The supreme court has issued its decision on whether Donald Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for actions taken while he was in the White House.
Our unanimous agreement regarding NetChoice’s failure to show that a sufficient number of its members engage in constitutionally protected expression prevents us from accepting NetChoice’s argument regarding these provisions. In the lower courts, NetChoice did not even try to show how these disclosure provisions chill each platform’s speech.
France: Kylian Mbappe is at his best coming off the flank, but this may cause an imbalance in the side as they take on Belgium, writes Jonathan Wilson.
Those teams: As expected, Antoine Griezmann is recalled to the France line-up, while Marcus Thuram starts in place of Ousmane Dembele.
A group of England fans at The Barrel Inn in Chesterfield celebrated wildly as Jude Bellingham scored a last-gasp equaliser against Slovakia. A number of the fans ended up on the pool table, while others jumped on each other in pure delight.
Mark Cavendish unable to break record for stage wins
Richard Carapaz took yellow jersey from Tadej Pogacar
The Eritrean Biniam Girmay won the third stage of the Tour de France in a sprint finish on Monday as Mark Cavendish missed out on his first opportunity to break Eddy Merckx’s record for career stage victories.
Biniam, who became the first black African rider to win a stage on the Tour de France, timed his effort to perfection to beat the Colombian Fernando Gaviria and the Belgian Arnaud de Lie, who finished second and third respectively as the stage ended in Turin.
Readers respond to the economist Paul Krugman’s article about the effects of the Tories’ most defining policy during the coalition years
Paul Krugman (How the ‘unforced error’ of austerity wrecked Britain, 28 June) hits the nail on the head when he says that there was no economic case for the austerity that the coalition government foisted on us in 2010, the effects of which are still with us. It was a political choice on the part of George Osborne and David Cameron to advance their class interest, cleverly camouflaged by stories of Labour profligacy when the economic crisis to which it was the alleged response was caused by a surfeit of financial deregulation advocated by Osborne and Cameron and supinely accepted by Labour.
The American political economist Clara E Mattei, in her 2022 book, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, showed how similar policies were applied in Britain and Italy after the first world war, essentially to keep workers in their place, and how in Italy they led to the rise of Mussolini and fascism. Let us be warned. Prof Roger Brown Southampton
Val McDermid’s backing for the SNP is misplaced, writes John Mason. But George Elder wishes voters in England had a party like the SNP to support
Val McDermid (How could I back anyone but the SNP and the bolshie, buoyant Scotland it stands for?, 26 June) perpetuates the myth that the Scottish National party, Scotland and small European countries are all “progressive”. Free prescriptions are a middle-class subsidy. The poor already received these and the money lost on them is to the cost of other NHS services. The cost of university fees is met by taxpayers, many not well-off, and fees from foreign students. This results in many Scottish students struggling to find places. The SNP balks at taxing the excess profits of energy corporations and retains the tax breaks for private schools.
Scotland is not particularly progressive, but conservative with a small “c”. The SNP currently has a deputy leader whose social views seem to me to be to the right of most of the Conservative party. As for the small progressive nations in the EU, McDermid is obviously oblivious to the growth of the far right in these countries and the opposition to immigration in Ireland.
Only a whole-hearted endorsement of the New Popular Front coalition can stop the National Rally in second-round voting
It was an impressive score for a coalition frantically cobbled together only three weeks ago. On Sunday, France’s broad leftwing electoral alliance, the New Popular Front, won about 9m votes, behind Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) but comfortably ahead of Emmanuel Macron and his allies.
As a result, French voters face a stark choice when they head back to the polls on 7 July: do they want some type of coalition government with a centre of gravity to the left of the current one, or do they want to give the far right the keys to state power for the first time since the second world war?
Whatever Macron was hoping for when he called the snap elections, this couldn’t have been it. His wild gamble relied on the assumption that leftwing parties wouldn’t unite – and they quickly proved him wrong. They agreed on a simple economic programme far more popular than what his floundering presidency has to offer: a rise in the minimum wage to €1,600 (£1,400) a month after social security contributions, more investment in public services and the return of the wealth tax. And they positioned themselves as defenders of France’s core democratic values, more effective opponents of the RN’s immigrant-bashing and race-baiting than the president and his allies.
Biden campaign launches counter-offensive amid fears that frail appearance at debate could mean defeat in November
With the White House scrambling to prevent Joe Biden’s candidacy being enveloped in a full-blown crisis, several state governors were said to be subtly positioning themselves as late substitutes while avoiding being seen to do so.
The Biden campaign has launched a counter-offensive, including furious networking among senior Democrats, to counteract fears that the 81-year-old president’s frail appearance in last week’s debate had made defeat at the hands of Donald Trump in November’s election inevitable.
Georgia Mann is usually to be found at BBC Broadcasting House presenting Radio 3’s Essential Classics. Why was she in a field in Glastonbury this weekend, and did she get the festival crowd moving?
Waterproof trousers, ear plugs and a self-inflating mattress aren’t usually in my presenting kitbag but I’ve just packed away my tent and dug the mud out of my wellies after one of the most surreal gigs of my life: playing a DJ set at Glastonbury.
Several months ago an intriguing invitation came my way. The team at the Free University of Glastonbury asked if I wanted to cross the musical Rubicon and be the first act on at the Crow’s Nest at 11am on the Friday of the festival. Could I get a Glastonbury crowd primed for Coldplay, Black Pumas and Michael Kiwanuka to roar for Bach, Saint-Saëns and Sibelius? I selected an hour’s setlist spanning almost 500-years’ worth of music, told myself not to think too hard about the compost toilet situation, and headed for Worthy Farm.
Expect leaked nudes, fake texts and Ouija board mayhem as our young sleuth Pip investigates the mysterious deaths of two kids from her school. It’s such perfect fun you won’t even care about the plot holes
Hot on the heels of Netflix’s Geek Girl comes another adaptation of a young-adult bestseller, this time from the BBC. Holly Jackson’s 2019 debut, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, has been translated to the small screen by Poppy Cogan and is directed by Dolly Wells, best known as an actor (Doll & Em, Dracula, Inside Man and most recently The Completely Made-up Adventures of Dick Turpin).
As with Geek Girl, it has retained the book’s youthful energy and freshness and found a strikingly good actor to play the teenage lead. Emma Myers (who came to prominence as Wednesday Addams’ werewolf roommate in Netflix’s hit series about the eccentric family’s daughter) manages to bring all the nerdy naivety required for the part of 17-year-old Pippa Fitz-Amobi. Pip decides to investigate the suspected murder-suicide of two teenagers from her school as part of her extended exam project. This is such a perfect conceit – all the solipsism and idealism of adolescence compressed into one tiny moment – that I would like us to take a moment to admire it before we go on.
Ismail Kadare, the Albanian writer who explored Balkan history and culture in poetry and fiction, has died aged 88. Here are some of the most memorable quotes from interviews he gave throughout his life
The hell of communism, like every other hell, was smothering in the worst sense of the term. But literature transformed that into a life force, a force which helped you survive and hold your head up and win out over dictatorship.
In a country of that kind, the first thing for a writer is the most important one, the most substantial one, it is: do not take the regime seriously. You are a writer, you are going to have a much richer life than they have, you are in some sense or another eternal by comparison with those kinds of people, and in the last analysis you don’t need to bother about them very much.
When Hoxha broke with the Soviet Union in 1962, he was ready to turn to Europe, but he was rejected, so he made an absurd short-lived alliance with China. When that went wrong he built thousands of anti-nuclear pillboxes, which he knew were useless, but he wanted to create a fear-psychosis. Albania suffered longer than any other eastern European country.
Hoxha fancied himself an intellectual and poet who had been to the Sorbonne, and he didn’t want to be seen as an enemy of writers. Of course, he could have killed me in a ‘car crash’, or by ‘suicide’, as he did many others.
I am of the opinion that I am not a political writer, and, moreover, that as far as true literature is concerned, there actually are no political writers. I think that my writing is no more political than ancient Greek theatre. I would have become the writer I am in any political regime.
I have never claimed to be a ‘dissident’ in the proper meaning of the term. Open opposition to Hoxha’s regime, like open opposition to Stalin during Stalin’s reign in Russia, was simply impossible. Dissidence was a position no one could occupy, even for a few days, without facing the firing squad. On the other hand, my books themselves constitute a very obvious form of resistance to the regime.
On the one hand it secured protection for me in relation to the regime, on the other hand I was constantly under observation. What excited suspicion was ‘why does the western bourgeoisie hold a writer from a Stalinist country in high esteem?’
For me as a writer, Albanian is simply an extraordinary means of expression – rich, malleable, adaptable.
I hated the Soviet books, full of sunshine, working in the fields, the joyous spring, the summer full of hope. The first time I heard the words ‘hope’ and ‘hard work’, they made me yawn.
The founding father of Albanian literature is the 19th-century writer Naim Frashëri. Without having the greatness of Dante or Shakespeare, he is nonetheless the founder, the emblematic character. He wrote long epic poems, as well as lyrical poetry, to awaken the national consciousness of Albania. After him came Gjergj Fishta. We can say that these two are the giants of Albanian literature, the ones that children study at school. Later came other poets and writers who produced perhaps better works than those two, but they don’t occupy the same place in the nation’s memory.
In the early 60s, life in Albania was pleasant and well organised. A writer would not have known he should not write about the falsification of history.
For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature, otherwise writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship – Shakespeare, Cervantes. The great universal literature has always had a tragic relation with freedom. The Greeks renounced absolute freedom and imposed order on chaotic mythology, like a tyrant. In the west, the problem is not freedom. There are other servitudes – lack of talent, thousands of mediocre books published every year.
I have created a body of literary work during the time of two diametrically opposed political systems: a tyranny that lasted for 35 years (1955-1990), and 20 years of liberty. In both cases, the thing that could destroy literature is the same: self-censorship.
They say that contemporary literature is very dynamic because it is influenced by the cinema, the television, the speed of communication. But the opposite is true! If you compare the texts of the Greek antiquity with today’s literature, you’ll notice that the classics operated in a far larger terrain, painted on a much broader canvas, and had an infinitely greater dimension.
All this noise about innovations, new genres, is idle. There is real literature and then there is the rest.
I don’t work for more than two hours a day.
Writing is neither a happy nor an unhappy occupation – it is something in-between. It is almost a second life.
I am so grateful for literature, because it gives me the chance to overcome the impossible.
Brain-controlled device results in more natural gait and improves stability on stairs and uneven terrain
A brain-controlled bionic leg has allowed people with amputations to walk more quickly and navigate stairs and obstacles more easily in a groundbreaking trial.
The device allows the wearer to flex, point and rotate the foot of the prosthetic using their thoughts alone. This led to a more natural gait, improved stability on stairs and uneven terrain and a 41% increase in speed compared with a traditional prosthetic. The bionic leg works by reading activity in the patient’s residual leg muscles and uses these signals to control an electrically powered ankle.
La Roja midfielder magisterially dictated tempo and alleviated emotions in comeback win against Georgia
Rodri Hernández stopped, which was when Spain started again. “Sometimes,” the Manchester City midfielder said, “20 or 30 seconds of saying to people ‘Calm down’ is more productive than going on the attack” – and this was one of those times.
The selección were half an hour into their last-16 tie with Georgia and they had taken nine shots to their opponents none but to everyone’s shock, especially their own, they were losing through a Robin Le Normand own goal. Worse, they were losing control.
Debt-laden utility urged to show greater transparency as it faces investigation by industry regulator Ofwat
Thames Water has been urged to show greater transparency over its finances and was accused of “financial chicanery” after it emerged its board had approved a £150m dividend hours before its shareholders U-turned on providing emergency funding.
The Guardian revealed last week that the board of the struggling water supplier agreed to the payout at a meeting on 27 March.
Trans people say they are being used as political football with heightened mainstream and social media coverage
Politics is unavoidable for the transgender and non-binary young adults Oscar Hoyle works with, he says. Many of them will be voting for the first time on Thursday. “They’re forced to engage from a young age because they’re scared about their future.”
Hoyle runs Blossom, a nationwide support service for LGBTQ+ members of gen Z, whose experiences and challenges have been described as “political footballs” in the run-up to the UK election.
Actor says he is reluctantly following medical advice to ‘protect my recovery’
Ian McKellen has said that with “the greatest reluctance” he is taking medical advice to “protect my recovery” and withdrawing from a national tour of Player Kings after his fall from a West End stage.
A statement from the production said: “Following Ian McKellen’s injury during the West End run of Player Kings, his doctors’ advice is to take time off from work in order to fully recover. As such, he will not be returning to play Sir John Falstaff in the national tour of Players Kings (3-27 July 2024).
Attacker kissed hand before crotch-grabbing gesture
He says it was ‘inside joke’ and is unlikely to be banned
Jude Bellingham faces a Uefa investigation for the lewd gesture he made after scoring his dramatic equaliser against Slovakia on Sunday, although it is considered unlikely that England’s hero of the hour will be banned. Bellingham kept England in Euro 2024 with a last-gasp bicycle kick to force extra time and a Harry Kane goal carried England through to a quarter-final meeting with Switzerland on Saturday.
Bellingham was shown on TV to have kissed his right hand before making a crotch-grabbing gesture, although he said it had been “an inside-joke gesture towards some close friends who were at the game” and in no way aimed at the Slovakia bench.
Animals spooked by a bus unseat two riders before one is seen running into a car bonnet in Pimlico
Three military horses bolted through central London on Monday, the second incident in three months involving army animals breaking loose in the capital.
Six horses from the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment were taking part in a routine exercise under the control of five soldiers when the lead horse broke loose after being spooked by a London bus. This then led to two riders being unseated from their mounts, which also became loose.
Keep up with who is winning the battle to be top scorer at the European Championship in Germany, updated throughout the tournament
The Golden Boot is awarded to the player who scores the most goals in the tournament. If there are multiple players with the same number of goals, the tie is broken by assists – as was the case at Euro 2020, where Cristiano Ronaldo (five goals, one assist) edged out Czech striker Patrik Schick (five goals, no assists).
If the top scorers also have equal assists, the winner will be the player with the fewest total minutes in the tournament. This happened at Euro 2012, where Spain’s Fernando Torres (189 minutes) pipped Mario Gomez of Germany (282 minutes) after both men notched three goals and one assist each.
‘The studio was hesitant about suggesting Xena and Gabrielle were in a romantic relationship. But as time went on, they decided to look the other way and just let us get on with it’
I was in a meeting with an executive from Renaissance Pictures when he mentioned a series they were going to do: “A hip, updated version of Hercules.” Xena was a character in that, compellingly brought to life by Lucy Lawless. When Hercules: The Legendary Journeys became a big hit, they decided to spin her off into her own series. That’s when I became involved.
O2 Forum Kentish Town, London The seven-piece’s first London show in six years sees them tear through tributes to Slayer and the Exploited, while Ice-T’s son and daughter join him on stage
Ice-T contains multitudes. Thirty-two years ago, the man born Tracy Lauren Marrow was one of the most righteously furious-sounding figures in music, Body Count’s breakthrough single Cop Killer having smashed the barrier between hardcore hip-hop and hardcore metal while its incendiary lyrics drew condemnation from then-president George Bush. Tonight, however, the prevailing emotion isn’t the anger that burst from that signature song; Body Count’s first London show in six years is more instantly a love letter to heavy music.
After the seven-piece – long Ice’s main career focus, beyond even his solo and film work – bound out with Body Count’s in the House, they tear through a medley of songs by extreme metal antagonists Slayer. A similar tribute to punk legends the Exploited comes later in the set.
Rob Key hopes 41-year-old will take full coaching role
No decision made on Jos Buttler’s captaincy of T20 side
Jimmy Anderson will take up a mentoring role with England’s bowlers this summer after making his final international appearance at Lord’s next week. Anderson has been selected for the first Test only against West Indies – his 188th Test match – allowing him to sign off in front of home fans after taking 700 wickets in a 22-year career.
Rob Key, the managing director of England men’s cricket, said the 41-year-old could be in line for a permanent coaching role if it goes well. “English cricket would be very lucky if he chooses to stay in our game,” he said. “Then we’ll have a look at the end of the summer. It might be something that he doesn’t think is the right fit or it might be something that he absolutely loves. But he’s got so much to offer English cricket, we don’t want to see that go to waste.
The nearly 50-year-old song has been adopted by the under-30s to describe their particular feelings of ennui
What does Billy Joel know about being a teenage girl? Enough, it turns out, to have written one of gen Z’s favorite anti-hustle anthems: Vienna, a nearly 50-year-old song that’s been adopted by the under-30s to describe their particular feelings of ennui.
On TikTok, young women craft their identities around the song. One content creator said she booked a trip to the Austrian capitol because of it; others tattoothelyrics on their body. “I want to name my child Vienna but everyone says it reminds them of sausage,” reads one comment on a clip where a young woman lip-syncs the tune.
You would be forgiven for thinking that your wood pulp top is sustainable. But you might be surprised to hear just how many forests are being felled to make it
You might think that wearing a top made from wood pulp would give instant eco-credentials – it is renewable, biodegradable, and, having once been a tree, it has soaked up some carbon along the way. What’s more, it’s not plastic. This is why many brands are opting for viscose, Lycocell, acetate and modal – soft, silky, semi-synthetic fabrics made from tree-pulp – as an apparently more sustainable option.
Except that the chances are that your wood-pulp top may not be so green. “Deforestation continues to be a problem,” says Nicole Rycroft, who founded Canopy, a Vancouver-based NGO, 10 years ago to help protect ancient and endangered forests. The NGO’s initiative CanopyStyle focuses on fashion. “It’s 2024 – surely we are smarter than mowing down 1,000-year-old trees to make T-shirts.”
Steve Carell’s everyvillain starts a dull new life but nemesis Will Ferrell’s Maxime Le Mal has other ideas
Here’s something new in the saga of everysupervillain ordinariness featuring Gru the goofy animated megabaddie (voiced by Steve Carell), with his comedy bald head, pointy noise and foreign accent. We now reach the fourth film in the series; sixth, if you count the two spin-off films about his jabbering yellow sidekick minions.
This franchise from Illumination Entertainment has never come close to the inspired genius of its rival Pixar’s best work, despite the obvious indebtedness to Syndrome from Pixar’s The Incredibles; that mighty film’s influence looks even more obvious now, as Gru and his family have to be moved to a new city and given witness-protection-scheme-type new identities by their faintly exasperated handlers. But it has to be said that the Despicable Me franchise has marathon stamina; it relaxes into its long-established characterisation and storytelling and only a snob would deny this film’s unassuming consistency in delivering family entertainment. And this is, after all, the franchise that gave us the world-beatingly catchy Happy by Pharrell Williams, who returns to write songs for DM4.
Exclusive: ‘Vital’ recognition of migrant care worker’s plight may pave way for more cases, says union leader
A migrant nurse could be eligible for a significant payout from a British healthcare company after an employment judge ruled he was likely to win his case for unfair dismissal, in a judgment that could pave the way for dozens of other such cases.
Natasha Joffe, an employment judge, ruled that Clinica Private Healthcare, a London-based healthcare provider, may have to pay Kirankumar Rathod £13,000 in unpaid wages after it dismissed him in 2023. Rathod was dismissed after raising concerns about the lack of work being offered to him and other colleagues who had also moved to the UK on the promise of full-time employment.
The European Commission has accused Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta of breaching the EU’s new digital laws with an advertising model that charges users for ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram.
Meta launched a “pay or consent” model last year in an effort to comply with the bloc’s data privacy rules, under which users pay a monthly fee for an ad-free version of Facebook or Instagram that does not use their personal data for advertising purposes. If users do not pay, their data is used to tailor personalised adverts that appear in their social media feeds.
France’s left and centrist parties are scrambling to cobble together a united front after Marine Le Pen’s resounding victory in the first round of snap parliamentary elections on Sunday brought her far-right, anti-immigration party a step closer to power.
Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) and its allies on the right finished first with 33% of the vote, followed by the leftwing New Popular Front alliance (NFP) with 28%, while President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist bloc came third with 20% of the vote.
Clampdown follows fatal stabbing of Chinese woman who tried to stop attack on Japanese mother and child
China’s internet companies have announced a crackdown on “extreme nationalism” online, particularly anti-Japanese sentiment, after a Chinese woman was fatally stabbed while protecting a Japanese mother and child in Suzhou.
Tencent and NetEase, two of the biggest firms, said at the weekend that they would be investigating and banning users who stirred up hatred.
In the cold light of day, the sense remains Gareth Southgate got away with how he used his bench against Slovakia
Let’s pretend there was a strategy. Let’s pretend Gareth Southgate knew that waiting until the fourth minute of added time to bring on Ivan Toney would result in the randomness of Marc Guéhi’s header from Kyle Walker’s long throw landing in just the right spot for Jude Bellingham to score a bicycle kick. Let’s pretend there was evidence of some grand managerial plan coming together as England muddled their way to a face-saving victory over Slovakia in Gelsenkirchen.
There was plenty of incentive for Southgate to big up his substitutions after an unbalanced, confused team secured a quarter-final with Switzerland. Instead of facing an inquest into England exiting Euro 2024, the manager had room to talk about spirit, togetherness and desire. He could use a little diversion as he talked about giving a presentation to his players about the 1966 World Cup last month, explaining that England would not have won then without the understudies in Alf Ramsey’s squad being ready to contribute when their opportunity arrived. Remember hat-trick hero Geoff Hurst coming into the team only in the quarter-final? Look over there. Is that football coming home?
Agency rejected FOI request about potential conflicts of financial and business interests held by regional directors
The Environment Agency is refusing to provide campaigners with details of potential conflicts of interests with water companies held by its directors across England.
Film starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Weller marks a high-profile world premiere for the festival, now in its 68th year
Blitz, a new drama from Steve McQueen set in London during the second world war, is to open the capital’s film festival in October.
The film stars Saoirse Ronan as Rita, the mother of nine-year-old George (Elliott Heffernan), who sends him to safety in the countryside. But the evacuee is determined to return and travels solo home, while his distraught relatives search for him in the city.
Andy Murray has yet to decide if he is fit enough to play at Wimbledon, but fans have been queueing since Saturday for the chance to see the Scot play in what could be his last singles game at SW19.
The twice former champion, 37, had surgery nine days ago to remove a cyst on his spine and revealed at a press conference on Sunday that he did not yet have “100%” feeling in his right leg.
The 45-year-old has the perfect CV for the role, with experience at the Bank of England and in private finance – but how has her background shaped her tough stance on public finances?
Mark Robinson says younger fans have to be considered
All Blacks open England series in Dunedin on Saturday
New Zealand’s top rugby official says the introduction of 20-minute red cards at all levels of the game is an increasingly urgent necessity if the sport is to remain relevant to younger fans. He has also warned that rugby needs to think more about its paying public if it is serious about enhancing the game’s appeal in the longer term.
With the All Blacks due to face England in the first of two back-to-back Tests in Dunedin on Saturday, New Zealand Rugby’s chief executive, Mark Robinson, has renewed calls for the red card system to be reformed this year, urging World Rugby to extend its current closed trials to the entire global game.
Our selective engagement with nature stops humans from seeing animals clearly – and that’s not good for them or for us
One of my most annoying traits, I have been told, is my tendency to puncture others’ casual enjoyment of nature with brutal and unsolicited pieces of trivia. Chalk it up to the influence of my hobbyist herpetologist father, who instilled in me not only a passion for less cuddly animals but also a rigorous attention to the facts.
If your favourite animals are sea otters, which mate for life and hold hands so they don’t drift apart? I will inform you that they also sometimes rape baby seals to death. Oh, you prefer chimps? Have you seen that David Attenborough footage of a group of them hunting a monkey that was apparently too disturbing to broadcast with close-up detail?
British Horseracing Authority says it has been preparing for a change of government for many months
Few could have guessed when the field came under starter’s orders for the general election in May that betting and the Gambling Commission would turn out to be such fixtures on the daily news grid. Or, for that matter, that Keir Starmer would suggest, in response to a question on his political punting habits, that he “only bets on the horses”.
Assuming the price of around 1-33 is correct and that a Labour administration with a significant majority takes the reins this week, that may well prove to be the first and last significant mention of the turf – or gambling, for that matter – by a member of the new government for some while.
Minister says sale could ‘disturb stability in the region and potentially threaten Norwegian interests’
The Norwegian government has called off a plan to sell the last privately owned piece of land on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard in order to prevent its acquisition by China.
The remote Sore Fagerfjord property in south-west Svalbard – 60 sq miles (sq km) of mountains, plains and a glacier – was on sale for €300m (£277m).
Shares on the French stock market have risen after the first round of voting in the country’s parliamentary election eased concerns about an outright victory for the rightwing National Rally (RN) party.
The euro rose against the dollar, while the risk premium investors demand for holding French government bonds fell as the markets took the view that the result could have been worse.
Hurricane warnings in effect for Barbados, Grenada, St Lucia, Tobago and St Vincent and the Grenadines
Hurricane Beryl bore down on the south-east Caribbean early on Monday as a powerful category 3 storm after previously becoming the earliest storm of category 4 strength to form in the Atlantic, fueled by record warm waters.
Hurricane warnings were in effect for Barbados, Grenada, St Lucia, Tobago, and St Vincent and the Grenadines as thousands of people hunkered down in homes and shelters hoping for the best.
Rajesh Nair, UK boss of Tata Steel, offers new round of discussions about future investment at site
A strike at the Port Talbot steelworks has been called off after its owner, Tata Steel, offered to engage in fresh talks with trade unions over future investment in a plant destined to lose 2,800 jobs and close its last remaining blast furnaces.
Members of the Unite trade union had been due to begin industrial action on 8 July, days after Tata plans to begin a process that will ultimately end more than 70 years of making steel from scratch at the plant.
France can look in the mirror and ask what went wrong – or vote for the left to limit the National Rally’s grip on power
For all of my adult life, the Le Pen family has felt like a shadow hanging over my head. Jean-Marie, the father, used to make jokes about the Holocaust. He was a former French paratrooper in Algeria who was accused of torturing prisoners. Then along came his daughter, Marine, who looked less threatening but more ambitious. Then her niece, Marion, who proved even more reactionary.
The Le Pen influence appeared to be growing, but I always had the naive idea that “reasonable” people, from the right as well as from the left, would never let them win. It proved true in 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen made it to the second round of the presidential election: the French then voted massively for Jacques Chirac. It proved true again in 2017 and 2022, when Marine also reached the second round and was defeated by Emmanuel Macron, the promising young outsider who wanted to dismantle the left-right dividing line. It’s no longer true.
Pierre Haski is a former foreign correspondent and a former deputy editor of the French daily Libération. He is also president of the press freedom NGO Reporters without Borders
A finance bill was the trigger, but the backdrop is government debt and blinkered interventions from western institutions
There is as yet no resolution after an unprecedented week in Kenyan politics. What began as protests against a rushed-through finance bill has revealed a crisis of legitimacy within the executive, the legislature and the police that were sent to do the government’s bidding. And while the protesters have been very clear about their demands – reject the finance bill – outsiders who are accustomed to simplistic narratives about African politics have been scrambling and failing to understand what these events really mean.
Kenya is experiencing a polycrisis of sorts. The finance bill is the immediate trigger: an annually produced document that lays out the government’s fiscal strategy, and which normally passes without much comment. But this year it attracted an unprecedented level of attention because it contained several proposals for the taxation of everyday goods, including bread, sanitary towels and more. Kenyans were already struggling with the effects of a collapsing currency and the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis. However, the government was not merely looking to meet its financial obligations but to increase year-on-year spending from the last finance bill, which had already introduced a number of new taxes.
Nanjala Nyabola is a writer, political analyst and author of Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Politics in Kenya
The England player’s impromptu move took me back to the noughties, when PES 4-6 provided ‘the illusion of control in a sandbox of chaos’. It was the beautiful video game
Football, like everything else important in life, is about stories. People implant themselves into the narrative: where they were when they saw Maradona’s handball, the strangers they hugged when Ole Gunnar Solskjær scored that historic last-minute winner at the 1999 Champions League final. No doubt new tales are already being conjured around Jude Bellingham’s scissor kick against Slovakia in the dying seconds of Sunday’s Euro 24 match. Sport is a nostalgia machine – and this is as true for video game simulations as it is for the real thing. Every gamer has their favourite footie sim, but for me, and many other players of my … ahem, vintage … it was Pro Evolution Soccer, numbers 3 to 6.
This was the early 2000s, the age of the PlayStation 2. I was a writer for hire at Future Publishing, basically hanging out at its office in Bath, working mostly on the Official PlayStation magazine. But every lunch time, all the magazines would get together and play PES – especially during major tournaments, where we’d organise our own versions. Fifa? Forget it. Konami had already proved its ability with footie games through the excellent International Superstar Soccer series on the Mega Drive, Nintendo 64 and PlayStation, but the introduction of PES in 2001 brought a new level of dynamism and detail. Pace was fluid, player abilities were defined by 45 different stats, adding depth and variety, controls were intuitive yet expansive. “These games felt like authentic football,” says Ben Wilson who was editor of Official PlayStation at the time. “There was genuine joy to be had in grinding out a 1-0 win. Modern football games have as much in common with basketball as football – you shoot, I shoot, you shoot, I shoot, final score 6-4.”
Hollywood is beholden to the reboot, the safe bet trumping the imagination of something original. Into cinemas this month arrives an update to the 1996-tornado epic Twister, titled Twisters. How clever. And right until that moment, it seemed as if another sequel to a disaster film was in production, with Gareth Southgate’s England side ready to emulate their cataclysmic defeat by Iceland at the Euros eight years ago.
I happened to watch the clip of a recent performance by a popular English group whose cold play divides opinions. In a fashion similar to the countless criticisms aimed at Gareth Southgate, thousands of fans sang in unison about how they would try to Fix You. Here’s to a bone-igniting quarter-final now” – Peter Oh.
A doff of the cap to the England team for consistently proving throughout this tournament that Napoleon (emperor of France and king of Italy, not the cognac) was right and that it is better to be lucky than good. And it all worked out well for him. Oh …” – Noble Francis.
For more than a decade, Conservatives have promised to crack down on illegal migration and slash the number of legal arrivals. Their repeated failure has infuriated voters – and further demonised immigrants to the UK
In his first major speech as UK prime minister, at the start of 2023, a hopeful Rishi Sunak announced “five promises” to show that his government would “always reflect the people’s priorities”. Alongside familiar pledges to reduce inflation and grow the economy, there was a bold new promise: to “stop the boats”.
“We will pass new laws to stop small boats, making sure that if you come to this country illegally, you are detained and swiftly removed,” Sunak announced. “No tricks, no ambiguity, we’re either delivering for you or we’re not,” he told reporters – in an upbeat mood and a crisp white shirt, a long way from the rain-sodden and crestfallen prime minister we saw announcing the election last month.
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