Midfielder says criticism of Clarke ‘unjustified’ before Greece’s visit in the Nations League playoff second leg

The scale of anger as Scotland were unceremoniously bundled out of Euro 2024 was such that there was cause to ponder whether Steve Clarke could or should survive as the manager. Clarke’s response has fully justified his remaining in post; Scotland take a narrow lead into the second leg of the Nations League playoff against Greece, with the retaining of status in the top tier within touching distance. From lying on the canvas, the Scots are unbeaten in four and have won three in a row. This feels like a team on an upward curve once more. Scott McTominay, the goalscorer in Greece, has made plain that questioning Clarke was folly.

“In the summer it was very fine margins,” McTominay said. “The media will always say it is doom and gloom, stuff like that. It was such slim margins where, if you don’t take your moments in both boxes against top teams, you are going to get punished.

• Lionesses in talks over payments for Euro 2025
• FA’s offer believed to be lower than other countries

England Women are facing another impasse with the Football Association over bonuses, with the squad yet to agree to the terms they have been offered for their European Championship defence this summer.

A dispute over bonuses interrupted the Lionesses’ preparations for the World Cup two years ago, with the FA initially refusing to offer performance-related payments after Fifa introduced individual player fees, leading to negotiations being paused on the eve of the tournament amid concerns they were proving a distraction.

International trade boomed with the city’s early adoption of technological and economic changes, but Black neighborhoods became ‘sacrifice zones’

Oakland, California, is often treated as a city on the margins, best known for its struggles with poverty and gun violence, as well as for its history of radical Black activism. But a new book, The Pacific Circuit, argues that Oakland should be viewed as one of the centers of global change in the past century, serving both as a key node in the new global economy built around trans-Pacific trade, and as one of the “sacrifice zones” this economy requires.

Far from being an outlier, US journalist Alexis Madrigal argues, Oakland is in fact an early adopter of the technological and economic changes now tearing through cities across the US, and around the world. Oakland has long been the canary in Silicon Valley’s coalmine of disruption, the book suggests. But its residents don’t suffer passively: they organize and learn how to fight back.

​Documentary-maker Sandhya Suri’s remarkable feature debut​ pitches a new female cop into a ​complex rural murder case

This is a phenomenal achievement: the feature film debut from British-Indian former documentary maker Sandhya Suri is a punchy, muscular Hindi-language police procedural set in rural north India. Elegantly scripted by Suri, Santosh combines gripping, gritty storytelling with a deft acknowledgment of some of the murkier aspects of modern India: the police corruption and brutality, the baked-in sexism, the caste prejudice and anti-Muslim sentiment. It strikes a tricky balance between perceptive, issue-led film-making and propulsive entertainment.

The movie was this year’s UK submission to the international Oscar category, but due to problems with the censors is yet to be released in India. It follows the journey of the eponymous central character. Recently widowed Santosh (a magnetic, watchful turn by Shahana Goswami) is, thanks to a government scheme, offered her late husband’s job as a police officer. It’s an opportunity that grants her independence from her hectoring, judgmental in-laws and a growing self-respect. Level-headed, serious and diligent, Santosh is instinctively suited to the job. When a scandal involving the murder of a Dalit (the lowest caste) girl threatens to ignite local unrest, Geeta (Sunita Rajwar, excellent), the veteran female cop brought in to quell the rising tension, immediately spots Santosh’s potential and brings her on to the case as her second-in-command.

In UK and Irish cinemas

The Palestinian writer and campaigner on Mahler, Gaza, Edinburgh – and the peace of his West Bank garden

Raja Shehadeh is a Palestinian author and lawyer, and co-founder of the human rights organisation Al-Haq. He won the Orwell prize in 2008 for his book Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape , and his new book, Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s Hidden Places and Lost Memorials , written with his wife, Penny Johnson, is out now.

In Britain, the Treasury is taking the idea of social happiness surprisingly seriously – and the chancellor needs to as well

Last week’s International Day of Happiness lives on. Not so much in the US, where the chaotic uncertainty engineered by Donald Trump and his Project 2025 supporters is creating misery, and not just for the public servants fired or suspended from their jobs.

It might also be difficult to see how the goal of happiness is rated in Whitehall when the UK sits only one place above the US in the United Nations’ annual world happiness index. The UK slipped from the 20th most happy country to 23rd in this year’s index , while the US dropped one position to 24th, both well behind the Nordic countries, which lead the world, and many ­others including Mexico, Australia and Belgium.

Imperial College project could lead to less invasive testing and combat increase in antibiotic resistance

Jodie is a canine with special ­powers, scientists have discovered. The golden labrador can smell and ­identify ­particular bacteria and could soon play a key role in helping researchers develop a programme in which dogs could sniff out individuals infected with dangerous microbes.

The project, recently launched by scientists at Imperial College London, could be vital in the battle against antibiotic resistance as well as the treatment of patients with lung ­disease and other conditions, they say.

Club co-owner’s request for hundreds of millions of pounds to help regenerate local area labelled ‘outrageous’ by critics

Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the co-owner of Manchester United, has been challenged over the proposed use of hundreds of millions of pounds of public funds to deliver his vision of building the “world’s greatest stadium”.

Ratcliffe, who has an estimated fortune of about £12bn, quit the UK for tax-free Monaco in 2020. He is now urging ministers to help support the club’s vision of the stadium with public funds to regenerate the surrounding area.

Aviva Studios, Manchester
The ever out-there British artist tours her latest album, Eusexua, with a show whose mix of club vibe, winged beast props and prime back catalogue delights and confounds

Somewhere between a gig, a cutting-edge dance piece and a high-concept club night, the tour for the British multidisciplinary artist FKA twigs ’s latest album, Eusexua , boldly defies convention. It’s exquisite and confounding. For one, it demands its audience be extremely tall to witness anything unless they are in the first dozen, tightly packed rows. The view is not great for the rest of the 4,800 people here – a shame, because there’s so much to take in.

Since her career began more than a decade ago, twigs’s work has been doggedly conceptual, with a keen eye for visuals – physically grounded in movement as well as musically abstract. Defying convention is baked into her offering. Now it feels as though Tahliah Debrett Barnett has the audience, and the big label budget, to really go nuts with set design.