It might be too early to push the panic button but Roberto De Zerbi faces a huge task if he is to turn Spurs around

Time for Tottenham to start panicking? This is, of course, a subtle trick question. Tottenham is one of those clubs that never actually stops panicking. They panic when they concede and they panic when they score. They panic when they have the ball and they panic when someone else does. They have a coach in Roberto De Zerbi whose face evokes a state of permanent alarm, the expression of a man perpetually having a toilet door opened on him. One year they even managed to panic their way to the Europa League. For the ever-rattled Spurs fan, this club is less a treasured devotion and more a lifelong haunting, broken up by occasional panic substitutions.

You could intuit that sense of encrusted resignation pretty much from the moment Anthony Elanga’s improvised shot kissed the post and trickled over the line to give Newcastle the lead. Since beating Aston Villa 4-1 in late 2024, Tottenham have gone behind 44 times in all competitions and come back to win precisely zero of them. There is something innate and endemic here, a chronic case of Long Tottenham for which – despite the new coach, the new leadership structure and more than a third of a billion pounds in transfer fees – there remains no proven cure. Yoane Wissa’s clincher was of zero surprise to anyone.

• Super League: Wigan Warriors 46-0 Hull KR

• Liam Marshall bags hat-trick of tries in rout

On the night when Wigan Warriors celebrated one of their greatest entertainers, perhaps it was fitting that Matt Peet’s class of 2026 produced a performance Sir Billy Boston would have been proud of on their charge, potentially, towards another Super League title.

There are some nights where the result is dwarfed by the occasion. Where sport, in truth, comes second. This was undoubtedly one of those, as what felt like the entirety of this town where rugby league is more akin to a religion than it is a pastime came together in grief to remember the life and career of their most cherished adopted son.

Kylian Mbappé scored a hat-trick as Real Madrid beat Real Sociedad 4-1 at the Bernabéu on Wednesday ⁠in their first home match since the return of José Mourinho as head coach.

Mbappé put Madrid ahead in the 40th minute before Luka Sucic levelled four minutes later, but the ⁠France forward restored the ⁠hosts’ lead on ​the hour. Vinícius Júnior added a third in the 68th minute before Mbappé completed his treble 10 minutes from time.

One more day of testimony expected as closing arguments set for Thursday and jury likely begins deliberations Friday

One more day of rebuttal testimony was expected this week in the trial against Lindsay Clancy, followed by closing statements likely on Thursday.

The jury, which will likely begin deliberations on Friday, will decide whether the Massachusetts mother was experiencing postpartum psychosis when she killed her three children in January 2023.

In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

Justices’ ruling comes after lower courts had blocked president’s election order ahead of November midterms

Donald Trump’s administration can proceed with a nationwide crackdown on mail-in voting, the US supreme court has ruled, approving its emergency appeal.

It remains unclear, however, how his administration can implement the decision in time for the midterm elections in November, and the ruling leaves room for legal challenges.

UK-born married couples under 35 with children would get priority under proposals to be outlined by Farage’s party

British citizens who were born abroad would be made to wait longer for social housing under proposals to be announced by Reform UK on Monday.

Nigel Farage’s party will announce the policy at a press conference in London. Under the policy, people born in the UK and young married couples with children would be given priority for social housing.

Kassebaum Baker became the first woman elected to the US Senate without following a spouse into office

Nancy Kassebaum Baker, a Kansas governor’s daughter who became the first woman elected to the US Senate without following a spouse into office, has died. She was 94.

Kassebaum Baker died on Friday of natural causes, according to her son, Bill Kassebaum.

• Super League: Wigan 26-12 Wakefield

• French leads the way as Warriors break club record

If you are a Wigan Warriors supporter and a keen believer in omens, it may be wise to cancel any plans you had for the first weekend of October.

The Warriors are back on top of Super League, albeit for potentially just 48 hours before Leeds Rhinos get the chance to return serve on Sunday in York. But this was a record-breaking night for one of rugby league’s great clubs, who have now set a club record for most consecutive league wins in the summer era after a 12th straight triumph, this time against Wakefield.

Exclusive: Rahil Prakash tells the Guardian: ‘I wanted to see if fake polls could penetrate the ecosystem that easily’

A 21-year-old recent college graduate was behind an anonymous website that put out widely shared fake election polling in Wisconsin, Nevada and California, the Guardian can reveal.

The website, Median Strategies, abruptly shut down and withdrew its polling earlier this week following questions from a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. In an unsigned statement, it described a “short-term social experiment” to examine how fake polling “could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification”.

It’s impossible not be be enraged by this story of Indigenous children who were taken from their families. This heartbreaking show has been a hit in Canada – and it would be a crime for the rest of the world to miss it

Few dramas will enrage you as much as Little Bird. Not because it’s in any way hokey or problematic. On the contrary. Based on the real story of the Sixties Scoop – a period in Canada from the mid-1950s to the 1980s, when an estimated 20,000 First Nations children were forcibly removed from their families and adopted by non-Indigenous families – this heartbreaking tale is restrained and carefully measured. Melodrama is swerved, letting the injustice at this story’s core slowly metastasise.

Spread across six episodes, the series juggles two timelines – 1968 in Saskatchewan; 1985 in Montreal – tracking one family’s rupture; and the decades-long reckoning that follows. We meet Esther Rosenblum (Darla Contois), a first-year law student, at her engagement party, where her fiance David (Rowen Kahn), a doctor, mingles with his wealthy Jewish family. When his mother describes her as “exotic”, the word lodges like shrapnel. She was transplanted when she was five from the (fictional) and raised in the Jewish faith by a Canadian family.

Little Bird aired on Sky Atlantic and is on Now

Today we begin our drive to get everyone in for Christmas. And it will be for local communities up and down the land to decide how best to do it

• Burnham launches ‘national drive’ to get rough sleepers off streets by Christmas

I’ve always thought you can tell something about a country by what it learns to walk past. And, somewhere along the way, we’ve got used to seeing people sleeping rough on our streets.

We see people bedded down in doorways and sat outside stations, carrying their lives in rucksacks and with sleeping bags on their backs. And I think most people have the same reaction: this isn’t right; it shouldn’t be happening here. But we’ve lived with it for so long that something that used to shock us now feels like part of the scenery.

Andy Burnham is prime minister of the United Kingdom

Amid heated race with Anthropic, firm says it’s overhauling research and training and will require greater safety parameters of AI after hack

OpenAI on ⁠Tuesday said it had slowed down the ⁠pace of ⁠its ​AI development while it overhauled its ⁠research and training systems.

The company’s researchers were ⁠caught unaware last month ​when an ‌AI agent ‌under testing hacked another AI ‌firm, Hugging Face.

After pubs and clubs get rates relief, authors back open letter calling for similar support for bookshops, described as the ‘beating hearts’ of high streets

Maggie O’Farrell, Philip Pullman, Katherine Rundell and Elif Shafak are among the authors supporting a campaign by independent booksellers who have urged Andy Burnham to extend business rates relief for pubs, clubs and live music venues to bookshops, warning that rising bills could put some shops at risk of closure.

A total of 234 independent booksellers have signed an open letter organised by the Booksellers Association, calling on the prime minister and the chancellor to give bookshops the same consideration as other businesses that play a significant, positive role in their communities.

Lawyers seek dismissal of state charges after Mangione pleaded guilty in federal case over Brian Thompson killing

A New York state ⁠judge on Monday ⁠effectively ​postponed Luigi Mangione’s trial on murder and weapons charges over ⁠the 2024 killing of a health insurance company CEO, after Mangione pleaded ⁠guilty last week to separate federal charges.

The ​trial had ‌previously been ‌scheduled to begin on September 8. Mangione ‌has pleaded not guilty to the state charges. Mangione’s lawyers on Friday asked New York state justice Gregory Carro, who is overseeing the state case, ‌to dismiss the charges.

Shasta county, hotbed of US election denialism movement, set to appoint ex-Colorado clerk who served prison term

A northern California county that has become a hotbed of activism for those who sow doubts about the reliability of voting machines plans to hire Tina Peters, the prominent Colorado election denier recently released from prison, to work on elections.

Clint Curtis, the top election official in Shasta county, told the Guardian he plans to hire Peters as a consultant to replace Brent Turner, his top deputy, who has been on medical leave. He said Peters would not have access to the county’s voting system. Plans to hire Peters were first reported by Action News Now.

Edinburgh film festival
Luis Gnecco brings warmth, wit and quiet melancholy to Jorge Luis Borges in this gently enchanting adaptation of Jay Parini’s semi-fictional memoir

There is great sweetness and high-minded, unworldly charm in this adaptation of American author Jay Parini’s embellished memoir, a romantic account of his road trip through the Scottish Highlands that, as a young doctoral student at St Andrews in 1971, he really did take with Jorge Luis Borges, the great writer whose blindness had become part of his mystique. Author of poetry, enigmatic short stories and metaphysical vignettes untranslatably known as the “ficciones”, Borges is described here as “the father of magical realism” – although he is surely more unique and interesting than that.

Parini drives Borges around, describes everything to the maestro (who is rapt and beaming), and shields him when he uninhibitedly urinates in public; all the while he is almost entirely unaware of Borges’ reputation and the enormous honour that this therefore was. Fionn Whitehead plays the callow young Parini, in specs and duffle coat resembling a young Tom Courtenay, wretched that he may have inadvertently persuaded his brother Billy back home to volunteer for military service in Vietnam. He is ungratefully grumpy that he has to spend time away from his PhD for this babysitting task, assigned to him by his supervisor, poet and Borges translator Alastair Reid, played by Alan Cumming.

Borges himself is entertainingly played by the Chilean actor Luis Gnecco; priestly, childlike, mischievous and sly, a performance executed with theatrical panache – I can imagine him doing it on stage – but without hammily overdoing the milky-eyed upward gaze. His Borges is a man who like all charming people has cultivated a dependency on others, and we can see how he has had a lifetime to deploy the combination of his huge reputation and the poignant helplessness of the blind. He has come to Scotland without a nurse or amanuensis and has to rely on the (cowed) kindness of strangers.

• Manager’s deal expires at end of the new season

• ‘They don’t have to worry … I want to be here’

Mikel Arteta has said he is relaxed about his Arsenal contract expiring at the end of the new season and believes his side will need to be better than last year to defend their title successfully.

The Premier League champions will face Enzo Maresca’s Manchester City in the Community Shield in Cardiff on Sunday and are heavy favourites to win back-to-back league titles for the first time since the 1930s. The departure of Pep Guardiola from their traditional rivals City means Arteta is now the Premier League’s longest-serving manager, with the Spaniard having joined in December 2019.

• Becomes first man to win three European 400m titles

• Hudson-Smith: ‘Nobody is going to beat me on this track’

Stand … and deliver. On a balmy night in Birmingham, Matt Hudson-Smith powered past the stand bearing his name at the Alexander Stadium and into history by becoming the first man to win three European Championship 400m titles.

And afterwards, as the adrenaline flooded his body and he posed wearing a crown in front of his own stand, the 31-year-old made it clear just how much it meant. “Nobody is going to beat me on this track,” he said. “This is my home. I have been here since I was nine. I know this track like the back of my hand.

Justice department is asked to weigh new charges against David Hearn after US attorney dropped vandalism charges

The White House has asked the Department of Justice to weigh new charges against a former Olympian accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, according to a person familiar with the matter, pushing to revive a case Donald Trump has fumed about ever since an ally dropped the case citing insufficient evidence.

Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for the District of Columbia, dropped the charges against the man, David Hearn, on 31 July, blaming a contractor for a flawed installation. In a 20-page filing dismissing the charges, Pirro’s office said it had received evidence that damage to the pool occurred before Hearn visited it, and that “it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism, let alone to establish that fact beyond a reasonable doubt.” Hearn has maintained that he reached in the water to touch a piece of already detached lining while he was on a bike ride in June.

Sara Sanchez, 27, and her daughter died after a speedboat capsized in the New York Harbor over the weekend

The driver of a speedboat that capsized in New York Harbor over the weekend, killing a 27-year-old woman and her infant daughter, was charged on Monday with causing their deaths through misconduct or neglect.

Manuel Hernandez, 46, wiped his eyes with his hand as he arrived for his initial appearance in Manhattan federal court. He was not required to enter a plea and was released on bail.