Author: The Guardian

Ukraine’s acting sports minister Matvey Bidny has told Ukrainian athletes to remain “calm” and ignore any provocative behavior by Russian athletes at this summer’s Olympics.Speaking to the Guardian at the Ministry of Youth and Sports in Kiev, Bidny predicted that Russia would use its representative in Paris as part of its propaganda campaign, explaining that recommendations had been put in place to help the Ukrainian team avoid becoming embroiled in the controversy.Last July, Ukrainian fencer Olha Kharlan was expelled from the world championships for refusing to shake hands with his Russian opponent, raising concerns that if he repeated the mistake,…

It had been an uneventful journey from Heathrow. After 10 hours in the sky, flight SQ321 from London to Singapore was just a few hours from its destination, above the Irrawaddy Basin in Myanmar, when the aircraft dropped. Passengers said it happened in an instant, with little time to respond to warnings to fasten their seatbelts. The plane descended by 6,000ft (1,800 metres) in just three minutes. Passengers who were not strapped in were launched into the ceiling and across the aisles as the aircraft hit a patch of severe turbulence.Flight attendants had been serving breakfast at the time. Coffee…

I Buying London is the British version of Netflix’s hugely successful Selling Sunset, in which eccentric rich people buy properties in Los Angeles from charming real estate agents whose personalities are chosen from a preset menu of reality shows from. I hate that it bases all of its dramatic tension on women pitted against each other. I hate that it makes Richard Curtis’ film Notting Hill look like a true documentary about the mean streets of London. I hate its “Idiots of England” gimmick, it’s clearly aimed at the international market. I hate its reverence for billionaires and its poor…

In October 2019, I was in India, standing by the dusty banks of the Ganges on a quest to spread my grandmother’s ashes. She hadn’t lived in the country for the last 50 years and hadn’t even set foot in it for a decade at least. My parents had never lived there and neither had my brother and I. This wasn’t a homecoming. It was a chore borne from her final request: to perform her last rites in the place she had barely clung on to. It was a strange holiday.At 25, I had already experienced my fair share of…

Research shows that fish oil supplements may increase people’s risk of heart disease or stroke, but may reduce the risk in people who already have cardiovascular disease.Fish oil is a rich source of omega-3 fatty acids. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) recommends eating at least one serving of oily fish a week to help prevent the onset of cardiovascular disease.To understand how protective fish oil might be, a team of researchers from China, the United States, the United Kingdom and Denmark monitored the health of more than 400,000 participants in the UK Biobank for an average of 12 years…

A TV meteorologist condemned the Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s so-called “don’t say climate change” law on air and urged viewers to vote.Steve MacLaughlin of WTVJ in Miami addressed viewers on Saturday amid rising heat records across the state, saying: “On Thursday, we reported … that the government of Florida was beginning to roll back really important climate-change legislation and really important climate-change language.”MacLaughin condemned DeSantis’s position on the matter, saying that it came “in spite of the fact that the state of Florida over the last couple of years has seen record heat, record flooding, record rain, record insurance rates,…

The United Nations has suspended food distribution in the southern Gaza city of Rafah due to lack of supplies and insecurity.It also said no aid trucks have entered the territory in the past two days via a floating pier set up by the US for sea deliveries, and warned that the $320m (£250m) project may fail unless Israel starts providing the conditions humanitarian groups need to operate safely.Several hundred thousand people remain in Rafah after the Israeli military launched an intensified assault there on 6 May, but relief agencies say food aid deliveries have been reduced to a trickle.Abeer Etefa,…

A former Royal Marine commando who was charged with spying for the Hong Kong intelligence service has died, police have said.Matthew Trickett, 37, who was on bail, was found by a member of the public in a park near where he lived in Maidenhead, Berkshire.Thames Valley police said officers attended and administered emergency treatment but he was pronounced dead at the scene in Grenfell Park on Sunday. The force said: “An investigation is ongoing into the death, which is currently being treated as unexplained.”Trickett appeared in court along with two other men last week accused of monitoring, surveillance and harassment…

Chelsea are prepared to rival Brighton for the appointment of Ipswich’s Kieran McKenna after ­reaching an agreement to part company with Mauricio Pochettino by mutual consent on Tuesday.Pochettino, who led the club to sixth after a strong end to his only season in charge, has left after ­holding talks with the co-sporting directors, Laurence Stewart and Paul ­Winstanley, and the co-controlling owner Behdad Eghbali over the course of two days.It is understood the split is down to a difference of opinion between the Argentinian and Chelsea over strategy. Pochettino, who was hired last summer on a two-year deal, was frustrated…

Israel has urged what it called “nations of the civilised world” to refuse to implement any international criminal court arrest warrants issued against its leaders.Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the world’s top court, announced on Monday that his office had applied to a pre-trial panel for arrest warrants for three senior Hamas officials, as well as the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Hamas attack of 7 October and the ensuing seven-month-old war in Gaza.What was widely interpreted in Israel as an equivalence between the…