Northern Ireland super-featherweight Anthony Cacace pulled off a huge shock in Saudi Arabia by stopping Joe Cordina in the eighth round to win the IBF world title.
“This could be the lowest scoring day in major-championship history,” opines Sky commentator Paul McGinley. No wind, soft greens, warm sunshine, all that. This being the case, you don’t want to be going backwards too much at any given point. So it’s a big putt for Bob MacIntyre on 3. Having dropped a shot at 2, he’s facing another bogey at 3. Unless he makes a 15-footer, he’ll effectively be making his fourth in his last five holes of play. But in it goes, and Scotland’s only representative here remains at -6.
Shane Lowry is this close to holding out from a greenside bunker at 6. That’s an end to his run of birdies, though. Tom Hoge drains a monster from downtown on 17, his fourth birdie of the day, and he’s -6. And there are opening birdies for Bryson DeChambeau and Austin Eckroat. A lot of players throwing darts, with the course there for the taking.
Benny Gantz’s threat to withdraw his opposition party from coalition calls into question future of government
The Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz has threatened to resign if Benjamin Netanyahu fails to adopt an agreed plan for Gaza, calling into question the future of the Israeli government.
During a press conference on Saturday, Gantz announced that if a plan for postwar governance of the territory is not consolidated and approved by 8 June, his opposition National Unity party will withdraw from the coalition government.
In latest Opinium poll, only 16% say accepting rightwing Tory MP’s defection was the right move – against 33% who see it as a mistake
More voters believe Keir Starmer was wrong to allow a rightwing Tory MP into Labour than think it was the right move, after anger from within the party’s ranks over the defection.
Natalie Elphicke, the Dover MP, said the Tories had become “a byword for incompetence and division” when she made her shock departure to Labour earlier in May. The party leadership regarded it as a major coup to win the support of the MP on the frontline of the Channel crossings issue that Rishi Sunak has attempted to prioritise. The move came despite concerns among MPs that her views conflict with Labour in a variety of areas.
No manager has combined heart and soul with details and hard maths like the German, no wonder he has run out of energy
“I am, how can I say it, running out of energy.” It is, in its own way, the saddest of managerial farewells. Not to mention the most decisive. This is Jürgen Klopp’s thing. He’s an energy source. He’s joules, watts, volts, catalytic reactions. His energy is his energy, both in the tactical pattern of his teams and as a sustained feat of personality.
Throughout the Klopp elegies of the past few weeks, the deep-dives and unpeelings, the endless daily Klopp-trap, it is striking how little that decision has been questioned. The idea of an energy-free-Klopp is just so final, like José Mourinho telling you he’s run out of toxic bile, or Pep Guardiola confessing that, actually, he’s starting to find detailed positional strategy a little samey and humdrum these days. Jürgen is tired. And when that happens, it really is time to go.
Exhausted Chelsea manager signs off with fifth successive title
‘I felt we deserved title,’ says Manchester City’s Gareth Taylor
Emma Hayes said she doesn’t “have another drop to give” after bowing out as Chelsea manager with a fifth Women’s Super League title in a row, while Manchester City’s Gareth Taylor felt his team would have deserved to be champions.
Hayes spoke passionately and emotionally after her side won the league on goal difference with a 6-0 win at Manchester United, her final game before she leaves to take over the US women’s national team in time for the Olympics. “I’d say it’s taken its toll, rather than changed me,” she said of her 12 years at the club. “I categorically cannot carry on. So, I am absolutely leaving at the right time. I don’t have another drop to give it.”
World champion equals Senna record of eight straight poles
Oscar Piastri demoted to fifth so Lando Norris second on grid
Max Verstappen had to pull off a comeback he believed was the best he had managed for more than five years to claim pole position for the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix, delivering a suitably superb lap under immense pressure that raised him to stand alongside Ayrton Senna with a record eighth consecutive pole.
In the year of the 30th anniversary of Senna’s death at Imola, Verstappen had to dig deep to deliver, after a torrid weekend during which he and Red Bull have struggled with the car’s grip and balance.
Pole is third woman to win in Madrid and Italy in same year
World No 1 Iga Swiatek brushed aside the No 2 Aryna Sabalenka to win the Italian Open in Rome.
The 22-year-old Pole needed just one hour and 29 minutes to ease to a 6-2, 6-3 victory over her Belarusian opponent on the clay to claim the crown for the third time in four years.
A thoroughly implausible yarn about a Mexican cartel leader who hires a lawyer to arrange his transition, but is carried along by its cheesy Broadway energy
Anglo-progressives and US liberals might worry about whether or not certain stories are “theirs to tell”. But that’s not a scruple that worries French auteur Jacques Audiard who, with amazing boldness and sweep, launches into this slightly bizarre yet watchable musical melodrama of crime and gender, set in Mexico. It plays like a thriller by Amat Escalante with music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, and a touch of Almodovar.
Argentinian trans actor Karla Sofia Gascon plays Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, a terrifyingly powerful and ruthless cartel leader in Mexico, married to Jessi (Selena Gomez), with two young children. Manitas is intrigued by a high-profile murder trial in which an obviously guilty defendant gets off due to his smart and industrious lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldana); she is nearing 40 and secretly wretched from devoting her life to protecting unrepentant slimeballs, who go on to get ever richer while she labours for pitiful fees. Manitas kidnaps Rita and makes her an offer she can’t refuse: a one-off job for an unimaginably vast amount of money on which she can retire.
Steven Moffat’s return to Doctor Who has alien planets, murderous AI – and Ncuti Gatwa trapped in an incredibly tense race against time
After two episodes, where Doctor Who seemed determined to greet any potential new Disney viewers with everything that could be fun, camp and ridiculous about the show, this was a darker turn from the pen of former showrunner Steven Moffat.
The conceit that the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) could not move for nearly the whole episode, and instead had to rely on Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) to get him out of a fix, dialled up the tension and gave both actors a chance to deepen their characterisations. Ruby is clearly prepared to take risks, and this Doctor is more vulnerable and emotional than some previous incarnations. You could imagine Peter Capaldi trying to sarcasm his way out of being stuck on a landmine, rather than being forced to sing a haunting soldier’s lament to calm the nerves.
Salome Zourabichvili says bill contradicts constitution but ruling party is expected to override her action in coming days
Georgia’s president has vetoed a “foreign agents” bill that has split the country and appealed to the government not to overrule her over a law she said was “Russian in sprit and essence”.
Salome Zourabichvil followed through on her stated intention to use her veto on Saturday although the governing Georgian Dream party has the votes to disregard her intervention.
Pro-Palestinian students were attempting to take over a university hall to protest school’s refusal to negotiate in ‘good faith’
More than a dozen pro-Palestinian activists, including six students at the University of Pennsylvania, were arrested after attempting to occupy a hall on the university campus late Friday.
The protesters were arrested around 9pm after trying to take over Fisher-Bennett Hall but had been met with a response from university and Philadelphia police, according to reports. The Daily Pennsylvanian reported that protesters caused the evacuation of an alumni event at the Penn Museum.
As the inquiry publishes it final report, the chancellor is under pressure to find £10bn to put right a longstanding injustice
The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, will come under pressure to stay true to his word and sign off on immediate compensation payments totalling up to £10bn to victims of the contaminated blood scandal when the long-awaited final report on the affair is published on Monday.
The scandal is described as the worst treatment disaster in NHS history, with more than 3,000 people having died as a result of receiving contaminated blood products in the 1970s and 1980s. It is estimated that, even today, a person infected during the scandal dies every four days.
Chelsea have identified Ipswich’s Kieran McKenna as one of the leading candidates to take over from Mauricio Pochettino, whose future is up in the air before his end-of-season review with the club’s hierarchy.
While some key figures at Stamford Bridge are in favour of Pochettino staying, the Todd Boehly-Clearlake Capital ownership is yet to reach a consensus on whether a change is required.
I have followed the life of this desperate child as her life has been ruined by a bankrupt system
You’re a teenage girl and you’ve been locked in a bare hospital room for more than 15 months. Your bed is a platform attached to the floor. There’s a plastic toilet and a sink moulded into the wall. Your only human contact is through a hatch in the door. Sometimes you get to hold your mum’s hand through it.
You’ve tried to kill yourself multiple times, including trying to throw yourself off a bridge over the M6. That was after escaping being driven to an unregulated children’s home miles away from your family. You can’t understand why your mum’s not able to look after you, as she does with your two siblings.
And so, the fabled Oxfordshire adage rings true again. Yes, revenge truly is a main course best dished up in the Wembley sunshine, in front of a 30,000-strong yellow wall, and with a Championship spot to contest.
Well, at least that could have been Des Buckingham’s message to Oxford’s players as they wandered out to face a team who had swatted them aside by five goals in mid-March. Because what followed cackled in the face of Bolton’s “clear favourites” tag. Josh Murphy sparkled, scoring twice in the first half, and Oxford were promoted.
Surfers and families vent their frustration with water companies after more news of poisoned drinking water and polluted lakes
“Cut the crap” and “Fishes not faeces” read some of the many colourful slogans at Gyllyngvase Beach in Falmouth where hundreds of protesters gathered on Saturday to demand action over the scourge of sewage pollution in British waterways.
Wearing fancy dress and waving inflated plastic poops, they paddled into the bay on surfboards, kayaks and standup paddle boards – as did protesters at more than 30 other events across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – with the Cornish charity Surfers Against Sewage leading the way.
Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, has issued an impassioned plea to the government and Keir Starmer’s Labour party to scrap the two-child limit on benefit payments to families, branding it as a cruel and immoral policy that plunges hundreds of thousands of children into poverty.
The intervention by the head of the Church of England will place particular pressure on Starmer to make a firm commitment to end the policy, which he has so far refused to do, as he tries to position Labour as being responsible with the public finances.
The cultural sector falls short on other measures of diversity too, with 9o% of workers white, says new report
Six in 10 of all arts and culture workers in the UK now come from middle-class backgrounds, compared with just over 42% of the wider workforce, according to new research.
And while 23% of the UK workforce is from a working-class background, working-class people are underrepresented in every area of arts and culture. They make up 8.4% of those working in film, TV, radio and photography, while in museums, archives and libraries, the proportion is only 5.2%.
A quarter of Britain’s children live below the poverty line. Near his Fife home, the former PM shows how charities help families and says this issue must be a priority for any government
Outside a warehouse squeezed between a waste recycling plant, an auto parts outlet and a scaffolding company in Lochgelly, Fife, a blur of figures in hi-vis jackets are busily packing boxes into headteacher Ailsa Swankie’s car. Not for the first time, she is taking delivery of household essentials, hygiene products and food from the area’s heaving “multibank” – an institution she describes as an “absolute lifeline”.
The specific items differ with each pick-up – sometimes toilet rolls, other times washing powder or hot water bottles, donated by local businesses or sourced cheaply. But the need for each trip is always the same: an increasing number of families at her school who have found themselves struggling to afford what should be basic products. “We do have a lot of working families who work very, very hard, but they’re still really struggling,” Swankie says. “If I took nappies back to school, they’d all be gone by 3pm.”
The US-based writer and translator on his new novel set in 1930s Vienna, his deep connection with the authors he has worked with and why he always returns to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History
Sam Taylor, 53, was living in rural France with four well-received novels to his name when he realised that he wasn’t going to be able to support his family through writing alone. After being turned down for bar work in nearby Lourdes, he decided to try literary translating, starting with Laurent Binet’s Goncourt-winning novel HHhH. So began an award-winning second career that has seen him work with high-profile authors including Leila Slimani and David Diop. Now based in Texas, he has returned to novel-writing with The Two Loves of Sophie Strom. Centring on a provocative idea, it opens in 1930s Vienna as antisemitic neighbours torch 13-year-old Max Spiegelman’s home. In a parallel universe, the fire leaves Max an orphan, and he’s adopted by an Aryan family who rename him Hans and encourage him to join the Hitler-Jugend. At night, Max and Hans, on opposing sides of history, dream of each other’s lives.
Where did the idea come from? Weirdly enough, the spark came from a line in my first novel [The Republic of Trees, 2005], about the night self and the day self, the waking self and the sleeping self. It’s sliding doors, except the twist is Max and Hans are dreaming about each other, so they’re aware of each other’s lives.
The Two Loves of Sophie Strom by Sam Taylor is published by Faber (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Almost one in three British children now live in relative poverty. Former prime minister Gordon Brown last week referred to this generation as “austerity’s children”: children who have known nothing but what it is to grow up in families where money concerns are a constant toxic stress, where a lack of a financial cushion means one adverse event can trigger a downward debt spiral, and where parents have to make tough choices about essentials such as food and heating. Rising rates of child poverty are a product of political choices; that we have a government that has enabled them is a stain on our national conscience.
The headline rate of child poverty is underpinned by other alarming trends. Two-thirds of children living in relative poverty, defined as 60% of median income, after housing costs, are in families where at least one adult works, a product of the number of low-paid jobs in the economy that do not allow parents to adequately provide for their children. Unsurprisingly, child poverty rates are higher in families where someone has a disability, and 58% of children from Pakistani and 67% of Bangladeshi backgrounds live in relative child poverty. Child homelessness is at record levels – more than 140,000 children in England are homeless, many living for years on end in temporary accommodation that does not meet the most basic of standards. One in six children live in families experiencing food insecurity, and one in 40 in a family that has had to access a food bank in the past 30 days.
Thousands of homes and farming land damaged in Ghor province, a week after over 300 people killed in flash floods
At least 60 people have been killed in a fresh bout of heavy rain and flooding in central Afghanistan, according to an official.
Dozens others remained missing, said Abdul Wahid Hamas, spokesperson for Ghor’s provincial governor, on Saturday. He said the province had suffered significant financial losses, with thousands of homes and properties damaged and hundreds of hectares of agricultural land destroyed in the floods on Friday, including in the province’s capital city, Feroz Koh.
Police were able to rescue child, who is in hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, before house caught fire with father still in it
A six-month-old baby is currently hospitalized after a man allegedly shot the infant several times during an armed home standoff in Surprise, Arizona, about 30 miles north-west of Phoenix.
At about 3am on Friday, the father of the child allegedly broke into the home where the child and mother lived, according to Surprise police. The child’s father did not live in the house, police said, adding that the man held the mother and child hostage for several hours before the mother managed to escape.
Republican Glenn Youngkin also vetoed bills related to maintaining access to contraception, saying they were ‘not ready’
Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin has vetoed two bills that would have stripped tax exemptions for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization that has opposed the removal of statues of southern state generals during the US civil war and other markers of the southern states’ attempt to secede from the Union in defense of slavery.
The Republican governor vetoed several measures, including those related to maintaining access to contraception, saying in a statement they were “not ready to become law”.
Thousands of people in Devon can now safely drink their tap water again without having to boil it first, the region’s water supplier has announced after a parasite outbreak.
South West Water said about 14,500 households in the Alston supply area could use their tap water safely, although about 2,500 properties in Hillhead, the upper parts of Brixham and Kingswear should continue to boil their supply before drinking it.
The screams of delight from the departing Emma Hayes in her technical area, the roar and chest-thumping of the injured Sam Kerr sat high above the dugout, and the chaotic flailing arms from the jubilant corner of fans in blue. Chelsea are Women’s Super League champions for a fifth time in a row having thrashed the FA Cup winners Manchester United 6-0 at Old Trafford.
Those scenes came within 10 minutes. That’s all it took. In the end it was all a little anticlimactic, Chelsea’s two goals inside those eight minutes enough to give them an almost insurmountable four-goal advantage on goal difference over Manchester City. By half-time, despite City leading 1-0 at Aston Villa, Chelsea had doubled their tally and extended their advantage, going in four up – Sjoeke Nüsken and the utterly unplayable Mayra Ramírez adding to the latter’s opener and Johanna Rytting Kaneryd’s goal. Melanie Leupolz added a fifth after the break as they ran up the numbers and there was an emotional sixth from the departing record goalscorer Fran Kirby, but it wasn’t needed, with City only limping to a 2-1 win.
Will Muir scores two of Bath’s six tries to seal second place
Bath could hardly have wished for a more encouraging May day beside the River Avon. A comfortable win over the Premiership leaders was almost the lesser bonus compared with the unexpected prize of a home semi-final. Sale have done them a mighty favour which may not be repaid when the Sharks head to Somerset in the last four a week on Saturday.
Admittedly this was largely a Northampton second string but Bath are precisely the kind of team who could finish the season at a proper gallop. Powerful up front and hard to contain behind, Johann van Graan’s side are now 80 minutes away from a first Premiership final for nine years and, historically, home semi-final advantage has proved a significant advantage.
The maverick director and his trusted cast on making Kinds of Kindness, the ‘bonkers’ film causing a stir on the Croisette
Joe Alwyn, the British star of one of the most disturbing films to compete at the Cannes festival this year, has given his verdict on making the “bonkers” Kinds of Kindness, which features scenes of group sex, cannibalism and violence and in which Alwyn has to perform a drug rape on the character played by Oscar-winner Emma Stone. “You have to try not to unpack it all too much, or you get it stuck in your head,” he said on Saturday.
The 33-year-old, until now best known as a former partner of Taylor Swift, has been thrust into the glaring lights of Cannes this weekend, but has also had to survive entering the odd imagination of Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos. Alwyn said the best way to prepare himself for Lanthimos’s unsettling and explicit screen world had been to “trust him, trust him, trust him”. “It is bizarre and strange and bonkers and special,” Alwyn added, “but one of the reasons I love his films is because you feel it first, before you try to understand it all.”
We and the EU must show the Russian leader we mean business and seize $300bn of his country’s central bank funds
Vladimir Putin is digging deep to win the war with Ukraine. And it could be only months before the tide turns in his favour. If he pummels Ukraine into submission, a military victory will quickly become a wider economic disaster, which is why we underestimate at our peril how much we need to focus on the war.
The Russian leader, who was inaugurated for a fifth term as president a fortnight ago, ditched his old friend and defence minister Sergei Shoigu on Monday in favour of an economist to make sure Moscow’s war machine runs more efficiently. That economist, Andrei Belousov, has been likened to Albert Speer, the architect who served as the minister of armaments and war production in Nazi Germany.
Ending this shortsighted and unfair policy would lift half a million children out of poverty immediately, says Martyn Snow
In Leicester, where I live and work as bishop, two in five children now live in poverty. That’s 12 pupils in every classroom struggling to focus. Some haven’t eaten breakfast. Others are no doubt worried about arguments they have overheard at home about money, and how to afford next year’s school uniform. When I visit our local schools, I hear of teachers bringing in food for pupils who would otherwise go hungry and schools covering the costs of trips to protect children from the shame of being left out. I’m hugely proud of all that our churches do to support those in need, whether it’s with holiday clubs or food hubs. But we cannot by ourselves reverse the trend of growing child poverty seen across the country. One policy change, however, could: ending the two-child benefit cap.
The limit restricts the child element of universal credit to two children per household, so that families lose about £3,200 a year for any third or subsequent child born after April 2017. This is a huge amount for any family trying to make ends meet: of the 1.5 million children affected in 2023, 1.1 million were living in poverty.
After being promoted by US bloggers and Instagram, cottage cheese sales are now up 40% in the UK. Its blandness is befitting of the times
While I didn’t see the cottage-cheese craze coming – who could ever have predicted this pineapple-chunk-inflected bout of collective madness? – now it’s here, I find myself strangely fascinated by it. In one sense, of course, its ascendancy is utterly banal: another creation of social media (its new popularity may be traced originally to TikTok), it can’t be long before the buffet moves on, maybe in the direction of luncheon meat or tinned mandarins. But on the other hand, it’s still deeply weird, especially to those of us who last ate cottage cheese three decades ago, and then only in extremis (as a student, I sometimes kept an emergency pot cooling on the window ledge of my college room for those piercing moments of youthful crisis when I had no time to eat properly).
Like a mushroom, this trend sprouted last year, seemingly overnight, in the US. “It’s time to stop pretending it’s not delicious,” said Emily Eggers, a New York chef and food blogger who was on a “mission” to make it the new burrata – a quote I thought so preposterous at the time, I quickly added it, last minute, to a book I was writing. But who’s laughing now? “In the 1970s, sales were focused on slimmers trying to lose weight before their holiday to Spain,” says Jimmy Dickinson, the owner of the brand we all remember, Longley Farm. “[But] now the interest is very much, ‘I’ve just swum 50 lengths, and I’ll eat cottage cheese as my protein fix at the end of it.’” According to Dickinson, demand in the UK has reportedly risen by as much as 40% in recent months, a growth that has been powered by the influencers of Instagram and their helpful recipes for dishes that try very hard indeed to make cottage cheese seem … oh dear. I had a look, and none of their ideas are even remotely alluring to my eyes. What, really, is the point of cottage-cheese cheesecake or cookie dough? Even if I was in search of a “protein hit” – at this point, I picture someone being beaten about the head with a leg of lamb – cottage-cheese lasagne is really not for me.
From price rises to a ridiculous mascot, the French have had it up to here with the event
We tend to view Paris as a fairytale princess, all romance and half-seen glitter. But for all its glamour, Paris has actually been depressed and irritable for a couple of hundred years now.
Far from being subdued by it, the citizens of Paris wear this perma-gloom like a disconsolate badge of honour. More tightly packed than in any housing estate high-rise, Parisians lead their stressed, underpaid lives defiantly. They mock and complain. They rail and grumble. Unlike anywhere I’ve ever known, in this city, if you say something nice about the place, the citizens disdainfully correct you. Paris doesn’t believe it is the best place. It just knows everywhere else is worse.
There’s been high drama in Ambridge and a great start for Today’s new presenter. Plus, a delightful Lee Krasner documentary and an amusing study of unfinished art
Pray for this week’s radio reviewer, allergic since time immemorial to the theme tune of The Archers, finding herself writing in the thick of a blockbuster storyline. But with a crack consultant to hand (my mother-in-law, who remembers listening to Grace Archer dying in a stable fire in 1955: thank you, Lill) I’m braving the challenge.
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