Looks like Ebong will captain Belarus tonight. It’s a much changed side from the XI that lost heavily to Greece. Belarus are the world’s 97th-ranked team, and have not fared well since Uefa and Fifa imposed the current sanctions, winning just three of their 11 competitive matches under the new rules.
Post-final brawl involved Miami and Seattle players
Major League Soccer has suspended striker Luis Suárez three league games for his role in the mass brawl between his Inter Miami side and the Seattle Sounders after the Leagues Cup final. Suárez was at the center of the confrontation, first putting Sounders midfielder Obed Vargas in a headlock before being dragged away. Later, TV cameras caught Suárez yelling at, and spitting on, Sounders security director Gene Ramirez.
Sounders team psychologist Steven Lenhart, himself a former MLS player who was known for confrontations and physical play, has also had his credential revoked for the remainder of the 2025 season. Lenhart was among a large group of Sounders players and staff who joined the melee along with Inter Miami players and staff.
Union says ‘Amazon is breaking the law’ after drivers working for contractor Cornucopia were terminated
Amazon has fired more than 150 unionized drivers working for a third-party contractor in Queens, New York, according to the Teamsters union.
Workers rallied at the company’s DBK4 facility in Queens on Monday after the company fired the drivers, who worked for Cornucopia, a delivery service provider (DSP) that Amazon contracted with to make deliveries. Amazon works with more than 3,000 DSPs around the world who deliver the company’s packages.
Government collapses after Emmanuel Macron’s ally wins support of just 194 MPs with 364 against
François Bayrou has been ousted in a confidence vote after only nine months as prime minister, collapsing his minority government and plunging France into a political crisis.
Bayrou, 74, will hand his resignation to Emmanuel Macron, his longterm centrist ally, on Tuesday morning.
Palestinian gunmen opened fire at a crowded bus stop in the northern outskirts of Jerusalem on Monday, killing six people and injuring 12 others before being shot dead by an off-duty soldier and a civilian at the scene.
The victims included a 79-year-old former cardiologist, a 43-year-old rabbi and a 25-year-old who had recently emigrated from Spain. Twenty-six others suffered injuries, including six who were left in a serious condition with gunshot wounds.
Exclusive: Leak exposes how former leader has used publicly subsidised office to manage commercial interests
A trove of leaked data from Boris Johnson’s private office reveals how the former prime minister has been profiting from contacts and influence he gained in office in a possible breach of ethics and lobbying rules.
The Boris Files contain emails, letters, invoices, speeches and business contracts. They shine a spotlight on the inner workings of a publicly subsidised company Johnson established after leaving Downing Street in September 2022.
Italian has dominated against all opponents except one but rivalry with Spaniard has prompted him to plan big changes
In the 90 minutes between Jannik Sinner’s defeat by Carlos Alcaraz in the US Open final and his post-match debrief, his mind had already shifted. Rather than dwelling on the pain of losing his US Open title and No 1 ranking, he was thinking about the future.
Sinner felt his game was too predictable, even one-dimensional, compared with Alcaraz, whose deep toolbox of shots left him uncomfortable and unable to find rhythm on the court. As a result of that discomfort, Sinner made a decision. The 24-year-old resolved to make significant changes to his game in pursuit of becoming a better, more complete tennis player and keeping up with his rival, even if he might suffer in the short term.
Democrat Chuck Schumer returned to the Senate floor last week with some urgent questions. “Will Senate Republicans continue to kowtow to a leader they know is dragging the country down?” he demanded. “That they know is a pathological liar? Or will they, as the Founding Fathers intended, stand up to him? Will they help us fight America’s slide into authoritarianism?”
It was a recognition of how Donald Trump has spent eight months seeking to expand presidential power at the expense of Congress and others. He has signed 200 executive orders – more than Joe Biden in four years – unleashed squadrons of national guard troops in Washington, turned investigators on his political foes and sought to bring academic, cultural, financial and legal institutions to heel.
Potential candidates need backing of at least 20% of parliamentary party, as Shabana Mahmood rules herself out
Labour MPs hoping to replace Angela Rayner as the party’s deputy leader have until Thursday afternoon to gather the 80 MPs’ nominations they will need to stand, with the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, ruling herself out of the race.
Mahmood is the latest mooted hopeful to decide not to run, with Jess Phillips and Lisa Nandy also opting out.
The prime minister’s new chief secretary has been out and about trying to calm the storm after Angela Rayner’s exit
Don’t Panic! Don’t Panic! Over the weekend the newly promoted Darren Jones, Keir Starmer’s very own Keir Starmer tribute act, was out and about on the airwaves trying to convince everyone – himself included – that the government was not in crisis.
What do you mean, chaos, he said time and again as the questions kept on coming. Each time sounding slightly more chippy. He’s not a man who takes kindly to even a hint of mockery. Darren takes Darren extremely seriously.
Crowe and Malek are hugely watchable but this ultimately fails to deliver an authentic version of events
If the Nuremberg trials were political theatre, writer and director James Vanderbilt leans into the spectacle of it. His new movie Nuremberg, about the show put on for the rest of the world to indict Nazi war criminals, is packaged like old-fashioned entertainment. There are movie stars (chiefly Rami Malek and Russell Crowe) with slicked-back hair, trading snappy barbs and self-important monologues in smoky rooms, meanwhile the gravity of the moment tends to be kept at bay. All the bureaucratic and legal speak around fine-tuning an unprecedented process, where one country prosecutes the high command of another, goes down easy in an Aaron Sorkin sort of way. It is riveting when its urgency is defended by an actor as great as Michael Shannon. It is all so watchable, to a fault, especially when dealing with the unspeakable.
There’s some rhyme and reason to the director’s approach. Vanderbilt (who wrote the screenplay for David Fincher’s Zodiac, a masterpiece about the impossible pursuit for truth) has made a movie about two figures so narcissistic, opportunistic and caught up in the showmanship that they leave very little room for the gravity of the moment to sink in.
Toronto film festival: Conclave director Edward Berger makes a less cohesive follow-up with an over-stylised adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s novel sold by a killer central performance
It was easy to understand why Edward Berger’s name was being bandied around in relation to the reinvention of 007, the director having shown himself to be more than capable of both extravagantly staged action (his Oscar-winning breakout All Quiet on the Western Front) and knife-edge intrigue (his Oscar-winning follow-up Conclave). He dismissed speculation at the time (with some mild annoyance) and the job has since landed at the feet of Denis Villeneuve – but his latest, China-set gambling drama Ballad of a Small Player, adds flashy bombast to his résumé and helps to explain why even though he might have passed on Bond (and recently Ocean’s too), he’s in development on a Bourne.
Berger is a canny commercial director, confidently switching between genre, language and location, the kind of able film-maker studios are desperate to entrust a franchise with, but I hope he’s sparing with the time he chooses to spend under the studio thumb. Ballad of a Small Player, an operatic adaptation of the Lawrence Osborne novel, is not quite him at his best – it is far more bark than bite – but it’s made with such force and finesse and is so distinctively separate from his other films that I look forward to seeing what other non-sequel journeys he chooses to take us on in the future.
President touted contest in Buenos Aires province – 40% of electorate – as ‘life or death battle’ but won only 34% of vote
Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, has suffered his worst electoral defeat since taking office, as he faces his administration’s most serious corruption scandal and signs that the economy is slowing.
In local legislative elections on Sunday for Buenos Aires province – home to almost 40% of the country’s electorate – the coalition led by the self-styled anarcho-capitalist was beaten by the opposition by 47% to 34%.
Toronto film festival: The two stars are knockouts in Chloé Zhao’s poignant adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel with a stirring tearjerker ending
Maggie O’Farrell’s lauded 2020 novel Hamnet is a dense and lyrical imagining of the lives of William Shakespeare’s family, full of interior thought and lush descriptions of the physical world. It would seem, upon reading, near impossible to adapt into a film. Or, at least, a film worthy of O’Farrell’s so finely woven sensory spell. Film-maker Chloé Zhao has attempted to do so anyway, and the result is a stately, occasionally lugubrious drama whose closing minutes are among the most poignant in recent memory.
Zhao is a good fit for the material. She, too, is a close observer of nature and of the many aching, yearning people passing through it. But she has previously not made anything as traditionally tailored and refined as this. The humbler dimensions of her films The Rider and Nomadland are missed here; Hamnet too often gives off the effortful hum of prestige awards-bait.
The singer, who died from a heart attack on 5 September, ripped up the two-minute hardcore song blueprint and won over a legion of fans including Kurt Cobain and Jane’s Addiction
As the blitzing tempo and mosh pit violence of hardcore swept the US in the early-80s, San Francisco punks Flipper – whose frontman, Bruce Loose, died this weekend of a heart attack – assumed a provocative stance, choosing sarcastic nihilism over dumb machismo and swapping high-velocity thrash for menacing, slow-as-sludge post-punk jams. In an era of 7in singles packed with 30-second screeds, Flipper would draw their tunes out to 20-or-more minutes of grind, fielding spiteful comparisons to hated hippies the Grateful Dead as bassist and founder Will Shatter warned audiences, “the more you heckle us, the longer this song gets”.
But the true “culprit for any pissing off of audiences”, as drummer Steve DePace told Scene Point Blank in 2022, was Loose. Born Bruce Calderwood, in the late 70s Loose cashed in a life insurance policy his mother bought for him and spent the money on a bass guitar and amplifier. He soon joined an embryonic version of Flipper in 1979, assuming the nom-du-punk “Bruce Lose” (which he later switched for “Bruce Loose”, because he wanted to be “less negative”) and sharing bass and vocal duties with Shatter. The pair laid down heavy, industrial bass lines, while guitarist Tim Falconi, a Vietnam vet Loose later alleged had PTSD, fired off abrasive, trebly guitar lines.
Donald Trump launched a vitriolic attack against Tom Hanks for supposedly being “destructive” and “woke” after one of America’s most beloved actors was snubbed without much explanation by West Point last week.
On his social media site on Monday, the US president applauded the alumni association of the US Military Academy (or West Point) for abruptly calling off a ceremony honoring Hanks, twice an Academy award winner who has played numerous military characters and also has a long history of advocating for veterans.
His account kept being deactivated, even though he had spent thousands of dollars to use the social media site for advertising. Just one of the perils of sharing a name with the world-famous tech billionaire ...
Bellamy says game is becoming increasingly physical
Wales play Canada in Swansea on Tuesday
Craig Bellamy compared Premier League players to “cyborgs” as he discussed the growing physicality in the game after Thomas Tuchel said long throws and direct tactics were in vogue.
The Wales manager said he handpicked friendlies against Canada on Tuesday and England next month – two higher-ranked nations – to provide a barometer of his team’s progress and believes facing the latter at Wembley will be the perfect warm-up for hosting Belgium in a crunch World Cup qualifier four days later.
Countries that refuse to take back rejected asylum seekers from the UK could face visa suspensions, Shabana Mahmood said on Monday, as she promised to move “further and faster” as home secretary.
Confirming that she hopes to take a harder line than her predecessor, Yvette Cooper, she said she would do “whatever it takes” to cut the number of people entering the UK by irregular routes such as small boats.
Can one really relax while being prodded by large robotic arms?
I am alone in a dimly lit room, splayed face down on a table. Megan Thee Stallion’s Mamushi is bumping from a speaker, and on a large screen, two white circles roam up and down an outline of my body.
Carlos Alcarez in Barbie pink, Naomi Osaka crowned with rosebuds – tennis is becoming a hot ticket in the fashion world. And this time it is emerging not heritage brands dominating play
It has been one of the breakout stories of the US Open: not the surprising second-round exits, nor the at-the-net spats, but the freshly shorn head and Barbie-pink tank top of the winner, Carlos Alcaraz. The outsize reaction to the Spanish phenomenon’s new look is the latest example of the final grand slam of the year attracting attention not just for sporting prowess, but for the style moments it serves.
Take, for instance, former champion Naomi Osaka, who crashed out to Amanda Animisova in Thursday’s semi-final, but not before sparkling under the night lights in a custom Nike indigo zip-up jacket embellished with Swarovski crystals, worn over a bubble-hem minidress. For her opening match, she wore a rose headpiece. (Also present throughout Osaka’s tournament: a series of bejewelled Labubu dolls, created by accessories line A-Morir, with monikers including “Billie Jean Bling” and “Andre Swagassi”.) The getup was “really elaborate”, Osaka admitted in a press conference, but it’s the kind of statement outfit her fans have come to expect and appreciate.
Donald Trump now cannot claim presidential immunity to get off the hook from paying $83.3m in damages to the writer E Jean Carroll, a federal appeals court ruled on Monday, upholding a jury’s 2024 award against the president for defamation.
Trump’s lawyers had pointed to the supreme court’s ruling last year saying the president has immunity for official acts to argue that the damages should be overturned. A three-judge panel for the US court of appeals for the second circuit, rejected that argument.
Volkswagen is closing in on a tariff deal with the US, the boss of the German carmaker has said, as it eyes up the market for affordable electric cars in Europe.
Europe’s biggest car manufacturer, which also owns the Audi, Seat and Porsche brands, has been hit hard by Donald Trump’s trade tariffs, announced in April. The levies, combined with a turbulent market, have already cost “several billions”, the chief executive, Oliver Blume, said.
More than 350 French lawmakers voted against François Bayrou
And over in Brussels, EU diplomats have been briefing journalists that the European Commission is expected to propose a 19th package of sanctions against Russia by Friday, Reuters said.
The EU has stepped up its listings and is no longer shying away from larger entities in third countries, and it could list banks in two central Asian countries too, they said.
Connexion
