Hezbollah praises Ibrahim Akil as ‘one of its great leaders’ following his deatg in Israeli airstrike

The Guardian graphics team have created this map, which shows the airstrikes and artillery fire across the Israel-Lebanon border between 19-20 September 2024.

Further violence between Israel and Iran’s allies Hezbollah and Hamas could ignite a devastating regional conflict, the United Nations has warned, after an Israeli airstrike in Beirut killed at least 14 people including a senior Hezbollah leader and wounded 66.

We risk seeing a conflagration that could dwarf even the devastation and suffering witnessed so far.”

It is not too late to avoid such folly. There is still room for diplomacy. I also strongly urge member states with influence over the parties to leverage it now.”

The sequence of actions in the new phase will continue until our goal is achieved: the safe return of the residents of the north to their homes.”

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© Photograph: AP

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© Photograph: AP

Emily and Sophie were sent out to dinner in the grip of a heatwave. But 34C temperatures and even a scoring blunder couldn’t stop the romance …

Like all great love stories, this one begins with sweat-patches. It was July 2018, and London was in the grip of the kind of heatwave that melts tarmac. At 7.21pm, Emily Lewis stumbled off the train in a state of panic. She was meant to be attending a Guardian Blind date in exactly nine minutes, but her T-shirt was soaked with sweat.

Spotting a Gap store across the road, Emily dashed in and bought a new top almost at random, hiding her wet shirt at the bottom of her rucksack. With three minutes to go, she power-walked to the restaurant, but at the door she faced another hurdle – the hostess had never heard of the Guardian, let alone Blind date. Sweating through her new top, and almost ready to give up, Emily felt a tap on her shoulder. A woman with dark hair was smiling at her, looking cool and unruffled. “I’m Sophie,” she said. “And I think you’re my date.”

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© Photograph: Stephanie Sian Smith/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Stephanie Sian Smith/The Guardian

The Pulitzer-winning author of The Overstory on how ocean life inspired his latest novel – and why we need to rewrite our relationship with nature

Richard Powers was around 10 years old when his sister Peggy gave him what he now describes as a very unusual birthday present “for a kid in the northern suburbs of a midwestern city”: a book on coral reefs. But it was a revelatory choice, sparking in the novelist an explosion of curiosity and joy that has come to creative fruition over half a century later in his 14th novel, Playground. “I just thought, the world is actually huge and mysterious and ancient and out there, and I can’t get to it,” he tells me from his home in the Smoky Mountains, where he is surrounded by forest in every direction as far as the eye can see.

In the event, he didn’t have to wait that long to access the ocean for real – the following year, the family followed his father’s job as a school principal from Chicago to Bangkok, and Powers found himself scuba diving and snorkelling in the coral reefs of the South China Sea. Until the family moved back to the States six years later, Powers was convinced he would become, like one of Playground’s central characters, an oceanographer. That ambition gave way to physics and computer programming before, in 1985, he published his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. But the persistence of his many enthusiasms is evident in his fiction, from the mixture of music and DNA in 1991’s The Gold Bug Variations to the Pygmalion-inflected story of artificial intelligence in 1995’s Galatea 2.2 to the ecological and environmental concerns of his most recent novels, The Overstory and Bewilderment.

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© Photograph: Mike Belleme

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© Photograph: Mike Belleme

The designer, determined to have fun, spiked every detail with party spirit in collection presented at Milan castle

Donatella Versace wore a cherry red trouser suit for a preview of her collection in her design studio, and a minidress in the same colour for her catwalk show. She is almost never seen in any colour but black, and clothes have been Donatella’s channel of communication with the world ever since she started working with her brother in 1976, so this was a strong statement. “I feel like I need to bring positivity,” she shrugged. “This is a terrible moment. War is tearing the world apart. What else can I do but try and bring joy?

To locate that elusive joy, she revisited the late 1990s. “It was a very Versace time. I was smoking, all the time! There was not so much thinking, you know? Fashion can get very intellectual, sometimes.”

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© Photograph: Antonio Calanni/AP

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© Photograph: Antonio Calanni/AP

Papua was incorporated into Indonesia in 1969 under a United Nations-sponsored ballot that was widely seen as a sham.

HOUSTON — Justin Verlander missed almost two months this summer with a neck injury. After his latest tough start on Friday night in Houston’s 9-7 win over the Angels, the 41-year-old right-hander said he should have taken more time to recover. “I think I came back from the neck injury a little fast,” he said....

Voicing aquanaut Gordon Tracy and scientist Brains to Daleks and Grandpa Pig, Graham was ‘generous with his time and his talent’

David Graham, who was the voice of characters in Thunderbirds and Peppa Pig, has died aged 99, it has been confirmed.

The London-born star also voiced the evil Daleks in Doctor Who, and brought to life the Thunderbirds puppet characters aquanaut Gordon Tracy, scientist Brains, and Lady Penelope’s driver, Aloysius “Nosey” Parker, in the series in which a secret organisation tried to save the world.

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© Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA

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© Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA

Martin Sheen and others from the cast of “The West Wing,” the hit drama about a liberal president and his staff, were invited by first lady Jill Biden for an event to mark the 25th anniversary of the show.

The London mayor has big plans for the famous shopping street. We look at how similar schemes in Paris, New York and Barcelona have fared

From the rooftop of London’s original John Lewis, the mayor, Sadiq Khan, never knowingly underselling himself, laid out the changes in store for the Oxford Street below: “We want this street to overperform … We want a public realm that is world class, green, healthy and safe – but also increases footfall in the shops.”

Unveiling a £150m plan earlier this week to ban all traffic on the capital’s famous shopping street, the mayor suggested that the West End shopping thoroughfare could be revived to rival Times Square, La Rambla or the Champs-Élysées.

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© Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian

Arsenal travel to Manchester City on Sunday and the key battle once again looks like the Gunners’ defensive duo against City’s prolific Norwegian

The final whistle had been blown but that didn’t stop Erling Haaland and Gabriel Magalhães. Having battled it out for 90 minutes during March’s 0-0 draw at the Etihad between Manchester City and Arsenal, the Brazilian defender was in no mood to back down.

As their teammates shook hands, Gabriel confronted Haaland, whose claim for a late penalty had been waved away by the referee, Anthony Taylor. Pep Guardiola was first on the scene to act as peacemaker as temperatures simmered, pushing the Norwegian striker away before the two players eventually embraced. “Good game,” said Haaland.

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© Composite: Guardian Picture Desk

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© Composite: Guardian Picture Desk

In besieged Kharkiv, I saw how Ukraine is approaching a perilous moment. To turn the tide, it first needs to decisively knock back Russia

Earlier this week, I started a 3,000km, two-day journey back from the other end of Europe, where I witnessed Ukrainian resilience against Russian terror in the besieged city of Kharkiv. A university lecturer told me that from a 12th storey balcony in a north-eastern suburb she had actually seen the flashes of missiles taking off from launchpads just across the frontier, in the Russian city of Belgorod. An S-300 missile can reach Kharkiv from Belgorod in about 30 seconds, so you have no time to hide. If it’s not a missile, it’s a glide bomb launched from a Russian warplane – and so, day after day, death rains indifferently down.

After more than 900 days of the largest war in Europe since 1945, Ukraine is approaching a perilous moment of truth. The Ukrainian David has courage and innovation, but the Russian Goliath has ruthlessness and mass. In an underground location in Kharkiv, I was shown highly sophisticated, novel military uses of IT and drones. With its Cossack-style innovation, the country has developed more than 200 different kinds of drone.

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist

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© Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/Reuters

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© Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/Reuters

Exclusive: Speakers and attendees pull out of Economist Impact event over ties to Philip Morris and Japan Tobacco

A division of the publisher of the Economist has been forced to cancel a high-profile cancer conference at the last minute amid a backlash from speakers and attendees over its association with the tobacco companies behind brands including Marlboro and Benson & Hedges.

Economist Impact, part of the Economist Group, which owns the eponymous weekly business magazine, was due to hold its 10th annual world cancer series in Brussels at the end of the month.

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© Photograph: Science Photo Library/Alamy

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© Photograph: Science Photo Library/Alamy

The Bikeriders, Jeff Nichols’s drama starring Jodie Comer, Austin Butler and Tom Hardy, follows in the leather-clad slipstream of Easy Rider, Quadrophenia and more

At 41, there’s still time for my midlife crisis to take an unexpected turn, but as yet I must confess that I have never known the pleasure of riding a motorcycle. As a London cyclist I can’t exactly claim danger avoidance as a reason, and as a keen driver I’d love to feel the open road minus the sensation barriers of doors and a windscreen. Still, biking is one of those things that movies have rendered so untouchably cool that real life can only make it less so – and even on my best day I’m not going to resemble midcentury Marlon Brando in head-to-toe leather.

Nor Austin Butler and Tom Hardy, for that matter, though while Jeff Nichols’s very entertaining The Bikeriders, now on VOD, to some extent continues cinema’s love affair with handsome, squinting men astride their two-wheel steeds, it deromanticises the scene a bit. Set between the mid-60s and early 70s, it chronicles the evolution of a Chicago biker gang from a mindset of simple, stick-it-to-the-man rebellion to a more directionless, Vietnam-soured atmosphere of crime and violence – and the dogged efforts of Jodie Comer’s disillusioned biker wife to domesticate her tarmac-addicted man. Whatever macho wish-fulfilment The Bikeriders offers is laced with melancholy.

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© Photograph: Clockwise from top left - Kyle Kaplan/AP, Columbia/Sportsphoto/Allstar, Alamy, Focus Features/Allstar

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© Photograph: Clockwise from top left - Kyle Kaplan/AP, Columbia/Sportsphoto/Allstar, Alamy, Focus Features/Allstar

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© Illustration: Tom Gauld/The Guardian

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© Illustration: Tom Gauld/The Guardian

Enjoy these shellfish steamed alla vodka in a creamy tomato sauce or in a spicy-smoky, Thai-style broth

Yes, there’s the “r” rule – that is, the guidance that we’re meant to eat shellfish only during months with an “r”’ in their name – but I’m as much about the “s” rule: that is, seasonal, sustainably sourced shellfish, whatever the month. Typically steamed until their shells open up, mussels are generally on the table in less than 15 minutes. Super-speedy September suppers clocks up another four “s”s to add to that list.

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© Photograph: Louise Hagger/The Guardian. Food styling: Emily Kydd. Prop styling: Jennifer Kay. Food styling assistant: Laura Lawrence.

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© Photograph: Louise Hagger/The Guardian. Food styling: Emily Kydd. Prop styling: Jennifer Kay. Food styling assistant: Laura Lawrence.

Dear Abby advises a mom on how to deal with grandparents favoring one child over the other.

Destructive interplay between human influence on rain and land can be seen in municipalities such as St Pölten

By the third night of rain, the situation in the command centre had escalated from tense to critical. Mateusz Fryn, the deputy firefighter chief in St Pölten, Austria, told his colleagues to stop filling sandbags and pumping water out of basements. Instead, it was time to focus on saving lives.

“It was no longer about acting, it was about reacting,” said Fryn, standing in front of a map of the town and pointing to water-logged areas that had needed rescue operations.

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© Photograph: Christoph Reichwein/Avalon

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© Photograph: Christoph Reichwein/Avalon

Little Rascals star Brandon “Bug” Hall is facing backlash for quipping that his newborn son will be his "heir" and his oldest daughters were described as "dishwashers."

Caitlin Clark might already be trying out for her second career.

Tipping your hand at what you might actually say when trash talking is probably not the best strategy.

A thoughtful, witty and warmhearted journey through children’s literature

If you were lucky enough to grow up loving books, the world of childhood reading may now feel like a lost paradise. I remember mine as a swirl of djinn, trolls, rabbits, pointy-hatted witches, smoking caterpillars, rogue elephants, hot-air balloons, underground rivers, volcanoes, monkeys, treasure-maps and Mississippi rafts, all consumed by me with an uncritical delight that is harder to achieve in adult life.

Delight, as Sam Leith argues in this splendid survey of children’s literature from Aesop to Philip Pullman, lies at the very heart of the genre. A good children’s book thrills its readers with ripping adventures and strong characters; it evokes mental images that can stay imprinted for ever. It revels in words: think of Dr Seuss’s stories, or Rudyard Kipling’s perfect ear in lines such as: “Go to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, and find out.” Underlying it all, children’s books tend to remain close to the deep structures of myth, providing a fast track to readerly satisfaction.

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© Photograph: EH Shepard/PA

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© Photograph: EH Shepard/PA

Roughly two years ago, Kevin O’Toole was simultaneously a rookie on trial with NYCFC and finishing his senior thesis for Princeton.