Karen

Posted by Rob Smyth (now) and Taha Hashim (later)

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/live/2025/jul/04/england-v-india-second-mens-cricket-test-day-three-live

• Updates from the third day at Edgbaston, 11am BST start

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“I feel like people who get very very very annoyed about ‘brainless’ shots have convinced themselves that having the right mentality, and getting the right shot selection, is the easy bit of being a cricketer – perhaps because it’s more or less the only bit of being a cricketer we can imagine ourselves being good at,” writes Mike Morris. “Since this England team is looking a bit like the Jimmy White of Test cricket, it reminds me of how people would sigh with exasperation at Jimmy’s careless shots that cost him titles, rather than acknowledge that snooker - like cricket - is a mentally exhausting sport and maintaining concentration all the time is hard.

“My feeling is that Stokes and McCullum have created a team with such incredible self-belief that it isn’t even troubled by the opposition being 430 for 3, and can repeatedly chase huge totals. Establishing that sort of mentality has a cost, and in England’s case the cost is some frustratingly hubristic dismissals. I think we should all accept that you can’t have one without the other, particularly when the cricket is so much fun.”

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/live/2025/jul/04/england-v-india-second-mens-cricket-test-day-three-live

Posted by Katy Murrells (now) and Niall McVeigh (later)

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/live/2025/jul/04/wimbledon-2025-raducanu-sabalenka-alcaraz-kartal-norrie-fritz-day-five-live

• Day five updates as the third round gets under way

• Email Katy | Draper knocked out by inspired Cilic

Centre Court (1.30pm UK time)
(5) Taylor Fritz (US) v (26) Alejandro Davidovich Fokina (Spa)
Jan-Lennard Struff (Ger) v (2) Carlos Alcaraz (Spa)
(1) Aryna Sabalenka (Blr) v Emma Raducanu (GB)

Court 1 (1pm)
Diane Parry (Fra) v Sonay Kartal (GB)
Mattia Bellucci (Ita) v Cameron Norrie (GB)
(24) Elise Mertens (Bel) v (14) Elina Svitolina (Ukr)

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/live/2025/jul/04/wimbledon-2025-raducanu-sabalenka-alcaraz-kartal-norrie-fritz-day-five-live

Posted by Amy Sedghi

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2025/jul/04/jeremy-corbyn-zarah-sultana-independent-alliance-labour-keir-starmer-rachel-reeves-uk-politics-latest-news

Sultana announced on Thursday she was quitting Labour to join Jeremy Corbyn’s Independent Alliance

My colleague Lauren Almeida, who is running the Guardian’s business live blog, has shared the following:

Rachel Reeves has not given herself enough fiscal headroom to manage public finances, Charlie Bean, the former deputy of the Bank of England has said, and has to “neurotically fine tune taxes”.

About £10bn – that’s a very small number in the context of overall public spending. Government spending is about one and a quarter trillion so £10bn is a small number … and it is a small number in the context of typical forecasting errors.

You can’t forecast the future perfectly both because you can’t forecast the economy and you can’t forecast all the elements of public finances …. The forecasts are imprecise and there is no way you can avoid that. That is a fact of life.

In light of reports of atrocities committed by the Israeli government in Gaza and reports of the UK’s collaboration with Israeli military operations, it is increasingly urgent to confirm whether the UK has contributed to any violations of international humanitarian law through economic or political cooperation with the Israeli government since October 2023, including the sale, supply or use of weapons, surveillance aircraft and Royal Air Force bases.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2025/jul/04/jeremy-corbyn-zarah-sultana-independent-alliance-labour-keir-starmer-rachel-reeves-uk-politics-latest-news

Posted by Andrew Clements

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jul/04/shostakovich-preludes-fugues-op-67-yulianna-avdeeva-album-review

Yulianna Avdeeva
(Pentatone)
It’s fascinating to compare this nuanced set with the performance by the Soviet pianist who inspired Shostakovich in 1950

Shostakovich composed his 24 Preludes and Fugues in 1950 and 1951, between his Ninth and Tenth Symphonies. As a judge in the first International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in Leipzig in 1950, he had been hugely impressed by the playing of the Soviet pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva in The Well-Tempered Clavier. On his return to Moscow he began composing a series of preludes and fugues for Nikolayeva, consciously modelling them on Bach, though ordering them according to the circle of fifths rather than chromatically as Bach does, and larding them with references not only to his model but to his own works. He completed the set in all the major and minor keys the following year and Nikolayeva gave the premiere in Leningrad in 1952. She went on to make no less than four recordings of it, including one for Hyperion in 1990 that has become the benchmark version.

Comparing Nikolayeva’s performances with those by Yulianna Avdeeva on her new set is fascinating. Avdeeva, who won the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 2010, takes a lighter approach, less forthright, and perhaps not digging as deeply into the barely disguised tragedy of the E minor Prelude as Nikolayeva does, but equally dazzling in the exuberant display of the A minor. She finds exactly the right mood of delicate insouciance for the F sharp minor prelude, too, and for the mysterious halting fugue that follows.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jul/04/shostakovich-preludes-fugues-op-67-yulianna-avdeeva-album-review

Posted by Eddy Frankel

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/jul/04/santiago-yahuarcani-peruvian-whitworth-manchester-hallucinogens

Whitworth, Manchester
The Peruvian artist paints hybrid creatures, rocks with eyes and fish brandishing spears in a shamanistic celebration of his home and his people – but also the terrifying colonial horrors inflicted upon them

Santiago Yahuarcani is the leader of the White Heron clan of the Uitoto Nation, an Indigenous population of the Amazon basin in Peru and Colombia. He uses his work to preserve the history of his people, confront the violence they have had to endure, and fight for a future that is relentlessly under threat. In his paintings, celestial beings dance in starlight. Hybrid creatures – part-human, part-dolphin – wade through rivers. Bodies meld with nature and jungle melds with body. These dizzyingly shamanistic paintings of mythological creatures and Indigenous spiritualism are a celebration of his home, his people and his past.

The show opens with three vast, chaotic paintings on traditional bark canvas, a rough, dense material that he painstakingly hammers flat with a machete. Each work is filled with a whorl of licking tongues, gawping mouths and endless hybrid creatures. A woman with webbed fingers and scales down her back gathers fish in her arms as a man inhales big clouds of smoke being puffed out by a grey figure with crab claws for hands. Rocks have eyes and teeth, birds become lizards, fish brandish spears. If it sounds like it’s fuelled by hallucinogens, that’s because it is: medicinal plants like ayahuasca, as well as coca and tobacco, are an integral part of Uitoto culture.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/jul/04/santiago-yahuarcani-peruvian-whitworth-manchester-hallucinogens

Posted by Lauren Almeida

https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2025/jul/04/trump-tax-bill-uk-electric-car-economy-ftse-business-live-news

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, as Trump celebrates the passage of his flagship tax and spending bill

The downturn in UK construction is starting to ease, according to new data released this morning.

The S&P Global UK Construction Purchasing Managers’ Index rose to 48.8 from 47.9 in May, reaching a six-month high. It is still below the 50 threshold which represents growth in the market.

Yes the overall contraction in industry workloads continues to ease, and housebuilders even saw output rise in June. That’s the good news.

But on the other side of the ledger, commercial sector workloads fell sharply, declining at their fastest level since May 2020 - a month when Britain was in the teeth of the Covid pandemic. Infrastructure and civil engineering work contracted even more rapidly.

We consider the inability to make modest cuts to welfare spending, which has ballooned in the UK since the 2020 pandemic, underscores the UK government’s very limited budgetary room for manoeuvre.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2025/jul/04/trump-tax-bill-uk-electric-car-economy-ftse-business-live-news

Posted by Emillia Hawkins

https://www.theguardian.com/football/live/2025/jul/04/womens-euro-2025-five-star-spain-lay-down-marker-before-germany-enter-fray-live

• Denmark face Sweden before Germany take on Poland

• Player guide | David Squires’ wallchart | Mail Emillia

Feel free to email me or matchday.live@theguardian.com with any thoughts or feelings today. Score predictions are welcome too. It would also be good to know who you think deserves to start for England when the Lionesses take on France tomorrow.

You can keep up to date with the race for the Euro 2025 Golden Boot here:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/live/2025/jul/04/womens-euro-2025-five-star-spain-lay-down-marker-before-germany-enter-fray-live

Posted by Lauren Almeida

https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2025/jul/04/trump-tax-bill-uk-electric-car-economy-ftse-business-live-news

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, as Trump celebrates the passage of his flagship tax and spending bill

The downturn in UK construction is starting to ease, according to new data released this morning.

The S&P Global UK Construction Purchasing Managers’ Index rose to 48.8 from 47.9 in May, reaching a six-month high. It is still below the 50 threshold which represents growth in the market.

Yes the overall contraction in industry workloads continues to ease, and housebuilders even saw output rise in June. That’s the good news.

But on the other side of the ledger, commercial sector workloads fell sharply, declining at their fastest level since May 2020 - a month when Britain was in the teeth of the Covid pandemic. Infrastructure and civil engineering work contracted even more rapidly.

We consider the inability to make modest cuts to welfare spending, which has ballooned in the UK since the 2020 pandemic, underscores the UK government’s very limited budgetary room for manoeuvre.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2025/jul/04/trump-tax-bill-uk-electric-car-economy-ftse-business-live-news