Team of pizza-makers and teachers brought together by a passion for the sport hope to win hearts back at home

In a basement office in the north of Rome, Riccardo Maggio is unpacking boxes of blue jerseys with “Italia” written on them. He sighs when the landline phone rings again, and then again. Maggio is on his own, multitasking in the headquarters of the Italian Cricket Federation, tucked away in the building that houses the Italian Olympic Committee (Coni), the governing body for national sports.

The room is small and improvised, its shelves cluttered with old trophies, faded photographs of players and souvenir cricket bats. The base for Italian cricket is hardly the nucleus of a global sporting moment. Yet, in a story that has largely flown under the radar in Italy, for the first time in their history the men’s national cricket team have qualified for the T20 World Cup, co-hosted by Sri Lanka and India, which begins this weekend.

Stars could align for USA and Canada in ice hockey, while hosts Italy are getting their downhill hopes up

All eyes are on the, ah, essentials of the Norwegian men’s ski jump team as they try to recover from one of the great botched crotch stitch switch scandals of 2025. Two of their gold medal-winning athletes from Beijing 2022, including the defending Olympic champion on the long hill, were banned for three months after a whistleblower published a video of their coach tampering with the (strictly regulated) crotch stitching on their jumpsuits at the Nordic world championships last year, in an attempt to make them more aerodynamic by adding padding. Groin-gate led to a national debate about ethics in sport and a complete overhaul of the rules. We’re told doctors are now using “3D measurements” to carefully scrutinise all competing athletes before competition.

Frida loves cycling everywhere, while Frantz likes to slow down and smell the roses. You decide who is getting a rough ride
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England have the squad depth, but France have a returning hero and hosting duties for the potentially decisive finale

What are you most looking forward to? Let’s hope it stops raining at some stage. Because if Matthieu Jalibert, Louis Bielle-Biarrey, Henry Arundell, Manny Feyi-Waboso, Louis Rees-Zammit et al have a licence to thrill with a dry ball this could be an eye-catching championship.

Vivid dreamscape sold to fans in 2021 is yet to materialise amid layers upon layers of bureaucracy, economics and geopolitics

Layer two: Nick Woltemade, signed for £69m in the hot madness of summer, has stopped scoring. Anthony Elanga, a £55m winger, has struggled for game time and goals. Malick Thiaw, a £35m centre-half bought from Milan, keeps making basic errors. Last summer’s transfer window, conducted without a sporting director and with an outgoing chief executive, looks increasingly like a disaster. The football seems a little slower and less urgent these days, St James’ Park a little quieter and more anxious. Eddie Howe is basically holding this thing together with hugs and smiles.

Layer three: turns out Alexander Isak lighted the exit path so that others might follow. Sandro Tonali’s agent decided to make a little mischief on transfer deadline day, putting Arsenal on alert. Perhaps Tonali will be the next painful transfer saga, perhaps Bruno Guimarães or Lewis Hall or Tino Livramento. The sporting director, Ross Wilson, is still getting his feet under the table. The chief executive, David Hopkinson, reckons Newcastle can be the best team in the world by 2030. They sit 11th in the Premier League. No signings arrived in January.

Women in rural communities describe trauma of moderating violent and pornographic content for global tech companies

On the veranda of her family’s home, with her laptop balanced on a mud slab built into the wall, Monsumi Murmu works from one of the few places where the mobile signal holds. The familiar sounds of domestic life come from inside the house: clinking utensils, footsteps, voices.

On her screen a very different scene plays: a woman is pinned down by a group of men, the camera shakes, there is shouting and the sound of breathing. The video is so disturbing Murmu speeds it up, but her job requires her to watch to the end.

After experiencing the strangeness of the Academy Awards with her last film The Brutalist, the indie actor has reunited with its creators for period curio The Testament of Ann Lee. But what she’d really like to get her teeth into is a certain dino franchise

Stacy Martin is “not a religious person”. Still, the actor insists things have happened in her life that have made her realise there’s “a whole expanse of things that are unexplainable”. Once, at home in north London, she noticed a lightbulb flickering. She couldn’t solve the mystery: no matter how many times she changed it, the bulb continued to blink. Instead of consulting the internet, Martin went to see her psychic, a tea leaf reader she meets annually, booking in under a fake name.

The psychic suggested that someone was trying to communicate with her. “I was like: ‘What if I just start talking to this person that apparently wants to talk to me?’” says Martin. “And so I did. And that light never flickered again.” Martin prefers not to use the word ghost, but she’s aware there are things the mind can’t make sense of; things the body somehow knows.

British duo Jennifer Dodds and Bruce Mouat get the better of Norway after power failure at curling arena

Curling fans, rejoice! It is only fitting that the one sport played every single day of the Winter Olympics is the one that opens proceedings at Milano Cortina. Dubbed “chess on ice”, curling may not have the brute force of ice hockey or the airtime of snowboarding, but it is a huge test in precision, patience and handling pressure.

Enter mixed doubles, which has its own subplot straight out of a romcom, with husband-and-wife pairings representing Norway, Canada and Switzerland. Norway’s Kristin Skaslien and Magnus Nedregotten came up against familiar foes on Wednesday, having edged Great Britain’s Jennifer Dodds and Bruce Mouat in a semi-final thriller at Beijing 2022, sealing victory with the last stone.

Apparent collapse of Nvidia–OpenAI tie-up raises questions about circular funding and who will bear the cost of AI’s expansion

Did the circular AI economy just wobble? Last week it was reported that a much-discussed $100bn deal – announced last September – between Nvidia and OpenAI might not be happening at all.

This was a circular arrangement through which the chipmaker would supply the ChatGPT developer with huge sums of money that would largely go towards the purchase of its own chips.

Compact and comfortable Pixel Buds have noise cancelling, decent battery life and good everyday sound

Google’s latest budget Pixel earbuds are smaller, lighter, more comfortable and have noise cancelling, plus a case that allows you to replace the battery at home.

The Pixel Buds 2a uses the design of the excellent Pixel Buds Pro 2 with a few high-end features at a more palatable £109 (€129/$129/A$239) price, undercutting rivals in the process.

Water resistance: IP54 (splash resistant)

Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.4 (SBC, AAC)

Battery life: 7h with ANC (20h with case)

Earbud dimensions: 23.1 x 16 x 17.8mm

Earbud weight: 4.7g each

Driver size: 11mm

Charging case dimensions: 50 x 57.2 x 24.5mm

Charging case weight: 47.6g

Case charging: USB-C

Timothy Spall and Art Malik co-star in Aneil Karia’s intelligent and stark retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy, set in the world of shady family business

Screenwriter Michael Lesslie and director Aneil Karia have devised a stark and severe new interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet; there are transpositions and cuts, some light modernisations, and the text is stripped down a good deal. It’s an austerely challenging reading and incidentally, right about now, nothing could be further from the richly empathetic and redemptive approach of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, about the play’s imagined origins.

The setting is modern London’s world of shady family business and family dysfunction, wedding parties, blandly scheming associates and SUVs speeding through the night-time streets. Hamlet looks here like no one as much as Kendall Roy from TV’s Succession. Riz Ahmed plays the prince, horrified by a ghostly vision of his dead father (Avijit Dutt) who, in a chilling scene, summons him to a bleak urban rooftop to announce he was murdered by his brother Claudius (Art Malik). Claudius now is a hard-faced property speculator who has evicted a tented community of people led by Fortinbras from some prime real estate, and who now intends to marry Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha).

In celebration of the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, which starts this week, paralympic swimming champion Simone Barlaam shares his favourite places in his hometown

Born in Milan in 2000, Paralympic swimmer Simone Barlaam, is a 13-time world champion who won three golds and a silver medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics. He’s a torchbearer and ambassador for the Milano Cortina Winter Olympic Games, which run from 6-22 February (the Paralympic Games run from 6-15 March) at sites across Lombardy and north-east Italy (with events such as speed skating, figure skating and ice hockey in the city). He also worked as a graphic designer for the games.

Barlaam grew up in Milan and lives in NoLo (North of Loreto), a vibrant, artistic neighbourhood. “I’ve lived all over the place, so I can take you around the city and the places that belong to my heart,” he says. Here, he chooses his favourite spots, beyond obvious sights such as the Duomo, La Scala opera house and the glossy Quadrilatero della Moda fashion district.

Wendy Ewald’s novel Magic Eyes is interspersed with photographs of the children she taught in a village outside Bogotá – and the stunning pictures she taught them to take

• ‘My motivation to win is exactly the same,’ says champion

• McLaren driver admires rival Verstappen’s killer instinct

Lando Norris insists he enters the new Formula One season highly motivated to retain the world championship he won for the first time last year. The McLaren driver believes his maiden triumph has only given him greater confidence in his ability to defend the title.

Norris won the championship after an intense competition that went to the wire. After a three-way fight with his teammate, Oscar Piastri, and Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, Norris sealed the title by just two points at the final race of the season in Abu Dhabi.

The Curious Incident author describes the upbringing that shaped him – and for which he can’t help feeling nostalgia

Attempting a psychological analysis of a literary work is a fool’s errand, for obvious reasons: you’re trying to assess the inside of the writer’s head from the inside of your own, using the inherently treacherous medium of make-believe. And the aim on their part, of course, is always to beguile, and often to deceive.

And yet the temptation is sometimes too great to resist. Mark Haddon, whose blistering memoir details a mainly miserable and loveless childhood and an adulthood studded with significant hurdles, hit the literary jackpot with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in 2003. In it, a teenage protagonist who struggles to communicate with the world around him uncovers a world of lying adults – most egregiously, he has been told his mother has died, rather than absconded with the nextdoor neighbour – and runs away from home. A more recent novel, The Porpoise, opens with a fatal air crash before morphing into a reworking of Pericles; in Leaving Home, we discover that Haddon is terrified of flying. We also learn that he borrowed heavily from childhood holidays in Brighton to create the atmosphere and texture for his story The Pier Falls, a merciless, documentary-style narration of a cataclysmic seaside disaster.

Snowbanks reach shoulder height and tourists visit giant icy sculptures of baseball players as northern half of country is blanketed in white

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Marbled flesh and fat are key to this rich, succulent and dense ragu, boosted with powerful notes of bay, sage and rosemary

It’s 10.30am and steam carrying the smell of onions, beans, cabbage and braised meat escapes from the kitchen in the corner of box 37 on Testaccio market. In the small kitchen is Leonardo Cioni, a tall chef from San Giovanni Valdarno, midway between Florence and Arezzo, who, for the past three-and-a-half years, has run box 37 as Sicché Roba Toscana, which roughly translates as “therefore Tuscan stuff”. The escaping steam is effective advertising, leading eyes to the blackboard above the counter to discover exactly what is going on in the back.

Always on the menu is lampredotto. The fourth stomach of the cow and the most tender, delicate tripe, lampredotto looks like a damp dishcloth crossed with a heavily ruffled shirt. It is prepared by simmering it in broth made from onion, carrot, celery, tomatoes, parsley and basil for about an hour and a half, then seasoned with salt and pepper, and served in a roll, maybe with a spoonful of salsa verde. Also made daily by Leo, and many times over, are trays of torta di ceci, a baked chickpea flour pancake much like farinata that is sandwiched in a flatbread called schiaccia, which can also be filled with salumi or cheese. The rest of the menu changes daily, but always includes a bean dish, at least one legume and vegetable soup (often thickened with polenta or bread), some sort of long-braised stew and maybe a ragu.

Darcy Tinning, 19, allegedly made threat ahead of Herzog’s planned visit and made remark that constitutes hate speech, court hears

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A teenager has appeared in court after allegedly threatening the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, ahead of his contentious visit to Australia.

Darcy Tinning, 19, has been accused of threatening to shoot the head of state with a pistol in a 19 January post on the social media platform X. He’s also accused of threatening to kill Donald Trump.

• Cup rules state new signings must arrive before semi-final first leg

• City will ask EFL to clarify rule: ‘Hopefully they can change it’

Pep Guardiola has questioned the rule which means Marc Guéhi cannot play in the Carabao Cup final against Arsenal in March, though the Manchester City manager has said the club will ask the Football League to reconsider.

City reached the Wembley showpiece after Wednesday’s 3-1 semi-final second-leg win against Newcastle, which gave them a 5-1 aggregate victory after the 2-0 result in the first leg on 13 January.

Taiwanese president says ties with Washington ‘rock solid’, hours after leaders of US and China share first call since November

In their first call since November, Chinese leader Xi Jinping warned US president Donald Trump to be “prudent” about supplying arms to Taiwan, according to a readout of their call provided by China’s foreign ministry.

“President Xi emphasised that the Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-US relations,” the readout said. “China must safeguard its own sovereignty and territorial integrity, and will never allow Taiwan to be separated. The US must handle the issue of arms sales to Taiwan with prudence.”

The 21-year-old, who is close to becoming the first European yokozuna or grand champion in Japan, is motivated by messages from his war-torn home

The swish of feet on clay and sand has a soothing, rhythmic feel, as wrestlers at a sumo stable in Tokyo propel themselves across the ring, their bodies low, eyes fixed on an imaginary foe. But by the time their morning training ends an hour later, all but one of the rikishi are bathed in sweat, gulping lungfuls of air, their strength waning with every shove.

Just one wrestler has spent all but the final minutes of the session at the side of the dohyo ring, guiding his stablemates with words delivered with economy and purpose. After the group bow to a miniature Shinto shrine on the back wall, they gather around their mentor in a communal expression of gratitude.

For me – and many other Black men – my experience of hair begins and ends in the barbershop. But as my two daughters get older, I’m determined to make ‘salon night’ pain free – and maybe even enjoyable

In the basement of Larry King’s salon in Marylebone, London, stylist and curly hair advocate Jennie Roberts is giving me a much-needed pep talk. “It’s all about education and making everything simplified,” she says, perhaps sensing my apprehension as I stand uneasily before her with a comb in hand.

“It’s not a big effort, it is not going to cost a lot of money. Managing curly hair, once you know how, is easy,” Roberts says. “It really is. It’s easier than trying to hide it anyway.”

At a party event in a school hall in Lewisham, people told me how disillusionment with Labour has led to this moment

“How many?”

On the end of the phone is a nice press officer for the Greens, head full from a long day in Gorton, Manchester, showing off their would-be MP. And now, as Friday’s sky turns indigo, I’m calling about reports from Lewisham, south London, that tomorrow they’re expecting a flood of 500 Green activists. This comes as a surprise to the party’s own news machine.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

Huge release of files provides extraordinary detail on the extent of the disgraced financier’s network

Among the new trove of 3m files relating to Jeffrey Epstein released last week are a vast number of stories shedding light on his relationships with prominent figures in the US, the UK, and around the world. Inclusion in the files does not imply wrongdoing or knowledge of Epstein’s wrongdoing – but a sampling of some of the details they include provides extraordinary detail on the extent of his network.