Latest updates from the opening day of the 153rd Open
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Padraig Harrington bogeys the par-three 3rd as well. Two putts from 42 feet far from a gimme … and he doesn’t make them. His place at the top is taken by Jacob Skov Olesen: the 26-year-old Dane, making his professional debut at the Open – he finished in a tie for 60th at Troon as an amateur – tramlines a 40-foot putt on 1. Had that not hit the cup, it was halfway to Giant’s Causeway. A sizzling Danish start to the Open.
-1: Højgaard (3), Olesen (1)
E: Harrington (3), Migliozzi (2)
© Photograph: Stuart Franklin/R&A/Getty Images
© Photograph: Stuart Franklin/R&A/Getty Images
© Photograph: Stuart Franklin/R&A/Getty Images
Andy Farrell opts for Smith’s versatility over son Owen
Tom Curry to start in back-row with Beirne and Conan
Marcus Smith has been named on the bench for the British & Irish Lions’ first Test against Australia with Tom Curry and Sione Tuipulotu selected to start in Brisbane on Saturday.
Smith has defied the odds to claim a place in the match-day 23, benefiting from injuries to Blair Kinghorn and Mack Hansen and preferred to Owen Farrell among the replacements.
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© Photograph: Billy Stickland/INPHO/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Billy Stickland/INPHO/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Billy Stickland/INPHO/Shutterstock
Officers accused Laura Murton who also had a sign saying ‘Free Gaza’ of supporting a proscribed organisation
Armed police threatened a peaceful protester with arrest under the Terrorism Act for holding a Palestinian flag and having signs saying “Free Gaza” and “Israel is committing genocide”, accusing her of supporting a proscribed organisation.
Officers told Laura Murton, 42, that her demonstration in Canterbury, Kent, on Monday evening expressed views supportive of Palestine Action, which was banned under terrorism legislation earlier this month.
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© Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
© Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
© Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
The country, beset by war, has the world’s lowest rates of vaccination, says the World Health Organization, as global immunisation drive also stalls
Children in Sudan, caught up in what aid organisations have called the world’s largest humanitarian crisis and threatened by rising levels of violence, are increasingly vulnerable to deadly infectious diseases as vaccinations in the country plummet.
In 2022, more than 90% of young children in Sudan received their routine vaccinations. But that figure has nearly halved to 48%, the lowest in the world, according to the World Health Organization.
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© Photograph: Mohammed Abdulmajid/UNICEF
© Photograph: Mohammed Abdulmajid/UNICEF
© Photograph: Mohammed Abdulmajid/UNICEF
The Maasroute is the ideal entry-level, multiday bike trip for young children – flat with plenty of riverside cafes, family-friendly campsites and ice-cream stops en route
As early as I can remember, I’ve always got a thrill out of poring over a map, tracing wavy river lines with my fingers, roads that connect and borders that divide – all the routes I could take. The freedom of heading out on my bike and not knowing where I’m going to pitch my tent that night. Now that my children are aged seven and nine, I wanted to introduce them to the liberation of this kind of adventure. They adore a day out on their bikes, but this was to be our first multiday bike trip as a family of four, so it was crucial to find a route easy and fun enough to captivate them.
The Maasroute follows the course of the Maas River as it meanders for 300 miles (484km) through the Netherlands, from the inland city of Maastricht to the Hook of Holland, then loops back to Rotterdam. It forms part of the much longer Meuse cycle route (EuroVelo 19) that stretches from the source of the Maas (or Meuse as it’s known in France) on the Langres plateau, travelling through the French and Belgian Ardennes before crossing into the Netherlands.
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© Photograph: PR
© Photograph: PR
© Photograph: PR
The extraordinary story of the women who fought to bring their Nazi persecutors to justice
Shortly after her release from Ravensbrück in 1945, Comtesse Germaine de Renty attended a dinner party in Paris with old friends. One guest complimented her on how well she was looking, concluding that “life in Ravensbrück was not nearly as terrible as we’ve been told”. De Renty stared at the woman for a moment, before explaining icily that a typical day in the camp began by stepping over the corpses of friends who had died in the night. They would probably have no eyes, she added, since the rats had already eaten them. And with that, the comtesse stood up and swept out.
Ravensbrück always had a credibility issue, explains Lynne Olson in this consistently thoughtful book. The camp, although only 50 miles north of Berlin, had been liberated late, which gave the SS plenty of time to burn incriminating records. There was limited visual evidence, too, since no cameramen accompanied the Soviet army when it knocked down the gates on 30 April 1945. While images from Auschwitz and Dachau of starving prisoners and rotting corpses were flashed before a horrified world, Ravensbrück left little trace in the moral imagination.
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© Photograph: Agencja Fotograficzna Caro/Alamy
© Photograph: Agencja Fotograficzna Caro/Alamy
© Photograph: Agencja Fotograficzna Caro/Alamy
Stories of monks behaving badly are not uncommon in Thailand, but the scale of a recent scandal has sparked questions about wealth and privilege
The disappearance of a respected monk from his Buddhist temple in central Bangkok has revealed a sex scandal that has rocked Thailand, with allegations of blackmail, lavish gifts and a string of dismissals raising questions about the money and power enjoyed by the country’s orange-robed clergy.
Investigations into the whereabouts of senior monk Phra Thep Wachirapamok unexpectedly led police to a woman who the police suspect conducted intimate relationships with several senior monks, and then blackmailed them to keep the liaisons quiet.
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© Photograph: Rungroj Yongrit/EPA
© Photograph: Rungroj Yongrit/EPA
© Photograph: Rungroj Yongrit/EPA
Ahmed al-Sharaa thanks American, Arab and Turkish mediators as efforts to restore order in city of Sweida continue
Syria’s interim president has condemned Israel for “wide-scale targeting of civilian and government facilities” after the Israeli military struck Damascus on Wednesday as it sought to intervene in clashes between the Syrian army and Druze fighters.
Israel’s strikes would have pushed “matters to a large-scale escalation, except for the effective intervention of American, Arab, and Turkish mediation, which saved the region from an unknown fate”, Ahmed al-Sharaa said in his first televised statement since the attacks.
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© Photograph: Ali Haj Suleiman/Getty Images
© Photograph: Ali Haj Suleiman/Getty Images
© Photograph: Ali Haj Suleiman/Getty Images
In Chile’s drought-stricken Atacama desert, Indigenous people say desalination plants cannot counter the impact of intensive lithium and copper mining on local water sources
Photographs by Luis Bustamante
Vast pipelines cross the endless dunes of northern Chile, pumping seawater up to an altitude of more than 3,000 metres in the Andes mountains to the Escondida mine, the world’s largest copper producer. The mine’s owners say sourcing water directly from the sea, instead of relying on local reservoirs, could help preserve regional water resources. Yet, this is not the perception of Sergio Cubillos, leader of the Indigenous community Lickanantay de Peine.
Cubillos and his fellow activists believe that the mining industry is helping to degrade the region’s meagre water resources, as Chile continues to be ravaged by a mega-drought that has plagued the country for 15 years. They also fear that the use of desalinated seawater cannot make up for the devastation of the northern Atacama region’s sensitive water ecosystem and local livelihoods.
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© Photograph: Luis Bustamante/The Guardian
© Photograph: Luis Bustamante/The Guardian
© Photograph: Luis Bustamante/The Guardian
Exclusive: Britain has paused some weapons sales to Israel, but a Guardian investigation shows revenues from the GBU-39 bomb generated by the US arm of MBDA flow through the UK
Europe’s largest missiles maker, MBDA, is selling key components for bombs that have been shipped in their thousands to Israel and used in multiple airstrikes where research indicates Palestinian children and other civilians were killed.
With concerns mounting about the extent to which European companies may be profiting from the devastation of Gaza, a Guardian investigation with the independent newsrooms Disclose and Follow the Money has examined the supply chain behind the GBU-39 bomb, and the ways in which it has been deployed during the conflict.
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© Photograph: Thaer Maher Aabed
© Photograph: Thaer Maher Aabed
© Photograph: Thaer Maher Aabed
Risotto all’onda is wonderfully fluid, creamy and cheesy
As Venice braced itself recently for another wedding, I had been thinking back to last September, when Adriana and Thom exchanged vows in the cavernous cool of the boathouse belonging to Burano’s rowing club. Following the ceremony, the double doors were opened wide, so friends and family could line the ramp all the way to the edge of the lagoon. There, standing majestically at the end of a green gondola, was Adriana’s childhood friend Giulia, a champion of voga Veneta, or Venetian rowing, ready to take the couple to the other side of the island for lunch.
While Giulia rowed Adriana and Thom around the island, the rest of us walked across it to Trattoria Da Romano, where Adriana’s family have celebrated for lifetimes, and it was completely given over to our euphoric wedding party. I am sure I would remember all seven courses (several of which involved more than one dish) even if I didn’t have the menu memento stuck to our fridge with a cat magnet. What I remember most vividly, though, is the fish risotto, because Adriana told me to get near enough the kitchen door to see how energetically the chefs beat it, and how soft and rippling the texture was.
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© Photograph: Rachel Roddy/The Guardian
© Photograph: Rachel Roddy/The Guardian
© Photograph: Rachel Roddy/The Guardian
Laurence Tubiana urges governments to consider levies on energy-hungry technology
Governments should consider taxing artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies to generate funds to deal with the climate crisis, one of the architects of the Paris agreement has said.
Laurence Tubiana, the chief executive of the European Climate Foundation and a former French diplomat, is co-lead of the Global Solidarity Levies Task Force, an international initiative to find new sources of funds for climate action by taxing highly polluting activities including aviation and fossil fuel extraction.
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© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
In its refusal to renationalise water, it’s clear the government operates in the interests of private capital and not of the country
For a rich and fairly stable country, we are staggeringly ill-prepared for climate shocks. We respond to predictable crises as if we had had no warning. Lessons from previous disasters go unlearned, mistakes are recycled, failures lodged so deeply that they come to define the system.
This is not because of a deficiency in the national character, but because of a deficiency in the ideology of government: an elite belief, shared by scarcely any citizens, that public intervention should be used only when all other measures have failed. Until that point, our problems should be addressed by the private sector. As drought rolls across the country once again, England’s privatised water system guarantees an irrational response.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
On Tuesday 16 September, join George Monbiot, Mikaela Loach and other special guests discussing the forces driving climate denialism, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at Guardian.Live
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© Illustration: Ben Jennings/The Guardian
© Illustration: Ben Jennings/The Guardian
© Illustration: Ben Jennings/The Guardian
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