Gaza’s civil defence agency said ‘Israeli gunfire’ had killed 22 people at one site and four at another
Israeli troops opened fire on Saturday toward crowds of Palestinians seeking food from distribution hubs run by an Israeli-backed group in southern Gaza, killing at least 32 people, according to witnesses and hospital officials, the Associated Press (AP) reports.
The two incidents occurred near hubs operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. In other violence, two Palestinians were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City, health officials said.
As always, I want to hear from you today! Be sure to message me with any thoughts on the Euro 2025 quarter-finals so far and predictions for tonight’s match.
I think I’ve only just recovered from the drama of Thursday’s clash between Sweden and England. What a match! Here is how England fans reacted to the outcome…
We’ve started to lose overs, but the afternoon forecast has improved and it looks increasingly likely that there will be some cricket.
The forecast is less apocalyptic after lunch, so there’s still a decent chance of a reduced-overs game. Hard to see anything happening for at least another couple of hours though.
With vacations of up to 14 weeks on the continent, education can suffer – although on the plus side childcare and holidays are much more affordable
Remember the summer holidays of your childhood – the seemingly endless, sunny days many of us look back on fondly? Those six “precious” weeks look very different when you’re a parent. Having to feed, entertain, look after and fund your offspring during the extended break can sometimes make the summer seem endless for all the wrong reasons.
Parents in England where, as in Scotland and Wales, the school summer break is six weeks, have complained that this is too long, and are backing a reduction to four weeks. Pity then the parents in mainland Europe: French school holidays last for eight weeks. In some regions of Italy, summer is a whopping 14-weeks long. Having birthed and brought up my five children in France, only moving back to England in April last year when my eldest was 14 and my youngest nine, I’ve experienced summers on both sides of the Channel. And it will be no surprise that I prefer the six-week version.
Gillian Harvey is an author and mother of five living in Norfolk. She is the author of The Village Café in the Loire
Los Angeles fire department says up to five people are in critical condition after incident on Santa Monica Boulevard
A vehicle has driven into a crowd in east Hollywood, injuring more than 20 people, the Los Angeles fire department has said.
Up to five people were in critical condition and a further eight to 10 were in serious condition after the incident on Santa Monica Boulevard, the department said on Saturday.
Former Arsenal player wins admiration for his taste in books, but admits one novel defeated him
Héctor Bellerín’s summer holidays look a little different from your typical footballer. Rather than pictures from a recent jaunt to Ibiza clubs such as Ushuaia or questionable birthday parties, his Instagram is dominated by books.
Images of paperbacks he’s read are all over his feed, a mix of classics and contemporary novels, with a majority from Spain and South America.
After a life shaped by grief and resilience, Singh began running at 89 and became an icon of endurance and joy
The first 20 miles of a marathon are not difficult, Fauja Singh once said. When it came to the last six miles, however, “I run while talking to God.”
The fact that he was attempting the distance at all might seem, to some, proof of divine assistance. Singh was 89 when he first took up distance running, having stumbled across a TV snippet of people running a marathon, and decided to give it a go. By his mid-90s he was a marathon veteran, a record holder for his age group and even a poster model for Adidas; aged 101 – or at least so he believed, since he never had a birth certificate – he became the oldest person ever to run the distance.
George Strus founded Breaking the Binary Theatre, one of the only theatrical spaces in the US created for and run by gender-expansive artists, in 2022
For George Strus, theater was one of many roving interests during their childhood in northern New Jersey.
First, there was baseball. Then, a short stint in ice skating. “I was really into Webkinz for like, two months,” said the 27-year-old during a phone interview. A fixation on Sillybandz, the brightly colored, animal shaped rubber bracelets, soon followed.
The lawyer turned motivational speaker fills arenas with her promise that you can always turn things around – even if her ideas aren’t exactly new. What is it about her that makes people listen?
‘Putting yourself in this room today,” booms Mel Robbins from the stage of a sold-out London theatre, “is a decision that’s going to change the trajectory of your life.” Rows and rows of (almost exclusively) women gaze at the podcaster and self-help superstar, her image on a huge screen behind her. It’s the final day of Robbins’s first tour, this one to promote her latest book and viral sensation, The Let Them Theory – her tool for helping people detach from other people’s dramas. Outside forces, she teaches, from annoying relatives to strangers in a traffic jam, are not in your control; nor are you responsible for what they do, feel or think (so long as they are not your children). It’s a waste of time, energy and emotion to even try. Instead, you should just say to yourself: “Let them.”
Robbins is bounding around, sparkling with charisma and no-nonsense charm, first in a comfy tracksuit (available from her website for £150), then in boss-lady blazer and sexy denim. For nearly two hours, she commands the stage – occasionally joined by her two grown-up daughters, one of whom, Sawyer, is the book’s co-author – and the women in the audience smile, nod, hug each other and cry. By the finale, when the confetti cannons go off and yellow ribbons rain down to Coldplay’s booming A Sky Full of Stars, I have promised myself I will (in no particular order) lose my perimenopause tummy, be nicer to my children and care less what other people think. I am, I decide, beaming to myself, ready to change the trajectory of my life.
Couples and singles let us into their idealised love lives online, but our role as viewers makes it more of a ménage à trois
Sitting in a hospital bed, pregnant Campbell Puckett, known as “Pookie”, is handed a Craie Kelly Epsom 25 Hermès bag (retailing around £20,000) by her husband, Jett. “It’s time for her push present,” he says behind the camera. The husband and wife are arguably the internet’s favourite heterosexual couple at the moment, and if they are anything to go by, the standards for modern romance are high.
Jett recently gave Pookie a single instruction on one of their European getaways: “Do not leave Paris without a Birkin.” Luxury unboxings are a staple on their page.These #relationshipgoals have increasingly influenced viewers’ standards and expectations in their own relationships. The spectacle of lavish gifts and experiences can shift expectations and expressions of love towards the more demonstrable aspects of romance.“If my husband doesn’t get me a Hermès Kelly as my push present, he will be fired,” reads one TikTok comment.
Concerns raised that legislation to ensure economy is less dependent on US was pushed through without consultation
Several First Nations leaders have walked out of a meeting with Mark Carney , as an event the Canadian prime minister hoped would assuage their concerns over his Building Canada Act instead left many with growing concern that it would violate their rights.
Carney has spent recent weeks promoting the act, which passed last month as part of Bill C-5 and which he says is a key part of his campaign promise to ensure Canada’s economy is less dependent on the US under Donald Trump, who has repeatedly threatened huge tariffs.
The Syrian presidency has declared an “immediate and comprehensive” ceasefire in Sweida, saying internal security forces had been deployed in the southern province after almost a week of fighting in the predominantly Druze area which has killed more than 700 people.
Three decades on from Blur and Oasis, a new and more diverse wave of stars is celebrating British identity
In the opening episode of Lena Dunham’s Netflix show Too Much, a heartbroken New Yorker moves to London to live out her fantasy of British life and love stories. Jess is quickly swept up in her feelings for an indie musician, dreamily referring to him as “My Mr Darcy, my Rochester, my Alan Rickman”.
Produced by the team behind Bridget Jones, Notting Hill and Love Actually, the show was inspired by Dunham’s own move to London in 2021.
The author’s instinctive image of colourful windows in a house undergoing renovation was selected for the Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition
Elizabeth Day felt as if she hadn’t seen the sun for decades. It was a gloomy December morning and the podcaster and author was headed towards a London recording studio. On the way, she passed a row of houses that were being renovated. The windows on one particular house had just been replaced and covered with a translucent blue sheet and haphazard orange tape; the scene caught her eye, so she paused to capture it with her iPhone 15 Pro.
“I’m known among my loved ones as someone who takes photos of random things, but I just found this so arresting,” Day says. “I was struck by the grammar of it, the angular nature. The tape reminded me of art’s golden ratio, the geometry like a Mondrian crossed with a Rothko. I was exhausted that morning and it completely brightened my mood.”
Six-hour bombardment of strategic hub in Dnipropetrovsk region came as airstrikes killed one person in Odesa
Russia launched its biggest ever attack on the eastern Ukrainian city of Pavlohrad early on Saturday, as part of a large wave of strikes across the country involving hundreds of kamikaze drones and ballistic missiles.
The six-hour bombardment was the worst in the city’s history. The head of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Sergey Lysak, said a factory had been damaged, a fire station destroyed and a five-storey residential building hit.
Royal Albert Hall, London An oddly disparate programme, including an Errollyn Wallen world premiere and a Vaughan Williams rarity, didn’t quite cohere in this opening concert, but all was outstandingly played
This year’s Proms began with a curiously uneven concert. The programme, conducted by Sakari Oramo with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, felt oddly disparate. The main works were the Sibelius Violin Concerto with Lisa Batiashvili as soloist, and Vaughan Williams’s oratorio Sancta Civitas, a comparative rarity. There was new music, too, the world premiere of The Elements by Errollyn Wallen, Master of the King’s Music. Oramo opened, however, with Arthur Bliss’s Birthday Fanfare for Sir Henry Wood, before segueing, without pause, into Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, the latter most beautifully done, with finely focussed strings and woodwind, but something of a jolt after Bliss’s jaunty little piece for brass and timpani in honour of the Proms’ founder.
Wallen’s new work, meanwhile, didn’t feel entirely successful. The Proms Guide argues that it explores the “periodic table of orchestral elements” that form the basis of composition, though Wallen writes, in her own programme note, that its prime concern is “the fundamentals of music, life and love.” It’s cast in a single-three section movement, the first dark and gritty, the second poised, elegant and sounding like Ravel, the third ringing changes on music from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen. But it never coheres, and the Purcell quotes just leave you longing for the original.
The conductor, whose historically informed evangelism helped transform the classical music world, has died. Tom Service remembers a man who looked to the past to find a fresh and thrilling present.
The conductor Sir Roger Norrington, whose death was announced yesterday at the age of 91, remains still the maverick presence that classical music needs. His mission wasn’t only to make us hear the repertoire we thought it knew through the prism of the techniques and playing styles of its time, rather than the ossifications of later traditions. He was also an irresistible firebrand in performance, whose energy wasn’t only about inspiring his performers to get closer to the music they were playing, it was also an invitation to his audiences that their listening should be involved too. Norrington wanted everyone to feel the urgency of Beethoven’s rhetorical power and rudeness, from the radiance of one of his favourite pieces, the Missa Solemnis, to the emetic contrabassoon in the finale of the Ninth Symphony, which was always the richest of raspberries in his performances and recordings.
Haydn’s symphonies, particularly, were pieces of participative performance art in Norrington’s hands, in which his delight in sharing the radical humour and jaw-dropping discontinuities of the music was so evident. The conductor would turn round to his listeners - especially in the Prommers in the arena of the Royal Albert Hall in one of his 42 appearances at the Proms - to make sure we all realised just how weird and wonderful this music really was.
Amy Heckerling, Alicia Silverstone and more involved with the defining 1995 movie talk about their memories of making a film that Hollywood kept passing on
In the early 1990s, the writer-director Amy Heckerling was feeling down. Heckerling had burst on to the scene a decade earlier with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a groundbreaking coming-of-age comedy of libidinous teens, and scored a surprise box office hit with 1989’s Look Who’s Talking. But she was struggling to fit Hollywood demands. “I was thinking: ‘Oh, I’m never going to make a film that’s what I want it to be, because you can’t have protagonists that are female, you have to do slob comedies, but there’s only a few actors that they accept in those roles, and you don’t get a chance to work with them if you’re a female,’” Heckerling told me recently.
With little interest in catering to the prevailing tastes of the day, Heckerling went back to the drawing board: what did she want to write? A true native New Yorker with the accent to match, Heckerling “gravitated towards darker stuff” – early gangster movies, David Lynch. But she was most amused by “people who are very optimistic and happy. I just think, how the hell did they get that way?” Like the main character in the 1994 movie Ed Wood, perpetually pleased with his mediocre work, or the star of Gentleman Prefer Blondes (the book), sending herself flowers to stir the jealousy of men around her. She envisioned a woman in a “big, pink bubble that can’t be burst”, convinced of her centrality but still winsome, relentlessly positive and naive. Someone like Cher Horowitz, the most impeccably dressed 16-year-old in America, hapless social matchmaker of Beverly Hills’ Bronson Alcott high school and the lead of Heckerling’s movie Clueless.
Trump’s grooming of his followers is impossible to undo. Now he is bedeviled by a conspiracy theory gap
Some enchanted evening, Donald Trump saw a stranger across a crowded room.
It is likely that there is hardly anyone living who knows exactly under what glowing lights Donald Trump met Jeffrey Epstein, except perhaps Trump himself and Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend who is serving a 20-year prison term for helping to procure minors for sexual abuse. Trump said in an interview in 2002, when his Epstein relationship was still tight, that it had been a 15-year mutual admiration society. Epstein was “a terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with,” and “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side”. Epstein described himself as “Donald’s closest friend for 10 years”.
“It’s sad. I think it killed the town,” says Debbie, sitting in a cafe in Bridgend and recalling the closure of Ford’s south Wales engine plant almost five years ago. “There were lots of men and women working there at the end.”
During its 40 years of operations, workers at Bridgend Ford produced 22m engines for Ford, Volvo and Jaguar cars, before it closed quietly in September 2020 during ongoing Covid restrictions.
The White House is trying to drive out the Federal Reserve chair. Critics warn it would be a costly bid to pass the buck
Memo from the White House: inflation is “right on track”, it declared this week, citing the latest official data. Price growth is now “very low”, according to Donald Trump. The actual statistics paint a markedly different picture.
Just six months after he regained power, in part by promising to rapidly reduce prices, Trump has presided over the chaotic rollout of tariffs on an array of overseas products that many have argued risk having the exact opposite effect.
A Sicilian shaved ice dessert of fresh pomegranate juice and a luxurious frozen cream pudding layered with boozy cake
Here are two recipes that I’ve been eating at home with my family since even before the warmer weather started to make me smile: a tiramisu semifreddo and a granita, the Sicilian iced slush (made from fresh fruit juice, nut milks or coffee) that is is the Slush Puppie’s distinguished aunt. The ultimate refreshers on a sunny day at any time of the year.
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