March expected to be Britain’s largest far-right rally in decades, and will include speakers from Britain, the US and Europe

More than a hundred people have gathered outside Russell Square before the ‘march against fascism’ counter-protest against the ‘unite the kingdom’ march, featuring far-right activist Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Both are being held in central London on Saturday.

According to the PA news agency, people in Russell Square milled around with placards that said “refugees welcome” and “oppose Tommy Robinson”. Chants of “say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here” started at about 11.20am, the news agency reports.

The far right are a menace to the whole of society. Their first targets, asylum seekers and Muslims, are broadening to all migrants, black people and on to trade unionists, all religious minorities and anti-racists.

This is going to be big, but we are also talking about movement to the right of Reform UK and we still don’t know where it is going.

• Updates from the Lions v Suns clash at the Gabba

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Q1: 15 mins remaining: Brisbane 1.1.7 – Gold Coast 2.0.12

Haphazard in the forward line from Brisbane, but they’re on the board. Zorko’s pinpoint pass from half back into the centre sets it up, then follows up with the one-two. Kick inside 50 is spoiled, Cameron gets ironed out in the contest, the ball is knocked around via Ashcroft, little kick inboard isn’t marked on the full, Logan Morris gets the snap away as he’s tackled, but he gets enough purchase and it sails through.

• Match at Emirates Stadium kicks off at 12.30pm (BST)

• Postecoglou vows to helm Forest back to ‘rightful place’

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In September 2023, Ange Postecoglou secured a creditable 2-2 draw for Tottenham at Arsenal in his first north London derby. It was a moment – six Premier League games into his tenure – when people wondered whether his team might be the real thing. In September of last year, after another derby against Arsenal, this one at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, the manager came out with his famous comment about how he always won silverware in his second season. And here we are again. Postecoglou versus Arsenal in the early weeks of a season; the plot-lines crackling.

It is a little sleepy around the stadium at the moment; too early in the day, perhaps, for any Ange-baiting from the Arsenal support. That will change. It is rare that a visiting manager transcends a game here but that is the unmistakable vibe around Postecoglou’s Nottingham Forest debut. He has succeeded a very popular guy in Nuno Espirito Santo at a club where a major power battle has just played out, Edu (the ex-Arsenal sporting director) getting the vote of confidence from Evangelos Marinakis rather than Nuno. Postecoglou’s preferred approach is the polar opposite to that of his predecessor. And he must get it to click immediately. Good thing Ange has never taken the easy path.

PM understood not to have seen messages from former ambassador to sex offender when speaking in Commons

Keir Starmer defended Peter Mandelson in the House of Commons two days after details of the damning emails between Lord Mandelson and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were passed to Downing Street, according to reports.

The prime minister sacked Mandelson as the British ambassador to the US on Thursday after the emails were published, revealing that Mandelson told Epstein “your friends stay with you and love you” while the disgraced financier was facing jail for sex offences.

Phil Bellamy’s daughters refuse to ride in his electric car without travel sickness tablets. Are there other solutions?

It was a year in to driving his daughter to school in his new electric vehicle that Phil Bellamy discovered she dreaded the 10-minute daily ride – it made her feel sick in a way no other car did.

As the driver, Bellamy had no problems with the car but his teenage daughters struggled with sickness every time they entered the vehicle. Research has shown this is an issue – people who did not usually have motion sickness in a conventional car found that they did in EVs.

Customised plates often cost more than the car – and yet the number of people queueing up to buy them is at an all‑time high. What’s the appeal?

‘Well, lot number 56 created quite a buzz, ladies and gentlemen … ” I’m sitting in a marquee in Chichester at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, sheltering from the summer heat. The auctioneer tells us that there have already been several telephone bids for this particular lot. Someone on the phone kicks things off with £180,000. The room holds its breath. Behind us are various astonishingly luxurious cars. One, an orange 1992 Mazda RX-7 FD Veilside Fortune Coupe, was used in the film The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. All of a sudden the bidding for lot 56 is at £220,000. Now £230,000. Now £240,000 from someone online. Now £250,000. I can hear the distant vrooming of race cars tearing around a track. But lot 56 isn’t a car. It’s a number plate.

Until recently, the UK record for a number plate sold at public auction was £518,480, set in 2014 when Ferrari dealer John Collins beat the competition to get his hands on “25 O”. Private deals have been done for millions of pounds. In Dubai, “P7” sold for £12m in 2023, setting a world record. Number plates can dwarf the value of the cars on which they sit. The question is: why?

The American dream has never looked more seductive, with long and loose summer wardrobes and beachy jewellery

With the death of Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren became the world’s oldest major working fashion designer. The spotlight arrives with great timing for an 85-year-old on a hot streak. His brand is in better health than it has been for decades, with shares up 35% in 2025 and annual sales figures showing an 8% growth to $7.1bn (£1.25bn).

On the first night of New York fashion week, Lauren hosted the curtain-raiser for a month of catwalks with a show in his Madison Avenue design studio. Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King chatted to Lauren’s family; Usher smiled broadly behind sunglasses, lounging on a plushly cushioned front row. Champagne was served on silver trays under twinkling chandeliers. In the fractious climate, with the US reeling from the shooting of the far-right activist Charlie Kirk, Ralph Lauren’s affable, charming vision of the American dream has never looked more seductive.

The Canada-based photographer used his camera’s slo-mo mode to create a fluid pattern

Raghuvamsh Chavali was born in Hyderabad, India, and now calls Canada – or more specifically Guelph in Ontario – his home. He describes his adopted city as “a peaceful and friendly place, with a mix of heritage buildings and modern life”. It also proved an ideal backdrop for his extended photographic series Wings Over Concrete, which explores the presence and movement of birds in urban environments.

Before he took this image, one cloudy afternoon in downtown Guelph, Chavali had been tracking this particular flock of pigeons for several weeks. “I was in search of the natural patterns of birds, and I’d seen this flock flying in circles around the buildings near a train station at the same time each day. They moved in a tight, repeated loop, and on this day the light was soft and just right to capture their movement clearly,” he says. He utilised his phone camera’s slo-mo mode “to create a visual that almost feels like it was drawn with light. Their flight formed a fluid, layered pattern, like an S-shaped ribbon floating in space.”

• South Africa thump New Zealand 43-10 in Wellington

• Tourists score 36 unanswered points in second half

The All Blacks suffered their heaviest-ever Test defeat as South Africa beat New Zealand 43-10 in Wellington to revive their Rugby Championship campaign.

Cheslin Kolbe scored a try in each half and Damian Willemse, Kwagga Smith, RG Snyman and André Esterhuizen also touched down at the end of ambitious and clinical attacks as South Africa ran in six tries to one.

The year’s biggest night in television sees plenty of nominations for Severance, The Studio, The White Lotus and Adolescence – but who will win?

It’s that time of year again, where you consider all that you have and have not watched in the vast world of television. The Emmys are back, more or less kicking off the Hollywood award season with a healthy mix of Emmy stalwarts and beloved newbies. Will voters choose between the head (Severance, with a leading 27 noms) or the heart (The Pitt) for best drama? Will The Studio sweep the comedy awards? Here are our picks for the night:

Just before Sunday’s crucial qualifier against Samoa in Denver, the American domestic league lost a third team in less than two months

The US Eagles men can qualify for the 2027 World Cup on Sunday, by beating Samoa in the Pacific Nations Cup fifth-place play-off in Denver. Defeat will not end hopes of making it to Australia, as further play-offs await. But in another horrible week for American men’s rugby, to have one weighty challenge dealt with would be welcome indeed.

On Thursday, in a move the Guardian understands caught other team owners by surprise, the Houston SaberCats became the third team to drop out of Major League Rugby this year. That reduced the competition to just seven teams from 11 last season, given the merger of San Diego and LA, announced in August as NOLA Gold and Miami Sharks also called it quits. Houston, San Diego and NOLA were founder clubs in 2018.

Martin Pengelly writes on Substack at The National Maul, on rugby in the US

The Guardian joins the Swedish coastguard to patrol an area that has become a hybrid warfare battleground

In front of a bank of screens on the boat’s bridge, the Swedish coastguard Jan Erik Antonsson shows on a live map on a laptop how many vessels of Russia’s “shadow fleet” there are in the area. “These green symbols are the shadow fleet,” he says. More than a dozen green triangles representing shadow fleet vessels pop up around the coastline of southern Sweden alone.

Every day hundreds of shadow fleet ships – unregulated ageing tankers from around the world in varying states of repair carrying oil from Russia to states including China and India – are moving through a relatively narrow passage in the Baltic.

Will Canelo’s power or Crawford’s precision prove the decisive factor in Saturday night’s showdown in Las Vegas? Our writers set out the arguments on both sides

For years Bud Crawford’s name has been synonymous with patience. Denied mainstream recognition and opportunities against name-brand fighters, he kept beating everyone they put in front of him until he’d unified all four titles at junior welterweight. Then he did it again at welterweight with a dismantling of Errol Spence Jr so complete it cemented his place in boxing’s pound-for-pound S-tier alongside Naoya Inoue and Oleksandr Usyk. His gifts are obvious: the ability to switch seamlessly between stances, to read rhythms like sheet music, and to mete out punishment with icy composure once he’s cracked the code.

• Updates from Tokyo as the championships get under way

• Mail John | The stars aiming to break records in Tokyo

Now for the women’s 100m heats. The first sees the US’s Melissa Jefferson-Wooden win in a time of 10.99. That looked easy for the Olympic bronze medallist. Dina Asher-Smith goes in the second heat. Three to go through, and Asher-Smith makes it, second behind Tina Clayton, the young Jamaican.

The women’s long jump was going ahead while those steeplechases were taking place. Tara Davis-Woodhall, the Olympic champion, makes it with her first jump, of 6.88m. It’s 6.75 to qualify, and the others are having their struggles.

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Scottish Premiership

“Oh matchday live, how could you?” thunders says Simon McMahon. “You forgot about about Dundee United’s trip to Easter Road to face Hibs at 5.45pm, so please, allow me. United manager Jim Goodwin this week signed a new deal, and Ivan Dolcek, one of this summer’s 14 new faces at Tannadice, was named Scottish Premiership Player of the Month for August. Add in the fact that our last game was a 2-0 schooling of Dundee at Dens and it’s easy to see why there’s a lot of positivity from United fans at the moment.

The Priestdaddy author on quitting social media, Maga conspiracies and how her second novel grew out of a period of post-Covid mania

There is a thing Patricia Lockwood does whenever she spots a priest while walking through an airport. The 43-year-old grew up as one of five children of a Catholic priest in the American midwest, an eccentric upbringing documented, famously, in Priestdaddy, her hit memoir of 2017, and a wellspring of comic material that just keeps giving. Priests in the wild amuse and comfort her, a reminder of home and the superiority that comes with niche expertise. “I was recently at St Louis airport and saw a priest,” she says, “high church, not Catholic, because of the width of the collar; that’s the thing they never get right in TV shows. And I gave him a look that was a little bit too intimate. A little bit like: I know.” Sometimes, as she’s passing, she’ll whisper, “encyclical”.

This is Lockwood: elfin, fast-talking, determinedly idiosyncratic, with the uniform irony of a writer who came up through social media and for whom life online is a primary subject. If Priestdaddy documented her unconventional upbringing in more or less conventional comic style, her novels and poems since then have worked in more fragmentary modes that mimic the disjointed experience of processing information in bite-size non sequiturs. In 2021, Lockwood published her first novel, No One Is Talking About This, in which she wrote of the disorienting grief at the death of her infant niece from a rare genetic disorder. In her new novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, she returns to the theme, eliding that grief with her descent into a Covid-induced mania, a terrifying experience leavened with very good jokes. A danger of Lockwood’s writing is that it traps her in a persona that makes sincerity – any statement not hedged and flattened by sarcasm – almost impossible. But Lockwood, it seems to me, has a bouncy energy closer to an Elizabeth Gilbert than a Lauren Oyler or an Ottessa Moshfegh, say, so that no matter how glib her one-liners, you tend to come away from reading her with a general feeling of warmth.

Portugal star will hand Gianni Infantino the perfect publicity coup if he does play in America for the first time in more than 10 years, having already begun cosying up to Donald Trump

Is it still safe to stage the World Cup in the United States? After more headline evidence this week of the extreme nature of American gun violence, some may conclude that the answer is no. Nine months out from the opening game, it is now almost impossible to ignore this. But believe it or not statistics suggest more than 300 people will have been shot in America last Wednesday alone.

The same number will also be shot on Friday, Saturday, every day next week, and every day of World Cup year. On average 127 of these unnamed, largely non-famous people not called things such as the superstar influencer Charlie Kirk will die each day. Within this, youth gun deaths will be both alarmingly high and a register of social injustice: a disproportionate 46% of all young people shot will be black.

Sarah Hunter and Lou Meadows pinpoint when it all clicked for Red Roses ahead of their World Cup quarter-final

Earning the right to win each game may be the Red Roses’ mantra at this Rugby World Cup but making history on home soil is the goal Sarah Hunter and Lou Meadows are working to orchestrate. England’s assistant coaches describe themselves as complementary, bringing diverse experience that creates a “good blend” alongside the forwards coach, Louis Deacon, and the head coach, John Mitchell, with the Red Roses unbeaten under the New Zealander’s tenure.

In a hotel meeting room on the outskirts of Bristol as England enter the business end of the tournament, Hunter and Meadows explain how the coaching setup offers “different lenses” for tactics and planning. The duo have brought a sharp, strategic edge to the hosts’ defence and attack and for 40 minutes they range over a series of topics, including picking in which game this England side have come closest to perfection.

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• Fast-finishing Australia lose 28-26 to Argentina in Sydney

• Joe Schmidt’s side pay price for conceding 13 penalties

With their backs to the wall again after an error strewn hour had left them 18 points behind, the Wallabies looked forlornly to the Allianz Stadium grandstands and saw Rugby Australia boss Phil Waugh sitting with John Howard. Surely this was the omen they needed to emulate the former Prime Minister’s famous “Lazarus with a triple-bypass” comeback.

Joe Schmidt’s side have a reputation for rising from the ashes with last-gasp victories. They beat England in November with a last-play roll of the dice and they shocked Argentina last week with a try in overtime. Today, in another rousing fightback before 41,912 in Sydney, they clawed their way back to trail 28-26 with seconds left on the clock.

• Two-time major winner records highest PGA Tour Champions hole score

• US golfer finds water seven times on par-5 12th at Sanford International

John Daly made it into the PGA Tour Champions record book Friday for the wrong reason. The two-time major champion took a 19 on the par-5 12th hole at the Sanford International.

Daly also broke his personal record by one shot, after he took an 18 on the par-5 sixth hole in the 1998 Bay Hill Invitational when he hit 3-wood into the water six straight times.

Educational bodies from Europe to South America are boycotting Israeli institutions, though Universities UK said it did not support the action

A growing number of universities, academic institutions and scholarly bodies around the world are cutting links with Israeli academia amid claims that it is complicit in the Israeli government’s actions towards Palestinians.

According to Gaza’s health ministry, more than 63,000 people have been killed in the territory – the majority of them civilians – with the true toll likely far higher. UN-backed experts have confirmed parts of Gaza, much of which has been reduced to rubble, are now in a “man-made” famine.

Here in metal-mad Finland, I see the 50-year-old genre is still in rude health – and helping people see the light in dark times

• Mike Watson is a media and art theorist and educator born in the UK and based in Finland

In June, I travelled to Helsinki to see Iron Maiden. I live in Finland and so know well that the country is heavy metal mad. It boasts more metal bands per capita than any other country in the world. Metal has long been the nation’s unofficial flagship cultural pursuit, with bands (called things such as Nightwish, Apocalyptica and Amorphis) acting as ambassadors where few other cultural figures have broken through abroad. But I still wasn’t prepared for what I saw.

The gig was preceded by a gathering of the “Crazy Finns” – a ragbag of Finnish Maiden fanatics who have followed the band on tour for two decades. The fan group celebrated their 20th anniversary with a concert pre-party featuring Dennis Stratton, who played on the band’s self-titled debut in 1980. As Stratton performed an acoustic version of Prowler, backed by local musician Henri Seger, the tears started to flow – predominantly from the men in the audience. At this point I realised one of the main reasons for metal’s popularity in a country where the inhabitants are famously emotionally restrained – it offers a rare outlet for collective expression. I won’t forget the sight of these macho, taciturn Finnish men united in their tears and their denims, the instantly recognisable uniform of the metal fanbase worldwide.

Mike Watson is a media and art theorist and educator based in Finland. He is the author of Hungry Ghosts in the Machine: Digital Capitalism and the Search for Self. He is co-editing a compendium of essays What’s Left of Metal? with David Burke