Foreign minister says move is not aimed at Israeli people but ‘ensuring their government respects international and humanitarian law’
Gaza’s civil defence agency spokesperson Mahmud Bassal told the Agence France-Presse news agency (AFP) that Israeli forces had struck the top floor of a residential building in southwestern Gaza City overnight, killing 10 people.
Bassal said Israeli helicopters also struck an apartment in the west of the city, killing three and injuring several others.
Scott Bessent says ‘all options on the table’ and condemns ‘despicable’ increase in attacks as Russian leader receives warm welcome in China
in Brussels
Belgium will recognise a Palestinian state at the UN general assembly,adding to the growing number of countries seeking to put pressure on Israel and keep alive a two-state solution to end the conflict.
“In view of the humanitarian tragedy playing out in Palestine and particularly in Gaza, and in the face of the violence perpetrated by Israel in violation of international law, given its international obligations, including the duty to prevent any risk of genocide, Belgium had to take strong decisions to increase pressure on the Israeli government and the Hamas terrorists.”
‘Quite the reverse’, says home secretary, amid reports Starmer’s reorganisation is aimed at freezing chancellor out ahead of autumn budget
Good morning. Kemi Badenoch has a big speech this morning (albeit one extensively trailed), the Greens are announcing the results of their leadership contest, but there is still considerable focus on what is happening in Downing Street, where Keir Starmer will chair the first cabinet to be attended by Darren Jones in his new role as chief secretary to the PM. As Pippa Crerar and Jessica Elgot report in the Guardian’s splash, Starmer’s mini-reshuffle is being seen as an attempt “to wrest back control of economic policy from the Treasury”.
Other papers have offered a more brutal intepretation, writing this up as Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, being marginalised.
Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
The jump in UK bond yields today shows that Keir Starmer’s reshuffle of his Number 10 team has not reassured investors, says Mohit Kumar, chief economist at investment bank Jefferies International.
That reshuffle tooks to be Starmer’s attempt to take control of economic policy from the Treasury, with DarrenJones put in charge of day-to-day delivery and MinoucheShafik, the former Bank of England deputy governor, appointed the prime minister’s chief economic adviser.
Fiscal concerns are being felt in the UK as well with 30Y Gilts yields close to the highest level since 1998. The recent economic reshuffle in the government did little to ease investor concerns and is seen as undermining Chacellor Reeves.
Tax rises are inevitable, but we are reaching a stage where further tax rises could become counterproductive. So far the government has shied away from difficult decisions on spending cuts which would be required to bring the fiscal picture back in order. We remain negative on the UK long end and continue to favour steepeners along the curve.
Climate phenomenon cools surface of Pacific but won’t stop human-induced climate change increasing temperatures and exacerbating extreme weather
The cooling La Niña weather phenomenon may return between September and November, but even if it does, global temperatures are expected to be above average, the United Nations has said.
La Niña is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon that cools surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. It brings changes in winds, pressure and rainfall patterns.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — At a steel plant in Pennsylvania in May, U.S. President Donald Trump promised workers a new era of domestic steel production. Read More
Shock, panic, guilt and grief grip survivors as mental health experts warn of chronic trauma from repeated exposure to natural disasters
For a 10-year-old, the loss is proving hard to grasp. “It has been four days since I last saw my home,” says Ahsan. He has not yet understood that the floods completely swept away his house in Dogoro Basha village in Shigar, Pakistan.
His confusion is part of the devastating aftermath of long months of rain and floods that have devastated thousands of families in the country’s northern provinces and left more than 860 people dead so far.
The lives of Scottish artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, who found love and fame and lost it all, are vividly reimagined
What if the protagonist of a novel was not a single person but a couple? Damian Barr takes on this challenge, and he’s found a historic couple who make the ideal source material. Working-class Scottish artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun were rarely apart after they met in 1933. They lived and worked together, became famous together and then declined into desperate squalor together – even poorer than when they began.
Barr knows what it’s like to conquer Glasgow from a small, working-class town on its outskirts; he knows what it’s like to find yourself feted for your portraits of the place you’ve left irrevocably behind. His memoir, Maggie and Me, was a hard-hitting yet rambunctious tale of growing up gay near Motherwell under Thatcher, uneasily aware that the woman who pushed his parents deeper into poverty also taught him that the ruthless exercise of his talents offered his escape. He expanded his exploration of how brutality can take hold in his novel You Will Be Safe Here, set in South Africa. Now he returns to Scotland in this moving meditation on art, love and home.
Poignant documentary by Irish director Gar O’Rourke peers into a faded Soviet-era institution where visitors search for relief while war grinds on outside
There is something ever so slightly Martin Parr-like about this documentary, filmed inside a shabby rundown health resort near Odesa, in Ukraine. It’s not the colour palette, which is Soviet-era pale beige, but the images of holidaymakers: elderly men strutting about in thongs and playing ping pong in their vests; retirees of both sexes glad-ragged at the disco. Like Parr’s photos, the images are funny but not unkind; everyone retains their dignity. The director is Irish film-maker Gar O’Rourke, who planned Sanatorium before the war, but filmed it after Russia invaded Ukraine, which adds a layer of melancholy to the guests’ search for health and happiness.
The huge Kuyalnik sanatorium is a time warp with its brutalist architecture and institutional interiors. Back in its glory days, people must have come here in their thousands. Now, the place is a little tired: paint peeling off the walls, the ceilings stained by leaks. The health treatments too have a retro feel: mud wraps and electro massage machines. One guest is Natalia, who has brought her single 40-ish son Andriy, hoping to find him a wife. That doesn’t look promising since most of the other guests look old enough to have visited the sanatorium back in the day. Mother and son give the film a lovely moment slow dancing together to George Michael’s Careless Whisper at the disco. Other stories emerge: one woman’s husband was killed on the frontline; a younger guest is a soldier recovering from injuries sustained on the frontline. Another woman is here for help with fertility.
From Shakespeare’s fools to Donald Trump, this exhilarating read considers stupidity in its many forms
Stupidity, no question, can be just as rich and subtle as its opposite. Three and a half decades on, I still sometimes meditate on what a school friend of mine said in a here’s-a-profound-thought tone of voice: “I’d rather be stupid than happy”.
In this clever book, Stuart Jeffries starts out at a double disadvantage, though. First: he has an excellently snappy title but it’s open to question whether stupidity can be said to have a history in any meaningful sense. The quality of stupidity is just, sort of, there; and there’s lots of it. Could you write a history of happiness, or bad luck, or knees? You’d be on firmer ground, as he recognises, historicising the concept of stupidity: a short history, in other words, of “stupidity” – how successive societies and thinkers have defined and responded to reason’s derr-brained secret sharer. As an intellectual historian who has written smart and chewy popular books about the Frankfurt School (Grand Hotel Abyss) and postmodernism (Everything, All the Time, Everywhere), he certainly has the chops for it.
Vladimir Putin hailed "unprecedentedly high relations" with China and thanked his "dear friend" Xi for the warm welcome during talks at Beijing's Great Hall of the People, while Kim Jong Un's armoured special train snaked towards the Chinese capital.
The Gambler and his Cowboys is a gritty portrayal of the rise and fall of a sports dynasty that leaves the viewer wanting more of its glory and grubbiness
Of all the unflinching moments in the new Netflix blockbuster, America’s Team: the Gambler and his Cowboys, one stands out more than most. It comes after the Dallas Cowboys’ former star receiver Michael Irvin is asked about the White House, the secret mansion where some players would unwind while winning three Super Bowls during the 1990s. “I was the president of the White House,” Irvin says with a cackle, his eyes lighting up. “It was a safe place for camaraderie.”
But this, it turns out, was a very different style of team building than going down the pub.
He struggles to maintain an erection and I feel worthless as his partner. I wonder whether there’s a way back for us
When we first met, 12 years ago, my husband and I didn’t waste any time in starting the sexual part of our relationship. He warned me he was a sex addict, and I am enthusiastic about sex. On our first night together I was aware of some erectile dysfunction – he wasn’t entirely hard and benefited from holding himself when penetrating me – though this didn’t stop us reaching climax. We joked about how many times I would orgasm and neither of us seemed inhibited.
Over time, my husband needed more and more help with ejaculating and would often lose his erection during sex. He has shown less interest in any form of intimacy with me, while I have been trying to show my attraction to him in other ways, like hugging and holding hands.
Pamela Stephenson Connolly is a US-based psychotherapist who specialises in treating sexual disorders.
If you would like advice from Pamela on sexual matters, send us a brief description of your concerns to private.lives@theguardian.com (please don’t send attachments). Each week, Pamela chooses one problem to answer, which will be published online. She regrets that she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions.
Comments on this piece are premoderated to ensure discussion remains on topics raised by the writer. Please be aware there may be a short delay in comments appearing on the site.
President Trump hinted that he will troll ex-President Joe Biden with an “autopen portrait” in a new White House gallery he's calling the “Presidential Wall of Fame,” according to a report.
It was a decade that saw the end of prohibition but also the start of the Great Depression and the looming threat of war, an unusual period for commerce, summed up in Taschen’s latest look at American ads from a certain era. In All-American Ads of the 30s, colorful advertisements for everything from alcohol to cereal showcase new developments in design and a persistent optimism despite economic concerns. The book will be released in September
It’s the 1990s and a famous pop star is taken hostage by a fan in Jimmy Warden’s stylish but confused film, loosely inspired by a real-life stalker case involving Madonna
Paul Duerson (Raymond Nicholson) has got it bad for world famous pop star and actor Sofia (Samara Weaving). It being the 1990s, he doesn’t have the option of simply being creepy on social media; instead, he takes her hostage and attempts to marry her, as you do, in a period-comedy-horror-thriller that is entertaining enough moment-to-moment, but doesn’t add up anything very substantial overall. Standing in the way of Paul’s deranged scheme is bodyguard Bell (a grounded and nicely judged performance by Eric Dane), and rounding out the men in Sofia’s life is her NBA player boyfriend Rhodes (Jimmie Fails).
Screenwriter Jimmy Warden knows a grabby real-life premise when he sees one. In 1985, a bear ate a massive amount of cocaine and fatally overdosed, leading, in 2023, to the release of the Warden-scripted movie Cocaine Bear. In 1996, Robert Dewey Hoskins was sentenced to 10 years in prison for stalking Madonna, providing the loose inspiration for this latest Warden script, which this time out he has also directed (casting his wife Weaving in the lead role). Warden is not a bad director of individual scenes, with several sequences playing out like miniature music videos, complete with big bold needle-drop choices on the soundtrack. The problem is the overall cohesion, or rather, lack of it – there are plenty of cool ideas, and a narrative that strings them together effectively enough, but it’s unclear what we’re meant to feel about any of it.
With four murder inquiries in play, JK Rowling’s eighth Cormoran Strike novel avoids the page-padding longeurs of previous volumes – but will he finally tell Robin how he feels about her?
In his popular BBC series Just One Thing, the late Michael Mosley made the case for resistance training. Lifting weights, he explained, not only builds stronger muscles, it also boosts the immune system, maintains a healthy heart and improves brain function. Best of all, it can be done in your kitchen, using ordinary domestic items: pints of milk in place of dumbbells, say, or squats wearing a backpack full of books.
Anyone intending to use Robert Galbraith’s Strike novels for this purpose would be advised to seek the advice of a GP. The Hallmarked Man may not be the heftiest of the eight so far – it does not even make it into the top three – but it still clocks in at a cool 912 pages. Galbraith’s tendency to whopperdom has in the past elicited a fair amount of griping from critics, me among them, who argued that judicious pruning would better serve her plots and her charismatic private detective duo, the sweary one-legged army veteran Cormoran Strike and his brave, decent business partner Robin Ellacott. Not that it changed anything. The books remained resolutely huge (as did sales – by 2024, a staggering 20 million books had been sold in over 50 countries). Galbraith, otherwise known as JK Rowling, has never been one to bow to her detractors.
A site in the pine-clad hills of Andalucía is part of a chain that seeks to connect with nature and outdoor adventure while offering a stylish glamping experience
A few years ago, camping with friends, I watched in awe as Becky set up her pitch. While the rest of us were stringing out guy ropes on tents as glamorous as giant cagoules, she arrived with a bell tent, duvets instead of sleeping bags, sheepskin rugs and vintage folding chairs. For all the talk of breathability, practicality and “high performance” gear, it was Becky’s tent we all wanted to sleep in. In the years since, I have never quite achieved her level of camping chic – until this summer, when I discovered the innovative Spanish camping brand Kampaoh.
It all began back in 2016, when Kampaoh CEO Salvador Lora and his partner were backpacking in the Dominican Republic. One night they came across a campsite with pre-erected tents within which were mattresses and blankets. “We were in the middle of nature, surrounded by peace, and lacked nothing,” he tells me.
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