Updates from 110.4km stage from Brest to Quimper
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.
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© Photograph: Szymon Gruchalski/Getty Images
© Photograph: Szymon Gruchalski/Getty Images
© Photograph: Szymon Gruchalski/Getty Images
Live updates from the final day of play at Old Trafford
As the players skip out, there’s a decent enough crowd but still spaces if you’ve got a spare day and £26 in your pocket (£6 for juniors).
As the punters settle into their seats, climb the skeleton steps to the party stand, what is your OBO hunch? I love these final days.
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© Photograph: Martin Rickett/PA
© Photograph: Martin Rickett/PA
© Photograph: Martin Rickett/PA
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.
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© Photograph: Ryan Davies
© Photograph: Ryan Davies
© Photograph: Ryan Davies
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.
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© Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
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.”
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© Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images
Every day brings more devastation. But daily forms of rebellion can restore our sense of purpose
The exterminating force of Project 2025 is plowing through the culture, the government and people’s hearts and bodies like a drunk on a violent tear. We wake each morning, holding our breath to bear witness to the new devastation: PBS and NPR defunded, cuts to the fight against human trafficking, Medicaid gone for millions, Ice working to surveil critics, tons of food for the poor ordered burned and wasted.
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
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© Photograph: Olga Fedorova/EPA
© Photograph: Olga Fedorova/EPA
© Photograph: Olga Fedorova/EPA
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.
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© Illustration: The Guardian
© Illustration: The Guardian
© Illustration: The Guardian
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
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© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images/Alamy
© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images/Alamy
© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images/Alamy
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.
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© Photograph: Reed Saxon/AP
© Photograph: Reed Saxon/AP
© Photograph: Reed Saxon/AP
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.
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© Photograph: Luis Ferraz/The Guardian
© Photograph: Luis Ferraz/The Guardian
© Photograph: Luis Ferraz/The Guardian
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.
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© Photograph: c/o Bautista Ceprián
© Photograph: c/o Bautista Ceprián
© Photograph: c/o Bautista Ceprián
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.
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© Photograph: Steve Christo/Sportsfile/Getty Images
© Photograph: Steve Christo/Sportsfile/Getty Images
© Photograph: Steve Christo/Sportsfile/Getty Images
Luis’s depression has badly affected his sex life with partner Henry, but the bond between them is as strong as ever
• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously
We have the option to play away, but I don’t want to experience that intimacy with anybody else
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© Illustration: Ryan Gillett/The Guardian
© Illustration: Ryan Gillett/The Guardian
© Illustration: Ryan Gillett/The Guardian
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
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© Illustration: Wouter Tjeenk Willink/The Guardian
© Illustration: Wouter Tjeenk Willink/The Guardian
© Illustration: Wouter Tjeenk Willink/The Guardian
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