Updates from the World Cup match in Colombo
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“Because the pitch looks good,” says Fatima Sana, “and will be an advantage for our spinners.” Nat Sciver Brunt would have bowled too.

Hello from Colombo, via a dank, grey Manchester morning. Game four for England of what has been a rather excellent campaign – three games, three wins and nestled just below Australia in second place, but with a superior run rate. A win today will take them top, springboarding artistically into the serious end of the round-robin when they play India and Australia, and New Zealand.

Israel previously said the flow of aid would be cut by half and Rafah crossing would not open as planned due to delay in returning bodies of hostages

Israel limits aid into Gaza in dispute over hostages’ remains

The Israeli military said on Wednesday that one of the bodies handed over by Hamas the previous day as part of the ceasefire deal is not that of one of the hostages who was held in Gaza.

Four bodies were handed over by Hamas on Tuesday to ease pressure on the fragile ceasefire, after the first four on Monday – when the last 20 living hostages were released.

The military said that “following the completion of examinations at the National Institute of Forensic Medicine, the fourth body handed over to Israel by Hamas does not match any of the hostages”.

In the north of the territory, as Israeli forces withdrew from Gaza City, the Hamas government’s black-masked armed police resumed street patrols, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Our message is clear: There will be no place for outlaws or those who threaten the security of citizens.

Fears Moscow testing west in grey zone between war and peace with incursions into Nato territory

Senior Ukrainian officials visiting the United States said Wednesday that they met with representatives of US weapon manufacturers, including Raytheon, which produces Tomahawk missiles that Washington could provide to Kyiv, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.

The Ukrainian delegation’s two-day visit also included talks with senior US officials and comes ahead of a planned meeting between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday.

There is no doubt about Spain’s commitment and contribution to (transatlantic) security.

Active pension scheme expected to start in January is part of chancellor’s ‘autumn of reforms’ to tackle economic stagnation

Germans who continue in the labour market beyond retirement age will be able to earn up to €2,000 (£1,750) a month tax-free on top of their pension under a scheme aimed at boosting economic growth and labour force participation rates.

The “Aktivrente”, or active pension scheme, due to come into force in January, was promised on the campaign trail by the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, before he came into office five months ago.

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year is an annual competition hosted by the Natural History Museum in London, which awards top honours in various categories for outstanding photography

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some wonderful new paperbacks, from chilling short stories to a biography of a duke

This French bestseller, in which a girl and her grandfather visit Paris museums, aims to be a Sophie’s World for art history – but the conversations are sentimental and simplistic

The complaint that cynics often make about modern art is that most of it looks as though it were made by children. (If your 10-year-old is pulling out crumpled Kandinskys from their schoolbags on a regular basis then lucky you, I say.) But what about art criticism? Could a child’s understanding of art be as radical as John Berger’s or as wise as Sister Wendy’s, for instance? Art historian Thomas Schlesser thinks so. His debut novel, a bestseller in France, has been translated into 38 languages. Perhaps in one of them it lives up to the hype.

In Mona’s Eyes, a 10-year-old girl embarks on an artistic adventure with her grandfather, visiting the most famous works in Paris museums over the course of a year. They pledge to gaze at these works intently and to discuss them deeply. The resulting conversations are intended to be charming and moving. The kindest observation to be made about this book is that they are not.

Scientists from University of Tennessee, Knoxville, look at 37 species to identify cause of ‘rat hole’ in pavement

With a front paw outstretched and its tail at an angle, the creature that fell on to wet concrete in Chicago left quite the memento mori.

Now, researchers say they have unmasked the identity of the victim, revealing the famous “rat hole” was most probably made by a squirrel.

The average Premier League game lasts 100 minutes and 36 seconds, but the ball is only in play for 54.7% of that

By Opta Analyst

The start of every football match brings a little flutter in the stomach. Will the stars perform? Will the referee have a good game by giving your players every decision? And will the football gods shine down on your team? A more pertinent question to ask this season, though, is how much football will we actually see?

We wrote about ball-in-play time a few seasons ago, revealing that fans were not seeing as much football as in previous years. We’re not saying our data nosiness led to referees adding more stoppage time, but there was a notable rise in ball-in-play time over the next two campaigns. It went up from 54 minutes and 49 seconds in 2022-23 to 58 minutes and 11 seconds in 2023-24. It’s still early in the 2025-26 season, but the pendulum may be swinging back the other way.

The city – the Sudanese army’s last stronghold in the west of the country – has withstood more than 500 days of attacks by paramilitary RSF

The besieged Sudanese city of El Fasher has been declared “uninhabitable” with new data indicating most homes are destroyed and critical levels of malnourishment among people trapped there.

The stark assessment comes as the city endures constant artillery and drone attacks, shoehorning its 250,000 starving people into a shrinking urban enclave.

• Canadian club folded during Covid-19 pandemic in 2020

• Players receive around £750,000 in unpaid income

Players from the former Super League club Toronto Wolfpack have finally been paid around £750,000 in unpaid salaries following a five-year legal battle, the Guardian can reveal.

The Wolfpack folded in 2020 during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic leaving their playing squad – which included the likes of Sonny Bill Williams – unemployed and without a contract. Some of those players were able to source deals for 2021 and continue playing but others retired from the sport altogether and had to take jobs outside rugby league to make ends meet.

Plus: more players ignoring tactical instructions, free-kick flurries and Wembley Stadium’s first resident club

• Mail us with your questions and answers

“Last month, Jeremy Ngakia scored twice for Watford against Oxford to take his career goals total to three from 116 senior club appearances. Excluding players who scored only once, has anybody with 100+ appearances managed a higher percentage of their career goals in a single match?” wonders Peter Skilton.

Denis Boone writes in with the tale of Matthieu Chalmé. “French right-back Chalmé played 362 professional matches during his career, mostly for Lille and Bordeaux,” Denis writes. “He scored four career goals, with three of them coming in a single game. Chalmé netted all three goals in Lille’s 3-0 win at Ajaccio in March 2004, recording the most unlikely of hat-tricks.”

Any more for any more? Mail us with your suggestions.

This six-part adaption of Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s novel is an odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of an isolated 19th-century village … but the murder investigation at its heart is risible

A debate recently went viral on social media, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers by Deborah Bragan-Turner). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which population comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.

Legislative change comes five years after treaty suspended in response to city’s crackdown on pro-democracy activists

Exiled Hong Kong dissidents say they fear UK government plans to restart some extraditions with the city could put them in greater danger, saying Hong Kong authorities will use any pretext to pursue them.

An amendment to UK extradition laws was passed on Tuesday more than five years after Britain and several other countries suspended extradition treaties with Hong Kong in response to the government crackdown on the pro-democracy movement, and its imposition of a Beijing-designed national security law.

Ultra-slim and light smartphone feels special, but cuts to camera and battery may be too hard to ignore for most

The iPhone Air is a technical and design marvel that asks: how much are you willing to give up for a lightweight and ultra-slender profile?

Beyond the obvious engineering effort that has gone into creating one of the slimmest phones ever made, the Air is a reductive exercise that boils down the iPhone into the absolute essentials in a premium body.

Inspired by Gustav Klimt’s ‘golden phase’ and the religious icons of medieval Europe, US photographer Tawny Chatmon reimagines Black identity by upturning art history

From prosthetic testicles for dogs to sociable reptiles, a behavioural scientist explains what we get wrong – and right – about animal minds

In the 1970s a former Soviet naval officer named Igor Charkovsky popularised a concept which came to be known as dolphin-assisted birth. Likely inspired by New Age theories, he urged expectant mothers to dip in the ice-cold water of the Black Sea, commune with dolphins, and give birth underwater. In the “very near future,” he claimed, “a newborn child would be able to live in the ocean with a pod of dolphins and feed on dolphin milk”.

The oddest thing about Charkovsky was not so much his theory, but its remarkable resilience within both Soviet and western culture, as Justin Gregg sets out in his illuminating and lively new book. Gregg’s work is both a dissection and an ode to the irresistible allure of anthropomorphism, our tendency to apply human characteristics to non-humans, whether animals, objects, AI, or God. An expert on animal cognition who also teaches improv, Gregg deftly guides us through our alternately charming, destructive and wrong-headed fantasies about everything from marine mammals to our iPhones.

For years, I kept a stash of ‘nice things’, waiting for the right occasion to use them. The accident taught me to live now, rather than in the future

I used to have a drawer where the “nice things” lived: posh candles and fancy bubble bath; two flagons of Greek extra virgin olive oil; that Aesop handwash, to bring out for visitors. A bottle of fizz gathered dust on the kitchen side and, in the bathroom, an expensive moisturiser remained unopened. Life’s little luxuries, I believed, weren’t for enjoying now, but were to be saved for some unspecified “special” time in the future.

Then I was hit by a car. It happened in May last year, while I was walking down a quiet street soon after lunchtime in Bermuda, where I’d been sent on an assignment for work.

• Ronaldo double includes 41st World Cup qualifying goal

• Republic of Ireland keep dream alive with Armenia win

Cristiano Ronaldo set a record for World Cup qualifying goals but the Group F leaders Portugal were denied early World Cup qualification by a late Hungary equaliser to snatch a 2-2 draw.

Two Ronaldo goals – the first his 40th in qualifying to set the landmark – put Portugal on the verge of qualification but Liverpool’s Dominik Szoboszlai struck in added time to stop the celebration party in Lisbon.

• ‘It’s British humour and I can take it,’ says England head coach

• Tuchel says his side have achieved something ‘special’

Thomas Tuchel laughed off the mockery from the fans and hailed his side for achieving something special after England qualified for the World Cup finals tournament with a 5‑0 win against Latvia in Riga.

The head coach was in good spirits after another fine display and he did not mind being the butt of the joke at a rain-sodden Daugava Stadium. England’s fans did not hesitate to express their displeasure with Tuchel’s critical comments about the atmosphere during the win against Wales at Wembley last week but the German admitted he was fair game and insisted he thought the chants aimed in his direction were funny.

Royal Albert Hall to host Grand Sumo Tournament marking only the second time a full competition is held overseas

They play Major League Baseball at the Olympic Stadium, Tottenham’s ground is a second home for the National Football League, the National Basketball Association is staging a game at the 02 Arena next year, and South Africa just beat Argentina in a rugby Test at Twickenham, but it’s been a long time since London has hosted anything on the scale of the Grand Sumo Tournament taking place at the Royal Albert Hall this week. Forty wrestlers have flown over from Japan to compete in it. That’s around six tons of elite athlete to be fed, watered, transported and supported.

“We’ve actually had to source and buy new chairs which can take up to 200kg in weight,” says Matthew Todd, the Royal Albert Hall’s harassed director of programming. “Our usual standard is only 100kg.” They’ve also had to reinforce the toilets. “It’s the ones that are screwed into the wall which are the most challenging,” Todd explains, wearily.

A new documentary, The Lost Boys of Carbis Bay, follows a band of explorers into their underground world

The surf was up off the north coast of Cornwall but a hardy band of adventurers turned their backs on the temptations of the sunny beaches and headed inland to burrow into the darkness.

Over the next few hours members of the Carbis Bay Crew explored the shafts and tunnels of an old mine, laughing, joking and making sure each other was OK as they clambered down precipitous ladders and squeezed through tight gaps.

Mimi’s Shebeen, choreographed by Alesandra Seutin, charts South African legend’s exile and ascendancy with ‘beautiful songs, strong messages and moments that hit’

“You speak about Miriam Makeba in South Africa and it’s like speaking about a queen,” says Alesandra Seutin. The legendary singer Makeba was known as Mama Africa, and the Empress of African Song; but she also hung out in Greenwich Village with Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. She was a teenager sent out to work to support her family in Johannesburg who later became a diplomat for Ghana, then Guinea’s official delegate to the UN. An outspoken anti-apartheid activist, she was the wife of a Black Panther. And her rich life and legacy are the inspiration for choreographer Seutin’s latest work, Mimi’s Shebeen, about to get its UK premiere.

Mimi’s Shebeen blends dance, live music and spoken word in a piece of theatre that’s no straightforward biodrama but draws on Makeba’s history, particularly her story of exile: after moving to New York in 1959 Makeba was barred from South Africa for 30 years because of her anti-apartheid stance. She was later banned from the US after marrying the Black Panther activist Stokely Carmichael. The show comes across like a ritual of remembrance, a deconstructed funeral – part eulogy, part celebration, part provocation – with the fabulous South African singer Tutu Puoane at the centre bringing Makeba’s songs to vibrant life.

Caramelised apples on a buttery biscuit base, and an apple cake with a rubbly topping

It’s easy to forget just how extraordinary apples can be. Often relegated to less exciting regions of the fruit bowl, they actually come in a dizzying array of varieties – sharp, sweet, floral, crisp – and each with their own quirks. And now is the time to celebrate apples, so this week I’m giving them the attention they deserve in a no-bake toffee apple pie (banoffee’s autumn cousin) and a soft, cinnamon-spiced crumb cake.