Transfers

There is "mutual tension" between Chelsea and their manager Antonio Conte after the Italian told striker Diego Costa by text message that he is not part of the plans for next season. (Gazzetta dello Sport - in Italian)

The club wish to patch things up with Costa, 28, who is willing to discuss his future, but Conte is refusing to back down. (Sun)

Conte has also set a number of conditions which include a direct line of communication to owner Roman Abramovich, if he is to stay as manager at Stamford Bridge. (Daily Record)

Also at Chelsea, contract negotiations with goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois, 25, have stalled over his wage demands. The Belgium keeper is on a £100,000-a-week deal, which comes to an end in two years' time.(Times - subscription required)

Cristiano Ronaldo, 32, has told Real Madrid he wants to leave Spain and his decision is "irreversible". (A Bola)

Jose Mourinho has valued Manchester United goalkeeper David de Gea, 26, at £100m amid interest from Real Madrid and has told the La Liga champions they can sign the Spaniard for £45m plus striker Alvaro Morata, 24. (Daily Star)

But Real say they want £78m for Morata despite details of a "hugely attractive package" being agreed with Manchester United. (Independent)

Meanwhile, Inter Milan winger Ivan Perisic, 28, is already planning for life as a Manchester United player. The two clubs are yet to agree a fee for the £44m-rated Croatia player. (Manchester Evening News)

After completing a deal for defender Victor Lindelof, Manchester United could go back to Benfica to sign £15m-rated midfielder Anderson Talisca, 23, who spent last season on loan at Besiktas. (Daily Mirror)

Swansea midfielder Gylfi Sigurdsson, 27, remains a target for Everton despite the Merseyside club signing Dutchman Davy Klaassen. (Wales Online)

Liverpool want to raise about £60m on player sales by offloading defender Mamadou Sakho, 27, for £30m, full-back Alberto Moreno, 24, for £12m and 23-year-old forward Lazar Markovic for £20m. (Times - subscription required)

New Watford manager Marco Silva could move for Markovic, having worked with the player last season when the Serbia player was on loan at Hull. (Times - subscription required)

Arsenal have had a £17.6m bid rejected for Juventus winger Juan Cuadrado, 29, but the Serie A champions are looking for about £30m for the former Chelsea player. (Sun)

The Gunners have also made a £10.5m bid for Fenerbahce centre-back Simon Kjaer, 28, who is also wanted by city rivals AC and Inter Milan. (Turksvoetbal - in Turkish)

Arsenal defender Nacho Monreal, 31, says he is "almost certain" fellow full-back Hector Bellerin, 22, will stay at the club next season amid interest from Barcelona. (Evening Standard)

West Ham have dropped their interest in £15m-rated Manchester United defender Chris Smalling, 27, but Everton, Newcastle and West Brom are all keen. (Daily Star)

Manchester City striker Patrick Roberts, 20, who scored 11 goals on loan at Celtic last season, has held talks with French side Nice over another loan move. (Sun)

But newly promoted Huddersfield are set to offer him the chance to play in the Premier League. (Daily Record) 

Tottenham are a number of clubs interested in signing Lazio forward Keita Balde, 22, who is valued at £30m by the Serie A club. (Daily Mirror)

Southampton intend to interview former Ajax boss Frank de Boer and ex-Valencia manager Mauricio Pellegrino to replace the sacked Claude Puel and hope to make an appointment by the end of next week. (Daily Telegraph)

However former Borussia Dortmund boss Thomas Tuchel has ruled himself out of the Southampton vacancy. (Sky Sports)

Stoke would want more than the British record £30m Everton paid to sign Jordan Pickford, if they were to sell goalkeeper Jack Butland, 24. (Stoke Sentinel)

Several Premier League clubs, most notably Newcastle, have enquired about Valencia's £13.1m-rated centre-back Aymen Abdennour, 27. (Foot Mercato)

French Ligue 1 side Paris St-Germain have ended their pursuit of Borussia Dortmund striker Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, 27, as the club's new sporting director Antero Henrique deems the £61m-rated player to be too expensive.(Goal.com)

Marseille are trying to sign full-back Bacary Sagna, 34, who is a free agent after being released by Manchester City. (Daily Mirror)

AC Milan goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma, 18, has rejected the club's offer of a new £80,000-a-week contract. His current deal expires in 2018. (Gazzetta dello Sport - in Italian)

Leicester manager Craig Shakespeare has made a bid to appoint Oxford manager Michael Appleton as his assistant. (Daily Mail)

Meanwhile...

A hair restoration company has tweeted images of Wales midfielder Joe Ledley - a free agent after being released by Crystal Palace - who is having surgery for a hair transplant. (KSL Hair)

Manchester United full-back Matteo Darmian has returned to Italy... as he married his long-term fiancee at a ceremony close to his home town of Legnano. (Sun)

Darmian's new team-mate, defender Victor Lindelof, headed to a well-known Chinese restaurant in Manchester after sealing a £31m move to Old Trafford. (Daily Mail)

Best of Thursday's transfer news

Arsenal are prepared to use French striker Olivier Giroud, 30, as part of a deal to sign Monaco forward Kylian Mbappe, 18, or Lyon counterpart Alexandre Lacazette, 26. (London Evening Standard)

Newcastle manager Rafael Benitez is interested in reuniting with 30-year-old defensive midfielder Lucas Leiva, who is believed to be available for about £4m from Liverpool. (Northern Echo)

Paris St-Germain midfielder Marco Verratti, 24, could be nearing an £88m move to Barcelona after being spotted - with his agent - in the same Ibiza restaurant as the Spanish side's superstar forward Lionel Messi.(Goal.com)

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British and Irish Lions: Warren Gatland to call up new players

Warren Gatland is set to call up at least five players to bolster his British and Irish Lions squad before the first Test against New Zealand.

Maori All Blacks v British and Irish Lions
Date: Saturday, 17 June Time: 08:35 BST Venue: Rotorua International Stadium
Coverage: Live text commentary on the BBC Sport website and app

The British and Irish Lions have won two of the first four games on the tour to New Zealand

The Lions face Maori All Blacks on Saturday (08:35 BST) and the Chiefs on Tuesday, before the first Test against the All Blacks in Auckland on 24 June.

Head coach Gatland wants the extra players to ensure that none of the Test squad have to play twice in a week.

The players may well come from Wales and Scotland, who are in Australasia.

Wales are currently in Auckland having beaten Tonga 24-6 on Friday, with Scotland in Sydney to face Australia on Saturday.

England would have several strong candidates to be drafted in, but Eddie Jones' squad is preparing for the second Test in Argentina, which is in a different time zone and may count against those players.

Gatland mentioned calling up new players as a possibility last year, and the Lions say it was always part of the tour's planning.

Wales interim head coach Robin McBryde, speaking after the win over Tonga, said he was willing to help out the man he is filling in for.

"We weren't short-sighted enough to think we would come all the way to the other side of the world and not support the Lions if the call comes," he said.

"If we can support them then we'll help them out, but I don't know what Warren is going to do."

Scotland fly-half Finn Russell is likely to be a candidate to be called up with Owen Farrell injured and facing a race to be fit for the first Test a week on Saturday.

His compatriot Jonny Gray is another player likely to be considered by Gatland with doubts over the fitness of England lock Courtney Lawes, who was injured in Tuesday's defeat by the Highlanders.

Englishmen George Ford, as No.10 cover, and second-row Joe Launchbury would be powerful options if Gatland accepts the extra travelling time and the additional period they may take to assimilate to New Zealand time.

Lions tour
3 June	Provincial Barbarians	Won 13-7
7 June	Blues	Lost 22-16
10 June	Crusaders	Won 12-3
13 June	Highlanders	Lost 23-22
17 June	Maori All Blacks
20 June	Chiefs
24 June	New Zealand
27 June	Hurricanes
1 July	New Zealand
8 July	New Zealand

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China's quantum satellite in big leap

The term "spy satellite" has taken on a new meaning with the successful test of a novel Chinese spacecraft.
Micius went up from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in China's north west

The term "spy satellite" has taken on a new meaning with the successful test of a novel Chinese spacecraft.

The mission can provide unbreakable secret communications channels, in principle, using the laws of quantum science.

Called Micius, the satellite is the first of its kind and was launched from the Gobi desert last August.

It is all part of a push towards a new kind of internet that would be far more secure than the one we use now.

The experimental Micius, with its delicate optical equipment, continues to circle the Earth, transmitting to two mountain-top Earth bases separated by 1,200km.

The optics on-board are paramount. They're needed to distribute to the ground stations the particles, or photons, of light that can encode the "keys" to secret messages.

"I think we have started a worldwide quantum space race," says lead researcher Jian-Wei Pan, who is based in Hefei in China's Anhui Province.

'Messy business'

Quantum privacy in many ways should be like the encryption that already keeps our financial data private online.

Before sensitive information is shared between shopper and online shop, the two exchange a complicated number that is then used to scramble the subsequent characters. It also hides the key that will allow the shop to unscramble the text securely.

The weakness is that the number itself can be intercepted, and with enough computing power, cracked.

Quantum cryptography, as it is called, goes one step further, by using the power of quantum science to hide the key.

As one of the founders of quantum mechanics Werner Heisenberg realized over 90 years ago, any measurement or detection of a quantum system, such as an atom or photon of light, uncontrollably and unpredictably changes the system.

This quantum uncertainty is the property that allows those engaged in secret communications to know if they are being spied on: the eavesdropper's efforts would mess up the connection.

Artwork: The two Earth stations are 1,200km apart

The idea has been developed since it was first understood in the 1980s.

Typically, pairs of photons created or born simultaneously like quantum twins will share their quantum properties no matter how long they are separated or how far they have travelled. Reading the photons later, by shopper and shop, leads to the numerical key that can then be used to encrypt a message. Unless the measurements show interference from an eavesdropper.

A network established in Vienna in 2008 successfully used telecommunications fibre optics criss-crossing the city to carry these "entangled photons", as they are called. But even the clearest of optical fibres looks foggy to light, if it's long enough. And an ambitious 2,000km link from Beijing to Shanghai launched last year needs repeater hubs every 100km or so - weak points for quantum hackers of the future to target.

And that, explains Anton Zeilinger, one of the pioneers of the field and creator of the Vienna network, is the reason to communicate via satellite instead.

"On the ground, through the air, through glass fibres - you cannot go much further than 200km. So a satellite in outer space is the choice if you want to go a really large distance," he said.

The point being that in the vacuum of space, there are no atoms, or at least hardly any, to mess up the quantum signal.

That is what makes the tests with Micius, named after an ancient Chinese philosopher, so significant. They have proved a spaced-based network is possible, asrevealed in the latest edition of the journal Science.

Technical tour de force

Not that it is easy. The satellite passes 500km over China for just less than five minutes each day - or rather each night, as bright sunlight would easily swamp the quantum signal. Micius' intricate optics create the all-important photon pairs and fires them down towards telescopes on some of China's high mountains.

"When I had the idea of doing this in 2003, many people thought it was a crazy idea," Jian-Wei Pan told the BBC World Service from his office in the University of Science and Technology of China. "Because it was very challenging already doing the sophisticated quantum optics experiments in a lab - so how can you do a similar experiment at a thousand-kilometre distance and with optical elements moving at a speed of 8km/s?"

Additional lasers steered the satellite's optics as it flew over China, keeping them pointed at the base stations. Nevertheless, owing to clouds, dust and atmospheric turbulence, most of the photons created on the satellite failed to reach their target: only one pair of the 10 million photon pairs generated each second actually completed the trip successfully.

But that was enough to complete the test successfully. It showed that the photons that did arrive preserved the quantum properties needed for quantum crypto-circuits.

"The Chinese experiment is a quite remarkable technological achievement," enthused mathematician Artur Ekert in an e-mail to the BBC. It was as a student in quantum information at Oxford University in the 1990s that Ekert proposed the paired-photon approach to cryptography. Relishing the pun, he added wryly "when I proposed the scheme, I did not expect it to be elevated to such heights."

Alex Ling from the National University of Singapore is a rival physicist. His first quantum minisatellite blew up shortly after launch in 2014, but he is generous in his praise of the Micius mission: "The experiment is definitely a technical tour de force.

"We are pretty excited about this development, and hope it heralds a new era in quantum communications capability."

 Jian-Wei Pan is now set to team up with his old PhD supervisor, Anton Zeilinger, who is based in Vienna

The next step will be a collaboration between Jian-Wei Pan and his former PhD supervisor, Anton Zeilinger in the University of Vienna - to prove what can be done across a single nation can also be achieved between whole continents, still using Micius.

"The idea is the satellite flies over China, establishes a secret key with a ground station; then it flies over Austria, it establishes another secret key with that ground station. Then the keys are combined to establish a key between say Vienna and Beijing," he told the BBC's Science in Action programme.

Pan says his team will soon arrive in Vienna to start those tests.

Meanwhile, Zeilinger is working on Qapital, a quantum network connecting many of the capitals of Europe, Vienna and Bratislava. Existing optic fibres laid alongside data networks but not currently used could make the backbone of this network, Zeilinger believes.

"A future quantum internet," he says, "will consist of fibre optic networks on the ground that will be connected to other fibre networks by satellites overhead. I think it will happen."

Pan is already planning the details of the satellite constellation that will make this possible.

The need? Secrecy is the stuff of spy agencies, who have large budgets. But financial institutions which trade billions of dollars internationally day by day also have valuable resources to protect.

Although some observers are sceptical they would want to pay for a quantum internet, Pan, Zeilinger and the other technologists think the case will be irresistible once one exists.

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Elizabeth Banks apologises for Steven Spielberg diversity comments

Actress Elizabeth Banks has apologised to Steven Spielberg after she wrongly "called him out" in public for never directing a film with a female lead.

The star made the comments at a Women in Film awards ceremony on Wednesday.

Actress Shari Belafonte called out from the audience Spielberg had directed the 1985 film The Color Purple, starring Whoopi Goldberg. But after another audience member yelled it was wrong, Banks believed she was still correct.

"I messed up," Banks said in a tweet.

The Hunger Games star was awarded an excellence in film prize at the ceremony and used her acceptance speech to highlight gender equality in Hollywood.

"We can't do it by ourselves... It's our responsibility to bring the men along," she said.

'I'm wrong'

"I went to Indiana Jones and Jaws and every movie Steven Spielberg ever made, and by the way, he's never made a movie with a female lead. Sorry, Steven. I don't mean to call your ass out, but it's true."

After Belafonte reminded Banks of Oscar-nominated movie The Color Purple, the actress initially corrected herself.

"OK... I'm wrong. Ummm… he directed?" she queried.

Another guest mistakenly called out no, so Banks concluded: "Oh, so I'm right still," and moved on.

The error was much talked about in both social and general media - especially as The Color Purple focuses on the issues African American women faced in early 20th Century.

The Color Purple

• Based on the 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Alice Walker
• Set in rural Georgia, tells the story of oppressed African-American girl Celie
• Addresses themes of racism, misogyny, equality and domestic violence
• Nominated for 11 Oscars - including best actress for Whoopi Goldberg and best supporting actress for Oprah Winfrey and Margaret Avery - but didn't win any

Banks posted a lengthy apology on Twitter on Thursday, saying she "framed [her] comments about [Spielberg's] films inaccurately".

"I want to be clear from the start that I take full responsibility for what I said and I'm sorry," she wrote.

"When I made the comments, I was thinking of recent films Steven directed, it was not my intention to dismiss the importance of the iconic #TheColorPurple.

"I made things worse by giving the impression that I was dismissing Shari Belafonte when she attempted to correct me. I spoke with Shari backstage and she was kind enough to forgive me.

"Those who have the privilege and honour of directing and producing films should be held to account for our mistakes, whether it's about diversity or inaccurate statements. I'm very sorry."

Steven Spielberg directed Elizabeth Banks in 2002 film Catch Me If You Can

Since Banks's error, others have pointed out that while she was wrong in her claim about Spielberg, the director has only helmed three films out of his 30 which feature a female lead.

In addition to The Color Purple, he also directed Goldie Hawn in The Sugarland Express (1974) and his most recent film, The BFG, featured 12-year-old Ruby Barnhill in the lead.

His next film, The Papers, also stars Meryl Streep in the main role as the first US female newspaper publisher.

Banks is next set to direct a rebooted film version of Charlie's Angels.

As well as appearing in the Pitch Perfect series of films, she directed the second and served as a producer on all three.

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London fire: Queen and Prince William visit Grenfell Tower centre

The Queen and Prince William visited a relief center for Grenfell Tower fire victims, while the missing could number as many as 76, the BBC understands.

Her Majesty was shown the food supplies donated to those made homeless by the fire

The prime minister - who faced criticism for not meeting survivors of the tragedy on a visit to the scene on Thursday - said the victims "deserve answers".

Mrs May visited those injured in the fire on Friday morning, and will chair a cross-Whitehall meeting later on how the authorities can help the community recover.

Six victims of the blaze have been provisionally identified.

However, Commander Cundy has said earlier there was "a risk that sadly we may not be able to identify everybody".

When previously asked about the number of dead, he said he hoped the death toll would not reach "triple figures".

He added: "We as the police, we investigate criminal offences - I am not sitting here and saying there are criminal offences that have been committed, that's why you do an investigation, to establish it."

Candles and messages of condolence have been left near Grenfell Tower

The leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council - the authority that owns the tower block - told BBC Two's Newsnight it would not use the type of cladding fitted to Grenfell Tower on other buildings in the borough.

The cladding - installed on the tower in a recent renovation - has come under scrutiny, with experts saying a more fire resistant type could have been used.

Cllr Nicholas Paget-Brown also said there had not been a "collective view" among residents in favor of installing sprinklers during the renovations.

Meanwhile, Conservative MP Chris Philp said the public inquiry should produce interim findings to ensure swift action can be taken if residents in other tower blocks are at risk.

On Thursday, the first victim of the fire was named as Syrian refugee Mohammed Alhajali, 23.

The Syria Solidarity Campaign said Mr Alhajali, a civil engineering student, had been in a flat on the 14th floor when the fire broke out, and had spent two hours on the phone to a friend in Syria

He had been trying to get through to his family while he was waiting to be rescued.

His older brother, Omar, told the BBC he had lost Mohammed on the way out of the building.

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At the scene

By Peter Hunt, BBC royal correspondent

This is the British monarchy, in action, showing it has learnt from its mistakes of the past.

Mistakes that have included the significant time that elapsed before the Queen visited the site of the Aberfan disaster in the 1960's and the "Show us you care" newspaper headlines that were printed 20 years ago, in the days following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

As Theresa May is learning to her cost, it is a tragedy with a growing political dimension. There is a howl of pain and anger being directed at an establishment which has the royals at its heart.

There's the talk of the divide between rich and poor. The Queen's grandson is a millionaire prince living in a palace in the same borough as Grenfell Tower.

In coming to the site, the Queen was acting as "head of the nation" - a focal point at a moment of considerable pain. She was also providing her prime minister with a masterclass in how to respond on such occasions.

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