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.
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.
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.
‘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.
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.”
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.
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!
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.”
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.
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”.
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.”
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.
Who was it that first realised you could make an approximation of the shape of a heart using your hands? And why did they then put it on Instagram?
For millennia human beings have had hands.
Oh, what things we have done with these hands! We have woven great tapestries. We have deftly saved the lives of our fellow beings. We have written works of such enduring power they have transcended the centuries. The Sistine Chapel? Hands. Open heart surgery? Also hands.
Two iconoclasts of contemporary fashion will show side by side in the first major Australian exhibition since the London designer’s death two years ago
Two era-defining avant garde fashion designers, Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo, will be brought together in a blockbuster summer exhibition announced on Tuesday by the National Gallery of Victoria.
It has been more than 20 years since Westwood’s work has been exhibited extensively in Australia, and the NGV show will be the first since the designer’s death in December 2023.
If confirmed Luhansk would be first Ukrainian region to be fully occupied by Moscow; pictures show North Korean leader at repatriation of soldiers apparently killed in Ukraine. What we know on day 1,224
Moscow’s forces have seized all of Luhansk – one of four regions Russia illegally annexed from Ukraine in September 2022 despite not fully controlling a single one – Leonid Pasechnik, a Russia-appointed official there, said on Monday. If confirmed, that would make Luhansk the first Ukrainian region to be fully occupied by Russia after more than three years of war. There was no immediate comment from Kyiv on Pasechnik’s claim. In remarks to Russia’s state TV Channel One that aired Monday evening, Pasechnik said he had received a report “literally two days ago” saying that “100%” of the region was now under the control of Russian forces.
Russian forces have captured a village in the Ukrainian region of Dnipropetrovsk for the first time in their three-year offensive, Russian state media and pro-war bloggers have claimed. Dnipropetrovsk, which lies to the west of the Donetsk region, is not among the five Ukrainian regions over which Russia has asserted a formal territorial claim. There was no immediate confirmation from Ukrainian officials or from the Russian defence ministry.
North Korea’s state media showed on Monday leader Kim Jong-un draping coffins with the national flag in what appeared to be the repatriation of soldiers killed fighting for Russia against Ukraine, as the countries marked a landmark military treaty. In a series of photographs displayed in the backdrop of a gala performance by North Korean and visiting Russian artists in Pyongyang, Kim is seen by rows of a half a dozen coffins, covering them with flags and pausing briefly with both hands resting on them.
The European Union said Monday it had agreed a new long-term trade deal with Ukraine, covering imports of food products from the war-torn country that have angered EU farmers. Brussels and Kyiv have been wrangling over the deal after protests from farmers saw the EU slap quotas on tariff-free Ukrainian agricultural imports into the bloc. Brussels added certain restrictions in 2024, when it extended the agreement for one additional year, by introducing a maximum ceiling on certain tariff-free products such as cereals, poultry, eggs, sugar and corn. The European Commission said that under the new deal – which still needs to be finalised – quotas would remain for those sensitive agricultural areas. In return, Kyiv will cut its quotas for pork, poultry and sugar imported from the EU and push to align its food production standards with those of the 27-nation bloc by 2028, Brussels said.
The International Monetary Fund said on Monday it has completed its eighth review of Ukraine’s $15.5bn four-year support program, paving the way for a disbursement of an additional $500m to the war-torn country. That will bring total disbursements to $10.6bn, the IMF said in a statement, after its board’s approval of the review of Ukraine’s Extended Fund Facility. It warned of ongoing and “exceptionally high” risks to the country’s outlook.
Russian President Vladimir Putin “wants to subjugate the whole of Ukraine and at the same time spread fear throughout Europe,” German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said on a visit to Kyiv on Monday, adding that Putin’s “alleged willingness to negotiate is just a facade.” Kyiv and its allies have accused Russia of sabotaging diplomatic efforts, which have stalled in recent weeks, despite Washington’s desires to reach a quick peace deal.
US President Donald Trump’s senior envoy for Ukraine and Russia Keith Kellog also said on Monday that Russia cannot continue to stall for time “while it bombs civilian targets in Ukraine.” “We urge an immediate ceasefire and a move to trilateral talks to end the war,” Kellogg wrote on X.
Offshore wind power boom helps push profit from land and property to more than double what it was two years ago
King Charles is set to receive official annual income of £132m next year, after his portfolio of land and property made more than £1bn in profits thanks to a boom in the offshore wind sector.
Profits at the crown estate – which partly funds the monarchy – were flat at £1.1bn in its financial year to the end of March but more than double their level two years ago, at £442.6m.
Victorian health authorities are recommending that 1,200 children are tested for infectious diseases after a Melbourne childcare worker was charged with allegedly sexually abusing infants and children in his care.
Police on Tuesday confirmed that a Point Cook resident, Joshua Brown, 26, had been charged in May with more than 70 offences relating to eight alleged victims aged between five months and two years old.
Growing popularity of mysticism can also be connected to increasing sense of cultural confidence as Chinese brands and products go global
Pass my exams. Meet Mr Right. Get rich. Pinned to a board by the entrance of a dimly lit fortune telling bar in Fengtai, an urban district in the south of Beijing, handwritten notes reveal the inner worries of customers coming for cocktails with a side of spiritual salvation.
One As All is one of several fortune telling bars to have opened in Beijing, Shanghai and other Chinese cities in recent years. Hidden on the 12th floor of a commercial building, the bar serves a wide range of drinks starting at an auspicious 88 yuan (£9) (eight is considered to be lucky number in China). As well as enjoying a sundowner with a view over Beijing’s skyline, customers can consult the in-house fortune teller who specialises in qiuqian, known in English as Chinese lottery sticks, an ancient style of divination often found in Taoist temples. From a private side-room, the smell of incense burning in front of a genuine Taoist shrine wafts into the bar.
Bryan Kohberger to be spared death penalty but will be given four consecutive life sentences, ABC News reports
Bryan Kohberger, the man accused of killing four Idaho college students in 2022, has agreed to plead guilty to all counts, a move that would spare him from the death penalty, ABC News reported on Monday, citing a letter sent to victims’ family members.
Kohberger, who previously pleaded not guilty on charges of murder in the fatal stabbings, will be sentenced to four consecutive life sentences and waives all right to appeal, according to ABC News.
The Oscar winner will appear alongside Oscar nominee Andrea Riseborough when they play the same character at different ages in Tracy Letts’ play Mary Page Marlowe
Susan Sarandon is to make her UK theatre debut alongside Andrea Riseborough, when the pair portray the same woman at different ages, in Tracy Letts’ drama Mary Page Marlowe.
The play will be staged this autumn at the Old Vic in London by Matthew Warchus, in his final season as artistic director. Several actors portray the title character, which is described as a “time-jumping mosaic” spanning 70 years in the life of an accountant and mother of two in Ohio.
Club captain on coming back from injury, the importance of his family and Trent Alexander-Arnold fitting in well
Dani Carvajal misses his family. The good news is that in return he’s about to become reacquainted with something he has missed as much. For some players, this is a competition too far, played on poor pitches in half-empty stadiums and suffocating heat, something they could do without, but it has been good for Real Madrid’s captain, something to aim at.
Now, 270 days later and 4,400 miles away, just as the Club World Cup gets real, he is back to face Juventus in the last 16 in Miami. “And I know what I’m like: if they let me loose, there’ll be no fear,” he says.
44-year-old goalkeeper Fábio makes series of fine saves
The Brazilian side Fluminense stunned Inter by knocking the Champions League finalists out of the Club World Cup with a 2-0 victory in the last 16 in Charlotte.
Dealing with very serious blazes means fire and rescue service has limited ability to respond to other emergencies
Firefighters battled wildfires in the Scottish Highlands for a third day on Monday in a situation the first minister has called “extremely serious”.
The Scottish Gamekeepers Association (SGA), which has helped tackle the blazes, warned the fires are “becoming a danger to human life” that are leaving “stretched” firefighters unable to attend other incidents.
Advocates say the move could turn the tide for other British overseas territories battling for LGBTQ+ rights
A court in London has upheld a Cayman Islands law legalising same-sex civil partnerships, in a move that campaigners say could turn the tide for other British overseas territories battling for LGBTQ+ rights.
On Monday, the privy council, the final court of appeal for the British overseas territory, rejected an appeal that had argued the Caribbean island’s governor had no right to enact the bill, after lawmakers had rejected similar legislation.
In this astonishing and gross series, we stand witness as teams battle to clean up blood, guts and body fluids. Viewer discretion is very much advised – there will be maggots
It has been a while since we had a good, honest point-and-boke documentary, is it not? “Boke”, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, means to be sick. I use it here because the onomatopoeia gives a better sense of the fight that precedes the act, especially if – say – a programme is unspooling in front of you that keeps the nausea building until you are past the point of no return. Viewer discretion – and a plastic bowl – is advised.
So, then, to Crime Scene Cleaners, a 10-part documentary – yes, 10! – that does exactly what it says on the tin. It follows teams from British and American companies as they move in after bodies have been removed and evidence bagged and tagged by police to clean up anything left behind. “Anything” can mean blood – spattered, accumulated in the bottom of a bath tub, trailed along a floor, soaked into a carpet, stained into grouting, arterially sprayed along skirting boards. Hepatitis B, we are informed via a dramatic voiceover, can survive for up to seven days in dried blood, hepatitis C for up to six weeks on hard surfaces. Clever pathogens.
Club have history of promoting from within and remain pragmatic about potential departure of Bryan Mbeumo
Phil Giles had already given the update on Christian Nørgaard. “It’s more likely than not,” the Brentford director of football said, suggesting that the club captain was close to sealing a £10m move to Arsenal, which is expected to feature £5m in add-ons. Then it was time for Giles to do likewise with Bryan Mbeumo, who is the subject of a bid from Manchester United. Brentford value their 20-goal top scorer from last season at about £65m. United are nearly there with it.
“We’ve made our point clear,” Giles said. “If Bryan earned a massive move now and it was right for us financially, we’d be open to it. But if he ended up here with us next season, I wouldn’t be massively surprised. We’d be delighted. And it would save me a massive headache, frankly.” With that, Giles glanced at the man to his left – the new Brentford head coach, Keith Andrews, presumably the source of said headache if Mbeumo were to leave.
Carlos Alcaraz said he was proud to have squeezed into the second round after struggling with his nerves and the heat on Centre Court during his dramatic five-set win against Fabio Fognini on Monday.
In searing temperatures, Alcaraz started his pursuit of a third consecutive Wimbledon title by outlasting the veteran Italian 7-5, 6-7 (1), 7-5, 2-6, 6-1 after 4hr 37min on-court.
Palace accounts show Treasury finding to remain at £86.3m, while duchy of Cornwall will waive some charity rents
The royal family’s private “royal train” will be decommissioned as part of King Charles’s drive to modernise the monarchy and reduce costs.
The train has been used to transport members of the royal family around Britain’s railway network since 1840, but it has become increasingly costly to maintain and store. Rolling stock from the 1980s would need to be updated for modern railway networks, and two new more fuel-efficient helicopters offer a suitable alternative.
Club misses payments for third time in four months
Danny Röhl expected to leave and negotiating severance
Sheffield Wednesday are facing further disciplinary action from the EFL and a possible walkout of players after failing to pay all the squad’s wages for the third time in four months.
The Guardian has learned that while some of the club’s younger players received their June salaries earlier today, not all of Danny Röhl’s squad were paid, putting the club in breach of EFL regulations and at risk of losing players on free transfers.
“Come on Britain!” echoed through the sweltering 32C heat on No 1 Court as Emma Raducanu defeated Mimi Xu in straight sets, 6-3, 6-3. The all-British clash featured two players – attired similarly in matching outfits and golf visors – who captivated the home crowd.
While Raducanu has been a fan favourite since her fairytale 2021 US Open triumph, the grand slam debutant Xu, ranked No 300 in the world, has impressed in junior circuits and shown significant promise on the senior tour.
7 min: Darmian comes through the back of Cano, and is fortunate not to go into the book. Inter have already committed a couple of fouls, so their next miscreant might not be so fortunate.
5 min: Inter try to reply immediately, Darmian making good down the right. But his cross is no use. What a start by Flu, though; the Brazilians, well, flew out of the traps and got right up in Inter’s collective grille. They got their reward.
Grisly finding comes at end of worst month in war between Sinaloa factions as government tries to stop killings
Mexican authorities have found 20 bodies in the state of Sinaloa, a region gripped by a war between factions of the Sinaloa drug cartel that is reaching new heights of violence.
The state prosecutor’s office said on Monday that four of the victims had been decapitated and their bodies had been found hanging from a bridge on a main road near Culiacán, the state capital.
MPs including select committee chairs express doubts that concessions agreed last week go far enough
Downing Street’s plans to see off a major Labour welfare rebellion were in chaos on Monday night, amid continued brinkmanship between MPs and the government over the scale of the concessions.
There was significant division between government departments over how to respond to rebels’ demands – with seemingly little idea how to quell continuing anger ahead of the knife-edge vote on Tuesday.
We pick half a dozen contenders to lead the scoring charts in Switzerland, from the WSL Golden Boot winner to France’s formidable finisher
Russo is coming into this tournament in the form of her career. Her 12 goals in the Women’s Super League played an integral role in the Gunners’ second-place finish and earned her a share of the Golden Boot, alongside Manchester City’s Khadija Shaw. She was also Arsenal’s top scorer in their run to securing the Champions League. Her productivity in front of goal has been the biggest improvement to her game.
The US president is to issue an order cancelling a 2004 declaration, in move to stabilise country’s new government
Donald Trump is expected to issue an executive order to lift some financial sanctions on Syria in a move that the White House says will help stabilise the country after the ousting of Bashar al-Assad.
The US was expected on Monday to “terminate the United States’ sanctions programme on Syria”, a White House spokesperson said, cancelling a 2004 declaration that froze Syrian government property and limited exports to Syria over Damascus’s chemical weapons programme.
We have laws to deal with crimes linked to protest. What this is really about is a government complicit in the Gaza atrocities seeking to silence dissent
Juliet Stevenson is an award-winning actor
Strongly worded emails are not doing it. Appeals to MPs are not doing it. Taking to the streets in our hundreds of thousands with banners and placards is not working. Elected representatives from every party in parliament have stood in the Commons and asked the government to act. Some government ministers themselves have condemned Israel’s starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. Every poll of public opinion shows that the nation demands we stop arming Israel, and wants to see an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire. But none of these things are working.
Keir Starmer and his cabinet remain impervious to all calls for humanitarian intervention, and Israel is still killing children in Gaza with the support of the British government.
Half-time breaks should be extended to 20 minutes in extreme heat, the global players’ union has said. Fifpro is calling for extra measures to protect footballers after what it describes as the “wake-up call” of the Club World Cup, which has been plagued by extreme temperatures over the past two weeks.
Fifa protocols allow for a cooling break lasting for three minutes in each half if temperature thresholds are exceeded. According to Fifpro’s medical director, Dr Vincent Gouttebarge, an extended half-time break would provide a necessary additional tool in helping to keep players’ core temperatures within their normal range.
Scores of Palestinians reported killed as senior Netanyahu adviser due to arrive in Washington for ceasefire talks
Israel ramped up its offensive in Gaza on Monday, with new displacement orders sending tens of thousands of people fleeing the north of the devastated territory and waves of airstrikes killing about 60 Palestinians, according to local officials and medical staff.
The violence in Gaza came as a senior adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, was due to arrive in Washington for talks on a new ceasefire, a day after Donald Trump called in a social media post for a deal to end the 20-month war and free 50 hostages held by Hamas.
Footage of three-a-side game shows humanoids struggling to kick the ball or stay upright
They think it’s all over … for human footballers at least.
The pitch wasn’t the only artificial element on display at a football match on Saturday. Four teams of humanoid robots took each other on in Beijing, in games of three-a-side powered by artificial intelligence.
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