’ despite winning the WSL, FA Cup and League Cup last season

So, Naomi Girma, how do you top a treble-winning season? The US international, sitting relaxed on the 3G pitch at Chelsea’s Cobham training ground, bits of the rubber crumb being squeezed between her fingers, does not hesitate before answering.

“We feel like we have another level we can get to,” she says. “It’s not about how we maintain this level but how we continue evolving and keep getting better. Having that mentality is always better than focusing on making sure no one catches us.

World Liberty Financial’s digital token $WLFI fell in price on first day, a year after launch by Trump family and partners

The Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial, put its namesake digital tokens up for sale on Monday, adding some $5bn in paper value to Donald Trump’s family fortune. The token, known as $WLFI, fell in value on Monday in their first day of trading.

The World Liberty tokens were sold to investors after the Trump family and its business partners last year launched the venture, a decentralized finance platform that has also issued a stablecoin, a cryptocurrency meant to maintain a specific price by tying its value to a specific asset.

‘Megaberg’ known as A23a has rapidly disintegrated in warmer warmers and could disappear within weeks

Nearly 40 years after breaking off Antarctica, a colossal iceberg ranked among the oldest and largest ever recorded is finally crumbling apart in warmer waters, and could disappear within weeks.

Earlier this year, the “megaberg” known as A23a weighed a little under a trillion tonnes and was more than twice the size of Greater London, a behemoth unrivalled at the time.

Lawmakers plan pressure campaign for release of Epstein files as victims meet with speaker and oversight committee

• US politics live – latest updates

Congress returned to session on Tuesday, and with it comes a political headache for Donald Trump in the form of renewed attention on the investigation into the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and his death, a subject that the president has sought to avoid in recent weeks.

While the president got a month-long break from the Epstein issue when lawmakers left town for the annual August recess – with the House of Representatives wrapping up a day early because of the controversy over Epstein – the calm will probably end quickly. Representatives from both parties have planned press conferences and legislative maneuvers intended to put pressure on the Trump administration for more transparency over Epstein, whose suicide while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges in 2019 has been the subject of conspiracy theories the president amplified while on the campaign trail.

• Tour de France winner left with a pericardial rupture

• Kooij wins opening stage of 2025 men’s Tour of Britain

Chris Froome sustained a life-threatening injury to his heart in the training crash in France last week that left him in hospital with a broken back and broken ribs. The four-time Tour de France winner also sustained a pericardial rupture, a tear to the sac that surrounds the heart, in the crash.

“It was obviously a lot more serious than some broken bones,” his wife, Michelle Froome, told the Times. “He’s fine, but it’s going to be a long recovery process. He won’t be riding a bike for a while.”

Critics argue ‘shared map’ of Swedish culture is ‘very exclusionary’ and a ‘nationalist education project’

The Gustav Vasa 1541 bible, Pippi Longstocking, Ikea, the right to roam, paternity leave, Sámi joiks, the Nobel prize and works by Ingmar Bergman and August Strindberg all made it into Sweden’s long-awaited, much-criticised proposal for a “cultural canon”.

However, notable omissions from the list of 100 works and references that have formed Sweden’s culture and history – intended, its creators said in Uppsala on Tuesday, to establish a “shared map and compass” for Swedish citizens and new arrivals to Sweden – included Abba and anything from after 1975, a period that has seen Sweden transform into an international, multicultural society.

From Super Pacs fighting regulation to OpenAI’s first wrongful death lawsuit, the AI tech giants are spending big and facing growing scrutiny

Hello, and welcome to TechScape.

A little over two years ago, OpenAI’s founder Sam Altman stood in front of lawmakers at a congressional hearing and asked them for stronger regulations on artificial intelligence. The technology was “risky” and “could cause significant harm to the world”, Altman said, calling for the creation of a new regulatory agency to address AI safety.

Hundred Year Hunger – which has a chorus in Arabic – has been released by the British protest singer to coincide with a humanitarian aid flotilla heading for Gaza

Billy Bragg has released a new original song to show his support for the people of Palestine. The title of Hundred Year Hunger was inspired by a new book of the same name by E Mark Windle about the history of chronic malnutrition and deprivation in Gaza and will raise money for the Amos Trust’s Gaza Appeal.

Writing on Instagram, the British protest singer said that the song “looks at the current famine that Israel has created in Gaza through the lens of a century of enforced food insecurity and malnutrition imposed on the Palestinian people, firstly by British imperialism, then as a weapon of mass displacement by the state of Israel”.

A mass politics of anti-austerity, identity and climate is emerging from the left’s margins. Keir Starmer cannot afford to ignore it

Zack Polanski’s landslide election as leader of the Green party marks a turning point for Britain’s fractured left. Young, rhetorically fluent and unafraid to cloak climate arguments in those about class, Mr Polanski is nothing if not ambitious. He sees his party not as a parliamentary pressure group but as a replacement for Labour itself.

His ascent might have seemed fanciful last July when Labour had just won a thumping majority. Yet Labour languishes in the polls. Sir Keir Starmer’s personal ratings have collapsed. On the extreme right Reform UK now boasts 237,000 members, 870 councillors, and 10 councils under its control. The Greens have more MPs than ever before. And the uneasy leadership team of Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana is preparing to launch a new party to Labour’s left. This is no longer political noise at the margins. This is about the structural failure of leadership at the centre.

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Gaps in access to dentists mirror other health inequalities. And ‘golden hellos’ won’t solve the problem on their own

Disadvantaged primary school pupils at the government’s first wave of new breakfast clubs can expect to be trained in toothbrushing, as well as fed. Data showing that a fifth of all five-year-olds in England have experienced tooth decay persuaded ministers to make improved oral health part of the early years and reception class curriculum. But the prevalence of decay is not evenly spread across the country. And research showing how much worse the situation is for children in deprived areas is in line with other findings about widening health inequalities.

New analysis from the Local Government Association highlights the differing availability of dental care across council areas – a situation sometimes described as a dental divide. It found no specific correlation between the numbers of NHS dentists and young children with tooth decay. But it adds to a body of research showing that people in poorer areas are generally less well provided for. In Middlesbrough, for example, there are just 10 NHS dental practices per 100,000 people, while in wealthy Richmond upon Thames there are 28.

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Daughter of former Nazi official and her husband to be questioned after raid on home failed to find masterpiece

A federal court in Argentina has ordered house arrest for the daughter of a former Nazi official and her husband after a raid failed to locate a painting stolen from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam.

Authorities raided a home in the coastal city of Mar del Plata last week after a Dutch newspaper identified a painting seen in a real estate photo as an Italian masterpiece registered on a database of lost wartime art.

After the controversy over Amy Sherald’s portrait of a trans Statue of Liberty, trans artists speak about why their work speaks to an important moment

Part of the magic of portraiture is how it renders so much of the human experience accessible to us, things we might never see otherwise. This has been very much on Black artist Amy Sherald’s mind. When I spoke to her in advance of the debut of her exhibition American Sublime, she told me that Black representation was foundational to her practice: “I developed this idea that, when I look at art history, for the most part I don’t see portraits of people that look like me. So it started there.”

That exhibition’s curator, Sarah Roberts, also spoke about Sherald’s passion for representing the LGBTQ+ community: “Amy has thought a lot about her role as an artist and the need for representation, and she has long been a champion of LGBTQ+ rights. This work is thinking about who gets depicted as being American.”

• £125m striker thanks former teammates and staff

• ‘It has been an honour … Thank you, Newcastle’

Alexander Isak has made a belated attempt to rebuild bridges at Newcastle by thanking his former teammates, St James’ Park staff and the club’s fans for their support during his three years on Tyneside.

When Isak joined Liverpool for £125m on Monday evening the Sweden striker departed a squad and a city thoroughly disillusioned by his decision not to train with or play for Eddie Howe’s team for the majority of this summer. Ultimately that tactic succeeded in forcing the move to Anfield he had long craved but, along the way, a player who scored 27 times for Newcastle last season shredded his reputation there.

Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson and Tracy Letts star in this immaculately constructed nightmare procedural that ticks down the minutes from an atomic bomb’s launch to its detonation

Kathryn Bigelow has reopened the subject that we all tacitly agree not to discuss or imagine, in the movies or anywhere else: the subject of an actual nuclear strike. It’s the subject which tests narrative forms and thinkability levels.

Maybe this is why we prefer to see it as something for absurdism and satire – a way of not staring into the sun – to remember Kubrick’s (brilliant) black comedy Dr Strangelove, with no fighting in the war room etc, rather than Lumet’s deadly serious Fail Safe.

Bigelow, with screenwriter Noah Oppenheim, broaches one of the most frightening thoughts of all: that a nuclear war could or rather will start with no one knowing who started it or who ended it. I watched this film with translucently white knuckles but also that strange climbing nausea that only this topic can create.

The drama is recounted in one 18-minute segment, repeated from various standpoints and various locations: 18 minutes being the time estimated to elapse between military observers reporting the out-of-the-blue launch of a nuke from the Pacific and its projected arrival in Chicago.

The action plays out in a series of situation rooms and command-and-control suites with acronyms like PEOC (Presidential Emergency Operations Center) featuring military and civilian personnel in banks of desks, generally in a shallow horseshoe shape facing a very big screen flashing up the threat level from Defcon 2 to Defcon 1 and also showing a large map displaying the missile’s current position, which is occasionally replaced with what amounts to a Zoom mosaic of tense faces belonging to high-ranking officials with no idea what to do, dialling in chaotically from their smartphones.

Rebecca Ferguson plays intelligence analyst Capt Olivia Walker, Tracy Letts is the gung ho military chief Gen Anthony Brady – this drama’s equivalent of the cold war’s Gen Curtis LeMay – who advocates an immediate pre-emptive counterstrike before the incoming missile arrives, Jared Harris is the defense secretary Reid Baker who realises that his estranged daughter is in Chicago, Gabriel Basso plays the brilliant and flustered young NSA adviser Jake Baerington who, if this was an Aaron Sorkin script, could be relied on to save the day.

Author quipped she wrote ‘suitable’ piece after Alberta school ban included her novel The Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret Atwood has released a new short story critiquing elected officials for a wide-ranging book ban in the Canadian province of Alberta. The controversial decision to remove books purportedly containing “explicit sexual content” has seen numerous works of literature swept up in the dragnet, including Atwood’s, dystopian work The Handmaid‘s Tale.

In a social media post, Atwood wrote that since her famed work was no longer permissible in Alberta schools, she had written a “suitable” short work for teens, adding the work was necessary because the province’s minister of education thought students were “stupid babies”.

• England 131; South Africa 137-3; SA win by seven wickets

• Markram smashes 55-ball 86 after England collapse

They say that if you fail to prepare you should prepare to fail, and it turns out that is what England were doing across the two understaffed days of training with which they launched themselves into this series.

England proceeded to get bowled out for 131 in 24.3 overs before Aiden Markram humbled their bowlers – picking on the debutant Sonny Baker – and propelled South Africa towards victory by seven wickets, sealed with 175 balls to spare.

• American won three golds at Paris 2024

• 28-year-old has been dealing with achilles injury

Olympic champion Gabby Thomas will miss this month’s World Athletics Championships with an achilles tendon injury she’s been dealing with since May.

Thomas, who won the 200m in Paris and was on the 4x100m and 4x400m gold-medal relay teams, said she exacerbated the injury in July.

“I understand that it will be disappointing for some track fans to hear this news, but I’ve finally come to the realization that it’s OK to be human and take care of myself,” Thomas said in a press release on Tuesday. “As an athlete you always want to keep grinding, but sometimes you simply can’t outwork an injury. Sometimes it’s about patience and making the right decision for the long term. All the best to my Team USA teammates fighting for medals in Tokyo.”

Soldiers express doubts about serving in Gaza but few will refuse to fight

Tens of thousands of reservists in Israel will return to active service in the coming weeks amid an intense debate in their ranks over the war in Gaza, which reflects wider divisions in the country.

Some will be forced to make their decision within days. The Israel Defense Forces began mobilising tens of thousands of reservists on Tuesday after calling up 60,000 for an expanded offensive in Gaza City, one of the few places in the devastated territory outside its control. More will be ordered to report to military bases if the fighting continues for many months, as analysts expect.

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Strasbourg, official seat of the European parliament, the jewel of the Alsace region on the west bank of the Rhine. Important historically, geographically and politically. One of the city’s most famous sons, Arsène Wenger, as a boy, was so embedded that his first language was Low Alemannic German, not French. To use a word Wenger brought to the English football vernacular – footballistically – Strasbourg was never too much of a hub. The club reformed after liquidation as recently as 2011, having won just one French title back in 1979 when Wenger was a fringe player already embedded in coaching. In defence was the future France coach Raymond Domenech, the keen astrologist in charge when a very Gallic bust-up ravaged Les Bleus at the 2010 World Cup.

We’re all captivated by the journey of Wrexham. It’s been amazing for Welsh football and hopefully now in a number of years we’ll see young players coming through … There isn’t similarities to how I play to how Wrexham play. It’s different ways, no right or wrong way for this” – Craig Bellamy, the Wales manager, praises Wrexham’s rise under the co-ownership of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. Despite his newfound diplomacy, let’s assume the former Cardiff forward isn’t entirely sold on a style of play focused on 6ft 5in striker Kieffer Moore.

In the first two episodes of a six-part series, the stardom of 80s primetime host Enzo Tortora is cleverly crosscut with the scramble of a mob secretary who implicates him – and his parrot – in drug trafficking

Marco Bellocchio, the tireless warhorse of Italian cinema, kicks up a swirling dust cloud of corruption with this fabulous, stranger-than-fiction account of an 80s TV star convicted of conspiring with the Camorra. Shot for the streaming service HBO Max, it is the director’s second historical miniseries after 2022’s Exterior Night, about the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, and features the same lead player in Fabrizio Gifuni, an actor who has surely cornered the market in playing glossy public figures whose lives are about to take a hellish turn. Bellocchio’s dramas typically inhabit this kind of shonky, venal moral universe. The ground is liable to drop away pretty much at any moment.

Gifuni stars as Enzo Tortora, a primetime TV presenter in the twinkling Terry Wogan mould who hosts a Friday night entertainment show on a soundstage made up to resemble an old-style small-town market. Portobello features dances and phone-ins and stars a parrot called Ramon, who point-blank refuses to speak. The show pulls in a peak audience of about 28 million, which means it’s watched by everyone, in all social classes, from the sisters at the convent to the cons inside Naples’ Poggioreale prison. One of these prisoners is such a fan of Portobello, in fact, that he posts Tortora a set of knitted lace doilies to be auctioned at his market. Naturally the inmate wants a namecheck on the show – or failing that, a letter of thanks. So he writes to Tortora again, and this time he’s more peeved.