The County Championship could be transformed with a 12-team top division split into two pools of six

It feels symptomatic of English cricket’s dysfunctional nature that, having started the summer with five different options for a restructured County Championship, the 18 first-class chairs will conclude a tortuous process next week with a sixth on the table. International peace treaties have been negotiated quicker than talks over whether, and how, to cut a handful of playing days from a domestic calendar that, with four different competitions and formats to accommodate, is bursting at the seams.

The tongue-in-cheek words of the England and Wales Cricket Board’s managing director of the professional game, Rob Andrew, when announcing the review in April have proved prophetic. “We have 18 counties that agree it’s not right, but 19 different versions of what the answer is,” he said.

Critics concerned as Wagestream offers loans of up to £25,000 to workers at Pizza Express, Asda and others

• ‘The app’s like candy’: Wagestream borrowers’ concerns

Low-wage workers are being offered a controversial new type of high-interest loan of up to £25,000 through the “financial wellbeing” app Wagestream, a specialist lender that has signed deals with some of the UK’s best-known employers including Asda and Pizza Express.

The app is pitched as an employee benefit, and gives workers access to loans with a representative APR of between 13.9% and 19.9%, meaning at least 51% of borrowers will get that rate.

It is understood an investigation will look at whether Paul Bean of Durham council breached civil service code

A local councillor for Reform UK who works for the Home Office processing asylum and immigration claims has been suspended from his job while an investigation is carried out, the Guardian has learned.

Paul Bean, who serves as a councillor for Crook ward at Durham county council, declared his day job as a civil servant at the Home Office in his register of interests.

​In this week’s newsletter: T​he platform has shaped how music is consumed ​a​nd how it is valued. But recent controversies suggest the bargain may no longer feel worth it

At the moment, the Spotify exodus of 2025 is a trickle rather than a flood. A noticeable trickle, like a leak from the upstairs bathroom dribbling down the living room wall, but nothing existential yet. The five notable bands who have left Spotify in the past month – shoegazers Hotline TNT last week, joining Deerhoof, Xiu Xiu, Godspeed You! Black Emperor (GY!BE) and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – are well liked in indie circles, but aren’t the sorts to rack up billions of listens. Still, it feels significant if only because, well, this sort of thing wasn’t really supposed to happen any more.

Plenty of bands and artists refused to play ball with Spotify in its early years, when the streamer still had work to do before achieving total ubiquity. But at some point there seemed to a collective recognition that resistance was futile, that Spotify had won and those bands would have to bend to its less-than-appealing model. That realisation was best summed up by the Black Keys, a legitimately big rock band at the time of Spotify’s emergence who refused to put the albums they released around then – 2011’s El Camino and 2014’s Turn Blue – on the platform. They relented two years later and say now that “taking a stand definitely hurt us in the long run”.

Fears of disease as more than 1,400 villages under water after three large rivers overflow their banks

Iman Salim is used to seeing flood waters in the field of lush lilypads next to her home in the village of Kamanwala. But nothing prepared her for this week, when torrential monsoon rains that broke a 49-year record lashed the area, flooding her house with water that rose above her chest.

“The whole house has drowned. The water left nothing,” the 24-year-old said.

From Jesus in the wilderness and Moses at Mount Sinai to Claude, DeepSeek and Llama, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 Whose only non-US concerts were three dates in Canada in 1957?
2 What country was home to the Western Desert art movement?
3 Which brother and sister have both played football for England?
4 Mom & Me & Mom is the seventh and final volume of whose autobiography?
5 Lyndhurst is known as the “capital” of which national park?
6 Which banker recently left the Daily Telegraph after 33 years?
7 What Ford model is the UK’s bestselling current car?
8 What name is shared by a Hebridean island and a French department?
What links:
9 Cleopatra and Mark Antony; Mary Stuart and Lord Darnley; Ygritte and Jon Snow; Carol Ferris and Hal Jordan?
10 Caracas; Hanoi; Port Vila?
11 Rain causing a flood; Moses’ visits to Mount Sinai; Jesus in the wilderness?
12 Bowman’s capsule; glomerulus; loop of Henle?
13 First (20.00-24.00); morning (04.00-08.00); first dog (16.00-18.00)?
14 Claude; DeepSeek; Gemini, Grok; Llama; Magistral; Sora?
15 Equestrian statue of Louis XV; guillotine; obelisk and two fountains?