The Iranian ballistic missile landed a little over an hour before the ceasefire was to take effect on Tuesday morning, crumpling the seven-storey apartment block in Beersheba, south Israel, killing four residents and wounding 30.
Jessica Sardinas felt the blast 300 metres away in her safe room, where she had slept every night for the past 10 days. She had read the news of a ceasefire before sleeping, but did not believe it.
Home Office to bar group under anti-terrorism laws, with officials said to be investigating possible Tehran funding
Palestine Action has condemned a briefing by Home Office officials that it could be funded by Iran as “baseless smears”.
The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, announced plans on Monday to ban the protest group, which takes direct action against Israeli arms companies in the UK, under anti-terrorism laws.
After five days of toil and plenty of angst about the decision to bowl first, England emerged victorious, reeling in a target of 371 runs in the final session of the match to beat India by five wickets. Headingley had witnessed another entry into its annals of absurdity, as had this impossibly spirited team led by Ben Stokes.
There were a few nerves and setbacks on the final day, moments when this new-look India side summoned up the tamasha and squeezed hard. But at 6.28pm, as Jamie Smith launched Ravindra Jadeja into the stands, a run chase underpinned by Ben Duckett’s sublime 149 was completed and with it a 1-0 lead in this five-match series.
Among the biggest surprises was that Jasprit Bumrah went wicketless on the final day as England – and a pitch that largely held firm to the end – successfully neutered India’s champion bowler. Smith, applied the coup de grâce to finish on 44 not out, while the typically unflappable Joe Root was out in the middle unbeaten on 53.
Better diplomacy than war, but the US president’s inconsistency and Benjamin Netanyahu’s political needs increase the dangers in this Middle East crisis
Donald Trump declared a ceasefire that would last “for ever”. Or perhaps not. Within hours, he had attacked both Israel and Iran for breaking the deal he took credit for, though there seemed to be a precarious peace. But the volatility of events owes much to the unpredictability of Mr Trump’s own rhetoric and actions. The Middle East crisis will continue to overshadow the Nato summit in The Hague, intended to shore up support for Ukraine.
It is just over two weeks since Mr Trump told Israel’s prime minister not to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, hoping for a deal with Tehran. Benjamin Netanyahu ignored him – and within hours, as Fox News celebrated the Israeli offensive, the president sought to associate himself with it. He demanded Iran’s unconditional surrender and threatened its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; then, last Thursday, said he would take two weeks to decide whether to strike.
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From renewed conflict to a resurgent regime, people tell of their fears, concerns … and a glimmer of hope
People from the Tehran area said the hours of darkness before Donald Trump’s ceasefire took hold were the most terrifying of the war as Israel intensified its bombardment.
“We felt jets flying so low above our apartment that the windows shook. The bombing intensified to a level I’ve never experienced before. People ran into the streets, terrified and panicking,” said Mariam, 39, from the village of Kordan, about 30 miles (50km) north-west of the capital. Like everyone quoted in this article, she chose to use a pseudonym.
Defense for 55-year-old music mogul indicates they do not intend to call any witnesses of their own
After more than a month of testimony from over 30 witnesses, the government rested its case in Sean “Diddy” Combs’s federal sex-trafficking and racketeering conspiracy trial on Tuesday afternoon
The 55-year-old music mogul’s defense team indicated this week that they do not intend to call any witnesses of their own, but will submit exhibits into evidence before closing arguments.
Sunglasses and bright colours dominated a beach-ready collection, as director Anthony Vaccarello namechecked artists who documented LGBTQ+ life
Fire Island, the holiday destination near New York, has been associated with the LGBTQ+ community since the 30s. It has inspired books (Edmund White’s 1973 novel, Forgetting Elena), a 2022 eponymous romcom and now, a fashion show for Saint Laurent.
Taking place at Paris fashion week in 30C heat more suited to a vacation, the show notes named the beach spot as a reference for the creative director, Anthony Vaccarello. They placed the show “somewhere between Paris and Fire Island, where escape becomes elegance, and desire becomes a language”.
Four hundred distribution points have dwindled to four under this private and militarised ‘aid’ system. This is not how to avert a famine
James Elder is Unicef’s global spokesperson
Abed Al Rahman, just a boy, carried the weight of his family’s hunger as he stepped into the streets of Gaza in search of bread. He had his father’s money, but when he saw the tide of people pushing towards a food distribution site in Rafah, hunger pulled him into their flow.
Almost immediately, the site descended into chaos. Gunfire. Drones. Then in a flash, shrapnel from a tank shell ripped through his little body. When I met him at a hospital in Khan Younis – where painkillers, like food, are scarce – the 13-year-old was in agony. “I have shrapnel inside my body that they couldn’t remove,” he told me. “I am in real pain; since 6am I have been asking for a painkiller.” As he recounted the chaos, his father’s composure shattered, and tears rolled down his face. Was he going to lose his son simply because Abed Al Rahman wanted his family to eat?
James Elder is Unicef’s global spokesperson
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Shootings by Israeli forces raise death toll of such incidents in Gaza in last two weeks to more than 500
At least 40 Palestinians seeking aid in Gaza have died in new shootings by Israeli forces, local medics and officials said, raising the total killed in the last two weeks in such incidents in the devastated territory to more than 500.
Though the fragile ceasefire declared between Israel and Iran has boosted hopes in Gaza that the 20-month-long war in the territory may end soon, there were further Israeli airstrikes on Tuesday and reports of at least two incidents involving Israeli troops opening fire on civilians seeking humanitarian assistance.
Irish hooker on forging alliances with sworn enemies and the challenge of getting ‘four different nations connected’
The best way to sum up the unique dynamic of a British & Irish Lions tour is to consult a player experiencing it for the first time. “It’s mad how fast you can go from despising people to hanging around to go for a coffee with them,” says Ireland’s straight-talking hooker Dan Sheehan, admitting he had not been expecting to bond instantly with his new English mate Ellis Genge. “He’s definitely someone that surprises you that he’s not a dickhead.”
Welcome to the psychological maze that is the first week of a Lions tour on the other side of the world. Dealing with jet lag is the easy part. Even for top players like the 26-year-old Sheehan, a probable Test starter, the need to rub shoulders – often literally – with previously sworn enemies and forging unlikely alliances is a challenge in itself. “Genge would be a good one. He’s obviously a passionate, animated player for England and someone who we would consider, in an Irish jersey, as a talisman and someone we’d need to target.
British player wins 6-7 (5), 6-3, 6-1 in first round
‘I’m very, very happy to come through that’
Emma Raducanu fought back tears after resuming her Wimbledon preparations by battling back from a set down to beat the US’s Ann Li in the first round of the Eastbourne Open.
Amid blustery conditions, the British No 1, who missed last week’s Berlin Open as she managed a back problem, triumphed 6-7 (5), 6-3, 6-1.
The government’s new security strategy said it has to actively prepare for potential wartime scenarios
Britain needs to prepare for the possibility of being attacked on its own soil, the government has warned in its security strategy, laying out in stark terms the range of threats ministers say the UK now faces.
Russia’s military buildup and Iran’s increasing attacks on dissidents abroad mean the country could soon find itself involved in a domestic war, the review says.
As another piece of art falls victim to social media, Florence’s Uffizi gallery is placing restrictions on visitors’ behaviour. Is this a sensible safeguard – or simple snobbery?
It’s that time of year again. As the crowds grow, historic Italian cities and museums become the setting for a You’ve Been Framed-style sequence of absurdist moments. Last year it was a young woman embracing a (replica) Giambologna statue in the streets of Florence. This year the Uffizi gallery, guardian of Florentine art, has been defiled as a man posed for a photo in front of a portrait of Ferdinando de’ Medici. While imitating the hand-on-hip, baton-wielding pose of this scion of the soon-to-be-extinct Medici family, he slipped and put his hand through the canvas. This comes shortly after an incident in a Verona museum, where a tourist sat on an artwork in the form of a crystal chair, also for a photo, and shattered it.
The Uffizi’s director says it will now take action against the swarm of visitors “coming to museums to make memes or take selfies for social media … We will set very precise limits, preventing behaviour that is not compatible with the sense of our institutions and respect for cultural heritage.” But is it really fair to see everyone who takes a selfie with a painting, or shares their travels on social media, as part of a barbarian horde intent on destroying civilisation? If so, the battle is lost.
Activists threatened to fill the canal around the Scuola della Misericordia with inflatable crocodiles to block access
Campaigners in Venice have claimed victory after Jeff Bezos was reportedly forced to change the venue for his wedding celebrations in the city as his guests started arriving on Tuesday for the three-day jamboree.
The main reception for the wedding of Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, a former TV journalist, was due to be held in the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, a majestic 16th-century building in the city centre.
Jury awarded $500,000 to widow and estate of the police officer who killed himself nine days after the January 6 riot
A federal jury on Monday awarded $500,000 to the widow and estate of a police officer who killed himself nine days after he helped defend the US Capitol from the mob that attacked on January 6, 2021, including a man who scuffled with the officer during the uprising.
The eight-member jury ordered the man, 69-year-old chiropractor David Walls-Kaufman, to pay $380,000 in punitive damages and $60,000 in compensatory damages to Erin Smith for assaulting her husband, Washington DC metropolitan police officer Jeffrey Smith, inside the Capitol. They awarded an additional $60,000 to compensate Jeffrey Smith’s estate for his pain and suffering.
The US president has disregarded the central bank’s longstanding independence to repeatedly call for rate cuts to spur economic growth and launch a series of personal attacks on Powell.
It has been a confusing and chaotic 24 hours for those following the war between Israel and Iran since Tehran struck a US military base in Qatar on Monday.
That attack was seen by the US as being an attempt to respond to the US’s weekend bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites without escalating the situation.
Nato spending plan overlooks risks to security posed by environmental breakdown and social decay, say economists
Europe risks choosing militarism over social and environmental security, economists have warned, as the head of Nato said all 32 members had agreed to increase weapons spending.
Analyses drafted in anticipation of a Nato summit beginning on Tuesday warned of the opportunity cost that higher military spending would pose to the continent’s climate mitigation and social programmes, which are consistently underfunded.
Senior figure has set up Humanist France and is attracting support due to his criticisms of Israel’s actions in Gaza
The former French prime minister and foreign policy chief Dominique de Villepin has launched a political party called Humanist France, with a view to a possible bid for the French presidency in 2027.
De Villepin, who was prime minister under the rightwing president Jacques Chirac from 2005 to 2007, is best known for his dramatic speech to the United Nations in 2003, setting out France’s opposition to a US-led Iraq war and warning of the “incalculable consequences” of military action in the region.
Bayern monitoring developments but Blues confident
Chelsea are pushing to finalise an agreement to buy Jamie Gittens from Borussia Dortmund. Enzo Maresca has made no secret of his desire to sign a winger and talks over Gittens are moving in the right direction.
Bayern Munich are also monitoring developments around the England Under-21 international but Chelsea are confident they will not be outflanked by the Bundesliga champions.
Cooking at home tends to be healthier and cheaper than eating out or ordering in. So how does one start cooking? We asked the experts
Food is more than just nutrition: it can be joyful, social and exciting. But the act of preparing it can feel awfully daunting.
Many beginner cooks suffer from a fear of failure, a lack of foundational knowledge and a poor understanding of how long it actually takes to prepare a dish, says Sam Nasserian, founder and CEO of Cozymeal, a culinary services company. But “once people learn the basics and try a few recipes, they’re surprised by how easy and fun cooking can be”, he says.
The £31m signing from Wolves says Pep Guardiola’s instructions helped spark an eye-catching debut against Al Ain
With relentless zigzag bursts along the wing and razor-sharp dribbling into Al Ain’s area, Manchester City’s new left-back, Rayan Aït-Nouri, was a potent force in Sunday’s 6-0 win at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
In City’s second Club World Cup group victory, the 24-year-old executed precisely what Pep Guardiola instructed him to do.
Caught in the crossfire, Qatar on Monday night found itself in the unusual position of being asked by the US to mediate to end a war where one of the two parties was firing missiles at it. But then there are few countries as multifaceted as Qatar, or few conflicts quite as tangled as the Iran-Israel war.
It seems Monday’s heavily signalled Iranian attack on Qatar’s 60-acre Al Udeid airbase, the largest US military facility in the Middle East, may even have become the opening to resume diplomacy. The attack, which caused no casualties, cleared the ground for Donald Trump and Qatar to work together to secure the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran. It once again highlights Qatar’s role as professional mediator – a bespoke service this tiny but massively wealthy country makes available from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Gaza.
Vice-president said the bombing was a ‘success’, but reports suggest the stockpile was probably moved elsewhere
JD Vance has suggested Iran’s estimated 400kg (882lb) stockpile of enriched uranium, which is just short of weapons-grade, remains intact despite the recent US bombing campaign against Iran.
On Monday, the vice-president told Fox News that the location of the uranium “is not the question before us”, and said the relevant question was: “Can Iran enrich the uranium to weapons-grade level and can they convert that fuel into a nuclear weapon?”
Five health workers reportedly among the dead in West Kordofan as paramilitary RSF blames Sudanese military
The head of the World Health Organization has condemned an attack on a hospital in Sudan that he said had killed more than 40 civilians, as the country’s civil war, which has caused the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, rages on.
The attack on al-Mujlad hospital in West Kordofan happened on Saturday close to the frontline between the Sudanese military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The WHO’s local office, which did not assign blame, said six children and five health workers were among the dead and that there were “dozens of injuries”.
In December 2023, shortly before signing for Grêmio, Luis Suárez warned that his footballing days were numbered. His right knee had become so painful, following a Covid-affected rehabilitation from surgery in 2020, that he could barely walk. “In my last stage of recovery, the pandemic came and I had to do exercises on my own and I couldn’t finish stretching my knee,” he told Uruguayan media. “On the inside I have cartilage wear and that hits the bone. The days before each game I take three pills and hours before playing I get an injection. If not, I can’t play. Hence the limp. I have to think that in maybe five years I won’t be able to play five-a-side football with my friends. The truth is that the first steps in the morning are very painful. Anyone who sees me thinks that it is impossible for me to play a game. My son asks me to play with him and I can’t.”
It is almost impossible to train or to make a session because of the weather. This morning’s session has been very, very, very short. Tomorrow will be our 60th game of the season. The ones who had international games had even more” – Enzo Maresca wipes his brow before trying to express the difficulty and danger involved in organising Chelsea sessions with shattered players in egg-frying 41C heat at Copa Gianni.
Dear Football Daily, the assertion that Jude and Jobe Bellingham became the first brothers to score in the same tournament (yesterday’s Football Daily) is untrue. I expect there may be other examples, but Frank and Ronald de Boer both scored for the Netherlands in Euro 2000” – Thomas Lovegrove.
I’m sceptical about this weird Copa Gianni but some of the matchups have been entertaining. My favourite goalkeeper so far is Botafogo’s. While Atlético Madrid busied themselves writing their ‘Dear John’ farewell letter to the tournament, he came off his line to steamroller an opponent and a teammate before punching the ball away, recovered to block the follow-up shot from point-blank range, tossed the dead ball behind his back, beyond the reach of an incensed opponent, then theatrically threw himself to the ground when said incensed player bumped him. Dear John, never change” – Peter Oh.
The trailer for the new film about Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy at the 2002 World Cup, with someone who looks nothing like Roy Keane and someone else (Steve Coogan) who looks nothing like Mick McCarthy, appears to be as rubbish as you might expect. It won’t beat the lowest grossing film in US history obviously” – Noble Francis.
It seems a sensible move to use explicit warning labels on products. What I’m more sceptical about is the ‘No amount of alcohol is safe for you’ messaging ...
You’re going to want to sit down with a big glass of water for this one, because I’m afraid I have some bad news. Here we go: alcohol is not terribly good for you. Shocker, right? You’ve probably never heard anything like this before in your life. No doubt, you’ve been choking down a glass of pinot with dinner whenever you can stomach it because you thought it was good for your cholesterol. Instead, it is elevating your risk of cancer.
If public health experts have their way, the fact that alcohol is carcinogenic is going to be very hard for British drinkers to ignore. Dozens of medical and health organisations recently wrote to Keir Starmer urging the prime minister to force companies to include “bold and unambiguous” labels on booze bottles, warning that alcohol causes cancer.
Researchers say tobacco linked to about one in eight deaths worldwide and numbers rising sharply in some countries
Exposure to tobacco killed more than 7 million people worldwide in 2023, according to estimates.
It remains the leading risk factor for deaths in men, among whom there were 5.59m deaths, and ranks seventh for women, among whom there were 1.77m deaths.
Award, to be shared between poet and translator, is a joint project by three publishers and will give a $5,000 advance for a new collection
A new poetry prize for collections translated into English is opening for entries next month.
Publishers Fitzcarraldo Editions, Giramondo Publishing and New Directions have launched the biennial Poetry in Translation prize, which will award an advance of $5,000 (£3,700) to be shared equally between poet and translator.
Can you imagine Liverpool without its Welsh Streets or London without Battersea Power Station? For 50 years, one small band of activists have been finding creative alternative uses for great buildings their owners couldn’t see
It’s hard to imagine London without the mighty riverside citadels of Tate Modern and Battersea power station, or bereft of the ornate Victorian market halls of Smithfield and Billingsgate. It is equally difficult to picture Yorkshire without its majestic sandstone mills, Grimsby without its fishing docks, or parts of Liverpool without their streets of terrace houses. Yet all these things could have victims of the wrecking ball, if it weren’t for one small band of plucky activists.
You may not have heard of Save Britain’s Heritage, or SAVE as it likes to style itself, suggesting the urgency of the matter at hand. But the tiny charity, which celebrates its 50th birthday this month, has had more influence than any other group in campaigning for the imaginative reuse of buildings at risk, most of which had no legal protections whatsoever from being bulldozed.
“We felt that a much more punchy approach to endangered buildings was really needed,” says Marcus Binney, who founded Save in 1975, with an agile network of likeminded journalists, historians, architects and planners. “There was too much, ‘Oh, we’ll write to the minister, and have a word with the chairman of the county council.’ The usual channels were not working. We realised that the real battleground was the media.”
They were spurred by the surprise success of a 1974 exhibition at the V&A, The Destruction of the Country House, co-curated by Binney, which conveyed the shocking scale of demolition across the country with graphic power. The “Hall of Destruction”, replete with toppling classical columns, displayed more than 1,000 country houses that had been lost in the preceding century, a number that rose to 1,600 by the time the exhibition closed. The scale of the issue struck a chord: more than 1.5m signatures of support were gathered to keep these buildings standing.
What set Save apart from other heritage groups at the time was its proactive, propositional approach and energetic, youthful zeal. They had no qualms about calling out the villains, and would admonish greedy developers and lazy local authorities with ferocious glee. Their press releases and campaign pamphlets were a breath of fresh air, emblazoned with bold graphics, punchy headlines and evocative texts written with fierce authority – with a critical media-savviness brought by trustees including Simon Jenkins and Dan Cruickshank. Most crucially of all, theirs was not a call to keep the world in aspic, but to find creative alternative uses for buildings that their owners couldn’t see. “The argument for demolition was always that a building had ‘reached the end of its useful life,’” says Binney. “But the question is: ‘Useful for whom?’”
When the Central Electricity Generating Board planned to demolish its (then unlisted) Bankside power station in Southwark and replace it with offices, Save conjured a proposal in 1979, in a moment of wildly improbable blue-sky thinking, to turn it into an art gallery instead. A decade later, Tate announced that Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s great brick colossus would become the home of its modern art collection. It is now one of the most visited museums in the world. Twenty years on, when a developer wanted to scoop out the elegant innards of Smithfield market and replace them with a bloated office block and shops, Save commissioned an alternative vision, fought two crowdfunded public inquiries, and won. The London Museum is set to open there next year, breathing fresh new life into the atmospheric warren of cast-iron domes and brick vaults, that would otherwise be dust.
Royal Academy, London The Dutch artist looks like a prophet of the Holocaust when viewed through the 80-year-old German painter’s dark lens in this startling show, which makes you see how Van Gogh might have painted modern horrors
Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853, in the middle of the comparatively peaceful 19th century. If he hadn’t shot himself in a cornfield at the age of 37, and had made it to his 60s, he could have witnessed all that end in the 1914-18 war. If he’d lived to 80, he would have read in his newspaper, at an Arles cafe table, of Adolf Hitler becoming German chancellor, and in 1945, at 92, watched newsreel footage of the emaciated survivors of Belsen.
Odd thoughts, but they are stoked by the Royal Academy’s strange and startling exhibition. This is an intimate encounter between the great living German history painter, to mark his 80th year, and his hero Van Gogh. It juxtaposes his responses to the latter, from teenage drawings to recent gold-spattered wheatfield scenes, with the Dutch artist’s works. The peculiar result is to make you see how the dreamer of sunflowers and starry nights might have painted the horrors of modern history, if he’d lived to see them.
The shaky truce between Israel and Iran appeared to be holding on Tuesday evening, after an extraordinary day in which a furious Donald Trump at one point personally intervened by calling Benjamin Netanyahu in order to get him to scale down an Israeli airstrike.
Waking in Washington to find the ceasefire he had brokered the night before had been violated by both sides, Trump told the media: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”
Far-right AfD party welcomes ruling in favour of Compact, which sets high bar for any government crackdown
A German federal court has overturned a ban on a magazine classed by the government as rightwing extremist, in a high-profile legal battle seen as pitting efforts by the authorities to protect the democratic order against media freedom.
The federal administrative court said that while Compact, a publication with close ties to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, had produced “anticonstitutional” content, it did “not yet” represent a threat to the state.
Emma Hayes is leaning on NWSL players for friendlies to plan for individual development and vet wider playing pool
While national teams in Europe, Africa and South America prepare for the biggest tournaments in their region, the US women’s national team convene this month for three friendlies with a unique approach. For back-to-back tests against Republic of Ireland followed by a meeting with Canada, nearly all of their Europe-based players are on vacation.
“We’ve left out the vast majority of players that are playing in Europe bar one, and that’s Naomi Girma,” said the head coach, Emma Hayes. “The rest of those players have been playing non-stop [for the] last two years without a summer break and this is the only opportunity they will get for a much-needed break. It also gives us the chance to play players who are playing domestically.”
The frantic attempts to decode his behaviour reminds me of self-help relationship babble in the 1990s. Then, as now – it’s not you, it’s him
Until it finally opens, there remains much speculation over precisely which artefacts will occupy Donald Trump’s eventual presidential library. My current view is that you could do a lot worse than fill it with all the volumes of text that have been written in the cause of “understanding” him. These increasingly read like the most futile female-targeted self-help books of the 1990s. You Have to Understand He is Very Transactional. Take Him Seriously But Not Literally. Guys, please – no more. We all urgently need rescuing from the Mind, Body & Statecraft section of the bookshop.
As I say, so many gazillions of words have been expended on this cause that Trump reminds me a lot of the men of the 1990s – indeed, he was one. Back then, he had emerged from a decade of valiantly avoiding contracting STIs in 1980s Manhattan – a battle he would later describe as “my personal Vietnam”. For much of the 1990s, the rest of mankind – certainly womankind – felt that personal victories of their own must be just around the corner. It definitely helped that the economy was booming and history had ended. But it was a time when people believed you could change everything through self-control/hard work/the right roadmap. In fact, speaking of roads, one of the biggest nonfiction titles of the 90s in the US was M Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled, a hymn to personal growth that was treated by many as the key to all mythologies.
To the surprise of almost no one, all sides declared victory as they formally accepted Donald Trump’s announcement of a ceasefire on Tuesday morning, but the long-term winners – if any – and losers will take some time to emerge.
By midday in the Middle East, the dust had not even settled. More than two hours after the ceasefire was supposed to have started, at 05:00 GMT, Israel said it had intercepted at least two missiles coming from Iran heading for the north of the country. Iran denied having launched anything, but Israel vowed devastating retaliation.
Connexion
