A war engulfing the Middle East has cleared the region’s skies, forcing airlines to make drastic rerouting plans and leaving a massive void in usually busy global airspace.
With Israel and the US bombing Iran day after day – and Tehran responding with waves of missiles and drones attacks – airlines have been forced to divert their passenger jets away from the Gulf or risk a catastrophic accident.
Plan, which aims to preserve jobs in clean tech and low carbon sectors, could include UK if there is reciprocal market access
The European Commission has proposed a “Buy EU” plan to boost domestic low-carbon industries and help the continent compete against China.
The commission published a draft regulation – called the Industrial Accelerator Act – on Wednesday, setting demands for EU-made and low-carbon content on bodies spending public money. The rules mark a major shift in economic thinking from Brussels, long a bastion of open markets.
Global oil and gas prices have spiked as the conflict in the Middle East halts energy exports from the region. The strait of Hormuz has been in effect closed since the war began, causing fears of a global economic crisis. About a fifth of the world’s oil is shipped through the narrow passage of water, but, according to reports, traffic has dropped by about 80%, with little sign of return. How long until we feel the effects? Nosheen Iqbal speaks to John Collingridge, the Guardian’s head of business.
‘Divorce rings’ have been gaining popularity. But for some women, freedom warrants a stronger, more defiant symbol
I have been a divorce coach for five years. Every client’s process is different, but occasionally I notice new trends. One afternoon, a woman showed up to her session fuming. Her soon to be ex-husband was trying to claw back her engagement ring through his attorney.
“Absolutely not,” she said, her jaw stiffening. “That ring is mine. I earned it. And I already know exactly what I’m doing with it.”
McLaren could start slowly, Mercedes may set the pace, while newcomers – and returning heroes – add huge interest
Car MCL40 Engine Mercedes Principal Andrea Stella Debut Monaco 1966 GPs 994 Constructors’ titles 10 Last season 1st. Held their nerve to close out the constructors’ and drivers’ double last season, albeit with the latter going to the wire as they rather tied themselves in knots trying to be fair to both drivers. Enter this year a little off the front but in a season likely to be marked by a fierce development battle, will expect to exploit their huge strengths in bringing the car on with alacrity and be in the mix in no short order.
Climate deniers expected more resistance to the fossil fuel blitz. But Democrats, billionaires and activists have gone silent
This story is published in partnership with DeSmog, the climate investigations site
As Donald Trump assaults the legal foundation of America’s ability to regulate global warming emissions, climate deniers have been privately celebrating what they claim is the “silent” acquiescence of billionaires, Democrats, climate activists and even reporters to the president’s aggressive pro-fossil-fuel agenda.
“In my 26 years of being focused on climate, I’ve never seen anything like this. Trump is gutting everything they ever stood for,” Marc Morano, a long-time climate denier, said in January at the World Prosperity Forum, a five-day event in Zurich, Switzerland, billed as a rightwing alternative to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The German government convened a crisis meeting after several prize winners at this year’s event condemned Israel’s actions against Palestinians
The American head of the Berlin film festival, Tricia Tuttle, will keep her job after a free speech row over Gaza, but the event will have to consider a new code of conduct to “fight antisemitism”, the German culture ministry has said.
The House ethics committee said on Wednesday that it has opened an investigation of Tony Gonzales, a Republican representative from Texas, over allegations that include having an affair with an aide.
The top Republican and Democratic members on the committee said in a joint statement that an investigative panel would look into whether Gonzales engaged in sexual misconduct toward an employee in his office and whether he discriminated unfairly by dispensing special favors or privileges.
The TV drama Love Story has brought their fashion back into the spotlight – and inspired nine big trends, from bootcut jeans to backwards caps
When images taken on the set of the Disney+ series Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette were teased on social media in June, fans were adamant that the show had got the styling wrong. The fictionalised drama details the relationship between John F Kennedy Jr, then the world’s most eligible bachelor, and the fashion publicist Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, tracing their courtship and marriage, which was lived out under the scrutiny of the press.
“This is fashion murder,” wrote one user underneath a picture of Sarah Pidgeon, who plays Bessette Kennedy, and Paul Anthony Kelly, who depicts Kennedy Jr. Such was the outrage that the executive producer Ryan Murphy was forced to defend the styling as “a work in progress”, which led to him hiring a new costume designer, Rudy Mance, to focus on the historical precision. Nine months later, the internet has done a U-turn, with fans now rushing to emulate the couple’s on-screen and off-screen 90s looks. In the past week alone, searches for “Carolyn Bessette style” have increased by 150% on Google. Here are nine trends that the fans are championing.
It seemed hard to believe, and it was even harder to clean. All I know about the culprit is that they must be agile
Last summer, I found poo in the wheelie bin. Nothing unusual there: you can’t blame dog walkers for a reluctance to tote warm sacks in a heatwave. But this was different. This was unbagged and … not canine.
Had our bin really moonlit as a loo? It seemed hard to believe. Someone would have had to trundle it from its traditional position by the path, line it up with the wall, flip its lid, walk into the neighbours’ garden, climb on to their bike shed and strategically crouch, conscious that one false wobble could be, if not fatal, then certainly quite messy. In full view of the street. On a sort of podium. When a handy hedge was right there. Surely not?
Europe’s largest trade union is trying to gain control of the works council at Elon Musk’s Tesla gigafactory near Berlin, in an industrial relations showdown marked by lawsuits and mutual accusations of slander.
The works council, an elected body of employees that negotiates everything from working hours to pay deals with a company’s management, is considered an entrenched aspect of the German corporate world, particularly in the car industry.
Analysis shows average levels are 30cm higher than thought, and up to 150cm in south-east Asia and Indo-Pacific
Sea levels around the world have been underestimated due to inaccurate modelling, with research suggesting ocean levels are far higher than previously understood.
The finding could significantly affect assessments of the future impacts of global heating and the effects on coastal settlements.
Player found guilty of ‘non-serious assault’ in 2020
England defender to appeal again against verdict
The England and Manchester United defender Harry Maguire has been handed a 15-month suspended prison sentence by a Greek court over a 2020 incident in Mykonos.
In 2020, Maguire was found guilty of repeated bodily harm, attempted bribery and violence against public employees after his arrest after a brawl outside a nightclub.
Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, offered few details and was evasive when asked about the deadly strike on a girls’ school in Iran, saying only that the US was “investigating” the incident.
Iranian officials say the attack, which happened on Saturday, killed at least 165 students.
The war will have incalculable implications for Europe – and yet, the chancellor has held back from publicly challenging an increasingly erratic Donald Trump
You could be forgiven for thinking Friedrich Merz would rather be anywhere but Germany of late.
But hopes that his stop in Washington this week would provide the chancellor even a brief respite from woes at home were dashed by Donald Trump’s risky Iran gamble.
Israel has carried out a wave of airstrikes on Iranian security targets and Hezbollah in Beirut as Tehran threatened the “complete destruction of the region’s military and economic infrastructure” as the rapidly escalating war entered its fifth day and reached as far as the Indian Ocean off Sri Lanka.
The Israeli military said it had hit buildings in Iran belonging to the Basij, the volunteer police arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and buildings belonging to internal security forces. Police stations and IRGC headquarters in the Kurdish regions of north-western Iran were also razed by strikes, Kurdish media reported.
‘She saw these tarot cards on my table and asked me to read her future. I predicted absolutely nothing’
Before switching to photography I studied fashion, so my early photographs concentrated on that. But, in 1994, I decided that music and people were the subjects I wanted to get involved in. I went into a newsagent and found a music magazine called Touch, which I really liked the look of. After agreeing to look at my fashion portfolio, the editor said: “Well, you’ve got beautiful models here. Can you make boring DJs look as interesting?”
He commissioned me to photograph drum’n’bass DJ General Levy, and it ended up on the cover of the magazine. As a result, I picked up work from DJ Mag – they asked if I was into drum’n’bass and I just went with it. I photographed clubbers at London’s Ministry of Sound – there was a guy in the crowd who really stood out, and I was later excited to discover he was Goldie.
As Americans embrace ‘alternative’ remedies, people online joke that they’re ‘Chinamaxxing’ their wellness routines
Did you drink ice water today? If you did, that was “not very Chinese of you”, according to Sherry Zhu, a 23-year-old Chinese American creator based in New Jersey. If you were really serious about “becoming Chinese”, you would be sipping hot water every day, she warned in a TikTok video with millions of views. “I really do feel like, digestion-wise, a lot better when I’m drinking hot water,” she later explained to GQ.
Zhu’s guidance is taken from traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), a health system that dates back 5,000 years and offers a holistic approach to treating symptoms – physically, emotionally and spiritually. Other creators of Chinese descent have their own TCM hacks: keep your feet warm and your periods will be more bearable. Drink tea made with goji berries, jujubes and ginger as a cure-all. Move your body every day to promote the flow of qi, or internal energy. “Do my Chinese baddie routine with me,” they caption their videos in half-authoritative, half-joking tones. “Advice from your Chinese big sister.”
With the wait for the new Winds and Waves games set to stretch into 2027, Pokemon’s 30th anniversary celebrations have plugged the gap with a deluge of nostalgia bait. Is the franchise in danger of losing its heart?
It has been almost impossible to escape Pokémon for the past few weeks. To mark the 30th anniversary of the original games, the Pokémon Company has been on an unprecedented promotional nostalgia trip for the entire month: there was a campaign where celebrities gushed about their favourite Pokémon, gifting us the memorable sight of Lady Gaga singing with a Jigglypuff, and Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen (great Game Boy Advance remakes of the original 1996 games) were rereleased on the Nintendo Switch. The Natural History Museum in London has opened a special Pokémon pop-up shop, and a limited-edition greyscale Pikachu plush toy sold out in about three seconds (they will be making more, to the disappointment of scalpers everywhere).
And all that is just the start. We’ve seen the opening of a Pokémon theme park in Tokyo, the announcement of a tiny Game Boy-shaped music player that plays the games’ soundtrack, a collaboration with high-fashion brand JimmyPaul that had its own runway show … it’s been endless. Regular readers will know that I am exactly the target audience for this festival of Pokémon nostalgia: the first generation of Pokémon kids and now hurtling towards 40. And yet I have been unmoved by most of this, even slightly annoyed by it.
An heiress helping to traffic young women to brutal billionaires: the finale of the banker drama used one of its characters to take on a huge real-life scandal
Just who is Yasmin Kara-Hanani? It’s a question that has dogged Industry’s trauma-logged heiress since the series began in 2020. “Who have I married?” wonders Henry Muck, Yasmin’s hapless aristocratic new husband about his ruthlessly ambitious bride in her Lady Macbeth era.
The season four finale solves the mystery with a shocking Epstein-inspired arc. As the Tender scandal spirals, revealing the payment processor/wannabe bank as a front for Russian intelligence, the former Lady Muck cuts and runs from her marriage to Henry, as well as her job in communications at Tender. She is now carving a niche for herself trafficking young women to a transnational crew of brutal billionaires hellbent on breaking the social contract nation by nation. Turns out, Yasmin (Marisa Abela) is a millennial-style take on Ghislaine Maxwell. It’s a ruinous evolution perversely pitched as a dream realised.
MPs warn the plan so far lacks direction and drive, but there are four clear ways to really move on from our disastrous Brexit
Many of us have been there: in the driver’s seat on a tricky hill start, when the engine cuts out and the car judders to a halt. Since the EU-UKsummit last May – the event that was supposed to map a new and dynamic way forward – stalling is fast becoming a real risk for Keir Starmer’s most crucial long-term policy area: improving Britain’s relationship with the EU.
Today’s report by MPs on parliament’s foreign affairs committee rightly warns that despite the hugely welcome – and essential – progress in relations with our closest allies and neighbours, Starmer’s project is “suffering from a lack of direction, definition and drive”. If Labour is to deliver a growing economy, improve living standards for every UK resident and tackle the very real threat of Reform UK, getting the EU reset back into gear is a matter of urgency.
Naomi Smith is chief executive of Best for Britain
Lawsuit is first wrongful death case brought against Google over flagship AI product after death of Jonathan Gavalas
Last August, Jonathan Gavalas became entirely consumed with his Google Gemini chatbot. The 36-year-old Florida resident had started casually using the artificial intelligence tool earlier that month to help with writing and shopping. Then Google introduced its Gemini Live AI assistant, which included voice-based chats that had the capability to detect people’s emotions and respond in a more human-like way.
“Holy shit, this is kind of creepy,” Gavalas told the chatbot the night the feature debuted, according to court documents. “You’re way too real.”
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