The US has stepped up its military presence in the Middle East since the weekend but has left certain details vague to preserve operational ambiguity for Donald Trump as he considers whether the US will intervene in the Israel-Iran war.
Critically, there has been no new information about the deployment of B-2 bombers that would be used to attack Iran’s deep-lying nuclear enrichment site at Fordow with 13.6-tonne (30,000lb) bunker-buster bombs, designed to penetrate 60 metres of rock.
From the Ohio pussy who triggered a wild conspiracy theory to the Brexit ‘Leave’ votes piling up, the great American photographer has turned her lens on election excesses. But what are those fake eyelashes doing in there?
In 2016, almost by accident, the US artist Taryn Simon ended up making a video work about the most important moment in recent British political history. While scouting for a location for another work, she visited Alexandra Palace in London just as a rehearsal for the Brexit ballot-counting was taking place. “I immediately asked if I could come back and film the actual count,” says Simon, whose request was approved, making her the only person in the world permitted to record a Brexit count.
She’s speaking with me from Paris, where the video has just gone on show. Presented on two screens, it is at first unremarkable: one view shows a wide frame of the historic Great Hall of the palace, with count staff seated at tables covered with black tablecloths and scattered with paper. A second screen offers a closeup view of two count staff in their official burgundy T-shirts, sorting papers into “Leave” and “Remain”. The tension mounts as each stack grows, but no climax is reached.
Mykola Lykhovydov is living his sporting dream with Ukraine’s Real Pharma, helped by a haka-like warm-up, local water and naps
Mykola Lykhovydov half-boils a kettle and, pausing slightly for dramatic effect, decants its contents into the waiting glasses. The water comes from an artesian well close to this small, rickety dressing room that doubles as a clubhouse. They say it flows from 80 metres underground and should be consumed just like this, served a little above body temperature and sipped gently so the body’s cells can properly hydrate. Nobody at FK Real Pharma would drink anything else before training and Lykhovydov swears by an extra benefit. “A doctor from Dynamo Kyiv told me this is the best water in Ukraine,” he announces. “It is the secret of eternal youth.”
Whether marvel or myth, the regimen is serving Lykhovydov well. He turned 59 in January and is, as far as anybody knows, the oldest active professional footballer in the world. At almost a year older than the Japanese great Kazuyoshi Miura he lays convincing claim to the record and has no intention of stopping here. He can still do a job in the Ukrainian third tier. “I was thinking I’d make it to 50,” he says. “But now I’m almost 60 I won’t put limits on myself.”
If the Pataudi Trophy had to be renamed then the rivalry between India and England’s two most-capped Test cricketers was worthy of the switch
Spring 2006 and India are batting against England at the Wankhede in Mumbai. The series is all square, one Test each with one to play. England, batting first, have made an even 400, thanks in large part to a century by Andrew Strauss and 88 from his Middlesex teammate Owais Shah, who is making his debut.
It is just past tea on the second day and India’s openers are already gone, bounced out by Matthew Hoggard. Sachin Tendulkar is at No 4 and England’s captain, Andrew Flintoff, has just thrown the ball to his first-change bowler, Jimmy Anderson.
Police say the man tested negative for alcohol but did not divulge whether or not he had been using a satnav
An 80-year-old man drove a car down the Spanish Steps in Rome early on Tuesday before getting stuck part way down, municipal police said in a statement.
The man tested negative for alcohol, police said. They did not identify the driver or say if the car, a Mercedes-Benz, was his. Nor did they say whether or not he had been using a satnav.
Top players to vie for increased prize of £740,000
Couple Stefanos Tsitsipas and Paula Badosa will team up
There will be a sprinkling of stardust at the US Open mixed doubles later this summer with Carlos Alcaraz partnering British No 1 Emma Raducanu in an event many top players have decided to give a try for the first time.
Jannik Sinner will play alongside the world No 9 Emma Navarro, while British No 1 Jack Draper will partner Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen. Novak Djokovic, meanwhile, has agreed to play with his Serbian compatriot Olga Danilovic.
If he does nothing, the US president may alienate Israel’s fervent American allies. If he intervenes, he’ll undermine his own foreign policy
During his three presidential campaigns, Donald Trump ran as an opponent of serial military interventions and wars of “regime change” à la Iraq and Libya, which neoconservatives and liberal internationalists alike had embraced after the end of the cold war. He correctly sensed that many Americans had tired of “forever wars”.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s attack on Iran is a watershed moment for Trump. It will force him to reveal whether he truly represents a clean break with the foreign policy establishment, often referred to as “the blob”, or is in fact a continuation of it. It all depends on whether he decides to join Israel’s attacks on Iran.
Rajan Menon is a professor emeritus of international relations at the City College of New York and a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies
On Sunday, in an interview with Fox News, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, pontificated on a theme he has become increasingly attached to in recent years: that Israel under his leadership would not simply attempt to dismantle Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes through military attack, but in the process usher in regime change in Tehran.
The government in Tehran, he said, was “very weak”, adding that given the opportunity, “80% of the people would throw these theological thugs out”.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday afternoon, the country’s environment minister, Sara Aagesen, ruled out a cyber-attack as the cause of the outage on 28 April, saying it had been down to a “multifactorial” system failure caused by the network’s inability to control grid voltage.
The former president has denied wrongdoing as federal police accuse him of overseeing a spy ring targeting rivals
Federal police have formally accused Brazil’s former far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, of presiding over an illegal spying network which allegedly snooped on political rivals, journalists and environmentalists during his administration.
Bolsonaro is already facing the prospect of jail time over his alleged role in masterminding a military coup plot designed to help him keep power after losing the 2022 election to the leftwing veteran Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. There is broad consensus among analysts that Bolsonaro’s conviction is a foregone conclusion and the 70-year-old populist is expected to face arrest in the coming months once a supreme court trial concludes.
It was a turning point in the push for African independence – and it took place in Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall. We meet the writer of a play about the fifth Pan-African Congress
On the facade of the building that once housed Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall in Manchester sits a plaque commemorating a turning point in the push for African independence. The fifth Pan-African Congress in October 1945 was attended by future global leaders as well as activists and scholars from across Africa and its diaspora. But despite the event’s international importance, it has been largely overlooked by mainstream British history.Now a biting new play is set to remedy this.
“I think a lot of Mancunians don’t know it happened,” says playwright Ntombizodwa Nyoni, who lectures in the same building, now part of Manchester Metropolitan University. “But it’s like: you’re part of such a phenomenal moment in history.” Eighty years later, her dramatisation of the event, Liberation, is about to receive its world premiere at Manchester international festival.
Fariba Vancor, former boss of Think Pink waste management company, convicted of 19 serious environmental crimes
A Swedish entrepreneur who once called herself the “queen of trash” has been sentenced to six years in prison for illegally dumping hundreds of thousands of tonnes of toxic waste in the country’s biggest environmental crime case.
Fariba Vancor, previously known as Bella Nilsson and the former chief executive of waste management company Think Pink, was convicted on Tuesday of 19 counts of serious environmental crimes. Her ex-husband Thomas Nilsson was found guilty of 12 counts of serious environmental crimes and sentences to three years and six months in prison.
Wilson bought Parks a Volvo when he’d barely met him – and together they brought sublime poetry to pop. He remembers the making of Smile, Surf’s Up and more
It was the Beatles’ publicist Derek Taylor – who I met backstage at their first concert at the Hollywood Bowl – who first declared “Brian Wilson is a genius” as part of a [1966] publicity campaign. I knew that word would come back to haunt Brian and it did: from then on he was competing in a world of heightened expectations, but he did that very bravely all his life. He was basically forever competing against a previous version of himself, but as the great American beat poet Lewis MacAdams said: “If it’s not impossible, I’m not interested.” As for lyrics, you can’t beat “I’m a cork on the ocean” [in Til I Die] for a redux of thought from a Beach Boy. I will call that genius and I think the word does apply to Brian.
He had so many gifts. One of them was mutual empowerment. He brought out the best in everyone around him. In the studio, under great tensile strength, the things he could do with a piano, bass, and maybe a couple of guitars were like him entering a dark room and breathing light and life into it. He was a celebratory spirit with a dark coda on his life: the burden of some psychosis. I don’t believe that was caused by drugs. I think it was in his genes, but he had the ability to dig deep. He had a disciplined spiritual force and had sat on church pews and had learned musical lingos, had loved and absorbed everything from barbershop quartets to calypso to composers to Gershwin, was growing up when they coined the expression “Americana” and configured all this into a new kind of pop.
Information stolen from US company included details of 150,000 British residents including family trees
The genetic testing company 23andMe has been fined more than £2.3m for failing to protect the personal information of more than 150,000 UK residents after a large-scale cyberattack in 2023.
Family trees, health reports, names and postcodes were among the sensitive data hacked from the California-based company. It only confirmed the breach months after the infiltration started and once an employee saw the stolen data advertised for sale on the social media platform Reddit, according to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office – which levied the fine.
Juror 6 reportedly claimed during jury selection that he lived in the Bronx but told court staff he lived in New Jersey
The judge presiding over the high-profile federal sex-trafficking and racketeering trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs dismissed a juror on Monday over conflicting statements about his residency.
The juror, identified as Juror 6, reportedly claimed during jury selection that he lived in the Bronx, but last week, prosecutors said that he told a court staff member that he had been living in New Jersey, making him ineligible for a Manhattan federal jury.
Discussing the dilemma facing western diplomats in confronting Iran’s nuclear programme, Henry Kissinger wrote in 2006: “Diplomacy never operates in a vacuum. It persuades not by the eloquence of its practitioners but by assembling a balance of incentives and risks.”
Rarely has the balance of incentives and risks been placed so starkly in front of Iran’s leaders as now.
The popularity of ‘healing’ through psychedelics is fueling exploitation of Indigenous peoples and threatening biodiversity in Ecuador
In the world of the Ecuadorian Amazon, humans, plants and animals are relatives, and ancient stories reflect real ecological relationships and Indigenous knowledge rooted in profound connections to the land. But one of those connections – ceremonial medicine known as hayakwaska – is now marketed as a mystical shortcut to healing and enlightenment. Behind the scenes of these “healing retreats” lies a deeper story of cultural erasure, linguistic distortion and ongoing colonisation masked as wellness.
The global popularity of “ayahuasca” has given rise to a new form of spiritual tourism that romanticises and distorts Indigenous cultures. This growing industry fuels the exoticisation of Indigenous peoples, turning our languages, practices and identities into consumable fantasies for outsiders. Sacred rituals are stripped of context, spiritual roles are commercialised, and even the names of the plants are misused, reducing complex cultural systems into simplified, marketable experiences.
The US president left the G7 early to solve the Middle East crisis. Are you less anxious now? No, me neither
Whenever I need to leave a boring party, I always get my press secretary to tweet the apologies, and so it was that White House spokesmonster Karoline Leavitt informed X users in the dead of night that Donald Trump had ditched the G7 after barely 24 hours of mid-price hotel drabness, thus avoiding the possibility of getting cornered by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the kitchen. Trump later said he had to leave the summit “for obvious reasons”, though failed to elaborate whether he meant he’d been expected to talk with leaders, not at them, or simply that the trouser press in his room was broken.
You probably can’t call it a French exit if the French president then claims you left early to work on a ceasefire. But you can definitely up the stakes on Le Bumptious by calling him “publicity-seeking”, someone who “always gets it wrong”, and adding – almost by way of an afterthought – that all Iranians should “immediately evacuate” Tehran. (Population: 9.8 million.)
The plant medicine hayakwaska (ayahuasca), marketed as a mystical shortcut to healing and enlightenment, is an example of what the Indigenous storyteller Nina Gualinga, sees as commodification and extractivism in the Amazon. Nina is from the Kichwa people of Sarayaku, Ecuador, and she speaks with the memory of her shaman grandfather about the ongoing cultural appropriation, environmental destruction and marginalisation of her people, questioning our very relationship to the Earth and the quest for healing
Fans’ group will take megaphones, banners and flags to Switzerland to ensure the atmosphere doesn’t fall flat
In some parts of the world, Sweden is often confused with Switzerland. But this summer there will be no mistaking Swedish football fans as they descend on Switzerland for the Women’s European Championship bringing great colour as well as great noise. As ever, Soft Hooligans, a grassroots supporter group, is leading the line but this time there are more logistical issues to think about. “A major concern was how the ‘f’ we were going to get all our stuff down there,” says Caroline Gunnarsson, a Soft Hooligans member who will be driving the group’s campervan to Geneva, one which will be full to the brim with drums, megaphones, banners and flags.
Soft Hooligans was founded in 2017 after Estrid Kjellman returned from the Netherlands where she had watched the Euros with her family. She was impressed with the presence and passion of Dutch fans but was also taken aback by the lack of atmosphere in general. Used to the singing culture at men’s games in Sweden, Kjellman was inspired to change things.
Our regular reader will be well aware we always have the first betting heat, a fashion one, before the raccing gets underway. What colour will Camilla’s hat be?
Parliament to vote on decriminalising abortion in what would be biggest shake-up to reproductive rights in England and Wales in 60 years
Casey says in the past government has talked relentlessly about the need for better data sharing between departments.
But she says there is a need to consider making this mandatory.
I was there when the tragedy of Soham happened. We knew at that point that if we had had better data sharing there’s a possibility that we might have saved those girls’ lives. There’s certaintly an absolute clarity that intelligence would have been much faster in either avoiding it or or actually finding that dreadful human being earlier.
And we’ve known that forever onwards. And so I think there is also an issue that the Home Office can’t drag their feet on, looking at police intelligence systems, given we’ve living in the 21st century. Probably everbody in this room can connect within seconds. Yet we had Befordshire police finding a young boy that was being, in my mind trafficked to London. But the data intelligence system did not make it easy for them to find that he was in Deptford and being circled and dealt with by predators.
I feel very strongly on issues that are as searing as people’s race, when we know the prejudice and racism that people of colour experience in this country, to not get how you treat that data right is a different level of public irresponsibility.
Sorry, to put it so bluntly, I didn’t put it that bluntly yesterday, but I think it’s particularly important if you are collecting those sorts of issues to get them 100% right.
When we asked the good people of Greater Manchester Police to help us look at the data we also collected – I think it’s in the report – what was happening with child abuse more generally, and of course … if you look at the data on child sexual exploitation, suspects and offenders, it’s disproportionately Asian heritage. If you look at the data for child abuse, it is not disproportionate, and it is white men.
So again, just note to everybody, really outside here rather than in here. Let’s just keep calm here about how you interrogate data and what you draw from it.
The director of Jodie Comer’s tour de force is now staging Inter Alia, another legal drama by Suzie Miller. He talks about steering Stranger Things: The First Shadow, resisting the classics and his double act with Stephen Daldry
Earlier this year, opposing theatres in Charing Cross Road displayed “sold out” signs for their shows. Both of them – Stranger Things: The First Shadow and Kyoto – were co-directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin. “It was surreal,” says Martin. “Someone sent me a photo and I thought: I’m keeping that. As a little Australian, I’m still surprised to make a living out of this crazy career.”
Kyoto had a limited run but Stranger Things has been going for 18 months and has “the noisiest audience I’ve ever heard”, Martin reports. “I think the stat is that 60% of [them] have never been to a play before. So they eat popcorn throughout and just respond in a really natural way. If it’s boring, they leave. If they’re frightened, they really scream and gasp. It’s very live but, if you’re used to traditional theatre, it’s weird.”
Sabalenka says she did not intend to attack opponent
Aryna Sabalenka says she has written to Coco Gauff to apologize for the “unprofessional” comments she made after her loss to the American in the final of the French Open.
Speaking to Eurosport Germany, Sabalenka said her remarks after her defeat to Gauff at Roland-Garros this month were a mistake. In her post-match press conference in Paris, Sabalenka had suggested that the result was more due to her own errors than to Gauff’s performance.
This year’s edition to be last held in country after Belgrade withholds funding over support of anti-corruption activists
One of Europe’s largest music festivals will no longer be held in Serbia and could go “into exile” in Germany or a neighbouring Balkan state after Belgrade withheld funding over its support of the country’s anti-corruption student protesters.
Exit festival, which is held every July in a medieval bastion fortress in Serbia’s second city, Novi Sad, was founded in 2000 by student activists from the protest movement that helped topple Slobodan Milošević. Affordable ticket prices and starry lineups mean it has acquired a reputation as Europe’s premier music event with a social conscience, with 210,000 people from more than 80 countries attending in 2024.
Give it a squish to remove the moisture, then hard-fry in a robust coating – these are among the solutions our expert culinary panel suggests to achieving addictively crisp tofu
I want to like tofu, but I don’t because of its rubbery texture. How do I make it nice and crisp?
Anne, by email
“Moisture is the enemy of crisp tofu,” says Emma Chung, author of Easy Chinese Food Anyone Can Make, so the quest for cubes of bean curd that are crisp on the outside and soft on the inside starts by getting rid of as much excess water as possible (and choosing a tofu labelled “firm” or “extra-firm” in the first place). “I usually do this by wrapping the tofu in tea towels, placing it between two large plates and putting a heavy pot or pan on top,” Chung says. After 10 minutes, you “should have a nice and firm tofu that will have a lovely texture, and it will be a lot easier to crisp up”.
Guardian columnist Ravinder Bhogal, meanwhile, pops her tofu on a wire rack set over a tray and covers it with kitchen paper or a clean cloth: “Put a weight on top and leave it for a couple of hours, and ideally overnight – that will squeeze out the excess moisture.” She then pats the tofu dry and coats it in corn, rice or potato flour before frying (or putting in an air fryer) for an “off-the-Richter crunch”. Chung is simpatico, coating her tofu pieces in a thin layer of cornflour to create a crust that “turns extra crisp when fried or baked”. Simply put the cubed tofu in a bowl, cover “generously” with cornflour and give everything a good toss. “If you’re using slices of tofu, dip them in a shallow plate of cornflour to make sure they’re evenly coated.”
Donald Trump has said he is not seeking a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Iran but instead wants to see “a real end” to Iran’s nuclear programme, with Tehran abandoning it “entirely”.
The US president predicted Israel would not let up in its bombing campaign and suggested a decisive moment in that campaign was imminent, though he made clear he expected Israel to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities without US help.
Sebastian Bond named as publisher of site known as trolls’ paradise, which was ordered to pay out to couple in 2023
The previously anonymous operator of an online gossip forum described as a trolls’ paradise has been unmasked after losing a defamation case.
Sebastian Bond, also known as Bastian Durward, has been confirmed as the man behind Tattle Life after an Irish couple successfully sued the publisher, according to reports.
‘Spectacular’ discovery at site of about 30 graves includes pearls, coins, ceramics and a box containing gold thread
A 10th-century burial site believed to have belonged to a Viking noble family has been discovered in northern Denmark, packed with a “spectacular” trove of ancient objects, a museum has said.
The discovery came almost by chance when pearls, coins, ceramics and a box containing a gold thread were unearthed during construction work near Lisbjerg, a village located 4 miles (7km) north of Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city.
Cryptocurrency multibillionaire Justin Sun could barely contain his glee.
Last month, Sun publicly flaunted a $100,000 Donald Trump-branded watch that he was awarded at a private dinner at Trump’s Virginia golf club. Sun had earned the recognition for buying $20m dollars of the crypto memecoin $Trump, ranking him first among 220 purchasers of the token who received dinner invitations.
Patients in real world shed less weight than in clinical settings and may benefit more from bariatric surgery
People using weight loss jabs shed far fewer pounds in the real world than in clinical trials, researchers have found.
Jabs such as Wegovy and Mounjaro, which contain the drugs semaglutide and tirzepatide respectively, have transformed the treatment of obesity, with studies suggesting the former can help people lose up to 20% of their body weight after 72 weeks of treatment.
The response to these online fundraisers signals the rise of more overt, public support for racist actions
Shiloh Hendrix, a white woman based in Rochester, Minnesota, went viral after admitting in a video that she called a 5-year-old Black child the N-word while at a local park on 28 April.
Though Hendrix was met with widespread condemnation and denouncement after the incident, she also raised over $750,000 on the crowdfunding website GiveSendGo, commonly used by extremists to fundraise for far-right causes. Many contributors to Hendrix’s campaign, which was created to “protect [Hendrix’s] family” after backlash, used racial slurs and Nazi symbols in their donation names. As of 1 June, over 30,000 people had donated to Hendrix’s fundraiser. The support and funding Hendrix received for her racist actions raised alarm bells for many, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which flagged the fundraiser as being used to “spread hateful talking points and legitimize their ideas”. Experts say the response to her campaign signals the rise of more overt, public support for racist actions, versus their condemnation.
As regulator prepares to approve lenacapavir in the US, campaigners are urging the manufacturer, Gilead, to make it ‘available and affordable for all who need it’
A drug with the potential to “end the HIV pandemic” will launch in the US this week – as a new study reveals it could be sold for 1,000 times less than its possible price tag.
Lenacapavir, given as a twice-yearly injection, can prevent someone from being infected with HIV, according to clinical trial results.
This provocative documentary about the hugely controversial Toronto politician is a chaotic watch – and features tactics that would go on to serve Trump
I am surprised at how often 2013 feels like a lifetime ago, in political terms at least. That was the year the late Rob Ford, then mayor of Toronto, was reported to have been filmed smoking crack cocaine. He denied it, twisting the allegations into what he suggested was a smear campaign by an untrustworthy, left-leaning mainstream media. A few months later, the city’s chief of police, Bill Blair, held a press conference in which he announced that the police had the video in question, and it showed Ford smoking a glass pipe. The mayor was defiant. “I have no reason to resign,” he said. He didn’t.
Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem manages to squash the chaos of Ford’s many scandals into an appropriately hectic 49 minutes of documentary. (The fact that the police reporting the existence of a crack pipe video is only one of these scandals is telling: a reporter here vividly likens the number of controversies surrounding Ford to “sweat off a runner”.) It provides a brief account of his entry into politics, and viewers with an interest in the psyche of “controversial” politicians will be amazed and astonished to learn that, like Donald Trump, Ford was probably motivated by wanting to impress his tough millionaire businessman father, who had been a bellicose politician himself.
Rachel Reeves is considering caving in to City lobbying and softening changes to inheritance tax that affect wealthy individuals who would previously have been “non-doms”, reports suggest.
In her autumn budget, the chancellor confirmed that she would scrap the non-dom tax status, which allowed wealthy individuals with connections abroad to avoid paying full UK tax on their overseas earnings.
Social movements have long included some form of direct conflict with authorities. The key is whom the public blames for clashes
On 6 June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) conducted aggressive raids in Los Angeles, sweeping up gainfully employed workers with no criminal record. This led to demonstrations outside the Los Angeles federal building. During these protests, David Huerta, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) of California, was arrested alongside more than 100 others – leading to even larger demonstrations the next day.
Donald Trump responded on 7 June by sending federal troops to Los Angeles to quell the protests without consulting Governor Gavin Newsom and, in fact, in defiance of Newsom’s wishes. This dramatic federal response, paired with increasingly aggressive tactics by local police, led to the protests growing larger and escalating in their intensity. They’ve begun spreading to other major cities, too.
Scores of Christian men have been raised on ideas of abstinence and ‘purity’ – what does that mean for their sex lives later on?
Like many people, reaching the age of 40 inspired Matt to do some self-reflection. He had achieved many hallmarks of adulthood: a college degree, a career he enjoyed, and two beloved dogs. But he’d never had a relationship, or even a sexual partner.
This weighed heavy on him; he craved the experience of a deep romantic connection and wondered how it might feel to be in love.
Connexion
