Senior figure has set up Humanist France and is attracting support due to his criticisms of Israel’s actions in Gaza
The former French prime minister and foreign policy chief Dominique de Villepin has launched a political party called Humanist France, with a view to a possible bid for the French presidency in 2027.
De Villepin, who was prime minister under the rightwing president Jacques Chirac from 2005 to 2007, is best known for his dramatic speech to the United Nations in 2003, setting out France’s opposition to a US-led Iraq war and warning of the “incalculable consequences” of military action in the region.
Bayern monitoring developments but Blues confident
Chelsea are pushing to finalise an agreement to buy Jamie Gittens from Borussia Dortmund. Enzo Maresca has made no secret of his desire to sign a winger and talks over Gittens are moving in the right direction.
Bayern Munich are also monitoring developments around the England Under-21 international but Chelsea are confident they will not be outflanked by the Bundesliga champions.
Cooking at home tends to be healthier and cheaper than eating out or ordering in. So how does one start cooking? We asked the experts
Food is more than just nutrition: it can be joyful, social and exciting. But the act of preparing it can feel awfully daunting.
Many beginner cooks suffer from a fear of failure, a lack of foundational knowledge and a poor understanding of how long it actually takes to prepare a dish, says Sam Nasserian, founder and CEO of Cozymeal, a culinary services company. But “once people learn the basics and try a few recipes, they’re surprised by how easy and fun cooking can be”, he says.
The £31m signing from Wolves says Pep Guardiola’s instructions helped spark an eye-catching debut against Al Ain
With relentless zigzag bursts along the wing and razor-sharp dribbling into Al Ain’s area, Manchester City’s new left-back, Rayan Aït-Nouri, was a potent force in Sunday’s 6-0 win at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
In City’s second Club World Cup group victory, the 24-year-old executed precisely what Pep Guardiola instructed him to do.
Caught in the crossfire, Qatar on Monday night found itself in the unusual position of being asked by the US to mediate to end a war where one of the two parties was firing missiles at it. But then there are few countries as multifaceted as Qatar, or few conflicts quite as tangled as the Iran-Israel war.
It seems Monday’s heavily signalled Iranian attack on Qatar’s 60-acre Al Udeid airbase, the largest US military facility in the Middle East, may even have become the opening to resume diplomacy. The attack, which caused no casualties, cleared the ground for Donald Trump and Qatar to work together to secure the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran. It once again highlights Qatar’s role as professional mediator – a bespoke service this tiny but massively wealthy country makes available from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Gaza.
Vice-president said the bombing was a ‘success’, but reports suggest the stockpile was probably moved elsewhere
JD Vance has suggested Iran’s estimated 400kg (882lb) stockpile of enriched uranium, which is just short of weapons-grade, remains intact despite the recent US bombing campaign against Iran.
On Monday, the vice-president told Fox News that the location of the uranium “is not the question before us”, and said the relevant question was: “Can Iran enrich the uranium to weapons-grade level and can they convert that fuel into a nuclear weapon?”
Five health workers reportedly among the dead in West Kordofan as paramilitary RSF blames Sudanese military
The head of the World Health Organization has condemned an attack on a hospital in Sudan that he said had killed more than 40 civilians, as the country’s civil war, which has caused the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, rages on.
The attack on al-Mujlad hospital in West Kordofan happened on Saturday close to the frontline between the Sudanese military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The WHO’s local office, which did not assign blame, said six children and five health workers were among the dead and that there were “dozens of injuries”.
In December 2023, shortly before signing for Grêmio, Luis Suárez warned that his footballing days were numbered. His right knee had become so painful, following a Covid-affected rehabilitation from surgery in 2020, that he could barely walk. “In my last stage of recovery, the pandemic came and I had to do exercises on my own and I couldn’t finish stretching my knee,” he told Uruguayan media. “On the inside I have cartilage wear and that hits the bone. The days before each game I take three pills and hours before playing I get an injection. If not, I can’t play. Hence the limp. I have to think that in maybe five years I won’t be able to play five-a-side football with my friends. The truth is that the first steps in the morning are very painful. Anyone who sees me thinks that it is impossible for me to play a game. My son asks me to play with him and I can’t.”
It is almost impossible to train or to make a session because of the weather. This morning’s session has been very, very, very short. Tomorrow will be our 60th game of the season. The ones who had international games had even more” – Enzo Maresca wipes his brow before trying to express the difficulty and danger involved in organising Chelsea sessions with shattered players in egg-frying 41C heat at Copa Gianni.
Dear Football Daily, the assertion that Jude and Jobe Bellingham became the first brothers to score in the same tournament (yesterday’s Football Daily) is untrue. I expect there may be other examples, but Frank and Ronald de Boer both scored for the Netherlands in Euro 2000” – Thomas Lovegrove.
I’m sceptical about this weird Copa Gianni but some of the matchups have been entertaining. My favourite goalkeeper so far is Botafogo’s. While Atlético Madrid busied themselves writing their ‘Dear John’ farewell letter to the tournament, he came off his line to steamroller an opponent and a teammate before punching the ball away, recovered to block the follow-up shot from point-blank range, tossed the dead ball behind his back, beyond the reach of an incensed opponent, then theatrically threw himself to the ground when said incensed player bumped him. Dear John, never change” – Peter Oh.
The trailer for the new film about Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy at the 2002 World Cup, with someone who looks nothing like Roy Keane and someone else (Steve Coogan) who looks nothing like Mick McCarthy, appears to be as rubbish as you might expect. It won’t beat the lowest grossing film in US history obviously” – Noble Francis.
It seems a sensible move to use explicit warning labels on products. What I’m more sceptical about is the ‘No amount of alcohol is safe for you’ messaging ...
You’re going to want to sit down with a big glass of water for this one, because I’m afraid I have some bad news. Here we go: alcohol is not terribly good for you. Shocker, right? You’ve probably never heard anything like this before in your life. No doubt, you’ve been choking down a glass of pinot with dinner whenever you can stomach it because you thought it was good for your cholesterol. Instead, it is elevating your risk of cancer.
If public health experts have their way, the fact that alcohol is carcinogenic is going to be very hard for British drinkers to ignore. Dozens of medical and health organisations recently wrote to Keir Starmer urging the prime minister to force companies to include “bold and unambiguous” labels on booze bottles, warning that alcohol causes cancer.
Researchers say tobacco linked to about one in eight deaths worldwide and numbers rising sharply in some countries
Exposure to tobacco killed more than 7 million people worldwide in 2023, according to estimates.
It remains the leading risk factor for deaths in men, among whom there were 5.59m deaths, and ranks seventh for women, among whom there were 1.77m deaths.
Award, to be shared between poet and translator, is a joint project by three publishers and will give a $5,000 advance for a new collection
A new poetry prize for collections translated into English is opening for entries next month.
Publishers Fitzcarraldo Editions, Giramondo Publishing and New Directions have launched the biennial Poetry in Translation prize, which will award an advance of $5,000 (£3,700) to be shared equally between poet and translator.
Can you imagine Liverpool without its Welsh Streets or London without Battersea Power Station? For 50 years, one small band of activists have been finding creative alternative uses for great buildings their owners couldn’t see
It’s hard to imagine London without the mighty riverside citadels of Tate Modern and Battersea power station, or bereft of the ornate Victorian market halls of Smithfield and Billingsgate. It is equally difficult to picture Yorkshire without its majestic sandstone mills, Grimsby without its fishing docks, or parts of Liverpool without their streets of terrace houses. Yet all these things could have victims of the wrecking ball, if it weren’t for one small band of plucky activists.
You may not have heard of Save Britain’s Heritage, or SAVE as it likes to style itself, suggesting the urgency of the matter at hand. But the tiny charity, which celebrates its 50th birthday this month, has had more influence than any other group in campaigning for the imaginative reuse of buildings at risk, most of which had no legal protections whatsoever from being bulldozed.
“We felt that a much more punchy approach to endangered buildings was really needed,” says Marcus Binney, who founded Save in 1975, with an agile network of likeminded journalists, historians, architects and planners. “There was too much, ‘Oh, we’ll write to the minister, and have a word with the chairman of the county council.’ The usual channels were not working. We realised that the real battleground was the media.”
They were spurred by the surprise success of a 1974 exhibition at the V&A, The Destruction of the Country House, co-curated by Binney, which conveyed the shocking scale of demolition across the country with graphic power. The “Hall of Destruction”, replete with toppling classical columns, displayed more than 1,000 country houses that had been lost in the preceding century, a number that rose to 1,600 by the time the exhibition closed. The scale of the issue struck a chord: more than 1.5m signatures of support were gathered to keep these buildings standing.
What set Save apart from other heritage groups at the time was its proactive, propositional approach and energetic, youthful zeal. They had no qualms about calling out the villains, and would admonish greedy developers and lazy local authorities with ferocious glee. Their press releases and campaign pamphlets were a breath of fresh air, emblazoned with bold graphics, punchy headlines and evocative texts written with fierce authority – with a critical media-savviness brought by trustees including Simon Jenkins and Dan Cruickshank. Most crucially of all, theirs was not a call to keep the world in aspic, but to find creative alternative uses for buildings that their owners couldn’t see. “The argument for demolition was always that a building had ‘reached the end of its useful life,’” says Binney. “But the question is: ‘Useful for whom?’”
When the Central Electricity Generating Board planned to demolish its (then unlisted) Bankside power station in Southwark and replace it with offices, Save conjured a proposal in 1979, in a moment of wildly improbable blue-sky thinking, to turn it into an art gallery instead. A decade later, Tate announced that Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s great brick colossus would become the home of its modern art collection. It is now one of the most visited museums in the world. Twenty years on, when a developer wanted to scoop out the elegant innards of Smithfield market and replace them with a bloated office block and shops, Save commissioned an alternative vision, fought two crowdfunded public inquiries, and won. The London Museum is set to open there next year, breathing fresh new life into the atmospheric warren of cast-iron domes and brick vaults, that would otherwise be dust.
Royal Academy, London The Dutch artist looks like a prophet of the Holocaust when viewed through the 80-year-old German painter’s dark lens in this startling show, which makes you see how Van Gogh might have painted modern horrors
Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853, in the middle of the comparatively peaceful 19th century. If he hadn’t shot himself in a cornfield at the age of 37, and had made it to his 60s, he could have witnessed all that end in the 1914-18 war. If he’d lived to 80, he would have read in his newspaper, at an Arles cafe table, of Adolf Hitler becoming German chancellor, and in 1945, at 92, watched newsreel footage of the emaciated survivors of Belsen.
Odd thoughts, but they are stoked by the Royal Academy’s strange and startling exhibition. This is an intimate encounter between the great living German history painter, to mark his 80th year, and his hero Van Gogh. It juxtaposes his responses to the latter, from teenage drawings to recent gold-spattered wheatfield scenes, with the Dutch artist’s works. The peculiar result is to make you see how the dreamer of sunflowers and starry nights might have painted the horrors of modern history, if he’d lived to see them.
Donald Trump has reacted furiously after an Israel-Iran ceasefire he had brokered and taken credit for was violated within a few hours, ordering Israel to turn its warplanes around midair and abort their planned bombing sorties, which he warned would be a “major violation”.
Israel claimed Iran had been the first to break the truce, saying it had shot down two ballistic missiles heading for northern Israel at about 10.30am, about two and a half hours after the ceasefire was announced.
Far-right AfD party welcomes ruling in favour of Compact, which sets high bar for any government crackdown
A German federal court has overturned a ban on a magazine classed by the government as rightwing extremist, in a high-profile legal battle seen as pitting efforts by the authorities to protect the democratic order against media freedom.
The federal administrative court said that while Compact, a publication with close ties to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, had produced “anticonstitutional” content, it did “not yet” represent a threat to the state.
Emma Hayes is leaning on NWSL players for friendlies to plan for individual development and vet wider playing pool
While national teams in Europe, Africa and South America prepare for the biggest tournaments in their region, the US women’s national team convene this month for three friendlies with a unique approach. For back-to-back tests against Republic of Ireland followed by a meeting with Canada, nearly all of their Europe-based players are on vacation.
“We’ve left out the vast majority of players that are playing in Europe bar one, and that’s Naomi Girma,” said the head coach, Emma Hayes. “The rest of those players have been playing non-stop [for the] last two years without a summer break and this is the only opportunity they will get for a much-needed break. It also gives us the chance to play players who are playing domestically.”
The frantic attempts to decode his behaviour reminds me of self-help relationship babble in the 1990s. Then, as now – it’s not you, it’s him
Until it finally opens, there remains much speculation over precisely which artefacts will occupy Donald Trump’s eventual presidential library. My current view is that you could do a lot worse than fill it with all the volumes of text that have been written in the cause of “understanding” him. These increasingly read like the most futile female-targeted self-help books of the 1990s. You Have to Understand He is Very Transactional. Take Him Seriously But Not Literally. Guys, please – no more. We all urgently need rescuing from the Mind, Body & Statecraft section of the bookshop.
As I say, so many gazillions of words have been expended on this cause that Trump reminds me a lot of the men of the 1990s – indeed, he was one. Back then, he had emerged from a decade of valiantly avoiding contracting STIs in 1980s Manhattan – a battle he would later describe as “my personal Vietnam”. For much of the 1990s, the rest of mankind – certainly womankind – felt that personal victories of their own must be just around the corner. It definitely helped that the economy was booming and history had ended. But it was a time when people believed you could change everything through self-control/hard work/the right roadmap. In fact, speaking of roads, one of the biggest nonfiction titles of the 90s in the US was M Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled, a hymn to personal growth that was treated by many as the key to all mythologies.
To the surprise of almost no one, all sides declared victory as they formally accepted Donald Trump’s announcement of a ceasefire on Tuesday morning, but the long-term winners – if any – and losers will take some time to emerge.
By midday in the Middle East, the dust had not even settled. More than two hours after the ceasefire was supposed to have started, at 05:00 GMT, Israel said it had intercepted at least two missiles coming from Iran heading for the north of the country. Iran denied having launched anything, but Israel vowed devastating retaliation.
In 2013, more than 4,000 people on a malfunctioning 13-storey holiday boat had to spend days defecating into bags. This catch-up with passengers makes for a fun hour of unintentional comedy
With the latest instalments of the documentary anthology series Trainwreck, Netflix appears to be trying to grant us a brief summer pause from its usual run of true crime horror. Previous episodes included the Woodstock 99 riots and Astroworld festival crowd crush, in which 10 people died, including a nine-year-old child. Now, it has pivoted in tone.
Last week it gave us Mayor of Mayhem, the tale of Rob “I am not a crack addict” Ford, the crack-addicted mayor of Toronto and his very un-Canadian way of doing municipal business. In coming weeks, there will be accounts of the balloon boy’s story, a private investigation agency run by soccer moms, and “the greatest shitpost ever made”. Whether this tonal change comes as a relief from having your hopes for humanity further ground down, or feels as psychologically jarring (should such disparate subjects as child death and municipal confusion be yoked together in the same anthology series?), will vary.
Health networks in other US cities fear the Ice operations seen in LA will be replicated in their communities
On a Wednesday morning earlier this month, Jane*, the coordinator for a mobile clinic at a temporary housing campus in Downey, just southeast of Los Angeles, was weaving through the line of patients, helping them fill out routine forms.
Everything was normal, she recalled, until she glimpsed, from the corner of her eye, the facility’s security guard whisk away the cone that had been propping open the gate for the clinic, letting it swing shut. What had welcomed care now suddenly threatened capture.
Turn the volume down, don’t use cotton buds and get your hearing tested before it’s too late. Here’s what experts recommend to keep your ears healthy
Hearing loss can make life difficult and lead to social isolation. But with extremely loud devices in our pockets, and earbuds in near-constant use, we are at more risk than ever. How can you take care of your ears to avoid problems?
We’d like to hear from couples who are tying the knot this weekend in the Veneto capital at the same time as Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez
Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’ plans to marry his fiancee, former TV journalist, Lauren Sánchez in Venice this weekend have been met with protests from locals who feel the event is taking over the city.
According to reports in the Italian press, wedding planners have fully booked five of Venice’s plushest hotels and reserved almost the entire fleet of the city’s water taxis as well as a dock for Bezos’s mega-yacht, with hundreds of guests expected.
Jack Watkin, who featured in Rich Kids of Instagram, lured people to invest large sums on designer bags that failed to materialise
A fraudster who described himself as the “Kardashian of Cheshire” persuaded people to invest thousands of pounds in luxury handbags that failed to materialise by flaunting his luxury lifestyle on social media.
Jack Watkin, 26, of Alderley Edge, had gone on trial at Chester crown court on Monday, but on Tuesday – the second day of the trial – he changed his plea to guilty.
Extreme heat is bringing a stifling, dangerous, start to summer across much of the eastern US this week
A rare June heatwave is bringing a stifling, dangerous, start to summer across much of the eastern US this week, with forecasts for temperatures to get even hotter on Tuesday.
On Monday, just the second day of summer, the National Weather Service placed extreme heat warnings in effect from the Carolinas to Maine, advising against any outdoor activities under the conditions.
Eric Holthaus is a meteorologist and climate journalist based in Minnesota
The Alaska senator, who helped deal Trump’s first big legislative setback, believes there can be only so much fear that Americans can handle
Late one night about six months into Donald Trump’s first term, John McCain stepped on to the Senate floor and with a dramatic thumbs-down gesture dealt the president his first major legislative setback by defeating an attempt by his fellow Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
It was the last major political effort of the Arizona senator, who would die the following year from brain cancer, but his no vote would not have been effective had he not been joined by fellow Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – who gives that incident, and many other brushes with Trump, a prominent place in Far from Home, the memoir she released on Tuesday.
Australia coach Joe Schmidt has lifted team from lowest ebb and made a country feel it can win again
Australian rugby liked what it saw – and didn’t see – last week, as the British & Irish Lions got their 2025 tour off to a losing start against Argentina. Sure, it was the opening game of a 10-match odyssey and Andy Farrell’s men were lacking cohesion after only two weeks in camp. But for a young Wallabies side rising fast under their head coach, Joe Schmidt, it put blood in the water and proved the tourists are very beatable.
Schmidt’s 6-7 record in his first season in charge of the Wallabies might not cost Lions fans much sleep but Farrell, his former second‑in‑command at Ireland, will sniff the seeds of ambush. In their last start in November, the Wallabies led Ireland 13-5 only to lose 22-19. Schmidt won’t let that happen again. The 2025 Wallabies these Lions face are light years from the lambs Eddie Jones led to slaughter at the 2023 World Cup in France.
“A fantastic final day in store,” reckons Krishnamoorthy V. “While all the attention shall be on Bumrah (rightly so), I have a feeling that it is Ravindra Jadeja who is going to be the matchwinner, should India win this match. A Root century is going to be inevitable whether England wins it or loses it.”
Principality Stadium, Cardiff The US singer-songwriter graduates to the UK’s biggest venues with a theatrical show to match, featuring a house on fire, Allen Ginsberg recitals and some very real tears
Lana Del Rey is standing in a blue-on-white summer dress in front of a wood-panelled house, crying real tears next to plastic weeping willows, momentarily overcome by the size of the audience staring back at her. This sort of tension, the push-pull between genuine vulnerability and an exploration of aesthetics, has always been there in her music, and her wonderfully ambitious first stadium tour runs on it. Its theatrical staging and big ideas are all the more remarkable thanks to some very human moments of doubt.
Opening with Stars Fell on Alabama, one of several new songs foreshadowing a country record that might be around the corner, Del Rey’s voice is barely there, with its final notes followed by a dash to the wings to kiss her husband. But she stays on the rails. During Chemtrails Over the Country Club and Ultraviolence, she falls to the floor in Busby Berkeley-esque arrangements alongside her dancers, her vocals now steely as power chords and pulsing red lights ratchet up the drama.
The European Championships of 1980 and 2000 were only 20 years apart. They also belonged, both literally and figuratively, to different millennia. Euro 80 was a violent mess of negativity, apathy and hooliganism, Euro 2000 a joyous, sunkissed celebration of 21st-century football.
That jarring contrast was the spark for the latest series of Nessun Dorma: an odyssey through the history of football in the 1980s and 1990s. Our aim is to highlight, via a series of subterranean dives into each football season, how it went from being a “a slum sport played in slum stadiums and increasingly watched by slum people” – as a Sunday Times editorial called it in 1985 – to a multi-gazillion pound industry.
Economic assumptions about risks of the climate crisis are no longer relevant, says the communications expert Genevieve Guenther
Climate breakdown can be observed across many continuous, incremental changes such as soaring carbon dioxide levels, rising seas and heating oceans. The numbers creep up year after year, fuelled by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
But scientists have also identified at least 16 “tipping points” – thresholds where a tiny shift could cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically, irreversibly and with potentially devastating effects. These shifts can interact with each other and create feedback loops that heat the planet further or disrupt weather patterns, with unknown but potentially catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. It is possible some tipping points may already have been passed.
Shrouded in secrecy, the US law enforcement agency has become a kind of domestic stormtrooper for Maga’s agenda
Across the US, group chats and community threads have started spiking with warnings. Not just the typical alerts about traffic or out of service subway stations, but where and when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raid was last seen. What places to avoid. What the plainclothes agents might look like.
“Hey all,” a Brooklyn, New York, resident wrote in a closed chat with neighbors last week. “A little birdie just told me ICE is out.”
The hosts have lost the veteran Ramona Bachmann but Lia Wälti’s leadership gives them hope
This article is part of the Guardian’sEuro 2025 Experts’ Network, a cooperation between some of the best media organisations from the 16 countries who qualified. theguardian.com is running previews from two teams each day in the run-up to the tournament kicking off on 2 July.
Eliza Lynch was at her warlord partner’s side in a cataclysmic war and died in obscurity in Paris but is now being honoured – although not without controversy
By the time she turned 21, Eliza Alice Lynch had fled famine-stricken County Cork for Paris, married and left a French officer, become entangled with a South American warlord-in-waiting, and returned with him to Paraguay.
Ten years later, her partner – by then, president and grand marshal Francisco Solano López – led Paraguay into a cataclysmic four-year war against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Half of Paraguay’s population was wiped out. López was cornered and shot on a jungle battlefield called Cerro Corá, along with their 15-year-old son.
The former governor, now a New York City mayoral candidate, marks the party’s drift into boorishness and cruelty
As the far right has gained ascendancy, and the 2024 election is historicized as a blowout victory for Donald Trump rather than the relatively close contest that it actually was, members of the Democratic establishment and party leadership seem to be settling on the lesson that they will take into the second decade of the Trump era: if you can’t beat him, imitate him.
It’s long been the impulse of the party to move right, chasing Republican victories by replicating Republican policy positions, and since their loss last November many Democrats have followed in this decades-old tradition, shifting their rhetoric still further rightward on border policy, crypto, foreign policy, trans rights and DEI. They respond to polling and to a vague sense of the cultural zeitgeist, aiming less to persuade than to imitate. Often, Democrats seem as if they are not offering a different policy vision for the country so much as they are offering a different stylistic one: the same austerity, cultural revanchism and inequality but in a more polite package.
Peake stars opposite Jason Isaacs, as Politkovskaya’s husband, in this sentimental look at the life of a woman who, 19 years after her death, remains a folk hero
This British-American co-production offers a dramatised portrait of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya (played by Maxine Peake) who was assassinated in 2006. Politkovskaya’s gutsy, impassioned reporting on the second Chechen war was highly critical of the Kremlin, the Russian army and Vladimir Putin personally. (The fact that she was murdered on his birthday was surely no coincidence.) Nineteen years after her death, she remains a folk hero worldwide for resistances to autocracy, especially given the rise in repression everywhere and constant threats to journalists.
Given all that, the film deserves respect for the subject matter, even though this is a pretty basic rendition of Politkovskaya’s story, a little too sticky with hagiographic sentimentality and the cliches of crusading journalist-led movies. It also should be noted that Politkovskaya’s family haven’t given the film their blessing; some of them may not be happy, for instance, with the thinly written characterisations of their fictional counterparts, like her son Ilya (Harry Lawtey) who is made to seem peevish and self-absorbed even when his feelings are understandable. (“I’m not watching you die!” he bellows at one point.)
My talent for attracting coffee stains and mud splatters brings misery to my friends – especially the ones who lend me their pristine white shirts
I have a friend who curates her wardrobe pretty carefully – there’s nothing in it she doesn’t wear – and consequently she gives, sells or lends me a lot of things, and her taste is nonpareil so I never say no. Maybe one item in 10 is white, which unleashes dismay: she has to watch while I stain a pair of cream jeans she has kept pristine for five years, as fast as you can say, “Ooh, what’s this delicious salad dressing?”
Once, I splashed mud all the way up the back of a skirt she’d given me while she was cycling behind me, saying, “We’ve really got to get you some mudguards if you want to wear white.” Once, I got Tabasco sauce on her white bra, which was fine because who would see it? And yet, not fine, because how do you get sauce on your bra? Once, I spilled espresso down a white shirt, and that ain’t never coming out – but it actually wasn’t hers, it was her mother’s, so I’d trashed three decades of spotlessness in a moment.
By refusing to slash funding to poorer nations, Spain became an outlier in the new world disorder. Next week it hosts a UN summit in Seville to prove it
Spain swims against the tide. At a time when much of Europe is grappling with economic crises, caving in to populist anti-aid narratives and slashing development budgets, the country is increasing its financial support for the global south. Instead of planning future aid cuts, Spain has put ambitious goals for 2030 into law.
Moreover, at a time when much of the world is looking inward and retreating from multilateralism, Spain will host a UN summit in Seville this month, the first of its kind in the global north. Dozens of heads of government, state and multilateral organisations will discuss how to finance development in a post-aid world, suffocated by military spending and unpayable debt in dozens of countries, particularly those in Africa. For the Spanish government, the forthcoming Seville summit is a clear political statement.
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