Johann Wadephul says French president needs to make ‘difficult decisions’ and to ‘act accordingly’ to meet Nato spending targets
The press conference between the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, in Budapest, is expected to start shortly:
In other news, the Kremlin has dismissed assessments from five European countries that concluded that the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was killed using a poison developed from a dart frog toxin administered by the Russian state two years ago.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
Follow us over on Bluesky | Get in touch: email Daniel
Solberg of Norway looks like he’s going nicely, but he’s still well off the lad at every checkpoint. Increasingly, it looks like getting out first was a big advantage, Atle Lie McGrath still in front, as Sala of Italy joins the growing list of those who didn’t finish.
Visibility isn’t great as Dave “The Rocket” Ryding” sets off for his penultimate Olympic run. The GB veteran isn’t likely to trouble the podium, but he’ll want to make the second run, and he finishes 13th, 3.74 off the lead.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Gabriele Facciotti/AP
© Photograph: Gabriele Facciotti/AP
© Photograph: Gabriele Facciotti/AP
T20 World Cup Group C updates, play from 9.30am GMT
Sign up for The Spin newsletter | And you can mail Daniel
Alistair Connor writes in and wants to know, “what’s the record of this Italian side against ... Scotland?”
Hmmm. Well, according to a quick Google search, they’ve played each other once with Scotland winning by 73 runs.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Bikas Das/AP
© Photograph: Bikas Das/AP
© Photograph: Bikas Das/AP
Low pressure system funnels rain over already saturated areas, compounding risk of further flooding
A deep area of low pressure to the south-east of New Zealand’s North Island swept into the region on Sunday, bringing heavy rain, gale-force winds and dangerous coastal swells that lashed exposed shorelines. The storm triggered power outages, forced evacuations, and damaged infrastructure, with further impacts likely on Monday as the system lingers for a time, before tracking southwards later.
Its arrival came after days of widespread flooding in the Ōtorohanga district, where a man was found dead after his vehicle became submerged in flood waters. Some areas recorded more than 100mm of rain in 24 hours on Thursday, with Gisborne, Hawke’s Bay and the Bay of Plenty bearing the brunt of the deluge. The Tararua district and Wairarapa have also been experiencing heavy rain and strong winds from the storm, with 24-hour rainfall totals reaching more than 100mm locally, and wind speeds of about 80mph (130km/h) along coastal parts.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images
© Photograph: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images
© Photograph: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images
Two time-stamped poems are taken from a book-length sequence tracking the human moments of a factory night shift
01.29
When we look up at stars on break
we see only stars behind
the exhaled Milky Way
of Bobby’s Golden Virginia,
ways to navigate shift patterns,
nothing seismic or anything approaching
truth; for us stars mean only night shift,
insanity of depth,
the slow individual seconds
during which the dotted starlight
doesn’t burn fast enough.
© Illustration: Rowan Righelato
© Illustration: Rowan Righelato
© Illustration: Rowan Righelato
Multiple game creators describe ineffective moderation on the platform, resulting in unchecked hatred in forums and targeted campaigns of negative ‘anti-woke’ reviews
For years, the gaming storefront Steam has let abuse and bigotry pass through its moderation, according to players and developers who use it. The platform is now host to reams of content that violate its own guidelines.
According to developers who spoke with the Guardian, abuse – particularly directed towards transgender creators – is a fact of life on the platform. “Everyone is at one another’s throats all the time in reviews, discussions, forums, anywhere you can possibly find it on Steam,” says content creator and Steam curator Bri “BlondePizza” Moore. “It ensures no one is safe on the platform; developers and consumers alike.”
Continue reading...
© Photograph: alienmelon
© Photograph: alienmelon
© Photograph: alienmelon
The latest in our ongoing series of writers picking their comfort watches is an appreciation of Doris Day’s rule-defying heroine
There was a real vogue for gunslinging heroines back in mid-20th century American cinema. Gene Tierney wrangled civil war rebels in Belle Starr. Betty Hutton pranced around with a shotgun in a sparkly red cowgirl get-up, alongside a cowhide-wearing Howard Keel, in Annie Get Your Gun. But cinemagoers were thrown a curveball three years later when they got Doris Day – again with baritone sidekick Keel in tow – dressed, wise-cracking and swaggering exactly like a man.
Admittedly, when I first saw Calamity Jane aged nine, I was also not immediately sold. Not because of Day’s gender non-conformity, which had me hooked, but because of the bizarreness of the pseudo-biopic’s synopsis and its grating musical numbers. The New York Times had a point when they deemed it “shrill and preposterous”. Then there was the fact that on first look it appeared to be a western. Part crooning romcom, part frontier drama, it’s a strange beast of a film, but I was soon won over.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Richter/Cinetext/Warner Bros./Allstar
© Photograph: Richter/Cinetext/Warner Bros./Allstar
© Photograph: Richter/Cinetext/Warner Bros./Allstar
If plans by the UK’s science funding body go ahead, we won’t be able to benefit from Britain’s membership of Cern and other large international projects
Alarm bells are ringing in the UK research community. Physics departments may close and researchers leave the UK. What is happening and why?
The alarm comes from changes in the way taxpayers’ money is invested by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), which recently published its plan on how to disburse £38.6bn of public research and development funding over the next four years. Change is always unsettling, and as the UKRI’s chief executive, Ian Chapman, says, there will always be those who lose out when change happens. Difficult choices must be made.
Jon Butterworth is professor of physics at University College London, and a member of the ATLAS Collaboration at Cern
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Alban Kakulya/Panos Pictures
© Photograph: Alban Kakulya/Panos Pictures
© Photograph: Alban Kakulya/Panos Pictures
The world No 5 says she has been disturbed by events back home, and is not afraid to speak up about issues in the United States
While getting treatment and preparing for this week’s Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships, Coco Gauff has had the news on in the background almost every day.
Gauff could be forgiven if she’s not up-to-date on everything that’s been happening back in the United States: she is on the road for nearly 11 months a year, often thousands of miles away from her home in Delray Beach, Florida.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Robert Prange/Getty Images
© Photograph: Robert Prange/Getty Images
© Photograph: Robert Prange/Getty Images
Board considering whether to re-engage in move that could prompt a second bidding war with Netflix
Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) is reportedly weighing reopening sales talks with Paramount Skydance, in a move that could spark a fresh bidding war with Netflix for the Hollywood film and TV company.
Members of the board of WBD are discussing whether to re-engage with Paramount, which is pursuing a hostile $108.4bn (£76.8bn) cash takeover directly with shareholders in a bid to derail an agreed deal with Netflix, according to Bloomberg.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters
© Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters
© Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters
Rock structure which served as backdrop to countless proposals disappears into the Adriatic after storm
The famous arch of the sea stacks at Sant’Andrea in Melendugno, Puglia, Italy, popularly known as Lovers’ Arch, collapsed on Valentine’s Day after strong storm surges and heavy rain swept across southern Italy.
The rocky arch, one of the best-known natural landmarks on the Adriatic coast, got its name as it served as a backdrop for wedding proposals, selfies and postcards, and was one of the most recognisable symbols of the Salento, one of Italy’s most heavily visited tourist areas.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Alamy, Quotidiano di Puglia
© Photograph: Alamy, Quotidiano di Puglia
© Photograph: Alamy, Quotidiano di Puglia
A charming child’s-eye view of rural Ireland
There’s a particular energy to novels written from the point of view of small children. Humour, of course, in the things the child misinterprets; pathos in the things they feel they must keep hidden; jeopardy in the dangers we can see, and they cannot. As any relative or babysitter can attest, even the sweetest child can become mind-numbingly dull when they’re all the company one has, so there’s a skill to charm without boring. The other skill is to find ways of enabling the reader to read over the child’s shoulder, as it were, to piece together for themselves the adult dramas to which a child’s natural egotism, or simple innocence, blinds them.
In 1988, the longsuffering mother in Seán Farrell’s first novel, Frogs for Watchdogs, is stranded. This Englishwoman has had a boy and a girl with a handsome rogue of an Irish actor, but he has walked out on them. Asked to leave a commune unsuited to children, skint, too proud, perhaps, to return to the protection of well-heeled parents in England, she rents a farmhouse on the cheap in the deep countryside of County Meath, where she can grow vegetables, raise hens and a few sheep, and attempt to scrabble a living as a healer. (From the multiple dilutions her boy witnesses her perform, her fairly batty practice would seem to be some form of homeopathy with new age elements thrown in.) While her doubtless appalled parents insist on sending the oldest child, a forthright girl called B, to an English boarding school, B’s younger brother spends months running happily feral. Once he is eight, he will be old enough to follow her and be tamed and anglicised.
Frogs for Watchdogs by Seán Farrell is published by John Murray (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Conor Horgan
© Photograph: Conor Horgan
© Photograph: Conor Horgan
This three-part documentary has remarkable access to people involved with this 00s TV hit. It’s an awful tale of body-shaming, humiliation and toxic treatment
If you’re a millennial woman, America’s Next Top Model may have been your first experience of appointment TV. The show, which ran for 10 years from 2003, was an early reality juggernaut and made a household name of the supermodel Tyra Banks, its creator and host. At its peak, Top Model drew more than 100 million viewers globally, and left a niche but indelible impact on culture. “Smize”, meaning to “smile with your eyes”, is in the Collins dictionary, while Banks’ infamous tirade (“We were all rooting for you!”) at an unruly model still circulates as a meme.
With its high-concept photoshoots and extreme makeovers, Top Model was ahead of its time in manufacturing viral moments. Today, however, the exacting critiques and body-shaming makes for deeply uncomfortable viewing, as gen Zers bingeing the show through the pandemic have pointed out. This latter-day reckoning is the peg for Netflix’s three-part docuseries, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model.
Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model is on Netflix
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix
© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix
© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix
In what other field is a couple of hours’ work taking the credit for somebody else’s brilliance so venerated?
Who earns the easiest money in showbiz? And when I say “earns”, what I actually mean is “gets paid”. If David Guetta and Calvin Harris can make up to $1m for a festival-headlining set – a couple of hours’ work – there can only be one answer: DJs. Because boil it down and all they’re doing for such vast sums of money is quite competently playing music that somebody else actually created. They are proficient labourers rather than artists. In what other field is taking the credit for somebody else’s brilliance so venerated?
Ah, but they get people dancing, you say. Yet how difficult is it to get people to dance when they have come out with the specific intention of dancing, and a reasonable proportion of them are on another planet? These people have invested heavily in having a good time, so it invariably becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Given the sheer number of floor-filling tunes made during the past six or seven decades, it’s hardly a great feat to choose a few that other people will tolerate or even like.
Phil Mongredien is joint production editor for Guardian Opinion and Long Reads
Continue reading...
© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images
© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images
© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images
When Stephen Spencer began setting his daughter’s surreal stories to music, he had 36 followers. Now his banging pop miniatures have been streamed nearly 30m times – and are making parents cry
I’m listening to the latest Stephen Spencer song when suddenly I burst into tears. Was it the falsetto vocals? The swirling harmonies? No, it was the lyrics: “What did Apple-the-Stoola say? He said ‘I love you’ twenty-sixty times.”
Spencer, you see, has a unique lyrical collaborator: his three-year-old daughter. Over the last four months, he has been posting short songs online based on her stream-of-consciousness stories. There’s a smooth soul number about “a regular rabbit, who has regular ponytails just like me”. A song called Funchy the Snow-woman that could fit easily on to a 1975 album, but for its lyrical message about using a litter tray in the forest. And a festive tune about a Christmas cat called Harda Tarda, who hopes that Taja (“a funny way to say Santa”) will bring her “a doggy, a puppy and a ninja-bread man”.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: @_stephenspencer
© Photograph: @_stephenspencer
© Photograph: @_stephenspencer
Much of Messina’s cultural memory was destroyed in a 1908 earthquake, but the Italian government has secured a masterpiece by the port city’s greatest son
On 28 December 1908, the city of Messina was struck by what is still considered the deadliest natural catastrophe in modern European history. In just 37 seconds, a 7.1-magnitude earthquake killed half its population and levelled much of the city.
Along with homes, churches and monuments, invaluable historical sources and documents were lost, including works by Messina’s greatest son, Antonello da Messina, the artist widely credited with transforming the course of Renaissance art.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism/Reuters
© Photograph: Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism/Reuters
© Photograph: Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism/Reuters
David Nicholls’s romantic saga is heading to stage, in the very city where its characters first felt the sparks fly. But how to cram 20 years of romance into two tune-filled hours? By focusing on the little moments, say its creators
Playwright David Greig and director Max Webster are not afraid of a theatrical challenge. The last show they worked on together – The Lorax at London’s Old Vic in 2015 – transformed a complicated Dr Seuss story about capitalism, global heating and a grumpy forest guardian into a bright and breezy family show. Greig has tackled mammoth musicals (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and mountainside thrillers (Touching the Void), while Webster’s biggest hit, The Life of Pi, conjured up floating tigers and raging storms with theatrical flair and swagger.
Now the two are collaborating on a staged musical of David Nicholls’s much-loved – and much-adapted – novel One Day, first published in 2009. That might sound like a relatively straightforward theatrical challenge but there are pitfalls aplenty when it comes to staging the near-iconic love story, which follows would-be couple Dex and Em’s relationship over the same day – 15 July – across two decades. A case in point: the fairly disastrous 2011 film starring Anne Hathaway.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Danny Kaan
© Photograph: Danny Kaan
© Photograph: Danny Kaan
Dry air indoors can cause an inflammatory reaction, yet so can cold, windy outdoor conditions – but turning down the heating and using a moisturising cream can help
‘This is kind of true,” says consultant dermatologist Dr Emma Craythorne. Human skin has evolved to retain water, thanks to a protective barrier on its surface. But that barrier isn’t totally watertight. Water is constantly moving across it, depending on the humidity of the surrounding air.
Skin tends to be most comfortable at a relative humidity of about 40%. When the air around us is drier than that, water is more likely to leave the skin. That matters because the process of water escaping across the skin barrier is mildly inflammatory.
Continue reading...
© Illustration: Becky Barnicoat/The Guardian
© Illustration: Becky Barnicoat/The Guardian
© Illustration: Becky Barnicoat/The Guardian
Connexion