Victims misidentified and ‘commingled’ parts of more than one person placed in same casket, says lawyer
British families grieving after the Air India disaster have discovered that the remains of their loved ones have been wrongly identified and repatriated, according to an aviation lawyer representing them.
Relatives of one victim had to abandon funeral plans after being informed that their coffin contained the body of an unknown passenger.
Deal for Sporting striker includes €10m in add-ons
Gyökeres is fifth summer signing and ends wait for a No 9
Arsenal have finally reached agreement with Sporting for the transfer of Viktor Gyökeres in a deal worth up to €73.5m (£63.7m), having resolved the problematic issue of the €10m of add-ons to end a tortuous saga and Mikel Arteta’s hunt for a No 9.
The London club made the official breakthrough late on Tuesday, sending an updated offer to their Portuguese counterparts to satisfy them over the structure of the bonuses. Sporting have wanted the add-ons to be achievable, based on appearances, goals and assists by Gyökeres plus Champions League qualification, whereas Arsenal had wanted to include some more difficult ones.
More than 100 aid agencies, including Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and Oxfam, say ‘our colleagues and those we serve are wasting away’
Irish premier Micheál Martin on Tuesday called for the war in Gaza to end, describing the images of starving children as “horrific”. Mr Martin called for a surge in humanitarian aid to be allowed into Gaza.
In a post on X, he said:
The situation in Gaza is horrific.
The suffering of civilians and the death of innocent children is intolerable.
They wear traditional dress, play ancient melodies on violins and accordions, but the women of this island outpost ensure that it is more than just a living museum
“Welcome to Kihnu. We are not a matriarchy,” says Mare Mätas as she meets me off the ferry. I’ve stepped on to the wild and windswept Kihnu island, which floats in the Gulf of Riga off Estonia’s western coast like a castaway from another time. Just four miles (7km) long and two miles wide, this Baltic outpost is a world unto itself that has long been shielded from the full impact of modernity, a place where motorbikes share the road with horse-drawn carts, and women in bright striped skirts still sing ancient sea songs. But Kihnu is no museum – it’s a living, breathing culture all of its own, proudly cared for by its 650 or so residents.
Mare, a traditional culture specialist and local guide, promptly ushers me into the open back of her truck and takes me on a whistlestop tour of the island, giving me a history quiz as we stop at the museum, the lighthouse, the cemetery and the school.
Now for something completely different: this week’s Knowledge has dropped, looking at long gaps between top-flight derbies, odd trophies, players scoring more for their countries than clubs and more.
Some reactions from within the England camp. Sarina Wiegman has described this run as “like a movie.I feel relieved, happy, it feels a bit surreal making a final again but we’re here, and now we need to recover a bit”. Asked what the secret to her tournament success is, she replied: “I’m the lucky one to work with so many good people, good players, good staff, but I also I think I’m always myself.”
“Paris FC’s promotion means that Paris will have its first Ligue 1 derby since 1978-79. Is there any European city that has had a longer gap between top-flight derbies?” queries Steve Whittaker from Frankfurt (which hasn’t had a top-flight derby in the Bundesliga era).
We’ve touched on this before, many years ago, when we found a 44-year gap between the meeting of Hertha Berlin and FC Union and a 48-year wait for FSV v Eintracht in Steve’s home city. However both derbies reconvened in the second tier and don’t count here. So it is well worth us having a drill down into some top-flight derby deserts. The 46-year wait for Paris bragging rights to be earned is indeed a long one, particularly for a capital city.
Valencia had no derby between Valencia and Levante in La Liga between 10 January 1965 and 8 January 2005 (40 years).
Berlin had no Bundesliga derby between 1977 (Hertha Berlin v Tennis Borussia Berlin) until 2019 (Hertha Berlin v Union Berlin – 42 years). There were Berlin derbies in the old East German league, but teams from West Berlin would not have been able to participate in those.
Cologne has no league derby since 1974 (FC Köln v Fortuna Köln) but those two did meet in the 1982 DFB Pokal Cup, but that doesn’t count. So the gap is active at 51 years.
Finally, Naples has never had a Serie A derby at all. To get close to one, you need to venture back to the pre-Serie A days of 1921 when the Italian Championship involved a series of mini-leagues leading to a final round-robin. In the last round before it entered the final phase in 1921, three teams from Naples played each other in a mini league – Bagnolese, Internazionale Napoli, and Naples Foot-Ball Club. Bagnolese have since dissolved, and the other two merged in 1926 to form what is now Napoli. So that could be 105 years and counting.
A sense of menace hangs over a couple’s attempt to make a fresh start in lakeside seclusion, but the tensions too often sputter out
Thomas McMullan’s debut novel, The Last Good Man, was a darkly unsettling post-apocalyptic fable about moral puritanism and the perils of mob rule. Set in an isolated Dartmoor village, it was commended by Margaret Atwood as “a Scarlet Letter for our times” and won the Betty Trask prize. His follow-up, Groundwater, opens in similar style, with its protagonists fleeing a city in favour of rural seclusion, but this time his story is rooted in a more prosaic and recognisable present.
An unexpected inheritance has spurred John and Liz to trade in their rented flat in London for a remote house by a lake. After years of trying unsuccessfully for a baby, their relationship strained, both hope that the change will shift something inside them. Meanwhile, though most of their furniture is yet to arrive, they must prepare the house for Liz’s sister Monica and her family, who have invited themselves to stay.
We would like to hear your memories of Ozzy Osbourne – whether you met him, or appreciated his work as a musician
The Black Sabbath frontman and iconic heavy metal frontman, Ozzy Osbourne, has died aged 76.
Osbourne was one of the most notorious figures in rock: an innovator whose eerie wail helped usher in heavy metal, a showman who once bit the head off a bat on stage, an addict whose substance abuse led him to attempt to murder his wife, and latterly, a reality TV star much loved for his bemusement at family life on The Osbournes. His death comes less than three weeks after his retirement from performance.
Teams can rebound from abysmal innings yet, after their 27 all out against Australia, the Windies are losing hope
“People are coming and going like the walking dead, padding up and unpadding.” Michael Clarke surveys the hallucinogenic scene in front of him at Newlands in November 2011, the grand view of Table Mountain unlikely to ease the agony, his first-innings 151 now chip-shop paper. Clarke’s Australia are 21 for nine, sliding towards the lowest total in Test history.
Nathan Lyon and Peter Siddle get them to 47 to avoid record-breaking embarrassment but it’s barely consolatory. “By the time we go back into the field, we’re still unable to accept what’s happening,” Clarke writes in his autobiography. “We look like a cricket team, but we are 11 ghosts, unable to believe this reality.” South Africa have a target of 236 – hardly straightforward – but Graeme Smith and Hashim Amla ton up in an eight-wicket procession.
Briton pulls through gruelling encounter to advance
Norrie reaches men’s last 16 after seeing off Musetti
Emma Raducanu began her buildup towards next month’s US Open with an impressive straight-sets win over the seventh seed Marta Kostyuk at the DC Open in Washington.
Playing her first singles match since stretching the world No 1 Aryna Sabalenka in the third round of Wimbledon, Raducanu held off the Ukrainian world No 27 to pull through a gruelling encounter 7-6 (4), 6-4.
Being on a pre-season tour can make or break a player’s future. Yoane Wissa has left Brentford’s after the club turned down a £25m bid for his services from Newcastle, as he is eager to have a natter with the head honchos at the Gtech Community Stadium to sort out his future. The forward wants to test himself in the Champions League and does not want to be held back by something as minor as a club being unwilling to pay his full valuation. It is expected that the Magpies will up their offer in the coming days to a fee in the region of £30m plus add-ons. The Bees are not particularly keen on losing another striker days after selling Bryan Mbeumo to Manchester United.
Mateo Joseph has told Daniel Farke and Leeds that he wants out of Elland Road. The Spain Under-21s striker did not travel with the rest of the squad for their pre-season jaunt to Germany. Joseph was the subject of a bid in excess of £10m from Real Betis but Leeds want more for their young striker. “He came to me and to us and said that he wants a new challenge and would like to have a move,” Farke said. “He has also hinted that he prefers a move to Spain due to his Spanish roots. And yes, obviously that was more or less his call.”
Australia made a second $800m payment to America’s shipbuilding industry – bringing total payments so far to $1.6bn which was promised before the Trump administration placied the Aukus agreement under review.
As part of the Aukus deal – in which Australia would buy nuclear submarines from the US ahead of its own nuclear submarines being built in Adelaide – Australia has agreed to pay about $4.6bn towards boosting US shipbuilding capacity.
Belgian GP’s home is a rite of passage for drivers and fans alike, but the circuit faces a battle to stay on the calendar
Each summer, fans descend on the Belgian countryside, braving unpredictable weather and muddy campsites for a glimpse of Formula One’s most romanticised battleground. Tucked in the Ardennes forest, Spa-Francorchamps, hosting the Belgian Grand Prix this weekend, is a rite of passage for drivers, a pilgrimage for fans, and for many, the heart and soul of motor sport.
Since its debut on the calendar in 1950, Spa has carved itself into F1 folklore. Mika Häkkinen’s audacious double overtake on Michael Schumacher and Ricardo Zonta in 2000 is one of the sport’s most celebrated moves. In 2023, Max Verstappen stormed from 14th to victory in an epic comeback. Ayrton Senna won five times there, calling it his favourite circuit, a sentiment echoed by many current drivers.
Despite the ravages of Dutch elm disease, these once ubiquitous features of our landscape still loom large
Just as the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 did not originate in Spain, so Dutch elm disease is no fault of the Netherlands. It acquired the name thanks to the pioneering efforts of three Dutch scientists – Marie Beatrice Schol-Schwarz, Christine Buisman and Johanna Westerdijk – who identified the beetle-transported fungus that causes it in the 1920s.
Nor is the so-called “English elm” (Ulmus minor) really English, inasmuch as it is thought to have been transferred here from Italy, so Reform UK party enthusiasts should probably agitate to repatriate all such specimens. More confidently thought native to these isles is the wych elm (from the Old English for “supple”) or Scots elm, which has long been thought to have healing and protective qualities.
Our scholarly guide to this noble plant, Mandy Haggith, delves enthusiastically into such lore. The 17th-century English herbalist Nicholas Culpeper said that elm was connected to the planet Saturn and that its leaves could fix broken bones. Modern “healers” promise that drinking a decoction of elm bark can purge phlegm and stop diarrhoea. Haggith cites a present-day “Massachusetts-based herbalist and druid” who claims that slippery elm milk is good for insomnia.
It would be unkind to call this sort of thing merely barking. The author insists that “a western scientific worldview” (in other words, a scientific worldview, shared by scientists in China and India) “is absolutely not the only way forests can be thought about”, which is fair enough. But the fake cures of the “wellness” industry are not without their own ecological downsides: as Haggith writes later, fashionable pseudo-remedies gone viral on TikTok or whatever can inspire the stripping of bark from healthy trees at injurious scale.
Happily, elmwood was not only the preserve of quacks; it was also a sought-after material in shipbuilding (most of the hull of the fast clipper Cutty Sark was made of rock elm), and long before that for making spears and bows: an iron age Celtic tribe was known as “the ones who vanquish by the elm” (Lemovices). Medieval London, Bristol and other cities had running water delivered by mains pipes of elm. And elm is also the source of a famous insult: when the great Samuel Johnson claimed that there was no Gaelic literature, a poet responded with the Gaelic for “your head is made entirely of elm, especially your tongue and your gums”.
Luckily, although Dutch elm disease has killed hundreds of millions of trees since the early 20th century, the species is not lost, or even on the brink of extinction. Brighton, Haggith sees, is managing the blight well through city-wide surveillance and timely surgery. And the fossil record suggests that elms have previously suffered waves of pandemic disease before bouncing back. There will be time for more poetic mentions of elms of the kind the author rather exhaustively collects towards the end. (“Robert Frost was a big fan of elm trees …”)
But the greater part of this book’s devotion, and its delight, is reserved for living specimens in their habitats. Two rows of elms, Haggith notes, can form a “corridor for wildlife, dog walkers and feral children”, or “a church-like nave, an arch-shaped cloister that draws the eye” towards a monastery in Beauly. A cheerfully self-described “tree-hugger”, she is inspired to her best writing by close observation of the trees themselves. On an elm growing horizontally out of the rock near a Scottish loch: “I stand beneath it, neck craned in awe, looking up into the lush green profusion of its living community. It is winter, so all this greenery isn’t the tree’s own leaves, but photosynthesising life using it as a climbing frame”. Elsewhere she finds beauty even in a diseased log, happily noting the “beautiful doily pattern made by the brood-chamber and feeding passages of the grubs”.
And her enthusiasm is contagious. As someone who began this book with literally no idea what an elm looks like, I was inspired to download the Woodland Trust tree-ID app and resolve to pay more attention to our ligneous friends.
• The Lost Elms: A Love Letter to Our Vanished Trees by Mandy Haggith is published by Headline (£22). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
From his desolate wail on Black Sabbath’s doomy 70s masterpieces, to the twisted self-awareness of his huge-selling solo albums, Osbourne’s vocal style influenced generations of heavy metal
Ozzy Osbourne’s voice was probably at its strongest and most distinctive during the great run of Black Sabbath albums of the early 1970s, before years of drugs and alcohol took their effect. In those days, his desolate wail had reach and range, and a deep melancholy. That tone was perfect for the subject of this bleak and blasted reflection on cocaine (Vol 4 was dedicated to “the great COKE-Cola company of Los Angeles”). Osbourne sounds like a man who has been wiped clean, both terrified of and in thrall to the drug: “The sun no longer sets me free / I feel the snowflakes freezing me.” At a time when cocaine was still considered a party drug, the fervour in Osbourne’s voice as he celebrates enslavement to it is deeply unsettling – it’s every bit as amoral and devout in its drug worship as Lou Reed’s Heroin.
Plan was put forward by 19-year-old leader of Warwickshire council George Finch who also lobbied to remove Pride flag
Reform UK councillors have been accused of hypocrisy after voting to spend £150,000 on hiring political advisers at a county council despite pledging to cut waste and save money.
The plans were put forward by Reform councillor George Finch, a 19-year-old who was narrowly elected as the leader of Warwickshire county council during a meeting on Tuesday, which was picketed by protesters.
Super-slim frame, improved display, enhanced camera and plenty of power give the pricey phone-tablet hybrid a major upgrade
Samsung’s latest flagship folding phone looks like it has been put on a diet. The result is a transformation into one of the thinnest and lightest devices available and radically changes how it handles, for the better.
The Galaxy Z Fold 7 measures 8.9mm thick when shut – well within the realms of a standard smartphone if you ignore the camera bump on the back. It easily fits in a pocket but opens up to turn into a folding tablet just 4.2mm thick.
Jon Farley arrested under Terrorism Act at Leeds demonstration for holding sign making joke about Palestine Action ban
The terrorism arrest of a man for holding up a Private Eye cartoon during a protest at the weekend was “mind-boggling”, the magazine’s editor, Ian Hislop, has said, as the retired teacher called for an apology from police.
Jon Farley was picked up by police at a silent demonstration in Leeds on Saturday, which he described as a “pretty terrifying and upsetting experience”, for holding a sign that made a joke about the government’s proscription of the group Palestine Action from the last issue of the fortnightly satirical magazine.
The Guardian’s head of photography visited France’s renowned photography spectacular. From Nan Goldin to Kikuji Kawada to a father snipped from his own life story, she picks her highlights
At a time when the world is gripped by crisis, and conversations swirl with talk of conflict, political upheaval and nuclear attack, the work of the renowned Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada feels more relevant than ever.
On display at this year’s Rencontres d’Arles, Kawada’s seminal series The Map – created from his visits to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the aftermath of the atomic bombings 80 years ago – forms the cornerstone of an exhibition shown in France for the first time by the Kyotographie festival team in collaboration with Sigma. These haunting images stand as a powerful artistic response to the trauma of nuclear devastation, layered with political metaphor and historical weight.
Words Burning Up from the series Endless Map by Kikuji Kawada, above
An American wakes up on a Dakar bus to find an explosive device strapped to his chest in Jean Luc Herbulot’s propulsive and strikingly shot action thriller
Set in Senegal’s capital Dakar, this action thriller is so strikingly shot, so propulsively edited and so confident in its tonal shifts that by the end viewers are likely to feel enervated and stunned, but in a good way. It has one of those literal ticking-time-bomb narratives; a corny device to be sure, but one that Congolese writer-director Jean Luc Herbulot, with assistance from main actor and co-writer Hus Miller, manipulates in fresh and interesting ways. Certainly it will inspire some viewers to take a plunge into Herbulot’s back catalogue, which includes festival-anointed gangster-horror flick Saloum, another adept genre mash-up set in Senegal.
The conceit here is that Miller’s white, American-accented unnamed protagonist, called simply #1 in freeze-framed titles, wakes up on a Dakar bus with a sophisticated bomb strapped to his chest that is set to go off in 10 hours’ time. The bomb is connected to a countdown-displaying mobile phone, and a young woman sitting nearby explains to him that he needs to put a Bluetooth earpiece in his ear and answer when he hears the phone ring. When it does, a croaky American-accented voice (Willem Dafoe, no less!) explains that #1 has a number of chores to perform that day before the bomb goes off.
I was stuck in a job that made me miserable – then my friend suggested I go to a yoga class. When we played a kids’ game, the dark clouds parted and my life took a radical turn
I was halfway through a yoga session when it happened. I was sitting opposite a stranger and we were about to do a clapping exercise together, like a child’s game of pat-a-cake. I didn’t feel awkward, or silly; I went for it and gave it everything. It was as if the clouds parted and the sunlight shone through. I felt a huge sense of relief, as if I had just found something I had been looking for.
I was in my late 20s, and I’d had chronic depression since my teens. It would come in waves, and I could see another wave heading towards me. After a photography degree, and a couple of years working at a picture library, I had been desperate to break into the media and, in 2003, I was really excited about getting a job on a magazine picture desk. It felt like an achievement and a lucky break in a competitive industry, but I soon discovered its office was not a great place to be.
Researchers believe huge volcanic eruptions, and the absence of plants, turned our planet into one giant snowball
It’s hard to believe, but about 700m years ago it’s thought that our planet completely froze over with little to no liquid ocean or lakes exposed to the atmosphere, even in the tropics. But what tipped Earth’s climate into “Snowball Earth” state? A new study suggests a cold climate and massive volcanic eruptions set the scene.
The Franklin eruptions – about 720m years ago – spewed out vast amounts of fresh rock, stretching from what is now Alaska, through northern Canada to Greenland. Similarly large eruptions have happened at other times, but this one happened to coincide with an already cold climate. And combined with a lack of plants (they hadn’t evolved yet) these eruptions exposed a huge carpet of fresh rock to intense weathering.
Men from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Cuba to be temporarily held in kingdom
Civil society and opposition groups in Eswatini have expressed outrage after the US deported five men to the country, with the largest opposition party calling it “human trafficking disguised as a deportation deal”.
The men, from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Cuba, were flown to the small southern African country, an absolute monarchy, last week as the US stepped up deportations to “third countries” after the supreme court cleared them last month.
After the nail-biting Sweden quarter-final, it was the same again as England somehow battled back to beat Italy and reach the Euro 2025 final
This time they needed only one penalty, although even that came with complications. England are through to the Euro 2025 final and, in keeping with the white-knuckle nature of their tournament, that tells only a fraction of the story.
Sarina Wiegman’s team were moments from losing against an unfancied Italy who had played the role of underdog to perfection, holding on to their first-half lead with an exemplary tactical performance. England looked down and out until Michelle Agyemang, the young Arsenal striker, seized on a loose ball and finished clinically in injury time. The Lionesses had got out of jail again and the breaks did not end there.
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