Thomas Tuchel’s desire for clarity has him pitching two players against one another for each position. The competitive tension is palpable

In the analysis of Thomas Tuchel’s split-squad approach for this international window, his naming of 35 players for the Wembley friendlies against Uruguay on Friday and Japan on Tuesday – including nine that he has not previously worked with – one detail has slipped under the radar.

It is because it is easy to forget that the England manager recently signed up to stay on for Euro 2028. There is a degree of longer-term planning about him wanting to get a first look, for example, at Ben White and Lewis Hall, Kobbie Mainoo and James Garner. Fikayo Tomori as well. The centre-half left Chelsea for Milan, initially on loan, in January 2021 – four days before Tuchel arrived at the London club for his brief but storied spell.

Sculpture was retrieved from German battleship sunk in 1939 Battle of the River Plate but its future is controversial

The enormous bronze sculpture of an eagle clutching a swastika in its talons spent nearly 70 years lying at the bottom of the River Plate, off the coast of Uruguay.

After being salvaged in 2006, it briefly went on display in the Uruguayan capital – before the government reconsidered the wisdom of granting such prominence to a Nazi emblem, and the eagle was hidden away on a military base.

The Uruguay coach, who had such an impact at Leeds, needs a result at Wembley on Friday after a downturn for the South American side

The pattern is not unfamiliar. Marcelo Bielsa arrives. The force of his personality, the radicalism of his ideas, his charismatic eccentricity, elevates everyone. Results are good, performances intoxicating. The football is not merely successful but comes to be regarded almost as a moral good: playing the right way for a manager who projects a profound sense of integrity.

Gradually the picture changes. Fatigue sets in. Players weary of their manager’s obsessive nature. Pundits and fans begin to wonder if everything has to be quite so relentless all the time. Bielsa’s quirks come to be regarded less with affection than with aggravation. Levels drop, Bielsa leaves.

Bolivian interior ministry says Sebastián Marset is being extradited to US, where he’s wanted for money laundering

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Sebastián Marset, an alleged Uruguayan drug trafficker and one of South America’s most wanted criminals, has been arrested in Bolivia.

Marset, 34, is accused of trafficking tonnes of cocaine from South America to Europe, and also of having ordered the murder of a Paraguayan prosecutor who was shot dead as he honeymooned on a Colombian beach in 2022.

The Afro-Uruguayan rhythms, born among enslaved Africans and once banned, now draws thousands to public squares and carnival parades

Like the blues in the US, samba in Brazil, rumba in Cuba and plena in Puerto Rico, candombe, Uruguay’s Afro-descendent music, was once reviled, marginalised and even banned – but managed to endure.

But while other such genres have for decades formed part of the cultural mainstream across the Americas, only now is candombe experiencing its peak.

A drone view of the Rueda de Candombe gathering in the streets of Ciudad Vieja in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Agreement after 25 years of negotiations prompts farmers to block roads in Paris, Brussels and Warsaw

European Union member states have backed the biggest ever free trade agreement with a group of Latin American countries, ending 25 years of negotiations but stoking further tensions with farmers and environmentalists around the bloc.

The contentious Mercosur deal with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay prompted immediate protests in Poland, France, Greece and Belgium, with farmers blocking key roads in Paris, Brussels and Warsaw.