Photographs of leader with soldiers’ coffins were displayed at a gala concert marking anniversary of military treaty with Russia
Kim Jong-un has paid tribute to North Korean soldiers killed during Russia’s war with Ukraine, resting his hands on their repatriated coffins in a rare public acknowledgment that his armed forces have suffered fatalities in the conflict.
Photographs of the North Korean leader pausing in front of a line of half a dozen coffins draped in the country’s flag were displayed on a screen at a gala performance held on Sunday to mark the first anniversary of a military treaty between the North and Russia.
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© Photograph: KRT/Reuters
© Photograph: KRT/Reuters
© Ben Stansall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A biopic of Frantz Fanon and other remarkable new movies are finding success via social media, yet remain invisible at the big film festivals
France’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade was historically among the most significant in Europe. After Britain, France had the second biggest colonial empire. We know that 1.38 million people were deported in at least 4,220 documented French slave trade expeditions. Yet the stories of the lives of those people are almost entirely absent from the French collective imagination.
Growing up in France, the only images of this crime against humanity I ever saw on screen were in US-made films. I learned about it from the 1970s TV series Roots and from Steven Spielberg’s movie Amistad. Today in France, Hollywood films such as 12 Years a Slave or Django Unchained are still the references when it comes to depicting the horrors experienced by enslaved people.
Rokhaya Diallo is a Guardian Europe columnist
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© Photograph: Special Touch Studios
© Photograph: Special Touch Studios
Karin Kneissl made headlines around the world when she invited the Russian president to her wedding in 2018. Five years later, she moved to St Petersburg. The scandal revealed a dark truth about the ties between Vienna and Moscow
The trouble started with a dead cat. For years, the people of Seibersdorf had lived amicably alongside their most famous resident, more or less. True, there had been an incident when a neighbour complained about the smell of her horses. And yes, there had been rumblings about her lack of community spirit, that she was great at giving orders for neighbourhood events but never pitched in to fry a schnitzel or hang bunting. But for the most part, they got along.
Karin Kneissl was a blow-in from Vienna, an hour north. She had lived in Seibersdorf for more than two decades, moving into a rickety old apartment before buying a house near the central square. She had arrived as a junior diplomat, then became a freelance journalist and later began lecturing on international relations at some of Austria’s most prestigious institutions. For a brief period, she also sat on the town’s parish council.
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© Photograph: Roland Schlager/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Roland Schlager/AFP/Getty Images
‘There is a big need for theatre to work with existential problems,’ says translator, as Shakespeare productions boom across Ukraine
The Ukrainian Shakespeare festival in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk did not open with a play. Another kind of performance was staged on the steps of the theatre, one that did not deal with sad stories of the death of kings but with tragedy unfolding in real life.
This was theatre in a different sense: a rally involving several hundred people demonstrating on behalf of Ukrainian prisoners of war, thousands of whom are estimated to remain in Russian captivity.
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© Photograph: Supplied
© Photograph: Supplied
Legal complaints filed by former pupils accuse priests and staff of physical or sexual abuse from 1957 to 2004
When 14-year-old Pascal Gélie saw a brochure for an elite French Catholic boarding school boasting swimming in summer and skiing in winter, he begged his parents to send him. He had just watched the American school drama Dead Poets Society and was expecting “sport and friendship”.
“On the first night, I realised I’d made a terrible mistake,” said Gélie, now a 51-year-old office-worker in Bordeaux. “There were 40 of us in a dormitory with decrepit mattresses. When I whispered to another boy for some toilet paper to take to the bathroom, the supervisor grabbed me by the face and pointed to the stone terrace outside. Someone told me to take my coat because you could be forced to stand outside for hours in the cold and damp. I was made to stand there all night.”
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© Photograph: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images
Families report ‘horrific’ conditions in jails and fear executions may be hastened as part of broader crackdown
Life for Reza Khandan has only got worse since Tehran’s Evin prison, where he was an inmate, was hit by an Israeli airstrike on 23 June. The next night, the 60-year-old human rights activist – who was arrested in 2024 for his support of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement – was moved to another jail in the south of the capital, where he has told family conditions are hard to endure.
“My father and others do not have beds and are forced to sleep on the floor. He once found six or seven bedbugs in his blanket when he woke up,” said his daughter Mehraveh Khandan, who described “horrific” sanitary conditions in the prison.
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© Photograph: Mostafa Roudaki/AP
© Photograph: Mostafa Roudaki/AP
Working remotely from a beach in a far-off land sounds like bliss – and the number of people doing it has soared since 2019. But between bouts of illness, relentless admin and crushing loneliness, many have found comfort in the 9-5 back home
Jason, a 34-year-old American, is stumbling around the pool table, cue in hand. Five Saigon beers later, he will shuffle out, clamber on to a scooter and drive back to his beach hut. I know this because I’ve seen the same routine for the past four nights. Meanwhile, Eloise, 38, a French national, is gyrating on the dancefloor. Earlier, on the beach, she told me about her big bitcoin dreams – although she hasn’t got the funds she needs yet. Then there is Bex, a Briton in her late 50s whose eyes are large and wild because she has just popped a pill. She spends only a month a year in the UK – not because she wants to, she says, just to check in with family who are worried about her.
Here we are together on this paradise island in south-east Asia, laptops closed for the day. This is the digital nomad dream, isn’t it? This is what adventure and freedom looks like, right? We’re happy!
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© Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian
© Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian
Forever chemicals have polluted the water supply of 60,000 people, threatening human health, wildlife and the wider ecosystem. But activists say this is just the tip of the Pfas iceberg
One quiet Saturday night, Sandra Wiedemann was curled up on the sofa when a story broke on TV news: the water coming from her tap could be poisoning her. The 36-year-old, who is breastfeeding her six-month-old son Côme, lives in the quiet French commune of Buschwiller in Saint-Louis, near the Swiss city of Basel. Perched on a hill not far from the Swiss and German borders, it feels like a safe place to raise a child – spacious houses are surrounded by manicured gardens, framed by the wild Jura mountains.
But as she watched the news, this safety felt threatened: Wiedemann and her family use tap water every day, for drinking, brushing her teeth, showering, cooking and washing vegetables. Now, she learned that chemicals she had never heard of were lurking in her body, on her skin, potentially harming her son. “I find it scary,” she says. “Even if we stop drinking it we will be exposed to it and we can’t really do anything.”
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© Photograph: Stefan Pangritz/The Guardian
© Photograph: Stefan Pangritz/The Guardian
In today’s culture, responsiveness is a proxy for care. But being in constant rotation, always logging into another version of myself? I’m tired
A friend messaged me the other day. I saw it. I didn’t reply. A week later, I finally responded with the classic: Sorry for the late reply, just got to this.
She called me out. You didn’t just get to this, she said. I saw the double ticks.
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© Photograph: Luza Studios/Getty Images
© Photograph: Luza Studios/Getty Images
Turkey police face demonstrators after prosecutor orders arrests at LeMan magazine, whose editor-in-chief denies allegation and says image has been deliberately misinterpreted
Clashes erupted in Istanbul with police firing rubber bullets and teargas to disperse a mob on Monday after allegations that a satirical magazine had published a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad.
The clashes occurred after Istanbul’s chief prosecutor ordered the arrest of the editors at LeMan magazine on grounds it had published a cartoon that “publicly insulted religious values”.
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© Photograph: Ozan Köse/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Ozan Köse/AFP/Getty Images
League of Social Democrats disbands amid ‘the omnipresence of red lines and the draconian suppression of dissent’, days before anniversary of Beijing’s imposition of NSL
In a cramped, dark office, in front of a wall adorned by some misshapen shelves, faded photographs, and a single fan battling against the summer heat, Hong Kong’s last active pro-democracy party admitted defeat.
Behind them, a sticky-taped banner declared: “We’d rather be ashes than dust.”
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© Photograph: Tyrone Siu/Reuters
© Photograph: Tyrone Siu/Reuters
Senators convene for ‘vote-a-rama’ in which they will propose amendments, probably over many hours
US Senate Republicans will on Monday make a final push for passage of Donald Trump’s one big, beautiful bill, a massive tax-and-spending bill that the president has demanded be ready for his signature by Friday.
Senators convened at the Capitol for a process known as “vote-a-rama”, in which lawmakers will propose amendments to the legislation over what is expected to be many hours. Democrats, who universally oppose the bill, are expected to use the process to force the GOP into politically tricky votes that they will seek to wield against them in elections to come.
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© Photograph: Alex Wroblewski/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Alex Wroblewski/AFP/Getty Images
© John G Mabanglo/EPA, via Shutterstock
© Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
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