Updates from 2pm (GMT) match in Turin
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Some pre-match reading;
I’d like to think Fritz has the power to beat the big two on a good day, but I’m afraid I can’t persuade myself. Every tournament both of them have entered this year, one of them has won.
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© Photograph: Marco Alpozzi/LaPresse/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Marco Alpozzi/LaPresse/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Marco Alpozzi/LaPresse/Shutterstock
Storage dwindles in Mashhad, home to 4 million people, as country struggles with drought
Water levels at the dam reservoirs supplying Iran’s north-eastern city of Mashhad have plunged below 3%, according to reports, as the country suffers from severe water shortages.
“The water storage in Mashhad’s dams has now fallen to less than 3%,” Hossein Esmaeilian, the chief executive of the water company in Iran’s second largest city by population, told the ISNA news agency.
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© Photograph: Abedin Taherkenreh/EPA
© Photograph: Abedin Taherkenreh/EPA
© Photograph: Abedin Taherkenreh/EPA
Incursions halted flights at Brussels and Liège airports last week with Russia said to be the most likely culprit
Britain is deploying Royal Air Force specialists to help Belgium counter drone threats to the country’s airports after disruptive sightings last week that some politicians blamed on Russia.
Sir Richard Knighton, the head of the UK’s armed forces, said the British military would provide “our people, our equipment” to help Belgium, though he was careful to say “we don’t yet know” the origin of the drones seen last week.
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© Photograph: Olivier Hoslet/EPA
© Photograph: Olivier Hoslet/EPA
© Photograph: Olivier Hoslet/EPA
After 45 years as chief fake blood thrower, Ingrid Newkirk is still waging war on everything from leather to cashmere. Is she still relevant?
Ingrid Newkirk was 54 when she thought she was going to die in a plane crash. It was late summer and the founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) was flying from Minneapolis in the US to the company HQ in Norfolk, Virginia when her plane encountered strong wind shear. The pilot attempted an emergency landing, but failed; back up they went.
On the third attempt, with “a teaspoon of fuel” in the tank, he finally got the plane down safely. During those moments, Newkirk, now 76, scribbled a will on a napkin. She has tweaked it over the years, but it still reads like a horror movie prop list: her liver is to be sent to France to be made into foie gras, her skin to Hermès to create a handbag and her lips to whichever US president is in power, to shame them for granting a “patronising” pardon to a turkey each Thanksgiving. As wills go, it’s straight out of the Peta playbook: an audacious stunt of the kind that has made them the world’s most well-known, successful and in some quarters reviled animal rights organisation. “I know I’ll never be made a dame,” Newkirk says, laughing. “I’m too controversial.”
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© Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian
© Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian
© Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian
From back gardens to hi-tech hydroponics, the future of food doesn’t have to be rural
In 1982, artist Agnes Denes planted 2.2 acres of wheat on waste ground in New York’s Battery Park, near the recently completed World Trade Center. The towers soared over a golden field, as if dropped into Andrew Wyeth’s bucolic painting Christina’s World. Denes’s Wheatfield: A Confrontation was a challenge to what she called a “powerful paradox”: the absurdity of hunger in a wealthy world.
The global population in 1982 was 4.6 billion. By 2050, it will be more than double that, and the prospect of feeding everyone looks uncertain. Food insecurity already affects 2.3 billion people. Covid-19 and extreme weather have revealed the fragility of the food system. Denes was called a prophet for drawing attention to ecological breakdown decades before widespread public awareness. But perhaps she was prophetic, too, in foreseeing how we would feed ourselves. By 2050, more than two-thirds of us will live in cities. Could urban farming feed 10 billion?
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© Illustration: Elia Barbieri/The Guardian
© Illustration: Elia Barbieri/The Guardian
© Illustration: Elia Barbieri/The Guardian
They agreed on the importance of financial education, but how would a Trump supporter and a Green voter approach the issues of immigration and ICE?
Celestino, 55, Bristol
Occupation Retired
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© Photograph: Gareth Iwan Jones/The Guardian
© Photograph: Gareth Iwan Jones/The Guardian
© Photograph: Gareth Iwan Jones/The Guardian
White House is manipulating voting system, from redistricting to rule changes, to affect midterms
A year out from the 2026 midterms, with Republicans feeling the blows from a string of losses in this week’s elections, Donald Trump and his allies are mounting a multipronged attack on almost every aspect of voting in the United States and raising what experts say are troubling questions about the future of one of the world’s oldest democracies.
While Democratic leaders continue to invest their hopes in a “blue wave” to overturn Republican majorities in the House and Senate next year, Trump and some prominent supporters have sought to discredit the possibility that Republicans could lose in a fair fight and are using that premise to justify demands for a drastically different kind of electoral system.
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© Illustration: Angelica Alzona/Guardian Design
© Illustration: Angelica Alzona/Guardian Design
© Illustration: Angelica Alzona/Guardian Design
What do Swift and Plath have in common, and should Kamala Harris have spoken out about her political ambitions? The Argonauts author turns her lens on poetry, pop and patriarchy
Maggie Nelson is an unapologetic Taylor Swift fan. She knows the discography, drops song lyrics into conversation and tells me she took her family to the Vancouver leg of the Eras tour. So she’s a dyed-in-the-wool Swiftie? Nelson seems not entirely comfortable with the breathless connotations of that term but yes, the love is real. So much so, she has written a book about the billionaire singer-songwriter, or rather, a joint analysis of Swift and Sylvia Plath, who recurs in much of Nelson’s oeuvre.
The notion of uniting these two cultural titans, who are seemingly poles apart in sensibility – one a melancholic American poet, the other an all-American poster girl – came to her when she heard Swift’s 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department. Alongside its literary references to F Scott Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare, there are heavy resonances of Plath in its introspection and emotional tumult. But the book only started to take shape after a chat with her 13-year-old son’s friend, Alba. “We were making bracelets and she said ‘Have you ever heard of Sylvia Plath?’ I thought that was funny because I’d written my undergraduate thesis on Plath and I was [almost] 40 years older than her. So I said: ‘I have heard of Sylvia Plath.’ As I sat there, I thought, these kids don’t want to hear me talk on this topic but I have a lot to say because I’ve been thinking of it all.”
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© Photograph: Kevin Winter/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management
© Photograph: Kevin Winter/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management
© Photograph: Kevin Winter/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management
Annual migration from frigid Canadian winter to Florida sunshine could become thinner as travellers look elsewhere
The annual migration of hundreds of thousands of Canadian “snowbirds” escaping freezing temperatures in their homeland and heading to warmer US states such as Florida for the duration of the winter could be about to become noticeably thinner.
Many have ditched plans to visit their southern neighbor and are looking to spend their valuable dollars elsewhere, largely put off by Donald Trump’s escalating economic war with Canada and strict new immigration rules that have created fear and confusion.
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© Photograph: Miami Herald/TNS
© Photograph: Miami Herald/TNS
© Photograph: Miami Herald/TNS
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