A massive Lego man named Dada has welcomed visitors to the new Legoland resort in Shanghai

© Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Hurricane season can be stressful for millions of Americans living in coastal areas, as powerful winds and heavy rain can cause widespread damage, cut power for days or weeks and otherwise upend people’s lives

© Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Heavy rains have caused devastating flash floods in Texas Hill Country, killing at least 24 people and leaving many others missing

© Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

Pope Leo XIV is starting a six-week vacation this weekend at the papal summer retreat south of Rome

© Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

Dust and groundwater contaminated with heavy metals and radioactive chemicals pose a health threat that the authorities have been trying to address for years.

© The New York Times

Low environmental standards helped China become the world’s low-cost producer of rare earths, but Beijing was also focused on helping the industry.

© Reuters

Ready to rack up some deep discounts?

Amy Hawkins visits one of the many bars popping up across Chinese cities offering drinks, snacks and a vision of the future

In the age of self-help, self-improvement and self-obsession, there have never been more places to look to for guidance. Where the anxious and the uncertain might have once consulted a search engine for answers, now we can engage in a seemingly meaningful discussion about our problems with ChatGPT. Or, if you’re in China, DeepSeek.

To some, though, it feels as if our ancestors knew more about life than we do. Or at least, they knew how to look for them. And so it is that scores of young Chinese are turning to ancient forms of divination to find out what the future holds. In the past couple of years, fortune-telling bars have been popping up in China’s cities, offering drinks and snacks alongside xuanxue, or spiritualism. The trend makes sense: China’s economy is struggling, and although consumers are saving their pennies, going out for a drink is cheaper than other forms of retail therapy or an actual therapist. With a deep-rooted culture of mysticism that blends Daoist, Buddhist and folk practices, which have defied decades of the government trying to stamp out superstitious beliefs, for many Chinese people, turning to the unseen makes perfect sense.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Amy Hawkins/The Guardian

© Photograph: Amy Hawkins/The Guardian

To truly understand the president’s style of rule, we must go beyond Scandinavian sagas and Sicilian crime lore

Ever since Donald Trump returned to power, pundits have struggled to find apt analogies for his style of governance. Some liken his loyalty demands, patronage networks and intimidation tactics to the methods of a mafia don. Others cast him as a feudal overlord, operating a personality cult rooted in charisma and bound by oaths, rewards and threats rather than laws and institutions. A growing number of artists and AI creatives are depicting him as a Viking warrior. And of course, fierce debates continue over whether the moment has arrived for serious comparisons with fascist regimes.

While some of these analogies may offer a degree of insight, they are fundamentally limited by their Eurocentrism – as if 21st-century US politics must still be interpreted solely through the lens of old-world history. If we truly want to understand what is unfolding, we must move beyond Scandinavian sagas and Sicilian crime lore.

David Van Reybrouck is philosopher laureate for the Netherlands and Flanders. His books include Congo: The Epic History of a People and Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Yuri Gripas/UPI/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Yuri Gripas/UPI/Shutterstock

Chelsea scored the go-ahead goal on Malo Gusto's 83rd-minute shot that went in after a pair of deflections, beating Palmeiras 2-1 on Friday night.

• Palmeiras 1-2 Chelsea (Estêvão 53); Palmer (16), Weverton (83, og)

• Malo Gusto’s cross deflected past Palmeiras goalkeeper

Their place in the last four of the Club World Cup in the bag and the prospect of a £97m windfall still up for grabs, Chelsea found themselves in an unusual position: relieved to have survived a taxing second half, hailing Malo Gusto’s unlikely role as matchwinner and able to delight in the opposition’s goalscorer being named superior player of the match.

For a while the story of this entertaining quarter-final looked like it was going to be about Enzo Maresca finding it within himself to forgive Estêvão Willian. Everything had changed when the Brazilian sensation, who joins Chelsea after this tournament, cancelled out an early goal from Cole Palmer and hauled Palmeiras level at the start of the second half.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Héctor Vivas/FIFA/Getty Images

© Photograph: Héctor Vivas/FIFA/Getty Images

Heroes, zeros and the inside pitch from the Mets’ 6-5 win over the Yankees on Friday afternoon in the Subway Series in Queens.

England and Wales get under way at Euro 2025 in Switzerland.

© PA Wire

Novak Djokovic is one away from a century of Wimbledon match wins.

© PA Wire

Melbourne Theatre Company
Thornton, Yael Stone and Ash Flanders give beautiful performances as a miserable family, but startling tonal shifts send this American play into silliness

• Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email

Poisonous and heavily self-medicating mothers are a standard in the theatre, from Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night to Violet Weston in August: Osage County. Self-absorbed, vain and hypercritical, they tend to stalk their stages like injured lionesses, their own offspring the convenient targets of their abuse and cynicism. US playwright Paula Vogel adds Phyllis Herman (Sigrid Thornton) to this list, as monstrous and brittle as any of them.

While Mother Play (the subtitle is A Play in Five Evictions) flirts with the toxicity and histrionics of those antecedents, it feels closer in spirit to Tennessee Williams’ “memory play” The Glass Menagerie. Where Williams created the character of Tom as an authorial surrogate, Vogel gives us Martha (Yael Stone), who is likewise desperate to escape her mother’s clutches while trying to understand what makes her tick. There’s a deep melancholy working under the play, a sense of all that’s been lost to the ravages of time and forgetting.

Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Brett Boardman

© Photograph: Brett Boardman

Cal Raleigh tied Ken Griffey Jr. for the franchise record for home runs before the All-Star break with 35 with a pair of blasts in Seattle's 6-0 win.

Estevao Willian had equalised for Palmeiras against the club he will join after the tournament.

© AP

It's clear that Emma Raducanu was not happy about Wimbledon's electric line calling on Friday.

Art is doing ‘extremely well,’ his new owner said on social media

© Pasadena Humane

Independence Day fireworks shows have kicked off across the East Coast

© AP

Texas officials said between 23 to 25 kids from Camp Mystic remain unaccounted for after the Guadalupe River swelled above its banks during a freak early morning rainstorm.

Camp Mystic — where a frantic search is underway for survivors of a catastrophic flood — has been a destination for the daughters of Texas’s political elite since it was founded in 1926.

Rockaway Beach in Queens was closed after shark sightings on Friday

© NYC Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Kaz Daughtry

IAEA chief says electricity restored after 3½ hours as Ukraine blames Russian shelling for outage; Kyiv accuses Putin of ‘humiliating’ Trump with attack on capital. What we know on day 1,228

• Read all our Ukraine war coverage

Continue reading...

© Photograph: AP

© Photograph: AP

The annual extravaganza featured 80,000 total shells firing off 1,000 feet over the Brooklyn Bridge and East River.

U.S. President Donald Trump signed his US$3.4 trillion budget bill into law Friday, enshrining an extension of tax cuts, temporary new breaks for tipped workers and funding to crack down on illegal immigration. Read More

Bill Belichick is not afraid to rip a player a new one, and Stephon Gilmore was no exception.

"Mind u, this is an ACTUAL convicted felon. but go off," one commenter wrote of Joe who served 41 months behind bars for fraud and failure to pay taxes.

Multiple shark sightings in Far Rockaway on July 4th led to temporary beach closures as NYC officials deployed drones and lifeguards to monitor and protect beachgoers.

The Citi Field crowd was large and loud.

“I was thinking about that last pitch,’’ Domínguez said. “I should have waited for another strike, but I swung.” 

The Australian actor broke into Hollywood playing suave villains in Nip/Tuck and Fantastic Four – but one of his final roles was some of his best work

• Julian McMahon – a life in pictures

• Julian McMahon dies aged 56

The Australian-American actor Julian McMahon, who has died from cancer aged 56, had a long and accomplished career. Like many Australian actors, it began with a soap opera – McMahon played Ben Lucini in 150 episodes of Home and Away – but he soon broke free to pursue a more ambitious and challenging oeuvre.

McMahon, the son of former prime minister Sir William “Billy” McMahon, made a name for himself overseas through US television in his 30s. On supernatural drama Charmed he played Cole Turner, a half-human, half-demon assassin turned love interest for one of the witches he was hired to kill. McMahon took to the show’s campy tone with aplomb, delivering lines like “I’m going straight to hell, cause it’s got to be a sin to look this good” with a twinkle in his eye.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Jessica Brooks/Netflix

© Photograph: Jessica Brooks/Netflix

The Mets’ new-look top of the order has settled in and is showing potential few teams can match. The bottom of the order, though, has been a problem. 

"[W]hose elbow is that at the right[?]" jeered one X user.

Jacksonville, Florida was rated the most boring city in the U.S., according to one analysis

© Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Hundreds of protesters in Mexico City have destroyed businesses and harassed tourists in the city’s touristic hub in a march railing against mass-tourism and gentrification

© Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Universities use their endowments to fund critical operations and to provide services, such as tuition assistance to low-income students

© Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

The provision overturns the previous ability of gamblers to deduct all their losses from income taxes

© Getty Images

© AFP/Getty