Trump's admiration for British royals traces to late mother's deep reverence and influence
US president heads to Chequers as former deputy PM and Meta executive Nick Clegg says UK must learn to be less reliant on US technology
President Trump is now leaving Windsor Castle. He will be flying to Chequers by helicopter.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, has thanked King Charles for what he said at the state banquet last night strongly supporting the Ukrainian cause.
I extend my deepest thanks to His Majesty King Charles III @RoyalFamily for his steadfast support. Ukraine greatly values the United Kingdom’s unwavering and principled stance.
When tyranny threatens Europe once again, we must all hold firm, and Britain continues to lead in defending freedom on many fronts. Together, we have achieved a lot, and with the support of freedom-loving nations—the UK, our European partners, and the US—we continue to defend values and protect lives. We are united in our efforts to make diplomacy work and secure lasting peace for the European continent.
Our countries have the closest defence, security and intelligence relationship ever known. In two world wars, we fought together to defeat the forces of tyranny.
Today, as tyranny once again threatens Europe, we and our allies stand together in support of Ukraine, to deter aggression and secure peace. And our Aukus submarine partnership, with Australia, sets the benchmark for innovative and vital collaboration.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
Latest updates from the track on night six in Tokyo
こんにちは – kon’nichiwa – and welcome to the World Athletics Championships – night six!
And it’s another stacked session. We’ve various qualifying to enjoy – women’s 5000m featuring Faith Kipyegon, plus high jump and 800m – along with a pair of field finals – men’s javelin, women’s triple jump. But it’s the sprints that’ll really get us going.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Dylan Martinez/Reuters
© Photograph: Dylan Martinez/Reuters
© Photograph: Dylan Martinez/Reuters
Michael Werner Gallery, London
Artists as varied as Sarah Lucas, Gwen John and Georg Baselitz are called upon by critic-curator Hilton Als to chime with the writer of Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys was a perpetual outsider. Born Welsh and Creole into largely black Dominican society in 1890, she was out of place everywhere – too foreign for Europe, too Caribbean for Britain, too white for Dominica, and much too female to be taken seriously as a writer for most of her lifetime.
But her literary influence continues to grow and resonate, especially with American critic and curator Hilton Als. His group show is a heady, passionate, experimental love letter to Jean Rhys – to her literature, her in-betweenness, her life of unbound creativity in a postcolonial world – in the vein of his previous exhibitions-as-portraits of Joan Didion and James Baldwin.
Continue reading...© Photograph: © Hurvin Anderson. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery
© Photograph: © Hurvin Anderson. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery
© Photograph: © Hurvin Anderson. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery
Aerospace firm Honeywell also subject of lawsuit from families of four passengers, who allege negligence
The families of four passengers who died in the Air India crash in June have sued the aerospace manufacturers Boeing and Honeywell, blaming negligence and a faulty fuel cutoff switch for the disaster that killed 260 people.
Air India flight 171 crashed shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad en route to London on 12 June.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Amit Dave/Reuters
© Photograph: Amit Dave/Reuters
© Photograph: Amit Dave/Reuters
Donald Trump wants drastic rate cuts – and his campaign to exert greater political control over the Fed continues apace
The time has come to ban the “revolving door” between the White House and the Federal Reserve, two academics argued last year. Doing so would be “critical to reducing the incentives for officials to act in the short-term political interests of the president”, they wrote.
Eight months ago, the two writers – Dan Katz and Stephen Miran – joined the Trump administration in senior roles. On Tuesday, Miran, the chair of the US Council of Economic Advisers, walked into the Fed as a governor.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters
© Photograph: Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters
© Photograph: Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters
Basic principles need to be enshrined to protect the sacred craft of storytelling from this automated onslaught
Jonny Geller is a literary agent and CEO of The Curtis Brown Group
The single biggest threat to the livelihood of authors and, by extension, to our culture, is not short attention spans. It is AI.
The UK publishing industry – worth more than £11bn, part of the £126bn that our creative industries generate for the British economy – has sat by while big tech has “swept” copyrighted material from the internet in order to train their models. Recently, the AI startup Anthropic settled a $1.5bn copyright case over this issue, but the ship has undeniably left the harbour and big tech is sailing off with the goods.
Jonny Geller is CEO of The Curtis Brown Group
Continue reading...© Illustration: Xeniya Udod Femagora/Getty Images
© Illustration: Xeniya Udod Femagora/Getty Images
© Illustration: Xeniya Udod Femagora/Getty Images
We’d like to hear from people across France about how they view Thursday’s strikes
Around 800,000 people are expected to join marches across France on Thursday.
French trade unions across many sectors from schools to transport have called for the nationwide strike to oppose unpopular budget plans.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Michel Euler/AP
© Photograph: Michel Euler/AP
© Photograph: Michel Euler/AP
Tennis legend told diagnosis was ‘really, really bad’
Borg also recalls drug use after early retirement
Björn Borg, the five-time Wimbledon tennis champion, has said he is taking life “day by day, year by year” after his “extremely aggressive” prostate cancer diagnosis.
The former world no1, who won 11 grand slam titles before retiring aged 25, revealed the diagnosis in the final chapter of his autobiography, which will be published this week in the UK and next week in the US. The Swede is in remission, having had an operation in 2024, but described the diagnosis as “difficult psychologically”.
Read Bjorn Borg’s interview with Simon Hattenstone on theguardian.com from 4pm UK time on Thursday
Continue reading...© Photograph: Colorsport/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Colorsport/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Colorsport/Shutterstock
A thriller-like account of the influential men and women who opposed Hitler and paid a terrible price
On 10 September 1943, a loose group of well-connected friends met in a small apartment in the Charlottenberg area of Berlin. The host was Elisabeth von Thadden and the nominal reason for the get-together was her younger sister’s 50th birthday. Really, though, this was a cover story for nine influential people meeting to discuss what should happen now that it was clear that Hitler was losing the war.
Otto Kiep, a former diplomat, talked hopefully about how Mussolini’s recent toppling meant that Italy was ready to make peace with the allies, while political hostess Hanna Solf gleefully anticipated the moment when Hitler fell: “We’ll put him against a wall.” Meanwhile, Von Thadden herself, a devout Protestant and former headteacher of an elite girls’ school, warned of the humanitarian crisis that would follow the end of hostilities. For those who gathered on that late summer’s day for tea, sandwiches and a particularly unappetising food item called “war cake”, Germany’s rebirth as a democratic nation state felt so near that they could almost touch it.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
© Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
© Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
On a tiny Italian island, scientists conducted a radical experiment to see if the bees were causing their wild cousins to decline
Off the coast of Tuscany is a tiny island in the shape of a crescent moon. An hour from mainland Italy, Giannutri has just two beaches for boats to dock. In summer, hundreds of tourists flock there, hiking to the red and white lighthouse on its southern tip before diving into the clear waters. In winter, its population dwindles to 10. The island’s rocky ridges are coated with thickets of rosemary and juniper, and in warmer months the air is sweetened by flowers and the gentle hum of bees.
“Residents are people who like fishing, or being alone, or who have retired. Everyone has their story,” says Leonardo Dapporto, associate professor at the University of Florence.
Giannutri island’s remote location made it a perfect open-air laboratory for the bee experiments. Photographs: Giuseppe Nucci
Continue reading...© Photograph: Giuseppe Nucci/The Guardian
© Photograph: Giuseppe Nucci/The Guardian
© Photograph: Giuseppe Nucci/The Guardian
The phenomenal response to an article we published on this question led to detailed cognitive research – and the findings have implications that go way beyond gamers
Five years ago, on the verge of the first Covid lockdown, I wrote an article asking what seemed to be an extremely niche question: why do some people invert their controls when playing 3D games? A majority of players push down on the controller to make their onscreen character look down, and up to make them look up. But there is a sizeable minority who do the opposite, controlling their avatars like a pilot controls a plane, pulling back to go up. For most modern games, this requires going into the settings and reconfiguring the default controls. Why do they still persist?
I thought a few hardcore gamers would be interested in the question. Instead, more than one million people read the article, and the ensuing debate caught the attention of Dr Jennifer Corbett (quoted in the original piece) and Dr Jaap Munneke, then based at the Visual Perception and Attention Lab at Brunel University London.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Monika Wisniewska/Alamy
© Photograph: Monika Wisniewska/Alamy
© Photograph: Monika Wisniewska/Alamy
Jonathan Millet makes his fiction feature debut with an ambitious slow-burn thriller that opens up a complex world of pain
The face of a Syrian refugee is the enigmatic key to this slow-burning drama-thriller, the fiction feature debut of French film-maker Jonathan Millet; it is hard, blank, withdrawn, yet showing us an inexpressible agony, a suppressed, unprocessed trauma, complicated by what is evidently a new strategic wariness. The refugee is Hamid (played by Adam Bessa), a former literature professor from Aleppo who is now in Strasbourg in France in 2016, having suffered torture in Damascus’s notorious Sednaya prison, and the killing of his wife and infant daughter.
Hamid asks expatriate Syrians if they know a certain man, showing them a hazy photograph, claiming that this is his cousin. In fact, it is a man who tortured him and Hamid is a member of a ring dedicated to tracking down Syrian war criminals all over Europe. Haunted, exhausted and unhappy, Hamid’s only real relationship is with his elderly mother in a Lebanese refugee camp, with whom he has weekly Zoom calls; this a tender performance from Shafiqa El Till.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Album/Alamy
© Photograph: Album/Alamy
© Photograph: Album/Alamy