After his dubious intervention at the World Cup, the president is now an arbiter of high-level fairway disputes. There’s one word for that: SAD!

For so many of us around the world, the final scenes of the World Cup were a chance to switch off the TV with an eye-roll and observe mildly: “Well, I think that’s quite enough America for us all for a while now.” And yet: there can and must always be more. It is simply the way of things. If you thought the World Cup being carried on to the pitch ahead of Sunday’s final in some kind of Louis Vuitton sex trunk was the nadir of hysterical trashiness in sport, then simply recall the lesson of the past few years and expand your mind. It can always get trashier.

To the parched fairways of Royal Birkdale, then, the host of this year’s Open Championship, which – yesssssss! – was won by someone other than Bryson DeChambeau or Scottie Scheffler or any of the other radioactively ghastly US golfers you’d cheerfully head-flush in a Mar-a-Lago loo just as long as you could clear the classified documents out of it first. It has now been revealed that, during his heated row over a two-shot penalty he was handed for improving the area for his backswing, DeChambeau has been accused of threatening to call the US president unless it was all resolved in his favour. To repeat: threatening to call Donald Trump.

As Nick in the blockbuster TV comedy, the actor was adored by millions. So will his new comedy The Dink, which he jokes is a ‘sexier Challengers’, make him even more popular?

You might assume that Jake Johnson would know a little something about pickleball. The actor is starring in The Dink, a sort of spiritual heir to Dodgeball – it has a Ben Stiller cameo – and he plays Dusty Boyd, a former tennis pro turned plucky pickleball upstart. Presumably Johnson took the gig because he has a deep love of the sport, a fondness for its pockmarked balls and weirdly smooth paddles? “No experience of it whatsoever,” says the actor, cheerfully, on a video call from Los Angeles.

Yet this underdog of a racket sport, loved by retirees, found him anyway. At the climax of the movie, Dusty must play against an old foe, which meant Johnson had to undertake months of real-life training in pickleball and tennis, so it looked as if he could play. “It was like WWE. They call it fake wrestling. The outcome is there, but you still have to wrestle. That was probably the most stressful part of the film to me.”

Picture editor Jonny Weeks has created a rapid audio-visual review of the tournament featuring key moments, colourful fans ... and the precious trophy.

This video contains flashing images and an audio track.

• Top 30: from half a million World Cup photos, why I love these the most

Interviews with residents of Russian-held region point to frustration with Moscow as Ukrainian campaign to isolate it takes toll on daily life

First, the guests stopped coming. As Ukrainian drones and missiles pounded Crimea throughout the spring and into the summer, Russian tourists began cancelling their bookings at the small guesthouse Marina runs in Yevpatoria, a resort town on the peninsula’s Black Sea coast.

Then petrol became scarce, making it harder to stock the business with food and other essentials. Now, electricity and running water are cut off for much of the day, just as the summer heat sets in.

Surfboards, knee-length shorts, wetsuits, flip-flops: all have been seen on the catwalks this year. But what do actual surfers think of the trend? We went to Newquay to find out

Summer is here, and with it the annual scramble to decide what kind of season we’re supposed to be having. What will it be? On offer in 2026 are “freaky sandal summer”, which requires you to wear weird shoes, and “euromaxxing”, which is presumably about making the most of the easyJet sale without considering the environmental impact. Maybe “poet girl summer” is for you, whereby you listen to Gracie Abrams while wearing a silk camisole. Or simply “no mascara summer”, which I won’t spell out but sounds quite appealing.

The most plausible contender is “board short summer”, a phrase coined by Marie Claire, which broadly involves dressing like you surf even if you’ve never set foot on a board.

The company argues that it’s for individuals to ensure they don’t ‘actively exploit’ this technology. That won’t keep children safe

It took me a while to realise what the man sitting next to me on the train was doing. He was flicking through pictures of a little girl on his phone; zooming in on some, cropping the images. Hardly unusual, of course, except that on closer inspection the pictures were very clearly of the toddler sitting opposite us, playing with her parents. On a crowded train of people mostly staring obliviously at our own phones, a stranger had been covertly photographing that little girl over and over again. And if it hadn’t been for that very visible phone screen giving him away, he wouldn’t have been caught.

That encounter was a while ago but my memory was jogged last week listening to a clip of Meta’s VP of wearables, Alex Himel, talk fondly to the BBC about using his new smartglasses to film his daughter singing in a talent contest. They let him capture the memory without having to watch her through a screen, he said, freeing him to be “kind of living in the moment, head up and hands free”. So far, so sweet. But what about the risk of creeps potentially using them to film other people’s daughters covertly, heads up and hands free? Meta’s smartglasses have a tiny flashing warning light on the frame to indicate when the wearer is recording, but the technology is still new enough that many people don’t think to look for it. And in the age of AI, stolen images of children matter. Taken in real life or scraped from the internet, they’re the raw material for generating realistic-looking child abuse material of the most extreme and disturbing kind. (If that sounds like a grim but ultimately fairly victimless crime, the Internet Watch Foundation warned in a recent report that AI-generated material risks fuelling sexual interest in children, normalising violence and increasing the risk of real-life offending.)

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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The new prime minister said he wants his government to look at ‘all possible ways’ to help families with high costs

• Burnham to cut VAT on electricity bills in first cost-of-living move

António Costa, the president of the European council, said in a post on X that he held a “good” phone call with Andy Burnham last night, in which he said they agreed to “further strengthen” EU-UK relations and continue to cooperate to support Ukraine.

He said there was also discussion about “common geopolitical challenges facing Europe”, which could be a reference to many things, including energy prices soaring due to the US-Israel war on Iran, Europe’s trading and security relationship with Washington, the future of Nato, the continent facing a wave of hybrid warfare, driven by Russia, or the surge of national populism and backlash against immigration.

New prime minister urged to introduce 2% minimum charge on households with more than £100m in wealth

A wealth tax on the UK’s super-rich households could raise £10bn a year, according to academics who urged Andy Burnham to include the measure in his plans to “make tax fairer” and pay for better public services.

The sum could be raised through a 2% minimum charge on households with more than £100m in wealth and would affect fewer than 1,000 of the richest UK households, according to the study by Gabriel Zucman, a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics, and Ben Tippet, a lecturer in economics and wealth inequality at King’s College London.

Tories, Reform, fossil fuel industry and some in his party lined up against decarbonisation target as energy secretary

“Whenever the Labour party feels a bit sad,” according to one close observer of the current government, speaking some months ago, “they wheel out Ed Miliband to talk about rooftop solar.”

It might not have been literally true, but it often felt during Keir Starmer’s premiership as if energy secretary Miliband brought the sun. Unfailingly upbeat, with a simple message that was understandable to voters, he had a clear mission – to decarbonise the UK’s power sector by 2030 – that was seen to be progressing fast.

Revolutionary Guard claims attack on oil tanker and two other ships as US carries out tenth consecutive night of strikes

• Full report: Almost 100 troops injured in recent weeks, Pentagon admits, as Iran launches reprisals on US allies

Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun, is due to meet Donald Trump for the first time today as he wraps up a four-day visit to Washington.

The meeting coincides with ongoing US-mediated talks between Lebanon and Israel. The two sides announced a “framework agreement” on 26 June which stipulates the withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon as well as the disarmament of Hezbollah.