Associated Press

Published 12:58 a.m. ET Aug. 31, 2018 | Updated 2:09 a.m. ET Aug. 31, 2018

A Ugandan pop star-turned-opposition lawmaker has been blocked from leaving for the United States for treatment on his injuries from alleged torture, his lawyers said.

Bobi Wine, whose real name is Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, was stopped while trying to board a flight at Entebbe airport on Thursday and police did not explain why, lawyer Asuman Basalirwa told The Associated Press.

He was then checked into a hospital in the capital, Kampala, in a “worrying condition”, said Basalirwa.

Another lawyer, Nicholas Opiyo, said on Twitter that police “violently abducted” Ssentamu and put him into a police ambulance.

Any doctor who treats the singer without his consent is violating his or her oath and “will be personally pursued”, he added. 

Ssentamu’s wife, Barbara, said in a Facebook post that security forces “manhandled” her husband, who “groaned in pain” as he shouted for help.

Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The 36-year-old was freed on bail on Monday but faced no travel restrictions after he and more than 30 other lawmakers were arrested over an incident in which the president’s motorcade was pelted with stones and Ssentamu’s driver was shot dead.

A lawyer for the singer called the charge false.

The police action escalated a political dispute between the government of longtime President Yoweri Museveni and a youthful generation that fears he intends to rule for life after 32 years in power.

Ssentamu emerged as a powerful opposition voice among youth frustrated by Museveni, especially after the constitution was changed last year to remove an age limit on the presidency. 

The singer won a parliament seat last year without the backing of a political party.

Dozens of global musicians including Chris Martin, Angelique Kidjo and Brian Eno last week issued an open letter condemning the treatment of Ssentamu, who in his first public appearance after his arrest had to walk with support and appeared to cry.

Earlier on Thursday, another lawmaker, Francis Zaake, was barred from boarding a plane to India, with authorities saying he was a suspect in a criminal case.

Government spokesperson Ofwono Opondo said on Twitter that Zaake, who has not been charged with any crime, escaped police custody “and should be arrested at the earliest”.

After the outcry over Ssentamu’s treatment at the airport, Opondo said both he and Zaake can travel “after government doctors have examined them to ascertain their medical conditions”.

Both men had been hospitalised with serious injuries they said they sustained at the hands of security forces during detention.

The speaker of Uganda’s parliament, Rebecca Kadaga, in a letter to Museveni this week described Zaake as “gravely ill” and said Ssentamu “has visible signs of torture and beatings”.

The government has denied the allegations of torture.

Fernando Alonso says he would be staying in Formula 1 if he had a winning car – but would not enjoy it as much as racing in another series.

The two-time world champion also, in an exclusive interview BBC Sport, renewed his criticism of the “too predictable” sport in which “only two teams can win”.

Alonso said: “I read I am stopping because I am not competitive, which is partly true.

“If I was winning all the races, I would continue. But it’s also true I would not be having the same fun as I am elsewhere.”

In a wide-ranging interview before the Italian Grand Prix, Alonso discussed:

• How he feels about being considered to have had less success than his talent deserves
• The difficulties of racing an uncompetitive car for the last five years
• His feelings about modern F1
• His view of Ferrari’s current success in the context of his five years with the team
• His fascination with the Indianapolis 500
• Highlights of his illustrious career
• His emotions about leaving F1 after 17 years

On his career results

Alonso’s 32 Grand Prix victories put him sixth on the all-time list of winners, but last week Lewis Hamilton said the Spaniard was the best driver he had ever raced against and that it was a “shame” he had not had as much success as his talent deserved.

Alonso said: “Probably I don’t take the second part of what people have in their minds. I feel extremely lucky and privileged to have my achievements.

“I feel F1 and the sport gave me a lot and I don’t think too much on the downside of how many more championships I could have.

“It is true – maybe with five or seven points more I could be five times world champion. But on the other hand I could have zero world championships, and zero wins or zero podiums because F1 is an extremely competitive environment. So I just take the positives and I am happy with my achievements.”

On five years of no success

Alonso has not won a race since May 2013 and has been saddled with uncompetitive cars for the last five and half years.

He said it had been “tough” to face this situation, but added: “There is nothing you can do. You obviously believe in your team and their performance and their projects.

“Even if you have a difficult season, you still believe the following year will be better and a good one. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen in Ferrari in the last years and it didn’t happen in McLaren the last four seasons.

“But even with that, or despite that, we still showed probably some commitment and determination to keep fighting, whatever the result was that particular weekend.

“And at the same time, thanks to this lack of performance, I explored different categories outside F1 and I discovered a beautiful thing with the Indy 500, or this year I am lucky to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

“It is true I am eighth in the world championship and I will not fight for this year’s title. But right now in September, on the F1 grid I am the most successful driver because I won the Le Mans 24 Hours and even the title contenders now, they won nothing now.

“In November one of them will be world champion. The second one it will be a worse season than Fernando had. So maybe only one man will be happier than me in November. And I am happy for that.”

His feeling about modern F1

Alonso criticises F1 for being “too predictable”. He is referring to the domination of Mercedes and Ferrari, and those teams’ focus on Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel, when he says that “only two teams or two drivers will win the Monza Grand Prix or Singapore or Abu Dhabi. The other [drivers] will just follow the recommendations of the engineers.”

But he also says the cars, the way the sport is structured politically, and even the length of the calendar are less than ideal.

“These cars are made to drive in a very efficient way, that you need to control the batteries and tyres and everything they need to tell you from the garage,” Alonso said.

“We see there are also a lot of B teams that don’t get in the way of the A team to don’t disturb too much and have all the benefits. That’s one thing.

“The calendar is tough – 21 races, most of them outside Europe. When I joined F1 I was 19 years old, full of energy. You had 16 grands prix and most of them in Europe. It was a demanding, tough life but now it is just total commitment and dedication to F1.

“Now at 37 years old and having already achieved some good results, it is time for me to finish F1 with a good feeling and good performance and taking my own decisions.”

Ferrari’s current success

Alonso left Ferrari at the end of 2014, despite their initial desire to extend his contract, because he believed that the team would never produce a competitive car in the time he had remaining in F1.

This year, Ferrari are fighting for wins with Mercedes, and Sebastian Vettel, who replaced Alonso, has a good chance of becoming world champion.

But asked whether he ever thought it should be him in the Ferrari, Alonso said: “I am not thinking about it, to be honest. If I was this year in that Ferrari, maybe I was fighting for the world championship and feeling competitive.

“But at the same time, if you look back and are honest, Mercedes was world champion in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017, and in 2018 Mercedes is leading the championship.

“So how could I have been in 2018 still not winning a championship with Ferrari if already after five years I felt a lot of pressure and a lot of things were not going perfectly?

“Because if you are not winning with Ferrari, there are a lot of things going on. And already with five years I think it was enough. If this was my eighth year in F1 with Ferrari not winning, it is difficult to imagine.”

Passion for the Indy 500

Alonso has not confirmed what he is doing next year, but he has been open about his desire to win the Indianapolis 500 and become only the second man in history after Graham Hill to complete motorsport’s unofficial ‘triple crown’ of F1 world title, Le Mans and Indy.

Alonso raced at Indy in 2017 and led 27 of the 200 laps before his engine failed in the closing stages while he was contending for victory.

Alonso said: “It is a race that [people] consider one of the biggest in motorsport. One of three biggest – Le Mans, Indy and Monte Carlo. So just for that reason it makes quite a special challenge.

“Second thing is the way I discovered last year the approach to the race, the way of driving those cars, the way of anticipating the tows, the overtaking manoeuvres. Everything is quite different to what we have in F1.

“And going out of that comfort zone we have here, [where] you have learnt probably everything you have to learn, and starting from zero, it was quite fascinating.

“I liked that feeling. And I am happy to work in the new categories and challenges that give you a sense of being alive again and start from zero.”

Alonso said he had not expected the explosion of global interest in his decision to race at Indy.

“It was a surprise from day one,” he said. “When we tested the car three weeks before the race and we had two million viewers on YouTube just one car running alone; that was the first surprise.

“And then we confirmed that feeling on the race weekend. From that moment, I think I realised I could have different things in my life, away from F1, and still have a huge impact on myself first as a person but also on the sport in general.”

Emotions about leaving F1

Alonso’s last grand prix will be in Abu Dhabi at the end of November. He said he had not thought how he would feel that weekend, but that he had already noticed his decision to leave had changed his attitude.

“It is going to be emotional because, so far, from the moment I decided to stop, all the parade laps, all the last couple of laps, the formation lap, everything about the weekend has been different, more emotional.

“I was taking care of everything, more details. I realised I was filming with my telephone the drivers’ parade in Spa. And when I saw the video at night, I was, ‘Why did I film seven minutes of drivers’ parade?’

“And I did it because I want to have that in my memory, and in Abu Dhabi it is going to be something like that, but huge.”

Highlights of his career

Who was his toughest rival?

“Michael [Schumacher]. Winning the two titles means a lot when Michael is on track but, apart from that, Michael was unstoppable.

“He was a man who fighting with him was tough because on a good day with a good car, he was unbeatable. With a bad day and a bad car, he was still there. He was special.”

Most difficult team-mate?

“Probably Lewis [Hamilton] in 2007. We only shared the team one year but he was quick, tough and difficult to beat.”

Best race?

“Maybe Korea 2010, or Malaysia 2012, or Valencia 2012. All in those moments.”

Because of the intensity?

“Intensity, yes. Normally wet conditions, wet to dry, dry to damp, all this when you are fighting for a world championship there is no room for mistakes, and if you win that race it is an explosion of adrenaline and emotions.”

Best overtaking move?

“On television, 130R against Michael in Suzuka in 2005. But from the inside it was not that difficult, or it didn’t feel that difficult.”

Even though you overtook him around the outside at 207mph?

“Yes. It looks spectacular on TV, but the difficulty I would put more on the starts, like in Barcelona into Turn One. The level of difficulty in those manoeuvres was higher than 130R.”

The opening weeknight of the college football season saw the defending national champions kickoff off its quest for a repeat with an easy conference win.

That would be Central Florida, which added another notch to its winning streak with a 56-17 victory against Connecticut. Through one game, the Knights are still rolling behind new coach Josh Heupel.

Thursday night’s action also saw the debut of Jimbo Fisher at Texas A&M. The Aggies started the Fisher era with an easy win against Northwestern State.

Here are Thursday’s winners and losers as college football makes its full return after a long offseason:

WINNERS

Central Florida. The Knights showed no hangover from last year’s undefeated season and the offseason change from Scott Frost to Heupel in a convincing win against the Huskies. Yeah, UConn is going to occupy one of the lower rungs in the American Athletic Conference. UCF still looked the part. So did its quarterback: McKenzie Milton kicked off his Heisman Trophy push with 346 yards and five touchdowns.

Texas A&M. Things went as expected: A&M took a 35-0 lead into halftime and cruised against an inferior opponent. It’s all good so far for Jimbo Fisher as he looks to build the Aggies into a Southeastern Conference contender. But we’ll know more after next Saturday, when Fisher and A&M play host to one of college football’s elite teams in Clemson.

Northwestern. The Wildcats looked the part of a borderline top-25 team in netting a 31-27 win on the road against Purdue. It took a second to adjust to seeing two foes from the Big Ten Conference meeting in the season opener. The defense had no answer for Purdue’s Rondale Moore, the game’s breakout star, but Northwestern drew a strong performance from running back Jeremy Larkin and saw enough from quarterback Clayton Thorson to ease concerns over how well he’d bounce back from last year’s knee injury.

Wake Forest. A non-conference win against a Group of Five opponent is not always cause for celebration, especially when it takes overtime. But Wake Forest’s 23-17 win came on the road against a solid Tulane team that should end up in bowl play. The victory also came with a true freshman quarterback in the starting lineup. Dave Clawson and the Demon Deacons will take it.

MORE COLLEGE FOOTBALL:

LOSERS

New Mexico State. Last year’s bowl berth made the Aggies one of the feel-good stories of the 2017 season. It’s too early to write off the team’s odds of making a return trip, but two losses in a row to kick off the year — the latest by 38 points to Minnesota — has NMSU off to a sour start. The Aggies have scored just 17 points across two games.

Purdue. The Boilermakers turned the ball over three times and committed nine penalties for 95 yards in the loss to Northwestern. Oops. The good news is that the Boilermakers were sloppy on offense and ineffective on defense yet only lost by a single possession. In other words, these one stings but there’s likely a bowl game in Purdue’s future should the Boilermakers take care of the details.

Follow USA TODAY Sports’ Paul Myerberg on Twitter @PaulMyerberg.

 

Stephen King has written an absolute eff-ton of books, novellas, and short stories in his time, but his most famous is likely The Shining. It’s a dark, sad tale of alcoholism, telepathy, and the danger of topiary sculptures best immortalized in the Stanley Kubrick film that cast Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, the anger-challenged author who attempted to murder his wife and child while under the influence of the haunted Overlook Hotel. 

Since Castle Rock takes place in the same universe as many (and perhaps all) of King’s stories, it was a given that the show would connect somehow to The Shining, but until Episode 8 the only reference was the name and character of Diane “Jackie” Torrance — canonically Jack Torrance’s niece who renamed herself after her uncle to piss off her parent — the town’s resident crime enthusiast who longs for the weird old days when interesting (read: deadly) things happened in her hometown.

In Episode 8, Jackie finally became more than an easter egg when a new hotel opened in town and allowed her to live out her bloodiest dreams for reasons much better than her axe-happy uncle’s were. 

The episode begins with the story of a disgraced professor and his cheating wife moving into deceased warden Dale Lacy’s old house with the intention of turning it into a murder-themed bed & breakfast, capitalizing on Castle Rock’s macabre past to draw in true crime fans. It’s a pretty neat idea, except for the fact that The Kid is roaming around town and dragging the bad old days with him, so inevitably the professor murders their first guests for no reason and his wife helps him hide the bodies. 

Enter Jackie Torrance, whose curiosity about the new hotel’s theme brings her to the bed and breakfast right after the bodies are disposed of. After crimesplaining a few of their historic details to the professor and his wife (in a particularly heavy-handed moment, he remarks that Torrance “really knows her axes”), they shoo her away, but not before acting creepily enough to keep her interested. 

Jackie’s love of a good murder and distrust of the couple comes in clutch in one of the episode’s later sequences, then Henry Deaver breaks into the B&B and is attacked by the knife-wielding couple. Just when it looks like the professor will take him out — whack. It’s Jackie Torrance standing triumphant over the attacker’s body, having killed him with, what else? A felling axe.

Having Jackie save Henry makes Episode 8 a tiny redemptive coda to the story of the Torrance family seen in The Shining. Jack was driven crazy by a hotel and tried to murder his family with an axe; Jackie used an axe to save someone from being murdered by hotel owners. It’s small, but as far as tying back into King’s stories it’s one of the more fun and direct nods to the continuity of his ever-expanding universe.

Ex-England opener Geoffrey Boycott says the Test team have “gone backwards” and called their batting “rubbish” after another collapse against India.

India, who cut England’s series lead to 2-1 with a 203-run win at Trent Bridge, had the hosts 86-6 on day one of the fourth Test at Southampton.

Sam Curran’s 78 helped England to 246, before India reached 19-0.

Boycott told BBC Test Match Special: “It’s not a solid batting line-up. You just don’t have confidence.”

After England chose to bat, Keaton Jennings suffered a horrendous fourth ball lbw dismissal in the third over. Root and Jonny Bairstow also fell cheaply.

“If you can’t bat, you are always up against it,” said Boycott, returning to the TMS commentary box after heart surgery. “You are climbing against the wind all the time.”

England have made 100 or fewer at the loss of their fourth wicket in 32 of their past 63 innings, over the past three years.

They have gone 15 innings since last making 400, against Australia in Melbourne in December.

It needed a career-best from Curran – left out of the team at Trent Bridge – in a partnership of 81 with Moeen Ali, who made 40, to help them to 246.

“Cook’s form is getting worse, not better; Jennings is not cutting it,” Boycott said.

“We have dropped our young kid at four, Ollie Pope. We are no further forward in finding batsmen. The selectors would be better at county matches trying to find somebody.

“It’s puzzling because they have a batting coach – I’m not just blaming [Mark] Ramprakash – but they have a head coach [Trevor Bayliss] who is supposed to be a batsman – he played for New South Wales. And you wonder what they are doing.

“Isn’t it a poor reflection on county cricket’s batsmen that a wicketkeeper/batsman has to bat four?”

Former England captain Michael Vaughan said number eight Curran, who has made 225 runs in his first five Test innings, is the “best technician” in the England side this summer.

“He looks naturally the best defensive player that England have had in this series,” Vaughan said. “The rest of them still jab at the ball even in defence.

“Alastair Cook looked OK but he is a concern for me at the top of the order. I still don’t think he looks in.

“When he is in quality form, it’s the mind that plays so well and it has always been so strong. To see him deflect it to third slip, like fielding practice, I’ve not seen that from him.

“I don’t think Joe Root wants to play at three, he wants to bat at four. If he continues to play with that head falling to one side, it doesn’t matter where he is batting – he is going to get out.”

Surrey all-rounder Curran, 20, in only his fourth Test, said: “I was disappointed to miss out on the last Test but you can’t drop someone who has got a hundred [Chris Woakes].

“I saw it as a positive and luckily I’m back in the team.”

Sen. John McCain will be honored at the U.S. Capitol on Friday and Saturday at two memorial services. 

Speakers include two former presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and current Vice President Mike Pence. McCain’s children and several notable political leaders are planning tributes or readings. 

Here are the details and how to watch the events live:

Friday

McCain will lie in state at the U.S. Capitol with a ceremony honoring his life and service on Friday, beginning at 11 a.m. Eastern time (8 a.m. Arizona time). The service will be live-streamed at azcentral.com.

Speakers include Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and  Pence. 

Following the ceremony, people can pay their respects in-person from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern time as he lies in state. 

Saturday

On Saturday at 8:30 a.m. Eastern time (5:30 a.m. Arizona time) a motorcade will carry the senator’s body from the U.S. Capitol to the Washington National Cathedral.

On the way, the procession will pause at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where Cindy McCain will lay a ceremonial wreath honoring those who died during the Vietnam War. The public is welcome to line the procession route along Constitution Avenue to pay respects to the senator. 

An invitation-only national memorial service celebrating the senator’s life will begin at 10 a.m. Eastern time (7 a.m. Arizona time) at Washington National Cathedral. The event will be live-streamed at azcentral.com.

Former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, former Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger will give tributes.

McCain’s daughter Meghan will give a tribute and daughter Sidney will give a reading. McCain’s son, Jimmy, will read the poem “The Requiem.”

McCain’s close friend, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., will read from the gospels. 

Bush was McCain’s rival in the 2000 presidential race. The senator withdrew after losing a series of primaries to Bush on Super Tuesday. McCain later supported his former adversary.

As the GOP nominee in 2008, McCain lost to Obama. In McCain’s concession speech at the Arizona Biltmore, he graciously spoke of the significance of Obama’s win, as the first African-American to hold the presidency.  

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That’s one small step from Whiplash, and one giant leap away from La La Land. 

Academy Award-winning director Damien Chazelle is moving away from musicals at light speed with the premiere of his historical drama, First Man, at the opening night of Venice Film Festival. 

And critics are loving it. 

The Neil Armstrong biopic stars Ryan Gosling as Armstrong, House of Cards‘ Corey Stoll as Buzz Aldrin, and The Crown‘s Claire Foy as Armstrong’s first wife, Janet Shearon. Based on early reviews, the star-studded cast is just one of the film’s many assets.

First Man will receive a U.S. wide release on October 12. In the meantime, check out what critics had to say about their early Venice viewing below.

It shows early space travel from a fragile, first-person POV 

Michael Nordine, IndieWire: 

Chazelle is so successful at putting you inside the cold, claustrophobic spacecraft that Neil never truly leaves — we’re often just inches away from his face, whether behind a visor or not — that we’re sometimes at sea when it comes to understanding what exactly these men and why it’s so important. If you’d like to know the exact purpose of the Gemini 8 mission, look it up beforehand — “First Man” won’t tell you. It’s a kind of first-person procedural, less concerned with the nuts and bolts of these undertakings than one man’s experience of them.

David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter:

The movie opens with the first of several white-knuckle sequences as Armstrong mans a solo test flight 140,000 feet off the ground, exiting and then re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere with a malfunctioning bounce on the way back. Chazelle immediately summons echoes of great space-exploration films from The Right Stuff to Gravity with the infernal noise and stomach-churning rattle of what seems like a tin can hurtling around in the void. The fragility of these vessels is a constant throughout. In what will become another recurring motif, there’s also a stirring tranquility in the interlude when Armstrong penetrates the atmospheric barrier. In scenes like this, Chazelle uses the beauty of sudden silence to tremendous effect.

The moon landing sans flag planting isn’t super patriotic 

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian:

It is also a film that downgrades the patriotic fervour of the landing. Armstrong and his comrades are certainly shown to be deeply nettled by news of initial Soviet triumphs in the space race, but Chazelle abolishes the planting of the stars and stripes on the moon.

Jessica Kiang, The Playlist:

But amid all the things that “First Man” is, it’s also notable for what it is not. There’s minimal flag-waving here, making it a universal story about tenacity and sacrifice, rather than anything more overtly patriotic. That’s a good thing, but it means that politics are dialed right back in general, with only some Vietnam War footage playing on background TV screens and one moment in which Gil Scott-Heron‘s “Whitey On The Moon” sounds out, making a particularly pointed comment on the social context of the era. But then Chazelle is as little interested in that context as he is in the spiritual or philosophical potential of this story (this is a tale of lunar exploration in which a journalist’s question about “feeling the presence of God” is played for a laugh).

Gosling holds back in all of the right ways 

Owen Gleiberman, Variety:

Gosling gives a tricky, compelling performance that grows on you. He plays Armstrong as a brainy go-getter who has learned to hold most of what he feels inside (he wrote musicals in college, and is now ashamed of it). Yet he lets out just enough emotion, especially when someone crosses him, to exude a quiet command. Shortly after he’s chosen to be a Gemini astronaut, Armstrong is strapped into a spherical training simulator that looks like a cross between a carnival ride and a medieval torture device. It turns you every which way at once, which results in each astronaut passing out, then running into the bathroom to throw up. But by the time Armstrong gets to ride a rocket in Gemini 8, the simulation turns real: His mission is to dock his capsule to an adjacent rocket, which happens without a hitch, but then everything goes haywire. The capsule starts “rolling left” (i.e., spinning out of the control). Gosling makes Armstrong a figure of intensely contained can-do moxie whose ability to guide a ship, especially when it’s at death’s door, is the essence of grace under pressure.

Leonardo Goi, The Film Stage:

In one pivotal scene that predates Armstrong’s departure for the Apollo 11 mission, she snaps at his refusal to speak about the risks involved, and forces him to tell their kids he may never see them again. It’s a harrowing chat that Gosling half avoids through a press-conference style interview, his kids asking questions he laconically responds to, and in reinforcing a crucial rupture between First Man and Chazelle’s prior work, it crystallizes Gosling’s Armstrong as a far more fragile and intricate entry in the director’s pantheon of male heroes. “You’re a bunch of boys making models out of balsa wood,” Jan shouts to Neil’s superiors when things take a tragic turn. Watching Gosling struggling to hold the emotions in, a forced repression that can only be released away from other people’s eyes, her remarks reverberate with a sad echo. Contrasted with Jan’s indomitable and rational persona, there are moments when Gosling and his colleagues look like boys whose will to “make history” has trapped them in a protracted state of denial, and toy with vehicles whose lethal power is far clearer to their families than their own selves.

Scotland Women’s World Cup hopes are now out of their own hands after Shelley Kerr’s side could only beat Switzerland by just a single goal.

The Scots needed to beat the group leaders by two clear goals to control their own destiny with a game to go.

Erin Cuthbert and Kim Little fired the hosts into the lead within five minutes in Paisley only for Lara Dickenmann to hit back two minutes later.

Scotland now go to Albania on Tuesday needing to win and hope.

With automatic qualification now unlikely, the best four runners-up go up against each other for a spot in next year’s tournament in France with Scotland sitting well-placed to be in the mix.

Dream starts & false dawns

It was the dream start. The exciting, attacking football Kerr has been billing during this campaign. Scotland needed the win, they needed the goals and that intent was clear with Cuthbert’s early goal, the 20-year-old scoring her fourth of the campaign in the opening moments.

Little, who looked her most threatening since returning from injury for April’s away leg, added a second minutes later to have a record crowd on their feet.

But the Swiss, adamant they were not giving up top spot to the Scots, responded swiftly with skipper Dickenmann clawing one back soon after.

Undeterred the hosts continued to press their rattled visitors, whose first real sign of recovery came from Chelsea’s Ramona Bachmann but Jennifer Beattie was well placed to sweep it clear of the line.

Half-time brought relief as Scotland struggled to contain the awakening Swiss, a chance to regroup and offer more of the same high-tempo play that opened the match.

It was end-to-end action for much of the second half with striker Jane Ross being brought into the mix, a sign they were fighting for automatic qualification.

A free-kick from the edge of the box presented them an opportunity but Caroline Weir’s 25-yard attempt was blocked.

The final 10 minutes saw more chances come to Little, as player of the match Cuthbert picked herself up from yet another rough challenge.

Another change for the Swiss was not enough to help the, equalise but did prevent the Scots getting that group winning goal.

‘Campaign not over for scrappy Scots’ – analysis

The fight and passion was what fans had been hoping for in this campaign. The mood music in the days building up to this game had changed – there was excitement, an air of cautious confidence and sheer determination.

The nerves that held the Scots back in earlier matches was not on show here, they more than competed with the higher-ranked Swiss.

They left the pitch looking dejected but rallied in the face of the delighted young fans who had just watched their girls win, sure that the dream of gracing the World Cup stage was still alive.

This campaign is not over for the national side by any means, and the scrappy Scots will fight to the very end. Kerr’s Scotland don’t know anything different.

President Donald Trump threatened to “get involved” in law enforcement decisions at the Justice Department Thursday, telling supporters at an Indiana campaign rally that the investigations into his campaign were “disgraceful.”

“Our Justice Department and the FBI at the top – because inside they have incredible people — but our Justice Department and our FBI need to start doing their job and doing it right and doing it right now,” he said. “Because people are angry.”

Trump has stepped up his attacks on law enforcement agencies as a double-pronged investigation into his campaign has snowballed in recent weeks.

His former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort was found guilty this month of tax evasion and bank fraud for activities unrelated to the campaign. The same say, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to fraud and campaign finance charges and agreed to cooperate with investigators looking into hush-money payments made to porn stars.

On Twitter, Trump has lashed out against top Justice Department officials – including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has recused himself from overseeing the investigations because he was an adviser to the Trump campaign. A special counsel, Robert Mueller, is leading the investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian agents in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Just before leaving the White House for the rally in Evansville, Ind., Trump complained that the Mueller investigation was “illegal” but told Bloomberg News that Sessions’ job is safe at least until November. 

“What’s happening is a disgrace,” Trump said in Indiana. “I will get involved and I will get in there if I have to. Disgraceful.”

More: President Donald Trump accuses NBC of ‘fudging’ interview with him

OnPolitics Today: Trump to federal workers: No raise for you

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