1st over: New Zealand 5-0 (Bates 4, Plimmer 0) Cross starts with a leg-side wide that Amy Jones does well to pluck off her toes. Not a lot of bounce or carry on first glance. Shot! Bates drives down the ground for four to open the Kiwi account. Cross finds her radar and beats the bat with a beauty that nips away late.
Enjoyed this chat with Amy Jones, she is terrific with the gloves.
England winger Anthony Gordon made the headlines this week – after falling off his bike. The 23-year-old was launched head over handlebars following a mix-up with his brakes, much to the amusement of Gareth Southgate. He said: “The bike has not just slowed down, it has fully come to a stop … and I haven’t. I have gone 10 feet into the air, chin first. I carried on and finished the bike ride, and when I got back to the camp I had to put the stuff on, which absolutely stung. That was the worst bit. To be fair, nobody had seen it and I didn’t press record so there were some positives!”
Gordon continued: “He [Southgate] laughed. Like everyone else did. It wasn’t too serious. I could have been injured with the speed I was going down the hill, I could have ended up anywhere. It was on the golf course and I’ve managed to land on the only bit of gravel there was. So, really lucky in some instances and unlucky in others.”
Having children has become an unaffordable luxury for many of her generation, says Vanessa, a 35-year-old project manager living in Brighton.
“My friends who managed to start a family, without exception, all received large sums of money from their parents to get on the property ladder. For those of us not fortunate enough, we are trapped in the rental market, largely with insecure, poorly paid employment.”
The Tour is the Tour, even if Saturday’s stage resembled a rather difficult edition of the Giro. Especially for poor Mark Cavendish, who spent the day being hauled along feeling sick as a dog. It did provide a classic breakaway and an emotional winner in Romain Bardet. So, super Sunday, where we remain in Italy for 199km. And it’s going to be hilly, too.
Per William Fotheringham.
Today’s start is dedicated to Marco Pantani, 20 years after his death; the “Pirate”, winner of the Tour and Giro in 1998, grew up in Cesenatico, which has a museum and a statue dedicated to him. Today won’t suit the sprinters, with two ascents of the San Luca climb in the final 32km. It’s a punchy ascent used in the Giro dell’Emilia, won in 2023 by Primoz Roglic, and it is perfect for Mathieu van der Poel.
After the president’s disastrous debate performance, some want to drop him as the party nominee. But it’s not so simple
If anyone were to doubt the menace of Donald Trump, they had only to watch his performance in Thursday night’s debate.
His bullying lies were not just lies –they were frightening opposites of the truth, uttered with the vigor and certainty of someone who has now mastered the dark art of demagoguery.
I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious. I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know: I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. And I know how to do this job. I know how to get things done. And I know, like millions of Americans know, when you get knocked down you get back up.
We’ve been making short-term decisions about our planet for a long time. The consequences are horrific to behold
The slashing rain turned the dirt roads into muddy creeks, the bus’s wipers shoved the torrent back and forth across the windshield, and Don Schreiber handled the wheel like Sandra Bullock in Speed as he wisecracked from under a big gray moustache. The vehicle swerved and slid in the storm, lightning flashed on the horizon, thunder shook the air. Whether the old yellow bus would make it back to the ranch house, get stuck or slide and flip depended on his driving.
Don, in his white Stetson and a blue and white checked western shirt, was our tour guide on this land in northwestern New Mexico that he knew intimately and had dedicated his retirement to protecting. When he and his wife Jane Schreiber bought the ranchland about 200 miles north-west of Santa Fe in 1999 to retire to, they – like many westerners – found that they owned the land, but not the subsurface rights. The fracking boom came, and gas companies began gouging holes for gas wells, laying pipelines and cutting roads across the fragile desert soil. Big trucks rolled across the land night and day to service the wells that studded the landscape. At the well we stopped at, the pressure gauge was broken.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility
A disturbing documentary explores tech’s questionable ability to bring digital ‘comfort’ to the bereaved
Death is a booming business. For one thing, it’s inevitable. For another, it brings a uniquely vulnerable and receptive market for any product that promises to numb the grief. Enter artificial intelligence. This thought-provoking and bang-up-to-the-minute documentary explores a morally questionable use of AI: the digital afterlife business, tech that recreates the personality (and in some cases speaking voice and even the likeness) of deceased individuals, designed to offer “comfort” to the bereaved. It’s the kind of technology that exists on the knife-edge between thrilling innovation and cynical recklessness. We meet a mother from South Korea who is introduced to an avatar of her daughter through a VR headset; a woman whose “chats” with her late boyfriend take on an unsettlingly demonic quality when the AI tells her that he’s “in hell” and threatens to haunt her. These posthumous AI avatars are, one interviewee says, simultaneously a precision-tooled product and also the perfect salesperson for that product. It’s hard not to watch this without a mounting sense of dread and a suspicion that a fairly significant Rubicon has been crossed.
A great homemade pickle goes a long way during the summer months
All those laid-back summer lunches, the salads and cold cuts, smoked fish and simple tarts seem to cry out for a crisp, sharp accompaniment. The answer in this house is a tangle of bright young vegetables that has been left in a sweet and salty marinade. A pickle to bring out at will – I keep mine in the fridge – to complement whatever else is on the plate.
I take shavings of new season carrots, chunks of cucumber and sliced, white-tipped radishes and dress them with a little sauerkraut, juniper berries, rice wine vinegar and fennel seeds. The sharpness they bring is refreshing and the crunch of raw vegetables is always welcome, but especially at a sunny summer’s lunch.
From watching his father star in Lloyd Webber’s mega-hit in futuristic 1980s Japan, to taking his own family to its reboot in London this year, writer Johny Pitts recounts how Starlight Express has been a thread in his life that has also charted his changing perception of the world
If I had to choose a cultural artefact that most underpinned my 1980s childhood, it would be the Andrew Lloyd Webber mega-musical Starlight Express. The show is around the same age as me, and I’ve come to think of it as the prism through which it is possible to unpick more than my own memories, but the dreams and nightmares of the decadent decade that gave birth to it.
When Starlight Express launched in 1984 at London’s Apollo theatre, the world had never seen anything like it before. A truly immersive experience, it involved actors on roller-skates racing through and around the audience in a purpose-built auditorium, and broke ground with its diverse casting, at one point hiring more Black actors than the rest of the West End combined. James Baldwin was often backstage to visit his friend Lon Satton, a longtime cast member, and another member of the cast, Jeffrey Daniel, invented the moonwalk that Michael Jackson made famous (MJ was also a fan of the show, and visited on more than one occasion).
Take a nostalgia trip at a newly-opened hotel in the bohemian heart of the French capital
A visit to Paris’s fifth arrondissement can make you feel unusually nostalgic in the current climate. Home to the Sorbonne, student-filled cafés and all-round Rive Gauche cool, it’s a world away from France on the brink of change. Also known as the Latin Quarter, le cinquième has ready supplies of retro charm and specialist shops to browse and lose yourself in.
On an early-evening wander, I come across a shop on rue des Écoles that sells mandolins and a rare bookshop on rue du Cardinal-Lemoine with a window display of ironic protest material, including a copy of the Watergate Cookbook. Near the Seine, you’ll find the Jardin des Plantes botanical gardens and the Natural History Museum, all just a stone’s throw away.
Bairstow, Foakes and Leach miss West Indies series start
Surrey keeper Jamie Smith handed maiden Test call-up
The end of Jimmy Anderson’s remarkable Test career will also be the start of a new chapter – Bazball 2.0, perhaps – after England named a 14-man squad for the start of the forthcoming series against West Indies that sees change very much afoot.
Out with the old, in with the new is the call from Rob Key, the men’s team director, having now settled the old wicket-keeping debate of Jonny Bairstow or Ben Foakes. The pair of them dropped after the 3-1 defeat by India earlier this year is the answer, with Surrey’s Jamie Smith, 23, handed a maiden Test call-up and the gloves.
Tournament soccer should be a party but exorbitant ticket prices, high temperatures and ill-considered venues have hurt the atmosphere
The official X account of Copa América put out a post during the opening Group C game between Uruguay and Panama. “Look who’s here,” it read. Attached were photos of young, glamorous social media influencers posing as they enjoyed the game from the executive boxes.
The post soon went viral and has been viewed more than 7m times. Not by fans expressing joy, but rather by the Americas joining together to ask: “Who?”
Prime minister says he’s ‘fighting very hard’ as campaigning reaches final days with Labour retaining the lead in polling for the Observer
Rishi Sunak said the slur used about him by a Reform UK canvasser was “deeply inappropriate and racist”.
The prime minister told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg show that anyone becoming a politician expects a degree of criticism because it “comes with the territory”.
Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz says Iran’s warning of an “obliterating war” if Lebanon is attacked “deserves to be destroyed,” he stated in a post on X.
Katz added that Israel will act with “full force” if Hezbollah does not cease fire and withdraw from southern Lebanon,
Festival opens its arms with more diversity but rock royalty gets the crowd bouncing
“This is our favourite thing to do on earth, so thank you for letting us do it here,” says Chris Martin as Coldplay headline Glastonbury for a record-breaking fifth time. No other band has such a direct line to the festival’s inclusive, idealistic heart. Their speciality is the universal.
Each year’s line-up throws its arms a little wider around the world of music. On Friday afternoon, for example, you could see in quick succession Indonesian heavy metal, Indian disco, Sofia Kourtesis’ dreamy, therapeutic dance music and Headie One’s furious drill.
Stone, Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe head the cast in the Poor Things director’s odd three-part study of control whose central idea proves elusive
Cannibalism. Auto-amputation. Obsession. Delusion. A glum, bearded, entirely silent man whose initials are RMF. Numerous themes and plot points are nipping away at the bones of Yorgos Lanthimos’s follow-up to Poor Things. An unwieldy triptych of not quite connected stories, starring the same repertory group of actors – Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie and Joe Alwyn – in different roles in each of the three chapters, Kinds of Kindness leans back into the surreal cruelty and bizarro-banal logic of the director’s earlier films. Dogtooth is an obvious reference, but there’s also an element of The Lobster’stwisted relationship politics here.
But despite the recurring themes in the three stories, a unifying idea or central thesis that ties them together proves to be frustratingly elusive. Two things are undeniable, however. The first is that kindness of any kind is conspicuously absent in the film. The second is that Lanthimos is evidently fascinated (to a degree that may not be entirely healthy) with the idea of total control and subjugation of free will.
From newly published novels to timeless classics, Elizabeth Strout, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Irvine Welsh, Tessa Hadley and other writers choose their holiday favourites
Booker prize-nominated author of Caledonian Road and Mayflies
The 16-year-old star leads Spain’s new generation against the Georgia team he beat on his debut 10 months ago
The first time Lamine Yamal joined the Spain squad, they left his boots behind. His and everyone else’s too. When the selección touched down in Tbilisi to face Georgia in September 2023, the trunk carrying part of their kit was still sitting at Barajas, forcing themto complete the evening session at the Boris Paichadze stadium in trainers, unable to strike the ball. The following night, they scored seven. On his debut, the Barcelona winger got the last of them, aged 16 years and 57 days, and the national team got a new beginning.
Ten months on, Spain face Georgia again, this time for place in the quarter-final of Euro 2024. They are, Lamine Yamal says, the best side here but, he adds, “nothing we have done in the group phase will mean anything if we get knocked out”.
The first – and only – All Black to come out publicly as gay on his life-changing decision and being a role model
On a midweek lunchtime in Hawke’s Bay you would not instantly single out Campbell Johnstone as a former New Zealand international prop. Standing outside a local cafe near the beach in Napier in his checked shirt and dark blue gilet, there is nothing much to differentiate him from any other passing Kiwi. Unless, that is, you happen to be aware of his unique place in All Black history and the courageous personal path upon which he has embarked.
As the first – and only – All Black to come out as gay, Johnstone is better placed than anyone to say whether professional men’s rugby still has a way to go in terms of inclusivity. Once upon a time he was best known for being the 1,056th man to pull on the sport’s most famous jersey, playing against the British & Irish Lions in 2005 alongside legends such as Sir Richie McCaw and Dan Carter. It may be that the value of his legacy outstrips both of theirs.
The unrelenting pursuit by America exposed how far officialdom will go to hide the truth
It was a messy ending to an often chaotic story. Julian Assange was released last week from Belmarsh prison to board a flight to the US-governed Pacific island of Saipan. There, under a special deal with the US authorities, he pleaded guilty in court to illegally securing and publishing classified documents in exchange for a prison sentence of five years, which he had already served in British prisons. And so, for the first time in 12 years, Assange found himself a free man.
Having to plead guilty to espionage was a necessity for Assange to gain personal freedom. But it raises wider questions about journalistic freedom. Assange has been charged with espionage not because he spied for a foreign government but because he did what many journalists do: he published classified material that the US government did not want the public to see. The charges Assange faced “rely almost entirely on conduct that investigative journalists engage in every day”, Columbia University’s Jameel Jaffer, an expert on free speech, observed in 2019 when the indictments were first brought. That is why “the indictment should be understood as a frontal attack on press freedom”.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
Three women have died after the coach they were travelling in collided with a caravan in the Whitsunday region on Queensland’s northern coast.
The bus was carrying 33 people when it came off the Bruce Highway, 8km north of Gumlu, on Sunday morning after crashing into a four-wheel drive towing a caravan.
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