Over-by-over updates from 11am UK time Sooryavanshi to face England | Email James Was there anything more soul-sappingly disappointing as a child than flicking on the television on a Saturday morning fully expecting to luxuriate in a day of Test cricket watching only to be met with the sight of gun metal skies, drizzle and full covers stretched across the outfield. Urgh. Welcome to the third day of the first Test from Lord’s. I’m afraid to say that it is a wet one, folks. The good news is that the weather is much better tomorrow and so we should see a result in this match but today’s prospects are gloomier, with a high percentage chance of rain through most of the day. Continue reading...

2026 tournament will be the biggest, longest and most expensive – and the most intricately refereed – ever seen The 2026 World Cup will be the biggest, longest and most expensive. It will also feature a hefty number of rule changes. New responsibilities for video assistant referees, new red card offences and a number of initiatives to speed up the game will be put into effect. Here are the rule changes for the US, Canada and Mexico and why they have been implemented. Continue reading...

Teenagers will now serve time in response to surging gang crime, but head of country’s largest jail has misgivings Inside H block, staff at Sweden’s largest jail are preparing for the arrival of the first child prisoners in the institution’s 60-year history. New furniture has been ordered, extra beds have been removed from what were previously double-occupancy adult cells and classrooms are under construction. There are plans to repaint the walls from red to a shade of light green. In a matter of weeks, Kumla, a high-security prison on the edge of a small town in central Sweden, is expected to start receiving boys as young as 13. The Swedish parliament has already voted through plans for 15- to 17-year-olds convicted of serious crimes to serve their sentences in prison, which will come into force in July. And in June, it is expected to also vote to lower the criminal age of responsibility from 15 to 13 for crimescarrying a minimum sentence of four years’ imprisonment. Continue reading...

Oil tankers may be stuck behind strait of Hormuz, but holding the Iata AGM in Brazil defies warnings of impending shortages Nothing says jet fuel crisis, as one prospective attender put it, like flying everyone to Rio de Janeiro. Aviation leaders will converge in Brazil this weekend for the Iata AGM, the annual global airline summit, with the industry still, for the most part, looking resolutely skyward. The oil tankers may still be stuck behind the strait of Hormuz as the conflict between the US, Israel and Iran flickers on, but for now, airlines continue to defy dire warnings of impending shortages which had stoked fears of a summer of chaos for European holidaymakers. Continue reading...

The Amandaland actor on her statue phobia, what she’d like to say to her mum, and lusting after Keanu Reeves Born in Dublin, Philippa Dunne, 44, trained at the Gaiety School of Acting and co-founded a comedy group called Diet of Worms. Her TV work includes Derry Girls and This Is Going to Hurt. Since 2016, she has played Anne Flynn in the BBC sitcom Motherland and its spin-off, Amandaland, now in its second series; her performance won her a Bafta nomination this year. She is married with a daughter and lives in London. When were you happiest? Any time I’m in rehearsals. Continue reading...

Lawyer for British women attacks ‘extraordinary spectacle’ of Tate’s arrival in Moscow British women who have accused Andrew Tate of rape, assault and coercive control have questioned why the self-professed misogynistic influencer has appeared in Russia as UK authorities continue to hold off on seeking his extradition. Tate admires Vladimir Putin and amplifies Kremlin propaganda online. He arrived in the same week that Russian authorities welcomed US rightwing figures at an annual conference described as Russia’s answer to Davos. Continue reading...

Fans will be allowed one sealed bottle at matches World body again alters policy after condemnation Fifa has again amended its water bottle policy for the World Cup in North America, allowing fans to bring in one sealed, disposable 590ml bottle into stadiums. Ticket holders had previously been permitted an empty, transparent and reusable bottle up to one litre but an update earlier this week confirmed reusable bottles were no longer permitted. Continue reading...

After critics and authors picked their top 100 novels we asked for your favourites. From Uruguay to the Isle of Skye, more than 3,000 readers cast their votes. Here’s your list – topped by a new number 1 • Read about your choices here *** 100 Continue reading...

This word for outdoing or outshining others originated in the manosphere, but is now thoroughly mainstream. Why is it so popular – and should we be worried about slang that arises from toxic subcultures? Until recently, if someone had said “mog” to me, I probably would have assumed they were talking about the children’s book cat created by the late great Judith Kerr. If asked about “mogging” or being “mogged,” I would have been completely baffled. But for many members of gen Z and gen Alpha (or anyone who is just a bit too online), the slang term, which means to outdo or outshine others, is everywhere. Mogging’s origins are in the manosphere, where it began as a verb derived from the acronym “Amog” (alpha male of the group). In misogynistic forums in the 2010s, to “mog” came to mean to outdo someone in terms of sexual desirability. Mogging has been adopted by “looksmaxxing” influencers such as Braden Peters, known online as Clavicular, who encourage men to try to alter their looks – sometimes in extreme ways – to increase their “sexual market value”. Such an influencer might talk of “frame mogging” another person in a photo or video – a variation on mogging that specifically refers to being more muscular. Continue reading...

Commentators say the conditions that led to bloody prewar protests have been made worse Iran is already preparing for the perilous transition from wartime unity to a fractious peace marked by hyperinflation, a 10% contraction in the economy, power cuts and calls for a triumphalist government to end its unprecedented hunting down of dissent. With peace not yet secured, the debates within the regime about Iran’s future are only just starting to emerge but its rulers are clearly thinking about how after surviving the war, they can survive the peace. Continue reading...

Hungerford, Berkshire: In a nearby farm, ever-resourceful birds and bees are getting creative with where they build their nests There are some unusual nesting spots being utilised in the farm and stableyard, revealed by pauses between chores. My wheelbarrow trips to the muck heap are attended by pied and grey wagtail pairs that make small aerial assaults on insects, though I’ve yet to locate their nests. Swallows are well-served here by midges and flies swarming around warm-blooded animals, and there is always mud for nest repairs, with the regular slosh of water buckets and hosing down of sweaty horses. New bales of hay must be opened with caution. Tash, who keeps her shire cross Jack here, narrowly avoids pulling down a robin’s nest inside one (the adult happily resettles on her eggs) and two years ago, one side of a haystack had to be avoided completely until a tawny owl had raised two owlets in it. Continue reading...

Uruguayans hope Marcelo Bielsa will have less of a rollercoaster of results so Federico Valverde can inspire them to reach the latter stages This article is part of the Guardian’s 2026 World Cup Experts’ Network, a cooperation between some of the best media organisations from the 48 countries who qualified. theguardian.com is running previews from three countries each day in the run-up to the tournament kicking off on 11 June. Continue reading...

A wonderful thing happened on a visit to the new V&A East: a very public, taxpayer-funded soundtrack of my life This is surreal. I’m standing in the new home of one of Britain’s most historically august cultural institutions, and it looks and feels for all the world like a silent disco. There is a middle-aged white woman to my right, staring intently ahead, swaying gently and bobbing her head as rhythmically as the giant headphones covering her ears will allow. Behind me there is a young black woman, her hair pulled back to give the headset and whatever she is listening to untrammelled passage. She is swaying, rising a bit, then falling: in the room but in a world of her own. Behind me, I see a muscular guy of mixed heritage; his ripped torso is still, his head of braided hair is not, and his face gently creases as he smiles about what he is hearing. My feet are planted, but I’m aware that I’m giddy, as if slightly drunk. There we are, imbibing different musical clips of different things in different bits of semi-darkened galleries, and yet it is a shared endeavour. Continue reading...

Ten years in the making, the greatest show on earth is set for a six-week sprint through Trump’s America This is the end, of our elaborate plans, the end. Of everything that stands, the end. It seems fitting that football’s latest stopping point on its voyage upriver into the blank parts of the map, a mission so choice that when it’s over you may never want another one, should be a World Cup overseen by a haunted-looking man with a messiah complex, out there operating beyond the pale of acceptable sporting governance, the warrior-poet Swiss lawyer football never knew it needed. The 2026 World Cup in the US, Mexico and Canada will finally kick off in earnest on 11 June at the Azteca Stadium. From there the tournament will unspool across 39 days, 16 host cities, 104 matches and a 6,000-mile span from Mexico City in the south to Vancouver in the north to Boston in the east. Ten years in the making, the end product of a century of powerplay and hyper-grift, this is by almost any metric not just the largest sporting event ever staged, but the largest event, as we say in America, period. Continue reading...

Shaun Hancox has created scores of ponds for rewilding projects across Britain – and he says there’s a lot more to it than digging a hole He is known as “the Picasso of ponds” but the tableaux being created by Shaun Hancox in a boggy field in Somerset currently looks more like a building site. An orange and black excavator is rhythmically removing lumpy clay soil and sculpting it into brown banks. The result looks like a scar of bare earth on what was once green pasture – but the magic happens as soon as rain fills the newly created depressions. Plants seed swiftly, invertebrates and amphibians rapidly find the water, and life explodes. Continue reading...

Brazil’s 1994 World Cup winner on being good without training, his political legacy and why he loves social media Few people’s interview list over the past year features Neymar, Robert Lewandowski, Xavi Hernández and Iker Casillas. But then not many interviewers have the pulling power of Romário. Thirty-two years after the former Brazil striker was crowned world champion and best player at the 1994 World Cup, he is travelling far and wide to speak with football greats for his YouTube channel. Romário began his “face to face with the man” project a year ago. “This whole Romário TV thing is a brand-new situation in my life,” he says. “I’m really happy, enjoying it. It’s so cool. Continue reading...

Government department says man was in the water around Michaelmas Island, near Albany, when he was bitten by a suspected 4.5-metre shark Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast A male diver aged in his 30s has died after being bitten by a shark in Western Australia. The state’s police force confirmed on Saturday afternoon that the 35-year-old man had died, after being treated by paramedics at the scene for more than two hours. Continue reading...

Apps intended to replace branches have been hit by outages, as a poll finds most Britons want high street services With its windows blanked out, a poster pinned to the door of the Staines branch of Lloyds Bank tells its customers they can do their “everyday banking with our mobile banking app”. But not today. On Wednesday, when the Guardian visited Staines, they wouldn’t have got very far because the Lloyds group was battling an IT outage that left thousands of its customers unable to make payments or send money. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: The unprecedented success of Backrooms and Obsession has made stars of their creators. For the good of cinema, however, they’d do well to look beyond the genre going forward • Don’t get The Guide delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Did you go to the cinema this week? If you did, that rumbling you felt wasn’t down to those spicy nachos you ate. Well, it might have been – but equally, you may just have been experiencing the tectonic shift suddenly under way in Hollywood. This was the week that two twentysomething YouTubers took over the box office with their horror films, upending all the industry rules and preconceptions in the process. At the top of the tree sits Kane Parsons, a 20-year-old phenom whose debut film, Backrooms – an A24 psychological chiller based on his own webseries, and inspired by a “creepypasta” horror story shared across the internet – has grossed a scarcely fathomable $140m worldwide in its first week. Just beneath Parsons, though a shade older at 26, is Curry Baker, a YouTube comic whose supernatural horror movie, Obsession, has enjoyed an almost unheard of week-on-week-on-week rise in ticket sales, and is on course to be one of the most profitable films of all time, having been made for a tiddly $750,000. That the pair have nudged Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian and Grogu – a far more expensive movie that was expected to squat atop the box office for much of May and June – into third place only underscores what an unlikely cinematic revolution this is. Continue reading...

A week-long mountain trek with two young children felt like an ambitious undertaking – but they loved every minute It’s said the 19th-century Parisian flâneur, intent on not rushing past the beauties of the street, would take a tortoise on a lead to set the pace. I thought about this as my donkey bent his head to another thistle and I turned my attention to the view, waiting for him to finish. Every way I looked, layers of mountains receded in deepening shades of eggshell blue. There were no sounds but the wind, the squeals of marmots and the giggles of my two young kids. I was extremely, uncomplicatedly happy. Our donkeys were on loan from Burrotrek, a small outfit run by Swiss-born Denise Wirth. Twenty years ago, Denise spent four and a half months walking the Camino from Switzerland to Santiago de Compostela with two donkeys. She liked Spain, and she loved donkeys, so she settled on the idea of offering donkey treks in the Pyrenees. She has not looked back. For much of the year she is based where she settled, near Cadaqués, and offers a variety of self-guided itineraries through the vineyards in the foothills and along the Mediterranean coast, with trips lasting between a day and a week. But for the summer months, when temperatures soar, she relocates with her donkeys to Cal Jan de la Llosa in the province of Girona, a gorgeous ruin of a farm several miles up an unpaved track. From here, she lends her animals to people who, for whatever reason, have a romantic notion of what it might be like to take a donkey up a mountain. Continue reading...

From the ‘Intransigents’ to Simple Comforts and Cookery Bible, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz 1 What began to tilt in 1178? 2 Which deep-sea fish attracts prey with a glowing lure called an esca? 3 Habitat 67 is a Brutalist housing development in which North American city? 4 Which founder member of the Football League no longer exists? 5 What was Barbara Castle’s 1969 plan to improve industrial relations? 6 Vasco Núñez de Balboa was the first European to see what? 7 Which artistic group were originally called the “Intransigents”? 8 Which 1963 fantasy film did Tom Hanks declare the “greatest movie ever made”? What links: 9 Simple Comforts; Cookery Bible; How to Be a Domestic Goddess? 10 I’m a Believer; I Wanna Be Yours; Feel Good Inc? 11 Champagne (Chekhov); Mozart (Mahler); veal pie (Pitt the Younger); whisky (Dylan Thomas)? 12 Altes; Bode; Neues; Pergamon? 13 Estonian; Finnish; Hungarian; Sámi? 14 Dupplin Moor; Halidon Hill; Culblean; Neville’s Cross? 15 Aird; Dickinson & Sawyer; Edgar; Hunt; Mundson; Poulain? Continue reading...

Relationship between Vladimir Putin and traditional ally has slowly unravelled under current PM Nikol Pashinyan The bottling line at the Abovyan cognac factory in Armenia is running at full tilt. Women in white coats and hairnets work the conveyor with practised speed – labelling, stacking, loading pallets – racing to fill a truck. Continue reading...

A fake alien made by a Doctor Who sculptor, animal organs sourced from a butcher, an actual magician behind the camera … this outrageous story makes for a great watch If you had to be interviewed on film, how would you hope to come across? Attractive, honest, a good egg? Or pathologically shifty, to the point that audiences want to throw their shoes at the screen? I found myself unlacing my Doc Martens this week, watching a documentary about the biggest hoax of the last century. In 1995, a grainy film was released that purported to be of an autopsy conducted on a creature recovered from a crash site on military land in Roswell, New Mexico. The incident had long been hallowed in ufology, but no moving footage had ever been uncovered. You’ve seen it. Hazmat figures loom over a bulbous-headed humanoid, spreadeagled on the table. Its dead, oval eyes are black, mouth agape, belly distended. I saw the shocking footage again last night, or thought I did. It was actually my laptop screen going dark, after I fell asleep in front of Netflix. Continue reading...

Attributed to the president of Namibia, the speech is still being shared as citizens across Africa and the Caribbean cry out for moral leaders willing to speak uncomfortable truths For a moment, the speech attributed to Namibia’s president travelled across the world like a gust of hope. It was fierce. Defiant. Unapologetically sovereign. The speaker denounced corruption, condemned foreign exploitation and declared that Africa’s resources belonged not to politicians or multinational corporations but to its people. Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah spoke of leaders who signed away national wealth behind closed doors and warned that those who betrayed the public trust would face accountability. It sounded like the language of decolonisation reborn. Across social media, many listened with admiration. Finally, here was a leader speaking with moral clarity. Here was the rhetoric that generations of postcolonial citizens had been waiting to hear. But there was one problem. It was fake. Nandi-Ndaitwah rejected it as an AI-generated fabrication. Continue reading...

The holiday from hell is a hoot to watch in Two Weeks in August. Plus: relive the joy of the 1966 World Cup final. Here’s what to watch this evening 9.15pm, BBC One Continue reading...