She was five when I first took her to a junior parkrun and I was amazed at her attitude and ability. After a lifetime of seeing exercise as punishment, I could suddenly appreciate it
As a teenager, I was very much a “don’t put me down for cardio” girl. At school I would volunteer to be the goalkeeper as it required the least amount of movement. When it came to sports day, if I couldn’t blag a sicknote, I’d reluctantly sign up for long jump, since the long-jump pit was tucked away behind the bike shed and drew no crowds. The idea of running on the track in front of the whole school felt like a nightmare brought to life.
Unlike lots of my male friends who played football or rugby for fun, I only saw exercise as punishment. Diet culture in the 90s dictated that thinness – and subsequent “goodness” – was a simple case of calories in versus calories out. Exercise was a gruelling way to stay slim and nothing more. I knew nothing of the feelgood effects of exercise, since I only ever experienced feeling as if I was going to pass out.
As Cuba prepares for the storm to make landfall any minute, officials in Jamaica are preparing to assess the damage on Wednesday.
A video shared by the Jamaican Constabulary Force shows officers surveying extensive destruction in Black River, close to where Hurricane Melissa made landfall on Tuesday as a Category 5 storm.
Major parties rule out coalition with rightwinger, giving his party little chance of being part of government
Voting is under way in parliamentary elections in the Netherlands that polls suggest could again be won by the anti-immigration firebrand Geert Wilders’s Freedom party (PVV), although there is little chance of it being part of the next government.
The PVV, which finished a shock first in the previous election and formed a four-party all-conservative coalition that lasted barely a year before collapsing, is marginally ahead in the polls and forecast to return between 24 and 28 MPs to the 150-seat parliament.
We’re watching the Orbánisation of the US – and as in Hungary, control of the media is key to consolidating power
Democracy may be dying in the US. Whether the patient receives emergency treatment in time will determine whether the condition becomes terminal. Before Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, I warned of “Orbánisation” – in reference to Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán. There, democracy was not extinguished by firing squads or the mass imprisonment of dissidents, but by slow attrition. The electoral system was warped, civil society was targeted and pro-Orbán moguls quietly absorbed the media.
Nine months on, and Orbánisation is in full bloom across the Atlantic. Billionaire Larry Ellison, the Oracle co-founder, and his filmmaker son, David, have become blunt instruments in this process. Trump boasts they are “friends of mine – they’re big supporters of mine”. Larry Ellison, second only to Elon Musk as the world’s richest man, has poured tens of millions into Republican coffers. Shortly after the 2020 election, he joined a call that discussed challenging the legitimacy of the vote. His son, David, has a history of backing Democrats – but at one time, so did Trump, his daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
At 90, McCullin has spent seven decades recording conflict and tragedy – while escaping snipers, mortar fire and capture. He reflects on pain, pride and regret
War photographers are not meant to reach 90. “Fate has had my life in its hands,” says Don McCullin. Over his seven-decade career covering wars, famines and disasters McCullin has been captured, and escaped snipers, mortar fire and more. How does it feel to be a survivor? “Uncomfortable,” he says. No wonder he finds solace in the beautiful still lifes he creates in his shed, or in the images he composes in the countryside around his Somerset home.
McCullin is proud of escaping the extreme poverty he was born into, and the interesting and adventurous life he has lived, but he says the accolades – including a knighthood in 2017 – make him uneasy. “I feel as if I’ve been over-rewarded, and I definitely feel uncomfortable about that, because it’s been at the expense of other people’s lives.” But he has been the witness to atrocity, I point out, and that’s important. “Yes,” he says, uncertainly, “but, at the end of the day, it’s done absolutely no good at all. Look at Ukraine. Look at Gaza. I haven’t changed a solitary thing. I mean it. I feel as if I’ve been riding on other people’s pain over the last 60 years, and their pain hasn’t helped prevent this kind of tragedy. We’ve learned nothing.” It makes him despair.
The government of Aleksandar Vučić’s now resembles a political Ponzi scheme: borrowing legitimacy through spectacle while deferring its collapse
On 1 November 2024, a concrete canopy collapsed at the railway station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, killing 16 people. The tragedy triggered the longest wave of protests the country had seen in a decade – a spontaneous uprising against corruption, negligence and the arrogance of power. One year on, the cracks in Serbia’s concrete have turned into fissures in its political foundations.
The calamity cut deep for two reasons.
Srdjan Cvijić is a writer and the president of the International Advisory Committee of the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy thinktank
In Finland, kindergartens are exposing children to more mud, wild plants and moss - and finding changes to their health that show how crucial biodiversity is to wellbeing
Aurora Nikula, 5, is having a normal day at her nursery. She is making a cake out of sand and mud, adding in make-believe carrots, potatoes and meat. “It’s overcooked,” she says as she splashes water in, then adds another dollop of sand. “More sugar, it tastes better,” she says. A handful of mud goes in, and the dish evolves into a chocolate cake.
Aki Sinkkonen, a principal scientist with the Natural Resources Institute Finland, is watching. He’s also very interested in Aurora’s cake, but for different reasons. “Perfect,” he says, admiring the way she is mixing soil, sand and leaves and then putting it on her face. “She’s really getting her hands in it.”
Aki Sinkkonen (left) and Marja Roslund from the Natural Resources Institute Finland in the Humpula garden
National Audit Office reports nearly two-thirds of independent hospices in deficit in 2023-24 as demand increases
Hospices in England are cutting hundreds of beds and staff because of a funding crisis, despite a sharp rise in demand for palliative care, a damning report warns.
People needing end of life care faced a postcode lottery because access to services was so patchy, the National Audit Office (NAO) reported.
Exclusive: Former PM gave consent while foreign secretary for Royal Mint Court complex, a project still in limbo seven years later
Boris Johnson approved the China’s super-embassy proposal in 2018 and welcomed the fact it would represent “China’s largest overseas diplomatic investment” anywhere in the world, the Guardian can disclose.
In a letter to Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat, Johnson gave his consent for Royal Mint Court to house a sprawling diplomatic complex in May 2018. The Chinese government bought the 20,000 sq metres site for £255m that same month.
Claire Throssell has been central to the campaign to repeal parental contact laws following the deaths of her two sons at the hands of their father in 2014
When Claire Throssell held her dying son Jack in her arms, she made him a promise: that no more children would die in the circumstances he had – at the hands of a violent parent, on a court-ordered unsupervised visit.
Jack and Paul, then aged 12 and nine, were killed by their father 11 years ago, when he lured them into the attic with a new train set, barricaded the house shut and used Throssell’s possessions to set 14 separate fires.
Jean-Xavier de Lestrade defends decision to film mini-series inside Paris theatre where 130 people died in 2016
The Oscar-winning director of a TV mini-series about survivors of the 2015 terrorist attack at the Bataclan in Paris has rejected accusations his decision to film inside the theatre was “indecent”.
Jean-Xavier de Lestrade said the hostages on whose story the eight-part docudrama was based wanted their terrifying ordeal recreated inside the building and to film it elsewhere would have been “trickery”.
High on agenda for the leaders of the US and China will be rare earths and tariffs, with a chance of a relationship reset
Ahead of Thursday’s long-awaited first meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping since the US president’s return to office, officials from both sides have been hammering out the contours of what a trade deal between Washington and Beijing might look like, an agreement that could bring an end to months of global economic chaos caused by the US-China trade war.
The two leaders have not met in person since 2019. Since then, the war in Ukraine and increasing concern in Washington about China’s technological advances, as well as longstanding issues about the imbalanced US-China trade relationship, have strained the bonds between the two superpowers.
Less than a day after staggering through one of the most draining defeats in World Series history, the Toronto Blue Jays played with total command.
Vladimir Guerrero Jr crushed a two-run homer and Shane Bieber delivered a composed start as Toronto beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 6-2 in Game 4 on Tuesday night at Dodger Stadium, squaring the Fall Classic at two wins apiece and guaranteeing the series will return to Canada.
Forward injured in England’s 3-0 win over Australia
Beever-Jones: ‘I will be praying she will be OK’
Sarina Wiegman said she was “not feeling very positive” about the extent of the knee injury suffered by forward Michelle Agyemang in England’s 3-0 defeat of Australia.
The 19-year-old forward, on loan at Brighton from Arsenal, slammed the Pride Park pitch in agony after going down off the ball, prompting teammates and medical staff to rush to her side. She exited on a stretcher, with a concerned Wiegman speaking to her as she was taken down the tunnel.
Teenager could be picked to face Brighton in Carabao Cup
Jesus, Havertz, Martinelli, Madueke, Saliba all to miss out
Mikel Arteta has admitted that he is tempted to play the 15-year-old Max Dowman against Brighton in the Carabao Cup on Wednesday night. “When you look at what he does in training you have to play him,” the Arsenal manager said.
Dowman made a pair of Premier League appearances in August, having been a sensation in pre‑season. His most recent first‑team involvement was as a substitute at Port Vale in the Carabao Cup on 24 September. As with the careful management of Ethan Nwaneri, who may also play his part at the Emirates Stadium against Brighton, Arsenal have mapped out Dowman’s development. He was an unused substitute last week in the Champions League defeat of Athletic Bilbao.
Forward says players will perform ‘in any situation’
Crystal Palace visit Anfield in Carabao Cup on Wednesday
Federico Chiesa has claimed that Liverpool’s troubles are not long term and Arne Slot’s side will have answers for any long-ball tactics that Crystal Palace employ in the Carabao Cup.
Liverpool have lost twice against Palace this season, with the reverse at Selhurst Park last month marking the start of a damaging sequence of five defeats in six games. The teams meet again at Anfield on Wednesday when Slot faces a dilemma over the extent of his rotation, given injuries and recent results.
A juvenile humpback whale has been found dead after becoming entangled in a shark net off the New South Wales coast.
The 8-metre whale, estimated to be two years old, was found wrapped in netting north of Wollongong on Tuesday, in waters between Coledale and Wombarra.
Playwright Bess Wohl looks back on her mother’s activism in a moving and cleverly constructed look at how to balance the personal and the political
Though not listed in the program, Liberation, an inventive and resonant new play by Bess Wohl, possesses a subtitle: A Memory Play About Things I Don’t Remember. The line presumably refers to the personal nature of the show, based in part on the life of Wohl’s mother, Lisa Cronin Wohl, who worked for Ms Magazine in New York during Wohl’s early years, but it also applies to the conversations at hand, within a women’s lib group in small-town Ohio, 1970. On the basketball court of a local rec center, six women hit the blinkered beats of second-wave feminism – workplace inequalities, consciousness raising, The Feminine Mystique – that many in the audience will only know secondhand, through family histories, re-creations like FX’s superb series Mrs America or inherited cultural shorthand. I, like Wohl – like anyone born after Roe – have only inherited memories of this stage in the fight for sex and gender equality.
There’s often a tone of light derision applied to second-wave feminism, whose white, upper-middle class limitations were glaring even if its aims were noble, albeit tragically fragile. Lizzie, an adult woman of our times, seems to know this. She’s played, by Susannah Flood, as anxious, apologetic, eager to over-explain; she addresses the audience first as a peer, with the lights up, the required sealing of phones acknowledged, the fourth wall unbuilt. Perhaps, to get a restless crowd of New Yorkers to sit for two and a half hours with this circle in Ohio, one must lure them slowly through the back door of theater – here, a resurrection of the group in which Lizzie plays both herself, its chronicler, and her late mother, its founder – with slowly solidifying artifice and the eternally alluring question of who our parents were before us. The mother, according to the daughter, sewed the costumes for every school play, made every family dinner and did all the dishes – how could she have ever been radical?
President remains barred from deploying national guard as appeals court agrees to ‘en banc’ rehearing of case
The Trump administration remains barred from deploying the national guard in Portland, Oregon, following a federal appeals court ruling.
The ninth circuit court of appeals agreed on Tuesday that it would rehear a case over the president’s authority with a broader court of 11 judges. The appeals court also vacated a ruling from a three-judge panel last week that sided with the Trump administration.
4th over: England 25-1 (Smith 13, Root 11) Jamie Smith clatters a pull shot to the midwicket fence for four and then picks up a single in the same region. Root continues his busy start with a single past point and Jamie Smith then plays a nonchalant flick for SIX onto the grass bank on the leg side.
3rd over: England 13-1 (Smith 2, Root 10) Joe Root is the new batter. He whips Duffy off his pads for two and then times the next one even better for four. Root then pings a drive through cover for four more! Ten runs and the wicket of Duckett off the over.
EU edges towards using ‘reparations loan’ using Russian frozen assets; Kremlin pressing ahead with year-round conscription. What we know on day 1,344
Ukraine sent drones towards Moscow for the third consecutive night, closing airports, Russian authorities said late on Tuesday. Rosaviatsiya, the air transport watchdog, said Moscow’s Sheremetyevo,Domodedovo and Zhukovsky airports had flights halted or restricted. Russia usually says all incoming drones were destroyed, regardless of the outcome, and typically gives limited details about the effects of Ukrainian strikes unless civilians or civilian infrastructure are hit. Over the previous two nights, Russia’s defence ministry said there were 35 Ukrainian drones destroyed over the Moscow region. Ukraine says its long-range drone strikes of recent months on Moscow and other Russian regions are aimed at hitting military and industrial assets, damaging Russia’s war economy and bringing the conflict home to Russians.
Ukraine also launched several drones targeting the Budyonnovsk industrial zone in Russia’s Stavropol oblast, said its governor, Vladimir Vladimirov. Online reporting suggested the drones targeted a petrochemical and plastics plant, with videos showing a fire.
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and leaders of Nordic countries said on Tuesday that they were confident that using frozen Russian assets for Ukraine’s benefit would be approved by December. EU leaders last week stopped short of approving a mammoth “reparations loan” backed by the assets, because Belgium, where the bulk of the €200bn pot is held, fears facing any legal consequences alone. Instead, they told the European Commission to move ahead with options for funding Ukraine for two more years, leaving the door open for a €140bn “reparations loan” using frozen Russian assets. “It’s legally a sound proposal, not trivial, but a sound proposal,” said von der Leyen.
Russia is poised to enforce year-long military conscription, rather than just in the spring and autumn. Russian conscripts are theoretically not liable to be sent to Ukraine, but human rights groups and media reports say many have been coerced into signing contracts as volunteers for the war. The Russian parliament is in the process of approving a permanent draft. Putin has ordered the number of active troops to be increased by 180,000, to 1.5 million. He said in September that the military has over 700,000 troops fighting in Ukraine. Putin in 2022 ordered a “partial mobilisation” of 300,000 reservists into the war but was forced to abandon the hugely unpopular programme after protests erupted, recruiting stations were burned and many thousands of men fled to other countries. Russia has since relied on recruiting volunteers with the promise of relatively high wages and other benefits.
Volodymyr ZelenskyysaidUkrainian and European officials would meet at the end of the week to discuss the details of a ceasefire plan, Reuters reported. “It is not a plan to end the war. First of all, a ceasefire is needed,” said the Ukrainian president. “This is a plan to begin diplomacy … Our advisers will meet in the coming days, we agreed on Friday or Saturday. They will discuss the details of this plan.”
Ukraine plans to begin limited exports of weapons next month, Zelenskyy said. During his meeting with a government team, Zelenskyy also ordered a continued increase in drone production and sought to ensure that domestically produced weapons and ammunition cover about 50% of the army’s needs.
The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, announced plans to reopen two border crossings with Belarus in Kuźnica-Bruzgi and Bobrowniki to facilitate local traffic and trade, saying it was possible thanks to strengthened controls alongside the entire border line. Poland closed its border with Belarus on 12 September as a result of Russia-led military exercises taking place in Belarus and 21 Russian drones entering Polish airspace on the night of 9-10 September. Tusk noted that the opening needed to be coordinated with Lithuania, acknowledging its decision to close its crossings with Belarus in response to balloons coming across the border over the last week. Lithuania says the balloons are used to smuggle cigarettes but the Belarusian ruler, Alexander Lukashenko, allows the flights to take place as a form of “hybrid warfare” harassment.
Bipartisan measure would terminate sweeping tariffs on coffee, beef and other products – key US politics stories from 28 October at a glance
The Republican-led US Senate has passed a measure that would terminate Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on Brazilian imports, including coffee, beef and other products, in a rare bipartisan show of opposition to the president’s trade war.
The vote passed 52-48. The resolution was led by Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat of Virginia, and seeks to overturn the national emergency that Trump has declared to justify the levies.
US president will meet his South Korean counterpart, Lee Jae Myung, but expectations of a breakthrough on tariffs are low
Donald Trump heads to South Korea on Wednesday to meet President Lee Jae Myung, with deadlocked talks over a $350bn trade deal between the two countries threatening to cast a shadow over the event.
After arriving on a flight from Tokyo, where he signed a rare earths deal with Japan’s new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, the US president is due to address a summit of CEOs and meet Lee in the town of Gyeongju, a historical city playing host to the annual Apec summit.
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