Liverpool have confirmed 12 player exits this summer including Mohamed Salah and Ibrahima Konate

Liverpool will see 12 players leave Anfield this summer, with two more potentially joining the likes of Mohamed Salah and Ibrahima Konate in departing. The Reds have already said goodbye to club legend Andy Robertson, who joined Tottenham on a free transfer before making his World Cup debut with Scotland.

Salah revealed his Anfield exit earlier this year, confirming he would end his contract a year early for a fresh challenge. Meanwhile, Konate has been strongly linked with a free move to Real Madrid after being unable to reach an agreement on fresh terms with the Reds.

Other confirmed departures include academy talents such as Kareem Ahmed, Emmanuel Airoboma, James Balagizi, DJ Bernard, Oakley Cannonier, Josh Davidson, Terence Miles and Jacob Poytress. In their official announcement regarding club exits, Liverpool expressed gratitude to every player for their contribution and “wish each of them the best for the future.”

The above list may not be the only ones departing Anfield this summer. Andoni Iraola has taken charge of Liverpool following Arne Slot’s dismissal, and he could offload two more players as he seeks to impose his vision on the team.

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OPINION

Curtis Jones is one player rumoured to be considering a departure from his boyhood club. Liverpool have already received an approach from Inter Milan for the midfielder, according to Gazzetta dello Sport, but the proposal fell short of the valuation.

Reports suggest that the Serie A outfit are extremely interested in Jones and intend to offload Davide Frattesi to Nottingham Forest in order to finance their move for the 25-year-old. It is believed that Liverpool value Jones at approximately £35m but would consider £25m for his services.

Federico Chiesa is the other Liverpool player who could be departing. The Italy international has already insisted he will leave the Reds if new manager Iraola does not guarantee regular first-team football.

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Speaking to Gazzetta dello Sport, Chiesa said: “I repeat: I want to play. If I don’t find consistency in the Premier League, I’ll have to look elsewhere. I barely played in my first year at Liverpool, and in the last one, very little. I’ll go on a training camp in the US, then I’ll talk to the club and the new manager, Iraola, and we’ll see.

“I’m open to anything; the important thing is to play. I’m not so presumptuous as to say: I have to be a starter. I’m ready to fight for a place, anywhere.”

There is certainly interest from the winger in staying at Anfield, but speculation regarding a return to his home country persists. Reports in January indicated that Juve had approached the Reds to bring Chiesa back, but these never materialised.

Weighing up a potential return to Serie A, the 28-year-old recently admitted: “I’d love to return to Juventus. It’s also been said that I demanded a lot of money, but the truth is different: I was never offered a renewal. We never even discussed it. [Cristiano] Giuntoli and Thiago Motta told me, ‘Fede, we don’t need you: find a team.’

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“I was lucky; I started again with one of the top five in the world, Liverpool. But Juventus is always in my heart and I’d like to return. I’ve never discussed money with Juve and I never will.”

Chiesa also touched on the prospect of Jones following him to Italy, revealing that the 25-year-old had quizzed him about life in Serie A. He added: “Jones just asked me what life is like in Italy.

“I told him it’s great and the weather is better than Liverpool, which aside from that is a special place. Jones is really strong technically, Inter are right to think about him.”

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Santander’s quarterly “scamtracker”, which charts volumes, values and trends in authorised push payment (APP) scams where people are tricked into sending money to criminals, found that men handed over the equivalent of £100,000 to scammers every day during the first six months of the year, with the biggest hitters by value being investment and purchase scams.

Two customers pulled Douglas MacRae off a member of the security staff in B&M in Foss Islands Road, York, said Kathryn Walters, prosecuting.

While on bail pending trial for that offence, he carried out a series of raids on Waitrose, also on Foss Islands Road, and other shops and when staff tried to stop him assaulted them.

“He accepts he is going to jail today,” said his solicitor Craig Robertson.

York magistrates passed their maximum prison sentence but added that a law passed earlier this year meant they had to suspend the sentence because there were no “exceptional circumstances”.

They gave MacRae a 52-week prison sentence suspended for two years without requirements and warned him that if he commits another offence during the suspension period, he will have to serve a year in jail.

They did not order him to do any work with probation or unpaid work as a requirement of the suspension after hearing he was unable to work with probation officers and did not order him to pay compensation to the shop staff or the shops after hearing he already owes the court more than £5,000 as a result of other cases. 

They did order him to pay £125 prosecution costs and a £187 statutory surcharge.

MacRae, who had been sent to the court in custody following his arrest by police, walked free.

The 42-year-old of Bull Lane, off Hull Road, York, pleaded guilty to 10 offences of shop theft and five of assaulting staff. 

Apart from the assault at B&M on February 16, which he had initially denied, all the offences were committed between May 7 and June 10. He has a long criminal history.

Ms Walters said he had stolen items worth £490.25 in five raids on Waitrose on Foss Islands Road, £300 from Sainsbury’s, £259.79 from B&M in three raids, £35.20 from a Co-op shop on Hull Road, and £50 from The Range.

York magistrates heard he had assaulted two staff at Waitrose on separate days, one at The Range and two including the security staff attacked on February 16 at B&M.

Mr Robertson said of the assaults: “They are all the same thing – staff say stop; he doesn’t, runs and pushes them out of the way.”

Ms Walters said the security staff member spotted MacRae stealing in B&M on February 16 and told him to stop.

MacRae claimed he had done nothing wrong, grabbed hold of him in an aggressive way and the two scuffled through the store until they reached the till area where the security man managed to get MacRae on the floor.

The struggle continued until the two customers intervened and MacRae made good his escape. The security staff member was scratched.

Mr Robertson said none of the other shop staff assaulted by MacRae were injured.

ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia’s Republican legislative leaders on Wednesday rejected Gov. Brian Kemp’s call to redraw congressional and legislative districts during a special session, citing concerns about moving too quickly after a U.S. Supreme Court decision weakened federal Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters.

The aborted effort to reduce nonwhite voters’ representation contrasts with other Southern states where Republican majorities moved quickly to redraw congressional boundaries ahead of the November midterms, partly in response to President Donald Trump’s pleas to shore up the GOP’s fragile House majority.

Civil rights activists and Democrats, especially Black and other nonwhite lawmakers, celebrated the development and claimed victory after exerting weeks of pressure and gathering hundreds of citizens at the Georgia Capitol on Wednesday ahead of the session.

“Today showed that ordinary people don’t need to wait until November to make their voices heard and protect our democracy,” said U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, the state’s first Black senator who returned to Atlanta from Washington to be at the Capitol. “We can stand up and speak right now.”

Kemp had not asked his fellow Republicans to reopen Georgia districts ahead of November. Instead, he wanted them to redraw congressional boundaries for the 2028 election. But the governor, in the final months of his second term, also called on lawmakers to redraw their own districts — a move that would have made Georgia the first state to apply the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision to its legislature.

State House Speaker Jon Burns sent Kemp a letter hours before Wednesday’s special session was set to begin, informing him that legislators would not consider redistricting at all during the session. He announced the decision publicly shortly after, as demonstrators filled the Capitol with chants of “Black voters matter!”

Kemp said he believes Georgia’s current districts are unconstitutional, and he sees no reason to delay redistricting.

“Legislative districting, however, is the responsibility of the General Assembly, and it is within their discretion to defer the issue until a later date,” Kemp said in a statement.

Burns said lawmakers want to take their time after the Callais decision, which struck down Louisiana’s congressional map as an illegal racial gerrymander and laid the groundwork for legislatures to reduce the number of districts where Black and other nonwhite voters hold most sway.

The speaker said it was more important for lawmakers to focus on economic matters rather than “partisan games.” He also cited pending litigation over existing Georgia districts and the need to understand the full ramifications for how race can or cannot be used in redistricting.

Privately, Republicans had expressed concerns that a rushed process that diminished Black and other minority voters’ political power could cause a backlash. And they worried that redrawn districts could unintentionally create more competitive jurisdictions that Democrats could win, especially around Atlanta.

Still, Georgia Republicans did not rule out revisiting redistricting later this year.

Conservative justices gave the green light

Before Callais, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was understood to require maps — for Congress, state legislatures and local legislative bodies — that gave historically marginalized minorities a reasonable chance to select candidates of their choice. Nationally, those so-called “opportunity districts” have disproportionately elected Black and other nonwhite representatives.

About one-third of Georgia’s 180 state representatives are Black. Latino, Asian and other minorities bring the total nonwhite share to about 40% — roughly reflecting the state’s overall population. Georgia’s U.S. House delegation has five districts out of 14 total where the electorate is majority or plurality nonwhite. All elected Black Democrats in 2024.

With the Callais ruling, a conservative majority of justices concluded that jurisdictions drawn with racial makeup in mind violate the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion declared that apportionment should be “race neutral.”

Alito’s stated reasoning did not hinge on party interests, and federal courts have said partisan gerrymandering is constitutionally permissible. But in Southern states, party loyalty dovetails considerably with race and ethnicity. So the decision has allowed Republicans to redraw maps to boost GOP districts by redistributing nonwhite voters who tend to support Democrats.

Many civil rights activists argue that makes it impossible for Southern legislatures to be genuinely “race neutral” when drawing boundaries.

Democrats and activists opposed the special session

Minority voting rights are especially salient in Georgia, where the Capitol complex includes a statue of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and sits blocks from where the assassinated civil rights icon lived, preached and led the movement that yielded the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Warnock, who is also minister at the Atlanta church where King once preached, invoked the civil rights icon as he led demonstrators who criticized the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Callais that it was discriminatory to draw districts to allow minority voters a chance to elect their preferred representatives.

The senator compared the possibility of scaling back nonwhite representation to the long Jim Crow history of poll taxes and literacy tests. White conservatives in the South once called those policies “race neutral,” too, Warnock noted.

Speaking before Burns’ announcement, Warnock lamented that some white Republicans who might consider redrawing district lines — or already have in other states — also praise King on his federal holiday each year.

“If you want to redraw maps and you have the power to do it, I guess you can do it,” he said. “But keep Dr. King’s name out of your mouth.”

Trump started the fight before the Supreme Court decision

Nationally, a partisan redistricting battle started last year when Trump urged Republican-controlled states to gerrymander their congressional maps. Texas answered the call first.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats in Sacramento answered with their own gerrymander that voters later approved. A succession of states followed. The outcome would have been close to even had the Virginia Supreme Court, controlled by conservatives, not struck down new Democratic-drawn maps approved voters. All told, Republicans think they could notch a net gain of 10 seats across the multiple states.

That still may not be enough for the GOP to hold a congressional majority, given Trump’s lagging approval ratings. But it could mitigate Democratic gains and set Republicans up well for 2028 and beyond.

Special Ops: Lioness is a pulse-racing CIA thriller starring Zoe Saldaña and with season three on the way to Paramount Plus, now is the perfect time to watch

Paramount Plus recently dropped the trailer for the third season of a show that is one of the best things I’ve ever seen. The forthcoming series is set to launch on August 2, while the debut season is currently streaming on Netflix.

The adrenaline-fuelled show Special Ops: Lioness secured a coveted place in Netflix’s top 10 back in October. With a cast boasting Hollywood titans such as Morgan Freeman, Nicole Kidman and Zoe Saldaña, it quickly became apparent why.

For those seeking something fast-paced, accessible and engrossing, without demanding too much intellectual heavy-lifting, this gripping series could be precisely what you need. It came to my attention via a recommendation from my parents.

When they mentioned they were watching something called ‘Lioness’, my initial assumption was that it revolved around the England women’s football team. Thrilling as back-to-back Euros victories were, however, Lioness is an altogether different kind of thriller.

It follows CIA operatives as they “embark on a dangerous undercover mission to stop the next 9/11”.

Avatar star Zoe Saldaña takes the lead role, while also serving as executive producer, with the series focusing on an operative “juggling motherhood with her job leading an undercover unit on high-risk missions as she sends her new marine recruit out onto the field”.

The first season debuted in 2023, created by Taylor Sheridan, the mastermind behind Yellowstone.

Like its predecessor, Lioness skilfully explores intricate family dynamics and relationships, while simultaneously delivering considerably more explosive action sequences, especially throughout its adrenaline-fuelled military operations.

While fictional, Lioness takes its premise from an authentic CIA initiative that deployed female military personnel on operations in war zones including Iraq and Afghanistan.

Within the series, Zoe Saldaña’s character Joe manages Lionesses who penetrate terrorist organisations by establishing connections with the relatives or daughters of priority targets.

Multiple sequences are brilliantly tense, and this critic found it equally gripping – perhaps even more so – than Prime Video’s Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan featuring John Krasinski.

While it may not secure its position amongst television’s all-time greats such as The Sopranos or The Wire, Lioness delivered thoroughly compelling viewing and ranked amongst the best programmes I watched last year.

Other exceptional series from 2025, the year I viewed Lioness, include Adolescence and Say Nothing, both arguably more profound, emotionally resonant and nuanced than Taylor’s programme. However, as a parent with two children aged three and under, the infrequent moments I can sit down in front of the television at night require something readily bingeable that doesn’t necessitate excessive mental energy.

That’s exactly why Special Ops: Lioness proved ideal – it demanded minimal concentration following an exhausting day, while remaining sufficiently fast-paced and engaging to sustain my interest throughout all eight action-filled episodes.

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Without divulging any spoilers, one of the series’ most intriguing elements was its avoidance of the straightforward formula where villainy is vanquished and virtue prevails.

The ending was far more sophisticated, allowing viewers to decide for themselves whether the resolution was ultimately positive or not.

The groundbreaking programme, which convinced me to join Paramount+ for its second season (equally impressive), provided a gratifying conclusion, with the closing scenes feeling genuine rather than manufactured purely for dramatic effect.

The season three trailer has garnered 4.4million views, suggesting I’m far from alone in eagerly anticipating its return.

Speaking on Kane’s performance at full-time, Tuchel said: “To see the commitment of our captain, of our No9 in the extra time, to block a crucial shot with all his body. His commitment to buy into a defensive action like this, then you know everything about his performance today.

Nidhi Nathan is said to have been driving her Audi A3 dangerously on July 28, 2024, when she caused the death of Beverley Hainsworth and seriously injured her husband.

Mrs Hainsworth, a 55-year-old school teaching assistant, was a mum-of-two who lived in Pickering, North Yorkshire.

Nathan, of Milburn Avenue, Oldbrook, Milton Keynes, has been charged with causing death by dangerous driving and causing serious injury by dangerous driving.

At South Cumbria Magistrates’ Court on June 12, District Judge Philip Holden adjourned the case to Carlisle Crown Court.

The defendant will next appear for a plea and trial preparation hearing on July 10.

A moving tribute was issued through police by relatives of Mrs Hainsworth at the time of her death.

“Bev, always selfless and happy to help anyone, was sadly taken too soon,” said her family.

“She was out doing something she loved with dad on the bike going to her favourite place — Keswick. We will miss her every day and hope she is somewhere nice with people she loves.”

Plans have been submitted to Hartlepool Borough Council for a dedicated cycling and walking route along the perimeter of the National Museum of the Royal Navy.

The path would run from Maritime Avenue through the museum’s car park and include a ramp onto the new Highlight hub site.

National Museum of the Royal Navy in Hartlepool (Image: Google Maps)

The route would link existing cycleways and connect Seaton promenade with the Headland and the town centre.

A planning statement described the proposal as, “key piece of infrastructure” for Hartlepool Borough Council.

It would form part of Tees Valley Combined Authority’s wider cycling strategy.

New routes are being backed by a £4.5 million in Government funding secured through the Tees Valley Combined Authority. (Image: Hartlepool Borough Council)

The planning statement added: “This will be a significant addition to HBC’s policy on health and wellbeing as well as giving the people of the town greener ways to travel.”

The proposed cycleway would be 2.5 metres wide, with an adjacent two-metre-wide footpath for pedestrians.

This new scheme follows Hartlepool councillors’ approval last year of three cycling projects totaling £9.2 million, aimed at improving sustainable transport options around the town.

Those schemes included links from the town centre to Catcote Road, the Waterfront, and the Headland.

The projects are fully funded through Department for Transport funding administered by the Tees Valley Combined Authority.

A decision on the latest application is expected to be made by the council next month.

The defendant’s sister runs a successful cleaning business and upon renewal of an Access NI check, she subsequently became aware of the Community Resolution Notice against her and had to notify police it wasn’t her

A Belfast woman who provided police with her sister’s name following a search was handed a suspended sentence today.

Elaine Pierce was both arraigned on two charges and sentenced at Belfast Crown Court by Judge Mark Reel.

The 39-year old, from Stormount Street in the east of the city, pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice and was handed a four-month sentence which was suspended for 12 months.

She was also fined £60 for a charge of possessing the Class C drug Pregabalin.

The court heard that on August 19, 2025 Pierce was in a flat with a man, drink was consumed and the male then phoned a taxi for Pierce to take her from his property.

After getting into the taxi, she provided the driver with a number of different addresses to take her to.

The fed-up taxi driver then dropped her off outside Grosvenor Road police station.

She was spoken to at the station by officers and due to concerns she was under the influence, Pierce was searched for drugs and was found to be in possession of Pregabalin without a prescription.

She was handed a Community Resolution Notice but falsely provided police with her sister’s name instead of hers.

The defendant’s sister runs a successful cleaning business and upon renewal of an Access NI check, she subsequently became aware of the Community Resolution Notice against her and had to notify police it wasn’t her.

Solicitor Jonathan Burke said his client was “a lady with a very troubled past” and said the offence of perverting the course of justice by providing police with her sister’s name was “always something that was going to be detected.”

Mr Burke also revealed that whilst Pierce had “foolishly” given her sister’s name, the sibling remains a support to his client.

The solicitor also told Judge Reel that Pierce has been in custody since May 30 when her bail was revoked due to her home being damaged by arson.

As he passed sentence, Judge Reel noted Pierce had a “long history of problems with alcohol” and had suffered domestic abuse by a former partner.

The Judge also branded her criminal record, which consists of 99 previous convictions, as “appalling.”

Regarding the offence of perverting the course of justice, Judge Reel said it emerged when it “began to affect the victim” but was “at the bottom of the criminal calendar”

After he handed Pierce the suspended sentence, Judge Reel warned her that if she commits “any offence punishable by imprisonment” in the next 12 months, that would mean a return to court and a likelihood of serving the four-month sentence in addition to any other sentence imposed.

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