Heat in Eastern Europe Fuels Fire, Fish Deaths and Tensions Over Protests
© Vadim Ghirda/Associated Press
© Vadim Ghirda/Associated Press
Sultana announced on Thursday she was quitting Labour to join Jeremy Corbyn’s Independent Alliance
My colleague Lauren Almeida, who is running the Guardian’s business live blog, has shared the following:
Rachel Reeves has not given herself enough fiscal headroom to manage public finances, Charlie Bean, the former deputy of the Bank of England has said, and has to “neurotically fine tune taxes”.
About £10bn – that’s a very small number in the context of overall public spending. Government spending is about one and a quarter trillion so £10bn is a small number … and it is a small number in the context of typical forecasting errors.
You can’t forecast the future perfectly both because you can’t forecast the economy and you can’t forecast all the elements of public finances …. The forecasts are imprecise and there is no way you can avoid that. That is a fact of life.
In light of reports of atrocities committed by the Israeli government in Gaza and reports of the UK’s collaboration with Israeli military operations, it is increasingly urgent to confirm whether the UK has contributed to any violations of international humanitarian law through economic or political cooperation with the Israeli government since October 2023, including the sale, supply or use of weapons, surveillance aircraft and Royal Air Force bases.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
© Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world
Continue reading...© Composite: Wireimage
© Composite: Wireimage
Arsenal had held talks with forward this summer
Jonathan David poised to join Juventus from Lille
Arsenal’s hopes of one day signing Nico Williams have taken a blow after the Spain forward agreed an eight-year contract extension to stay at Athletic Bilbao until 2035.
Mikel Arteta is a long-term admirer of Williams and Arsenal’s sporting director, Andrea Berta, held talks with the player’s representatives this year over a potential move. The 22-year-old had looked set to join Barcelona until this week. Barcelona, despite the sales of Ansu Fati to Monaco and Clement Lenglet to Atlético Madrid this week, have yet to satisfy La Liga’s financial requirements to register new players.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Vincent West/Reuters
© Photograph: Vincent West/Reuters
Family of Dr Marwan al-Sultan says the Israeli airstrike ‘precisely’ hit the apartment block the cardiologist and his relatives occupied
The children of Dr Marwan al-Sultan, director of Gaza’s Indonesian hospital and one of the territory’s most senior doctors, said they believed their father was deliberately targeted in the Israeli airstrike that killed him on Wednesday.
Sultan died when an Israeli missile was fired into the apartment block in Gaza City where he and his extended family were staying after their displacement from northern Gaza. His wife, daughter, sister and son-in-law were also killed in the attack.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
The yearly commemoration has always marked a contradiction. But despair is not a strategy: this is a moment to create change
The Fourth of July celebration of freedom rings hollow this year. The contradictions built into a national commemoration of our triumph over autocracy feel newly personal and perilous – especially to those who have, until now, felt relatively secure in the federal government’s commitment to democracy and the rule of law.
But the contradiction is far from new. Black, brown and Indigenous communities have always seen the gap between the ideals of American democracy and the lived reality of exclusion. Frederick Douglass’s 1852 address What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? demanded that Americans confront the hypocrisy of celebrating liberty while millions were enslaved. Today, those contradictions persist in enduring racial disparities and policies that perpetuate segregation, second-class citizenship and selective protection of rights.
Deborah N Archer is the president of the ACLU, the Margaret B Hoppin professor of law at NYU Law School, and the author of Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality. L Song Richardson is the former dean and currently chancellor’s professor of law at the University of California Irvine School of Law. She previously served as president of Colorado College. Susan Sturm is the George M Jaffin professor of law and social responsibility and the founding director of the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School and author of What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA
© Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA
From scoring so badly at Eurovision it made Terry Wogan resign to having Paul Hollywood call your cake ‘tough as old boots’, here are the contestants who lost big on the nation’s favourite shows
We often hear about the people who win TV contests. As well as the glory of victory, they might earn an enviable cash prize, a lucrative record deal or a life-changing career boost. But what about those who finish last? Are they philosophical in defeat or throwing tantrums behind the scenes? We tracked down five TV losers to relive their failure in front of millions, reveal how they recovered from humiliation and share what they learned.
Continue reading...© Composite: PR
© Composite: PR
Advocates in Springfield, Ohio – a city thousands of Haitians now call home – fear the fallout of Trump’s DHS revoking temporary protected status for Haitian nationals
Inside a church a few blocks south of downtown Springfield, Ohio, about 30 concerned Haitians, church leaders and community members have gathered on a balmy summer evening to try to map out a plan.
It’s been just a few days since Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, announced that Haitian nationals with temporary protected status (TPS) would face termination proceedings in a matter of months. By 2 September, they would be forced out of the US.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
© Photograph: Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
In an Arctic reshaped by the climate crisis, less ice really means more as countries face risks in push for more ships
For millennia, a mass of sea ice in the high Arctic has changed with the seasons, casting off its outer layer in summer and expanding in winter as it spins between Russia, Canada and Alaska. Known as the Beaufort Gyre, this fluke of geography and oceanography was once a proving ground for ice to “mature” into icebergs.
But no more. A rapidly changing climate has reshaped the region, reducing perennial sea ice. As ocean currents spin what is left of the gyre, chunks of ice now clog many of the channels separating the northern islands.
Continue reading...© Photograph: US Coast Guard Photo/Alamy
© Photograph: US Coast Guard Photo/Alamy
This elderflower margarita shakes hands with a champagne cocktail, and then gives her a big sting in the tail
How better to welcome the arrival of summer proper than with a refreshing champagne cocktail with a spicy Mexican twist?
Guilherme Vieira, bars manager, Síbín Speakeasy at Great Scotland Yard hotel, London SW1
Continue reading...© Photograph: Rob Lawson/The Guardian. Drink stylist: Seb Davis.
© Photograph: Rob Lawson/The Guardian. Drink stylist: Seb Davis.
When the Leicester band were forced to drop their old name after a legal threats from a certain budget airline, it could have been curtains. But frontman Murray Matravers’s trip to Japan has prompted a bold new outlook – and an upbeat new album
When writing songs, “95% of the time” Murray Matravers starts with the title. It’s a tactic he picked up from Gary Barlow: a producer once told him the Take That man tends to arrive at sessions touting a load of prospective song titles “cut out on little pieces of paper, and he’d put them on the table and you could just choose one. I was like: that’s fucking brilliant. Ever since I’ve always had loads of titles in my Notes app. It actually changed the way I wrote music,” he says with genuine enthusiasm. “Shout out to Gary Barlow!”
Names are clearly very important to the 29-year-old – but in recent years they have also caused him untold stress. By 2023, Matravers’ band Easy Life was thriving, having scored two No 2 albums on the trot by fusing upbeat, synthy bedroom pop with wry emo-rap. But that same year, his career came to a screeching halt when easyGroup – owners of the easyJet brand name with a long history of taking legal action against businesses with the word “easy” in their branding – decided to sue the Leicester band for trademark infringement.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Charles Gall
© Photograph: Charles Gall
Rachel Reeves’s distress may help destigmatise emotional response to stress or professional frustration
Rachel Reeves’s tears this week triggered a fall in the pound and attracted widespread derision from political columnists, mostly male. “What is wrong with Rachel Reeves?” the Telegraph asked. In an article headlined “The meaning of the chancellor’s tears”, a New Statesman columnist told readers that Reeves’s authority was “beginning to melt away”. The Daily Mail spoke disdainfully of her “waterworks”.
But in the longer term the chancellor’s display of distress may prove to have an unexpectedly positive legacy, helpfully normalising a still hugely stigmatised phenomenon: women’s tears in the workplace.
Continue reading...© Photograph: House of Commons/PA
© Photograph: House of Commons/PA
With audiences ‘more fashion aware than ever’, being worn on a TV show can be life-changing for small brands
The Bear is back for season 4, but never mind Carmy’s famous white T-shirt. All eyes are on Sydney, the quietly competent sous chef played by Ayo Edebiri, who has been breaking the internet with her own white tee.
Designed by a small independent US brand called Everybody.World, and worn as she is prepping in the opening episode, it mirrors the tight white T-shirt by Merz b. Schwanen preferred by her erratic boss. His crashed the company’s website – and helped propel Jeremy Allen White to become the face (and body) of Calvin Klein.
Continue reading...© Photograph: AP
© Photograph: AP