Trump moves nuclear submarines after Russian ex-president's comments
The US president says two nuclear submarines are being deployed in the "appropriate regions".
The US president says two nuclear submarines are being deployed in the "appropriate regions".
Some say Britain's decision is an important first step – while others worry it won't make a real difference, writes BBC's International Editor Jeremy Bowen.
A claimant in a car financing judgement is disappointed more people will not be able to claim.
Jon Ruben, 76, is charged with child cruelty offences, the Crown Prosecution Service says.
As technology transforms the war in Ukraine, soldiers are experiencing a new form of trauma: "Droneophobia".
The move comes as a weaker-than-expected jobs report stoked fears about tariffs.
The season's finale will mark the end of the "Sex and the City universe", its showrunner announced.
Parenthood is also released this week, Freakier Friday hits cinemas and MasterChef is back.
In a rare interview, a former North Korean IT worker reveals the secret scheme raising funds for Kim Jong Un’s regime.
Some people are calling the wrap dystopian, saying Kim Kardashian is tapping into insecurities.
Feeling jaded by dating fatigue, reporter Alex Taylor tries a different way to try to meet the future love of his life.
The Conservative Party leader says she has not renewed her passport for the West African country in years.
Tottenham captain Son Heung-min says he will leave the club this summer after 10 years.
The US President deploying nuclear submarines and Storm Floris hitting the UK make Saturday's front pages.
The move comes a week after Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking, met a top Justice Department official about the Epstein case.
Lenders no longer face the prospect of having to pay £30bn to £40bn to aggrieved car buyers, but the industry still faces hefty payouts.
BBC News has spoken to a range of experts to look at where you stand with cancellations and insurance.
Thousands of hot dogs spilled onto a Pennsylvania highway after a lorry scraped a car.
The Russian president says Moscow's initial tough demands must be met, despite a looming US sanctions deadline.
A psychotherapist explains how to spot a cult and why more support is needed for those who leave.
World number one Magnus Carlsen takes home $250,000 (£188,000) for winning the online competition.
The company's self-driving technology failed to prevent a 2019 crash which killed a 22-year-old woman and severely injured her boyfriend in Florida.
The visit with the IDF follows near daily reports of deadly shootings in the vicinity of the sites.
Top stories, breaking news, live reporting, and follow news topics that match your interests
Tottenham captain Son Heung-min says he will leave the club this summer after 10 years.
India quick Prasidh Krishna admits it was a deliberate tactic to try and disrupt Joe Root after the pair were involved in a heated exchange on day two of the fifth Test at The Oval.
The Lions are focused on completing a clean sweep against the Wallabies in Sydney in Saturday's final Test.
Britain's Emma Raducanu wins just three games as she is beaten by Wimbledon finalist Amanda Anisimova in the Canadian Open third round.
Liverpool could walk away from a move for Newcastle United striker Alexander Isak after their opening £110m offer was rejected.
McLaren driver Lando Norris' openness in admitting his frailties is "used against him", according to his former team-mate Carlos Sainz.
England take on Spain in their first World Cup warm-up match knowing most of the pressure is for team places in a competitive 32-strong squad.
Supreme Court rules lenders won’t have to pay compensation to millions of motorists.
The US president says Friday is the cut off
Jeremy Clarkson tells the story of the Arctic convoys of WWII and their greatest disaster.
His first 12 months at the Foreign Office have been hit by a string of high-stakes international flashpoints, from the unfolding horror in Gaza to regime change in Syria and Trump’s humiliation of Zelenskyy – but he’s not panicking“Remind me: why weren’t we able to meet in Washington DC?” David Lammy asks, spoon of Pret chicken laksa suspended in front of his mouth. It’s lunchtime in the foreign secretary’s office, a vast room of gilt edges, damask drapery and waxed oak. “Because Israel bombed Iran, and your trip was cancelled,” I say. “Oh, yes.” He scrapes the bottom of the pot, perhaps remembering the snap Cobra session on 13 June, the world holding its breath, the shared feeling we were on the brink of global war. It’s three weeks on and the heat of imminent conflict has lessened, if not the actual temperature, shining in the faces of staff. Lammy apologises for squeezing me into his lunch break. His schedule, running down a whiteboard in the ante office, is precision-timed. After our chat, he will be whisked off to Cyprus to see British troops, then to Beirut overnight, then a car ride through the mountains into Syria, where he’ll meet the new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly the head of the Islamist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Lammy will be the first British minister to set foot in the country in 14 years.He lifts his chin to prevent yellow soup dropping on his “sombre” green tie. You can sense his mood, he’ll tell me later, by his tie choice. Ordinarily he brings miso from home in a flask, but sometimes he’s left too early, or sped from an overnight flight, and then it’s the laksa, 296 calories. He’s on a diet, an intermittent fasting, “little bit no carby” regime. Plus he hasn’t drunk alcohol since taking the job: “I can’t drink and fly. It interrupts my sleep.” His last was a teeny half-pint watching England v Switzerland in the Euros on his first official trip last year. He’s taken 90 flights and visited 62 countries since, mostly on the UK government Airbus that gives him a stiff back – he is 53. Sleeping pills are an essential part of the job, he says. “There’s always a trip to the CVS pharmacy in Washington DC to buy the best melatonin gummies.” Continue reading...
Since her arrival at the Wall Street Journal, British editor-in-chief Emma Tucker has shaken up not only her own newsroom but also the White HouseThe danger posed to Donald Trump was obvious. It was a story that not only drew attention to his links to a convicted sex offender, it also risked widening a growing wedge between the president and some of his most vociferous supporters. The White House quickly concluded a full-force response was required.It was Tuesday 15 July. The Wall Street Journal had approached Trump’s team, stating it planned to publish allegations that Trump had composed a crude poem and doodle as part of a collection compiled for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday. Continue reading...
An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation argues that a global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished“We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.“I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens. Continue reading...
As horrific images emerge and western nations move to recognise Palestine, the Israeli PM’s defiance-at-all-costs strategy is falling apart“No one likes us, we don’t care.” It may be rousing on the stadium terraces of south London, as the signature chant for Millwall football club, but as a national strategy it’s a disaster. Even so, Israel has become a Millwall among the nations, apparently unbothered by and impervious to the condemnation of a watching world – condemnation which this week gained serious momentum.As one country after another pointed an accusing finger towards Israel, repelled by the starvation, devastation and bloodshed it has brought down on Gaza, Israeli officials offered the now-familiar middle finger in return. When Keir Starmer announced Britain’s intention to recognise a state of Palestine, it was swiftly brushed aside by the deputy mayor of Jerusalem as “much ado about nothing”. Continue reading...
Far-right activist flew to the Spanish island again this week in a moment of peril – but friends deny seeing him there“As far as I am aware, he is on mainland Spain,” said Barry Armstrong, a convicted fraudster and longtime friend and benefactor of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson.It was difficult to fit with what the staff at Robinson’s favourite breakfast place in Costa Adeje, in southern Tenerife, had said just that morning. “He was in here yesterday,” a member of the waiting staff said of Robinson. Continue reading...
Do eggshells really protect your plants from slugs? And what can you do about moles? Our gardening expert has the answersAs any gardener knows, we share our outdoor spaces with a vast array of creatures. This is mostly a wonderful and necessary thing. The majority of beasts are beneficial and ought to receive the warmest of welcomes. And given the biodiversity crisis, we must reconsider who we regard as a “pest”. Having said that, there are organisms whose presence can imperil our garden plans.When I was studying the principles of growing food organically, I was taught a systems approach to dealing with so-called pests: choose your interventions carefully and opt for the least disruptive before considering more drastic measures. Continue reading...
Exclusive: Data reveals ‘invisible crisis’ with millions yet to have first specialist appointment or diagnostic testAlmost half of the 6 million people needing treatment from the NHS in England have had no further care at all since joining a hospital waiting list, new data reveals.Previously unseen NHS England figures show that 2.99 million of the 6.23 million patients (48%) awaiting care have not had either their first appointment with a specialist or a diagnostic test since being referred by a GP. Continue reading...
Order comes after president’s anger at tweet from Dmitry Medvedev which called Trump’s threat to sanction Russia over Ukraine a ‘step towards war’Putin offers no hint of concessions as he says he wants ‘stable’ peace in UkraineDonald Trump has said that he has deployed nuclear-capable submarines to the “appropriate regions” in response to a threatening tweet by Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev, suggesting that he would be ready to launch a nuclear strike as tensions rise over the war in Ukraine.In a post on Truth Social on Friday, Trump wrote that he had decided to reposition the nuclear submarines because of “highly provocative statements” by Medvedev, noting he was now the deputy chairman of Russia’s security council. Continue reading...
Parents watch children waste away as deliberate aid restrictions from Israel mean hunger is becoming a killer, as experts confirm famine is currently playing outThe people of Gaza did not need this week’s official confirmation from UN-backed hunger experts that the “worst-case scenario of famine” was unfolding there. For months they have watched as their children waste away.“All my children have lost nearly half of their body weight,” said Jamil Mughari, a 38-year-old from Maghazi in central Gaza. “My daughter, who is five years old, now weighs only 11kg. My son Mohammad has become just skin and bones. All my children are like this. Continue reading...
Exclusive: Ian Bauckham says data apparently showing soaring extra time in A-levels and GCSEs was misunderstood, not wrongEngland’s chief regulator of exams has put up a staunch defence of Ofqual after it was forced to withdraw a decade of statistics detailing the number of students granted extra time and other assistance for A-levels and GCSEs.In his first interview with a national media organisation since his permanent appointment as head of Ofqual, and just weeks after the data was dramatically pulled, Sir Ian Bauckham said there had been no error in the figures, blaming instead the way they had been interpreted. Continue reading...
Exclusive: UK company reports 450 incidents in a year, with workers spat it, shaken off ladders and pushed down stairsFrom scissors being brandished as weapons to verbal abuse and being trapped during a home visit, the number of reported incidents of abuse and assault on telecoms engineers is on the rise.Openreach, the BT subsidiary that maintains the vast majority of the broadband network serving UK homes and businesses, recorded 450 reports of abuse and assault in the year to the end of March. Continue reading...
Woman wins apology and refund of almost £4,300 after claiming host’s photos were digitally manipulatedAirbnb has apologised to a woman after an apartment host falsely claimed she had caused thousands of pounds’ worth of damage and used images she says were digitally manipulated to back up his allegations.The London-based academic was refunded almost £4,300, and an internal review of how the case was dealt with has been launched at the short-term accommodation rental company. Continue reading...
Pattern of ‘hostile language’ in media and debates likely to describe people of colour with less sympathy, report saysA pattern of “hostile language” in news reports and UK parliamentary debates is more likely to describe people of colour as immigrants, or with less sympathy, researchers have found.The race equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust analysed more than 63m words from 52,990 news articles and 317 House of Commons debates on immigration between 2019 and the general election in July 2024. Continue reading...
The UK foreign secretary opens up about his friendship with the VP, that ‘island of strangers’ speech, and his guilt over Zelenskyy’s Oval Office encounter‘The world is on edge’: five tumultuous weeks with David LammyDavid Lammy has spoken of his friendship with the US vice-president, JD Vance, as the pair can relate over their “dysfunctional” working-class childhoods.In a series of interviews with the Guardian, conducted over several weeks, the foreign secretary opened up about a “wonderful hour and a half” spent with Vance over drinks at the US embassy in Italy in May alongside the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner. Continue reading...
Warm sea surface temperatures, exacerbated by global heating, have created favourable conditions for jellyfishComing to a beach near you: a guide to the jellyfish you’ll find off the UK coastAn unusually high number of jellyfish have arrived in the UK’s seas this summer, experts have said.Jellyfish blooms arrive for their yearly reproduction cycle by following the current of warm water to the coast. Warm sea surface temperatures, which are exacerbated by global heating, create favourable conditions for jellyfish. Continue reading...
Zelenskyy forced to U-turn on anti-corruption bodies but protesters know unrest only plays into Russia’s handsOnce a decade, Ukraine has a moment in which street protests redefine the country’s political direction. The Orange revolution of 2004; the Maidan revolution of 2014; and now, over the past 10 days, the first major wave of protest since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.A series of unexpectedly boisterous and well-attended demonstrations forced Volodymyr Zelenskyy to execute a swift U-turn on his decision to scrap the independence of two anti-corruption bodies. On Thursday, MPs reversed the contentious changes they had adopted a week previously. Outside the parliament building, crowds whooped and cheered as the result of the vote was announced. Continue reading...
Alex, 28, a sports writer, meets Zoe, 28, who works in TVWhat were you hoping for? At best, to meet my future wife. At worst, free food and a fun story. Continue reading...
Our short stay in the country ended in heartbreak. If there’s a best way for an animal to die, I can’t say I’ve found itIn the days before my father-in-law’s funeral, my wife and I drive to his cottage in the country with the dogs. Our schedule – shredded and hastily reassembled around events – has a window just big enough to go down there, check on things, do the front hedge, weed a bit. It seems important, even if it probably isn’t.Shortly after we arrive a visitor remarks on the decline of the old dog. Continue reading...
Relatable, absurd, hugely funny: the return of this tale of a male/female friendship duo soars when the two are onscreen togetherSylvia and Will are old college friends, without benefits, who have reunited in their 40s. They’re very close without being romantically interested in each other, and she has a habit of meddling in his relationships. Hmmm. We’re accustomed to onscreen chemistry of the explosive kind, which is generally used to exploit a heteronormative set-up. We see a man and woman getting along, and can’t help but wonder when they will burst into flames.Platonic (Apple TV+, from Wednesday), which stars Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne and returns for a second series, is flame-retardant. Will and the married Sylvia do not pine for or want to roll around on each other, but they do rely on, delight in, irritate and deeply understand each other. It’s a worthy addition to what we might call the Ephroniverse – the slim canon of stories about whether straight women and men can be friends. As their titles suggest, Platonic comes to a different conclusion than When Harry Met Sally. It’s the correct conclusion – so why is the question still interesting? Continue reading...
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Anastasia and Ricky don’t have as much sex as they did at the start of their relationship, but when they do, they really do it• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymouslyThere was an occasion when we had sex eight times in one day – we still call it our dirty weekend Continue reading...
Not just a cosy refuge, the video game showed me how to stop and appreciate what I had achieved, without constantly feeling I had to do moreMinecraft is my life. I got into it around 2012, when I was 23, and I’ve been playing ever since. It’s a game of endless possibility. You can do anything in it. You can build your own houses, machines, businesses, and put your own personality on to it. It’s an easy escape and can become quite addictive. It’s just so much more colourful, fun and cosy than the real world.But when you play this game for a decade you start to learn this incredible lesson about patience. It’s essentially a game where you build your world one block at a time. In the moment it’s this lovely dopamine-drip exercise, but recently it’s started to change my perspective on the world. You look back at what you’ve created and begin to appreciate all the work you’ve put in. I know that might sound silly. It’s just a game about blocks. But until you zoom out with time and perspective you don’t appreciate it for what it is. Continue reading...
Veteran manager tells Donald McRae about his 45-year-career, upcoming tour and missing out on Virgil van Dijk‘I was at Crystal Palace and I wanted a centre-half,” Neil Warnock says as, after 45 years as a manager, he describes how football has changed since his rise from non-league to the Premier League. “I sent Ronnie Jepson, my assistant, to Scotland to watch a centre-half. And he came back and said he would cost us around £4m, but he was very good. So I told the people at Crystal Palace.”Warnock resists identifying Steve Parish, Palace’s chairman, by name for he is deep in a story that illustrates how data analytics is not always infallible. “He asked for 24 hours and went to the data people. The next day he said: ‘We don’t want to go ahead.’ I asked him why and he said they don’t think he’s quick enough. I said: ‘He might not look quick enough, but he’s in second gear in Scotland. If he had to sprint, he’d sprint.’” Continue reading...
Australia will have other ideas but Andy Farrell’s team are intent on sealing the clean sweep with a triumph that would stand the test of timeAs the 2025 British & Irish Lions prepare for their last hurrah there are distant echoes of former glories in the damp Sydney air. A highly respected English lock forward leading out a history-chasing team in the same stadium which staged the 2003 Rugby World Cup final? It is not the worst of precedents for Maro Itoje as he and his modern-day Lions await their third and final date with destiny.Itoje and his squad would also dearly love to rekindle memories of another significant contest in this city. The decisive concluding Test of the 2013 Lions series was a classic example of a touring side saving its best until last, with a tiring Wallaby side eventually losing 41-16 after a certain assistant coach called Andy Farrell had urged the players to take their hosts to “the hurt arena”. Continue reading...
Root reacted to comment from Prasidh KrishnaKrishna: ‘It was just a little bit of banter’At the end of another day of backchat and occasionally fraying tempers, in which the former England captain Michael Vaughan suggested of the two sets of players that “it’s almost like they’ve had enough of each other”, India admitted Joe Root had been the target of a deliberate plan to wind him up and put him off his game.Alastair Cook, another former England captain, had suggested as much after Root reacted to a comment from Prasidh Krishna. “He was angry, he wasn’t in much control, but why wouldn’t you try to upset Joe Root?” Cook said. “I don’t know if it was a plan but you can say that it did work. I just hope what he said was within the line. I hope it didn’t cross the line, and was good old honest sledging. It definitely got Joe out of his bubble.” Continue reading...
Spurs captain reveals intention to leave this summerHe says it is the ‘most difficult decision’ of his careerThe Tottenham captain Son Heung-min has revealed he intends to leave the club this summer after a decade in north London.The 33-year-old attacker joined the Premier League side from Bayer Leverkusen in 2015 and went on to play more than 450 times for Spurs. In May he lifted the Europa League trophy but he had a poor season overall by his high standards and struggled with injury. Continue reading...
Newcastle value 25-year-old prized asset at £150mLiverpool keep offer on table but do not plan to go higher Liverpool have had a £110m bid for Alexander Isak rejected by Newcastle and do not intend to submit a second offer for the striker in this transfer window.Despite long-held interest in the Sweden international and his desire to move to Merseyside, Liverpool’s first formal offer came in under the £120m suggested when Richard Hughes, sporting director at Anfield, made an informal enquiry over Isak’s availability a fortnight ago. Newcastle value their prized asset at £150m, a British transfer-record sum, but are reluctant to sell the 25-year-old, who was the second highest goalscorer in the Premier League last season behind Mohamed Salah. Continue reading...
Familiar tones of rage, pain and betrayal that envelop men’s football were missing during England’s joyful run to glory“You can’t stand their voices? ALL women’s voices?” “Yes.” “Are you married to a woman?” “I am. And she feels the same.” Hmm. To be fair to Dave from Egham, whose name has been changed to protect the confused, the whole setup here was pretty bleak. It was Dave’s destiny a week on from England’s victory at Euro 2025 to find himself going viral after an appearance on LBC radio.In the clip Dave objects to the sound of all women’s voices, even if they’re Adele or Billie Holiday. Specifically he objects to women talking about women’s sport, which Dave hates because it is being thrown down his throat, and thrown down his throat to the extent he has to ring up a radio station and talk about the women talking about the women’s sport, simply to disentangle its tendrils from his throat, to steal a few gargling, sputtering final breaths. Continue reading...
British No 1 beaten 6-2, 6-1 in Montreal third roundAnisimova lines up meeting with Elina SvitolinaEmma Raducanu has crashed out of the Canadian Open in straight sets, going down 6-2, 6-1 to the American fifth seed Amanda Anisimova in the third round.Raducanu had won both of their previous meetings but rarely looked like extending that run as she held her serve just once in either set in Montreal. Continue reading...
Dale Vince’s team are giving away seats to a local doctor to be prescribed as an alternative to antidepressantsDale Vince, the green energy entrepreneur and owner of Forest Green Rovers, has been mixing football and social causes for years. And so it’s perhaps not surprising that he is one of the partners in an initiative where GPs can prescribe a day out watching his National League team as an alternative to antidepressants.“Our country’s facing a difficult time,” Vince says. “We’ve got extreme poverty at one end and extreme wealth at the other end, and football is the thing that binds us, it’s the thing that brings us together every week with a common purpose and a common cause. Modern life has stripped a lot from us as people and led to a mental health crisis. Football could help put that right.” Continue reading...
Livingston’s head of football operations on the fallout from his 10-game ban for betting on matches Conversation with Brian Rice flows easily. Brian Clough pounced to sign the red-haired midfielder after he failed to agree a contract with Hibernian in the summer of 1985. “Eff me, it’s Steve Davis,” roared Clough as Rice entered the manager’s office for the first time.It took until September ‘85 for a tribunal to determine Nottingham Forest would have to pay Hibs close to £200,000 for Rice. He had been unable to play until that dispute was resolved. Clough bawled at Rice again as he walked on to the training pitch the following day. “‘You’ll need to go back to Scotland. I’d need to sell the stand to sign you son,’” Rice recalls. Continue reading...
Sex toy tossed on court during Sky-Valkyries gamePlayers, fans call behavior immature and dangerousA sex toy was tossed onto the court during a WNBA game for the second time this week.Video showed the sex toy out of bounds under a basket after a whistle was blown to stop play during the third quarter of the Golden State Valkyries’ 73-66 victory over the Chicago Sky. An official then kicked it aside before it was picked up and removed. Continue reading...
Titans like Musk would love us to believe innovation means top-down solutions that only enrich the wealthy. In fact, we all have the powerThere’s a common misconception that state-of-the-art technology has to be expensive, energy consumptive and hard to engineer. That’s because we have been persuaded to believe that innovative technology is whatever bombastic billionaires claim it is, whether that’s commercial spacecraft or the endless iterations of generative AI tools.As the Canadian technologist and engineer Ursula Franklin once said, fantasies of technology would have it that innovation is always “investment-driven, shiny, lab-born, experimental, exciting”. But more often than not, in the real world, it is “needs-driven, scrappy, on location, iterative, practical, mundane”. The real pioneering technologies of today are genuinely useful systems I like to call “frugal tech”, and they are brought to life not by eccentric billionaires but by people doing more with less. They don’t impose top-down “solutions” that seem to complicate our lives while making a few people very rich. It turns out that genuinely innovative technology really can set people free. Continue reading...
Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. The EU should now steel itself and reject the terms imposed by Donald TrumpUrsula von der Leyen’s Turnberry golf course deal has been rightly called a capitulation and a humiliation for Europe. Assuming such an accord would put an end to Donald Trump’s coercion and bullying was either naive or the result of a miserable delusion. The EU should now steel itself and reject the terms imposed by Trump.Is this deal really as bad as it sounds? Unfortunately, it is, for at least three reasons.Georg Riekeles is the associate director of the European Policy Centre, and Varg Folkman is policy analyst at the European Policy Centre Continue reading...
New limits on what can be seen online have drawn consternation from Nigel Farage and progressives alike. Yet much of it is based on misinformationGeorge Billinge is a former Ofcom policy managerLast week, the UK’s Online Safety Act came into force. It’s fair to say it hasn’t been smooth sailing. Donald Trump’s allies have dubbed it the “UK’s online censorship law”, and the technology secretary, Peter Kyle, added fuel to the fire by claiming that Nigel Farage’s opposition to the act put him “on the side” of Jimmy Savile.Disdain from the right isn’t surprising. After all, tech companies will now have to assess the risk their platforms pose of disseminating the kind of racist misinformation that fuelled last year’s summer riots. What has particularly struck me, though, is the backlash from progressive quarters. Online outlet Novara Media published an interview claiming the Online Safety Act compromises children’s safety. Politics Joe joked that the act involves “banning Pornhub”. New YouGov polling shows that Labour voters are even less likely to support age verification on porn websites than Conservative or Liberal Democrat voters.George Billinge is a former Ofcom policy manager and is CEO of tech consultancy Illuminate TechDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...
Guardian revelations about Edinburgh University’s links to both the practice and theory of the evil trade must now provoke a national reckoning on raceHannah Lavery is a Scottish poet and playwrightAs a child growing up in Edinburgh, I was taught this was a city built on the genius of the Scottish Enlightenment. That story was sunk deep into our bones and passed between us as our treasured inheritance. It formed our sense of ourselves and our belief in Scotland’s good and worthy contribution to the world.We walked past statues of David Hume and Adam Smith. We celebrated their intellect and claimed it as our own. Yet no one spoke of what lay beneath that brilliance – of whose labour built their wealth, whose bodies were stolen, dispossessed and abused as a consequence of their “thinking”. Edinburgh was framed not as a city of complicity but of genius. That silence shaped us.Hannah Lavery is a Scottish poet and playwright. She will be appearing in Disrupting the Narrative – a Performance, at the Edinburgh international book festivalDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...
Actor’s Astronomer ad pokes fun at canoodling CEO, while Kim Kardashian’s face sling raises eyebrows and jowlsShe is an actor, a businesswoman, a guru and an influencer, but at heart – let’s be honest – Gwyneth Paltrow is a sales guy, who has shown us time and again via Goop how thoroughly she understands how to monetise sneering. This week, crisis PR-style, she lent her world-class expertise to Astronomer, the company that dragged everyone’s eyes up to the jumbotron at a Coldplay concert two weeks ago when two of its married executives were entwined where they shouldn’t have been. Continue reading...
Abundance is Rachel Reeves’s summer beach read, and with its optimistic ideas about energy and housing, it shows the left a possible way forwardSheer joy. That’s how it felt watching England’s Lionesses romping gleefully across the pitch after their victory in Basel – not just because they won but because of the way they did it, with an exuberance and a resilience and an obvious love of playing together that makes them irresistible to watch. That 65,000 people came out in the drizzle for their homecoming parade down the Mall was testament not just to the deserved new popularity of women’s football but also to the longing for a national event that, even if only briefly, made us feel cheerful, expansive, as if all things were possible.So it’s interesting that for her summer beach reading Rachel Reeves picked Abundance, the American journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s blueprint for the more permanent rebuilding of hope and joy. It’s a pro-growth, techno-optimist rallying cry for progressives to reinvent themselves as purveyors of plenty and good times in contrast to the right’s crabby, mean-spirited “scarcity mindset” – which revolves around the belief that there isn’t enough good stuff to go round and therefore the priority is snatching it back off immigrants or the poor or whatever bewildered former ally Donald Trump accuses of ripping America off.Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...
Brands are no longer concerned about trying to look progressive after nearly a decade of woke-vertising Hot off a gig where she was selling a bar of “morning wood” soap containing her used bathwater, the actor Sydney Sweeney is making headlines for another dubious advert. This one is for American Eagle and the campaign line idea is that Sweeney, clad in denim, has great jeans. Get it?An apparel company employing a zeitgeisty actor and exploiting an obvious genes/jeans pun to flog denim would not normally be noteworthy. But the ad has sparked an intense online discussion, one which has now bubbled up to the White House, about whether having a blond-haired, blue-eyed actor – who happens to keep pretty quiet about politics – talking about her great genes is a racist dog-whistle and nod to eugenics. Continue reading...
To counter attacks on net zero, challenges including the need for grid upgrades will have to be graspedWith net zero policies under attack from elected far-right populists as well as autocratic petrostates, and another summer of record-breaking temperatures in Europe, the failure to decarbonise the world’s power supply is as gravely concerning as ever. But the UN secretary general, António Guterres, struck an optimistic note in a recent speech in New York. The world, he said, “is on the cusp of a new era … The sun is rising on a clean energy age.” Pointing to falls in the cost of onshore wind and solar, and the risk of further gas-price shocks in future, he called on big technology companies – whose datacentres are one reason for soaring energy use – to adopt a target of 100% low-carbon electricity by 2030.Given US president Donald Trump’s personal hostility to renewable energy, Mr Guterres may be right that it makes more sense to demand action from US businesses at this point. In Scotland earlier this week, Mr Trump launched his latest misleading tirade, urging European leaders to “stop the windmills”.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...
It is refreshing to see women’s achievements celebrated, and statuary become more representative of a diverse nationEfforts to ensure that modern values are reflected in public sculpture began well before the Black Lives Matter protests five years ago. Those demonstrations saw the statue of the Bristol slave trader Edward Colston dragged from its pedestal and dumped in the harbour, while multiple Confederate monuments were removed from cities in the southern US.Statues in Britain have gradually reflected evolving social values. A statue of the suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst was unveiled in Westminster in 1930, two years after women were finally granted the vote on equal terms to men. Nelson Mandela joined Winston Churchill in Parliament Square in 2007. The nurse Mary Seacole became the first named black, Caribbean woman to be honoured with a UK statue in 2016. In the same year, the Monumental Welsh Women campaign was established. It set itself a target of five statues, and has only one to go.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...
Why do people dismiss this vital subject? asks Chris Walters. Plus Jeanette Hamilton on the importance of talking to childrenWhy is it that, in all of the recent discussion of oral literacy (Letters, 30 July; Editorial, 27 July; Simon Jenkins, 24 July), there appears to be no mention of the one subject that already exists that has speaking and listening at its very heart: drama? Of course, discussion, debates, rehearsed readings – all of the things that advocates of oral literacy cite – are vital. And all are embedded within the drama curriculum. Debates don’t have to be formal; watch a group of children negotiate how to form and shape a piece of drama, and you see vivid debate in action. Rehearsed readings? Surely rehearsed performance is better. So why this apparent dismissal?Perhaps it is distrust of the creative imagination that drama has as its very basis. Or the focus that the subject also has on movement as another vital tool of communication? Or is it a distaste for the apparent unruliness of the drama studio, where children do not sit in rows (other teachers dread covering for drama, in case they are required to oversee such chaos)? Of course, the debating chamber has its place. But what is for most children their most common oral experience, and frequently their most abiding memory? Performing in the school play, whether that be the infant nativity play or Shakespeare or some other challenging text. By all means, encourage oracy in the classroom. But don’t forget the drama studio or the school stage.Chris WaltersLittle Ickford, Buckinghamshire Continue reading...
Dr Wendy Bryant responds to an article by Abi Stephenson about hyperemesis gravidarumAbi Stephenson’s article about hyperemesis gravidarum – “extreme morning sickness” – carried me through memories, confirmation, horror and, at last, hope (Don’t call it morning sickness: ‘At times in my pregnancy I wondered if this was death coming for me’, 31 July).When I hear of a new pregnancy, I ask after the mother, recalling my two pregnancies in the early 1990s. Both ended with successful delivery, and I can’t imagine life without my two children. But I wonder whether my daughter will have inherited my predisposition to sickness throughout pregnancy, just as I did from my own mother. Continue reading...
Tate director, Maria Balshaw, responds to reports of a decline in visitor numbers. Catherine Bliss is unimpressed by recent offerings at the galleriesTate Britain’s visitor numbers continue to rise year on year, and Tate Modern is the most visited museum of modern art in the world. Over 6 million people visited a Tate gallery in 2024. Your report (Tate director blames Brexit and Covid for slump in visitors, 29 July) compares our latest attendance figures for Tate Modern and Tate Britain against the most visited year in their history, 2019, when they had 700,000 more visitors than the year before. It would be fairer to compare with an average of annual attendances before Covid.As your article notes, the number of UK visitors to Tate’s galleries has returned to 95% of pre-pandemic levels. Attendances at paid-for exhibitions at both Tate Modern and Tate Britain are also back up to pre-Covid levels. Almost all of the remaining shortfall is in international tourists’ visits to the free collections. However, a further 1 million people engaged with Tate works in exhibitions worldwide. While demographic changes in European visitation have had an impact, our success with local audiences, the achievement that your article notes of 76,000 visitors to Tate Modern’s Birthday Weekend (70% of whom were under 35), and our upcoming programme of Pablo Picasso, JMW Turner, John Constable and Tracey Emin, have given us a stronger platform than ever for future growth.Maria BalshawDirector, Tate Continue reading...
London airport expansion | Keir Starmer’s agenda | English pubs | Trump’s orangery | Scotching punsA decade ago a former mayor of London threatened to lie down in front of the bulldozers to stop Heathrow expansion. It obviously worked. Time for Sadiq to repeat Boris’s threat (Heathrow submits ‘shovel-ready’ plans for third runway, 1 August)?David DuellDurham• In his article comparing Starmer with Attlee, Martin Kettle asserts that there are “echoes of Attlee’s agenda in Starmer’s” (Critics say Starmer is no Attlee – and they’re right. Labour must look to the future, not the past, 31 July). Perhaps he could also tell us what that agenda is.Alasdair MacdonaldGlasgow Continue reading...
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Liam Neeson steps into Leslie Nielsen’s accident-prone shoes in a comic sequel, and the Addams Family’s most morbid member goes back to schoolThe Naked GunOut nowFollowing a slightly tortuous period in development, a new Naked Gun film is in cinemas with Liam Neeson playing the son of legendary Det Sgt Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen in the three original films). Also starring Pamela Anderson and Busta Rhymes. Continue reading...
Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the last seven days Continue reading...
There’s a hugely effective horror starring Sally Hawkins, and Rob Brydon hosts a fun new reality series about getting lost – but ideally not for long. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews Continue reading...
Conservative party leader, who grew up in Nigeria and US, says she has not renewed her Nigerian passport in decadesKemi Badenoch has said she no longer considers herself Nigerian and does not possess a Nigerian passport.The Conservative party leader, who was born in London, but grew up in Nigeria and the US and did not return to the UK until she was 16, said she had not renewed her Nigerian passport in two decades. Continue reading...
US president accused of ‘firing the messenger’ as he makes claims without evidence about Erika McEntarferDonald Trump fired the federal government official in charge of labor statistics, hours after data revealed jobs growth stalled this summer, prompting accusations that he is “firing the messenger”.The US president claimed that Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of labor statistics, had “faked” employment figures in the run-up to last year’s election, in an effort to boost Kamala Harris’s chances of victory. Continue reading...
Bishop of Fulham says sorry for offence caused when he told singers to leave for making ‘terrible racket’A bishop who went on stage in a dressing gown and shut down a choir for making a “terrible racket” has apologised for the “distress and offence” he caused.Last Friday, Jonathan Baker, the bishop of Fulham, told a room of about 360 people, including the City Academy Voices choir, to leave St Andrew church in Holborn, central London, as they neared the end of their special summer concert. Continue reading...
Bottle stashed in wall cavity of heritage-listed Cape Bruny lighthouse contained letter written in 1903 by Tasmanian lighthouse inspectorGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastA painter in Tasmania has uncovered a sealed glass bottle containing a message that was hidden within a wall cavity of the historic Cape Bruny lighthouse more than 120 years ago.Specialist painter Brian Burford was performing routine maintenance on the seaside structure when the discovery took place, according to Annita Waghorn, historic heritage manager for the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service. Continue reading...
Change to border security bill will also make it a crime to advertise fake passports, visas and work opportunitiesMinisters are to outlaw social media adverts promoting journeys on small boats across the Channel to asylum seekers.The government will create a UK-wide criminal offence that could lead to perpetrators being sentenced for up to five years in prison and a hefty fine. Continue reading...
US banks have already pulled out of NZBA, the UN environment programme’s finance initiativeBarclays has become the second UK bank to withdraw from a UN-backed net zero target-setting group, claiming that a wave of defections by international lenders meant it was no longer fit for purpose.It marks a fresh blow for the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), after HSBC left in early July. It came months after a wave of exits by US banks, which departed in the run-up to Donald Trump’s inauguration in January. Continue reading...
Government is counting on tech to provide a panacea, but there may be simpler ways to keep climate goals on trackHeathrow submits ‘shovel-ready’ plans for third runwayWhy is Heathrow’s third runway back on the agenda?Expanding Heathrow would result in increased carbon dioxide emissions and could put the UK further off track on its climate goals, but the government is claiming it can offset that by investing in research on new low-carbon fuels for aircraft and on electric planes.However, any such technology is still decades away, if it ever reaches commercial scale, making it certain that any new runway in the near future would be used by the same kerosene-fuelled, high-carbon aircraft that we have today. Continue reading...
Thistle-shaped Depastrum cyathiforme was last seen in France in 1976, but has now been found on South UistFor nearly 50 years, there has been no trace of Depastrum cyathiforme, a stalked jellyfish that resembles a thistle flower.The distinctive jellyfish was feared globally extinct after being last spotted in Roscoff, northern France, in 1976. Continue reading...
Donald Trump’s enduring hostility to wind power is no longer a personal quirk, it’s now a policy direction with profound consequences for global emissions• Don’t get Down to Earth delivered to your inbox? Sign up here to get the newsletter in fullThe inner workings of Donald Trump’s mind have long provoked bemusement and speculation, with his often erratic opinions driven seemingly by grievance and anecdote rather than evidence.But on one topic Trump has remained resolutely consistent: he hates wind turbines – and, more latterly, renewable energy in general. This enmity burst into view in 2011 – four years before he descended his golden escalator to announce he was running for US president – when Trump waged an unsuccessful battle to halt “ugly” offshore turbines visible from his Scottish golf course.Tilting at windmills? Trump’s claims about turbines fact-checked‘Shooting ourselves in the foot’: how Trump is fumbling geothermal energyTrump effort to ditch greenhouse gas finding ignores ‘clearcut’ science, expert says Continue reading...
Bectu and Fawcett Society say airing show will distress those who complained about Gregg Wallace and John TorodeThe BBC is facing mounting pressure to scrap this year’s series of MasterChef after the sacking of the presenters Gregg Wallace and John Torode.The heads of the broadcast union Bectu and a leading women’s rights organisation have joined those calling for the series to be shelved, arguing it would cause distress to the people who had made complaints about the two men. Continue reading...
600,000 people have signed up for updates on Corbyn and Sultana’s leftwing party. What is it called? You name itWhat’s in a name? Potentially a lot, if you are launching a movement with ambitions “to shape something truly transformative” in British politics.That’s the challenge facing Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, the former Labour MPs who announced plans last month, if not in the most coordinated fashion, to launch a leftwing political party. More than 600,000 people have already signed up for updates on the new group, which will be called … what? Continue reading...
Jon Ruben charged with three counts of wilful ill treatment of a child after illnesses at camp in StathernA 76-year-old man has been charged after a number of children became unwell at a summer camp in Leicestershire.Jon Ruben, of Ruddington, Nottingham, has been charged with three counts of wilful ill treatment of a child. The charges relate to three children at the rural camp in the village of Stathern, Leicestershire police said on Friday. Continue reading...
Family say Ameiya Del Brocco and younger brother Ricardo Junior were ‘beautiful, bright, and deeply loved children’A British brother and sister who drowned off a beach on the north-eastern coast of Spain have been named as Ameiya Del Brocco, 13, and 11-year-old Ricardo Junior.Their father, Ricardo Senior, who had also entered the water, was rescued by local emergency services after the incident during a family holiday in the Catalan town of Salou on Tuesday. Continue reading...
Days after neighbouring countries announced a ceasefire, tensions are high and thousands of Cambodians are leaving ThailandAs a Cambodian living in Thailand, 31-year-old Da, has kept her children home from school this week in fear they might face abuse.“One of my friends went to the market yesterday to buy durian and the seller told her that she hated Cambodians,” she says, of rising tensions between the neighbouring countries. Continue reading...
Move comes after Maxwell met with deputy attorney general about those involved in late sex offender’s crimesGhislaine Maxwell, the associate of Jeffrey Epstein who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex-trafficking crimes, has been transferred from a federal prison in Florida, to a lower-security facility in Texas, the US Bureau of Prisons said on Friday.“We can confirm, Ghislaine Maxwell is in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) at the Federal Prison Camp (FPC) Bryan in Bryan, Texas,” a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons said in a statement. Continue reading...
Case opens door to other costly lawsuits after jury held that the car company bore significant responsibility in the crashA Florida jury ordered Tesla to pay more than $200m to victims of a deadly crash involving its Autopilot driver assist technology.Friday’s verdict is a hit for Elon Musk’s car company, as it opens the door to other costly lawsuits and could potentially strike a blow to Tesla’s reputation for safety at a critical time for the company. Continue reading...
The critically maligned return of Carrie Bradshaw will not be returning after a two-part finaleAnd Just Like That, the Sex and the City spin-off series, is set to end after its current season.The news was announced on the official social channels by the showrunner Michael Patrick King, who wrote that they held off on telling fans to avoid overshadowing the third and final season, which will end with a two-part finale. “It’s with great gratitude we thank all the viewers who have let these characters into their homes and their hearts over these many years,” he said. Continue reading...
For the first time since 2011, we face a six-month gap in the release schedule for cape-wearing heroes. But what caused the slowdown, and is it a victory for ‘real’ cinema?Fed up with all those superhero movies cluttering up the multiplexes and forcing your delicate black-and-white Lithuanian goat-herding tragedy on to a single screen at 10am on a Tuesday? Angry, like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, that a $300m CGI raccoon gets more screen time than the slow and haunting meditation on existential despair your favourite auteur spent a decade working on? For you, then, the darkest days of comic book movie hegemony may be over. A quick peek at the theatrical release calendar suggests that there is not a single new major-studio superhero flick due to hit multiplexes in the next six months. That’s right, a full, blissful half a year – which hasn’t happened since May 2011. For years, the anti-comic-book brigade have insisted superhero movies are sucking the oxygen out of cinema and killing originality. Now, the great superhero drought of 2025 makes it look as though their side has finally prevailed. And maybe, after the best part of two decades of interchangeable third-act rubble fights and billionaire orphans growling about destiny, that’s as it should be.For those of us who are really rather fond of superheroes on the big screen, however, it feels like a worry. Six long months with no multiverse chaos or retconned origin stories?. What is going on? Is the comic book movie really dead? Did audiences finally get superhero fatigue? Or could it just be that the studios looked at their balance sheets, remembered Madame Web happened, and decided to give us all a six-month palate cleanse before trying again? Continue reading...
It’s an epic tale of revenge in The Count of Monte Cristo. Plus: Nicola Walker turns detective in Annika. Here’s what to watch this evening9pm, U&Drama Continue reading...
New documentary Spreadsheet Champions follows six competitors as they head to the Microsoft Office Specialist world championship in FloridaSix years ago, Melbourne-based film-maker Kristina Kraskov read an article about an international Microsoft Excel competition and had two thoughts. The first: “What the hell, that can’t be real.” The second: “There’s got to be a film about this – I want to watch it so badly.”There wasn’t a film about competitive spreadsheeting, so Kraskov decided to make it herself. The subject appealed to the director, whose work captures “different inner worlds that are a bit unusual on the outside”, including a short film titled Party in the Back, about a mullet festival. Continue reading...
Non-stop coitus, controversial nudity and shocking sex toys: steamy scenes in costume dramas have changed since Colin Firth got his shirt wet in Pride and Prejudice. Here is an outrageous history of small-screen saucinessOutlander first sizzled our screens in 2014, with Vulture soon declaring that the period drama had “the best sex on television”. Its tale of second world war nurse Claire (Caitriona Balfe) time-travelling to 18th-century Scotland and falling in love with clansman Jamie (Sam Heughan) certainly earned the accolade. The wedding night episode features Claire reaching such an explosive orgasm that it requires smelling salts for viewers to get through. There’s a knee-trembling “castle cunnilingus” scene and, at one point, the extraordinary moment when Claire saves Jamie’s life by masturbating him. It has proved so popular that in 2026 its eighth (and final) season will air.In the last year we’ve had shows such as Carême, about a Napoleonic-era celebrity chef who likes foreplay with a dollop of whipped cream, and orgy-filled Mary & George, about the lover of James I of England/James VI of Scotland. Outlander has even spawned a prequel, Blood of My Blood, about the entwining stories of Claire’s and Jamie’s parents, two couples who also enjoy time travel and sex. Sure enough, there’s a romp against a table less than half an hour in, a dizzying amount of hand brushes and a sex scene that clocks up nearly 10 long minutes. How did period dramas get so raunchy? Continue reading...
An American lives out her British dream in an uninspired yet competently assembled trifle from The Inbetweeners creator Iain MorrisCall it the Bridgerton effect, which itself was arguably the result of The Crown effect, but the Netflix algorithm is currently aimed toward the UK with moonier eyes than usual. Last month saw Lena Dunham recount her days as an American getting to grips with the realities of London in Too Much, and as production begins on yet another adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, here comes the sudsy romance My Oxford Year where the object of affection is England itself.One might assume that a university-set film directed by The Inbetweeners creator Iain Morris would be a ribald comedy geared toward a younger male crowd, but My Oxford Year, based on a novel by Julia Whelan, picks sentiment over sauce. It’s a frothy, throwaway fantasy about another American hoping to find herself in another country, think of Emily in Paris but Anna in Oxford. Anna (in-house Netflix star Sofia Carson) is a working-class New Yorker who has decided to defer her job at Goldman Sachs for a year so that she can study at Oxford, indulging her love of literature before she disappears into a life of numbers. Continue reading...
The musician was living in his mother’s basement when he blagged a job in LA. Soon, his mesmeric live shows sparked a bidding frenzy. He describes how finding his wavelength on stage can fill audiences with joyFour years ago, Tyler Perry’s stepfather offered him a job in the office of his dog-training company in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Perry had little else to fill his time: he was 29 and living in his mother’s basement, uncertain what he should do with the rest of his life.In 2017, he had left Berklee College of Music, where he had ostensibly studied songwriting, but largely smoked weed and skipped class. The songs he wrote then were introspective and folk-driven, in the lineage of Nick Drake and Elliott Smith – artists he had been drawn to in his senior year of high school, who had spoken to him just as depression had first set in. “I was depressed for, like, 10 years,” he says. Continue reading...
Known as a core Dean Blunt collaborator, the singer and painter has a way with hypnotic melodies and blurred guitar that brings to mind the best of GrouperFrom Blackpool, EnglandRecommended if you like Grouper, Sinéad O’Connor, Dean Blunt Up next New album Blurr released via AD 93 on 19 SeptemberThe best of the UK underground right now resonates with a dank hum, a grimy, disaffected feeling. You don’t need me to tell you why: just listen to Moin, Mark William Lewis, Quade or Still House Plants and let the feeling mingle with the deep sense of dread already entrenched in your bones. One strand of this sound’s DNA can be traced back to Dean Blunt’s warped experimentalism. Anyone attuned to the enigmatic London musician’s output is likely already aware of his long-term collaborator Joanne Robertson, a fixture on 2021’s Black Metal 2 and last year’s Backstage Raver among others. For those outside the Bluntverse, she’s likely to go overground this year as the latest tendril from its world, her new album Blurr adding folky shades to this invitingly squalid sonic scene. Continue reading...
Royal Albert Hall, LondonThe evening’s two proms brought wildly contrasting energies. The BBC Phil were on blistering form and, late-night, the Estonian Philharmonic Choir were immaculate even if the programme felt a little blandEven among the staunchest classical music lovers, the phrase “star clarinettist” rings false. Compared with celebrity pianists, violinists and singers, virtuoso woodwind players don’t get much time in the spotlight. Yet Swedish clarinettist Martin Fröst isn’t just capable of technical wizardry, but is also a mesmerising, full-body performer. On stage at the Royal Albert Hall, he danced, struck poses and contorted himself like a rock icon shredding a guitar solo. All while producing a tone of astonishing refinement, absolutely uniform across the instrument’s multiple registers.Fröst dominated the first half of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra’s latest Proms outing. Copland’s Clarinet Concerto showcased his ability to blend minutely with orchestral timbres, his solo lines seamlessly interwoven with the cashmere warmth of the BBC Phil’s strings under Joshua Weilerstein. Meanwhile Fröst’s gear-change from the tenderness of its central cadenza into the sassy jazz-infused third section (here all hard-edged articulation and chippy, slightly rustic string playing) was utterly compelling. Continue reading...
(Genre Defying Entertainment/D Production)This sequel retains the original’s generation-defining mix of dread and debauchery, although it is overshadowed by recent bolder versions of the soundCould there be a better time for AraabMuzik – the Rhode Island MPC wizard also known as Abraham Orellana – to return with a sequel to Electronic Dream, his generation-defining 2011 debut? The original album was confounding and exhilarating in equal measure, thanks to its canny fusion of EDM rave-up synths and blown-out hip-hop beats. Alongside the rise of producers such as Clams Casino, it spoke to a post-financial crisis millennial generation finding much-needed euphoria in electronic maximalism. Now, gen Z-beloved artists such as Bladee and Nettspend are reviving an even bigger, bolder version of that sound, and finding huge cult audiencesBut perhaps that’s why Electronic Dream 2 – while engrossing and atmospheric, capturing AraabMuzik’s trademark fusion of dread and debauchery – almost feels meek. Some songs, such as the smeary, blushing Til You Drop, capture the hallucinatory brilliance of the original album. Others, such as opener 3AM and the moody Half a World Away, feel more like generic beat tape cuts, in part because AraabMuzik’s sound has been so influential that it now seems a little rote. Continue reading...
As the film of Deborah Levy’s novel Hot Milk is released, author Abigail Bergstrom explores the literary fascination with inaccessible, emotionally distant maternal figures‘My love for my mother is like an axe,” the narrator of Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel Hot Milk tells us. “It cuts very deep”. Set in the Spanish coastal city of Almería, the book – which has now been made into a film starring Sex Education’s Emma Mackey – is a sun-drenched unravelling of a daughter tethered to her ailing mother.Hot Milk fits into a growing canon of literature exploring the absent, or fading, or otherwise inaccessible mother – stories in which the maternal figure is pulled to the edge of the frame, so that the daughter can take centre stage. Books such as Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms and First Love, both featuring mother-daughter relationships marked by emotional distance and strained communication. Or The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante, where the protagonist, Leda, is both unseen daughter and deserting mother, a collision that unleashes emotional chaos. Continue reading...
We would like to hear your tributes to Allan Ahlberg and what his children’s books meant to youAllan Ahlberg, the children’s writer famous for popular children’s books such as Each Peach Pear Plum and the Jolly Postman, has died aged 87.When Ahlberg met his wife, Janet, an artist, she asked him to write a children’s story for her to illustrate. Their first book together, Here Are the Brick Street Boys, was published in 1975, and the Ahlbergs went on to become one of the most successful writer/illustrator partnerships in children’s literature. Continue reading...
The crime author on rediscovering Edith Wharton, and the brilliantly twisted author who changed her ideas about writingMy earliest reading memory I have a distinct memory of sitting by the bookshelves in the first house we lived in and suddenly realising I could understand the words in lots of the books. It was like discovering I could perform magic – pulling out one book after the other and disappearing into other worlds. I bumped into a childhood friend the other day who told me she remembers being annoyed when I came for a play date at her house and the first thing I wanted to do was see if she had any books I hadn’t read. My favourite book growing up I loved Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge series as a girl. The exquisite intricacy of the pictures, their evocation of a hidden world … I’m enjoying rediscovering them with my four‑year‑old. The High Hills has a wonderful, Tolkien-esque quest element to it. Continue reading...
Passion by David Morley; Versus Versus edited by Rachael Boast; So What by Frederick Seidel; In the Hollow of the Wave by Nina Mingya Powles; Transfigurations by Jay WrightPassion by David Morley (Carcanet, £12.99) David Morley’s ardent, vividly alive latest collection draws on his Romany background and knowledge as an ecologist and naturalist. The poems weave the dynamism of the Romany language with English to celebrate our intimacy with the natural world’s vast mystery and beauty: “from elm top to hedgerow … from harebell to whitethroat: / Sorí simensar sí men, / Sorí simensar sí men.” (We are all one.) This evocative braid of language is also used to consider the aching cruelty of oppression – “The gavvers kettle the Travellers on the market square. / The locals stand by gawking, piss-taking” – as well as the defiant, quicksilver power of Romany language and community. “Nouns grew spry and spring-heeled /… words which Travellers / might ride, or hide behind from hard law /… But spoken language moves / like meltwater under ice. Speech thaws into life.”Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled & Neurodivergent Poets, edited by Rachael Boast (Bloodaxe, £14.99) This anthology is a dizzying, continent-crossing explosion of verse, its topics and styles as individual as the poets; revelling in the diversity of a community that is often boxed in by ableism and prejudice. A potent theme of resisting limits courses through the book. Lateef McLeod’s poem pushes back against others’ definitions: “I am too pretty for your Ugly Laws, / too smooth to be shut in”, while Mishka Hoosen’s work celebrates the power and agency of those who think and live differently: “I am that howl / in the night ward. I am electric / without your help.” In a period in the UK when disabled people’s rights and living conditions are under threat, this collection feels timely. As Maya Abu-Hayyat suggests: “They will fall in the end, / those who say you can’t.” Continue reading...
A trip to the seaside isn’t complete without a jangling cup of 2p coins or an overconfident uncle nursing a sore hand. Here’s a rundown of the top nostalgia-inducing gamesThe seaside day trip remains an almost essential component of the school summer holidays, and although the big beachfront arcades have changed a lot over the last decade, they are still a magnet for small kids with handfuls of change, as well as adults hoping to spy an old Space Invaders cabinet in the back. As a child of the 1980s, coin-op video games were an obsession, but what really fascinated me were the older machines, the electro-mechanical oddities that hung on into the digital age. Here are 10 of the best – please add your own in the comments. Continue reading...
There’s no shame any more, and no better place to lose yourself and the world with a few quiet rounds of Pocket Card Jockey or Marvel Snap than in the quiet of the privyThere are two types of people in the world. Those who play games on the toilet, and those who pretend they don’t. I am a proud member of the former category. I realise this may not be the most “Guardian” of Guardian article openings, but we all use the toilet and we all play games; I am merely providing a Venn diagram.We used to read books in there. I even had a small bookcase in mine, and am old enough to remember when a workplace was not considered civilised unless there was a copy of that day’s newspaper in every cubicle so that hard working staff could catch up with global goings on during their five minutes of down-the-pan time. Continue reading...
After a long day of exploring, swimming or hanging with grandparents, games from Fortnite to Super Mario are a good way to wind down. Sometimes I play along, tooWe’re a week into the school summer holidays here in England, and I wonder how many parents who started out determined to keep their children completely away from screens are now beginning to feel the strain. When my sons were much younger, I often had these idyllic images in my head of day trips to the seaside, back garden treasure hunts, paddling in the river, visiting relatives … an endless series of character forming experiences which I imagined in grainy Kodachrome colours. Then I’d be faced with the reality of having a job, and also the, let’s say, limited attention span of my sons. Those boys could rocket through a host of formative activities in a few hours leaving a trail of muddy boots, half-finished crafting projects and tired grandparents in their wake. Sheepishly, we’d end up allowing some Fortnite time to catch our breath.There is so much pressure and guilt around children and gaming, especially during long school breaks, and I think we need to seriously redress our outlook as a society. I harbour many lovely memories of gaming with my sons during hot August days; drowsily loafing about building ridiculous mansions in Minecraft or laughing ourselves stupid in Goat Simulator. We would always take the Switch on holiday with us, so that in the evenings, when we went out for meals, there would be an hour or so where my wife and I could linger over a glass of wine, while the boys silently played Super Mario together. We still managed to build sand castles, go swimming and explore unfamiliar towns, but games provided a way to wind down and enjoy something familiar. Continue reading...
Thief: The Dark Project converges with Kafka, Gogol and Tamagotichis in this immersive sim with a giant personalityPlanning is half the fun in immersive sims. Titles such as Thief and Dishonored drop players into clockwork worlds where there are emails or letters to be read, vents to wriggle through, and desperate situations to overcome with smarts and social engineering as much as sheer violence.You could argue that all that’s been missing from the genre until now is a colossal policeman whose lanky body rises hundreds of feet into the sky, and who can look down at you and see absolutely everything you’re doing. Luckily, the new game from the Russian developer Tallboys is here to fix that. In Militsioner, you have been arrested for some manner of nebulous crime and must now leave town as quickly as you can. Bribe the ticketmaster at the railway? Break a window to create a distraction? All classic immersive sim solutions. Sadly, there’s that policeman to deal with first, a melancholic but watchful giant who towers over the ravaged urban surroundings even when sat down with his hands resting on his knees. Continue reading...
Linder headlines the UK’s largest festival of visual art, Jeremy Deller delves into Welsh history and graffiti queen Lady Pink scares Keith Haring – all in your weekly dispatchEdinburgh art festivalArtists from Linder to Mike Nelson provide the fun in this hugely varied city-wide extravaganza. • Various Edinburgh venues, 7-24 August Continue reading...
Pleasance Courtyard, EdinburghHalf lecture, half nightmare, this high-precision performance blurs the line between medic and patient in a Victorian asylum for mentally ill womenIn 19th-century France, the Salpêtrière hospital was an institution for mentally ill women. Safe to say the definition of mental illness was not the same as it is today. Inmates could end up being committed for anything from promiscuity to poverty.It was here that Dr Jean-Martin Charcot developed his theory of hysteria, a word whose etymology goes back to the Greek word for uterus. Breaking with a long tradition of doctors who attributed erratic behaviour in women to a wandering womb, Charcot treated hysteria as a neurological disorder. He insisted men could be susceptible too. Continue reading...
Jermyn Street Theatre, LondonThe fictional island of Sirene is home to a tangled web of lovers in this fun and frolicking adaptation of Compton Mackenzie’s novel featuring a fantastic castCompton Mackenzie’s lesbian novel was published in the same year as two other canonical queer tomes that eclipsed it: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.Here, it is adapted into an arch musical comedy by Sarah Travis (score) and Richard Stirling (lyrics). It feels befitting of Mackenzie’s rather madcap interwar story featuring a Bloomsbury-style group of lesbians on the fictional island of Sirene. Continue reading...
Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Niall Moorjani plays a storyteller facing public execution for joining an uprising against India’s colonial rulersWhen it comes to cruel and unusual punishment, it is hard to think of anything more grizzly than that meted out by the British army in Kanpur (then anglicised as Cawnpore) in retribution for the 19th-century Indian uprising against colonial occupation. Having been rounded up, each ringleader was tied to the mouth of a cannon. Before the eyes of the public, the weapon was fired.To emphasise the point, a cannon sits on stage in Kanpur: 1857 – surely the largest prop at the fringe – positioned threateningly behind Niall Moorjani, who plays a storyteller facing his final hour, trying to come up with a narrative that makes sense of his awful predicament. How did a boy who grew up peacefully on the banks of the Ganges, who was captivated by poetry and the beauty of the spoken word, end up in this situation? Continue reading...
In this week’s newsletter: The British festival season is a logistical minefield. One veteran promoter walks us through the thrills, threats and total meltdowns and what to do when it all goes wrongWe’re in the thick of festival season in the UK, where every weekend seems to host a dizzying array of musical mega-events. The likes of Glastonbury, Download, TRNSMT, Wireless and others may already be in the rear-view, but there are still plenty more to come across all manner of genres: Camp Bestival (happening this very weekend), Creamfields, Green Man, All Points East, Reading and Leeds, End of the Road and so many others, across farms, city parks, country estates and the odd mid-Wales mountain range.For the people who run these festivals, months or even a full years-worth of work will have gone into readying for a single, crucial long weekend. The stakes are high: whether things go off without a hitch or not will, in some cases, determine that festival’s future. And boy, are there a lot of potential hitches: electricity, sanitation, ticketing, food and drink, security, and the fragile egos of famous musicians, to name but a few. “The scary thing about festivals is, if you take away one small element, the whole thing collapses,” says promoter James Scarlett. Continue reading...
The singer-songwriter and accordionist won six Grammy awards and worked with the Rolling Stones and Bob DylanFlaco Jiménez, master of the accordion and pioneer of tejano music, has died at the age of 86.“It is with great sadness that we share tonight the loss of our father, Flaco Jimenez,” reads a post from his family on Facebook. “He was surrounded by his loved ones and will be missed immensely. Thank you to all of his fans and friends – those who cherished his music. And a big thank you for all of the memories. His legacy will live on through his music and all of his fans.” Continue reading...
The superstar actor will release his latest film on YouTube so families who cannot afford cinema trips can watchAbout ten years ago, Aamir Khan became troubled. Despite being one of Bollywood’s most bankable superstars for more than three decades, he realised that only tiny numbers of Indians were watching him on the big screen.Indian cinema is widely adored and has an outsized influence on society but just 2-3% of its 1.4 billion people go to the cinema. Continue reading...
As his turn in cop-comedy reboot brings rave reviews, we look back on the actor’s varied career, from Schindler’s List to Star Wars and, of course, TakenLiam Neeson may have gained pop-culture immortality for his gravelly growl of a certain line of dialogue in the 2008 hostage thriller Taken – “I don’t have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills” – but the release of his new film, a reboot of the classic spoof cop movie The Naked Gun represents another remarkable turn in Neeson’s distinguished career, which has taken in heavyweight prestige dramas, historical biopics, blockbusting science fiction, superhero epics and head-cracking action cinema.In The Naked Gun, Neeson has for the first time taken the lead role in an out-and-out comedy. He plays Frank Drebin Jr, the police-detective son of Leslie Nielsen’s Frank Drebin in the original. Created by the celebrated comedy team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, The Naked Gun was released in 1988, with Nielsen featuring in two sequels, The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear from 1991 and Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult in 1994, as well as the preceding TV series Police Squad!, which aired in 1982. Neeson’s intense, unflappable acting style has been acclaimed by critics as a perfect match for Nielsen’s celebrated stone-face delivery; the Guardian’s chief film critic Peter Bradshaw said that Neeson “deadpans it impeccably”, while the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin writes that Neeson “delivers his dialogue with a gravelly matter-of-factness that only compounds its lunacy”. Continue reading...
As exam results days loom, we examine what the big lenders offer those heading to universityThis month, hundreds of thousands of students across the UK will receive some life-changing news that will determine where they spend the next few years of their lives.However, amid all the celebrations, as sixth-formers find out if they got into their first-choice university, and the (hopefully temporary) sorrows, as those whose exams did not go to plan scramble for a place through clearing, there are some important financial matters to think about. Continue reading...
Our menswear expert shares the summer-to-autumn fits that deserve a spot in every man’s wardrobe• The best short shorts for men – and how to pull them offAugust is a tricky time to buy clothes. Shops are winding down their summer sales and introducing new season collections, but there’s still at least another month of good weather. Yet you don’t want to double down on summery separates too much, because autumn/winter is just around the corner.That’s why it’s the best time to start buying transitional pieces – those you can wear whether the temperature’s in the 30s or the low teens. Think about clothes that lend themselves to layering, such as an Oxford shirt. You could wear it over a tank top with trousers for a nice dinner fit on holiday, but it works just as well under a blazer when the weather changes. Similarly, a lightweight knit could be worn around your shoulders, over a T-shirt or even across your front a la Nicholas Hoult. Continue reading...
Serve up perfect rice every time with our expert-tested rice cookers, from space-saving mini appliances to microwave steaming bowls• In the US? Check out our top-rated rice cookers thereHow often do you eat rice? Even if it’s not a daily staple in your house, it’s safe to say most Britons cook and eat rice at least a few times a week. And while it may seem a simple thing to cook, it can be surprisingly difficult to get it right.From long-grain to quick-cook, brown basmati to jasmine, different rice grains have different cook times, different rates of absorption and varying starch levels, which can all affect the result. Instead of fluffy, individual grains, you may find your rice burnt, stuck to the pan or with a claggy, chalky or overly glutinous texture. Dinner ruined.Best rice cooker overall: Yum Asia Bamboo rice cookerBest budget rice cooker: Russell Hobbs large rice cooker Continue reading...
Looking to ditch disposable cups for good? Our reviewer bounced on trampolines and braved boiling brews to find the best• Everything you need to make great coffee – and the kit that’s not worth itSingle-use takeaway cups belong with throwaway supermarket carrier bags in the landfill of history. Usually made from plastic-coated paper, the billions used each year burn through copious amounts of energy and water, while also contributing significantly to landfill.The solution is simple: switch to a reusable coffee cup. These take various forms, such as cups, bottles and mugs, but are more eco-friendly options once used multiple times. There are leakproof travel mugs that can sit in a rucksack pocket; small ones ideally suited to car cup holders; and ones made from recycled post-consumer materials.Best travel mug overall: KeepCup CommuterBest budget travel mug: Yeti the Rambler Continue reading...
From gen Z-approved wraparounds to £10 classics, these sunglasses will see you through summer and beyond• The best summer shoes: 44 sandals, pumps and trainers for everyoneTrying to find the right sunglasses can be overwhelming – after all, they’ll be on your face for the rest of this summer and hopefully several of the next. They take centre-stage, and as such, can be a daunting thing to shop for.But their main character energy is also part of the fun. Like a headline or a book cover, they set out an intention. More importantly, they also protect your eyes. The right pair will marry practicality with aesthetics. Continue reading...
A summery rice salad with a crispy south-east Asian twistIt’s been a salad kind of summer so far. Hot days spent camping with friends, impromptu picnics in the park, afternoons watching the tennis, reading in the garden with Test Match Special on in the background. Food has had to fit around summer life and, of all the meals, this has been one of the best. It has summer etched into the heart of it in that it’s fresh, flavourful and good for feeding a crowd. It’s a (very) wild take on Laotian crispy rice salad and is abundant with herbs, garden vegetables and, crucially, there’s barely any “cooking” involved at all. Continue reading...
This cool, textured grape that’s usually grown by the coast is an easy pairing with any catch of the day, and will also happily accompany any summer menuIt’s World Albariño Day today – 1 August. I’ve got a soft spot for arbitrary wine holidays, so I’m marking the occasion by using it as an excuse to spend the weekend guzzling one of my favourite white wines. I’ve given you notice (sort of), so off you go to your nearest independent or supermarket to pick up something racy and saline.It used to be thought that the albariño grape was brought to Spain by the French monks of Cluny, but that has since been disproved, with no parentage between albariño and burgundian varieties. Rather, the grape is now believed to be an ancient variety that’s native to the Iberian coast, with a naturally thick skin providing resistance to the diseases a humid climate can give rise to (alvarinho is the grape’s name in northern Portugal, where it’s essential in the production of easy-to-love vinho verde). Continue reading...
A margarita-alike with blackberries in place of triple sec makes for a refreshingly different summer snifterA neat little seasonal twist on the classic margarita, and simplicity itself to pull together.Nathan Woodhead, Lardo, London E8 Continue reading...
A fridge cake with layer upon layer of chocolate crepes sandwiching smooth white chocolate cream and cherry jamThis is a take on the classic black forest gateau, with layers of delicate chocolate crepes, silky white chocolate cream and sour cherry jam. (Use a good-quality store-bought jam if making your own is a step too far.) All the components can be made ahead of time, ready to be assembled, but be aware that the finished cake needs to be refrigerated for at least three hours, and preferably overnight. Continue reading...
Leanne has banned Wes’s hands-free hydrator because it’s a ‘turnoff’. You decide whose argument holds waterFind out how to get a disagreement settled or become a jurorIt looks like a drip and reminds me of a hospital. If he needs a drink, a cup is more appropriateI get that it was maybe insensitive to do it during sex, but I didn’t expect her to be so bothered Continue reading...
After a long, slow buildup, everything is over in a flash. Changing positions doesn’t help, so what’s left?I am a man in my 60s. When my wife and I have sex, I can keep it up (as it were) for 45 minutes, including about 20 minutes of coitus. All of which I enjoy very much. The problem in recent years is my orgasm. When it arrives, it is a bit of a letdown. It happens extremely quickly and feels like a premature ejaculation, even though it has taken a long time to get there. It makes no difference whether I am on top and in charge of the pace or whether my wife is. How can I make my orgasms more enjoyable?Certain medications – whether prescription or over-the-counter – can change the nature of one’s orgasm, so consider whether the culprit could be in your medicine cabinet. If this is a possibility, you should consult with the prescribing physician to find out if there might be an alternative. Another element to investigate is whether your hormones might have something to do with it. For example, you might ask a doctor to look at your testosterone levels. Strong orgasms are fuelled partly by sex hormones such as testosterone, and an insufficiency could lead to the symptoms you are experiencing. Finally, I can tell that you are proud of your sexual prowess, but it might be a good idea to relax a bit on the expectations you set for yourself. A person usually has a better orgasm when they are able to let go of performance pressure. Try to focus simply on pleasure. Continue reading...
In therapy, time apart is key to making the relationship work. The same applies to all the other people in our livesYou need a break. It is very important, from time to time, to take a break from your partner, from your work, from your children, from your exercise, from your screens, from alcohol and drugs and therapy and podcasts and crisps. We need time and space to rest; this is a crucial part of a better life. This much is obvious.But we need to take breaks for less obvious reasons too. Continue reading...
Luis’s depression has badly affected his sex life with partner Henry, but the bond between them is as strong as ever• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymouslyWe have the option to play away, but I don’t want to experience that intimacy with anybody else Continue reading...
From a new-build in Wales with balconies overlooking the sea to a historic cottage on the unspoilt north Cornwall coast Continue reading...
Cardiff council cancelled permit after its email asking for more information went into a driver’s spam folderMy husband and I have annually auto-renewed our two council parking permits, one for each vehicle, for three years.This April, as usual, our payment of £110 for both was debited, but a month later we were informed that the permits had been cancelled. Continue reading...
From museums to a cinema or the great outdoors, there are many ways to cut the cost of your excursionsA day trip begins with your journey to the attraction, and your savings can begin there, too, if you are using public transport. Continue reading...
A new review could bring big changes, from earlier auto enrolment and later retirement to flexible pensions that can help save for a house depositYou are going to have to start putting some money away for your retirement, or paying in more than you do now, and you are probably going to have to wait longer to get your hands on your state pension. That was effectively the message to millions of people this week when the government announced a wide-ranging review of the UK pensions system.The independent commission it launched will grapple with a host of thorny issues and make recommendations for change. Continue reading...
What’s most important about hearing health how it helps people stay engaged, say experts – here’s how to support itA recent study examined the potential link between hearing loss and dementia, suggesting that treating hearing loss can help the brain. Although the possible connection is still being untangled, study co-author and audiologist Nicholas Reed advises prioritizing hearing health regardless.“There are already more than enough established benefits related to hearing care,” says Reed, a faculty member of the NYU Langone Health Optimal Aging Institute. Continue reading...
Born with cystic fibrosis, Yvonne Hughes was lucky to survive her teens. She definitely didn’t expect to make it into her 50s. The comedian talks about the years she spent struggling to breathe – and the ‘miracle’ drug that turned her life aroundYvonne Hughes was 19, and attending the funeral of a friend with cystic fibrosis, when she realised: “Oh shit, I’m going to die of this.” She had met him during shared hospital stays in childhood, and although Hughes had always known she had CF, she had never understood her illness as terminal until that day in 1992, when she stood at the back of the crowded chapel in Glasgow. For three days afterwards, she couldn’t stop crying. “I had a kind of meltdown. That’s probably the first time I thought that this thing I had was going to kill me.”Over the next few months, Hughes, who was studying at the University of Glasgow, listened to her mum, dad and older sister chatting during family meals as if she was a ghost at the table. “I pulled back from them. I deliberately didn’t talk or include myself,” she says. “I wanted them to get used to sitting and chatting without me, so that when I died, they wouldn’t notice I wasn’t there.” Continue reading...
Experts weigh in on how to best protect your gut – and yourself – when you hit the roadSummer is in full swing, and for many, that means it’s time to hit the road. Whether you’re on a quick weekend jaunt or a multi-week tour of Europe, there are some things to consider: did you pack sunscreen? A phone charger? And how are you going to take care of your stomach?“Patients have troubles with stomach issues when they travel because they are exposed to unfamiliar food and water sources, differences in local hygiene and sanitation and changes in routine,” says Dr Franjo Vladic, a gastroenterologist at the Cleveland Clinic. Continue reading...
I kicked my habit on a retreat. Now I savour my daily coffee dose, which clears my thoughts and gives me a sense of wellbeing‘A little bit of what you fancy” is a call for moderation that has never worked for me. Not for my coffee habit, at least, which slides from the steely resolve to drink just two cups a day, to a wobbly-willed four, five mugs, or more. I’m better at giving it up altogether. Total detox brings the high of self-control and the illusion that I have overcome the caffeine addiction, at least until I fall off the wagon again.But some vices shouldn’t be given up, because they bring pleasure – and coffee is one of those for me. I love its mood-transforming uplift. It revs me up and calms me down. I once gave it up for two months – my longest abstention – hoping to shake off a virulent bout of insomnia, and it seemed as if I had entered the wilderness. Life felt more austere and my sleeplessness wasn’t solved, either. It was lose-lose. Continue reading...
Return of brand has been bubbling up through content creators on TikTok, and Hailey Bieber endorses itWhen it comes to glamorous fans, Emilio Pucci was the envy of other fashion designers. During the 1950s and 60s, the “prince of prints” – as the designer became known – dressed Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy and Sophia Loren. Marilyn Monroe was even buried in the brand. And now, more than 30 years after his death, Pucci’s trademark vibrant swirly prints are enjoying another fashion moment.The return of Pucci has been bubbling up through content creators on TikTok, and the brand has the endorsement of Gen Z favourite Hailey Bieber. But it was confirmed this week when Lyst, the fashion data experts, revealed that searches for the brand had increased 96% in the second quarter of the year. Two of the classic prints – the pink Marmo from 1968 and the Orchidee from 1966 – were particularly popular, on minidresses and handkerchief tops. Continue reading...
Criticised by some for promoting the language of eugenics but defended by others for killing ‘woke advertising’, the much-loved teen denim brand is causing a stirAmerican Eagle is a US-founded fashion brand that sells jeans, shrunken “baby” T-shirts and cropped sweatshirts to predominantly tween and teenage girls. On TikTok, users gush about their clothes in outfit-of-the-day posts or shopping hauls. This week, however, the brand found itself facing backlash over its new campaign, starring the 27-year-old White Lotus and Euphoria actor Sydney Sweeney, in which critics are alleging American Eagle uses the language of eugenics to try to sell denim.The campaign depicts Sweeney in a denim shirt and baggy jeans provocatively posing as a male voice says: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” In one now-viral clip, Sweeney is filmed pasting a campaign poster on to a billboard. The poster’s text reads “Sydney Sweeney has great genes jeans”. In another video that has since been removed from American Eagle’s social media channels, Sweeney, who has blond hair and blue eyes, says: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality, and even eye colour. My jeans are blue.” Continue reading...
Maybe you’re skipping the dishes and heading out for dinner. Or packing for a holiday with a big alfresco menu. Here are three ways to make getting dressed a doddle Continue reading...
From strappy sandals to brogues and patent pumps, there’s a flattie for every occasion and outfitWearing high heels in summer never worked. We must have been mad! Pretty much everything that is lovely about summer is incompatible with wearing heels. Being outside in the garden or the park, where the grass is soft underfoot! Delightful, but hopeless if you have to balance on tiptoes to stop your heels from sinking into the ground. Walking instead of getting the bus, because it’s so nice out! A seasonal treat, but only in comfy shoes. Summer weddings that start at 3pm and go on until the small hours! The absolute best, but murder with blisters. The beach! OK, we weren’t ever sufficiently insane to wear heels on sand or pebbles. Still, you get my drift.I haven’t sworn off heels for good, by the way. I think there was a time when lockdown broke my habit, but in the end I missed them. So when autumn comes around, I will relish pulling on my heeled boots for the first time. Come party season, I will hold fast to my belief that a really good night out starts with a shoe that gives a rush of visual pleasure and makes no concessions to being remotely sensible. But for the next couple of months, I have a strict flats-only policy. Continue reading...
A new company is offering swimmers the chance to cover the same distance as a cross-Channel swim but in friendlier waters – and with some tempting stops en routeFrom the port of Stari Grad, one of the oldest towns in Europe, we slip into the water and begin swimming out of the harbour, past the church of Saint Jerome and around a pine-clad headland to a nearby bay on Hvar’s northern coast. We emerge like an amphibious invasion force – about 160 swimmers, making our way to the hotel pool bar where drinks await. So far, so civilised. But this is only a warm-up …On 24 August 1875, Captain Matthew Webb became the first person to swim the Channel, slathered in animal fat to fend off the cold. At the time, it was heralded as a feat of near-superhuman endurance. One hundred and fifty years later, I signed up for a modern take on the 33.3km (21-mile) swim (the shortest distance across the Channel, although Webb was blown off course and ended up swimming something like 63km). This Croatian adaptation involves swimming between islands off the Dalmatian coast, is split across four days and includes a welcoming hotel (the three-star Places Hvar by Valamar) to recuperate in at the end of each day. And thankfully, neoprene has replaced tallow. Continue reading...
Our tipsters choose charming pubs on rivers, canals and lakes from Cornwall to Cumbria• Send us a tip on holidaying with teenagers – the best wins a £200 holiday voucherDuring last month’s heatwave I was lucky to cool off at an outside table at the Mayfly on the River Test near Stockbridge. Sipping a refreshing pint while leaping trout splashed in the water gave the scene a feel of the perfect English summer day. There’s a nearby weir, and forests and fields stretch into the distance. The pub has friendly staff, plenty of tables and a river-based menu including “brown butter chalk stream trout fillet” (£20.50) plus pub classics. If the setting inspired you as it did me, there are vineyards nearby to explore and the timber-framed village of Wherwell is just a stroll along the towpath.Joe Continue reading...
From Paris to Athens, we pick hidden havens to escape the summer heat and tourist crowdsEl Capricho, on the outskirts of Madrid, is one of the city’s lesser-known parks. It was built in 1784 by the Duke and Duchess of Osuna, and visited by 18th-century artists such as Francisco de Goya. Its 17-hectare gardens were designed by Jean Baptiste Mulot, who also worked on the Petit Trianon gardens at the Palace of Versailles. They are in three sections: Italian, French and English landscape. The park also has a small lake, a labyrinth, a bandstand and a mansion. One fascinating feature is an underground bunker, built in 1937 during the Spanish civil war – there are free guided tours at weekends.Open weekends and public holidays, 9am-9pm, April to September, then 9am-6.30pm, October to March, esmadrid.com Continue reading...
No money, no flat, no fiancee: in 2022 Bolton lost almost everything that underpinned his life. Three years and 53 countries later, he has more than rebuilt itOn the eve of his 30th birthday, Bobby Bolton found himself living in a mouldy caravan on a derelict farm in Hertfordshire. His relationship of 11 years had just ended, the construction business he had spent five years building was collapsing and he only had a few hundred pounds left in the bank. “I had moved out of the flat I shared with my ex, borrowed money from her to buy this caravan and had such low self-esteem about the direction my life and career was headed that I isolated myself,” he says. “I couldn’t socialise and I was stooping so much when I walked that I felt myself getting back issues. My mum thought I was suicidal.”She pleaded with him to come home and live with her in Wigan, but Bolton refused. “It felt like the ultimate defeat.” He compromised on a weekend visit instead. Driving the 200 miles north, Bolton soon ended up in the pub with old school friends. Several pints in, he saw something that would change his life. Continue reading...
From Arcadia, Babylon Uprising and Unfairground to Dean Martin and Inspector Morse, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz1 Bill Grundy regretted asking whom to “say something outrageous”?2 In 2018, who became the first UK Winter Olympian to retain their title?3 The 87-metre Ascent in Milwaukee is the world’s tallest building made from what?4 Which Harry Potter star is an Ivy League graduate?5 Which empire was founded in 1526 by Babur?6 What tinned food was first sold at Fortnum & Mason in 1886?7 Kerning is the space between what?8 Which work’s original title continued “… from this world, to that which is to come”?What links: 9 William Clark; Joy Davidman; Macklemore; Dean Martin; Inspector Morse?10 Arcadia; Babylon Uprising; Left Field; Shangri-La; Strummerville; Unfairground?11 95, 1995; XP, 2001; Vista, 2007; 11, 2021?12 Criollo; Forastero; Nacional; Trinitario?13 Busby; Dalglish; Ferguson; Ramsey; Robson; Southgate; Winterbottom?14 Eswatini; Lesotho; Morocco?15 Blaise Metreweli, 2025; Anne Keast-Butler, 2023; Stella Rimington, 1992? Continue reading...
Crook, County Durham: Back in June we noticed our giant thistle had clusters of aphids on it. Since then, it has put on quite a showA sultry, windless afternoon and the air above the garden path is shimmering. It’s too hot to do anything much during this heat, other than stand here and watch the carnage unfolding on this 7ft-tall cardoon plant.It was early June when we first noticed the small clusters of black aphids. Looking closer, we watched a long column of ants, from the nest under the paving stone, climbing the stems, tending the aphids, stroking them with their antennae and legs, encouraging them to produce drops of sweet honeydew. Continue reading...
Despite being uncredited for her role in launching what became a global craze, Joan Anderson was just ‘happy to bring so much joy to people’What began with a large bamboo ring wrapped in brown paper and posted across the Pacific to an Australian war bride in the US launched what became one of the world’s greatest fads of the late-1950s – the hula hoop.But Joan Anderson, the parcel’s recipient and the woman who delivered the concept of the hoop to America, was left out of the loop – ignored by the toy company that sold more than 100m hula hoops before the fad was replaced. Continue reading...
Grown in a pot or with plenty of space in a bed, these blade-leafed corms will add hot reds and oranges to your planting schemesAs regular readers of this column may have noticed, I am no taxonomist. I’ve never quite got on board with Latin names, but have gardened long enough to grudgingly accept that they are quite useful. For all that common names can be poetic (love-in-a-mist), intriguing (bladder wrack) or plain entertaining (goat’s beard), they can lack specificity.I’m not here to get into the weeds of determining whether one naming system is superior, and I use both interchangeably, but it is true that some Latin names have a certain panache. Crocosmia is among them. Continue reading...
Across the world, newly graduated medical students take an oath to uphold the ethics of medical practice. Dr Lina Qasem-Hassan, a Palestinian living and working in Israel, teaches medical ethics as well as practising as a physician, caring for both Israeli and Palestinian patients. In Israel’s internationally acclaimed healthcare system, regarded as one of the world’s leading examples, a quarter of doctors are Palestinian citizens of Israel. While the medical oath calls for equal care for all patients, Lina sees a profession increasingly at odds with that principle. Since filming began in February 2024, and with the conflict continuing to escalate ever since, Lina's commitment to the oath remains unwavering Continue reading...
Under pressure on domestic and international stage to act on Gaza, a shrug from the president allowed Starmer to make pledgeMiddle East crisis – live updatesIt was, in the end, an off-the-cuff remark from Donald Trump that moved the dial.“I’m not going to take a position,” the US president said when asked in Scotland about pressure on Keir Starmer to recognise a Palestinian state. “I don’t mind him taking a position. I’m looking for getting people [in Gaza] fed right now.” Continue reading...
Price hikes may frustrate some, but the mood at a California meetup shows why the trend isn’t slowing down yetLabubu-shaped bounce houses. Labubu-themed drinks. A chance to meet and greet a life-size Labubu.This was the scene at a recent meetup at an outdoor shopping center in southern California, where dozens of people gathered for the chance to get their hands on one of the wildly popular fluffy dolls. Continue reading...
Israel controls the flow of food into Gaza. It has calculated how many calories Palestinians need to stay alive. Its data shows only a fraction has been allowed inThe mathematics of famine are simple in Gaza. Palestinians cannot leave, war has ended farming and Israel has banned fishing, so practically every calorie its population eats must be brought in from outside.Israel knows how much food is needed. It has been calibrating hunger in Gaza for decades, initially calculating shipments to exert pressure while avoiding starvation. Continue reading...
We’d like to hear your stories about memorable and unusual objects left behind by the previous occupantWe want to hear from people who’ve moved house only to discover the previous occupier has left behind something unexpected.Perhaps you have found an heirloom with an untold story? An unusual oddity? Or something so bizarre it defies all explanation. Continue reading...
We would like to hear from people who have had their phone stolen in the last six monthsAccording to data compiled by an insurance firm, nearly two in every five mobile phones stolen in Europe are taken in the UK. Claims made to the American insurance company SquareTrade showed 39% of all phone thefts across the company’s 12 European markets were in Britain.The data revealed that phone theft claims in the UK had increased by 425% since June 2021 and 42% of phone thefts in the UK occurred in London. Continue reading...
We’d like to hear from you on the impact of devoting time, energy and money to your personal collectionFor some it’s boxfresh trainers, for others it’s first edition books. Or maybe getting your hands on rare vinyl is your thing. If you’re still enjoying a lifelong collecting odyssey, or if you’re just starting one, we’d like to hear from you.What sparked the collecting? What is, or was, your motivation? How has your personal collection impacted your life? Has it brought you in contact with like-minded people? Maybe friendships have developed, or perhaps relationships have become strained when your living space shrank as more and more items entered the home. Continue reading...
Google, Amazon and Meta are pouring billions into AI infrastructure, but at what cost to the planet, creatives, and the grid?Hello, and welcome to TechScape. Johana Bhuiyan and Dara Kerr here, filling in for Blake Montgomery, who’s enjoying the beach but likely getting sunburned. Continue reading...
Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they meanScroll less, understand more: sign up to receive our news email each weekday for clarity on the top stories in the UK and across the world.Explore all our newsletters: whether you love film, football, fashion or food, we’ve got something for you Continue reading...
A weekly email from Yotam Ottolenghi, Meera Sodha, Felicity Cloake and Rachel Roddy, featuring the latest recipes and seasonal eating ideasEach week we’ll send you an exclusive newsletter from our star food writers. We’ll also send you the latest recipes from Yotam Ottolenghi, Nigel Slater, Meera Sodha and all our star cooks, stand-out food features and seasonal eating inspiration, plus restaurant reviews from Grace Dent and Jay Rayner.Sign up below to start receiving the best of our culinary journalism in one mouth-watering weekly email. Continue reading...
Kick off your afternoon with the Guardian’s take on the world of footballEvery weekday, we’ll deliver a roundup the football news and gossip in our own belligerent, sometimes intelligent and – very occasionally – funny way. Still not convinced? Find out what you’re missing here.Try our other sports emails: there’s weekly catch-ups for cricket in The Spin and rugby union in The Breakdown, and our seven-day round-up of the best of our sports journalism in The Recap.Living in Australia? Try the Guardian Australia’s daily sports newsletter Continue reading...
Acute hunger in Gaza, Russian airstrikes in Kramatorsk, wildfires in Turkey and England’s Chloe Kelly celebrating at Euro 2025: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalistsWarning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing Continue reading...