Four our of four for Ben Stokes, who thinks the overhead conditions will be good for bowling and everyone’s had a good opportunity to relax and recharge. Everyone left everything out on the field at Lord’s, both sides have been excellent with little between them, and he thinks the wicket is typical Manchester, quite firm with a bit of grass coverage. It’s been a while since dawson played a Test, but he’s thoroughly earned his chance.
More than 100 aid agencies, including Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and Oxfam, say ‘our colleagues and those we serve are wasting away’
Irish premier Micheál Martin on Tuesday called for the war in Gaza to end, describing the images of starving children as “horrific”. Mr Martin called for a surge in humanitarian aid to be allowed into Gaza.
In a post on X, he said:
The situation in Gaza is horrific.
The suffering of civilians and the death of innocent children is intolerable.
In the third instalment of cinema’s shiny blue 3D eco fable, James Cameron drags us to the volcanic badlands to meet the ever so angry Ash People
Say what you like about James Cameron, but the man has somehow made three films, umpteen extraterrestrial biomes, and one endlessly grieving smurf wolf pack out of the phrase “don’t touch that tree”. Now, the veteran sci-fi film-maker returns with Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third instalment in cinema’s shiniest blue 3D eco fable. And from a preview of the trailer (to be released before showings of The Fantastic Four: First Steps this weekend) this is going to be yet another jaw-dropping, box-office smashing triumph of elemental, stereoscopic worldbuilding – or possibly a very long and very heavy bioluminescent deforestation story, depending on your point of view.
Where The Way of Water took us out to sea to commune with whales who cry in subtitles, Fire and Ash drags us into the scorched heart of Pandora’s volcanic badlands. Here we meet the Ash People – an angry, soot-streaked Na’vi clan who appear to have spent the last two films building up a healthy mistrust of outsiders. Imagine running into the scariest-looking Great Plains warriors Hollywood ever dreamed up, then dipping them in tar and relocating them to Mordor. They ride screaming banshees through smoke clouds, and if the trailer is anything to go by, they’ve had just about enough of Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully, his adoptive family and the entire colonial project of humanity in general.
Which is why it’s a little strange to see Stephen Lang’s Colonel Miles Quaritch, or at least the reborn recombinant that carries the returning villain’s memories, apparently sporting the same scarlet war paint as these newcomers to the franchise. Have the Ash People been conned by humanity into fighting their Na’vi brethren, or are they just the latest poor fools to fall victim to humankind’s time-honoured tradition of co-opting Indigenous resistance to fight its proxy wars?
Either way, this is a first glimpse of Fire and Ash that in terms of sheer scale, spectacle and blue-on-blue action looks likely to match anything the series has so far delivered. Oona Chaplin’s Varang, leader of the new clan, tells a terrified Kiri (the Na’vi born from the dormant Avatar left behind by Sigourney Weaver’s late Grace Augustine) that her goddess “has no dominion here”, which must be a pretty scary thing to hear when you’ve spent your entire life communing with Eywa-infused floating jellyfish. The Sullys appear to be caught up in their own family conflict, and at one point Sully basically tells Zoe Saldaña’s Neytiri to stop trying to solve all their life problems with arrows and screaming.
First and foremost, if Ozzy Osbourne is destined to be remembered for anything, it’ll be his music. Few people can genuinely claim to have invented a whole new genre of something. But Osbourne, along with the other members of Black Sabbath, did exactly that.
However, Ozzy Osbourne isn’t destined to be remembered for just one thing. Because, for three short years two decades ago, for better or worse (and this is genuinely debatable) Ozzy Osbourne also changed television forever. That’s right, it would be rude to remember Ozzy Osbourne without at least acknowledging that he is the man who gave us The Osbournes.
If our overlords can’t handle being joked about on late-night TV, we don’t need new shows. We need new leaders
Last week – just a few days after Stephen Colbert called out his parent company for paying Donald Trump millions of dollars – CBS canceled the Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
Maybe now people will finally stop saying Trump is good for comedy.
Defender praises England’s spirit after victory over Italy
‘People on the outside think we have to win every game’
Lucy Bronze has said England have “nothing to prove” after reaching a third successive major tournament final with a dramatic extra-time win over Italy despite some unconvincing performances.
“Do we have something to prove? Not really,” the Chelsea right-back said. “That’s people from the outside thinking that teams have to win every single game. We’ve done six consecutive semi-finals, three consecutive finals, who else has done that? Nobody. [The current] Spain and Germany are fantastic teams but even they haven’t managed that feat.”
In the UK and the US, ‘direct cremations’ – where no mourners are present and relatives and friends can organise their own ceremonies – are on the rise. Is it time to rethink how we say goodbye our loved ones?
When my father-in-law, Cliff, died in March 2021 after being diagnosed with an aggressive and late-caught cancer, he didn’t leave any funeral plans. Nor was there money squirrelled away to pay for them, even if he had. He was an ardent atheist, so a church service was out of the question, and pandemic restrictions had been limiting guest numbers, so my wife, Hayley, and her siblings decided to opt out of having a traditional funeral. Instead, they chose “direct cremation”, a service that minimises formalities – and, crucially, the cost. There is no funeral service; the coffin is simply brought into the crematorium before it is cremated, after which the ashes are returned to the family.
During an online consultation with “death specialists” Farewill, Hayley was quoted £1,062 for a direct cremation, more than £3,000 cheaper than the current average cost of a basic funeral. The only catch was that no one would attend the cremation, aside from those paid to carry it out. It seemed a cruel choice to some, who could not get their heads around the idea that there would not be a funeral to attend. But Hayley explained why it seemed like the perfect option: they could obtain her father’s ashes without fuss and hold their own, intimate ceremony on the banks of the River Wye, where Cliff had loved to fish.
The outstanding chess player of his generation is the latest figure to be associated with a kingdom that uses entertainment to pacify the public
In February, Norwegian chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen extended his reign over the online chess world when he defeated longtime rival Hikaru Nakamura in back-to-back matches to retain his Chessable Masters title. The tournament kicked off this year’s Champions Tour, a circuit Carlsen has dominated since its launch in 2020. But now, the stakes were even higher: the tour doubles as a qualifier for the Esports World Cup in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where the winner of the chess section of the tournament will take home $250,000 for three days’ work.
The chess tournament is part of the broader Esports World Cup, a seven-week spectacle that began on 8 July and stretches into late August. This is only the second edition of the World Cup but with more than 2,000 participating players, 25 different events and a record-breaking $70m total prize pool, it is the largest and most ambitious event of its kind.
Victims’ remains misidentified and ‘commingled’ parts of more than one person placed in one casket, says lawyer
British families grieving after the Air India disaster have discovered that the remains of their loved ones have been wrongly identified before repatriation, according to an aviation lawyer representing them.
Relatives of one victim had to abandon funeral plans after being informed that their coffin contained the body of an unknown passenger.
Deal for Sporting striker includes €10m in add-ons
Arsenal poised to confirm Cristhian Mosquera signing
Arsenal have finally reached agreement with Sporting for the transfer of Viktor Gyökeres in a deal worth up to €73.5m (£63.7m), having resolved the problematic issue of the €10m of add-ons to end a tortuous saga and Mikel Arteta’s hunt for a No 9.
The London club, , who are poised to confirm the signing of the centre-half Cristhian Mosquera from Valencia for an initial €15m, made the official breakthrough late on Tuesday, sending an updated offer to their Portuguese counterparts to satisfy them over the structure of the bonuses. Sporting have wanted the add-ons to be achievable, based on appearances, goals and assists by Gyökeres plus Champions League qualification, whereas Arsenal had wanted to include some more difficult ones.
They wear traditional dress, play ancient melodies on violins and accordions, but the women of this island outpost ensure that it is more than just a living museum
“Welcome to Kihnu. We are not a matriarchy,” says Mare Mätas as she meets me off the ferry. I’ve stepped on to the wild and windswept Kihnu island, which floats in the Gulf of Riga off Estonia’s western coast like a castaway from another time. Just four miles (7km) long and two miles wide, this Baltic outpost is a world unto itself that has long been shielded from the full impact of modernity, a place where motorbikes share the road with horse-drawn carts, and women in bright striped skirts still sing ancient sea songs. But Kihnu is no museum – it’s a living, breathing culture all of its own, proudly cared for by its 700 or so residents.
Mare, a traditional culture specialist and local guide, promptly ushers me into the open back of her truck and takes me on a whistlestop tour of the island, giving me a history quiz as we stop at the museum, the lighthouse, the cemetery and the school.
“Paris FC’s promotion means that Paris will have its first Ligue 1 derby since 1978-79. Is there any European city that has had a longer gap between top-flight derbies?” queries Steve Whittaker from Frankfurt (which hasn’t had a top-flight derby in the Bundesliga era).
We’ve touched on this before, many years ago, when we found a 44-year gap between the meeting of Hertha Berlin and FC Union and a 48-year wait for FSV v Eintracht in Steve’s home city. However both derbies reconvened in the second tier and don’t count here. So it is well worth us having a drill down into some top-flight derby deserts. The 46-year wait for Paris bragging rights to be earned is indeed a long one, particularly for a capital city.
Valencia had no derby between Valencia and Levante in La Liga between 10 January 1965 and 8 January 2005 (40 years).
Berlin had no Bundesliga derby between 1977 (Hertha Berlin v Tennis Borussia Berlin) until 2019 (Hertha Berlin v Union Berlin – 42 years). There were Berlin derbies in the old East German league, but teams from West Berlin would not have been able to participate in those.
Cologne has no league derby since 1974 (FC Köln v Fortuna Köln) but those two did meet in the 1982 DFB Pokal Cup, but that doesn’t count. So the gap is active at 51 years.
Finally, Naples has never had a Serie A derby at all. To get close to one, you need to venture back to the pre-Serie A days of 1921 when the Italian Championship involved a series of mini-leagues leading to a final round-robin. In the last round before it entered the final phase in 1921, three teams from Naples played each other in a mini league – Bagnolese, Internazionale Napoli, and Naples Foot-Ball Club. Bagnolese have since dissolved, and the other two merged in 1926 to form what is now Napoli. So that could be 105 years and counting.
A sense of menace hangs over a couple’s attempt to make a fresh start in lakeside seclusion, but the tensions too often sputter out
Thomas McMullan’s debut novel, The Last Good Man, was a darkly unsettling post-apocalyptic fable about moral puritanism and the perils of mob rule. Set in an isolated Dartmoor village, it was commended by Margaret Atwood as “a Scarlet Letter for our times” and won the Betty Trask prize. His follow-up, Groundwater, opens in similar style, with its protagonists fleeing a city in favour of rural seclusion, but this time his story is rooted in a more prosaic and recognisable present.
An unexpected inheritance has spurred John and Liz to trade in their rented flat in London for a remote house by a lake. After years of trying unsuccessfully for a baby, their relationship strained, both hope that the change will shift something inside them. Meanwhile, though most of their furniture is yet to arrive, they must prepare the house for Liz’s sister Monica and her family, who have invited themselves to stay.
We would like to hear your memories of Ozzy Osbourne – whether you met him, or appreciated his work as a musician
The Black Sabbath frontman and iconic heavy metal frontman, Ozzy Osbourne, has died aged 76.
Osbourne was one of the most notorious figures in rock: an innovator whose eerie wail helped usher in heavy metal, a showman who once bit the head off a bat on stage, an addict whose substance abuse led him to attempt to murder his wife, and latterly, a reality TV star much loved for his bemusement at family life on The Osbournes. His death comes less than three weeks after his retirement from performance.
Teams can rebound from abysmal innings yet, after their 27 all out against Australia, the Windies are losing hope
“People are coming and going like the walking dead, padding up and unpadding.” Michael Clarke surveys the hallucinogenic scene in front of him at Newlands in November 2011, the grand view of Table Mountain unlikely to ease the agony, his first-innings 151 now chip-shop paper. Clarke’s Australia are 21 for nine, sliding towards the lowest total in Test history.
Nathan Lyon and Peter Siddle get them to 47 to avoid record-breaking embarrassment but it’s barely consolatory. “By the time we go back into the field, we’re still unable to accept what’s happening,” Clarke writes in his autobiography. “We look like a cricket team, but we are 11 ghosts, unable to believe this reality.” South Africa have a target of 236 – hardly straightforward – but Graeme Smith and Hashim Amla ton up in an eight-wicket procession.
Tributes have poured in from across the music industry after the death of Ozzy Osbourne, British rock royalty.
The pioneering Black Sabbath frontman and reality TV star was 76 and, according to an official statement, he died “with his family and surrounded by love”.
Liam Crowley takes issue with Jonathan Liew. “That article is one of the most negative takes on something clearly positive I’ve ever read,” he thunders. “No, the real time wasters weren’t England, it was Italy. Nothing wrong with that, it’s what every team does and Italy do it better than anyone over both their sides, but England were playing with urgency, constantly pushing for an equaliser. They were not time wasting.
”As for England being ‘limp’, this is a side that, despite not being maybe as good as previous vintages, but have steel beyond belief. They have shown it, and had to show it, almost constantly throughout this tournament. You don’t conjure these moments by being ‘limp’.”
Being on a pre-season tour can make or break a player’s future. Yoane Wissa has left Brentford’s after the club turned down a £25m bid for his services from Newcastle, as he is eager to have a natter with the head honchos at the Gtech Community Stadium to sort out his future. The forward wants to test himself in the Champions League and does not want to be held back by something as minor as a club being unwilling to pay his full valuation. It is expected that the Magpies will up their offer in the coming days to a fee in the region of £30m plus add-ons. The Bees are not particularly keen on losing another striker days after selling Bryan Mbeumo to Manchester United.
Mateo Joseph has told Daniel Farke and Leeds that he wants out of Elland Road. The Spain Under-21s striker did not travel with the rest of the squad for their pre-season jaunt to Germany. Joseph was the subject of a bid in excess of £10m from Real Betis but Leeds want more for their young striker. “He came to me and to us and said that he wants a new challenge and would like to have a move,” Farke said. “He has also hinted that he prefers a move to Spain due to his Spanish roots. And yes, obviously that was more or less his call.”
Australia made a second $800m payment to America’s shipbuilding industry – bringing total payments so far to $1.6bn which was promised before the Trump administration placied the Aukus agreement under review.
As part of the Aukus deal – in which Australia would buy nuclear submarines from the US ahead of its own nuclear submarines being built in Adelaide – Australia has agreed to pay about $4.6bn towards boosting US shipbuilding capacity.
Belgian GP’s home is a rite of passage for drivers and fans alike, but the circuit faces a battle to stay on the calendar
Each summer, fans descend on the Belgian countryside, braving unpredictable weather and muddy campsites for a glimpse of Formula One’s most romanticised battleground. Tucked in the Ardennes forest, Spa-Francorchamps, hosting the Belgian Grand Prix this weekend, is a rite of passage for drivers, a pilgrimage for fans, and for many, the heart and soul of motor sport.
Since its debut on the calendar in 1950, Spa has carved itself into F1 folklore. Mika Häkkinen’s audacious double overtake on Michael Schumacher and Ricardo Zonta in 2000 is one of the sport’s most celebrated moves. In 2023, Max Verstappen stormed from 14th to victory in an epic comeback. Ayrton Senna won five times there, calling it his favourite circuit, a sentiment echoed by many current drivers.
Despite the ravages of Dutch elm disease, these once ubiquitous features of our landscape still loom large
Just as the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 did not originate in Spain, so Dutch elm disease is no fault of the Netherlands. It acquired the name thanks to the pioneering efforts of three Dutch scientists – Marie Beatrice Schol-Schwarz, Christine Buisman and Johanna Westerdijk – who identified the beetle-transported fungus that causes it in the 1920s.
Nor is the so-called “English elm” (Ulmus minor) really English, inasmuch as it is thought to have been transferred here from Italy, so Reform UK party enthusiasts should probably agitate to repatriate all such specimens. More confidently thought native to these isles is the wych elm (from the Old English for “supple”) or Scots elm, which has long been thought to have healing and protective qualities.
Our scholarly guide to this noble plant, Mandy Haggith, delves enthusiastically into such lore. The 17th-century English herbalist Nicholas Culpeper said that elm was connected to the planet Saturn and that its leaves could fix broken bones. Modern “healers” promise that drinking a decoction of elm bark can purge phlegm and stop diarrhoea. Haggith cites a present-day “Massachusetts-based herbalist and druid” who claims that slippery elm milk is good for insomnia.
It would be unkind to call this sort of thing merely barking. The author insists that “a western scientific worldview” (in other words, a scientific worldview, shared by scientists in China and India) “is absolutely not the only way forests can be thought about”, which is fair enough. But the fake cures of the “wellness” industry are not without their own ecological downsides: as Haggith writes later, fashionable pseudo-remedies gone viral on TikTok or whatever can inspire the stripping of bark from healthy trees at injurious scale.
Happily, elmwood was not only the preserve of quacks; it was also a sought-after material in shipbuilding (most of the hull of the fast clipper Cutty Sark was made of rock elm), and long before that for making spears and bows: an iron age Celtic tribe was known as “the ones who vanquish by the elm” (Lemovices). Medieval London, Bristol and other cities had running water delivered by mains pipes of elm. And elm is also the source of a famous insult: when the great Samuel Johnson claimed that there was no Gaelic literature, a poet responded with the Gaelic for “your head is made entirely of elm, especially your tongue and your gums”.
Luckily, although Dutch elm disease has killed hundreds of millions of trees since the early 20th century, the species is not lost, or even on the brink of extinction. Brighton, Haggith sees, is managing the blight well through city-wide surveillance and timely surgery. And the fossil record suggests that elms have previously suffered waves of pandemic disease before bouncing back. There will be time for more poetic mentions of elms of the kind the author rather exhaustively collects towards the end. (“Robert Frost was a big fan of elm trees …”)
But the greater part of this book’s devotion, and its delight, is reserved for living specimens in their habitats. Two rows of elms, Haggith notes, can form a “corridor for wildlife, dog walkers and feral children”, or “a church-like nave, an arch-shaped cloister that draws the eye” towards a monastery in Beauly. A cheerfully self-described “tree-hugger”, she is inspired to her best writing by close observation of the trees themselves. On an elm growing horizontally out of the rock near a Scottish loch: “I stand beneath it, neck craned in awe, looking up into the lush green profusion of its living community. It is winter, so all this greenery isn’t the tree’s own leaves, but photosynthesising life using it as a climbing frame”. Elsewhere she finds beauty even in a diseased log, happily noting the “beautiful doily pattern made by the brood-chamber and feeding passages of the grubs”.
And her enthusiasm is contagious. As someone who began this book with literally no idea what an elm looks like, I was inspired to download the Woodland Trust tree-ID app and resolve to pay more attention to our ligneous friends.
• The Lost Elms: A Love Letter to Our Vanished Trees by Mandy Haggith is published by Headline (£22). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
From his desolate wail on Black Sabbath’s doomy 70s masterpieces, to the twisted self-awareness of his huge-selling solo albums, Osbourne’s vocal style influenced generations of heavy metal
Ozzy Osbourne’s voice was probably at its strongest and most distinctive during the great run of Black Sabbath albums of the early 1970s, before years of drugs and alcohol took their effect. In those days, his desolate wail had reach and range, and a deep melancholy. That tone was perfect for the subject of this bleak and blasted reflection on cocaine (Vol 4 was dedicated to “the great COKE-Cola company of Los Angeles”). Osbourne sounds like a man who has been wiped clean, both terrified of and in thrall to the drug: “The sun no longer sets me free / I feel the snowflakes freezing me.” At a time when cocaine was still considered a party drug, the fervour in Osbourne’s voice as he celebrates enslavement to it is deeply unsettling – it’s every bit as amoral and devout in its drug worship as Lou Reed’s Heroin.
Plan was put forward by 19-year-old leader of Warwickshire council George Finch who also lobbied to remove Pride flag
Reform UK councillors have been accused of hypocrisy after voting to spend £150,000 on hiring political advisers at a county council despite pledging to cut waste and save money.
The plans were put forward by Reform councillor George Finch, a 19-year-old who was narrowly elected as the leader of Warwickshire county council during a meeting on Tuesday, which was picketed by protesters.
Super-slim frame, improved display, enhanced camera and plenty of power give the pricey phone-tablet hybrid a major upgrade
Samsung’s latest flagship folding phone looks like it has been put on a diet. The result is a transformation into one of the thinnest and lightest devices available and radically changes how it handles, for the better.
The Galaxy Z Fold 7 measures 8.9mm thick when shut – well within the realms of a standard smartphone if you ignore the camera bump on the back. It easily fits in a pocket but opens up to turn into a folding tablet just 4.2mm thick.
Connexion
