Journalists, fans of Combs, podcasters and others lined up to get into court, where Cassie testified about alleged rape

The high-profile federal trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs began this week in New York, where the 55-year-old music mogul faces charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy, and transportation to engage in prostitution.

Combs, who was arrested in September 2024, has pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

• Glanville was Sunday Times correspondent for 30 years
• Influential author of The Story of the World Cup

Brian Glanville, whose insightful football writing had a profound influence on generations of reporters and readers alike, has died aged 93.

A novelist and respected columnist, Glanville was a prolific commentator on his beloved game, a passionate chronicler of Italian football and author of some of football’s most influential books.

• Updates from day two of the latest round of matches
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A great journey down memory lane from Taha, and a thoughtful analysis on the disappearance of cricket from the national conversation.

In Division One, a feisty Jonny Bairstow frisked 89 at a honey-warm Oval, where the Guardian football writer Jonathan Wilson and his stag do were among the 6,000 spectators. There were three wickets apiece for Surrey ’s Jordan Clark and Tom Lawes and a gravity-defying catch by Ben Foakes, hanging in the air like an unvoiced memory. Adam Lyth added another fifty to his hefty season’s collection, but Yorkshire wilted after tea.

UN high commissioner for human rights Volker Türk says ‘we must stop the clock on this madness’

• Israel launches major offensive in Gaza

An Iraqi political official, speaking to the Associated Press (AP) on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to comment, said that Iran ’s al-Quds force commander Esmail Ghaani had paid a visit to Baghdad prior to the Arab League summit and “conveyed messages of support for the Iranian-American negotiations” for a nuclear deal and a demand for the lifting of crippling sanctions on Iran.

The Arab League is meeting in Baghdad on Saturday to discuss Gaza and other regional crises, but some leaders are expected to miss the talks that come straight after US president Donald Trump ’s Gulf tour.

Whatever the future for Italy’s secondary circuit, it will be remembered for some glorious moments, as well as some tragic ones

The Emilia Romagna Grand Prix is taking place against a backdrop of severe doubts over Imola’s Formula One future. The deaths of Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix remain etched on F1’s psyche but the demanding Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari has been the scene of some of the sport’s most-compelling races. Here are three of the best:

The actor on being a high-functioning introvert, her ‘wild man’ husband and why she loves Nick Cave

Born in Kent, Tamsin Greig, 58, studied drama at the University of Birmingham. Her television work includes Black Books, Green Wing , Episodes and Friday Night Dinner, and she won the 2007 Best Actress Olivier award for her role in Much Ado About Nothing. Until 21 June, she stars in The Deep Blue Sea at Theatre Royal Haymarket in London. She is married to actor Richard Leaf, has three children and lives in London.

Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Nick Cave for his determination to hold a space for public discourse on the deep and difficult and mysterious elements of life .

White House remakes foreign policy under pay-for-access code that critics say could violate US constitution

Former White House lawyers, diplomatic protocol officers and foreign affairs experts have told the Guardian that Donald Trump’ s receipt of overseas gifts and targeted investments are “unprecedented”, as the White House remakes US foreign policy under a pay-for-access code that eclipses past administrations with characteristic Trumpian excess.

The openness to foreign largesse was on full display this week as the US president was feted in the Gulf states during his first major diplomatic trip abroad this term, inking deals he claimed were worth trillions of dollars and pumping local leaders for investments as he says he remakes US foreign policy to prioritise “America first” – putting aside concerns of human rights or international law for the bottom line of American businesses and taxpayers.

As festivalgoers do whatever it takes to pay for the summer season, struggling organisers innovate to sell tickets

From Monday to Friday, Jessica Heath works as a civil servant in central London – but when the weekend comes, it’s not time to relax. For the past two years, the 28-year-old has also worked evening shifts most Saturdays and Sundays at a nearby wine bar, with one clear aim – to save up for her summers.

Heath has been a huge music festival fan since she first went to Leeds as a teenager and each year, including day events, she takes in at least seven, some as a volunteer. Without that and her second job, she’d never be able to afford it, she says.

As her memoir of losing her sons is published, the author talks about radical acceptance and how writing fiction helped her to prepare for tragedy

As the novelist Yiyun Li often observes, there is no good way to state the facts of her life and yet they are inescapable: she had two sons, and both died by suicide. After her elder son Vincent died in 2017, at the age of 16, Li wrote a novel for him. Where Reasons End is a conversation, sometimes an argument, between a mother and her dead son, and it is a work of fiction that doesn’t feel fictional at all, because it’s also an encounter between a writer in mourning and the son she can still conjure up on the page. “With Vincent’s book there was that joy of meeting him again in the book, hearing him, seeing him, it was like he was alive,” she says. The book had 16 chapters, one for each year of his life, and Li felt she could have spent the rest of her life writing it, and also that she could not linger.

When her younger son James died in 2024, aged 19, Li wanted to write a book for him, too. James was harder to write for. Her sons were best friends but “such different boys”, she says. She and James did not argue in the same way as she did with Vincent, and he would hate to be thrust into the spotlight, or for her to write a “sentimental” book. James had a mind so brilliant that his inner workings were often unreachable – by seven or eight he’d open meal-time conversations with “apparently the Higgs boson …” or “apparently the predatory tunicates …”. He did not speak often, but could converse in eight languages and his phone was set to Lithuanian, a ninth. He once described Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant as the only book that captured how he felt about the world. If Vincent lived “feelingly”, James lived “thinkingly”, Li says, and she wanted her book for him to be “as clear as James, as logical and rational”.