It’s worth flagging that this is a particularly early start for the riders, after a relatively late finish (6.38pm BST) yesterday. That is a tight turnaround, for the riders and the support staff to get their meals, massage and rest in, especially as the finish in Plumelec is over 200km from today’s start in Brest.
Stage two, though, is the second shortest stage of this year’s race, clocking in at 110km.
After struggles with mental health and addiction, Max Wallis launched a poetry magazine – and it has transformed his life
One morning in February last year, I received an urgent call from the journalist Paul Burston, alerting me to alarming recent social media posts by a mutual friend, the poet and former model Max Wallis.
It seemed he had left his London flat in deep distress and was headed to a bridge. Our best guess was the Millennium footbridge by St Paul’s Cathedral. Then we heard that Max might have taken refuge inside the cathedral. While I scanned gaggles of tourists in the nave, he was intercepted and removed by ambulance. I was relieved to get a message later that evening that he was safe.
While the Wall Street Journal cast a stone against the president, Fox News is more than making up for it
In the wake of new revelations regarding the friendship of Donald Trump and disgraced and deceased billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has both poured gasoline on to the story and come to Trump’s loyal defense. Experts say that, much like the broader Maga movement, the Epstein affair is testing Trump and Murdoch’s mostly chummy relationship.
To think, only months ago, at Jimmy Carter’s funeral, Barack Obama and Donald Trump were laughing together in the pews.
Uefa’s director of women’s football says 16-team Euro 2025 has been a success even without making a profit
“It really makes me emotional, it’s just something we didn’t have in my time,” says Nadine Kessler as she surveys the popularity and sheer scale of a sport whose future she now helps shape. Uefa’s director of women’s football was a brilliant player before retiring nine years ago after 11 surgeries on a knee; she was world footballer of the year in 2014 and, having won the European Championship with Germany a year previously, knows what it takes to dominate a continent.
Staging an entire tournament is a different matter, although one she has become accustomed to since joining the governing body in 2017. “I need to throw my to-do list out of the window,” she says before sitting down at Uefa’s designated hotel in Basel to survey the reverberations of a record-breaking Euro 2025 before the final. “It’s like my craziest match-day,” she says. “But it’s incredible.”
The momentum of cruelty always feels inevitable. Cruelty is by definition “a callous indifference to or pleasure in causing pain”. For those of us who have suffered physical, political, racial and emotional abuse, it feels like a familiar steamroller of violence. We only have to witness the cries of parents being separated from their children, men screaming out for “libertad” from cages in Everglades detention center (AKA Alligator Alcatraz), non-violent protesters beaten for trying to stop a genocide, to be frozen in that same incapacitating dread and fear.
V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a playwright and activist and the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls
Jobs, homes, kids, retirement – some say instability worsened under Trump is forcing them to postpone it all
Americans are getting married, having kids, buying a home, and retiring years later than what once was the norm. Many don’t ever reach these milestones.
While there is a complex web of factors that go into decisions like having kids or buying a house, a person’s financial situation often plays an major role. In a May Harris/Guardian poll, six out of 10 Americans said that the economy had affected at least one of their major life goals, because of either a lack of affordability or anxiety about where the economy is heading.
I thought my life was over when I was caught shoplifting from Boots. Instead, a wise act of kindness changed my understanding of my parents, and myself
When my parents told me they were splitting up, I was 15 and furious. It was an abstract, all-consuming kind of anger, alien to the hitherto conscientious, happy kid I had been. With the upset turbocharged by adolescent angst, I resolved to behave as badly as I could: if they were going to tear my life apart, well, I’d muck in.
In hindsight, my rebellions were pretty gentle – probably testament to how safe and stable things remained, even if I felt adrift. Nonetheless, I bravely cycled through teen cliches, beginning by escalating my casual smoking to the compulsive level of someone who had been promised a reward for every dog-end. That’ll show ’em!
Emily Watkins is a freelance writer based in London
Thongxay Nilakout, who shot Birte Pfleger’s parents in 1994, is among eight convicted criminals who were deported
The daughter of a woman murdered by a man from Laos who is among those controversially deported from the US to South Sudan has spoken out about her family’s pain but also to decry the lack of rights afforded to those who were expelled to countries other than their own.
Birte Pfleger lives in Los Angeles and was a history student at Cal State University in Long Beach when her parents came to visit her from their native Germany in 1994 and ended up shot by Thongxay Nilakout during a robbery while on a sightseeing trip. Pfleger’s mother, Gisela, was killed and her father, Klaus, wounded.
Like so many others, I moved from London to Portugal’s capital for the sun, lifestyle – and the tax break. But as tensions rise with struggling locals, many of us are beginning to wonder whether we’re doing more harm than good …
For the past five years, I’ve lived in a flat in a four-storey apartment building standing atop a hill in the pastel-hued district of Lapa, Lisbon. I work from my desk at home, with a view of palm fronds outside the window as I dial into Zooms with London advertising agencies, for which I’m paid in pounds into a UK bank account. Upstairs, one of my neighbours makes money from France, and downstairs another offers financial coaching to a range of international clients.
In the flat just across the hallway, three Scandinavian digital creatives work remotely for clients in their own home countries. All the school-age children attend international private schools. The building, clad in weathered Portuguese tiles, is owned by a single Portuguese family. The remote workers live among four siblings, aged 60-plus, who each live on one of the floors. The building tells a typical story of the demographic of the local area: Portuguese who have benefited from inherited wealth and foreigners earning foreign incomes.
Oil lamp fragments point to presence of previously unknown Jewish population in Ibero-Roman town of Cástulo
Seventeen centuries after they last burned, a handful of broken oil lamps could shed light on a small and long-vanished Jewish community that lived in southern Spain in the late Roman era as the old gods were being snuffed out by Christianity.
Archaeologists excavating the Ibero-Roman town of Cástulo, whose ruins lie near the present-day Andalucían town of Linares, have uncovered evidence of an apparent Jewish presence there in the late fourth or early fifth century AD.
Row escalates after Lions’ first series win in 12 years
Waugh backs criticism from Wallabies’ coach Schmidt
Australian rugby officials want an explanation of the decision to award the British & Irish Lions a last-gasp series-clinching try against the Wallabies at the MCG on Saturday.
Phil Waugh, the Rugby Australia chief executive, has called for accountability following Hugo Keenan’s 80th-minute try in an escalating row after the Lions’ first series win in 12 years.
We need to reckon honestly with science’s past and present to avoid a grim future
Science is in crisis. Funding infrastructures for both basic and applied research are being systematically decimated, while in places of great power, science’s influence on decision making is waning. Long-term and far-reaching studies are being shuttered, and thousands of scientists’ livelihoods are uncertain, to say nothing of the incalculable casualties resulting from the abrupt removal of life-saving medical and environmental interventions. Understandably, the scientific community is working hard to weather this storm and restore funding to whatever extent possible.
In times like these, it may be tempting to settle for the status quo of six months ago, wanting everything simply to go back to what it was (no doubt an improvement for science, compared to the present). But equally, such moments of crisis offer an opportunity to rebuild differently. As Arundhati Roy wrote about Covid-19 in April 2020, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” What could science look like, and what good could science bring, if we moved through the portal of the present moment into a different world?
Ambika Kamath is trained as a behavioral ecologist and evolutionary biologist. She lives, works, and grows community in Oakland, California, on Ohlone land
Melina Packer is Assistant Professor of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, on Ho-Chunk Nation land. She is the author of Toxic Sexual Politics: Economic Poisons and Endocrine Disruptions
With the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaching, a powerful five-part docuseries, produced by Ryan Coogler, takes a look back at the many lives affected
Earlier this year, NFL fans from across the country descended on New Orleans for the Super Bowl. But even as the Big Easy rushed to put its best face forward for the big game and quickly turn the page from a New Year’s Eve attack on its famed tourist district, there was no way of concealing the derelict homes, watermarked buildings and other ravages of Hurricane Katrina. “On the surface, New Orleans is still the New Orleans of our imagination, where there’s Bourbon Street, the French Quarter and you’re drinking in the middle of the day outside,” says the Oscar-nominated director Traci A Curry. “But for the people of this place, the people who know it, there’s New Orleans before Katrina and after Katrina. A lot of us who experienced it as spectators think of it as something that happened to America – and it wasn’t.”
Curry’s solo directorial debut, Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time, re-examines the epic storm 20 years later. The five-part series, which was made for National Geographic and counts Ryan and Zinzi Coogler and Alexis Ohanian as producers, isn’t a requiem in the vein of When the Levees Broke – Spike Lee’s superlative series that was just one of many works that informed this project – Curry says. Rather, it’s a tragedy thriller told through forensic analysis. The biggest jump scares come in the hindsight revelations. The first episode provides a refresher on Hurricane Pam – the multi-agency, worst-case scenario planning exercise that was conducted a year before Katrina and essentially predicted everything that would happen, down to the reports of violence breaking out across the city.
Performing at these festivals can be ruinously expensive – but can you at least attend one for free? Our writer ditches his wallet to find out, and meets the comedians doing their best on an ever-tightening budget
Fringe festivals have always been cash guzzlers, not only for punters but for the performers, whose show costs far outstrip their earnings – and that’s not including the money needed to eat, drink and find somewhere to crash. This is just how fringe festivals work. The performers have to pay to book their own venues, and rely on ticket sales to claw back their investment, all in a highly competitive market, with tickets for hundreds of shows a night going on sale.
Spiralling costs certainly make performing at fringe festivals seem elitist. But are they really only vanity projects for middle-class comedians bankrolled by their savings, or worse still, the bank of Mum and Dad? Or is living on a diet of Pot Noodles and top-and-tailing with a total stranger all part of the charm?
Books – on LGBTQ+ themes or Ukraine – are Moscow’s target this time. And there as elsewhere, self-censorship is amplifying oppressors’ work
Anna Aslanyan is a journalist and translator, and the author of Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History
“Manuscripts don’t burn,” the protagonist of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita is told. This maxim is voiced by Satan, in reference to the Master’s destroyed opus. Having restored it, the devil punishes the man who tipped off the police about “illegal literature” kept in the Master’s flat, so as to move there himself. Bulgakov didn’t have to make this up. Surrounded by snitches, he managed to survive the Great Terror of the 1930s, as did his books. The Master and Margarita, on which he worked until his death in 1940, was first published uncensored in the USSR in 1973.
In the early 1990s, censorship was officially lifted in Russia. For a while, one could publish almost anything, but now literature has again become a target of oppression. Things have become particularly dire since 2022, the year Russia invaded Ukraine and criminalised “LGBT propaganda” among adults. In 2023 another bill was passed, outlawing the “international LGBT public movement” as extremist. These laws are now being deployed in Russia’s war on its book industry.
While retaining their title is the big aim for the Lionesses this summer, their run to the Euro 2025 final in Switzerland has already delivered a broader success – another huge uplift in visibility for the women’s game, at elite and grassroots level.
England and Spain will both wear their home kits today in the final. Spain are set to wear red shorts.
Czech firefighters and Italian aircraft join fight against blazes that have ravaged homes and forced evacuations
Greece is battling wildfires that have ravaged homes and led to evacuations for a second day, with the help of Czech firefighters and Italian aircraft expected to arrive later on Sunday.
The wildfires were raging on Sunday morning in the Peloponnese area west of the capital, as well as on the islands of Evia and Kythera, with aircraft and helicopters resuming their work in several parts of the country at dawn.
Missionary groups are using audio devices in protected territories of the rainforest to attract and evangelise isolated or recently contacted Indigenous people in the Amazon. A joint investigation by the Guardian and Brazilian newspaper O Globo reveals that solar-powered devices reciting biblical messages in Portuguese and Spanish have appeared among members of the Korubo people in the Javari valley, near the Brazil-Peru border.
Drones have also been spotted by Brazilian state agents in charge of protecting the areas. The gadgets have raised concerns about illegal missionary activities, despite strict government measures designed to safeguard isolated Indigenous groups.
Arsenal’s new signing arrives with a reputation for goals but also mystery around his iconic celebration
Every goalscorer needs a trademark celebration and the one Viktor Gyökeres has shown off over the past few years has certainly increased its reach of late – fingers interlocked, thumbs pushed up, a mask formed across his mouth and nose.
As Gyökeres’s transfer from Sporting to Arsenal has edged along, fans of the London club became increasingly desperate for clues. They were convinced they spotted one when the defender, Riccardo Calafiori, was pictured at their kit launch with the shirt pulled up towards his eyes; mask-style. And then there was Myles Lewis-Skelly, another of their defenders, looking at a Gyökeres-to-Arsenal story on his phone and copying the gesture.
Amateur club where Wales captain Morgan learned rugby as a youngster has plenty of other tall tales from tours past
A way along the Great Western mainline, a way up the Swansea Valley, a way off Heol Gleien Road, is Cwmtwrch RFC, where Jac Morgan first learned his rugby. They have turned out a handful of Wales internationals in the 135 years since they were founded, but Morgan is their first British & Irish Lion.
He is also the one and only Welshman left on the tour and when he comes on to the field, 54 minutes into Saturday’s second Test at the MCG, the atmosphere quickens inside the clubhouse. There is a swell of quiet pride and a little anxiety, too, as he latches on to the pack for his first scrum.
With a fresh influx of talent joining the Premier League from the German top flight this summer, we examine the fortunes of those who made the switch
Liverpool have paid Eintracht Frankfurt an initial £69m to make Hugo Ekitiké their third summer buy from the Bundesliga, after the club record signing Florian Wirtz and right-back Jeremie Frimpong joined from Bayer Leverkusen. Leeds have also brought in three players from Germany’s top flight – Anton Stach, Sebastiaan Bornauw and Lukas Nmecha – and Jamie Gittens, who has moved to Chelsea, is among others who have made that journey in this transfer window. Here we look at 10 notable Premier League signings from the Bundesliga and how they fared.
It is not just Germany these days … countries like Italy, Switzerland and Poland are finding their feet in women’s game
A documentary is currently being broadcast on German TV. In it, former players talk about how they were prevented from playing football – by the association, their parents and society. Listening to the pioneers of our sport made me realise even more how privileged I had been. I received support from all sides throughout my career.
Women have been playing football for generations but, because it was made difficult or even forbidden in many countries, the level of performance struggled to evolve for a long time. That has changed, as the Euros in Switzerland has shown once again. It offers great sport and exciting entertainment.
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