Elbridge Colby, US undersecretary of defence for policy, tells European allies that the bulk of responsibility will fall on Europe, say reports
If you followed the blog on Wednesday, you know we looked at an incident with an allegedly Russian drone that crossed into Poland and exploded in a cornfield, some 100 km from Polish-Belarusian border.
A regional prosecutor issued an update today, saying that “there is a very high probability … that the object probably came from Belarus.”
Suspension of soy moratorium could open up area of rainforest the size of Portugal to destruction
One of the key agreements for Amazon rainforest protection – the soy moratorium – has been suspended by Brazilian authorities, potentially opening up an area the size of Portugal to destruction by farmers.
Coming less than three months before Brazil hosts the Cop30 climate summit in Belém, the news has shocked conservation groups, who say it is now more important than ever that consumers, supermarkets and traders stand up against Brazilian agribusiness groups that are using their growing political power to reverse past environmental gains.
African country’s foreign ministry says the two countries are working on the details of a deal over deportees
Uganda has reached an agreement with the US to take in deportees from third countries who may not get asylum, but are “reluctant” to go back to their own countries, according to Uganda’s foreign ministry.
Uganda won’t accept people with criminal records or unaccompanied minors under the temporary arrangement, the foreign ministry’s permanent secretary said in a statement. He did not say whether Uganda was receiving any payment or other benefits and how many deportees it would accept.
Jveuxdusoleil (I want sun) taps into a key part of Parisian culture: drinks on the terrasse, as many fear the extinction of the bistrot
In August, Paris is uncharacteristically quiet as hordes of residents scatter to the country’s beaches and coasts for a yearly month of vacation. Businesses close and the city nearly grinds to a halt. Among those who remain, there is an eternal, quintessentially Parisian quest: hunting for a balmy terrasse bathed in sunlight for an evening apéritif.
Finding the perfect seat on the pavement outside a cafe may be a matter of a chance stroll or a timely text from a friend. This summer, though, a digital solution has gained popularity in an extremely French instance of the old Apple slogan “there’s an app for that”: Jveuxdusoleil, an app that tracks the sun’s movement through the city’s maze of buildings to pinpoint exactly where you can claim a sunny spot on a terrace for your coffee. It arrives at a precarious moment for this particularly Parisian pursuit.
An estimated 1.2bn children are subject to this ‘harmful practice’ each year, affecting physical and mental wellbeing, report finds
The World Health Organization has declared corporal punishment a global public health concern that causes serious harm to children’s physical and mental wellbeing, and can lead to criminal behaviour.
A new report found that across 49 low- and middle-income countries, children exposed to corporal punishment – defined as “any punishment in which physical force is used and intended to cause some degree of pain or discomfort, however light” – were 24% less likely to be developmentally on track than children who were not.
Poor accessibility, questionable hygiene, scattered needles and budget cuts … the UK is in the midst of a public toilet crisis. Thankfully, Raymond Martin is fighting back
The first thing Raymond Martin looks for in a toilet, he says, is cleanliness. Does the tissue paper on the floor mean this public lavatory has failed his inspection? “You have to understand that it’s a working toilet, it’s now mid-afternoon – a few bits of tissue on the floor is neither here nor there,” Martin says. “If there were cigarette packets, bottles on the floor – that I’d be worried about.” We’re in Knutsford, Cheshire, and Martin is on a toilet-inspection tour of the north and west of the UK. He’s just come from the Lake District and Blackpool. When we part ways in a couple of hours, he’ll head on to Wales to inspect the public conveniences of Pembrokeshire.
Do people laugh when Martin, who is managing director of the British Toilet Association (BTA), tells them he does toilet inspections? They do, he says. “But then, immediately, they say, ‘I’ll tell you where I was and they had wonderful toilets …’.”
A love letter to the dwindling world of traditional manual labour – from bodgers to snobs
Britain, says James Fox, was once a place teeming with bodgers, badgers, ballers, bag women, bottom stainers, fat boys, flashers and flirters. That’s not forgetting the riddlers, slaggers and snobs. And before you say anything, these are all occupations that were once ubiquitous but are now vanishingly rare: a bodger makes chair legs; a badger is someone who etches glass; a fat boy is a greaser of axles in haulage systems, while a snob is a journeyman maker of boots and shoes.
According to the main charity that supports traditional skills, 285 crafts are still practised in Britain, of which more than half are endangered. Seventy-two are on the critical list and it is these, and the people who practise them, that James Fox sets out to record. He meets the Nobles, who are the pre-eminent stone-walling family “in Britain, if not the world”. Mostly they stick close to home, in the West Yorkshire village where they have farmed, and walled, for centuries. Building a dry-stone wall requires an extraordinary kind of embodied knowledge, the sort that knows instinctively how to use gravity, friction and exactly the right-shaped rock to build a structure that allows moorland gales to whistle through and remain standing. Done right, a dry-stone wall will last 200 years, compared with a post-and-wire fence which needs replacing after 20.
With its rousing card game about activism, indie studio Speculative Agency hopes to inspire players to engage with issues such as pollution and the climate crisis
The demo of All Will Rise begins with a win for lawyer Kuyili. She has just successfully argued in front of a court that a river running through the fictional version of the Indian city of Muziris should have the same rights as a person. According to Kuyili, this has precedent – after all, companies can argue in court similarly to individual people.
The excitement over this historic win doesn’t last long as, soon after, the river is polluted by a large oil spill, which catches fire, the toxic smoke enveloping several neighbourhoods. Pollution on this scale has devastating effects, so Kuyili and her colleagues begin investigating.
(Biophilia Records) Ambrose Akinmusire and Tyshawn Sorey join the bassist-composer on originals featuring top-end squeals, bass flurries and a guilelessly delicate highlight
The power of three has had a great press for a long time, embedded as it’s been in the tenets of Christians, witches, Buddhists, or just the beginnings, middles and ends of fireside stories. And in the thrifty music-making years after the second world war, the economical appeal of the jazz trio – often led by piano virtuosi such as Bill Evans or Ahmad Jamal, occasionally by such sax giants as Sonny Rollins – also revealed just how much spontaneous creativity could fly from minimal gatherings.
Linda May Han Oh, the Malaysia-born, New York-based Australian bassist and composer whose star employers have included Vijay Iyer and Pat Metheny, leads this standout example, composing everything except for covers of Geri Allen and Melba Liston tunes. Her trio partners are those stellar inventors of contemporary jazz, Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet) and Tyshawn Sorey (drums).
With Leverkusen and Dortmund in transition after losing key players, the stage is set for champions to reign again
The newly named Franz Beckenbauer Supercup has many uses. Unlike some of its continental counterparts, this curtain-raising meeting between league and cup winners tends to brim with a pleasing intensity. It unfolds in a partisan atmosphere too, taking place at one of the two competitors’ stadium rather than at a neutral venue, so we feel the real straight away.
Telling us what to expect for the coming nine months in the Bundesliga, however, isn’t often one of the Supercup’s strengths. Bayer Leverkusen gave a faithful impression of their double-winning form in emerging victorious in last year’s edition by punking Stuttgart with a late Patrik Schick goal before winning on penalties, having played a huge chunk of the match with 10 men. The year before, Harry Kane made an inauspicious Bayern Munich debut at the end of “a crazy 24 hours”, entering the field to tumultuous acclaim only for his new team to subsequently be flattened by Dani Olmo’s hat-trick for Leipzig. Pep Guardiola, meanwhile, never won it in his three years at Bayern.
Shearing off extraneous matter is how the featherless chicken was hatched. But ditching field events is too much plucking
You don’t hear much about the featherless chicken any more, which on reflection is probably for the best. The idea was simple enough: for poultry-rearing purposes feathers are a nuisance, bearing significant costs in labour and industrial plant, so by breeding genetically modified feather-free chickens you could save the industry billions. Just imagine if you could also convince the chicken to eat sage and onion stuffing. Perhaps even baste itself in lemon butter at regular intervals.
Alas, when it was unveiled in 2002 by scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the featherless chicken failed to take flight for one simple reason: it looked freaky as hell. It turned out that the feather layer, while gastronomically extrinsic, provided vastly underrated context. Above all, people did not want to see their Sunday dinner walking around in front of them. “It’s a normal chicken,” pleaded the geneticist Avigdor Cahaner, “except for the fact it has no feathers.”
Kidnappings, terrorists, blackmail: this globetrotting political thriller is a rollicking, propulsive yarn … and its take on female leaders is deeply refreshing
You know how it is. One moment you’re on a romantic walk in the woods with your saintly, supportive husband as he convinces you to stand for election as prime minister, the next you are that prime minister (with the shorter but still flattering haircut to prove it). You’re knee-deep in a cancer drug supply crisis and about to meet with the French president who alone can solve your problem, when news arrives that your saintly, supportive husband – who is, of course, a doctor with Doctors Without Borders – and his team have been abducted by unknown terrorists in French Guiana. What is a Suranne Jones with a Netflix budget behind her to do?
That is the set-up from which five punchy hours – Hostage fully swerves the curse of streamer-bloat – of great, globetrotting fun proceeds. Jones is the no-nonsense (in a good way, not a Thatcher way) politician-turned-PM Abigail Dalton; Julie Delpy is the icy president and master strategist Vivienne Toussaint; and Ashley Thomas is Dr Alex Anderson, Dalton’s blameless and soon deeply traumatised husband. Before news of the kidnappings arrives, Dalton is hoping to cut a deal with Toussaint that will involve the UK taking in a boatful of Ebola-ravaged refugees that were refused entry at Calais in return for France giving the UK a large amount of lifesaving medicine. Deux political crises averted with une stone, you see. Then the terrorists step in and demand as their ransom Dalton’s resignation by 1pm the next day.
USA center was ‘the kid in the pink scrum cap’ then soared with a winning blend of speed, power and body positivity
One Saturday in September 2014, the women’s rugby team from Quinnipiac University in Connecticut travelled to Norwich, Vermont. On the home team, a powerful 18-year-old prop scored three tries in a convincing win.
Quinnipiac coach Becky Carlson turned to her assistant. “Oh man,” she remembered saying. “Who’s the kid in the pink scrum cap? I’d give my right arm to have her.
Portraits at the Team USA media summit ahead of the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, at an event in New York<br>U.S. rugby player Ilona Maher poses for a portrait during the Team USA media summit ahead of the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, at an event in New York, U.S., April 15, 2024. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly
Portraits at the Team USA media summit ahead of the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, at an event in New York<br>U.S. rugby player Ilona Maher poses for a portrait during the Team USA media summit ahead of the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, at an event in New York, U.S., April 15, 2024. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly
Portraits at the Team USA media summit ahead of the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, at an event in New York<br>U.S. rugby player Ilona Maher poses for a portrait during the Team USA media summit ahead of the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, at an event in New York, U.S., April 15, 2024. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly
Host of TV show Caught in Providence billed his courtroom as a place ‘where people and cases are met with kindness’
Frank Caprio, a retired municipal judge in Rhode Island who found online fame for his compassionate nature as host of the reality courtroom series Caught in Providence, has died aged 88.
Caprio’s official social media accounts said that he “passed away peacefully” after “a long and courageous battle with pancreatic cancer”.
In Glass Mountain, Michael Lundgren captures remote American landscapes with a haunting stillness, revealing the hidden rhythms and enthralling mystery of the natural world
A sculptor and his unlikely soulmate navigate the political turmoil of the 20th century in a prize-winning blockbuster
In a remote monastery perched perilously on top of a crag in Piedmont, Italy, an old man lies dying. Thirty-two monks stand vigil at the deathbed; “Mimo” Vitaliani has lived among them for 40 years, yet few of them know exactly why. Nor did Vitaliani come alone, but with a mysterious statue that is kept under lock and key in the depths of the Sacra di San Michele, a pietà depicting the Virgin Mary mourning over the body of Christ, whose faces must not be seen. And all the while, the abbot tiptoes around the dying man, waiting for a word. These and others are the mysteries French writer Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s prize-winning fourth novel sets out to solve, mapped on to the course of an extraordinary century in the history of a resilient, self-sabotaging and remarkable nation.
Born in France to Italian parents in 1904, at the dawn of a new world order, Mimo is destined never quite to fit (nor, incidentally, ever to grow taller than 4ft 6in). His father was a stone carver who had hubris enough to christen the boy Michelangelo before getting himself conscripted and blown to bits; Mimo refuses the name, and yet finds himself taking up the art all the same.
I’ve met wonderful people here who make me feel that I belong – but there are now many who see asylum seekers as an easy political target
Hardly a day goes by without a new insult being hurled in the faces of asylum seekers and refugees. We’re scroungers, rapists, fighting-age men who shouldn’t have left our home countries. Sometimes we’re simply “illegals”, the most dehumanising term of all. When did it become a crime to run for your life?
The people levelling these accusations are superb at making themselves heard. Mud sticks – and most of us are too scared to try to set the record straight. I don’t know how many of our accusers have sat down with us, human to human, and listened to our stories. Here’s mine.
As told to Diane Taylor
Ayman Alhussein is a Syrian film-maker based in London
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Start with Andy Goldsworthy’s earthy installations at the Royal Scottish Academy, then head outdoors to discover more of his work, alongside pieces by Barbara Hepworth, Antony Gormley and Charles Jencks
A distinct farmyard smell lingers near the muddy Sheep Paintings. People walk slowly between two dense hedges of windfallen oak branches, or stand silently in a fragile cage of bulrush stems with light seeping through the mossy skylight overhead. I’m visiting the largest ever indoor exhibition of work by Andy Goldsworthy, one of Britain’s most influential nature artists. His recent installations have a visceral sense of rural landscape: hare’s blood on paper, sheep shit on canvas, rusty barbed wire, stained wool, cracked clay.
The show is a sensory celebration of earth – its textures and temperatures, colours, character. The seasons cycle through an ongoing multidecade series of photos featuring the same fallen elm. There are leaf patterns and delicate woven branches, crusts of snow, lines of summer foxglove flowers or autumn rosehips. Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years is a National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) exhibition in the neoclassical Royal Scottish Academy building.
Scientists have found the first robust evidence that people’s genes affect their chances of developing myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), a mysterious and debilitating illness that has been neglected and dismissed for decades by many in the medical community. To find out more, Madeleine Finlay speaks to science editor Ian Sample and to Nicky Proctor, who has ME and took part in the research. She also hears from Beth Pollack, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies ME/CFS and related conditions, about how scientific understanding of the illness has improved and how scientists are transforming this knowledge into ideas about future treatments
French president responds to Israeli PM’s ‘erroneous’ allegations in relation to decision to recognise state of Palestine
Emmanuel Macron has hit out at Benjamin Netanyahu for his “abject” and “erroneous” remarks after Israel’s prime minister claimed that antisemitism had “surged” in France after the country’s decision to recognise a Palestinian state in September.
In a statement released late on Tuesday, the office of the French president pushed back against Netanyahu’s claim. “The analysis suggesting that France’s decision to recognise the state of Palestine in September is behind the rise in antisemitic violence in France is erroneous, abject, and will not go unanswered,” it said. “The current period calls for seriousness and responsibility, not generalisation and manipulation.”
The ‘undeclared’ Sinpung-dong missile operating base is just 27km from the border with China, report by US thinktank says
North Korea has built a secret military base near its border with China which may house Pyongyang’s newest long-range ballistic missiles, according to new research.
The “undeclared” Sinpung-dong missile operating base lies about 27km (17 miles) from the Chinese frontier, the Washington-based thinktank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said in a report published on Wednesday.
In a draw filled with many of the best singles tennis players in the world, the Italians made a decisive case for the importance of teamwork in this discipline
Across two frantic days in New York, Andrea Vavassori and Sara Errani repeatedly made their intentions clear. As the only doubles specialist team in a tournament that had banished the rest of their kind, they were on a mission to prove their worth by succeeding on the court.
Shortly before midnight on an Arthur Ashe Stadium still filled with raucous spectators, the mission was complete. They triumphed in spectacular fashion at the reimagined US Open mixed doubles championship by closing out the star singles pairing of Iga Swiatek and Casper Ruud, the third seeds, 6-3, 5-7 (10-6) in a supreme, intense tussle to defend their title.
When the samphire is growing on the coasts of north Norfolk, our writer returns almost every year to cook this buttery, smoky marine dish
North Norfolk captured our hearts by stealth. For most of my life, this arcing coastal stretch of East Anglia was somewhere I had never visited, nor ever spent that much time thinking about; a span of English countryside that I mostly associated with Alan Partridge, Colman’s mustard and, in the context of my south London home, an awkward schlep. But then, almost exactly a decade ago, I stumbled through an internet rabbit hole on to an entry for a clutch of self-catering cottages in a seaside village near the gently bougie, wax-jacketed market town of Holt. Decision made.
Soon we were rumbling out across an impossibly wide and flat expanse, bound for the ripe, blustering winds and billowing steam trains of a varied network of time-warp beaches and little towns. Not expecting much, and yet falling a little more in love with each passing moment and meal, with each glistening fistful of perfect chips from No1 Cromer or a tea room crab roll after watching seals nose out of the water at Blakeney Point.
Picky by Jimi Famurewa, is published by Hodder & Stoughton at £20. To order a copy for £18, visit guardianbookshop.com
Connexion
