
Former 49-day PM helms a Conservative Political Action Conference that’s a far cry from the glitzy US version
Liz Truss has given us all so much in recent years. A mini-budget. A laugh a minute 49 days in office. A new monarch, after the queen decided enough was enough and died two days after Liz began her Airbnb stay in Downing Street. And now she has given us one thing more. She has imported the US Conservative Political Action Conference to the UK.
And like all things Liz, it’s predictably a bit shit. In the US, CPAC is a full glitz Trump fest where all the champions of the far right go to strut their stuff and sell their merch. In Liz’s hands, it’s an altogether more drab affair with little interest from the audience. A going through the motions by C-list speakers who are well past their sell-by dates and have been saying the same things for years. Everyone would have had more fun and more surprises if the conference had been AI generated. There again, with Liz you can never be too sure.
Continue reading...Many hoarders are scared to seek help but one UK housing association is taking a more empathetic approach
At one end of the table sits Tony*, who showers at his local leisure centre in Birkenhead every day. His landlord won’t fix his bathroom because of his hoarding. Then there’s Sarah*, who ended up homeless with her three teenagers after their landlord evicted them because of hoarding. In her new home the problem has started again, but she says she’s petrified to ask for help in case she loses her property.
Sian Cowley, 35, who has struggled with hoarding for decades, says: “I’ve lived without central heating for two years. A lot of us live without the basics like hot water, heating and cooking because we are too scared to get people in to do repairs because of the threat of eviction.”
Continue reading...Damien says plants last longer, but Tolu doesn’t think things have to survive for years to be worthwhile. Who should turn over a new leaf?
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror
Flowers are a fleeting gesture. Why not buy plants that last years instead?
Continue reading...It was a statistically weird game for Argentina’s talisman against England, full of outliers. It didn’t matter
Thomas Tuchel will have prepared for every eventuality before England’s match with Argentina. He will have considered how his team could prosper in attack while remaining solid in defence. What to change if they scored first or if the opening goal went against them and, like so many managers before him, he will have put plenty of thought into how best to deal with Lionel Messi.
For the first hour he was largely peripheral, with the data showing how England were limiting his involvement in dangerous areas. Messi’s only possession in the centre of the penalty area was snuffed out by an Elliot Anderson tackle shortly after Anthony Gordon had scored. The proportion of the distance he covered that was defined by Fifa as sprinting speed (at least 20km/h) was 4.3%, lower than against Switzerland (4.6%) or Egypt (5.4%) in the previous two rounds.
Continue reading...As the Colombian pop supremo prepares to perform at Sunday’s final, we rate her greatest work, including gossipy takedowns and lycanthropic lyrics
Of Shakira’s World Cup anthems, it’s the joyfully ludicrous Waka Waka from the 2010 tournament in South Africa that bangs hardest. Featuring Afro-fusion band Freshlyground, the Colombian superstar redraws preened football superstars such as Ronaldo et al as soldiers on a frontline.
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On the Bradford-born producer’s self-assured second album, drum’n’bass rhythms power up angsty odes with shades of Arctic Monkeys, Kate Nash and myriad genres
Like another of the year’s biggest pop records, Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, the second full-length from the self-proclaimed “emotional junglist” Nia Archives is an album of two halves. The first documents its protagonist falling in love at breakneck speed; the second, the whiplash of sudden heartbreak. Unlike Rodrigo, Archives didn’t grow up starring on Disney Channel, a predestined route to success, but in Bradford, cutting her teeth on early 00s pirate radio, dancehall and landfill indie.
More than most major artists, Archives has carved out her own path. After leaving home at just 16 to move into a youth hostel in Manchester, she started teaching herself to make beats; eventually, she uprooted to Hackney and studied music production, and used her student loan to fund the promotion of her self-released debut single. Since then, she’s made history as the first electronic/dance act to win a Mobo in decades (after publicly campaigning for the inclusion of dance music at the awards in 2022). With her 2024 debut album Silence Is Loud, she became the first junglist to be nominated for three Brit awards, and the first to be nominated for the Mercury prize since 1997 – before she was born.
Continue reading...Revised plan aims to ‘keep something going’ amid fears Netanyahu may gamble on new all-out offensive before Israeli elections
The Gaza recovery plan being pursued by Donald Trump’s Board of Peace (BoP) has shrunk dramatically from an ambitious blueprint for the reconstruction of the whole territory to a small pilot project in the south of the strip.
Even the envisaged pilot scheme – involving a temporary camp for a tiny fraction of Gaza’s 2 million displaced people, with a Palestinian administration, police and a small international security force – is not expected to take shape before the end of the year.
Continue reading...Appointment by the outgoing prime minister potentially opens door for London mayor to join Burnham cabinet
Sadiq Khan has been given a peerage by Keir Starmer just days before the prime minister stands down, potentially opening the door to one of Labour’s most high-profile mayors joining Andy Burnham’s cabinet in future.
The London mayor has long been tipped for the House of Lords, with Starmer said to have been keen to put him there immediately after the May local elections in an attempt to shore up Labour’s progressive flank.
Continue reading...JCVI says children should have one or two doses of menB vaccine at age 15, depending on if they had vaccine as a baby
All teenagers across the UK should be offered a meningitis vaccine on the NHS following a series of fatal outbreaks, a government commitee has said.
The recommendation, made by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), would mean that young people would be eligible for the menB vaccine at the age of 15, alongside catch-up programmes for those who otherwise would have missed out.
Continue reading...Spokesperson says islands belong to the UK
‘PM wishes both teams well for the final, especially Spain’
Keir Starmer supports the idea of Fifa investigating Argentina players who displayed a banner touting their country’s claim to the Falklands Islands after their World Cup semi-final win against England, Downing Street has said.
Starmer, who watched the match while travelling to Ukraine by train for the final overseas trip of his premiership, endorsed a call by Peter Kyle, the business secretary, for Fifa to investigate what rules may have been broken.
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