• All the action from qualifying at Imola
• Email Tom | Giles Richards’ weekend preview

…but no cars are out on the track yet.

Nicholas Tilson has emailed in: Not a word for Williams?

Storms also killed seven in Missouri, spawned tornadoes in Wisconsin and brought a heatwave to Texas

Storm systems sweeping across the midwestern US have left at least 16 dead, including nine people killed after a tornado sparked what authorities called a mass casualty event in south-eastern Kentucky.

Kentucky authorities said there were also severe injuries when a twister tore across Laurel county late on Friday.

• India batter retired from Test cricket this week
• Kohli could play in championship or Metro Bank Cup

Virat Kohli could yet be seen batting in England once more after Middlesex confirmed they are keen to lure India’s recently retired galáctico to Lord’s. The 36-year-old called time on his stellar Test career at the start of the week, ruling himself out of the five-Test series in England that begins at Headingley next month. But notably his statement said nothing about drawing a line through first-class cricket.

Middlesex have form when it comes to using Lord’s as a pull for star overseas talent, having signed South Africa’s AB de Villiers for the T20 Blast in 2019 and attracted New Zealand’s Kane Williamson over for the second half of this season. Both deals came about in collaboration with MCC – Williamson will also play for London Spirit – and officials there have indicated they would be happy to similarly split the cost of any deal for Kohli. There is a belief that, as someone steeped in the sport’s history, Kohli is keen to play at the Home of Cricket again.

CBP agents’ questioning of the leftwing streamer shone a light on an urgent question: what are your rights at the border (or airport)?

When Hasan Piker was stopped and questioned about his political views by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents at Chicago’s O’Hare airport last Sunday, the popular leftwing streamer thought he knew exactly what their motive was. “Obviously the reason for why they’re doing that is, I think, to try to create an environment of fear,” he told his legion of fans on a Twitch stream in which he described his ordeal. “To try to get people like myself … to shut the fuck up.”

But the decision by Piker – a 33-year-old US citizen – to entertain the agents’ questions for nearly two hours has some of the self-described socialist’s fans and allies questioning why he didn’t do just that.

Known for its trailblazing ‘Nordic model’ of generous parental perks, Norway now faces a return of low fertility

Norway’s generous parental leave, heavily subsidised childcare and high living standards have earned it a reputation as one of the best places in the world to have children. And yet fewer than ever are being born in the Nordic country.

Although falling birthrates are a global trend, such is the concern in Oslo the government has commissioned a birthrate committee to investigate the causes and possible consequences and devise strategies to reverse the population’s current trajectory.

Much remains uncertain about Valeria Márquez’s death. But it shines a light on a universal issue

Valeria Márquez was killed in one of the most horrifically public ways possible. On Tuesday evening, the 23-year-old Mexican social media influencer, who had built up a large following with videos about beauty and makeup, was recording a TikTok livestream in the beauty salon where she worked in Jalisco, a state in west-central Mexico. A man entered the establishment and, with her video still running, shot her dead.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

The New York Mets slugger was booed lustily on his return to Yankee Stadium after departing in free agency, showing just how deep the Subway Series rivalry now runs

During the last game of the 2024 baseball season – as the Los Angeles Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees in Game 5 of the World Series to clinch a championship in front of a sold-out crowd of disappointed New Yorkers – there were still Yankees fans buying No 22 Juan Soto jerseys at the ballpark. This was noteworthy because as soon as the game ended, Soto was a free agent.

He had been traded to New York from the San Diego Padres – where he landed after a bombshell trade from the Washington National team that drafted him and with whom he won a World Series in 2019 – just ahead of his walk year. But Soto had endeared himself to the fervent fanbase quickly. In 2024, he was 80% better than average at the plate according to wRC+ and, with the towering Aaron Judge hitting behind him, led the American League in runs scored. And it seemed his swagger fit with the famous franchise that brought him back to the Fall Classic for the first time since he was 20 years old.

The actor on being a high-functioning introvert, her ‘wild man’ husband and why she loves Nick Cave

Born in Kent, Tamsin Greig, 58, studied drama at the University of Birmingham. Her television work includes Black Books, Green Wing, Episodes and Friday Night Dinner, and she won the 2007 Best Actress Olivier award for her role in Much Ado About Nothing. Until 21 June, she stars in The Deep Blue Sea at Theatre Royal Haymarket in London. She is married to actor Richard Leaf, has three children and lives in London.

Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Nick Cave for his determination to hold a space for public discourse on the deep and difficult and mysterious elements of life.

John Alite, 62, was a top earner for John Gotti, the Teflon Don – now he says he’s on a mission to ‘do things right’

John Alite has big plans for Englishtown, New Jersey, a small hamlet best known for potatoes, a drag racing strip, and the Battle of Monmouth during the revolutionary wars.

But not everyone is certain they want Alite, 62, having a say over municipal matters in the town of about 2,350 people, where he was appointed a council member earlier this year and comes up for confirmation early next month.

Russian peace negotiator invokes Peter the Great’s 21-year struggle to defeat Sweden, as Putin is fond of doing

Peter the Great’s long war against Sweden – a grinding conflict that claimed countless Russian lives – is rarely held up as a model for modern diplomacy. Yet behind closed doors on Friday, during the first direct peace talks with Ukraine in three years, Russia’s lead negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, cited it as an explicit warning: Moscow was prepared to fight for as long as it took.

Just like when Russian troops rolled into Ukraine in 2022, the great northern war in the early 18th century began with humiliating defeats for Moscow. The tsarist Russian army was ill-prepared, poorly armed and easily outmanoeuvred. But instead of backing down, Peter I dug in. He conscripted peasants by the tens of thousands, poured resources into rebuilding his army, and waited. Twenty-one years later, he emerged victorious.

Labour members from Leeds West and Pudsey to write letter to chancellor over plans to reduce Pip payments

Rachel Reeves’ local Labour party will call for the chancellor to abandon her plans to cut disability benefits as rebellion among MPs over the policy grows.

The Leeds West and Pudsey constituency Labour party (CLP), which campaigned to return Reeves to parliament last year as its MP, has agreed to write to her “as soon as possible” to make clear it does not support the cuts.

Magpies can steal second from the Gunners on Sunday and Eddie Howe says club has ambitions to kick on this summer

Assumptions can be inaccurate, unfair and sometimes downright dangerous. Eddie Howe and Newcastle have had their fair share of often lazy theories – about the manager’s future and the limits of the club’s potential – but they travel to the Emirates Stadium on Sunday having trampled all over assorted hypotheses.

Should Newcastle win, Arsenal will have been beaten an unprecedented four times by one team in a single season and St James’ Park executives should feel sufficiently confident to start sprucing the stadium up for Champions League combat in early autumn.

Robert Prevost’s maternal grandparents came to US from Caribbean and at one point identified as Black

Evidence that the Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV’s bloodlines reflect the US’s legacy of immigration – and complicated relationship with race – has continued to emerge since he recently became the first American ever elected to lead the Roman Catholic church.

The family history service Ancestry recently announced that a team helmed by senior genealogist Kyle Betit had determined Leo’s paternal grandfather, John R Prevost, immigrated to the US from north-eastern Sicily.

The writer and poet on reimagining rivers as living beings, the ecological crisis near and far and why copyright laws should protect nature

Robert Macfarlane has been called the “great nature writer and nature poet of this generation”. A teacher, campaigner and mountaineer, he has been exploring the relationship between landscape and people since his breakthrough book, Mountains of the Mind, in 2003. His latest work, Is a River Alive?, was more than four years in the making, and, he says, the most urgent book he has written.

Q: Your book is poignant and inspiring, but one part that made me laugh is where you first tell your son the title and he replies, “Duh, of course it’s alive. That’s going to be a really short book.” So, I should first congratulate you on stringing it out for more than 350 pages!

What makes for a great place to live? Access to nature, a sense of community and culture on your doorstep can all help. So which towns make the cut?
• Homes in happy places to buy or rent in England and Scotland – in pictures

What makes a place somewhere good to live? Where might we be happiest if we had the choice of going anywhere? It’s an almost impossible question, as we do not all thrive on the same things, but there are some that are universally agreed to be conducive to cheeriness.

When we tried to work out the happiest places for Guardian readers, easy access to countryside and parks, sea, lakes and rivers were high on the list of ingredients, as studies have shown that getting out and about in nature can help improve your mood.

A new book has fueled controversy over press handling of the ex-president’s decline. But that distracts from a bigger problem

With a new book out about Joe Biden’s failed re-election campaign, a media reckoning is in full swing.

It goes something like this: mainstream journalism failed the voters. Reporters were complicit; they didn’t tell us how much the elderly president had declined. They didn’t dig beneath the surface of what Biden aides were doing as they covered up the physical and cognitive decline of the leader of the free world.

Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture

Our country faces a bumpy ride as US tariffs start to hurt and disillusioned voters double down on the far right

A few days after last month’s Canadian election had delivered a minority victory to Mark Carney and the Liberal party, I got an email from someone I worked with when I lived in Virginia. They asked how I was feeling about the result, a big and complicated question.

Many Canadians I know feel immense relief at what they see as Canada’s rejection of the Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre’s, Trump-style brand. But underneath it simmers dread about what might be coming down the pipeline.

Downsizing at Climeworks comes amid economic uncertainty and ‘reduced momentum’ for climate tech

A Swiss startup that has led the way in sucking carbon out of the air has announced plans to cut its workforce by more than 10% amid economic uncertainty and “reduced momentum” for climate tech.

The downsizing at Climeworks, the company that built the world’s first direct air capture facilities, comes one week after journalists in Iceland revealed its two flagship plants have captured far less carbon than their advertised capacity. A spokesperson said the timing of the redundancies was unrelated.

Fresh but filling crab cakes and a spicy, seasonal mango salad with crisped chickpeas

I don’t know about you, but I’m revelling in the asparagus, early strawberries and new potatoes that are flooding the local farmer’s market. Traders are no longer wrapped up tightly to withstand the cold, and there is a spring in everyone’s step. At the fish stall, some dressed crab caught my eye, and while I love nothing more than crab on toast with thick aïoli or a nutty salsa macha, there was a nip in the air on the night in question, so I was drawn to this rich, warming dish instead. The onions are a vehicle for the spices, adding sweetness and depth to both potato cake and crab. On the side, a gloriously refreshing, spicy salad makes the most of mango season.

• Madrid meet sought-after 20-year-old’s release clause
• Defender had been on radar of a host of top clubs

Real Madrid have completed the signing of the Bournemouth centre-back Dean Huijsen. The 20-year-old defender, who has also been targeted by Chelsea, Arsenal, Bayern Munich, Liverpool and Newcastle, will join the Spanish club at the end of the season after they agreed to pay a £50m release clause.

Real tried to sign the Netherlands-born Spain international when he was a youth player at Málaga and have continued to track the former Juventus and Roma defender’s progress. Huijsen’s footballing idol is Sergio Ramos, the former Spain and Madrid defender. After a loan spell at Roma, Huijsen signed for Bournemouth in July 2024.

Hamas official tells Reuters that a new round of talks with Israel has begun in Qatar

• Israel launches major offensive in Gaza

An Iraqi political official, speaking to the Associated Press (AP) on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to comment, said that Iran’s al-Quds force commander Esmail Ghaani had paid a visit to Baghdad prior to the Arab League summit and “conveyed messages of support for the Iranian-American negotiations” for a nuclear deal and a demand for the lifting of crippling sanctions on Iran.

The Arab League is meeting in Baghdad on Saturday to discuss Gaza and other regional crises, but some leaders are expected to miss the talks that come straight after US president Donald Trump’s Gulf tour.

The Mayo Clinic hopes to uncover how the microbiome affects how patients react to cancer medications

A leading US clinic hopes its fecal waste biobank will help researchers make new discoveries about how to treat cancer patients – one of several efforts to turn human waste into medicine.

The Mayo Clinic biobank is part of researchers’ years-long effort to “personalize” medicine by uncovering how the microbiome changes how patients react to cancer medications.

Journalists, fans of Combs, podcasters and others lined up to get into court, where Cassie testified about alleged rape

The high-profile federal trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs began this week in New York, where the 55-year-old music mogul faces charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy, and transportation to engage in prostitution.

Combs, who was arrested in September 2024, has pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

In 2015, the UK placed first on the rainbow map. But even then, as an 18-year-old gay man, I knew that wasn’t the whole story

It should surprise no one that the UK has dropped to its lowest ever position on the annual “rainbow map” of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association (ILGA), which ranks the best and worst European countries on the basis of laws and policies that affect LGBTQ+ people. The map assesses each country through seven categories, including equality and non-discrimination, legal gender recognition and asylum.

The supreme court’s ruling last month that a person’s sex in the Equality Act 2010 refers only to “biological sex” – a redefining of trans people’s rights to their detriment, and a political and cultural victory for the gender critical movement – will have played a key role in the downgrading. Senior politicians immediately capitulated to the ruling, interpreting the implications of the verdict beyond the scope of the court, with the gay health secretary even renouncing his own support for the notion that “trans women are women”. Meanwhile, the Scottish government has dropped plans to legislate for a ban on conversion therapy during this parliamentary session. At this rate of progress the ranking will be even lower next year, as it should be.

The administration seems to be getting clobbered in court, but it’s still unsettled whether the government can detain and deport noncitizens over political speech

The Trump administration suffered yet another blow this past week to its efforts to deport international students over their pro-Palestinian speech, when a third federal judge threw a wrench into a government campaign widely criticized as a political witch hunt with little historical precedent.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Virginia ordered immigration authorities to release Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow Badar Khan Suri from custody. The Indian scholar’s release followed that of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student from Turkey, and Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian permanent resident and Columbia University student. The administration is seeking to deport all of them on the grounds that their presence in the US is harmful to the country’s foreign policy, part of a crackdown on political dissent that has sent shockwaves through US campuses.

• Charlotte Caslick brings dare and dash in 30-19 win for Wallaroos
• Victory is crucial for Australia’s confidence ahead of World Cup

The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen. So rang the cry of the Canberra crowd after American rugby star and social media “queen” Ilona Maher was upstaged by Australia’s own golden girl, the Sevens star and Olympic gold medallist Charlotte Caslick, whose speed and daring inspired a 30-19 win over the USA at GIO Stadium.

This was a sweet victory for the Wallaroos – and a vital one. These sides will resume their rivalry in August via the same pool at the Rugby World Cup in England, with each nation hunting a first semi-final. Maher is crucial to the USA’s chances. Yet every time the Queen touched the ball last night she had a swarm of golden bees over her.

• Glanville was Sunday Times correspondent for 30 years
• Influential author of The Story of the World Cup

Brian Glanville, whose insightful football writing had a profound influence on generations of reporters and readers alike, has died aged 93.

A novelist and respected columnist, Glanville was a prolific commentator on his beloved game, a passionate chronicler of Italian football and author of some of football’s most influential books.

White House remakes foreign policy under pay-for-access code that critics say could violate US constitution

Former White House lawyers, diplomatic protocol officers and foreign affairs experts have told the Guardian that Donald Trump’s receipt of overseas gifts and targeted investments are “unprecedented”, as the White House remakes US foreign policy under a pay-for-access code that eclipses past administrations with characteristic Trumpian excess.

The openness to foreign largesse was on full display this week as the US president was feted in the Gulf states during his first major diplomatic trip abroad this term, inking deals he claimed were worth trillions of dollars and pumping local leaders for investments as he says he remakes US foreign policy to prioritise “America first” – putting aside concerns of human rights or international law for the bottom line of American businesses and taxpayers.

Whatever the future for Italy’s secondary circuit, it will be remembered for some glorious moments, as well as some tragic ones

The Emilia Romagna Grand Prix is taking place against a backdrop of severe doubts over Imola’s Formula One future. The deaths of Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix remain etched on F1’s psyche but the demanding Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari has been the scene of some of the sport’s most-compelling races. Here are three of the best:

Springsteen had told Manchester crowd that Trump was ‘unfit’ and ‘treasonous’, leading to angry outburst from the president

Donald Trump has angrily insulted Bruce Springsteen after the veteran musician said Trump was heading a “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration”.

Springsteen made a series of vehement speeches on stage in Manchester as he kicked off his latest tour, arguing that Trump was “an unfit president” heading up “a rogue government”. He said that in the US, “the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death … they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers … They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom.”

• All the buildup to the FA Cup final, 4.30pm kick-off
• Share your thoughts with matchday live or post BTL

Chat over. Will Hughes strolls across the car park to get some photographs taken. As it happens, the man emerging from the gym at that very moment is the Crystal Palace midfield partner whose praises Hughes has just been lavishly exalting.

“Just added about £20m to your fee in that interview,” Hughes shouts at Adam Wharton as they pass. “You can have half,” Wharton retorts. All delivered with a knowing smile, for this is the Palace of Oliver Glasner, where – as Hughes puts it – “there’s egos, but good egos”. No arrogance, none of the blame culture he sees elsewhere. “You watch other teams and hands are in the air, there’s moaning,” he says. “But I honestly don’t see any of that here.”

As her memoir of losing her sons is published, the author talks about radical acceptance and how writing fiction helped her to prepare for tragedy

As the novelist Yiyun Li often observes, there is no good way to state the facts of her life and yet they are inescapable: she had two sons, and both died by suicide. After her elder son Vincent died in 2017, at the age of 16, Li wrote a novel for him. Where Reasons End is a conversation, sometimes an argument, between a mother and her dead son, and it is a work of fiction that doesn’t feel fictional at all, because it’s also an encounter between a writer in mourning and the son she can still conjure up on the page. “With Vincent’s book there was that joy of meeting him again in the book, hearing him, seeing him, it was like he was alive,” she says. The book had 16 chapters, one for each year of his life, and Li felt she could have spent the rest of her life writing it, and also that she could not linger.

When her younger son James died in 2024, aged 19, Li wanted to write a book for him, too. James was harder to write for. Her sons were best friends but “such different boys”, she says. She and James did not argue in the same way as she did with Vincent, and he would hate to be thrust into the spotlight, or for her to write a “sentimental” book. James had a mind so brilliant that his inner workings were often unreachable – by seven or eight he’d open meal-time conversations with “apparently the Higgs boson …” or “apparently the predatory tunicates …”. He did not speak often, but could converse in eight languages and his phone was set to Lithuanian, a ninth. He once described Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant as the only book that captured how he felt about the world. If Vincent lived “feelingly”, James lived “thinkingly”, Li says, and she wanted her book for him to be “as clear as James, as logical and rational”.

The long-suffering Knickerbockers were the butt of jokes around the league for at least two decades, but now they’re just four wins away from the NBA finals

On Friday night in New York City, more than 19,000 Knicks fans poured out of Madison Square Garden and onto Seventh Avenue, celebrating their team’s improbable 4-2 series victory over the Boston Celtics. The NBA’s social media peanut gallery had previously taken issue with Knicks fans for their overly exuberant early-round victory celebrations, but after landing in the Eastern Conference finals for the first time in a quarter-century, this party was as legit as the Knicks newfound title hopes.

New York had beaten their rivals by a franchise playoff-record margin of 38 points, ending Boston’s reign as NBA champs. If you watched the way they suffocated the Celtics, you know it wasn’t even that close. The way this series ended was as stunning as how it began, with consecutive historic Celtic meltdowns at TD Garden, when the home team surrendered 20-point second-half leads not once but twice. Then New York were moments from wrapping up another improbable victory in Game 4 when Boston cornerstone Jayson Tatum went down with an achilles injury. Back in Boston, down three games to one, with their season on the brink and their all-NBA player in the hospital recovering from season-ending surgery, Boston powered through Game 5 on pure adrenaline. That wave of raw energy had crashed by the start of Game 6, and the Celtics finally tapped out. The Garden crowd let out 25 years of shpilkes as they watched their team bounce the champs.

We recognise extreme poverty as ruinous, but this turbo-charged affluence is deeply damaging too. Treat it as such

• Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah is chief executive of the New Economics Foundation and author of Power to the People
  

Once again, it’s the Hinduja family. Gopi Hinduja and his family, who run the Hinduja Group, are cited as Britain’s richest family in the latest Sunday Times rich list. The big story so far seems to be that their wealth has dropped to £35.3bn from £37.2bn the year before. But that story, and much of the discussion there will be this weekend, risks missing the real story. “Rich list” is barely the right description for the extreme wealth we should be talking about.

In 1989, when the Sunday Times first published its annual rich list, to be included someone would need to have 6,000 times the wealth of the average person in the UK. That’s already a pretty big gap – but this has now tripled to more than 18,000 times the average, according to a study by the University of Greenwich.

Edit your wardrobe, do a beauty blitz, organise your savings … Experts share tips on the tasks best tackled in small bites

Any day now I am going to do a complete wardrobe reorganisation and then make tons of money selling my old clothes on Vinted. Also, learn Spanish. Go through the 10,000 photos on my phone, print out the nice ones of the kids and put them in nice frames, and create one of those charming gallery walls. Definitely get into meditating and journalling. Should probably write a will? I’m all set. I’m just waiting for, say, a clear week to magically appear in my diary and I’ll get started.

Except, the penny is starting to drop that those pristine, blank diary pages are never going to happen. Life doesn’t work like that. And anyway, say a week off did magically appear, which it isn’t going to, wouldn’t it make more sense to go on holiday than sit on the floor sorting jumpers? If I had even half a day off, surely it would be a shame to waste it on dull jobs when I could, maybe, go to the cinema on my own – or get the train to Paris for lunch?

Most of those killed were elderly women who were being evacuated, according to local officials

Nine people have been killed in a Russian drone attack on a minibus that local authorities say was evacuating civilians in Ukraine’s northern Sumy region.

Local authorities said that most of those killed were elderly women being evacuated from Bilopillya, a town in the Sumy region that has come under repeated Russian attack.

Met police say the three charged under National Security Act for allegedly assisting Iranian foreign intelligence service

Three men have appeared in court charged under the National Security Act on suspicion of assisting the Iranian foreign intelligence service.

Mostafa Sepahvand, 39, of St John’s Wood, Farhad Javadi Manesh, 44, of Kensal Rise, and Shapoor Qalehali Khani Noori, 55, of Ealing, appeared before Westminster magistrates court on Saturday.

OVO Hydro, Glasgow
Her Tension world tour reaches the UK, and it’s the work of a relaxed but inherently flamboyant singer with a bold new vision for her back catalogue

The lights go down in Glasgow, and Kylie Minogue ascends from underneath the stage like a pop deity: head-to-toe in electric blue PVC, sitting in the centre of a giant neon diamond. After acclaimed runs in Australia and the US, she’s kicking off the UK leg of her Tension tour, celebrating an era that started two years ago with lead single Padam Padam – a phenomenon everywhere from gay clubs to TikTok – and continued with her equally hook-filled albums Tension and Tension II.

In contrast to some recent over-complicated arena tour concepts from the likes of Katy Perry, the Tension show is admirably straightforward after Kylie’s big entrance, allowing her to remain the focus at all times. She races through hits – some condensed into medleys – at an astonishing pace; from 1991’s What Do I Have To Do, to Good As Gone from Tension II. For Better the Devil You Know, she changes into a red sequin jumpsuit and matching mic, leading a troupe of highlighter-coloured dancers in front of a minimalist, impressionistic backdrop. There’s something of the Pet Shop Boys’ art-pop flair in the show’s considered design choices, and in Kylie’s inherent – rather than costume-driven – flamboyance.

England’s titanic tussle with Australia enthralled a nation but then the Test game vanished from UK free-to-air TV

How are you planning to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the 2005 men’s Ashes? Is it finally time to get that Kevin Pietersen skunk cut? Gather your friends for a drunken knees-up around Trafalgar Square?

Realistically, a quiet afternoon on YouTube will do, with Simon Jones’s reverse-swinger to Michael Clarke on repeat, off-stump gone like a popped cork. That rabbit hole should end up taking you to Pietersen’s 2014 appearance on the Graham Norton Show in which he discusses his strained relationship with Andrew Strauss while perched next to Taylor Swift. Yes, that actually happened.

The results of the election rerun could alter the future of the country, which is suffering under political divisions

Collecting her 10-year-old son from primary school in Bucharest’s crumbling Ferentari neighbourhood, Georgeta Petre was quite sure who she would be casting her ballot for on Sunday, and why.

“I hope he will change things,” she said. “I hope he’ll do things better. Everyone before him just … lied. Look around – we can’t continue like this. I can’t afford food, or clothes for the children. I’m voting for George Simion. He will be different.”