Exclusive: Operation comes weeks earlier than expected and is thought to have been timed to coincide with local elections

The Home Office will launch a surprise operation to detain asylum seekers across the UK on Monday, weeks earlier than expected, in preparation for their deportation to Rwanda, the Guardian can reveal.

Officials plan to hold refugees who turn up for routine meetings at immigration service offices and will also pick people up nationwide in a major two-week exercise.

Prime minister says he is not distracted by poor personal ratings as rebel MPs are said to be plotting to oust him after local elections

Rishi Sunak has refused to quash speculation of a July general election as he insisted he was not adistracteda by his personal ratings lingering at record lows.

The prime minister said he would not asay anything more than Iave already saida and that his aworking assumptiona was there would be an election in the second half of the year.

US secretary of state to discuss avoiding regional conflict amid fears about Israeli ground invasion of Rafah

• Middle East crisis a live updates

The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, will travel to Saudi Arabia to try to restart fraught ceasefire negotiations between Hamas and Israel and discuss efforts to prevent spiralling regional conflict, while other senior US officials claimed Israel was willing to listen to their fears about a ground invasion of Gazaas southernmost city.

A delegation from Hamas, expected in Cairo in parallel to Blinkenas visit, said they would provide a response to an Israeli proposal focused on an initial hostage release.

• Updates from the 4.30pm GMT kick-off at the City Ground
• Tottenham 2-3 Arsenal: Gunners survive late Spurs fightback
• Have any thoughts? Send them to Daniel via email

Arsenal hang on, beating Spurs 3-2, and now top the table by four points. City, though they have two games in hand, now trail by nine in goal difference.

Email! aGood morning from Pittsburgh!a begins Eric Petersen. aGoing out on a limb here, but I donat think Nottingham Forestas blowout loss in this one will be because of VAR. On the whole Mark Clattenburg soap opera, Iam surprised that Uefa or even Fifa hasnat weighed in yet. Itas one thing to question the integrity of the game, yet another for a club official to do so, but Clattenburg is a one-time internationally accredited referee endorsing such allegations via his compensated employment at that club. Inexplicable and unforgivable. Iad suggest consideration of a lifetime ban from the game.a

More than 300 workers to take action over plans to introduce rosters that could force 250 of them out of jobs

Hundreds of Border Force officers at Heathrow airport will begin a four-day strike on Monday in a dispute over working conditions.

The Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) said more than 300 of its members will walk out from 5am on Monday to 7am on Friday.

Grey skies and persistent rain could be replaced by temperatures as high as 20C in south-east England

Chilly April is on its way out with the coming days set to usher in warmer temperatures more akin to spring, according to the Met Office.

The lack of sunshine, and the grey skies and persistent rain, have contributed to it feeling unusually cold as April comes to a close.

Exclusive: School leaders say they have had to take on additional role as caretaker because they can no longer afford staff

Headteachers are being forced to mend desks and unblock toilets themselves after sacking school caretakers in the wake of budget cuts, the Guardian has been told.

School leaders in England said they could not afford to employ caretakers, and were having to change lightbulbs and clear playgrounds of dead rats themselves.

Burnley FC says it was informed about aoffensive footagea on social media from some of its supporters

A football fan has been charged with causing harassment, alarm or distress over alleged tragedy chanting during a Premier League match between Manchester United and Burnley.

Burnley FC said it was informed about aoffensive footagea on social media from some of its travelling supporters at Old Trafford on Saturday afternoon.

Ukrainian officials say situation avery difficulta but anot catastrophica amid loss of two villages and fighting in Ocheretyne

Russia has consolidated recent battlefield gains in the east of Ukraine, and is attempting to break through Ukrainian defensive lines before a long-awaited package of US military assistance arrives at the frontline.

On Sunday Russian troops advanced near the city of Avdiivka. They seized two villages and expanded a narrow corridor around the rural settlement of Ocheretyne, which the Russians entered a week ago. Ukrainian security officials described the situation in the Donbas region where Russia is attacking on multiple fronts as avery difficulta. It was anot critical or catastrophica, they added.

Airport staff surprised by arrival of centenarian instead of infant after American Airlines booking system errors

A 101-year-old woman has been regularly mistaken for an infant because an airlineas booking system was unable to compute her date of birth.

The woman, named only as Patricia, was born in 1922, but the American Airlines system apparently does not recognise that year, defaulting instead to 2022, the BBC reported.

Chris Webb is expected to win Blackpool South for Labour but eyes are on the fortunes of Mark Butcher, who works with the poor and insists he is anot a politiciana

Mark Butcher, Reform UKas candidate in Blackpool Southas byelection, watched as a carriage driver on the townas promenade plunged a fist into the manure-collecting bag behind his horse. Petty bureaucracy, both men furiously agreed, was stifling the resortas appeal.

aPeople came here because it was a magical place, but where have the donkey rides gone? Where are the ice-cream vendors?a asked Butcher, evoking a nostalgia for the townas glory days and reciting a mantra that Blackpool had long been ill-served by a Labour-controlled council and a when the ared walla crumbled in 2019 a a Conservative MP.

While some voters may want to send a message to Westminster, more local concerns will have an influence

This weekas local elections have been widely described as one of the toughest tests of Rishi Sunakas 18-month premiership, with Westminster-watchers considering the results as portents of his fate in the coming national poll a considered to be coming this autumn.

But while some voters in England may use their vote to bloody his nose this Thursday, a host of more local issues are also likely to influence the results.

Families of two girls killed when a Land Rover ploughed into their school are still waiting for answers, 10 months later

The question awhat if?a plagues Smera Chohan and her husband, Sajjad Butt.

Last July, Chohan had just posed for a photograph with their eight-year-old daughter, Nuria, at her school picnic in Wimbledon when a Land Rover crashed through a fence and ploughed into them. Nuria Sajjad and her friend Selena Lau were ultimately killed by the collision while Chohan was left with 10 broken bones and the overwhelming grief of losing her only child.

As Luca Guadagninoas acclaimed tennis film Challengers makes its case for sporting immortality, critic Guy Lodge chooses 20 of the genreas undisputed heavyweights

• Challengers reviewed by Wendy Ide

Analogies of life as sport have been exhausted by every PE teacher in existence. In the movies, however, theyare eternally renewable. Take Challengers, Luca Guadagninoas sleek, sexy, sweat-drenched new film, which hits every metaphor you might expect in its story of three tennis pros locked in a tense love triangle: games are won and lost, points scored, doubles partners swapped, and so on. Shot and paced with the ricocheting energy of a great tennis match, itas a sports movie that, like many a classic of the genre, understands the parallels between sport and cinema as two great crowd-pleasing pastimes.

The sports movie is pretty much as old as movies themselves: for early silent-cinema pioneers at the turn of the 20th century, the movement and momentum of a baseball game or a boxing match made them as dynamic a subject as any for the camera. Charlie Chaplinas very first appearance as the Little Tramp, in the short Kid Auto Races at Venice, cast him as a disruptive spectator at a racing-car derby. Classic templates for the genre emerged quickly: the Oscar-winning 1931 hit The Champ nailed a structure for the underdog sporting weepie that shaped everything from Rocky to The Wrestler, while the 1944 Elizabeth Taylor vehicle National Velvet minted a million further feelgood stories of plucky athletes defying the odds. (Itas far harder to involve audiences in stories of an athlete whoas born a winner.)

Having a baby led to an unexpected disease and then surgery that altered Lauren Benstedas body for ever. She talks about the pain she felt in being separated from her newborn, and her journey to learn to accept her new life

aWeare going to have to disconnect you,a says the man at my bedside. Since I was hospitalised a fortnight ago, this man and his team have been trying to save my colon, a 5ft-long tangle of ulcers and inflammation. The speed and scale of my colonas fury has fascinated doctors. I imagine them in their morning meetings, poring over my colonoscopy with the mystification usually reserved for the Voynich manuscript. But time is up. Unless they adisconnecta me, my bowel will perforate and I will die.

Disconnection, explains the doctor, involves whipping the whole colon out a here he mimes pulling a rabbit from a hat a and diverting my digestion through a hole in my abdomen called a stoma. He sketches my new anatomy on a piece of paper, quick as a high-street caricaturist. He cannot imagine what it is like to receive this news a to hear your body will change for ever and with it your whole life too a just as I cannot imagine what it is to break it. I want to grab his hand, ask him how. How does a body give birth to a healthy baby and then burst into flames?

As many as 28% of young adults in the UK do not drink. Here, three of them explain why their relationship with alcohol has changed

A recent World Health Organization (WHO) study found Great Britain has the worst rate of child alcohol consumption in the world a with more than half of children in England, Scotland and Wales having drunk alcohol by the age of 13.

Yet this is coupled with a growing move towards sobriety among young people. Alcohol education charity Drinkaware found that, as of 2021, young adults were the most likely to not drink alcohol, at 28%, whereas older adults were the least likely, at 15%.

The two-decade transformation of the industrial site north of Kingas Cross station in London, once notorious, now a pleasant enclave of offices, homes, shops, bars and boulevards, is essentially complete. Itas a huge success a and yet is there something missing?

The near quarter-century, kilometre-long, 67-acre project to redevelop Kingas Cross in London is a monument of its age. It is the urban embodiment of the Blair era in which it was conceived, of the third way, of the idea that market forces, wisely guided by light-touch government, can be a power for good. It will get into the history books about cities (if such things are written in the future), representing its time in the same way that John Nashas Regentas Park represents the Regency and the Barbican represents the 1960s.

The architects of its masterplan, Allies and Morrison and Demetri Porphyrios, have now submitted it for this yearas RIBA awards programme, which could get it on to the shortlist for the Stirling prize. This means that, although there is construction still to be done, not least on the Google headquarters, they consider the essential concept of the masterplan complete. Cadence, a residential building by Alison Brooks Architects, which occupies a culminating point at one end of the site, is also, bar some snagging, finished. Somewhat shockingly, of more than 30 practices commissioned on the site, Brooks is the first one with a womanas name in its title.

Long waiting lists are creating a boom in the medical insurance market, leading to fears of a long-term change in attitudes to the health service

When Rosemary Duff heard how long she would have to wait for a hip replacement operation on the NHS, she felt she had no choice but to dip into her savings.

aI waited a month to see my GP, then another four months to see a consultant. His opening words were aunless you go private, thereas an 18-month waiting lista, which was a bit of a shock,a said Duff, 71, from Norwich. aMuch against my principles, I agreed to go private.a

Often misused by politicians, nostalgia is a positive emotion that could do with a makeover

I have always been prone to homesickness. As a child, I didnat really enjoy holidays, I dreaded going away on school trips and I hated sleepovers. At the beginning of 2021, when I first started thinking about the history of nostalgia, and in the midst of the pandemic, I moved across the Atlantic from London to Montreal, Canada, for work. Far from home and away from my family and friends, I felt a kind of grief whenever I thought about the life Iad left behind. There was so much to love about my new life but I felt anxious, worrying constantly about the safety and wellbeing of my parents, siblings and friends. What if, due to the time difference, I missed an urgent call or woke up to terrible news? These fears were, of course, unfounded, and they were also ridiculous, childish even. Grownups a married 30-year-olds with mortgages and full-time jobs a shouldnat miss their mums.

I also tend to be homesick in a weirder, more abstract way a homesick for somewhere Iave never been. Itas a feeling otherwise known as nostalgia. Melding fairytales with Horrible Histories, as a child I spent hours imagining myself transported back in time to invented and romanticised versions of the past. I was an avid reader of Enid Blytonas novels and, despite my homesick inclinations, begged my parents to divert me from my 1990s London primary school to a boarding school in 1950s Cornwall. My pleas went unanswered, so I went to my uniform-free state school every day in pleated skirts and white blouses, desperate to return to a world Iad never inhabited.

The effectiveness of Tinder and Hinge is hard to judge without access to their data. But now researchers are creating a free alternative with full transparency

A class-action lawsuit filed in a US federal court last Valentineas Day accuses Match Group a the owners of Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid dating apps, among others a of using a apredatory business modela and of doing everything in its power to keep users hooked, in flagrant opposition to Hingeas claim that it is adesigned to be deleteda.

The lawsuit crystallised an ocean of dissatisfaction with the apps, and stimulated a new round of debate over their potential to harm mental health, but for scientists who study romantic relationships it sidestepped the central issue: do they work? Does using the apps increase your chances of finding your soulmate, or not? The answer is, nobody knows.

Itas almost a century since the 1924 expedition ended in tragedy, yet the question of whether the climbers conquered the summit remains unanswered

On the morning of 6 June, 1924, George Mallory a one of the worldas greatest mountaineers a set off with his companion, Sandy Irvine, from a camp on the slopes of Mount Everest and headed for its summit.

A veteran of three British Everest expeditions, Mallory knew the worldas highest mountain better than any other climber at the time. He had come close to death there on three occasions.

Everybody knew the backstory, how Arsenal had won their previous Premier League title almost 20 years ago to the day at White Hart Lane. To borrow a line from Mikel Arteta, it was about making their own history here, about doing everything they could to maintain the pressure on Manchester City, who would play at Nottingham Forest later in the day.

Arsenal achieved their ends, keeping their title hopes alive and kicking on the back of a clinical first-half performance that had seen them storm into a 3-0 lead. Nobody foresaw the second-half drama at that point, Arsenal oozing power, slickness and self-belief.

The Red Roses proved the sky is the limit but they will need to be keeping 15 players on the field come next yearas World Cup

England Womenas Six Nations campaign was formidable but it seems even more so when you look at their numbers: 270 points scored via 44 tries across five matches, with only 41 points conceded. The captain, Marlie Packer, said after the championship sealing win over France on Saturday that there are no limits in regards to what the Red Roses can achieve, which must be a daunting prospect for any opposition they face.

Last year, England were criticised for not having a dynamic attack and the team would often rely on their maul to keep the scoreboard ticking over. But this tournament has seen their attack diversify, with tries coming from every area of the pitch. The back three were particularly imposing, and responsible for scoring 18 of Englandas 44 tries.

Ugly row with JA1/4rgen Klopp on the London Stadium touchline shows the Egyptianas focus has waned

When it comes to picking one image to symbolise the end of an era at Liverpool, JA1/4rgen Kloppas quarrel with Mohamed Salah on the London Stadium touchline will take some beating. This is what happens when power slips away. This, sadly, is the way that it ends.

We will have to speculate about the specific reason behind the row that grabbed the attention after Liverpoolas deflating 2-2 draw with West Ham on Saturday. West Hamas equaliser had arrived before Klopp, who had been waiting to make a triple substitution, was able to introduce Salah, Darwin NAoA+-ez and Joe Gomez. The manager seemed miffed and appeared to admonish Salah, whose angry response made it very clear that he had zero interest in listening to any criticism.

Melchie Dumornayas late strike took the tie beyond PSG and set Lyon course for an 11th final

10 min: As is customary at many European games, and is anathema to those of us in Britain whose emotions are governed by whatas happening, the PSG fans seem to be having a whale of a time.

8 min: Endler, in the Paris goal, jumps high to collect a ball lofted to back post. PSG seem a tad short of ideas at present.

• Defender rues alack of tactical awarenessa in Barcelona defeat
• Chelsea resume WSL title bid against Liverpool on Wednesday

Jess Carter believes Chelsea have ano choicea but to regroup quickly after their Champions League semi-final heartbreak.

Emma Hayesas side suffered a 2-0 defeat at home to the holders, Barcelona, on Saturday, going out of the competition 2-1 on aggregate after claiming an impressive 1-0 first leg victory in Spain. Afterwards, the manager questioned the refereeing decisions that saw Kadeisha Buchanan sent off after two Ayellow cards and Barcelona awarded a Apenalty for a foul on Aitana BonmatA.

• Francesco Bagnaia wins in Spain for third straight year
• Reigning world champion closes gap to leader Jorge MartAn

The reigning MotoGP champion, Francesco Bagnaia, won his third straight Spanish Grand Prix on Sunday to make up ground on Jorge MartAn in the world championship standings after the Pramac Racing rider crashed out of the race while leading.

Marc MA!rquez, a six-times MotoGP champion, finished second from pole position for Gresini Racing at the Circuito de Jerez, with VR46 Racingas Marco Bezzecchi third.

• Gloucester 17-38 Exeter
• Playoff chasers score five tries in bonus-point win

A glance at the team sheet suggested this might be a difficult afternoon for Gloucester and so it proved. Exeteras international contingent, led by Walesas Dafydd Jenkins and spearheaded by virtuoso displays by England internationals Immanuel Feyi-Waboso and Henry Slade, kept their playoff hopes alive with a fluent bonus-point victory.

Slade kicked 13 points a a perfect six out of six a and stylishly contributed to a fluid attacking display from Rob Baxteras men, who scored five tries. Jacques Vermeulen got two, one in each half, while Dan John and Olly Woodburn crossed before the break and Feyi-Waboso sealed the bonus point after it. Exeter host Harlequins at Sandy Park in a couple of weeksa time before a final Premiership assignment away against Leicester at Welford Road. While the attack functioned well in this South-West derby, they will need to sharpen up defensively to force their way into the playoffs.

• Updates from around the grounds from first ball at 11am BST
• Saturday report: Derbyshire cling on after Root and Brook tons
• Email Tanya with your thoughts

Thereas justice in there somewhere. Worcestershire get onto the green first.

To sum up: play abandoned for the day at Grace Road, no play anywhere now, no play before lunch at The Oval, but, like a snowdrop in January, a pitch inspection at 11.30 at Bristol.

Criticism of the comments made by Ben Habib of Reform UK died down very quickly. And thatas terrifying

In the hourly deluge of outrage and nonsense that passes for the national conversation, it was only another fleeting moment. But last Tuesday, as the TalkTV presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer talked to Ben Habib a the Reform UK partyas aco-deputy leadera and its candidate in the recent Wellingborough byelection a about so-called small boats crossing the Channel, their conversation highlighted where the noise around that issue seems to be going: into places so inhuman and ugly that even a populist true believer such as Hartley-Brewer feels a pang of horror.

Their 11-minute chat took place the day after five people, including a four-year-old girl, had been killed trying to get to the English coastline from a beach near Boulogne, on an inflatable dinghy carrying 112 people. Reformas belief, Habib said, was that the UK authorities should ause forcea to stop such vessels entering our territorial waters, aand require them to turn rounda.