Padraig Harrington bogeys the par-three 3rd as well. Two putts from 42 feet far from a gimme … and he doesn’t make them. His place at the top is taken by Jacob Skov Olesen: the 26-year-old Dane, making his professional debut at the Open – he finished in a tie for 60th at Troon as an amateur – tramlines a 40-foot putt on 1. Had that not hit the cup, it was halfway to Giant’s Causeway. A sizzling Danish start to the Open.
Andy Farrell opts for Smith’s versatility over son Owen
Tom Curry to start in back-row with Beirne and Conan
Marcus Smith has been named on the bench for the British & Irish Lions’ first Test against Australia with Tom Curry and Sione Tuipulotu selected to start in Brisbane on Saturday.
Smith has defied the odds to claim a place in the match-day 23, benefiting from injuries to Blair Kinghorn and Mack Hansen and preferred to Owen Farrell among the replacements.
Officers accused Laura Murton who also had a sign saying ‘Free Gaza’ of supporting a proscribed organisation
Armed police threatened a peaceful protester with arrest under the Terrorism Act for holding a Palestinian flag and having signs saying “Free Gaza” and “Israel is committing genocide”, accusing her of supporting a proscribed organisation.
Officers told Laura Murton, 42, that her demonstration in Canterbury, Kent, on Monday evening expressed views supportive of Palestine Action, which was banned under terrorism legislation earlier this month.
The country, beset by war, has the world’s lowest rates of vaccination, says the World Health Organization, as global immunisation drive also stalls
Children in Sudan, caught up in what aid organisations have called the world’s largest humanitarian crisis and threatened by rising levels of violence, are increasingly vulnerable to deadly infectious diseases as vaccinations in the country plummet.
In 2022, more than 90% of young children in Sudan received their routine vaccinations. But that figure has nearly halved to 48%, the lowest in the world, according to the World Health Organization.
The Maasroute is the ideal entry-level, multiday bike trip for young children – flat with plenty of riverside cafes, family-friendly campsites and ice-cream stops en route
As early as I can remember, I’ve always got a thrill out of poring over a map, tracing wavy river lines with my fingers, roads that connect and borders that divide – all the routes I could take. The freedom of heading out on my bike and not knowing where I’m going to pitch my tent that night. Now that my children are aged seven and nine, I wanted to introduce them to the liberation of this kind of adventure. They adore a day out on their bikes, but this was to be our first multiday bike trip as a family of four, so it was crucial to find a route easy and fun enough to captivate them.
The Maasroute follows the course of the Maas River as it meanders for 300 miles (484km) through the Netherlands, from the inland city of Maastricht to the Hook of Holland, then loops back to Rotterdam. It forms part of the much longer Meuse cycle route (EuroVelo 19) that stretches from the source of the Maas (or Meuse as it’s known in France) on the Langres plateau, travelling through the French and Belgian Ardennes before crossing into the Netherlands.
The extraordinary story of the women who fought to bring their Nazi persecutors to justice
Shortly after her release from Ravensbrück in 1945, Comtesse Germaine de Renty attended a dinner party in Paris with old friends. One guest complimented her on how well she was looking, concluding that “life in Ravensbrück was not nearly as terrible as we’ve been told”. De Renty stared at the woman for a moment, before explaining icily that a typical day in the camp began by stepping over the corpses of friends who had died in the night. They would probably have no eyes, she added, since the rats had already eaten them. And with that, the comtesse stood up and swept out.
Ravensbrück always had a credibility issue, explains Lynne Olson in this consistently thoughtful book. The camp, although only 50 miles north of Berlin, had been liberated late, which gave the SS plenty of time to burn incriminating records. There was limited visual evidence, too, since no cameramen accompanied the Soviet army when it knocked down the gates on 30 April 1945. While images from Auschwitz and Dachau of starving prisoners and rotting corpses were flashed before a horrified world, Ravensbrück left little trace in the moral imagination.
Stories of monks behaving badly are not uncommon in Thailand, but the scale of a recent scandal has sparked questions about wealth and privilege
The disappearance of a respected monk from his Buddhist temple in central Bangkok has revealed a sex scandal that has rocked Thailand, with allegations of blackmail, lavish gifts and a string of dismissals raising questions about the money and power enjoyed by the country’s orange-robed clergy.
Investigations into the whereabouts of senior monk Phra Thep Wachirapamok unexpectedly led police to a woman who the police suspect conducted intimate relationships with several senior monks, and then blackmailed them to keep the liaisons quiet.
Ahmed al-Sharaa thanks American, Arab and Turkish mediators as efforts to restore order in city of Sweida continue
Syria’s interim president has condemned Israel for “wide-scale targeting of civilian and government facilities” after the Israeli military struck Damascus on Wednesday as it sought to intervene in clashes between the Syrian army and Druze fighters.
Israel’s strikes would have pushed “matters to a large-scale escalation, except for the effective intervention of American, Arab, and Turkish mediation, which saved the region from an unknown fate”, Ahmed al-Sharaa said in his first televised statement since the attacks.
In Chile’s drought-stricken Atacama desert, Indigenous people say desalination plants cannot counter the impact of intensive lithium and copper mining on local water sources
Photographs by Luis Bustamante
Vast pipelines cross the endless dunes of northern Chile, pumping seawater up to an altitude of more than 3,000 metres in the Andes mountains to the Escondida mine, the world’s largest copper producer. The mine’s owners say sourcing water directly from the sea, instead of relying on local reservoirs, could help preserve regional water resources. Yet, this is not the perception of Sergio Cubillos, leader of the Indigenous community Lickanantay de Peine.
Cubillos and his fellow activists believe that the mining industry is helping to degrade the region’s meagre water resources, as Chile continues to be ravaged by a mega-drought that has plagued the country for 15 years. They also fear that the use of desalinated seawater cannot make up for the devastation of the northern Atacama region’s sensitive water ecosystem and local livelihoods.
Exclusive: Britain has paused some weapons sales to Israel, but a Guardian investigation shows revenues from the GBU-39 bombgenerated by the US arm of MBDA flow through the UK
Europe’s largest missiles maker, MBDA, is selling key components for bombs that have been shipped in their thousands to Israel and used in multiple airstrikes where research indicates Palestinian children and other civilians were killed.
With concerns mounting about the extent to which European companies may be profiting from the devastation of Gaza, a Guardian investigation with the independent newsrooms Disclose and Follow the Money has examined the supply chain behind the GBU-39 bomb, and the ways in which it has been deployed during the conflict.
Risotto all’onda is wonderfully fluid, creamy and cheesy
As Venice braced itself recently for another wedding, I had been thinking back to last September, when Adriana and Thom exchanged vows in the cavernous cool of the boathouse belonging to Burano’s rowing club. Following the ceremony, the double doors were opened wide, so friends and family could line the ramp all the way to the edge of the lagoon. There, standing majestically at the end of a green gondola, was Adriana’s childhood friend Giulia, a champion of voga Veneta, or Venetian rowing, ready to take the couple to the other side of the island for lunch.
While Giulia rowed Adriana and Thom around the island, the rest of us walked across it to Trattoria Da Romano, where Adriana’s family have celebrated for lifetimes, and it was completely given over to our euphoric wedding party. I am sure I would remember all seven courses (several of which involved more than one dish) even if I didn’t have the menu memento stuck to our fridge with a cat magnet. What I remember most vividly, though, is the fish risotto, because Adriana told me to get near enough the kitchen door to see how energetically the chefs beat it, and how soft and rippling the texture was.
Laurence Tubiana urges governments to consider levies on energy-hungry technology
Governments should consider taxing artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies to generate funds to deal with the climate crisis, one of the architects of the Paris agreement has said.
Laurence Tubiana, the chief executive of the European Climate Foundation and a former French diplomat, is co-lead of the Global Solidarity Levies Task Force, an international initiative to find new sources of funds for climate action by taxing highly polluting activities including aviation and fossil fuel extraction.
In its refusal to renationalise water, it’s clear the government operates in the interests of private capital and not of the country
For a rich and fairly stable country, we are staggeringly ill-prepared for climate shocks. We respond to predictable crises as if we had had no warning. Lessons from previous disasters go unlearned, mistakes are recycled, failures lodged so deeply that they come to define the system.
This is not because of a deficiency in the national character, but because of a deficiency in the ideology of government: an elite belief, shared by scarcely any citizens, that public intervention should be used only when all other measures have failed. Until that point, our problems should be addressed by the private sector. As drought rolls across the country once again, England’s privatised water system guarantees an irrational response.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
On Tuesday 16 September, join George Monbiot, Mikaela Loach and other special guests discussing the forces driving climate denialism, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at Guardian.Live
Van Gogh saw compassion for the rural worker; Dalí saw phalluses and a child’s grave. As The Angelus comes to the UK, our critic celebrates a painting so deep it could even induce hallucinations
It was Salvador Dalí who turned a small, intense rural scene called The Angelus, painted by Jean-François Millet in 1857-59 and hugely popular in its day, into a totem of modern art.
In the original, a pious peasant couple have heard the Angelus bell from a distant church, the Catholic call to prayer, and paused their work digging potatoes to lower their heads and pray. But from Dalí’s writings, we know he saw far more in the painting, from obscene sex to family tragedy. In one of his many versions of it, Atavism at Twilight, the couple sprout agricultural implements from their bodies. In his surreal drawings these good country people become mouldering, mummified husks, or are transformed into fossils by time and sadness. Now that the original painting is being lent by the Musée d’Orsay to the National Gallery as the star of its forthcoming show Millet: Life on the Land, we will all get a chance to obsess over this innocent-seeming artwork.
The mass exhumation in Ireland is vindication for campaigners – but their battle for justice is far from over
A young girl played on a swing near a mass grave as the names of hundreds of children who died in a mother-and-baby institution in Ireland were read out during a memorial service late last year. The bright day turned to dark in the time it took.
Now, the playground near the site in Tuam has been dismantled and the long-awaited exhumation has begun. But why has it taken more than a decade since it emerged that those dead children were likely buried in sewage chambers on the grounds of a publicly funded institution run by nuns and the local council?
Plan, which also includes levies on tobacco and electronic waste, ignites major political scrap to define bloc’s future
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has called for new EU taxes on large companies, tobacco and electronic waste as part of a proposed €2tn (£1.7tn) budget.
Announcing the planned EU budget for 2028 to 2034, she effectively fired the starting gun on a major and complex political fight to define the EU’s future.
Flimsy characters, zero fun and the replacement of dread with upsetting scenes of child torture: this show strips out every bit of the author’s genius
Me, I’m always in the mood for hokum. You can serve it to me at any point on the largest platter you have and I will grab my hooey knife and absurdity fork and start shovelling. But, like any chef, you have to know what you’re doing. You have to make some effort, have the basic ingredients assembled in the right proportions and send it out from the kitchen hot, steaming and looking delicious. Tepid hokum, bland hokum – well, that ain’t no hokum at all.
And so to the latest Stephen King adaptation, this time by Benjamin Cavell and directed by Jack Bender (Lost, From, Under the Dome – the latter another King tale) of the horror master’s 2019 novel The Institute, travelling to our screens under the same name.
One of the giants of British media, Street-Porter is a regular on Loose Women, a former TV executive, newspaper editor and author – and about to launch a one-woman stage show. She talks about love, regrets and her fury with her late mother
Janet Street-Porter is the straight-talker’s straight talker. Nobody says it how it is quite like her, whether she’s talking about how she “hated” her mother, tried to kill her sister or cheated on her four ex-husbands. The former TV executive, newspaper editor, author and Loose Women regular is now going on the road with a one-woman show called Off the Leash. To be fair, she’s never been on it. Street-Porter’s website heralds her as “the nation’s favourite pissed-off pensioner” and promises that, with the new show, “in the words of her good friend Elton … ‘the bitch is back!’”
We meet at a restaurant she has booked in west London. When I get there, she’s already perusing the menu and eavesdropping on the couple behind us. “That man behind us is very irritating,” she stage-whispers. “He’s giving this woman advice about making friends.” My back is to him. What does he look like, I ask. She sticks two fingers down her throat and makes a gagging noise.
There was no firm basis to pick the teenager to begin with, but having done so, his only chance of success was to be backed as though there was
Sam Konstas had given up. After his duck in Grenada, he looked devastated. After his duck in Jamaica, resigned. On body language, here was a player expecting to make nothing and expecting to be dropped. After his second shot at batting in the third Test proved futile, his second stint of fielding was one of absence: late to move, throwing one hand at the first dropped catch, snatching at the second, misfielding the run that let West Indies escape the lowest Test score. On the tour that might have been his making, nothing had gone right.
You had to feel sorry for him, still 19 years old in a team of ancient dads. He had walked into his Test career full of bravura and left it five matches later with an average of 16. In nine innings since his 60 on debut he has averaged 11. The cockiness must have curdled to embarrassment. This is not to pile on to Konstas, a player attempting one of the hardest jobs in sport who still can’t buy a beer on transit home through Miami airport. Australia’s selectors, though, have done him a disservice, in what has turned out to be a crushing case of mismanagement.
Children removed from California home of couple who were arrested in May and had said they ‘wanted a large family’
More than 20 children are in the custody of a California child-welfare agency while authorities investigate a Los Angeles-area couple and whether they misled surrogate mothers around the country.
Fifteen children were removed from the couple’s opulent home in Arcadia after an abuse allegation in May, and another six living elsewhere were also located, said Arcadia’s police lieutenant, Kollin Cieadlo. They range in age from two months to 13 years, with most between one and three.
Meta has urged the Australian government not to make privacy law changes that would prevent the company using personal information taken from Facebook and Instagram posts to train its AI, arguing the AI needs to learn “how individuals discuss Australian concepts”.
In a submission to the Productivity Commission’s review on harnessing data and digital technology, published this week, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp argued for a “global policy alignment” in the Albanese government’s pursuit of privacy reform in the AI age.
As soon as 2060, global heating may send temperatures high enough to stop children in most parts of country from taking part in outdoor summer sports, study shows
The tens of thousands of fans filing into Koshien baseball stadium near Osaka are more grateful than usual for the freebies handed out at the entrance: floppy sun hats bearing the logo of the Hanshin Tigers, the baseball team they are about to watch play their rivals from Tokyo, the Yomiuri Giants, on a clammy July evening.
Spectators in seats in the steeply tiered bleachers waft uchiwa fans to cool their faces while vendors skipping up and down rows of steps do a roaring trade in cold beer and soft drinks.
‘If you promise to give the weapons, but say somebody else is going to pay, it’s not really given by you’; Russia bombs shopping centre, killing two. What we know on day 1,240
Donald Trump’s move to take credit for the additional weapons headed to Ukraine at Europe’s expense has created some mild friction in EU-US relations. “If we pay for these weapons, it’s our support,” said Kaja Kallas, the EU foreign policy chief, on Wednesday. “So it’s European support, and we are doing as much as we can to help Ukraine … If you promise to give the weapons but say that somebody else is going to pay for it, it’s not really given by you, is it? … We welcome President Trump’s announcement to send more weapons to Ukraine, although we would like to see the US share the burden.”
A meeting of Patriot owner nations and Ukraine donors – aiming to find additional Patriot air defence systems for Kyiv and chaired by Nato’s top military commander – could take place on Wednesday of next week, Reuters reported. A Nato official said the alliance would coordinate weapons deliveries through a mechanism known as Nato Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine based in Germany.
Kurt Volker, a former US ambassador to Nato, predicted Ukrainecould ultimately receive 12 to 13 Patriot batteries but it could take a year for them all to be delivered. Trump caused confusion by saying one country had 17 Patriots, some of which would go directly to Ukraine. No Nato member except the US is believed to have that number of Patriot systems.
Ukraine must boost the proportion of weapons made at home to 50% within six months, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has declared. The president said he was counting on his new incoming government under prime minister Yulia Svyrydenko to deliver on the goal. Zelenskyy said that he, the outgoing PM and new defence minister Denys Shmyhal and the outgoing defence minister Rustem Umerov had met and decided that the defence ministry would have “greater influence in the domain of arms production”.
“Ukrainian-made weapons now make up about 40% of those used at the front and in our operations,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address. “This is already significantly more than at any time in our country’s independence … Our goal is to reach 50% Ukrainian-made weaponry within the first six months of the new government, by expanding our domestic production. I am confident this is achievable, though not easy.” Ukraine’s arms production ramp-up so far has emphasised drones and air defences. Zelenskyy has in recent weeks stressed the importance of developing drone interceptors to tackle swarms of attacking drones.
A Russian bomb hit a shopping centre and market in Dobropillia near the frontline, killing two people and injuring up to 27 on Wednesday. Vadym Filashkin, governor of the Donetsk region, said a 500kg (1,100lb) bomb was dropped at 5.20pm when shoppers were out. “The occupier specifically targeted the shopping centre. All nearby shopping centres have been either destroyed or damaged.” Zelenskyy described the attack as “simply horrific, stupid Russian terror. There is no military logic to their strikes, only an effort to take as many lives as possible.”
Russia earlier bombed four Ukrainian cities overnight into Wednesday, injuring at least 15 people as it mostly targeted energy infrastructure, officials said. Russia launched 400 Shahed and decoy drones, as well as one ballistic missile, during the night, the Ukrainian air force said. The strikes targeted Kharkiv in Ukraine’s north-east, Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine, Vinnytsia in the west and Odesa in the south.
The Ukrainian foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, urged the EU to adopt further sanctions against Moscow as he rejected as “lies, manipulation and distortion” Russian accusations that Kyiv didn’t want to progress peace talks. Sybiha reiterated that Kyiv was ready to hold them anytime. EU ambassadors were again unable to approve the 18th package of sanctions against Russia today as Slovakia maintained its opposition.
Bot networks have targeted Ukrainians in Russian-controlled regions, posting thousands of comments on social media aimed at “manufacturing an artificial consensus in favour of Russia”, according to a report released by the Atlantic Council thinktank and a “cognitive defence” company called OpenMinds that works with governments including Ukraine. The report said short-lived “disposable” bots commented on posts – often leaving nonsensical remarks under meaningless names, suggesting the use of generative AI. One post said: “Lord, how wonderful that Putin advocates for the use of peaceful weapons.”
The demographic of tourists visiting Bali has changed since the pandemic, residents say, with a wave of backpackers, digital nomads and expats creating the conditions for a criminal underbelly to thrive on the Indonesian island famed for its peacefulness.
Bali politician Agung Bagus Pratiksa Linggih said he had seen an increase in long-term visitors with low budgets in the years since the Covid-19 pandemic, and that local facilities and infrastructure were racing to keep up.
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