Pair accused of spying on Neptune missile programme, which is seen as critical to defence against Russia
Ukraine says it has arrested a Chinese father and son on suspicion of spying on its Neptune anti-ship missile programme, a key part of Kyiv’s growing domestic arms industry that is critical to its defence against Russian forces.
The announcement by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) follows assertions by Kyiv in recent months that Beijing, which has sought to project an image of neutrality, is helping the Kremlin’s war effort.
I thought the show was going to be a bit of a money grab. I thought they’d turn their backs, play the songs, and not put too much effort into it. But it was just banger after banger. The pace was incredible. For me, it was pure nostalgia, with my brother and best mate. My brother and I had our own falling out earlier in the year, so there was reconciliation all round. Nature’s healing.
Castillo’s ambitious second novel, set in the worlds of social media and VR, considers labour and storytelling in a world veering right
Elaine Castillo’s second novel is set within the rotten heart of the US tech industry, where “Girlie was, by every conceivable metric, one of the very best.” What makes her so effective in her underpaid contract role moderating content for social media giant Reeden is that most prized of workplace currencies: a stoical capacity for labour. Though the job’s mental toll is clear – suicides are common, white staff never stick around and wellness support remains superficial – Girlie proves exceptionally hardy, near-perfect in her ability to identify and scrape feeds free of child sexual abuse content. Behind her productive impassivity, Castillo tells us with a sombre touch of irony, is a “glowing” line of ancestors – Filipina nurses and maids who have long cleaned up after others.
Things look up for Girlie once William Cheung enters the scene, inviting her to become a moderator at Playground, a virtual reality entertainment platform newly acquired by Reeden. Girlie is a perfect fit. As the American-born daughter of immigrants, she carries a cloying sense of filial indebtedness (“there was an unspoken understanding, an ironclad cultural code: if you made money, you had to pay your family back”). With the family home under mortgage, the generous benefits package is hard to resist. And, because we’re partly also in romance territory, so is the man offering it.
The late Argentinian director served up this tale of squalid fraud 25 years ago, but its questions about greed, cynicism and the human condition remain evergreen
Twenty-five years ago, Argentinian director Fabián Bielinsky gave us this grifter satire classic, a deliciously cynical tale of swindling and double-cross. It is confidence trickery perpetrated on the victim in parallel to narrative trickery perpetrated on the audience, who are invited to assume that however hard the fictional characters on screen are falling, the rug under their own feet is perfectly secure. Four years later, Hollywood paid this excellent film the traditional compliment of a well-meaning but inferior (and now forgotten) remake, pedantically renamed Criminal, starring John C Reilly and Diego Luna.
Now restored and rereleased, the original looks sharper than ever: a drama of squalid fraud which is a tale of human greed, but also a specific, prophetic jab at Argentina’s financial shady dealers in a deregulated banking system that crashed soon after the film came out. Ricardo Darín made an international name for himself in one of the tough-guy everyman roles that was to become his brand. He plays Marcos, a hard-bitten conman browsing in a convenience store one evening, and amused to notice fresh-faced wannabe trickster Juan (Gastón Pauls) incompetently trying to pull off a petty scam whereby the cashier is bamboozled into giving him too much change. (It’s a cheap trick to compare with that of Tatum O’Neal in Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon or John Cusack in Stephen Frears’ The Grifters.)
A 19-year-old surfer is stable in hospital after being found safe on a remote island off the northern New South Wales coast of Australia in an outcome his dad described as “one in a million”.
Darcy Deefholts’ family were “fearing for the worst”, his father, Terry, said in an urgent post to Facebook calling for rescue help on Wednesday night.
Police searching for German backpacker Carolina Wilga, who is missing in a remote part of Western Australia, have found an abandoned van believed to have mechanical issues.
The 26-year-old has not been seen or heard from since she visited a general store in the small town of Beacon, in WA’s north-east Wheatbelt region, on 29 June.
Shakhtar Donetsk coach on staying calm on the touchline and learning from Diego Simeone and Luis Enrique
Arda Turan knows the question is coming. How has the firebrand who thrilled and exasperated during a successful, sometimes wildly controversial, playing career become a manager with the temperament to take on one of Europe’s most delicate jobs? It comes down to taking a breath. “When there is something going on, right now the first thing that comes into my mind is thinking rather than reacting,” he says with a grin.
There will be plenty to occupy that fizzing brain at Shakhtar Donetsk, where he was appointed head coach in May. His competitive debut comes on Thursday, against the Finnish side Ilves, but it is a Europa League first qualifying round tie and the Ukrainian giants are not used to that stage. This is only their second year since the turn of the century without any form of Champions League football and they have rolled the dice by asking one of Turkey’s greatest ever footballers to set them straight.
Ava thinks everyone should have their own towel, but Lynsey says that means extra laundry and is bad for the environment. You decide who should throw in the towel
The Girls creator’s hugely anticipated return to TV is just not good enough. It’s tonally jarring, full of laboured jokes and abandons all thoughts of innovation. You expect far better
It takes a lot of talent to make something as singular as Girls. Then 26-year-old Lena Dunham created, starred in and executive-produced the show. She frequently directed, and she wrote or co-wrote 41 of the extraordinarily raw, realistic (Girls’ sex scenes reduced most screen and polite conventions to rubble), brutally funny and occasionally simply brutal 62 episodes that comprised its six seasons between 2012 and 2017. Girls’ impeccably witty script and sublime characterisations meant it pulled off a near-impossible feat. It made the story of four solipsistic, privileged twentysomethings navigating their lives one sexual/professional/ youthful/contraceptive mistake at a time in New York City compelling, funny and meaningful. As Dunham’s character and semi-alter ego Hannah Horvath said of herself – she may not have been the voice of a generation, but she was definitely a voice of her generation.
Since then, the output of a woman for whom the word “wunderkind” seemed woefully underpowered has itself been underwhelming. Dunham’s much-hyped first book did not deliver a fraction of the humour or insight Girls proved she was capable of – although certain passages did garner much publicity and controversy, a tradition she then continued with various ill-advised (or wilfully misinterpreted) comments on the #MeToo movement, writing out of imagination rather than lived experience and other hot button issues of the past decade or so. Her US remake of Julia Davis’s Camping was widely considered to have lost its originator’s bleak genius in translation, and Dunham’s adaptation of the beloved and brilliant children’s book Catherine Called Birdy, was an inoffensive bagatelle that did not detain critics or commerce long.
The Guardian’s Sarah Lee visits SW19 to sample the visual delights of the All England Club championships.‘In a world with so fewer anchors to civility and fair play,’ the photographer writes, ‘stepping inside the gates of the All England Club is a wonderful, albeit temporary, corrective’
Plan for Channel crossings marks forward step for the two leaders, though further UK funding remains a sticking point
Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron will announce a “one in, one out” migration deal on Thursday that will involve the UK accepting some cross-Channel asylum seekers but returning others to France.
The two leaders are expected to cap the French president’s three-day state visit to the UK with a press conference in London at which they will announce the new plan to tackle small boat crossings.
This impeccably sourced account of the secretive agency during a period of global turmoil deserves a Pulitzer
In 1976 when we were both based in Brussels, my BBC mentor, the great Charles Wheeler, came back to the office from a grand US embassy party one evening and remarked: “The cleverest and most entertaining people at these things are always CIA. Makes it all the harder to understand why they get everything wrong.” An exaggeration, of course, but one with a degree of truth to it. Why has an organisation with huge amounts of money at its disposal, a record of recruiting the brightest and the best, and the widest of remits, failed to notch up a better record? It’s true that we may not know about many of the CIA’s successes. But we know about a lot of its failures, and some of them have marked US history ineradicably.
In The Mission, Tim Weiner, whose reporting on the CIA in the New York Times was always essential reading, and whose subsequent books on the US intelligence community have a place on the shelves of anyone interested in international affairs, provides a variety of answers to this essential question. As he showed nearly 20 years ago in Legacy of Ashes, his history of the CIA from its founding in 1947 to the end of the 20th century, the agency’s position by the end of the 90s was pretty desperate. It was starved of cash and bleeding talent. A high-flyer who had been station chief in Bucharest was revealed to be working for the Russians, handing them the names of large numbers of agents and employees. But the new US administration that came in at the start of 2001 wasn’t too worried. In March that year, Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, told the joint chiefs of staff: “For the first time in decades, the country faces no strategic challenge.” Six months later came 9/11. The CIA had tried to convince the feckless George W Bush about the looming threat of Islamic ultra-fundamentalism, but no one in the administration listened. The agency was regarded as broken.
With forests under pressure from drought, heat, disease and deer, a study has found fewer trees across a range of species surviving to maturity. But scientists say there is still hope
To the untrained eye, Monks Wood looks healthy and lush in the summer sun. Hundreds of butterflies dance on the edge of footpaths in the ancient Cambridgeshire woodland, which is rich with ash, maple and oak trees. Birds flit through the hedgerows as they feed. A fox ambles through a forest clearing, before disappearing into long grass.
But for a number of years, it has been clear to Bruno Ladvocat and Rachel Mailes that something is missing. In 2022, Ladvocat, Mailes and their research team from Birmingham University were out sampling when they noticed that the small trees that typically cover the woodland floor were increasingly hard to find.
A lineup including Stephen Graham and Al Pacino seem wasted on this lavish, but hackneyed drama about the Italian artist
Some very cliched roistering, life-affirming wine-drinking, bourgeois-defying artistic shenanigans here from the veteran screenwriting couple Jerzy and Mary Olson-Kromolowski who have adapted a 1980 stage play, Modigliani by Dennis McIntyre, about the Italian sculptor and painter Amedeo Modigliani, known as Modi. Johnny Depp directs and perhaps sees his subject as a bohemian badass not unlike Hunter S Thompson, whom he played in Terry Gilliam’s 1998 movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – and perhaps not altogether unlike how he sees himself.
It is 1916 in Paris and the brutality of war is destroying the belle époque; Riccardo Scamarcio plays Modigliani, a brilliant, sensual but penniless artist facing poverty and casual antisemitism. Having got into a chaotic affray at a pompous posh restaurant – filmed like a deleted scene from Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers – Modigliani has to lie low from the police and dreams of quitting Paris, to the bewilderment of his quaintly imagined artist comrades Maurice Utrillo (Bruno Gouery) and Chaïm Soutine (Ryan McParland), and his lover (and subject) Beatrice Hastings (Antonia Desplat).
Social housing makes up almost half of the city’s 1m homes. The system isn’t perfect, but it gets a lot of things right
When it comes to best-practice examples in the housing debate, Vienna is a common reference. Indeed, the Austrian capital features prominently in narratives about successful housing policies. An article in the Observer concluded that Vienna shows “decent homes for all” is not an impossible dream. And the New York Times even declared it “a renters’ utopia”.
A considerable part of the attraction of Vienna relates to its large social-housing stock. It accounts for some 43% of the roughly 1m housing units in the city. About half of it is municipally owned council housing. The other half is provided and administered by limited-profit housing associations – an Austrian version of social housing providers that are permitted to make a small profit to finance their operations. Social housing is not just for those on low incomes, but also caters to middle- and even some upper-middle-class households.
After serious floods and landslides, some of the great trans-Alpine routes have reopened – with new services added – offering unforgettable train journeys from Austria to the Adriatic
The planning of main rail routes through the Alps was shaped by national ambition and rivalries. The opening of Austria’s Semmering railway in 1854, the Mont Cenis route (also known as Fréjus) between France and Italy in 1871 and Switzerland’s Gotthard tunnel in 1882 defined the broad contours of Alpine railway geography in the late 19th century. But Habsburg planners were keen to secure better links with Adriatic ports, so in 1901 they sketched out a bold plan for the Neue Alpenbahnen (new Alpine railways), of which Austria’s Tauern railway was the most important. It opened in 1909. When it closed for rebuilding in November 2024, it was a sharp reminder of how much passengers and freight rely on a handful of key Alpine rail routes. Lose one key Alpine link and the effects of that closure are felt across Europe.
The last couple of years have been tough for Alpine rail operators. Landslides, floods and derailment have played havoc on the lines. So three cheers for the more recent good news stories. The important Mont Cenis route reopened this spring, having been shut after a landslide in August 2023 (though there was a wobble last week when another landslide briefly interrupted services). That closure necessitated the cancellation of all high-speed trains between France and Italy. These links have now been restored, allowing travellers this summer to speed from Paris to Turin in just 5hrs 40mins, or from Lyon to Milan in under five hours.
From tearful scenes in war-torn Ukraine to the photo diaries of immigrants making treacherous journeys, French agency MYOP have spent two decades taking the pulse of our era
17-year-old continues meteoric rise after first playing in 2022
Australia play New Zealand in Wellington on Saturday
A big-stepping 17-year-old former gymnast has been drafted into Australia’s women’s rugby team, as the Wallaroos hope to end a 28-match losing streak against New Zealand as part of preparations for next month’s World Cup.
Waiaria Ellis – at 17 years and 305 days – will become the second youngest Australian player when she takes the field against the Black Ferns in Wellington on Saturday.
Somalia, DR Congo and Yemen among states forced to sign deals and barter their minerals for aid or military support
Some of the world’s poorest countries have started paying millions to lobbyists linked to Donald Trump to try to offset US cuts to foreign aid, an investigation reveals.
Somalia, Haiti and Yemen are among 11 countries to sign significant lobbying deals with figures tied directly to the US president after he slashed US foreign humanitarian assistance.
Several key players substituted as PSG romped to 4-0 win
Xabi Alonso ‘hurt’ but says ‘next year will be different’
On the afternoon that Paris Saint-Germain reached the final of the Club World Cup, placing them 90 minutes away from winning every trophy available this season, Luis Enrique underlined how far they had come by recalling: “In January, people said we didn’t have leaders and didn’t score goals.” Since then they have scored more than 100 and won their first ever Champions league with a 5-0 victory against Inter in the final. Here they put four past Real Madrid with a display so dominant that he had to deny that they had taken their foot off the gas.
In doing so, however, the PSG head coach did reveal that he had made changes with Sunday’s final against Chelsea in mind. PSG were two goals up inside 10 minutes and had made it 3-0 before they had played half an hour, the game effectively over, before Gonçalo Ramos added a fourth in the dying minutes.
Sarina Wiegman’s side delivered a warning shot to the rest in Zurich – the reigning champions will not go quietly
What was all the fuss about? On Saturday night England were staring into the abyss after a largely flat, listless defeat against France. Now their Euro 2025 campaign is up and running, a dominant dispatching of the Netherlands giving them a foot in the quarter-finals.
This was a warning shot to the rest; a clear message that the reigning champions will not fade into the night. Originally billed as a knife-edge contest between close rivals, the tie turned into a 4-0 rout under an azure Zurich sky.
No 8 seed through to face Bencic after 6-2, 7-5 victory
‘It feels great … I got goosebumps after this win’
From the moment she first set foot on the grass this year, there has been something different about Iga Swiatek. Where once trepidation would have been her overriding emotion on what has traditionally been her weakest surface, she has looked calm from day one and on Wednesday she held her nerve to reach the Wimbledon semi-finals for the first time, holding off a bold fightback from Liudmila Samsonova to claim a 6-2, 7-5 victory.
Leading by a set and 4-2, 40-0, Swiatek was cruising to victory, crunching groundstrokes, moving brilliantly and improvising impressively. However, Samsonova suddenly started going for broke and at 5-5, she had 0-30 on the Pole’s serve. But unlike on several occasions this year, Swiatek did not panic, dug deep and claimed her place in the last four, where she will play Belinda Bencic.
Research in Chile suggests climate crisis makes eruptions more likely and explosive, and warns of Antarctica risk
The melting of glaciers and ice caps by the climate crisis could unleash a barrage of explosive volcanic eruptions, a study suggests.
The loss of ice releases the pressure on underground magma chambers and makes eruptions more likely. This process has been seen in Iceland, an unusual island that sits on a mid-ocean tectonic plate boundary. But the research in Chile is one of the first studies to show a surge in volcanism on a continent in the past, after the last ice age ended.
Whether it’s bloodshed at Glastonbury or starving people on benefits, their ‘irony poisoning’ seeps obscene ideas into the range of the possible
Imagine the furore if a Guardian columnist suggested bombing, say, the Conservative party conference and the Tory stronghold of Arundel in Sussex. It would dominate public discussion for weeks. Despite protesting they were “only joking”, that person would never work in journalism again. Their editor would certainly be sacked. The police would probably come knocking. But when the Spectator columnist Rod Liddle speculates about bombing Glastonbury festival and Brighton, complaints are met with, “Calm down dear, can’t you take a joke?” The journalist keeps his job, as does his editor, the former justice secretary Michael Gove. There’s one rule for the left and another for the right.
The same applies to the recent comments on GB News by its regular guest Lewis Schaffer. He proposed that, to reduce the number of disabled people claiming benefits, he would “just starve them. I mean, that’s what people have to do, that’s what you’ve got to do to people, you just can’t give people money … What else can you do? Shoot them? I mean, I suggest that, but I think that’s maybe a bit strong.” The presenter, Patrick Christys replied, “Yeah, it’s just not allowed these days.”
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
On Tuesday 16 September, join George Monbiot and guests as they discuss 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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