• Team Emirates NZ lead Ineos Britannia crew 4-2
• Report from races five and six | And email Yara

Leg 3 of 6: So many potholes on the course but New Zealand are still maintaining that they want to stay on the left side. Their top speed is 40km/hr and they have a healthy lead. The Brits finish 24sec behind and you can sense their frustration in their communication.

Leg 2 of 6: This New Zealand team are so good. They have seemingly learned their lesson from the last two races and they team are constantly communicating on board and emphasising that they do not want to play catch up. They once again lead after the second leg and their opponents 13secs behind.

Republican nominee insults vice-president at New York event where she appeared remotely; Trump campaign reportedly weighs event with former rival

Donald Trump’s campaign is pondering arranging a town hall with Nikki Haley, his former UN ambassador turned rival for the Republican nomination, who has since endorsed his candidacy, the Bulwark reports.

The joint appearance, which could be held with conservative commentator Sean Hannity on Fox News, is a bid to shore up his standing with women voters, who polls indicate are less enthusiastic about returning Trump to the White House than are men. Haley and Trump were at-times bitter rivals in the GOP primaries earlier this year, but she later endorsed him during a speech at the Republican national convention in July.

Since then, however, Haley and Trump have not appeared together. And she hinted that tensions still linger on her new SiriusXM satellite radio show last month.

“I don’t agree with Trump 100 percent of the time,” Haley said.

Force says unmarked vehicle collided with car driven by 38-year-old woman in Eltham, south-east London

The Independent Office for Police Conduct has launched an investigation after a heavily pregnant woman and her unborn child were killed in a collision with an unmarked police car in London.

The Metropolitan police said an unmarked vehicle collided with a car on the A20 in Eltham, south-east London, at about 6.15pm on Thursday near the junction with Kidbrooke Park Road.

• Collins postpones previously announced retirement
• American is currently at ninth in WTA Tour rankings

Danielle Collins says she’s changed her mind about retiring from the WTA Tour at the end of this year and will be back in 2025.

The 30-year-old American said on her Instagram account Thursday that after dealing with hurricanes in her home state of Florida and seeing specialist doctors about her health issues, she’s been “a little MIA (missing in action) the last few weeks”.

The country boy from Lacken who is now a world-class No8 on enjoying captaincy, a fascination with psychology and his penchant for hot yoga

It will be another six months before Andy Farrell finally has to choose his British & Irish Lions captain for the 2025 expedition to Australia. Plenty of time for the landscape to change and, theoretically, for one or two surprise contenders to emerge from the shrubbery. Until, that is, you sit down with the staggeringly impressive Caelan Doris and realise there is little need for Farrell to look anywhere else.

A bold prediction? Hardly. It is not rocket science that a world-class player with the universal respect of his peers, a university degree in psychology and a warm smile might just fit the bill. Ireland have produced some illustrious Lions captains in the pro era, from Brian O’Driscoll to Paul O’Connell and Peter O’Mahony, and another top-drawer candidate lurks quietly in the wings.

Matt Garman, head of AWS unit, says ‘there are other companies around’, according to transcript

A senior Amazon executive has suggested that staff who do not like the company’s new five-days-a-week office-working policy should quit.

The head of the tech company’s cloud computing business told an internal meeting that if employees did not support the change they could look for a job elsewhere, according to a transcript reviewed by Reuters.

Pop legend calls for more kindness and empathy from public, and discusses his history of addiction

Robbie Williams has shared an impassioned tribute to the One Direction singer Liam Payne, who died this week after falling from a balcony in a Buenos Aires hotel.

Williams acted as a mentor to One Direction when the band competed on The X Factor in 2010, and continued a friendship with Payne and the group.

Activists in swing Michigan county are alarmed by Hispanic voters backing Trump despite his anti-immigrant rhetoric

Dan Soza has seen the harsh realities of Donald Trump’s immigration policies up close and so he is alarmed that many Latino voters in Saginaw, Michigan, do not take seriously the former US president’s threats of mass deportations.

As a child welfare officer in Saginaw, Soza places young unaccompanied refugees in foster families and watched the Trump administration’s separation of children from their parents at the Mexican border in 2018 with alarm. He said the cruelty of that policy, and the former president’s threats against refugees legally in the US, should serve as a warning that Trump might do what he says.

Ed Miliband seems happy to see the landscape blighted. We value townscape – everywhere else has to fend for itself

Does Labour believe in beauty? The energy secretary, Ed Miliband, celebrated his arrival in office this summer by permitting three of the largest solar panel arrays in Britain. One, a Suffolk array covering nearly 2,800 acres, was described by a county councillor as “the poorest infrastructure application that I have ever dealt with”.

Now Miliband is demanding a procession of pylons filling the glorious Amber Valley in the Derbyshire uplands. Another parade of 420 pylons, each nearly as tall as Nelson’s column, will run down the east of England from Grimsby to Walpole, near King’s Lynn in Norfolk. The government also wants to allow the return of onshore wind turbines, overriding local objections.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

Delia Balmer spent four days as the hostage of her murderer boyfriend, only to survive his axe attack – and get him put away. The team behind a challenging drama about her horrific experience tell all

Nick Stevens is remembering the first time he met Delia Balmer, the only known survivor of serial killer John Sweeney, whose story he wanted to dramatise. The meeting went very badly. “She was half an hour late,” recalls the screenwriter. “She wouldn’t look me in the eye. She was very agitated and angry.”

Even though Stevens was familiar with the sensitivities of true-crime stories from his previous dramas In Plain Sight and The Pembrokeshire Murders, this was extreme. But he soon realised that the behaviour of Balmer – played by Anna Maxwell Martin in new drama Until I Kill You – reflected the PTSD she suffers due to Sweeney. In 1994, after she ended their three-year relationship, he held her hostage tied to a bed for four days and later attacked her with an axe, as recounted in her memoir Living With a Serial Killer, on which the show is based.

People could face fines of up to 400,000 rubles, as data suggests birthrate has slid to lowest level in quarter of a century

A law that would ban “propaganda” seeking to champion a childfree lifestyle has cleared its first hurdle in Russia’s lower house of parliament, gaining unanimous approval among lawmakers for a bill promoted as a means to increase the country’s birthrate.

The new legislation sets out fines for those deemed to be discouraging people from having children, as official data released last month suggested Russia’s birthrate had slid to its lowest level in a quarter of a century, a slump exacerbated by the country’s ageing population and Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

Shane Simmonds, who admitted murder, also sentenced to 12-year terms for two rapes of a separate woman

A man from London has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 32 years after he admitted stabbing his wife to death and leaving the body in his attic.

Shane Simmonds, 39, had walked into a police station in Lewisham in the early hours of 3 January and told officers that he had killed his wife at their home.

As the descendant of a survivor of a genocide, the Holocaust, I refuse to be a bystander to another genocide

Time after time, Sha’ban al-Dalou, a 19-year-old software engineering student living in Gaza, nearly escaped death. He began studying at Gaza’s al-Azhar University two months before it was destroyed in November by a US-made bomb dropped by Israeli forces.

Sha’ban posted videos to social media, describing how his family – which he took care of, as the eldest of five – was displaced five times by the assaults and asking for financial support to flee to Egypt.

Elena Stein is director of organizing strategy for Jewish Voice for Peace, the largest anti-Zionist Jewish organization in the world and currently the fastest-growing Jewish organization in the country.

Hopeful Republicans are calling it the ‘farewell tour’, as the king toes the tried and tested constitutional line

As the king arrives in Australia for the first time as head of state, republican rumblings are once more on the media radar.

Will it be, as the Australian Republic Movement (ARM) optimistically opines, the monarchy’s “farewell tour”?

Using the toxin for gold extraction is banned in the Philippines, but the practice remains widespread. Now one town is trialling a technique that could end its use and protect the world’s 15 million small-scale miners

For a small, rural town in the central Philippines, Paracale has a lot of pawn shops. That’s because the ground underneath it has a lot of gold. There is so much that a decade ago local officials had to tell people to stop digging under their houses to stop them collapsing, says Shirley Suzara, vice-president of a local mining association.

But the precious metal comes at a cost. “Way back we started noticing these mysterious illnesses – in our lungs, some kind of poisoning,” says Suzara, gesturing to her chest. “But we couldn’t work out where it was coming from.”

The Kansas City Chiefs kicker became a hero on the right after a speech in May. Suddenly Fox News is OK with athletes in politics

In a segment last week, Laura Ingraham could barely contain her glee when she announced that Harrison Butker had decided to venture into politics: a “move sure to drive the liberals crazy”.

Butker, for those who aren’t aware, is a kicker with the Kansas City Chiefs – who are famous in non-sporty circles for being the team that Taylor Swift’s boyfriend, Travis Kelce, plays for. As well as being the highest-paid kicker in the NFL and the owner of a very impressive beard, Butker is what a polite person might call “traditional” and a more direct person might call “Taliban-adjacent”. He essentially thinks women should stay at home making sandwiches for their husbands and looking after their kids. In May, the athlete caused a stir when gave a commencement speech at Benedictine College, a Catholic private liberal arts school, espousing these views. In the same speech, Butker also denounced “dangerous gender ideologies”, called Pride month a “deadly sin”, and rattled off various other conservative talking points.

Brighton manager on his work for an art dealer, competitive board games and why being as young as his players helps

To understand Fabian Hürzeler’s journey to becoming the youngest permanent manager in the history of the Premier League, it is instructive to go back to 2016, when he was cutting his teeth as player-manager of the German fifth-tier side Pipinsried. Struggling to make ends meet after the bold decision to give up his professional playing career at the age of 23 to concentrate on coaching, he started working for an art dealer in Munich.

“When I sold one picture or one painting in a month, I was done,” Brighton’s manager says. “So I watched a lot of football games during this time. That was also a reason why I got fired. The owner recognised that I’m watching more football during working time instead of really working because we didn’t sell any more paintings. But that was also a good time for me.

The Drowned by John Banville; The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins; Midnight and Blue by Ian Rankin; A Case of Matricide by Graeme Macrae Burnet; The Burning Stones by Antti Tuomainen

The Drowned by John Banville (Faber, £18.99)
The latest in Banville’s series set in 1950s Ireland begins with a Mercedes, engine still running, abandoned in a field by the sea in County Wicklow. It’s discovered by the reclusive Denton Wymes, who shortly afterwards encounters the “mad, or drunk, or both” Ronnie Armitage, who claims that his wife left the car abruptly and may have drowned herself. The behaviour of the couple in the nearby cottage, where the two men go to phone the police, is no less bizarre. When a search by the coastguards fails to recover a body, Detective Inspector Strafford is sent from Dublin to investigate. Strafford has problems of his own to contend with – his wife wants a divorce (possible only because the Straffords were married in England, but still no simple matter) and his lover Phoebe, daughter of the lugubrious pathologist Quirke, is pregnant. A beautifully written and intriguing slowburn of a book, in which the various quandaries in the main characters’ private lives are as absorbing as the central mystery, The Drowned is narratively connected to its predecessor but certainly works as a standalone.

The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins (Doubleday, £22)
The missing spouse in Hawkins’s latest novel is the philandering husband of famous artist Vanessa Chapman; he disappeared without trace 20 years before a bone in one of her “found objects” sculptures was identified as human by a visitor to the Tate. Vanessa herself is now deceased, having spent her last years in virtual seclusion on the Scottish tidal island still inhabited by Grace: old friend, carer, and keeper of the flame. When an art historian arrives with the twin aims of averting a scandal by “clearing up this bone business” and prising the remainder of Chapman’s work, willed to the foundation that employs him, from Grace’s reluctant hands, long-buried secrets are uncovered. With an intricate plot and multiple timelines and perspectives, The Blue Hour is a complex, atmospheric study of ambition, loyalty and betrayal.

With his distinctive narration, the author-actor brings warmth and humour to his retelling of Homer’s epic, the last in his Greek myth series

We are not short of modern retellings of the Greek myths: Natalie Haynes, Costanza Casati, Pat Barker and Madeline Miller are among those to have done it with style. But in audio, it’s hard to beat Stephen Fry’s book series which began with 2017’s Mythos, about the history of the Greek gods, and continued with Heroes, featuring the adventures of Jason, Perseus, Oedipus et al, and Troy, about the Trojan war. Now comes Odyssey, the fourth and final instalment characterised by the same accessible storytelling of its predecessors.

With Troy having fallen and a decade of war over, the Greek fleet, with its kings, princes, commanders, is keen to return home. Chief among them is Odysseus, king of Ithaca and hero of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, who longs to be reunited with his wife Penelope and who encounters violent storms (at the behest of Poseidon), angry Cyclopes and the witch-goddess Circe. Meanwhile Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and commander of the Achaeans, is to be reunited with his wife, Clytemnestra. But there is a question over how he will be received since, 10 years prior, he sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, in return for safe passage to Troy.

Beckham is hot on heels of Ed Sheeran, Alice Cooper and Kim Kardashian as consumers develop appetite for spicy sauces

First came tequila. Then rosé. Now the latest celebrity-backed brand isn’t booze but a hot sauce.

Recently, Brooklyn Beckham made his debut into the spicy market with Cloud 23.

• Premier League: 10 things to look out for this weekend
• Sign up for the Football Daily newsletter | And email John

While we wait for more Premier League managers’ press conferences, here are our 10 things to look out for this weekend. Pressure is mounting at Tottenham, Manchester United and Crystal Palace while Adama Traoré and Yankuba Minteh could be ones to watch.

Bayern Munich have failed to record a win in their last three games but Vincent Kompany believes no major changes are needed and that victories are just around the corner.

We know we have to do things better but we have 100% faith that our way will be successful. Hopefully, we will take the next step in the next game.

I come from Belgium so we are very pragmatic, much like the Germans. It is not only the belief but also what the analyses showed.

‘We will not go ahead with the Tory plan,’ Alison McGovern says, adding: ‘We will bring forward our own reforms’

Rachel Reeves is considering raising the tax on vaping products in her budget this month as figures show that a quarter of 11 to 15-year-olds in England have used e-cigarettes.

The chancellor is looking at increasing the tax after a consultation carried out by the last Conservative government.

I myself am supporting Robert Jenrick because I think he’s brought more energy and commitment to the campaign, and being leader of the opposition is a really demanding job.

Much as I like Kemi, I think she’s preoccupied with her own children, quite understandably. I think Robert’s children are a bit older, and I think that it’s important that whoever leads the opposition has got an immense amount of time and energy.”