The US Supreme Court will conclude its current term in the coming days, with a series of pivotal decisions still pending, including three cases that scrutinise Donald Trump’s expansive of presidential authority.

The court, which holds a 6-3 conservative majority, has seven disputes yet to be resolved and has scheduled Monday as its next day for issuing rulings. Supreme Court terms typically commence in October and conclude around the end of June, occasionally extending into early July.

The cases involving Donald Trump centre on actions taken last year: his attempts to dismiss a member of the US Federal Reserve Board of Governors and a member of the Federal Trade Commission, alongside an executive order seeking to limit birthright citizenship. These actions collectively test the established boundaries of presidential powers.

Beyond these, the court is also set to rule on two significant election-related cases and one concerning state-level bans on transgender athletes.

The Republican president has recently seen favourable outcomes from the court, securing victories in two immigration-related cases on Thursday. Furthermore, since his return to office last year, the court has backed him in multiple emergency rulings, allowing policies previously blocked by lower courts to proceed while legal challenges continued. However, the court delivered a notable setback in February when it rejected his sweeping tariffs, which were issued under legislation intended for national emergencies.

FIRING FEDERAL OFFICIALS

The justices signaled skepticism during arguments in January toward Trump’s bid to fire the Fed’s Lisa Cook, a move ⁠that threatened the central bank’s independence.

No other president has tried to fire a Fed official since its founding in 1913. In creating the Fed, Congress passed ​a law that included ⁠provisions meant to insulate it from political interference, requiring governors to ‌be removed by a president only “for cause.” The statute does not define the term nor establish procedures for removal.

Trump cited unsubstantiated mortgage fraud allegations — denied by Cook — to justify the firing. Cook, who has remained in the post while the case plays out, called the allegations a pretext to oust her over monetary policy differences. The conservative justices during ‌arguments in December signaled they would uphold Trump’s firing of Democratic Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter ‌over policy differences. Lower courts ruled Trump exceeded his authority.

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, arguing for the administration, urged the justices to overturn a Supreme Court precedent in a 1935 case called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that has constrained presidential power by protecting the heads of certain independent agencies from removal. The court in recent decades has narrowed the precedent’s reach but stopped short of overturning it.

The conservative justices appeared sympathetic to the administration’s arguments ⁠that tenure protections given by Congress to the heads of independent agencies encroach on presidential powers under the U.S. Constitution. The court last year let Trump remove Slaughter while the case proceeded.

ELECTION-RELATED CASES

Two election-related decisions are due as the November midterm elections loom, with Republicans seeking to retain control of Congress. The conservative justices signaled skepticism during arguments in March toward a Mississippi law challenged by Republicans that permits a five-day grace period for mail-in ballots received after Election Day to be counted. That case could lead to stricter voting rules around the country.

The administration argued in favor of the challenge. Mississippi’s law permits mail-in ballots sent by eligible voters to be counted if they were postmarked on or before Election Day but received up to five business days after a federal election. A lower court ruled against the law. Trump, who has made false claims about widespread fraud ‌in U.S. elections, issued an executive order in March to restrict mail-in ballots nationwide, but a federal judge in Boston on Thursday blocked its implementation. The court ​heard arguments in December in a Republican-led bid to strike down federal limits on spending by political parties in coordination with candidates in a case ‌involving Vice President JD Vance. Some of the conservative justices appeared sympathetic toward the ⁠challenge. The court’s liberal members seemed inclined to preserve the restrictions.

The dispute centers on whether these limits violate the Constitution’s First Amendment protection against government abridgment ⁠of freedom of speech. A lower court upheld the restrictions.

TRANSGENDER ATHLETES

The court heard arguments in January over the legality of laws in Idaho and West Virginia banning transgender athletes from female sports teams at public schools including ‌universities. The conservative justices appeared ready to uphold the ​laws. The states said the measures preserve fair competition for women and girls. Critics see them ‌as part of wider efforts to restrict the rights of transgender Americans.

‘GEOFENCE’ ​WARRANTS

The court heard arguments in April in a case from Virginia involving whether law enforcement’s use of a “geofence” warrant to identify potential suspects based on data from cellphones near crime scenes violates the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment bar on unreasonable searches.

Marcus Rashford’s girlfriend, Lucia Loi, uploaded an emotional social media post at World Cup 2026

Marcus Rashford’s girlfriend, Lucia Loi, has shared details of her struggle with endometriosis in a heartfelt social media message. The 28-year-old was present as Rashford featured in England’s 2-0 World Cup 2026 victory against Panama.

The Three Lions have advanced to the knockout rounds in North America and Manchester United’s Rashford, who netted in the first group fixture against Croatia, shone on the left wing in the third match.

Supporting him from the stands in New Jersey was his childhood partner Loi, who began her relationship with Rashford when she was approximately 15 years old.

Earlier this week, Loi posted a photograph to Instagram showing herself in bed crying and in the accompanying text, she revealed her experiences with endometriosis while offering solidarity to others living with the condition.

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Loi wrote in her post: “This was me last night. I had my heels on, my makeup done, and I was ready to go and celebrate my friend’s birthday. Endometriosis had other ideas.

“I’ve been meaning to post about this for so long, but I never really found the courage. Last night, though, I felt so much anger at the fact that so many women go through this while there are so few effective treatment options and the condition remains so under-researched.

“Over time, I have found some things that have helped to an extent and intend to share more of that. I’m sending so much love to anyone living with a women’s health condition.”

The NHS describes endometriosis as a chronic condition where tissue resembling the womb lining develops outside of it, typically on organs within the pelvis. Throughout a menstrual cycle, this displaced tissue thickens, deteriorates, and bleeds in the same way as normal uterine lining.

Yet, because it remains trapped outside the womb with no means of leaving the body, it triggers serious internal inflammation, agonising pelvic pain, excruciating periods, the development of scar tissue and possible fertility complications. There is presently no definitive cure and it is thought to affect one in ten women across the UK.

Loi’s post received an outpouring of supportive comments, including from numerous fellow wives and girlfriends. Megan Pickford, partner of England goalkeeper Jordan, wrote: “Oh my darling, such an important message.” Jack Grealish’s partner, Sasha Attwood, commented: “Love you special girl.”

The 28-year-old met Rashford when they both attended Ashton-on-Mersey School in Greater Manchester and while she supported him throughout his United and England rise to prominence, they separated in 2021, maintaining a close friendship.

Their romance reignited in 2022 and Rashford subsequently proposed, but the wedding plans were abandoned and they parted ways again in 2023. Nevertheless, following Rashford’s loan transfer to Barcelona, the pair resumed their relationship once more and Loi is accompanying him in North America as the Three Lions strive to bring football home.

England’s 2026 World Cup kits

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Police were called to the scene at Cowbury Reservoir at around 6.30pm on Saturday, June 27, following reports of a teenager struggling in the water.

Emergency services including Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service (GMFRS) and North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) responded, and specialist teams later recovered a body from the water.

Chief Inspector Helen Baxter said:

“Yesterday’s events are nothing short of devastating and my thoughts are with the family and loved ones of the young boy who sadly lost his life in such awful circumstances.

“We are confident that there are no suspicious circumstances and that this is such a sad reminder of the dangers of entering open water.

“We remind the public to please avoid being tempted to cool off in reservoirs, rivers, canals or ponds.

“We all want to enjoy the warm weather; please make sure you do so in a safe way.”

Formal identification has taken place and the boy’s family have been informed.

Detectives from Tameside CID believe there are no suspicious circumstances surrounding the death.

Housed inside the town’s decommissioned Victorian railway station, it has become one of Europe’s largest second‑hand bookshops and a must‑stop for bookworms visiting the North East.

Opened in 1991 by Stuart and Mary Manley, Barter Books was founded on a simple swap system – customers could trade in their old books for credit and walk out with armfuls of new reads.

The couple transformed the disused Alnwick station, designed by Victorian architect William Bell in 1887, into a warm, labyrinthine space filled with shelves, armchairs and roaring fires.

But part of what makes Barter Books so beloved is the sense that it’s more than just a shop.

There are model trains rattling along tracks over the shelves, quotes from famous writers painted on the walls, and corners where you can tuck yourself away with a coffee and a book for an hour or an afternoon.

The shop attracts more than 350,000 visitors a year, with around 40 per cent of them travelling from outside the area.

One visitor on Tripadvisor described it as a “lovely old station building packed full with every book imaginable”, the sort of place you go in for a browse and inevitably come out with something.

Barter Books is also closely linked to one of Britain’s most recognisable slogans.

In the early 2000s, a forgotten wartime “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster was rediscovered in a box of books in the shop, helping to spark the design’s global revival and cementing Barter Books’ place in modern pop culture.

Today the shop is open every day from 9am to 7pm, including Sundays and most bank holidays, making it an easy detour for anyone heading to Alnwick Castle, the beach or the surrounding countryside.

Alongside the shelves there’s a buffet café and an ice‑cream parlour, making it one of those rare attractions that can keep book lovers, families and casual browsers equally happy under one ornate station roof.

The fleet includes an aircraft that is used by the Prime Minister and the royal family

Huge military aircraft will temporarily operate from an airport near Cambridgeshire during improvement work at RAF Brize Norton. The A330 Voyager fleet are normally located at the base in Oxfordshire but will be moved elsewhere for several months.

The fleet includes an aircraft that bears the Union Jack and is used by the Prime Minister and members of the royal family. The A330 Voyager fleet will operate from Prestwick, East Midlands, and Stansted airports between July and November.

Voyager is a military version of the Airbus A330 Airliner. The Ministry of Defence (MOD) say it is designed as a dual role air-to-air refuelling and air transport aircraft.

Voyager is being moved alongside the Atlas and Globemaster fleets while essential resurfacing and improvement works are done on the airfield operating surface at RAF Brize Norton. The RAF say it is a planned programme of modernisation work designed to ensure the base remains fully operational and fit for the decades to come.

The RAF say there is no cause for public concern and that the UK’s military air mobility capability is not diminished by the works. The Atlas and Globemaster fleets will operate primarily out of MoD Boscombe Down with occasional use of Bournemouth Airport.

All aircraft that are normally located at RAF Brize Norton will begin moving to their temporary alternative locations in July. Once the resurfacing work has been completed the aircraft are expected to return in late November.

Fifa has committed to reducing emissions by 50% by 2030 and to reaching net-zero by 2040.

For this year’s tournament, the world football governing body set out a number of environmental pledges, including:

However, even before the first ball was kicked on 11 June, there was scepticism from some climate scientists given the scale of the tournament.

A 2025 report from Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR) estimated the overall carbon footprint of this World Cup could reach nine million tonnes of CO2e.

It said this would equate to almost double the average for the past four World Cups, making this year’s tournament the most polluting ever.

In 2023, a Swiss regulator said Fifa had “made false statements” by claiming that Qatar 2022 would be the first carbon-neutral World Cup in history by using investments in low-carbon initiatives to offset emissions.

In response to the ruling, Fifa said it is “fully aware that climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our time and believes it requires each of us to take immediate and sustainable climate action”.

Infantino attended all 64 matches at the last World Cup in Qatar, where the eight stadiums used were separated by about an hour’s drive at most – but this year’s tournament spanning an entire continent presents a very different challenge.

Additional reporting by Mark Poynting.

Police said a scene is in place and there will be an increased police presence in the area today

A man has been hospitalised with serious injuries after a stabbing at a rave near Cambridge. Two men have been arrested after the incident in a field where hundreds were attending a music event.

Officers were initially called to the rave in the early hours of Sunday morning (June 28) in a field on Dry Drayton Hill, between Dry Drayton and Madingley. Police attended and found around 400 people at the rave.

Calls then came in that a man had been assaulted suffering injuries consistent with stab wounds. Paramedics attended and the man in his 20s was taken to hospital with serious but not life-threatening injuries.

Officers, including armed police, searched the area. Two men were arrested in connection with the attack. A scene is in place and will remain for most of the day, with an increased police presence in the area.

A spokesperson for Cambridgeshire Constabulary said: “Anyone with any information is urged to report this to police online quoting incident number 115 of today, or call 101 if you do not have internet access.”

He told Sky News’ Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips: “What Andy is saying is that this is one of the biggest economies on the planet, and yet we have some of the poorest regions in Europe in this country, and that is because of the grotesque regional economic inequality we have in this country.

The explosion was so powerful that it sent the huge disc-shaped lid of an oil storage tank flying high above the city on a cushion of black smoke and flame.

Ukrainian drones cut through the Russian air defences last week to strike an oil refinery in Moscow for the second time in three days, amid Kyiv’s largest ever attack on the capital.

The footage quickly travelled around the world as proof of Kyiv’s poise and ability to bring the war in Ukraine back to Vladimir Putin’s doorstep.

The Ukrainians have intensified strikes on refineries, depots and supply routes in recent months, having learned to overwhelm Russia’s defences with a growing arsenal of cutting-edge long-range drones.

Their successes have created debilitating shortages across Russia, from occupied Crimea to the eastern expanses of Siberia, giving Kyiv the upper hand as both sides weigh restarting peace talks.

The Independent looks at how Ukraine has mastered its long-range capabilites to devastating effect.

How has Ukraine’s drone campaign evolved?

Ukraine’s ministry of defence said in 2022 that it had the ability to hit targets some 630km away – about the distance between Kyiv and Tula. This year, it says its long-range weapons are destroying targets “at about a distance of 1,750km”.

That evolution has been years in the making. On the frontlines, Ukraine and Russia have been moving in step to adopt and develop drones capable of delivering payloads of explosives several kilometres away without risk to the operator.

Russia went into the war with a long-range advantage, hosting stockpiles of ballistic missiles and access to long-range Shahed drones as early as summer 2022. Those Iranian-made drones can travel up to 2,000km with a 50kg warhead.

That advantage gave Moscow the ability to thrash morale in Ukraine’s major cities, destroy warehouses full of munitions, and devastate energy infrastructure deep behind enemy lines.

But when its allies were hesitant to provide long-range weapons to hit back, Ukraine invested in its home-grown industry, learning from its experiences. That industry is maturing, and Ukraine is now advising in allies on how to fight a modern war.

Fire Point, maker of the FP-1 attack drone and the Flamingo cruise missile, is now planning to develop a European missile defence system. And the Pentagon is said to be considering buying Ukrainian drones and Electronic Warfare systems.

Read world affairs editor Sam Kiley’s dispatch from Ukraine on the start-up weapons industry – where homegrown missiles and drones are made from carbon printers and lawnmower engines – rising from the ashes.

According to the Baker Institute, a Texas-based think tank, Ukraine lacked the drone and missile capabilities for “sustained, long-range strikes” deep in Russia as late as 2025.

“Strikes on targets 1,000 or more kilometers into the territory of an adversary with capable air defense was considered, prior to Russia’s invasion, a domain in which perhaps only the US, Israel, China, and Russia possessed the requisite capabilities,” said Gabriel Collins, CES Lead, Energy and Geopolitics in Eurasia.

“The barriers to entry into long-range precision strike capabilities are considerably lower now. Ukraine’s national GDP before the war amounted to approximately one-fourth that of the Greater Houston area. Yet its combination of survival motivation, a talented and educated population, industrial base, and access to key imported components is culminating into a drone and missile complex — one that is highly capable and can credibly threaten key infrastructure assets up to 2,000 km from its borders.”

What has the impact been?

Kyiv says the strategy of targeting Russian energy facilities is aimed at sapping a key source of Russia’s war funds and showing Russians the four-year conflict started by Moscow is closer to home than ever. In these objectives, it has been effective.

Analysts estimate that more than a fifth of Russia’s total refining capacity may have been knocked offline already, and the International ‌Energy Agency (IEA) reported last week that Russian crude oil production dropped around 5 per cent year-on-year last month to 8.7m barrels per day due to the strikes.

“This level of disruption is unprecedented in the history of the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” the IEA said in its June report.

Grégoire Roos, director of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia programs at Chatham House, told CNBC that the drone attack on the Moscow refinery last week was “the most interesting development over the past year”.

Roos agreed it showed off Ukraine’s confidence and the wider strategy of hitting Russia “where it hurts the most” by wiping out energy revenues. Those revenues are worth around 23 per cent of the federal budget and about 20 per cent of GDP.

Slowly, those revenues are coming down, in part as Russia is forced to sell at lower prices due to sanctions, but also due to disruption from Ukrainian attacks.

An analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air found that Russia’s revenues from oil, gas, coal and refined product exports totalled 193 billion euros in the 12-month period to February 24, 2026, down by 27 per cent from the comparable period pre-invasion.

Indirectly, businesses in Russia also suffer under the weight of higher energy prices, with prices then passed on to consumers. Gasoline in Russia that cost around $0.65 per litre just before the invasion cost $0.95 in May of this year. Inflation is officially at 5.6 per cent.

In recent weeks, restrictions on buying gasoline have been imposed in the central region, blamed on ‘temporary logistical difficulties’. Similar issues are reported in southern and western Russia. Social media is flooded with videos of cars queuing for petrol in occupied Crimea.

In Omsk oblast – which only in January celebrated the lowest fuel prices in Siberia – residents were concerned about how shortages would affect their lives, some 2,400km from the frontline.

As a ban on filling containers came in late on Monday, one told local outlet NGS55: “I don’t have a car; I used to ask my neighbor to buy me [gasoline] in a canister. Now I’m supposed to cut firewood with a hacksaw? Mow the grass with a mower? We’ve come to this. Beyond words.”