As expected, the rain is not relenting yet. Play has been pushed back to 12.15, at the earliest. Though looking at the forecast there could be another couple of hours of drizzle before what’s forecast to be a clear mid-afternoon/evening.
Emma Raducanu stressed the importance of leaning on her support network at Wimbledon as she prepares for her challenging second-round match against Marketa Vondrousova, the 2023 champion.
Raducanu, who reached the second round on Monday with a solid 6-3, 6-3 win over the 17-year-old British wildcard Mimi Xu, reflected on the additional support she has received at the All England Club. “At Wimbledon, it’s particularly special. I had really good friends in the box there,” said Raducanu, before reeling off a list of names. “To have them all here in this one week, and the way the stars align that they could be here, it means so much when I see them there. It just makes me really happy.”
The Red Cross has warned that Gaza’s few functioning medical facilities are overwhelmed, with nearly all public hospitals “shut down or gutted by months of hostilities and restrictions” on supplies.
Family of Avtar Singh Khanda, who was thought to be on Indian authorities’ radar and died in 2023, call for inquest
The family of a Sikh activist who died suddenly in 2023 have made new calls for an inquest after a pathologist found the result of the postmortem exam “does not mean that a poisoning can be completely excluded”.
Avtar Singh Khanda, 35, died in June 2023, four days after being admitted to a hospital in Birmingham feeling unwell. The official cause of death was acute myeloid leukaemia, a blood cancer.
In other news, French president Emmanuel Macron spoke by telephone with Russian president Vladimir Putin last night in their first direct conversation in more than two years, French media reported.
AFP said Macron urged Putin to accept a ceasefire in Ukraine, but Russia’s leader hit back by blaming the West for the conflict.
Finally!!! There is no solution to the Russia-Ukraine war on the battlefield. The key is negotiation. We need diplomats, not generals!
At its heart, football is about community. A feeling of shared identity and purpose. A place where supporters gather to watch their team. The games, goals and moments that live on in the club’s collective memory through a shared act of will. The people responsible for these defining moments – shrewd managers, inspiring captains, prolific goalscorers – are increasingly immortalised in statues.
A sculptor is enlisted to preserve their likeness in a single definitive pose. The subjects take on a size and form, literally larger than life, befitting the impact they had on the club and community that chooses to honour them. According to the Sporting Statues Project, which is run by Chris Stride and Ffion Thomas, there are more than 100 football statues in the UK. The vast majority have been made since the turn of the millennium and there are even more in progress. They have exploded in popularity, becoming the established means of commemoration.
The craven failure to broadcast Gaza: Doctors Under Attack is just the latest example of skewed journalistic values over Israel’s war
Tonight, audiences can finally watch Gaza: Doctors Under Attack on Channel 4 and Zeteo. This timely film was originally produced for the BBC by award-winning production company Basement Films. The BBC has been delaying it since February, arguing it couldn’t go out before a review into an entirely different film, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, had culminated. That was a poor editorial decision with no precedent. But poorer still: after months of leaving the film in limbo, last week the BBC announced it wouldn’t air it – leaving it for Channel 4 to pick up.
Why? The BBC said it might create “the perception of partiality”. You’d be forgiven for thinking this was lifted from a dystopian novel. Perception, after all, has nothing to do with impartiality – at least in an ideal world. The BBC seems to have said the quiet part out loud. Impartiality, as far as it’s concerned, is about PR, optics and managing the anger of certain groups, rather than following the evidence and championing robust journalism – no matter who’s angered, no matter how it looks.
The justices’ decision limiting judicial injunctions gives a red light to the most effective check on the president’s power grab
Ever since Donald Trump returned to power, he has carried out an unprecedented assault against the country’s rule of law. But we can be thankful that one group of people – federal district court judges – have bravely stood up to him and his many illegal actions.
His excesses include gutting federal agencies, deporting immigrants without due process, seeking to cut thousands of federal jobs despite their legal protections, and ordering an end to birthright citizenship. Intent on upholding the constitution and rule of law, district court judges have issued more than 190 orders blocking or temporarily pausing Trump actions they considered illegal. Their decisions have slowed the US president’s wrecking ball as it demolishes federal agencies, devastates foreign aid, decimates scientific research and demoralizes government employees.
Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues
It shouldn’t be hard to lure them into my spaceship. I’d just have to tell them it was hosting a multimillion-dollar wedding party
Thoughts and prayers to the thousands of Norwegians who have just had one of the best weekends of their lives, followed by one hell of a comedown. Thanks to a currency conversion snafu by the state lottery operator, numerous people were incorrectly informed on Friday that they had won life-changing amounts of money in the Eurojackpot. On Monday, a text message was sent to players informing them of the mix-up.
It seems Norwegians are a prudent bunch; I haven’t found any examples of people spending Jeff Bezos-levels of money as soon as they were told they had won big. Me? I would have gone into evil billionaire mode immediately.
Coppola said his masterpiece Apocalypse Now ‘is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam’ – this superb film shows how little he was exaggerating
The greatest ever making-of documentary is now on re-release: the terrifying story of how Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam war masterpiece Apocalypse Now got made – even scarier than Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, about the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. The time has come to acknowledge Eleanor Coppola’s magnificent achievement here as first among equals of the credited directors in shooting the original location footage (later interspersed with interviews by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper), getting the stunningly intimate audio tapes of her husband Francis’s meltdown moments and, of course, in unassumingly keeping the family together while it was all going on.
With his personal and financial capital very high after The Conversation and the Godfather films, Coppola put up his own money and mortgaged property to make this stunningly audacious and toweringly mad version of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness from a script by John Milius; it is transplanted from 19th-century Belgian Congo where a rogue ivory trader has gone native in the dark interior, to south-east Asia during the Vietnam war where a brilliant US army officer is now reportedly being worshipped as a god among the Indigenous peoples and must have his command terminated “with extreme prejudice”. Marlon Brando had a whispery voiced cameo as the reclusive demi-deity, Martin Sheen was the troubled Captain Willard tasked with taking Kurtz down and Robert Duvall is the psychotically gung-ho Lt Col Kilgore, who leads a helicopter assault.
Research says Google’s carbon emissions went up by 65% between 2019-2024, not 51% as the tech giant had claimed
In 2021, Google set a lofty goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. Yet in the years since then, the company has moved in the opposite direction as it invests in energy-intensive artificial intelligence. In its latest sustainability report, Google said its carbon emissions had increased 51% between 2019 and 2024.
New research aims to debunk even that enormous figure and provide context to Google’s sustainability reports, painting a bleaker picture. A report authored by non-profit advocacy group Kairos Fellowship found that, between 2019 and 2024, Google’s carbon emissions actually went up by 65%. What’s more, between 2010, the first year there is publicly available data on Google’s emissions, and 2024, Google’s total greenhouse gas emissions increased 1,515%, Kairos found. The largest year-over-year jump in that window was also the most recent, 2023 to 2024, when Google saw a 26% increase in emissions just between 2023 and 2024, according to the report.
CPS says it is considering more charges against former nurse after evidence from detectives in Cheshire
Detectives investigating the former nurse Lucy Letby have passed evidence to prosecutors alleging she murdered and harmed more babies.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) confirmed on Wednesday that it was considering further charges against Letby over alleged crimes at the Countess of Chester hospital and Liverpool Women’s hospital.
It’s been over two years since the A’s were awarded public funding for their new ballpark. But despite last month’s “groundbreaking”, its completion is anything but certain
It had just turned 8am on a crystal clear, late June Monday morning, but it was already 85F (29F). Despite the tolerable heat (for the desert), a giant air conditioned tent had been erected on the former site of the Tropicana, the famed hotel which was demolished in a controlled implosion last October. Athletics owner John Fisher, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred and a gaggle of politicians had all gathered on the compact, nine-acre site for a ceremony over two years in the making: the groundbreaking for the new A’s stadium on the Strip, coming your way in 2028.
On the surface, it was your run-of-the-mill pomp and circumstance: a series of uneven speeches mixed in with a few kids gushing over how much they can’t wait to have the former Oakland and current A’s in Las Vegas. But if you had been following the long-running A’s stadium saga, one which led them to a temporary minor-league residency in Sacramento this season, you didn’t have to look far beyond the rented heavy-duty construction props to see the farce, and you didn’t have to dig much deeper than the dignitaries shoveling into the makeshift baseball diamond to understand what this ceremony really was: the latest stop on Fisher’s neverending, would-be stadium tour.
Karen Kneller resigns from Criminal Cases Review Commission, heavily criticised for bungling of Andrew Malkinson case
The chief executive of the miscarriage of justice watchdog for England, Wales and Northern Ireland has resigned after serious failings in the case of Andrew Malkinson.
Karen Kneller, who had held the position since 2013, has left her job at the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) after one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British legal history, it was announced on Wednesday.
From missing weddings and giving clothes away to mocking each other’s music and getting the kids involved, Noel and Liam have been through a lot in the last 16 years
Deal could rise to £35m and includes buy-back clause
Jarrad Branthwaite signs five-year-contract with Everton
Jarell Quansah has completed his move from Liverpool to Bayer Leverkusen in a deal worth up to £35m. The 22-year-old enjoyed an impressive European Under-21 Championship campaign as part of the triumphant England side, but found opportunities limited at club level last season. The homegrown central defender started four Premier League games, 13 in all competitions, as Virgil van Dijk and Ibrahima Konaté established a title-winning partnership.
Liverpool will receive a guaranteed £30m for Quansah plus £5m in add-ons. The deal is the third between the clubs this summer, following the Premier League champions’ acquisition of Jeremie Frimpong and record-signing Florian Wirtz.
Rarely will you be photographed as much, and be faced with the outcome for so many years. These products will give you coverage and comfort
I bristle at the expression “bridal makeup”, because it encourages the slightly weird idea that women’s faces should look very different on their wedding days. Brides these days might be wearing black or red, hair up, hair down, hi-top trainers or Dr Martens boots. Similarly, bride-appropriate makeup is however one feels most attractive, comfortable, confident and oneself.
But what I will concede is that the big day often calls for a new foundation. Rarely will you be photographed as much, over so many hours, and be faced with the outcome for so many years, so it’s worth wearing something a little higher-coverage and longer-lasting than for a day at the office.
The group’s ‘death to the IDF’ chant at Glastonbury ignited a firestorm – and prompted action from the US state department
Until this week, thepunk-rap duo Bob Vylan were largely unknown by mainstream audiences, despite having a UK top 20 album and an award from British rock magazine Kerrang! for album of the year. Now they’ve made headlines around the world after frontman Bobby Vylan led a crowd at Glastonbury in chants of “death, death to the IDF”.
The chant was met with widespread condemnation in the UK. Glastonbury festival said the remarks “crossed a line” and characterized the chant, which targeted the Israel Defense Forces, as antisemitic. Keir Starmer, the prime minister, said the chant was “appalling” and said groups “making threats or inciting violence” should not be given a platform.
For his first Nintendo Switch 2 appearance, DK goes on a rhythmic rampage, powered up to new hulking heights by singing sidekick Pauline. It’s big, brash and impossibly enjoyable
While searching for gold in the dingy mines of Ingot Isle, a severe storm sweeps dungaree-donning hero Donkey Kong into a vast underground world. You think he’d be distraught, yet with the subterranean depths apparently rich in banana-shaped gemstones, DK gleefully uses his furry fists to pummel and burrow his way towards treasure. From here, the first Donkey Kong platformer since 2014 is a dirt-filled journey to the centre of the Earth.
Much like the Battlefield games of old, Bananza is built to let you pulverise its destructible environments as you see fit. That seemingly enclosed starting area? You can burrow your way through the floor. Bored with jumping through a cave? Batter your way through the wall instead. There’s a cathartic mindlessness to smashing seven shades of stone out of every inch of the ground beneath you, pushing the physics tech to its limits and seeing what hidden collectibles and passageways you unearth.
Two years after Immy killed herself, her mother Louise is still trying to understand how she found her way to a pro-suicide forum – and a man accused of supplying more than 1,000 packages of poison
Just a few hours before she ended her life, Immy Nunn seemed happy. She and her mother, Louise, had been shopping and had lunch. It was the final day of 2022 and Immy, who was 25, appeared positive about the new year. She talked about taking her driving test and looking for a new flat. She was excited about the opportunities her profile on TikTok was bringing her; known as Deaf Immy, she had nearly 800,000 followers, attracted by her honest and often funny videos about her deafness and her mental health.
By the early hours of the next morning, Immy was dead, having taken poison she bought online, almost certainly after discovering it through an online pro-suicide forum.
The festival has plenty of returning heroes, from Nina Conti to Nick Mohammed. Here are 10 shows our critics praised
In cult clown duo Xhloe and Natasha’s two-hander, we are swiftly in the US of LBJ, Beatlemania and Tom Sawyer-style outdoor adventuring. The pair portray muddy-kneed boy scouts who, against a backdrop of chirping insects and with the sole prop of a tyre, recount their hijinks with an emotional impact that sneaks up on you. Read the review. Chris Wiegand theSpace @ Niddry St, 2-23 August
Miriam Margolyes, Alexei Sayle and Mike Leigh among signatories to letter criticising Jewish Chronicle ties
More than 400 stars and media figures including Miriam Margolyes, Alexei Sayle, Juliet Stevenson and Mike Leigh have signed a letter to BBC management calling for the removal of a board member, Robbie Gibb, over claims of conflict of interest regarding the Middle East.
The signatories also include 111 BBC journalists and Zawe Ashton, Khalid Abdalla, Shola Mos-Shogbamimu and the historian William Dalrymple, who express “concerns over opaque editorial decisions and censorship at the BBC on the reporting of Israel/Palestine”.
When Tim Boxall went to the protest outside Westminster on the eve of the welfare bill vote, he knew the 32C heat would exacerbate his multiple sclerosis. But he felt he had to be there.
“The hour train here and the heat will cause me spasms, pain, fatigue, and set off motor and vocal tics,” he says. “It’ll take days bedbound to recover, but if we don’t fight our own corner, who will?”
Boxall, 50, has received the personal independence payment (Pip) for a decade and calls it a “lifeline”, particularly since he had to give up work as a credit controller for a high street bank. The benefit bought the wheelchair he’s using today. “It pays for care but also things that give me a life, not just an existence.”
When news of the government’s win off the back of a major climbdown on Pip reached him, Boxall felt “disappointed” but “not disheartened”. “The patchwork of desperate, last-minute face-saving concessions, legislating on the fly, is an absolute embarrassment,” he says.
There will be “a cost” to the government’s climbdown on welfare changes at the budget, one of Keir Starmer’s senior ministers has said, as a leading fiscal thinktank said new tax rises appeared increasingly likely.
Pat McFadden, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, defended Starmer and the work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, after the second reading of the government’s main welfare bill passed its first Commons test only after a central element was removed.
This unfinished biography evokes Corfu and Alexandria – but leaves disturbing questions unanswered
Spirit of Place is a collection of minor travel pieces published by Lawrence Durrell in 1969. “Spirit of Place”, though, could easily serve as a descriptor for the entire arc of Durrell’s literary output: Prospero’s Cell (1945), an account of three years spent on Corfu before the second world war, the Cypriot memoir Bitter Lemons (1957), and the career-making Alexandria Quartet (1957-60). The islands and littorals of the Mediterranean gave Durrell his subject, remade by him into a theatre in which men and women, displaced by the political and social violence of the mid-20th century, stumbled towards each other amid the ruins of ancient civilisations.
It feels right, then, that this biography of Lawrence Durrell, only the second major one since his death in 1990, is by Michael Haag, who spent his career writing about the eastern Mediterranean. Haag’s best book was Alexandria: City of Memory (2004), which drew on the writings of Cavafy, EM Forster and Durrell to reconstruct the polyglot culture of the Greek, Italian, Jewish and Arabic population that flourished for centuries on the shores of north Africa. By the time of his own death in 2020, Haag had completed this biography of Durrell up to the year 1945, and the decision was made to publish posthumously. The result reads like an abbreviated account of Durrell’s life rather than an amputation: despite not becoming a significant literary figure until 1957, most of Durrell’s formative experiences had taken place by the time he left the city at the end of the war.
Dolly Parton adds star power to this formulaic music documentary about Ed and Dean Roland’s band
Unless you are a big fan of what the American charts call “mainstream rock” and entering late middle age round about now, you may never have heard of 90s outfit Collective Soul. And yet this clearly band-endorsed documentary hypes them so much, you may question your own remembrance of things past. For instance, much is made of Collective Soul’s first big hit, Shine from 1993, which first broke out via airplay at an Atlanta college radio station, with the film giving the impression that everyone was humming this tune back in the day. This may not in fact have been the case: you might associate the time more with the likes of Whitney Houston, Nirvana and dancefloor fillers like Rhythm Is a Dancer.
It turns out that Collective Soul, named after a phrase in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, is a classic rawk outfit with a guitar-heavy, chunky-riff and wailing-vocals sound, somewhat generic but enjoyable. The group is built around Stockbridge, Georgia, brothers Ed Roland (the lead singer and songwriter) and his rhythm guitarist brother Dean; they are the sons of a preacher man and father figures and old friends feature very heavily in their story. The film works its way through the band’s pre-history and story methodically, with Ed Roland dominant throughout as literally and figuratively the group’s loudest voice.
Review led to profound changes, some of which made young people feel unsupported, yet new clinics are opening
At the heart of the controversy about how to meet the needs of young people questioning their gender has been the huge rise in referrals to the Tavistock – previously the only dedicated clinic in England and Wales treating children with gender dysphoria.
The clinic was closed one month before the Cass review into youth gender identity services, commissioned by NHS England and led by the British paediatrician Hilary Cass, which found that children had been “let down” by the NHS amid a “toxic” public discourse.
Reignited quarrel centers around Musk’s opposition to the president’s signature tax bill as it moves through Congress
Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s feud reignited this week with the former political allies trading sharp public threats of retribution. The blowup, centered around Musk’s opposition to Trump’s signature tax bill as it moves through Congress, ends a period of rapprochement between two of the world’s most powerful men.
Musk posted escalating attacks against Trump’s sweeping spending bill on his social media platform X, calling the legislation “insane” and vowing to form a new political party if it passed late Monday. In response, Trump claimed he could “look into” deporting the South Africa-born billionaire, while also suggesting he could cut government subsidies for Musk’s companies or set the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) on its former leader.
The narrative arc of women’s football in Switzerland is a familiar one: from apathy to hostility to mockery to inertia to change. Now the country will host one of the biggest events in the sporting calendar…
Speaking of predictions, be sure to let me know your picks for;
The root cause of the substation fire that shut Heathrow airport was a preventable technical fault that National Grid had been aware of seven years ago but failed to fix properly, investigators have concluded.
The final report by the National Energy System Operator (Neso) on the incident said the fire that cut power to the airport on 21 March, affecting more than 1,350 flights, almost 300,000 passengers and cutting power to 67,000 homes, was “most likely” sparked by moisture entering the insulation around wires.
Pep Guardiola has plenty to think about over the summer after a last-16 defeat to Al-Hilal in the United States
A manager rejuvenated is no overblown assessment of Pep Guardiola, whose friendly wave to this correspondent during a morning training session at Manchester City’s Boca Raton camp was emblematic of a man who oozed energy and commitment for the challenge of elevating his side again throughout the Club. World Cup. Immediately after the winding blow of Monday’s 4-3 defeat by Al-Hilal in Orlando, the 54-year-old blended disappointment with a measured optimism, fairly pointing to how if chances had been taken then City would be facing off against Fluminense in Friday’s quarter-final, back at the Camping World Stadium.
They say say tech instead of people on court is progress, and perhaps it is. But society has hard calls to make: sometimes perfect is not worth having
It’s the perfect Wimbledon. The sun is out, the Brits are firing and as for the scoring, that too will be somewhat perfect, this being the first Wimbledon since the tournament told the line judges, long the arbiters of accuracy, that after 148 years, their services will no longer be required.
Arguments, unpredictability and, as the cameras zoom in to the line judge whose eyesight judgment prompts a participant explosion, buttock-clenching awkwardness in close-up: goodbye to all that. Hello, AI and sharp-eyed robots, analysing in real time 18 lots of footage.
“Has a team won the Champions League without beating any reigning champions?” asks Paddy French. “And if not, which teams have beaten the fewest champions to win it? And which teams have beaten the most champions in winning the Champions League/European Cup?”
Let’s just clarify that Paddy is referring to reigning league champions, here, not reigning European champions, to which we had a few answers. Even in an era in which many Champions League teams are also-rans from the big leagues around Europe, the answer to the first question is no.
Paramount said it would pay the $16m to Trump’s future presidential library and not to Trump himself. It also said the settlement did not include a statement of apology or regret.
CBS parent company Paramount on Wednesday settled a lawsuit filed by Donald Trump over an interview broadcast in October, in the latest concession by a media company to the US president, who has targeted outlets over what he describes as false or misleading coverage.
Paramount said it would pay $16m to settle the suit with the money allocated to Trump’s future presidential library, and not paid to Trump “directly or indirectly”.
Alien spaceships, parallel worlds… the Israeli writer’s seventh collection is vast in reach, yet grounded in the bewildering absurdity of modern life
‘It’s time we acknowledge it: people are not very good at remembering things the way they really happened. If an experience is an article of clothing, then memory is the garment after it’s been washed, not according to the instructions, over and over again: the colours fade, the size shrinks, the original, nostalgic scent has long since become the artificial orchid smell of fabric softener. Giyora Shiro, may he rest in peace, was thinking all this while standing in line to get into the next world …”
That’s quite the opener for a story, isn’t it? The apt but just slightly ridiculous metaphor, which is then revealed as not an authorial pronouncement but a character’s ruminations. And then we meet the character – excellently specific name – and we find out he’s dead, and, in that drolly formulaic aside “may he rest in peace”, we meet the author too.
Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader releases video statement in run-up to 90th birthday celebrations
The Dalai Lama has said the centuries-old Tibetan Buddhist institution will continue after his death, ending years of speculation that started when he indicated that he might be the last person to hold the role.
Speaking at prayer celebrations ahead of his 90th birthday on Sunday, the Nobel peace prize-winning spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism said in a recorded statement that the next Dalai Lama should be found and recognised as per past Buddhist traditions.
Colombian artist and photographer Isabella Madrid explores the ‘click to be saved’ economy of hope in her project, Lucky Girl Syndrome
Growing up in Colombia – and online – has defined the way I create art: my identity has been formed by a country riddled with superficial and conservative values; a happy country but also one of the most violent; a country where men pray to virgins and kill the ones who are not.
The internet felt like a safe space where I could be anyone – as a vulnerable young girl who felt out of place where I lived, it helped me define my personality and interests but it also alienated me from the real world and made me hyper aware of the way I looked and existed.
Ellie Wilson’s piece titled Moth x Human assigns different sounds to the species on Parsonage Down in Salisbury
They are vital pollinators who come out at night, but now moths have emerged into the bright light of day as co-creators of a new piece of music – composed using the insects’ own flight data.
Ellie Wilson composed Moth x Human in a protected habitat on Parsonage Down in Salisbury, Wiltshire. She assigned each of the 80 resident moth species a different sound, which was triggered when it landed on her monitor.
Connexion
