Back on Armstrong, we’re still level but at 4-4, Potapova playing with confidence and poise. She holds to 30, and Andreeva must now serve to stay in set one.
Zheng and Swiatek are out on court; Zheng, the Olympic champion, had to come through qualifying after missing time with an elbow injury, but two weeks of competition have brought her into the main event nicely loose. I’d be surprised if she finds a way to win here, but she did at those Olympics, so knows she can.
The former player’s credentials speak for themselves but the ECB has also taken a risk in employing him until the end of next year
For most of the time since his retirement as a player Kevin Pietersen has worked as a pundit and commentator, encouraged to be outspoken, hold strong opinions and state them powerfully. After his surprise appointment as a specialist mentor to the England men’s white-ball teams he will have to tread a bit more carefully.
He will bring positivity, as all great players initially do because of their stature within the game, but the fact that he was a great player lasts only so long, and then it’s about the words he uses and his ability to tailor his messaging.
Ed Miliband to reassert support for Palestinian rights and a two-state solution in move likely to draw fierce criticism from US and Israel
Ed Miliband will announce what he has described as a broad reset of the UK’s relations with Israel on Tuesday, promising the government will take a more active approach in supporting the Palestinian cause.
In an intervention that is expected to draw fierce criticism from the US and Israel, the foreign secretary will impose a UK ban on the trade in goods and some services from illegal Israeli settlements.
Friedrich Merz said his conservative CDU was shaken ‘to its very foundations’ after far-right victory in Saxony-Anhalt
A “shocked” and chastened Friedrich Merz has vowed to stay in office despite the far right’s triumph in a state election that has brought anti-immigrant, pro-Kremlin politicians within striking distance of power.
The German chancellor, appearing ashen-faced in front of reporters in Berlin, said on Monday that the landslide victory by the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Saxony-Anhalt had shaken his conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) “to its very foundations”.
From Dover to Saxony-Anhalt, extremists thrive when voters believe established parties can no longer deliver security, prosperity or meaningful change
What links the thuggish masked agitation in southern England this weekend and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland’s (AfD) best-ever result in a German state – where it more than doubled the 21% vote it received five years ago? Several hundred men in balaclavas blocking an A road are not the same as a party winning a landslide election. But both events draw on the idea that the political system has lost control. The extremists in Dover and Portsmouth dramatise this claim; the electoral result in Germany threatens to institutionalise it.
The prospect of Germany’s first far-right-led state government since the second world war carries real consequences. In Saxony-Anhalt it could see power handed to a party hostile to migrants, Islam, LGBTQ+ rights and climate policy. Alarmingly, it has senior figures linked to former neo-Nazi groups. About 170,000 foreign nationals live among 2 million people in Saxony-Anhalt – and roughly a fifth of the state’s doctors were born abroad. The grim paradox is that an AfD government could oversee the very state intelligence service that has classified the party as “rightwing extremist”.
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As he prepares for the upcoming international window, the US head coach spoke about Folarin Balogun, the LA Olympics and dual national players
It’s been two months since the US men’s national team crashed out of the World Cup in disappointing fashion, and their head coach, Mauricio Pochettino, is back at work.
The former Tottenham and PSG manager was largely viewed as a short-term hire when he joined the US in 2024, brought on to help the team capitalize on their first home World Cup in more than three decades. Along the way, Pochettino and US Soccer warmed to the idea of a contract extension, one they finalized in August.
The US will play four friendlies in late September and early October against Peru, Chile, Mexico and Canada, but that stretch of games pales in comparison to the larger task at hand. Pochettino must guide the US to qualification for the 2030 World Cup, of course, but the Argentinian – and the federation – have more ambitious goals that involve reshaping the structure of soccer in the United States.
Venice film festival: Tedeschi gives a career best performance as the mysterious stranger who visits a wealthy Italian family to prey on their pampered weaknesses
Everyone in the movie business has earnestly learned to call film-makers “storytellers”, despite the fact that film-makers don’t necessarily have to deliver conventional narrative and that so many of them are in any case no good at the old-fashioned business of storytelling.
But this last point certainly doesn’t apply to Italian director Paolo Strippoli who has brought to Venice an uproarious edge-of-the-seat gripper in which Valeria Bruni Tedeschi gives us the funniest performance of the festival and the best of her career.
It’s a satirical nightmare about a wealthy woman’s Faustian bargain, like one of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected – as elegantly designed and beautifully shot as anything by Paolo Sorrentino and with smart, subversive things to say about body image and body fascism and about a cosseted, self-involved Italian matriarch who eternally congratulates herself on sacrificing herself – or wanting to sacrifice herself – for her children.
At the centre of this bizarre drama is Anna (superbly played by Jasmine Trinca) who is complacently marred to wealthy alpha-male Bari businessman Walter (Adriano Giannini): they have two children: Alice (Romana Maggiora Vergone) and Tobia (Andrea Genovese). Each family member gets a chapter.
At a spectacular party at their gorgeous home, whose clear purpose is to make friends and neighbours jealous, a terrible accident happens, just after the children discover an ominous spiral of ants in the grass.
While praying desperately for a miracle, Anna is visited by “L’estranea” of the film’s Italian title, the mysterious stranger hilariously played by Tedeschi, who appears to know all about this rich, picture-perfect family and offers to solve their problems. But she wants something in return, a sadistic deal that cuts to the heart of both parents’ selfishness.
Anna had always wanted to act in her youth but her father forbade it – now she has been obsessively pushing Alice into acting and is morbidly upset at any physical problem that Alice has which damages this proxy ambition. As for macho Walter, he is thrilled at Tobia’s skills at football, and sponsors his son’s youth team; he is disgusted (rather than compassionate) at a weight issue that Tobia has which gets him dropped from the side.
And all the time Anna sombrely considers the sacrifices she has secretly brokered for other people to make with this smirking, skittish Mephistopheles in order to keep her family safe. But has she done wrong? Is she guilty of some obvious sin which is being punished? No. It is just a deadpan tale of supernatural cruelty meted out to someone whose only crime is smugness, vanity and being rude to her domestic staff. It all climaxes in an apocalyptic finale: an enjoyable and macabre family affair.
Three men on trial for killing Jake and Callum Robinson and Jack Carter Rhoad in Baja California in 2024
The alleged killers of two Australian surfers and an American at a Mexican surfing hotspot in 2024 have gone on trial in the border resort where the three were murdered.
The scandals are building, his touch perhaps not quite what it was. And, most of all, his party rivals are beginning to sense an opportunity
Nigel Farage didn’t know. He wasn’t told.
Sure, he was right there at the table when the undercover reporter he believed to be a rich American’s sonspelled out very clearly how he hoped to channel his father’s money to Reform, in ways that certainly don’t sound too lawful.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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Far-right activists gathered in two disruptive demonstrations in Dover and Portsmouth over the weekend, attempting to obstruct asylum seekers arriving on small boats from France. Many wore all black and balaclavas. The action was seemingly organised by Daniel Thomas, an agitator better known as Danny Tommo, who has close ties with the far-right extremist Tommy Robinson. Thomas was recorded on the ground saying Portsmouth was now ‘ground zero’ for small boat crossings, and has threatened further action. Lucy Hough speaks to political correspondent Ben Quinn
Chief of nuclear watchdog says secret Assad-era facility would have been able to produce fissile material
A nearly complete nuclear reactor built secretly during the rule of the toppled Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad would have been able to produce fissile material for possible use in nuclear weapons, the chief of the UN nuclear watchdog has revealed.
Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last month visited two sites, one in Deir ez-Zor and a second in an undisclosed location identified to them by Syrian authorities.
Venice film festival: Inserting himself into settings from Apocalypse Now to The Handmaid’s Tale, the pop-cultural critic finds it hard to locate the perfect ending – even with spoilers
The great pop-cultural critic and postmodern Marxist is back, with more entertaining and semi-serious provocations and deconstructive insights, notionally into the idea of “utopias”, as they appear in the movies and TV, having already done “cinema” and “ideology”.
I was incidentally hoping for a Slavoj Žižek aria about how unexpectedly great and profoundly important threequels are. This is of course delivered emphatically in that amazing voice, now as universally recognised as Werner Herzog’s. Is it too late for a cameo on The Simpsons?
The ‘stop the boats’ narrative is increasingly presented as if it stems from a concern for women’s safety. This is just the laundering of thuggery
It was a busy weekend for the insurgent and hard right, as Reform party delegates redoubled their commitment to women’s safety by physically attacking a female protester and Patriot Platform, a new group established by Danny Tommo, real name Daniel Thomas, arrived in Dover on Saturday, then Portsmouth on Sunday, dressed in balaclavas. No arrests were made in Dover, and therefore the protest was deemed peaceful. “A message was sent!” Thomas exclaimed later on his socials. “Now imagine how powerful the next message will be.” The next powerful message of peace the following day spurred the issuance of a dispersal order from Hampshire police, alongside some smashed windscreens (of police cars) and advice for local people to avoid the area.
The “stop the boats” narrative, along with a lot of Reform’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, has become increasingly bound up with a concern for the safety of women and children. It might be a slyly vague sentiment from Robert Jenrick, in which he doesn’t want his daughters sharing a neighbourhood with men “who broke into the country illegally, about whom we know next to nothing”, or it might be Zia Yusuf’s much more explicit complaint that the nation is prepared to “sacrifice British women and girls on the altar of diversity”. Protesters outside hotels housing asylum seekers get all their righteous wrath from the danger posed to women from foreign nationals, and Thomson stated his aims straightforwardly on Instagram – posting video of Saturday’s protest, he wrote: “Protect our country! And more importantly our women and children! This is our warning!”
Saxony-Anhalt win part of wider trend driven by mainstream policy failures and gradual normalisation of far right ideas
The numbers speak for themselves: Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a party that dabbles in Nazi imagery, distinguishes between “biological” and “passport” Germans, and is too extreme even for France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen, nearly doubled its score in Sunday’s state election in Saxony-Anhalt to 43.8% of the vote.
Meanwhile, the centre-right CDU of the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, collapsed to 17.2%, less than half its total in the same race five years ago, and the centre-left SPD – Germany’s other main party of government for the past 60-odd years – scraped 9.3%. The least that can be said is that the centre did not hold.
Lawes is back in the Prem after two years in France and has unfinished business at international level
Courtney Lawes was not expecting to be named in Steve Borthwick’s pre‑season England squad over the weekend. While the 37-year-old has made clear that his return to the Prem with Sale Sharks is in no small part down to his ambition to feature in a fifth World Cup next year, much like the national head coach Lawes favours action rather than words.
Borthwick has explained to players such as Lawes, his fellow Sale arrival Joe Marchant and Newcastle’s new No 8 Hoskins Sotutu that in order to achieve England selection they must prove themselves against the players they are now competing with in the Prem.
Singer has rewarded patience of hundreds waiting outside hotel with regular appearances and even some dancing
Noëlla Lamy, 52, who described herself as one of Céline Dion’s biggest fans, was preparing to spend all night on a Paris pavement without a tent but wearing a sweatshirt printed with the singer’s face for comfort.
“Céline Dion is a force of bravery and an inspiration,” she said.
Hundreds of men, some in balaclavas, try to prevent asylum seekers’ processing, two days after similar scenes in Dover
Downing Street has condemned the “thuggish and intimidating behaviour” of far-right activists who blocked roads in Portsmouth when a boat carrying asylum seekers arrived in the city, two days after similar scenes in Dover.
Hundreds of men, some dressed in black and wearing balaclavas, tried to stop the arrivals from being transported for processing until 3am, when police removed them with threats of arrest.
Estimates suggest drop in production with vineyards also concerned ‘smoke taint’ from wildfires may affect quality
French vineyards hit by severe drought and heatwaves are expected to report a 30-year low in wine production after the country’s hottest ever recorded summer, according to the agriculture ministry.
Initial estimates suggest winemakers will produce just under 34m hectolitres from this year’s harvest: a drop of 6% on last year, and 17% less than the 2021-2025 average.
Mobile phones of players confiscated as part of inquiry
Nine fined during Pakistan’s recent tour of Caribbean
Pakistan have launched an investigation into “discipline and conduct” during their highly dysfunctional tour of England, with two players understood to have had their mobile phones confiscated as part of the probe.
A spokesperson for the Pakistan Cricket Board confirmed on Monday that an investigation is currently under way and while no individuals have been named, it follows the removal of seven players from their original touring party last week in response to going 2-0 down with one Test still to play.
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