What happened
England began their World Cup campaign with a 4-2 victory over Croatia in Dallas, overcoming a shaky first half to pull away after the break in a match that has been hailed as one of the best of the tournament so far.

Harry Kane struck twice before half-time, including a penalty that had to be retaken after Croatian goalkeeper Dominik Livakovic moved early. Croatia responded on both occasions – through Martin Baturina and Petar Musa – exposing the Three Lions’ defensive weaknesses and leaving the match level at the interval.

England were better after the restart. Jude Bellingham surged through to score the decisive third goal before Marcus Rashford sealed the result late on as Thomas Tuchel’s side dominated large stretches of the second half.

Who said what
Croatia “got Kaned”, said The Sun’s Oli Gamp. “But it wasn’t all plain sailing.” Tuchel’s half-time team talk “fuelled the Three Lions to opening game glory”, said Will Schofield in the Daily Star. The manager’s speech “inspired England to victory after a sloppy first half”, agreed Matt Law in The Telegraph.

What next?
The win puts England in a strong early position in Group L, although questions remain about their defending. Croatia were “probably always there for the taking”, said Barney Ronay in The Guardian. “But there was hope here, and energy, and best of all something a little ragged and human.”

What happened
Jeremy Clarkson was diagnosed with an “aggressive” form of prostate cancer last year. The former “Top Gear” presenter delivered the confronting news during the final episodes of the latest series of “Clarkson’s Farm”, filmed between 2024 and 2025, which aired yesterday.

Who said what
Clarkson posted on social media that he usually kept his Amazon Prime Video show “bucolic and charming and cheerful”, but that the latest episodes were “none of those things”. “Sombre news,” he said. “They’re a difficult watch.” He will be out of action “for a while”, but the cancer was detected early and he underwent an operation to remove part of his prostate. “The prostate, 10% of it’s dead,” Clarkson said. “The 10% where the cancer is.”

It’s clear that “this show has become something else altogether”, said The Independent’s Ellie Harrison. “Yes, there will always be jokes about very small pigs resembling Richard Hammond.” But there will also be “genuinely hard times, too”.

Clarkson has helped raise “vital awareness”, said Chiara De Biase, fundraising director of Prostate Cancer UK.

What next?
Plans are underway for a sixth season of “Clarkson’s Farm”.

Infecting yourself with internal parasites doesn’t sound like the best way to feel better, but scientists have “engineered” the genes of hookworms to deliver medicine – and “it’s just crazy enough to work”, according to ZME Science.

US researchers have genetically modified hookworms to produce and secrete specific antibodies. This is a “first step” towards creating “living pharmaceutical factories” that can release therapeutic proteins “directly inside the host”, they said in their study, published in Nature Communications.

The hookworm has “spent millions of years perfecting how to assure long-term survival inside a human host, and how to get molecules out of its body and into ours”, said senior study author Dr Makedonka Mitreva, from Washington University in St Louis, on science news release site EurekAlert!

Mitreva and her team used CRISPR gene-editing technology to insert into a hookworm egg genome “a gene coding for an antibody known to counteract” the pufferfish poison tetrodotoxin, a lethal, weaponisable neurotoxin with no known commercial antidote. They then infected hamsters with the modified parasites, and samples taken later showed that the animals had antibodies to tetrodotoxin circulating in their blood.

“It was like the perfect moment,” Mitreva told R&D World. Now “we can start embarking on hookworms being a two-in-one platform” because we’ve shown that they “can not only deliver a drug, but produce that drug and deliver it”.

This is an “exciting” approach that “paves the way for all sorts of injection-free biologic drug delivery”, added ZME Science. It’s “tantalising” to think that “engineered hookworms could one day” be our “internal allies, providing continuous therapeutic benefits while living safely within a human host”.