When he starts at fly-half for England in the first Test against Argentina on Saturday, George Ford will become the seventh player to make 100 Test starts.
In the 2014 Six Nations, Ford, 32, made his England debut against Wales, and he was a key member of the team that reached the Rugby World Cup final in 2019.
In another game, Guy Pepper, an uncapped Bath back rower, and center Seb Atkinson and wing Will Muir both won their first England caps.
Sam Underhill’s return to the Tests after missing the Six Nations with an ankle injury is joined by Northampton’s Alex Coles in the second row and hooker Jamie George in Ford’s captaincy.
Steward, Roebuck, Coles, Coles, S. Atkinson, Muir, Ford, Spencer, Baxter, George, Heyes, Coles, Coles, B. Curry, Underhill, Willis, and Steward.
When he starts at fly-half for England in the first Test against Argentina on Saturday, George Ford will become the seventh player to make 100 Test starts.
In the 2014 Six Nations, Ford, 32, made his England debut against Wales, and he was a key member of the team that reached the Rugby World Cup final in 2019.
In another game, Guy Pepper, an uncapped Bath back rower, and center Seb Atkinson and wing Will Muir both won their first England caps.
Sam Underhill’s return to the Tests after missing the Six Nations with an ankle injury is joined by Northampton’s Alex Coles in the second row and hooker Jamie George in Ford’s captaincy.
Steward, Roebuck, Coles, Coles, S. Atkinson, Muir, Ford, Spencer, Baxter, George, Heyes, Coles, Coles, B. Curry, Underhill, Willis, and Steward.
This Morning host Dermot O’Leary was beaming with pride this week as he shared a snap of his wife, Dee Koppang O’Leary, on social media.
Dermot O’Leary, a familiar face on British television since his early days presenting T4 in the 2000s, has been a fixture on screens with gigs like The X Factor and stepping into Eamonn Holmes’ shoes for This Morning’s Friday slot in 2021.
But it’s not just Dermot making waves in the entertainment world; his wife Dee Koppang O’Leary is a celebrated TV and film director.
This week, Dermot took to Instagram to express his pride in Dee’s latest achievements, posting a photo of her online.
He wrote: “Proud as punch. 2 Broadcast awards! Congrats @deekoppangoleary @happyprincetv and #teamrivals”.
The post quickly garnered attention, with fans and celebrities alike chiming in with their congratulations. DJ Lauren Laverne exclaimed: “AMAAAAZIIINNNGGGG]sic]” while comedian Joel Dommett cheered: “Yessssss]sic]”.
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Followers joined in the praise, with comments like “Amazing Congratulations”. and “Brilliant.Well done Dee”.
Dee’s recent project, an adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s novel Rivals for Disney+, has received particular acclaim, reports Wales Online.
The series, set in the competitive world of 1980s television, showcases Dee’s talent behind the camera, adding to her impressive portfolio that includes hits like The Crown and Bridgerton.
A synopsis for the series reads: “It is 1986 and Britain is booming. ‘ Rivals ‘ dives headfirst into the cutthroat world of TV, where hair-dos are big and ambitions are even bigger. Deals are brokered in boardrooms, as well as bedrooms.
Dermot O’Leary and his wife Dee Koppang at a red carpet event(Image: GETTY)
” Nobody can be sure who will come out on top. With every man and woman out only for themselves, can true love really blossom in this highly anticipated adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s bestselling Rutshire Chronicles novel? “
Starring the likes of David Tennant, Danny Dyer and Emily Atack, the eight-part series was highly praised by viewers, who enjoyed watching the drama and scandals unfold.
Now, the show is well into filming season two as Rivals creator and executive producer Dame Jilly Cooper shared her enthusiasm.
Rivals was one of the biggest shows of 2024 (Image: Disney)
She commented:” I’m utterly sex-static filming for the second season is upon us.
“It was magical working with Happy Prince and Disney+ on the first season and seeing everyone fall head over heels for my beloved characters.
” I’m delighted to be able to work with them again and for everyone to see what further mischief they all get up to! “
“It’s not about where we come from, but where we’re going to”.
The sentence can be found at the entrance of the Gondomar SC academy followed by a picture of its illustrious son Diogo Jota wearing the colours of the club he played for between the ages of nine and 17.
Right next to it, there’s another one of him with the Portugal national team shirt too.
That’s how far Jota went.
Since 2022, it has been renamed as the Diogo Jota academy.
Those words, said by the forward himself after scoring twice in a 3-0 win against Sweden in the Nations League in 2020, illustrate exactly who he was.
The 28-year-old, who died along with his brother Andre Silva on Thursday following a car accident in Spain, spent almost all his formative years in his hometown with a third-tier team, paying around 20 euros each month to play for them while being overlooked by the big sides because of his size.
He kept believing and went from Gondomar to Pacos de Ferreira, then to Porto, Wolverhampton and finally Liverpool.
Jota became a symbol of hope and inspiration back home. He proved to an entire country that it’s possible to reach the top even if the path isn’t a straight line.
The talent had always been there.
So much so that in his early days, when he was starting to draw some attention with Pacos, one of his former coaches, Jorge Simao, made a big claim by saying Jota would be Cristiano Ronaldo’s successor.
The player was obviously surprised to hear that, but immediately thought to himself, ‘ If he believes in that, why can’t I do that? ‘
Jota was a rare case of an elite Portuguese footballer who never spent time at any of the big three academies – Benfica, Sporting and Porto.
“What set him apart from everyone else was really the mental aspect, the way he overcame any situation – and he realised that very quickly,” former Pacos’ youth football coordinator Gilberto Andrade told BBC Sport.
“I think there are moments when, whether you’re a coach, a coordinator, or a director, there are words, things said, that have a great impact on players. At the time, perhaps they don’t fully understand it, but later it reflects in their behaviour, in how they train, in how they live day to day.
” And Jota, I think, to some extent with us, understood what it meant to be a professional player, what it meant to be a good athlete, a good person. He was an example in that regard. An example, because often success leads many players to have a somewhat winding path due to the money they make.
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Jota took the long road, but always had it clear where he was going.
That became obvious to Andrade the day he came to him with an unusual request. “I want to learn a foreign language. Someday, I might play abroad and I’ve got to be ready”, said Jota.
The Gondomar boy was still young but had spent long enough outside the radar of the Portuguese powerhouses to realise his future could be far away from his home country.
“He knew very well where he was going”, recalled Andrade, who has also worked in Italy, Belgium and Saudi Arabia.
“Back then, I had those audio language courses, so I handed some of them to him. Soon, however, he realised they weren’t enough – he actually needed a teacher. For him, it was evident that he was going to need it later in his career. He was this different”.
For a brief moment, Jota feared his career would be at risk following a heart problem diagnosed during medical tests ahead of the 2014-15 season.
He was not allowed to train for almost a month.
“Do not put the cart before the horse”, he used to reply to anyone who came to him worried about the situation at the time.
That was how he lived his life – taking it day by day.
Jota quickly established himself as one of the rising talents of the Portuguese league after that, but didn’t change a bit.
The number of teams interested in his services kept rising and yet he chose to remain living in the club’s dormitory with other academy graduates and trialists that came and went until his very last day at Pacos. He was the only first-team player living there.
“He wouldn’t leave his room. He was solely focused on his work, there was no time for distractions when it came to him”, added Andrade.
Jota always knew where he was heading and, throughout his life, he proved time and again the journey mattered more than the starting point.
United States President Donald Trump has toured Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz immigration detention facility in the Everglades before it gets its first detainees.
“It’s known as Alligator Alcatraz, which is very appropriate because I looked outside and that’s not a place I want to go hiking,” Trump told the media during a livestreamed event on Tuesday. “But very soon, this facility will house some of the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet.”
Trump campaigned for the presidency on promises to tackle immigration but faces a shortage of detention beds. The One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump’s tax and spending plan, passed the Senate during his Florida stop and includes $150bn for his deportation agenda over four years.
State officials quickly built the expected 5,000-bed facility to detain immigrants on top of a decades-old landing strip. The Department of Homeland Security pegged the one-year cost of running the facility at $450m, which it plans to pay for with money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Shelter and Services Program.
Florida officials, including former Trump rival Governor Ron DeSantis, joined the president and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for the tour. DeSantis said Noem’s team told him the facility would be opened to receive detainees after Trump’s departure.
Trump talked for more than an hour as he deflected questions about who could lose Medicaid healthcare coverage under the tax and spending legislation, warmly responded to a suggestion to arrest former President Joe Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and repeated a frequent complaint about shower heads lacking sufficient water pressure. Noem, meanwhile, said US Immigration and Customs Enforcement had detained a “cannibal” who “started to eat himself” on an airplane.
Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s remarks:
Trump’s ‘illegal alien’ cost estimate comes from group that advocates for low immigration levels
While talking about the goal of cutting the federal budget, Trump said: “The average illegal alien costs American taxpayers an estimated $70,000.”
That is a lifetime estimate by an organisation that supports low levels of immigration. Critics have taken issue with it.
The White House quoted 2024 testimony to a committee in the House of Representatives by Steven A Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Camarota said in written testimony: “The lifetime fiscal drain (taxes paid minus costs) for each illegal immigrant is about $68,000.” He based his estimate on immigrants’ net fiscal impact by education level.
Camarota said the estimate came with caveats, including what percentage of immigrants in the US illegally were using welfare programmes and the amount of benefits they received and their use of public schools and emergency services.
Other analyses show positive economic effects from undocumented immigrants in the US.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a nonpartisan research arm of Congress, in a 2024 report found both costs and benefits from the Biden-era immigration increase. On net, CBO found, the impact was positive in several areas.
The CBO estimated an $8.9 trillion boost to the gross domestic product – a measurement of overall economic activity – over 10 years because of the immigration surge, which would improve wages, salaries and corporate profits. The CBO also estimated that federal deficits would decline by almost $1 trillion over 10 years because of increased tax revenues from immigrants, which the agency estimated would outweigh the costs they imposed in the form of additional federal outlays.
Separately, the libertarian Cato Institute in 2023 found “immigrants generate nearly $1 trillion (in 2024 dollars) in state, local and federal taxes, which is almost $300 billion more than they receive in government benefits, including cash assistance, entitlements, and public education.”
Michael A Clemens, a George Mason University economist, told PolitiFact that although the Center for Immigration Studies counted the use of public schools by immigrants in the US illegally as a cost, he and other economists see public school funding as having net positive benefits.
Trump repeats ‘autopen’ conspiracy theory about Biden
Trump said: “We have a lot of bad criminals that came into the country. … It was an unforced error. It was an incompetent president that allowed it to happen. It was an autopen, maybe, that allowed it to happen.”
He was referring to a conspiracy theory in pro-Trump circles that Biden was so out of the loop during his own presidency that aides were able to repeatedly forge his signature with a mechanical autopen to pursue their own policy goals.
No evidence has surfaced to indicate that a document Biden signed – whether by autopen or not – was done without his knowledge or consent. Anything Biden signed using an autopen would have been valid, legal experts say.
In March, we rated Trump’s claim that Biden’s pardons weren’t valid because they were signed with an autopen false. US presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, routinely have had subordinates sign pardons on their behalf.
Then-President Joe Biden signs a proclamation to establish two national monuments at the White House on January 14, 2025, in Washington, DC [Evan Vucci/AP]
Trump falsely says policy bill targets only Medicaid ‘waste, fraud and abuse’
During his visit, reporters asked Trump about the One Big Beautiful Bill – which the Senate approved mid-visit – and its effect on Medicaid. “Are you saying that the estimated 11.8 million people who could lose their health coverage, that is all waste, fraud and abuse?” a reporter asked.
Trump said: “No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying it’s going to be a very much smaller number than that, and that number will be waste, fraud and abuse.”
We rated a similar version of Trump’s statement false, finding that the Medicaid changes go beyond just waste, fraud and abuse.
The 11.8 million figure comes from a CBO analysis of the Senate-passed bill.
Although some provisions could improve the detection of beneficiaries who aren’t eligible for coverage, other provisions of the House and the Senate bills would change the healthcare programme for low-income Americans to align with Trump’s ideology and Republican priorities.
The bill incentivises states to stop using their own funds to cover people in the US illegally; it requires people to work or do another approved activity to secure benefits; and it bans Medicaid payments for gender-affirming care and to nonprofits such as Planned Parenthood that provide abortions among other services.
Other changes would impose copays and a shorter window for retroactive coverage. These would change the programme’s fiscal outlook but would not target waste, fraud or abuse.
Trump doubles estimate of immigrant arrivals under Biden
Trump said: “In the four years before I took office, Joe Biden allowed 21 million people, … illegal aliens, to invade our country.”
This campaign talking point remains false. During Biden’s tenure, immigration officials encountered immigrants illegally crossing the US border about 10 million times. When accounting for “got-aways” – people who evade border officials – the number rises to about 11.6 million.
Encounters aren’t the same as admissions. Encounters represent events, so one person who tries to cross the border twice counts as two encounters. Also, not everyone encountered is let into the country. The Homeland Security Department estimated about 4 million encounters under Biden led to expulsions or removals.
During Biden’s administration, about 3.8 million people were released into the US to await immigration court hearings, Department of Homeland Security data show.
As Noel and Liam Gallagher prepare to play their first reunion shows in Wales, one Oasis fan took to social media to vent their frustration over a lift issue at Cardiff Central.
Oasis are kicking off their tour this weekend(Image: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)
One Oasis fan has been left fuming after a broken lift situation in Cardiff has caused chaos for disabled travellers. The band are back together for the first time in years, as Noel and Liam Gallagher put aside their differences after a 16 year-long feud.
Fans are clamoring to get there early to get the best seats and enjoy the atmosphere as the band perform their first live show in years in Cardiff tomorrow evening.
However, some fans who use wheelchairs haven’t followed the right course of action. What do you think of the #liamgallagher and #NoelGallagher on social media as a result of @tfwrail having a lift out of order making wheelchair users unable to get off/on the train in the capital city of Wales – absolute shambles?
The passenger assistance representative at Cwmbran and Cardiff Central informed them that they had “spoke to the passenger assistance who stated that the lifts at both Cwmbran and Cardiff Central are out of order and that we couldn’t use an electric wheelchair as we couldn’t get to/off the platforms.”
Cardiff is gearing up for Oasis(Image: Rowan Griffiths / Daily Mirror)
The East End lift is “still accessible for passengers for platform 1 & 2, and” Transport for Wales then announced that Cardiff Platform 1 (to Cardiff) was accessible via a ramped path from Edlogan Way.”
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The fan then responded to explain that he was aware of the Cwmbran issues but that he had been informed that Cardiff’s lifts were unavailable by “passengers assistance.”
A number of road closures have resulted from Oasis’ Cardiff gigs, which have also caused chaos for wider transportation throughout the city. Significant road closures will be implemented throughout the city center of Cardiff as the city prepares for the arrival of music fans.
City center roads will be closed from noon until midnight for the Oasis concerts, and they are anticipated to reopen shortly thereafter. By using the park and ride at the Vindico Arena on International Drive in the Sports Village, the M4 motorway is anticipated to be very busy for these concerts, a Cardiff Council spokesperson said. “Please plan ahead.
Go to the Traffic Wales website or follow @TrafficWalesS on Facebook and Twitter for most up-to-date traffic information on the motorways and trunk roads. “Concertgoers are being asked to arrive in Cardiff early,” the statement read.
Due to preparations at gate five and to protect queuing fans, Scott Road and Park Street will be closed from 7am. Beginning at 12 noon and continuing until midnight, the city center roads will be completely closed on July 4 and 5.
Throughout the day, only event parking, limited commuter parking, loading, and access to private car parks are permitted entry to certain areas of the civic center.
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King Edward VII Avenue, Museum Avenue, City Hall Road, College Road, and Gorsedd Gardens Road are among the affected roads.
