Tube stoppages due on two 24-hour periods from midday on Tuesday and Thursday next week but sources say RMT seeking talks Hopes have been raised that next week’s strikes by London Underground drivers could yet be averted, after sources said the RMT union had put out feelers for talks. The RMT members, almost half of London’s Tube drivers, are due to strike for two 24-hour periods from midday on Tuesday and Thursday, closing some lines entirely and bringing widespread travel disruption to the capital until the weekend. Continue reading...

Eddie Howe admitted Anthony Gordon may have played his final match for Newcastle amid Bayern speculation Continue reading...

Andrew Richardson helped her win slam as an 18-year-old Partnership to start at Strasbourg in French Open buildup Emma Raducanu has rehired Andrew Richardson, the coach who helped guide her to her sensational US Open triumph in 2021, on a formal basis as she prepares to return to competition next week in Strasbourg in the buildup to the French Open. Richardson will accompany Raducanu at the WTA 500 event as she competes for the first time in two months after being sidelined by post-viral illness. During the early days of her return to the courts, Raducanu travelled to Richardson’s base at the Ferrer Academy in La Nucía, Spain, near Benidorm, for a clay-court training block that doubled as a trial period for a potential formal partnership. Continue reading...

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Under aviation regulator proposals rival companies would bid to design and build parts of airport expansion Heathrow could be forced to allow other companies to design and build its third runway and new terminal after the UK aviation regulator argued that rival bids could keep construction costs down. A long-awaited review by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) proposes changes to the regulatory model that governs how Heathrow runs and covers its costs. Continue reading...

Actors Vivica A Fox, Kara Young and Mallori Johnson on subverting revenge tropes as Aleshea Harris’s play storms on to the screen Kara Young remembers the fervor around Is God Is’s off-Broadway run in 2018. Playwright Aleshea Harris’s revenge tale ran at New York’s Soho Rep theater from February through May of that year. Young was performing in a different show at the time, but she knew she needed to see Harris’s play by any means necessary. “I was lucky to get a ticket,” says the two-time Tony award-winning actor, recalling the buzz about the show that rippled through the theater community and saw it transfer to London in 2021. As soon as she saw it, Young easily understood why: “It blew my mind. Those characters have stayed in my spirit since 2018.” Continue reading...

Athletes have always been targets for criminals hoping to profit from their wealth. But a new wave of dangers has cropped up in recent years With exorbitant ticket, travel and hotel prices making fans desperate to find an affordable way of attending this summer’s World Cup, it’s no surprise that security firms and law enforcement agencies are warning that fans are at significant risk of becoming fraud victims. While major tournaments are moments of heightened vulnerability for supporters, players themselves are increasingly attractive year-round targets for cybercriminals who can use AI to mount ever more sophisticated attacks. Continue reading...

The death toll included three children, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Finland and Latvia were both forced to step up their air defences last night after early alerts about potential drone incursions into their territory, but no incursions were eventually reported. The Latvian army issued an alert after midnight local time, with Nato Baltic air policing mission fighters scrambled to respond to the incident – just hours after the country’s government effectively collapsed over the previous incursion. Continue reading...

Updates from the latest round of Championship matches Get The Spin newsletter | And mail Tanya or post BTL The ECB has announced a new T20 hall of fame before the Blast, er, blasts off, a week today. The garlanded four are: Ravi Bopara, Charlotte Edwards, James Vince and Danni Wyatt-Hodge 1 Durham 91 Continue reading...

⚽ All the latest heading into a busy weekend ⚽ Ten things to look out for | Mail Dominic We’ll start with a plug to our 10 things to look out for this weekend, which of course includes the FA Cup final. Manchester City have lost the last two cup finals, while Chelsea were runners-up on three successive occasions in 2020, 2021 and 2022. Something’s got to give. What a week it’s been in football. We’ve got the playoff ‘spygate’ scandal, some genuinely superb on-field playoff drama in the EFL, and the small matter of the closest Premier League title race in years going on as well, by the way. Continue reading...

(Ghostly International) While the first track is a scorching mix of poetry, rap, falsetto vocals and acoustic guitar, elsewhere the Sudanese-American’s second album feels a little underbaked Spoken-word poetry about Prometheus, screamo rap, sun-dappled acoustic guitar, airy falsetto … and that’s just the first track on Dua Saleh’s Of Earth and Wires, their second album rooted in real-world crises and fictional lore. The Sudanese-American musician (best known for collaborating with Travis Scott and playing Cal in Netflix’s Sex Education) draws on fears of climate collapse and AI dominance, as well as the catastrophic civil war in Sudan, for a post-apocalyptic sequel to the fictional queer romance at the heart of their debut record. This is a lot of terrain to navigate, but that opening track, 5 Days, tackles it with real guts, twisting from tremulous vocals reminiscent of Perfume Genius into a hot flash of screamed frustration. It promises an exhilarating, bumpy ride – but Of Earth and Wires turns out to be more cautious than its urgent ideas would suggest. Continue reading...

The inspiring life of the Black American activist and legal scholar who changed the way the world things about race Kimberlé Crenshaw’s memoir describes a life shadowed by Jim Crow segregation and racism, but lit up by hope. That the social conditions of her early life did not destroy her family, as they had so many others, must be credited to their extraordinary grit and determination. The journey that led Crenshaw to create the influential legal theory of “intersectionality” begins with the “well of thoughtless devaluation faced by little Black girls”. And for all who think those days have long gone, Backtalker is a must read. “Backtalking” is how Crenshaw responds to anything that does not make sense. Whether as a five-year-old kindergarten student who was allowed to portray a witch but not a princess in a school play, or decades later, lobbying Harvard’s dean of law to hire Black faculty and being asked whether she wouldn’t prefer “an excellent white professor over a mediocre Black one”, Crenshaw talked back. For her, backtalking is about resilience in the midst of struggle, which sometimes painfully includes talking back to the ones we love. Continue reading...

Amanda Seyfried is astonishing in a fascinating musical about the Shaker sect, plus Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Frankenstein remix turns the stupendous Jessie Buckley into a girl power punk Mona Fastvold’s astonishing drama about the founder of the Shakers Christian sect in the 18th century defies simple classification – which may be why it was unjustly shunned during awards season. At heart it’s a historical biopic: Manchester cotton worker Ann Lee (a performance of great intensity from Amanda Seyfried) joins the Quakers, then forms her own group founded on celibacy, and ends up migrating to America to seek religious freedom. It’s also a highly choreographed folk musical, centred on the Shakers’ ecstatic singing and dancing. And it’s a fascinating tale of female empowerment in an age when the obstacles to self-determination were vast. Out now, Disney+ Continue reading...

The Photo London Emerging Photographer Award, presented in partnership with Nikon, launched in 2015 and was set up to nurture and enable the career development of emerging photographic artists. The shortlisted work for 2026 is on display at Photo London Continue reading...

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world Continue reading...

The UK’s 350 wealthiest individuals and families now have a combined wealth of £784bn, Sunday Times reports The Sunday Times have also calculated the UK’s biggest donors to charity. Hedge fund manager Sir Chris Hohn tops the list after giving away £1.4bn — or 16.8% of his estimated £8.6bn wealth in the last year, either personally or through his three foundations which include The Children’s Investment (TCI) fund. “I don’t need to persuade [anyone] that rich people are hoarding their money, many have made pledges but it’s about 0.4 per cent of their wealth they give away a year.” “I’m not doing this for publicity, but to see if I can encourage others to give. Our life is a gift and that means our money is a gift and we’re meant to share it.” The fact the number of billionaires has risen to 157 and their wealth has grown to £784 billion is outrageous, while one in five kids are living in poverty, small businesses are going under, and services are crippled by underinvestment. Right now, it feels like the Rich List is a running total of everything that is wrong in our society—a handful of people counting obscene amounts of wealth while everyone else scrapes by. It’s blindingly obvious, to anyone paying attention, that we need to do something about this. Continue reading...

(Thrill Jockey) The US guitarist excavates the outer reachers of the famed collector’s work, pointedly – and beautifully – reinterpreting songs from nations touched by major US conflicts Behind this gorgeous collection of folk tunes from Southeast Asia, Soviet Russia and the Islamic and Arabic worlds lies the legacy of two Americans: the peyote-dropping 78rpm collector Harry Smith (whose 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music presented folk, blues and country recordings from the 1920s and 1930s) and the exploratory guitarist Marisa Anderson, whose back catalogue is steeped in tradition and improvisation. In 2023, she begged for time in Smith’s shuttered archives, discovering hours of non-American music, before learning to perform and share it. Here, Anderson interprets nine of these tunes, pointedly taken from regions shaped by major US conflicts since her birth in 1970. While her fascinating liner notes track what is lost and found when trying to translate these compositions, their universal musicality still cuts through. Opener Quodlibet is beautiful: an intricate, minor-key medley of Uzbek tunes originally performed on the dambura (a fretless lute), on which Anderson adds bluegrass techniques to counter her inability to play quarter-tones on her guitar. Her take on a qawwali vocal tune, Hamd, is also a highlight, her stacked guitar layers ringing with warmth and emotion. Continue reading...

US grandmaster scored biggest success of his career at the Grand Chess Tour Rapid & Blitz and is close to world top 10 Hans Niemann, the controversial US grandmaster whose game with Magnus Carlsen at the 2022 Sinquefield Cup led to cheating allegations, a $100m lawsuit, an out of court settlement, the Netflix documentary Untold: Chess Mates, and a forthcoming book, scored the most important success of his career last weekend. Niemann, competing as a wildcard, won the $50,000 first prize at the Warsaw Rapid & Blitz in Poland, ahead of the US champion and the world No 3, Fabiano Caruana, India’s reigning world champion, Gukesh Dommaraju, and the Candidates winner, Javokhir Sindarov. The event was part of the St Louis-backed Grand Chess Tour, which ends in August and includes the prestigious Sinquefield Cup. Continue reading...

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Wreathed with more than 150 years of hopes, dreams and drama, the FA Cup reflects sporting heritage and mystique Footballing physiques have changed a great deal over the decades, but when Chelsea meet Manchester City on Saturday there’s one outline we’ll all recognise. While the average shape has got leaner and more toned, this body has stayed comfortable in its old-school proportions. A modest waist gives on to surprisingly wide hips. Arms that have never lifted weights remain a little skinny for the frame. And yet none of this has been a hindrance in the modern game: every year, the FA Cup trophy still ends up on the winning team. This is one of sport’s most iconic pieces of silverware, wreathed with more than 150 years of hopes, dreams and drama. It’s a far more emotive sight than the cartoonishly crowned Premier League trophy, or even the stylishly minimalist Champions League trophy. And this makes it even more extraordinary to remember that the object itself is still not out of its tween years. This weekend it will make its 13th Cup final appearance. Continue reading...

From late-night calls with Stevie Wonder to tours with Frank Sinatra, the US singer seemed primed for pop success – so what caused her to hide from the public for decades? Finally back in the spotlight, she tells her remarkable story ‘I can’t believe this is actually happening!” Suzette Charles says on a video call. At 63, she is about to release her self-titled debut album 33 years later than she had hoped, and her disbelief is understandable. Crowned the first biracial Miss America in 1984, aged 20, in controversial circumstances, Charles went on to suffer a lifetime of adversity. She faced a distressing tour with Bill Cosby and mistreatment by record labels, and her debut album was shelved when her songwriters Stock Aitken Waterman (SAW) – who had made huge hits for Kylie Minogue, Rick Astley and more – split up. Then came a decades-long marriage that seemed to end her artistic career altogether. “You can’t make this stuff up,” she says. But Charles has reunited with Mike Stock to finally finish the most emotional of projects, her appropriately self-titled debut. “I love the way the album’s turned out,” Stock says. “I’ve worked with Paul McCartney, Donna Summer, Cliff Richard – as a singer, I’d put Suzette in that bracket.” Continue reading...

History shows there have been more short-lived Labour governments than long-lasting ones. The party must secure a clear, progressive legacy In democratic countries at least, government is often about getting things done in time. Sooner or later, voters always turn on national leaders and governments fall. Even the most promising policy ideas are left unfulfilled. With one important exception, this life cycle is usually briefer for Labour governments, since they face more opposition from the media and powerful economic interests, and more suspicion from voters as a result. Despite the party winning three times as many big electoral majorities as the Conservatives over the past 30 years, Labour governments are still seen as unnatural by many people, both outside and inside the party. And without an assumed right to rule, governments age fast. Continue reading...

Bruno Fernandes, Declan Rice, Erling Haaland, David Raya and Rayan Cherki are the leading contenders By WhoScored There is a version of this season in which Bruno Fernandes left Manchester United in the summer. “The club wanted me to leave,” he said in December. Thankfully for United fans, he stayed, navigated the tactical ambiguity of playing for Ruben Amorim and led the team back into the Champions League. Continue reading...

The 35-year-old will break the Bears’ top-flight appearance record against Northampton – and still hasn’t scored a try Bristol’s Jake Woolmore has been pursuing a couple of personal goals for a while. Beneath the Friday night lights in Northampton he is about to tick off one of them by breaking the Bears’ top-flight appearance record. If he is also able to mark this special occasion by surrendering his status as the least likely person in the league to score a try, so much the better. With fifth-placed Bristol seeking a win over the league leaders to bolster their playoff hopes, the 35-year-old prop is quick to stress the team’s interests come first. That said, if he makes it over the try‑line for the first time on his 142nd league appearance for the club (and 184th in all competitions), the celebrations will be even mightier. As he puts it: “I can’t imagine there are many people who’ve played over 180 games for one club without scoring.” Continue reading...

Redress for force-fitting devices in homes of vulnerable includes £20m penalty and £70m of debt write-offs Thousands of British Gas customers who had prepayment meters force-fitted in their homes will receive up to £112m in compensation and debt write-offs on their energy bills. Great Britain’s energy regulator found that British Gas forced prepayment meters on homes that were not keeping up with their bills at the height of the Russian gas crisis, in one of the most complex Ofgem investigations in its history. Continue reading...