The strikes come a day after a suicide attack on a security compound in Pakistan’s Peshawar city
Pakistan strikes on neighbouring Afghanistan have killed 10 people – among them nine children – a Taliban government spokesperson has said, a day after a suicide attack on a security compound in Pakistan’s Peshawar city.
“The Pakistani invading forces bombed the house of a local civilian resident ... As a result, nine children (five boys and four girls) and one woman were martyred” in Khost province, Zabihullah Mujahid said on X.
At Maple Farm, nature is returning in droves: nightingales, grass snakes, slowworms, bats and insects. All due to the vision of a group determined to accelerate its recovery
The manically melodic song of the nightingale is a rare sound in Britain these days, but not at Maple Farm. Four years ago, a single bird could be heard at this secluded spot in rural Surrey; this summer, they were everywhere. “We were hearing them calling all night, from five different territories,” says Meg Cookson, lead ecologist for the Youngwilders, pointing to the woodland around us. A group of Youngwilders were camping out at the site, but the birds were so loud, “we couldn’t sleep all night,” says Layla Mapemba, the group’s engagement lead. “We were all knackered the next day, but it was so cool.” An expert from the Surrey Wildlife Trust came to help them net and ring one of the nightingales the next morning, Cookson recalls: “He’d never held a nightingale in his hands before. He was crying.”
Rewilding is by definition a slow business, but here at Maple Farm, after just four years, the results are already visible, and audible. The farm used to be a retirement home for horses. Now it’s a showpiece for the Youngwilders’ mission: to accelerate nature recovery, in one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, and to connect young people (18-30-year-olds) with a natural world they are often excluded from, and a climate crisis they are often powerless to prevent. Global heating continues, deforestation destroys natural habitats, and another Cop summit draws to a disappointing conclusion in Brazil – so who could blame young people for wanting to take matters into their own hands?
It took some oblique wording, but Saudi Arabia made a last-minute decision to sign deal that marks departure for Cop
Dawn was breaking over the Amazonian city of Belém on Saturday morning, but in the windowless conference room it could have been day or night. They had been stuck there for more than 12 hours, dozens of ministers representing 17 groups of countries, from the poorest on the planet to the richest, urged by the Brazilian hosts to accept a settlement cooked up the day before.
Tempers were short, the air thick as the sweaty and exhausted delegates faced up to reality: there would not be a deal here in Brazil. The 30th UN climate conference would end in abject failure.
Then PM says his finance minister was ‘more celebrity than economist’ with an agenda to promote his books
Yanis Varoufakis, the firebrand economist who rose to fame at the height of Greece’s debt drama, was not only egotistical but ultimately more interested in testing out his game theories on the nation than winning its battle to keep afloat.
So writes the former prime minister Alexis Tsipras in his newly released memoir, Ithaki, as the once radical leftwing leader, sparing no punches, seeks, 10 years later, to put the record straight.
Still largely viewed as a peaceful philosophy, across much of south-east Asia, the religion has been weaponised to serve nationalist goals
In the summer of 2023, I arrived in Dharamshala, an Indian town celebrated as the home of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader. The place hadn’t changed much since my last visit almost two decades ago. The roads were still a patchwork of uneven asphalt and dirt, and Tibetan monks in maroon robes filled the streets. Despite the relentless hum of traffic, Dharamshala had a rare stillness. The hills seemed to absorb the noise. Prayer flags flickered in the breeze, each rustle a reminder of something enduring.
But beneath the surface, the Buddhism practised across Asia has shifted. While still widely followed as a peaceful, nonviolent philosophy, it has been weaponised, in some quarters, in the service of nationalism, and in support of governments embracing a global trend toward majoritarianism and autocracy.
Pauline Hanson has been censured by the Senate and suspended from the chamber for seven days after her burqa stunt and will be barred from representing the parliament in overseas delegations.
In an overwhelming show of opposition to the repeat of her 2017 stunt, members of Labor, the Coalition, the Greens and crossbench voted for the censure motion. Only Hanson, her three fellow One Nation senators, and United Australia senator Ralph Babet opposed it.
One of the greatest stars of Jamaican reggae known for his 1969 hit Many Rivers to Cross and the film The Harder They Come
The singer and songwriter Jimmy Cliff, who has died aged 81, was one of Jamaica’s most celebrated performers. An itinerant ambassador who introduced the music and culture of his island to audiences across the world at a time when reggae was largely unknown, he was a pioneer with a distinctive high tenor voice whose themes of civil and human rights resonated with many.
The stirring optimism of his orchestrated Wonderful World, Beautiful People spent 13 weeks in the British singles charts in 1969, peaking at No 6, and his caustic Vietnam, in the same year, was a favourite of Bob Dylan’s that inspired Paul Simon to later record Mother and Child Reunion in Jamaica with the same backing band, after Dylan made him aware of it.
King has announced a genealogist working with the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds found no evidence of Cherokee ancestry in his family lineage
A prominent Canadian-American author, who has long claimed Indigenous ancestry and whose work exposed “the hard truths of the injustices of the Indigenous peoples of North America”, has learned from a genealogist that he has no Cherokee ancestry.
In an essay titled “A most inconvenient Indian” published on Monday for Canada’s Globe and Mail, Thomas King said he had learned of rumours circulating in recent years within both the arts and Indigenous communities that questioned his Cherokee heritage.
China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and Xi told Trump that its return was an ‘integral part of the post-war international order’
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has told Donald Trump that Beijing’s claims to Taiwan remain unchanged, in a phone call that came amid rising tensions over the self-governing island.
Xi told Trump on Monday that Taiwan’s return to China was an “integral part of the postwar international order” forged in the joint US-China fight against “fascism and militarism”, according to the Chinese foreign ministry.
Her commitment to food directly connected to its source shaped the tastes and thinking of a generation of cooks. We all wanted to sit next to her at dinner
Spring is a season of transition, when bare earth transforms into something alive with promise. It was also the name chef Skye Gyngell, who has died at age 62, chose for her London restaurant. She said it was her favourite season, but the truth is she embraced all four and lived them wholly.
Gyngell was singular: she had the palate of a chef and the palette of an artist. Those twin gifts met in food that was painterly in its composition, delicate in its details and tuned to nature’s shifting notes.
Expecting to be financial advisers at the Fortune 500 firm, some hires say they were ‘gaslit’ into peddling ‘terrible’ life insurance to all their contacts
Northwestern Mutual likes to think of itself as a storied American institution offering specialized financial advice. The 168-year-old financial giant, ranked 109 on the Fortune 500, and regularly anointed one of the World’s Most Admired Companies by the magazine, describes its financial advisers as “expert listeners” or a “trusted partner who helps you continue to reach goal after goal”.
It also tops Forbes’s list of Best Employers for New Grads, a title that makes it attractive to hundreds of college students desperate for an internship that could launch them into a career in financial services. Each year they file into Northwestern’s glassy offices across the country for a three-month internship that they hope could change their lives. There, they are slotted in beside thousands of full-time “financial representatives”, many of them recent graduates themselves.
The 65-year-old woman shocked temple staff when they heard a faint knocking and she started moving in her coffin after being brought in for cremation
A woman in Thailand shocked temple staff when she started moving in her coffin after being brought in for cremation.
Wat Rat Prakhong Tham, a Buddhist temple in the province of Nonthaburi on the outskirts of Bangkok , posted a video on its Facebook page, showing a woman lying in a white coffin in the back of a pick-up truck, slightly moving her arms and head, leaving temple staff bewildered.
Hundreds of thousands of vulnerable unpaid carers will have their cases reassessed after a damning official review concluded they had been left with huge debts because of government failure and maladministration.
The review, due to be published on Tuesday, was triggered after a year-long Guardian investigation revealed how carers had been hit with draconian penalties of as much as £20,000 relating to carer’s allowance. Some were plunged into hardship, others were jailed.
Trades, machine operations and administrative roles are most at-risk, says leading educational research charity
Up to 3m low-skilled jobs could disappear in the UK by 2035 because of automation and AI, according to a report by a leading educational research charity.
The jobs most at risk are those in occupations such as trades, machine operations and administrative roles, the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) said.
Two others rescued as authorities work to recover the bodies of those killed after they fell near the summit
Two mountain climbers have died on Aoraki, New Zealand’s tallest peak, with two others from the same group rescued, authorities said.
The climbers’ bodies have been found and specialist searchers were working to recover them “in a challenging alpine environment”, the police area commander Inspector Vicki Walker said on Tuesday. None of the climbers have been publicly identified.
United ‘were not perfect’ in the loss, says Amorim
David Moyes said he likes his players “fighting each other” after Idrissa Gueye was sent off in the 13th minute for slapping his teammate Michael Keane in Everton’s 1-0 win over Manchester United at Old Trafford on Monday.
The victory was a first at Old Trafford in the Premier League for the visitors since 2013. After Gueye’s red card, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall’s 29th-minute strike proved the winner as United lost for a first time in the competition at home after an opponent was reduced to 10 men.
Fifa has announced the creation of a partnership with a Saudi Arabian government agency, with up to $1bn (£762m) being pledged to fund the development of football infrastructure across the globe.
The game’s global governing body announced on Monday that it had signed a memorandum of understanding with the Saudi Fund for Development that would lead to it offering discounted loans “for the construction and rehabilitation” of stadiums and other infrastructure. Under the arrangement, priority for any loans will be given to developing nations.
President signs executive order for Rubio and Bessent to submit report on chapters in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan
Donald Trump on Monday began the process of designating certain Muslim Brotherhood chapters as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists, a move that would bring sanctions against one of the Arab world’s oldest and most influential Islamist movements.
Trump signed an executive order directing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and treasury secretary Scott Bessent to submit a report on whether to designate any Muslim Brotherhood chapters, such as those in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan, according to a White House fact sheet. It orders the secretaries to move forward with any designations within 45 days of the report.
A year to the day since Ruben Amorim fielded his first Manchester United XI, his latest iteration folded in capitulation to 10-man Everton, who ended United’s unbeaten run at five games.
Idrissa Gueye’s bizarre walking orders for slapping Michael Keane, his centre-back, gave United most of the match to overcome Everton, who had previously won once at Old Trafford in 32 years before Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall’s 20-yard strike gave David Moyes a first victory here as a visiting manager in the Premier League.
DoJ argues that congressional action last week to release the Epstein files permits unsealing of court records
The justice department has renewed its request to unseal grand jury materials from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation that led to the disgraced financier’s federal indictment on sex-trafficking charges in 2019.
The submission, signed by US attorney Jay Clayton for the southern district in New York, says that Congress made clear in approving the release of investigative materials last week that the court records should be released.
In newly translated excerpts of a February interview, David Adeang wrongly stated the people Australia has begun deporting to his country are not refugees
Nauru may seek to return refugees from the NZYQ cohort to their home countries, the Nauruan president has said in a new translation of a February interview that has been the subject of months-long controversy.
David Adeang’s interview erroneously claimed those being sent to Nauru were not refugees and said Nauru may seek to return them to their countries of origin where possible.
When Chelsea host Barcelona, fans can assess two 18-year-olds who are equally tipped as future Ballon d’Or winners
Comparisons mean little to Estêvão Willian. The Brazil winger did not even take kindly to being nicknamed Messinho – “Little Messi” – earlier in his career. He called the nickname “disruptive” and made clear that he had no interest in trying to be someone else. “I don’t like comparisons,” the 18-year-old told ESPN Brasil last year. “For those who don’t know how to deal with it, it’s quite disruptive. Me being Estêvão is very good.”
Chelsea no doubt agree. After all, opposition defenders aside, who could possibly complain about Estêvão just being Estêvão? Not for nothing is he widely tipped to win the Ballon d’Or one day. The teenager’s talent is outrageous, his start to life in England has been better than expected and, although the obvious risk with heaping too much praise on a young prospect is that it makes them take their eye off the ball, it is telling that those who know Estêvão say one of the qualities that set him apart is his character.
Test-winning century and Usman Khawaja’s bad back make strong case for the stand-in opener to lead Australia’s innings again
Accidents do not come much happier. Usman Khawaja’s mid-game back problem was annoying for the player and potentially damaging for his team, until it wasn’t. Clearing out the regular dry-powder opener created space in the final stanza of the Perth Test, allowing Travis Head to finish off England with the gory certainty and splatter count of a Mortal Kombat fatality move. Sometimes you mash the buttons and it all just works.
Consider an Ashes innings of 123 from 83 balls, on a bouncy pitch where two other players nudged 50, in an effort that did not just win the match, but has sent the opposition into a demoralising tailspin. So the fortuitous success creates a quandary about what to do next.
After 11 successive victories, England will go into next year’s Six Nations as the team to beat
A Six Nations grand slam, plus Nations Championship victories against South Africa and Fiji and England would head to Argentina next July having equalled their record run of 18 wins, in pursuit of a ground-breaking No 19. Sounds simple put like that, but there’s more chance of Steve Borthwick busting his best moves in England’s next viral TikTok video than him entertaining any thought of record runs.
That is not to criticise, because even though Borthwick is allergic to looking too far ahead, doing so would be to get drastically carried away. The point here is that the more England keep winning, and they will enter the Six Nations next year as the team to beat after 11 on the trot, the more expectation increases.
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