Syrian troops pulled out of Sweida on Thursday on the orders of the Islamist-led government, following days of deadly clashes

Gaza’s civil defence agency said on Friday that Israeli strikes killed 14 people in the north and south of the war-ravaged Palestinian territory, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.

The emergency service said fighter jets conducted airstrikes and there was artillery shelling and gunfire in the early morning in areas north of the southern city of Khan Younis.

Deal is 18th such package since Ukraine invasion as Ursula von der Leyen says EU is ‘striking the heart of Russia’s war machine’

One other thing to watch at this morning meeting of EU ministers in Brussels is the national reactions to the European Commission’s draft budget for 2028-2034.

German chancellor Friedrich Merz made it very clear last night that he was not happy with parts of it, particularly with the proposal to tax EU businesses as he regularly criticises burdens already placed on companies.

• ‘Devastated’ Samu told he cannot feature in tour match

• ‘They must have been worried we were going to win’

The British & Irish Lions have been accused of running scared on the eve of the first Test against the Wallabies amid a disagreement over the availability of Pete Samu for next week’s First Nations & Pasifika XV tour match.

Samu, who last season represented Bordeaux before joining the Waratahs for the next Super Rugby season, has been blocked from playing in Tuesday’s game and is said to be “devastated” by the head coach, Toutai Kefu.

Rules to prevent ‘enormous waste’ of fuel are seen as weak and poorly enforced and firms have little incentive to stop

The fossil fuel industry pumped an extra 389m tonnes of carbon pollution into the atmosphere last year by needlessly flaring gas, a World Bank report has found, describing it as an “enormous waste” of fuel that heats the planet by about as much as the country of France.

Flaring is a way to get rid of gases such as methane that arise when pumping oil out of the ground. While it can sometimes keep workers safe by relieving buildups of pressure, the practice is routine in many countries because it is often cheaper to burn gas than to capture, transport, process and sell it.

Treasury minister James Murray said Abbott’s claim that ‘this Labour leadership wants me out’ was ‘absolutely not the case’

There are “serious constitutional issues” raised by the Afghan data leak, the chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) has said.

Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland on Friday, Lord Beamish said the ISC was not informed of the breach, despite the names of more than 100 Britons being divulged - including spies and SAS operators.

Shapps, defence secretary when the superinjunction was imposed, said its use was ‘entirely justified’ to save lives

• Afghan nationals: have you arrived in the UK under the ARR?

The former defence secretary Grant Shapps has defended the use of an unprecedented superinjunction to suppress a data breach that led to the UK government relocating 15,000 Afghans.

The Afghanistan Response Route (ARR) was created in haste after it emerged that personal information about 18,700 Afghans who had applied to come to the UK had been leaked in error by a British defence official in early 2022.

(RCA)
While the sonic invention and off-kilter details remain, on his 10th album the cult musician eschews distortion for melancholic melodies and crooked love songs

Alexander Giannascoli’s nine-album back catalogue is the record of a great creative evolution. Starting with thin, wobbly Moldy Peaches-style anti-folk in his teenage years, the Pennsylvania native added lusher, twangier elements – Americana with a slacker twist – before introducing glitched beats, pitched-up vocals and copious vocoder. By 2022’s God Save the Animals he had a zealous cult following and was pushing at the limits of what indie singer-songwriter fare could be, melding acoustic strumming and sweet melody with distortion that ranged from unsettlingly inhuman to downright demonic.

On Headlights, his 10th album, Giannascoli, 32, reins in the warp and abrasion: the sonic invention remains, but it is deployed with increased subtlety. Exceptional opener June Guitar has chipmunk backing vocals and a surging organ riff that strongly recalls Centerfold by the J Geils Band; Beam Me Up is haunted by a mid-century sci-fi sound effect and Louisiana begins with a revving engine – yet all serve the timeless, melancholic soft-rock rather than overpowering it.

The 18-year-old No 1 draft pick struggled to shoot in his first Summer League game. But his poise, defense and winning mentality confirmed his billing as a generational talent

“I would say that might be one of the worst games of my life,” Cooper Flagg told reporters last Thursday night. “But we got the win, so that’s what really matters to me.” It was a telling statement from the 18-year-old basketball phenom after his first Las Vegas Summer League game. The No 1 overall pick in this year’s NBA draft – taken by the Dallas Mavericks after a one-and-done college career at Duke – didn’t have nearly as disastrous a debut as he made out. Though he struggled to shoot the ball, Flagg still managed to flash his playmaking and defensive range. Clearly hyperaware to the moment and the hype surrounding his technical NBA debut, he looked determined to put on a show: aggressively hunting his shot and seeking out highlight-reel dunks at every opportunity.

He bounced back with 31 points in his second (and ultimately final) Summer League appearance on Saturday. But it was the second-half of his comment after Thursday night’s game that encapsulates why Flagg is one of the most hyped teenage prospects in decades: the kid is a winner.

The journalist and TV presenter’s memoir of events leading up to her diagnosis, aged just 61, is a moving account of a life slowly unravelling before her and her husband’s eyes

In 2019, the TV presenter and journalist Fiona Phillips booked a last-minute trip to Vietnam with a friend. Nothing unusual there, you might think. But not only did Phillips not invite her husband or children, she didn’t consult them, instead simply informing them that she was leaving the following week. It was an impulsive decision that she hoped would lift her out of a depressive episode that was manifesting in brain fog and anxiety. But for her husband, TV editor Martin Frizell, it was another instance of Phillips behaving oddly, a sign that things “were not all they should be”.

Remember When chronicles, with illuminating candour, the changes that culminated in Phillips’s diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2022, at the age of 61. Billed as a memoir by Phillips herself, owing to her decline during the three-year writing process, it’s really a co-production between her, her ghostwriter Alison Phillips (no relation) and Frizell, who provides fitful interjections. As such, it offers a rare account of the impact of Alzheimer’s not just from the person who has it, but from their primary carer too.

Firm says technology used in El Eternauta is chance ‘to help creators make films and series better, not just cheaper’

Netflix has used artificial intelligence in one of its TV shows for the first time, in a move the streaming company’s boss said will make films and programmes cheaper and of better quality.

Ted Sarandos, a co-chief executive of Netflix, said the Argentinian science fiction series El Eternauta (The Eternaut) is the first it has made that involved using generative AI footage.

(River Lea)
Masters of atmosphere, Ruth Clinton, Cormac MacDiarmada and John Dermody contrast hauntological synths with robust noise on this playful debut

The latest gorgeous release from the fecund Irish folk scene doesn’t begin with bassy dread in the Lankum mode, but a mood of gentle, haunting psychedelia. Adieu Lovely Erin starts by evoking Broadcast swirling around a maypole; then it’s as if Cocteau Twins had been transported to a traditional music session. Its sweet, high female vocals also evoke the improvisations of sean-nós singing, while simmering, krautrock-like drums build drama.

Poor Creature comprises three musicians expert in heightening and managing atmosphere: Landless’s Ruth Clinton, Lankum’s Cormac MacDiarmada plus live Lankum drummer John Dermody. Their debut album steeps cowboy songs, Irish ballads, bluegrass and other traditional songs in a misty, playful lightness that somehow also carries an eerie power. Bury Me Not is a 19th-century American song about a dying sailor desperate not to be buried at sea, and Clinton delivers its lamenting lyrics with a bright, shining innocence. MacDiarmada leads Lorene, a rolling, country ballad by Alabama duo the Louvin Brothers, with a similarly soft, brooding magic. Singing as a boy desperate for a letter from his beloved, despite clearly knowing he’s being ghosted, the song’s melancholy slowly rises as voice and guitar mesh together.

The blockbuster adaptation of Homer’s epic has not finished filming and has no official runtime. But super fans – and scalpers – already have seats

The first tickets to Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s Odyssey have gone on sale – before he’s even finished filming it and a year before the film is even out, in what is likely the longest pre-sale in cinematic history.

The Odyssey, which stars Matt Damon as the cunning Odysseus as he fights his way home after the end of the Trojan war, will be released on 17 July 2026. But on Thursday, Imax released tickets to the first screenings at the 26 Imax cinemas around the world that have the staff and equipment required to project in 1570 format.

We need to know who is funding our parties, but this new frontier is custom-built for hostile actors. The elections bill is a good start – but only that

• Liam Byrne is the Labour MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill

Our party finance rules are riddled with loopholes. Shell companies. Unincorporated associations. Anonymous donations routed through digital campaigns between elections. All legal. All ripe for abuse. And now, a new gateway has opened: cryptocurrency.

When someone buys a cryptocurrency their identity is anonymous, but the transaction itself is recorded on the blockchain and is publicly visible. So far we know that this anonymity has allowed cryptocurrencies to be used to fund everything from sanctions evasion to election interference. A recent report from the Centre for Information Resilience revealed that A7A5, a new “digital rouble”, has already been linked to sanctions evasions by Russians. The report also found that Ilan Shor, a fugitive oligarch who has been accused of being involved with Russian-backed attempts to meddle in Moldovan elections, had allegedly used the currency to funnel at least $39m (£29m) into the bank accounts of thousands of Moldovans in exchange for their votes.

Liam Byrne is the Labour MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill

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Who’d be brave enough to programme John Tavener’s choral epic? We talk to the team behind the staging that’s opening this year’s Edinburgh international festival, and veterans of its 2003 premiere remember the challenges and rewards

What’s the longest concert you’ve ever been to? Ever found yourself sitting through more encores than you’d bargained for, worrying about your last train? Or mid-symphony becoming desperate to stand up and stretch?

What about the longest single piece of music? Opera-goers may or may not sympathise with Rossini’s quip about Wagner’s “good moments but awful quarters of an hour”, but there is no denying the monumental scale of Die Meistersinger, for instance, which runs to about four and a half hours, not including intervals. And then there’s the same composer’s Ring cycle – about 15 hours in total, albeit split across four instalments; as close to a marathon as classical music usually gets.

Piles of waste line the streets of Manshiyet Nasr, turning it into a no-go zone for many. But a new generation see themselves as agents of change in the fight against plastic pollution

When Mina Nedi graduated with a nursing degree last year, his friends and family expected him to start working in one of Egypt’s overstretched hospitals. Instead, the 25-year-old decided to join his father’s recycling business in Manshiyet Nasr, a neighbourhood on Cairo’s eastern outskirts known as Garbage City.

Every day, he sorts through thousands of plastic bottles, collected by a team of men who roam the city at night to pick up rubbish, separating them by colour and compressing them into large bundles with the help of a machine, ready to be sold for recycling and reuse.

Mina Nedi, 25, has been working as a plastic collector for five years and funded his university education with it

Once a haven for the world’s rich and famous, the landmark hotel was burned down this month as violence gripped Port-au-Prince

There was an outpouring of grief in Haiti when the Hotel Oloffson, a cultural and architectural landmark in Port-au-Prince, was set ablaze on the night of 5 July, in what local media described as retaliation by armed gangs after a police operation in its vicinity.

For many, its ruins are a stark and sobering symbol of the state of a capital city on the verge of collapse, and a sign that a once vibrant culture may be fading as violent criminal armed groups continue their reign of terror.

The International Booker winner explores Bulgarian family life under communism in this moving depiction of a son’s bereavement

The Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov was published quietly in the Anglophone world for years before he won the 2023 International Booker prize with Time Shelter, about an Alzheimer’s clinic that recreates the past so successfully, it beguiles the wider world.

He is perhaps now Bulgaria’s biggest export. Ever playful, never linear, his new novel Death and the Gardener consists of vignettes of a beloved dying and dead father, told by a narrator who, like Gospodinov, is an author. Gospodinov has spoken publicly about losing his own father recently, and the novel feels autobiographical in tone. When we read “My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden,” it is not the beginning of an Archimboldiesque surrealist tale, but rather a more direct exploration of how we express and where we put our love.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

Like celebrity bodies on the red carpet, everything from bottles, bag charms and even the bags they’re attached to are shrinking in size – but are bigger signs of status than ever

When it comes to attention-seeking fashion, bigger is usually better. A giant designer bag. Shoulder-grazing earrings. A straw hat the size of a bike tyre. Recently, however, there has been a shift. Like celebrity bodies on the red carpet, accessories are shrinking. Everything from bags to water bottles are noticeably downsizing.

In April, Uniqlo released a micro version of its mini shoulder bag. The original banana-shaped hit, which has become the brand’s bestselling bag of all time, measured 28cm by 17cm. Its £12.90 offspring has been scaled down to 21.5cm by 11.5cm and, like a matryoshka doll, comfortably nestles inside its progenitor.

• Latest updates from the second day of the 153rd Open

• Live official leaderboard | And you can email Scott

Adam Scott should have won this Championship in 2012. But he bogeyed holes 69 through 72 at Lytham, handing the Claret Jug to Ernie Els on a silver platter. What the genial Scott would give to play that stretch again. Ah well, he’ll always have Augusta National, nine months later. What the Big Easy would give for a green jacket. Scott started this morning on +1 after a 72 yesterday, but he’s going backwards now, after a clumsy double bogey, his first of the week, at the short par-three 3rd. He over-clubs, his ball disappearing down the swale at the back … then he under-chips, his ball coming back towards his feet. A second chip doesn’t get close, and two putts later, he’s +3 and prodding the green with his putter in annoyance, not so genial right now.

Sergio Garcia missed a five-foot putt to win the Open at Carnoustie in 2007. He had his chance to win at Hoylake in 2014 too, but failed to get out of a bunker at the par-three 15th and that was that too. At 45 years of age, it’s not too late to right those wrongs, and yesterday’s opening round of 70 offered hope. But he’s started his second round horrendously, tugging his opening tee shot into the thick stuff down the left, finding a greenside bunker, failing to get onto the green, chipping short, then failing to make the eight-footer that remains for bogey. A double, and those shoulders are slumping already. We’ve seen this story too often before. Oh Sergio. He’s +1.

• Australia’s No 8 says team will try to ‘win every moment’ on Saturday

• Nick Champion de Crespigny and Tom Lynagh come into injury-depleted squad

Australia captain Harry Wilson said the Wallabies were confident of beating the British & Irish Lions in the first Test at Lang Park on Saturday despite being heavy underdogs after losing several key players to injury.

The Wallabies have won only four of their last 11 Tests and on Saturday will be without regular fly-half Noah Lolesio and their best Test player of the last two years, loose forward Rob Valetini.

The bulk of global greenhouse gas emissions come from countries that are not democratic, and many big oil and gas exporters are also authoritarian

• The big emitters: which countries are holding back climate action and why?

When it comes to the climate crisis, how do you negotiate with an autocracy?

It is the case today, and it is almost certain to remain so for the dwindling number of years in which we can hope to stave off the worst of climate breakdown, that the bulk of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from countries that are not democratic. Add to that, many of the major suppliers of oil and gas – the Gulf petrostates for instance, plus Russia, Venezuela and a few others – are likewise authoritarian.

If it’s not superinjunctions, it’s Epstein files or deepfakes. It’s hard not to be a conspiracy theorist when sometimes they really are out to get you

If you were to invent a scandal expressly to convince conspiracy theorists they were right all along, the story of the Afghan superinjunction would be hard to beat.

A secret back door into Britain through which thousands of immigrants were brought, under cover of a draconian legal gagging order that helpfully also concealed an act of gross incompetence by the British state? It’s a rightwing agitator’s dream. “The real disinformation,” wrote Dominic Cummings on X, a platform notably awash with real disinformation, “is the regime media.” Yes, that Dominic Cummings.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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Exclusive: Customers are told the carmaker is allowing more time for testing and for demand to pick up

Britain’s largest carmaker, Jaguar Land Rover, has delayed the planned launches of its new electric Range Rover and electric Jaguar models to give it time for more testing and for demand to pick up, the Guardian can reveal.

JLR has written to customers waiting for the Range Rover Electric to inform them that deliveries of the new version of the model will not start until next year, after initially aiming for late 2025.