The Guardian joins the Swedish coastguard to patrol an area that has become a hybrid warfare battleground

In front of a bank of screens on the boat’s bridge, the Swedish coastguard Jan Erik Antonsson shows on a live map on a laptop how many vessels of Russia’s “shadow fleet” there are in the area. “These green symbols are the shadow fleet,” he says. More than a dozen green triangles representing shadow fleet vessels pop up around the coastline of southern Sweden alone.

Every day hundreds of shadow fleet ships – unregulated ageing tankers from around the world in varying states of repair carrying oil from Russia to states including China and India – are moving through a relatively narrow passage in the Baltic.

• Updates from Tokyo as the championships get under way

• Mail John | The stars aiming to break records in Tokyo

Reuters – Evan Dunfee of Canada and Spanish defending champion Maria Perez prevailed in suffocating Tokyo humidity to win the first gold medals of the 20th World Athletics Championships in the 35-km walks on Saturday.

Dunfee, the pain of the gruelling effort in tough conditions etched on his face, crossed the line at the National Stadium in two hours, 28 minutes and 22 seconds to claim his first global title.

Will Canelo’s power or Crawford’s precision prove the decisive factor in Saturday night’s showdown in Las Vegas? Our writers set out the arguments on both sides

For years Bud Crawford ’s name has been synonymous with patience. Denied mainstream recognition and opportunities against name-brand fighters, he kept beating everyone they put in front of him until he’d unified all four titles at junior welterweight. Then he did it again at welterweight with a dismantling of Errol Spence Jr so complete it cemented his place in boxing’s pound-for-pound S-tier alongside Naoya Inoue and Oleksandr Usyk. His gifts are obvious: the ability to switch seamlessly between stances, to read rhythms like sheet music, and to mete out punishment with icy composure once he’s cracked the code.

The Priestdaddy author on quitting social media, Maga conspiracies and how her second novel grew out of a period of post-Covid mania

There is a thing Patricia Lockwood does whenever she spots a priest while walking through an airport. The 43-year-old grew up as one of five children of a Catholic priest in the American midwest, an eccentric upbringing documented, famously, in Priestdaddy , her hit memoir of 2017, and a wellspring of comic material that just keeps giving. Priests in the wild amuse and comfort her, a reminder of home and the superiority that comes with niche expertise. “I was recently at St Louis airport and saw a priest,” she says, “high church, not Catholic, because of the width of the collar; that’s the thing they never get right in TV shows. And I gave him a look that was a little bit too intimate. A little bit like: I know .” Sometimes, as she’s passing, she’ll whisper, “encyclical”.

This is Lockwood: elfin, fast-talking, determinedly idiosyncratic, with the uniform irony of a writer who came up through social media and for whom life online is a primary subject. If Priestdaddy documented her unconventional upbringing in more or less conventional comic style, her novels and poems since then have worked in more fragmentary modes that mimic the disjointed experience of processing information in bite-size non sequiturs. In 2021, Lockwood published her first novel, No One Is Talking About This , in which she wrote of the disorienting grief at the death of her infant niece from a rare genetic disorder. In her new novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, she returns to the theme, eliding that grief with her descent into a Covid-induced mania, a terrifying experience leavened with very good jokes. A danger of Lockwood’s writing is that it traps her in a persona that makes sincerity – any statement not hedged and flattened by sarcasm – almost impossible. But Lockwood, it seems to me, has a bouncy energy closer to an Elizabeth Gilbert than a Lauren Oyler or an Ottessa Moshfegh, say, so that no matter how glib her one-liners, you tend to come away from reading her with a general feeling of warmth.

• News and buildup to the day’s football action

• Premier League things to look out for

Sheffield United’s diabolical start to the season continued when they were routed at Portman Road last night. Jadon Philogene scored a hat-trick for Ipswich, who ended a winless start to the season in style.

No Women’s Super League games today, with most of this weekend’s program taking place tomorrow. There was a single game last night at the Chigwell Construction Stadium, where Arsenal came from behind to pummel West Ham 5-1. Suzanne Wrack was there.

Portugal star will hand Gianni Infantino the perfect publicity coup if he does play in America for the first time in more than 10 years, having already begun cosying up to Donald Trump

Is it still safe to stage the World Cup in the United States? After more headline evidence this week of the extreme nature of American gun violence, some may conclude that the answer is no. Nine months out from the opening game, it is now almost impossible to ignore this. But believe it or not statistics suggest more than 300 people will have been shot in America last Wednesday alone.

The same number will also be shot on Friday, Saturday, every day next week, and every day of World Cup year. On average 127 of these unnamed, largely non-famous people not called things such as the superstar influencer Charlie Kirk will die each day. Within this, youth gun deaths will be both alarmingly high and a register of social injustice: a disproportionate 46% of all young people shot will be black.

The incoming vice-chancellor, Prof Frances Bowen, credits the student-focused approach at the University of Essex for its soaring rankings and high satisfaction rating

• The 2026 league table

• View the full guide

At the University of Essex’s open days this summer, only a few staff took particular notice of one inquisitive visitor talking to prospective students and parents – but that “mystery shopper” turned out to be Essex’s next vice-chancellor. Prof Frances Bowen became Essex’s senior leader in August, and took advantage of her anonymity before that to see its Colchester campus through the eyes of potential applicants and their families.

What stood out from her undercover experience was that “the passion for the place was really clear from our students, from staff,” – as well as the more surprising perspectives of parents touring the campus.

The time and money you invest in education should be repaid by a rewarding career, but is that always the case?

Is a university degree still worth it? That question has been asked for decades but with increased frequency over the last 10 years, as the cost of taking a degree has shifted from government to graduates.

The short answer is: yes it is, according to experts such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). But as undergraduates in England now finish their courses with tuition and maintenance loans averaging £53,000 , the longer answer is that it’s complicated.

Clearing has never been easier to navigate. So if you’ve changed your mind about courses, or your results are not what you expected, here’s how it works

Five years ago, predictions for the 2025 university admissions cycle were looking bleak for students. With a rising number of 18-year-olds in the UK, many assumed it would be a competitive scramble for places – but reality has unfolded rather differently.

“This year, the demand just isn’t there,” says Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute. “International numbers are down, there’s spare capacity, and more universities – even very selective ones – are opening places through clearing. Students now hold more power than expected.”