Author: The Guardian

A person has died after falling into the spinning turbine blades of a departing passenger jet at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport.The death occurred on the apron outside the busy hub’s terminal as a KLM flight was preparing to depart for Billund in Denmark.“A fatal incident took place at Schiphol today during which a person ended up in a running aircraft engine,” the Dutch flag carrier, KLM, said in a statement. “Sadly the person has died.” The victim has not yet been named.Dutch border police, who are responsible for security at the Netherlands’ largest airport, said passengers had been removed from the…

Name: french fries.Age: invented about 300 years ago, ironically in Belgium.Appearance: long and perfectly golden.Chips, yeah? It’s the same idea, but pommes frites really are a different thing altogether.How are they different? They’re just … better.And you get them in France? Yes, but not everywhere.Where in France do they not serve french fries? At the Olympic Games.The whole Olympics, without chips? Specifically, they will not be served to athletes at the 700-foot-long dining hall – reportedly the world’s largest restaurant – in the Olympic Village.Why not? Are French fries performance enhancing? Not in any sense.Are they performance detracting? Almost certainly,…

South Korea has warned residents living near the border with North Korea to be on alert, after accusing the regime of sending balloons containing what appeared to be rubbish and faeces into its neighbour’s territory.Photographs released by the South Korean military on Wednesday showed inflated balloons with plastic bags tethered to them. Other images appeared to show trash strewn around collapsed balloons, with the word “excrement” written on a bag in one photograph.By Wednesday, more than 150 balloons had been detected, according to the Yonhap news agency. Some had landed on the ground, while others were still in the air,…

Novak Djokovic arrives in Paris to defend his French Open title and he has good reason to doubt himself. His form has been dire and his support team has changed dramatically, with the 98-time ATP champion not even reaching a final this season.But he’s still Djokovic, still the best player in the world over the last 52 weeks, which means his mere presence marks him out as one of the tournament favorites and a real force to be reckoned with. Djokovic began his title defense in the French capital on Tuesday night, defeating French wild card Pierre Hugues 6-4, 7-6(3),…

It was a scenario that Donald Trump, in his pre-presidential celebrity days, might have relished; as he sat inside a Manhattan courtroom, Robert De Niro was waiting outside.But this was politics and De Niro, the pugnacious star of myriad Hollywood gangster films, was there not to pay homage to the former president as a fellow VIP, but to diss him in terms that might have been in place in Goodfellas or Mean Streets.The 80-year-old Oscar winner was present outside the New York courthouse where Trump’s hush-money trial was reaching its closing stages on Tuesday as an operative of Joe Biden’s…

Name: Loaded.Age: 30.Appearance: A reanimated mag for reanimated lads.Wow, Loaded is 30. Well, yes, on and off. Since its heyday in the 90s, Loaded was sold to several increasingly small publishers, before it eventually folded as a print publication for good in 2015, although a website lived on.So the message is that there hasn’t been an appetite for this sort of magazine for well over a decade. Oh, well, this is awkward. The message was supposed to be that Loaded is back with Elizabeth Hurley as the cover star.Sorry, Loaded is back? Yes! The Dubai-based businessman Stewart Lochrie has backed…

timeThree years after Russia occupied Crimea, Ukrainian climber Jenya Kazbekova returned to her “favorite place in the world” and set a personal best route on the rock. The key to her challenge that day in 2017 wasn’t scaling the serene, sun-drenched cliffs, but far below. “I turned a blind eye to the things that really bothered me — the Russian guns, the flag, the currency,” she said. This summer, after injury, illness and Covid-19 ended her Tokyo dreams, she was aiming to reach Paris to fight for Ukraine again, while Putin’s full-scale invasion became a living nightmare, forcing her family…

The former head of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, allegedly threatened a chief prosecutor of the international criminal court in a series of secret meetings in which he tried to pressure her into abandoning a war crimes investigation, the Guardian can reveal.Yossi Cohen’s covert contacts with the ICC’s then prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, took place in the years leading up to her decision to open a formal investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in occupied Palestinian territories.That investigation, launched in 2021, culminated last week when Bensouda’s successor, Karim Khan, announced that he was seeking an arrest warrant…

A woman who has helped find the final resting places of nearly 3,500 stillborn babies has said barriers remain to bereaved parents seeking the truth about their children’s fate.Paula Jackson set up the charity Brief Lives – Remembered in 2004 after helping a friend based in Australia find the grave of his twin sister, named Zoe, who was stillborn in Aldershot military hospital in 1960.As late as the 1990s, stillborn babies were routinely removed from their parents before they had a chance to hold or even look at the child, the theory being that any connection made would prolong the…

Australia’s Roland Garros woe has plunged to new depths as Max Purcell missed six match points before ultimately losing their first-round match in bewildering fashion after a thrilling comeback.But Purcell defended his underarm serve on a failed match point against qualifier Henry Squire, insisting he had “no regrets” after a five-set comeback despite his Reflecting on how “terrible” tennis is.The Sydney native was knocked out by the German Grand Slam newcomer on Monday, leaving the Green and Gold with an 0-6 record – five losses and an injury withdrawal – two days after the Women’s Challenge ended after Dalia Daria…