The Australian Defence Force (ADF) has conceded that one of its ships inadvertently blocked wireless internet and radio services across swathes of New Zealand’s North and South islands this week.
The incident occurred on Wednesday morning as HMAS Canberra, one of the largest ships in the Royal Australian Navy, was on its way to Wellington, where it ultimately arrived on Thursday.
Veer left or double down on the right? Either way, the prime minister needs to commit and sell it to an impatient electorate
After less than a year in power, Labour has reached a familiar place. Keir Starmer’s troubled government is at a fork in the road, wondering which direction to follow. With the delivery of its spending review next week after several acrimonious delays, and a Commons vote on its divisive welfare cuts expected later this month, the government’s unity and morale are fragile. The public finances are severely strained, with ever more competing demands, such as for extra defence spending. Though much more energetic than its Tory predecessor, this government often seems opaque, unable to explain its purpose in a compelling way.
Many voters and journalists – even more impatient than usual after years of manic politics – are already considering what might replace Starmer’s administration. At barely 20% in the polls, Labour is as unpopular as in its most disliked days under Jeremy Corbyn – and unlike then, has been overtaken by Nigel Farage’s latest vehicle. Most ominously of all, perhaps, even the government’s successes, such as its trade deals, seem to make little or no difference to its public standing or sense of momentum.
Historian mapping medieval murders has evidence John Ford’s stabbing was revenge hit by impenitent ex-lover
Almost 700 years ago, in a busy London street in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, a priest called John Ford was brazenly stabbed to death in a crime notable both for its public nature and its ferocity.
It was early evening, just after vespers on 4 May 1337, and the street in Westcheap would have been bustling with passersby. In full view of them all, one man sliced Ford’s throat with an anelace, a foot-long dagger, while two others used long knives to stab him in the belly. Was someone trying to make a very public example of the victim?
Arcola theatre, London The horrific reality of Russia’s invasion is recounted during the preparation of a Ukrainian salad in Anastasiia Kosidii and Josephine Burton’s play
During the violent chaos following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a woman whose husband is missing receives a phone call from his number. Brief relief implodes when the speaker is not him but a stranger revealing that this device has been found beside a corpse covered by a tarpaulin.
This is one of numerous shattering anecdotes in a play by Dash Arts, based on work by The Reckoning Project, which collects verbatim testimony from conflict victims with the aim of bringing prosecutions for war crimes.
Fruit and floral flavours with marshmallowy meringue make for a sensational melt-in-the-mouth dessert
Inspired by Pierre Hermé’s iconic ispahan macarons, where rose, lychee and raspberry create an exquisite flavour combination, this dessert reinterprets the trio in a crisp and marshmallowy pavlova. Instead of rose, I’ve used elderflower to infuse the cream, gently bringing together the delicate sweetness of lychee and the tart brightness of raspberries. Garnish with fresh elderflowers (if you can find any) and some coulis for a beautiful centrepiece.
House Speaker Mike Johnson is attempting to reconcile with Elon Musk after the billionaire's fierce opposition to the Big, Beautiful Bill caused turmoil among Republican lawmakers.
Luis Francisco Soriano, 31, allegedly killed two children, ages 2 and 4, and their parents in their Irondequoit, NY, home, which was then burned to the ground on August 31, 2024, according to Fox News.
A federal judge in Boston on Thursday temporarily blocked US President Donald Trump from barring US entry of foreign nationals seeking to study or participate in exchange programs at Harvard University
The fatal brain-eating amoeba Naegleria fowleri claimed the life of a Texas woman who used contaminated water in her nasal rinse, as the CDC highlights potential risks.
Bertin Huynh and Luca Ittimani explain the viral term – which involves neither chakras nor tractors – to Alyx Gorman
Bertin and Luca. You’re young people. Why are all the kids on my feeds suddenly talking about aura farming, and what does it have to do with Timothée Chalamet?
Who has more aura than theDune saga’s prophesied leaderPaul Atreides? Since that role, Chalamet has become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Aura farming is all about cultivating the coolest version of yourself. Think well-tailored suits, lots of grayscale, serious stares and sharp angles.
The New York/New Jersey 2026 World Cup Host Committee is sending the message that scenes like the ones that occurred at the Copa America final in 2024 in Miami won’t happen next year when the World Cup final takes place at MetLife Stadium. Alex Lasry, the head of the NY/NJ host committee, promised that the...
Four killed and 20 wounded as missiles and drones target the Ukrainian capital
Russia mounted an intense and sustained barrage of Kyiv overnight, with missiles and drones targeting the Ukrainian capital where there was a succession of large explosions, Reuters reporters in the city said.
By daybreak on Friday, authorities in Kyiv reported that four people were killed and 20 people had been wounded, of whom 16 had been hospitalised.
Jonathan Hall, a British government adviser, said in an interview that hostile states were paying local criminals to carry out acts of violence, espionage and intimidation.
After six months of turmoil, citizens hope for better times. But political polarization and international tensions over trade mean many worries remain.
The families of the six children killed in a primary school jumping castle incident are angry after the operator who set up the castle was found not guilty of a workplace safety charge.
Chace Harrison, Jalailah Jayne-Maree Jones, Zane Mellor, Addison Stewart, Jye Sheehan and Peter Dodt died after the incident at Hillcrest primary school in Devonport in December 2021.
Playing stadiums and causing dance crazes, the Irish singer-songwriter is going supernova – and whether opining on trans rights, body shaming or capitalism, she’s more forthright than ever
Ciara Mary-Anne Thompson, or CMAT as she’s professionally known, says she can clearly remember writing the song that changed her life. She was 22 and having moved from Ireland to Manchester, was working in TK Maxx and, at the weekends, as what she’s fond of calling a “sexy shots girl”: “Cash in hand, £8 an hour, 11pm to 3am, teetering up and down the stairs of a nightclub in the building where Joy Division shot the video for Love Will Tear Us Apart with a tray of Jägermeister shots they’d put a bit of dry ice in – burned your skin if you got it on your hands – selling them for three pound each. Terrible job. And just getting absolutely stoned out of my bin all the time, doing whatever drugs anyone would give me for free. I had absolutely no friends.”
An attempt to get her musical career off the ground, “trying to make hyperpop because I loved Charli xcx so much”, had come to nothing. She had just broken up with her “old, weird” boyfriend and was “completely alone in a flat in Chorlton, thinking: ‘What have I done?’ I got really, really, really upset. I kind of looked at myself in the mirror …” She lets out a snort of laughter. “I feel like there’s so many film scenes where people write songs and I’m like, ‘that didn’t fucking happen like that’, but this one did. So I’m crying, grabbed my guitar and wrote I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby! in like 20 minutes. And that was that. I thought: ‘I know what I need to do now.’”
In Galápagos, travellers leave post in an old barrel in the hope it will be picked up – I decided to help out
I have always loved travelling, and have spent most of my adult life either on the move or planning my next adventure. In 2014, I was living in London when my dad, Eric, was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND). I immediately moved back to my home town of New Plymouth in New Zealand, to help and spend time with him.
When he passed away in October 2022, I wanted to find a way to process my grief, and I was desperate to get back out into the world.
Exclusive: Levels of ‘multi-stress’ at highest since 2008 crash, study says, with people feeling profoundly powerless
More than 5 million UK adults are experiencing a triple whammy of financial, health and housing insecurity as British households hit levels of “multi-stress” not seen since the global economic crash well over a decade ago, research shows.
One in 10 working-age adults are juggling low income and debt, insecure tenancies and high rents, and problems accessing NHS care. They are at least twice as likely as the rest of the population to report mental stress, sleeplessness and isolation.
Call me a middle-class ‘bobo’, but inspired street art has nothing in common with sprayed-on assertions of ‘me, me, me’
Among the layers of life in Paris that energise me, I might list: peeling back the city’s music scene all the way to figuring out where, and when, the musicians go to jam together; the unassuming flair of even a basic brasserie; the way one can pivot, in the span of a week, from an art gallery opening to a friend’s concert to another friend’s restaurant to discover his Corsican-influenced menu, and end it by lingering on a terrace, “remaking the world” with others who challenge you – calmly – to see something a different way.
Among the things about this city that exhaust me are the people who cram their way into the Métro without letting you step out first (seriously, what neurons are misfiring in the heads of these people?), and the sheer prevalence of tags. It’s when you leave Paris for a bit and come back that you realise how many tags there are. How swaths of a city that is otherwise arrestingly beautiful look as if a giant toddler high on methamphetamines stumbled through them, scribbling on everything in sight with a giant Sharpie.
Lana Estemirova promised to tell story of her mother, a renowned human rights activist. This month it is published
Lana Estemirova was 15 in 2009, when her mother, the renowned Chechen human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, was kidnapped and murdered. Bundled into a car as she walked to the bus stop on her way to work, she was driven out of town and then shot five times in the chest and head.
The killing was widely seen as retribution for Estemirova’s fearless investigations of extrajudicial murders, kidnappings and human rights abuses in Chechnya, first by Russian soldiers and then by forces loyal to the Kremlin-appointed warlord, Ramzan Kadyrov. Nobody was ever prosecuted for the crime.
Andalucían police used shot of women sitting on chairs on pavement in request to keep public right of way clear
Somewhere towards the very top of the long list of unspoken Spanish rules – gin and tonic should not be drunk before a meal, chorizo has no place in the vicinity of a paella and children’s bedtimes cease to apply in the summer – is the silent injunction that forbids any attempts to alter the habits of the country’s cherished older people.
It was unfortunate, then, that police in the small Andalucían town of Santa Fe chose the photo they did to accompany a request for people not to disturb their neighbours by sitting around the streets late at night.
Emergency legislation is being used in increasingly repressive ways to grab back land granted during the civil war, say campaigners
In early May, the farming cooperative of El Bosque in Santa Tecla, one of El Salvador’s largest cities, received an eviction notice; a new battle in a decades-old fight for land. In response, community members organised a peaceful sit-in near hardline President Nayib Bukele’s private residence, hoping to appeal directly for help.
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