Author: The Guardian

In August 2023, Shelagh, 70, met Tony, 73, for a blind date in a restaurant in south London. The connection between them was immediate. In their interviews after the meal, both described being disarmed by the other’s honesty. They skipped the usual first date chit-chat and jumped straight to weightier topics: divorce, politics and religion.In my role as the Guardian’s matchmaker, I always hope couples will hit it off, but in Tony and Shelagh’s case I felt unusually confident. I emailed them, asking to be kept abreast of any updates. They replied with a photograph of themselves in front of the Colosseum, on a mini‑break in Rome.skip…

Joe Biden says he believes a new temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is possible next Monday.During a visit to New York on Monday, the US president gave a spontaneous update in response to a reporter’s question about when he expected the ceasefire to begin.”My national security adviser tells me we’re close. We’re close. We’re not done yet,” Biden said. “I hope that by next Monday we will have a ceasefire.”Biden made the remarks after a taping of NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers in New York.Over the weekend, Israel’s war cabinet approved broad terms of a deal to halt…

France’s President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday he refused to rule out sending ground troops to Ukraine, but said no consensus existed on the step, at a meeting of 20 mainly European leaders in Paris convened by Macron to ramp up the European response to the Russian military advances inside Ukraine.Protecting France’s strategic ambiguity he said “there is no consensus to officially back any ground troops. That said, nothing should be excluded. We will do everything that we can to make sure that Russia does not prevail.”He pointed out that past shibboleths such as sending long-range missiles and planes had…

Don Henley testified Monday that a “bad decision” led to his arrest in 1980 when authorities said they found drugs and an overdosed 16-year-old at the rock star’s Los Angeles home. worker.Henry was asked about the arrest while testifying at the criminal trial, which he said contained stolen handwritten drafts of lyrics to “Hotel California” and other Eagles hits.Henry said he called a sex worker one night in November 1980 because he “wanted to get out of the depression he was in over the breakup of his superstar band.””I wanted to forget everything that happened in the band, but I…

Officials in Alabama said on Monday they had launched an investigation into the detonation of an explosive device outside the office of the state’s attorney general at the weekend.“Thankfully, no staff or personnel were injured by the explosion. The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency will be leading the investigation, and we are urging anyone with information to contact them immediately,” the attorney general, Steve Marshall, said in a statement.The explosion occurred early on Saturday morning, and the statement gave no other details. The extent of any property damage is not yet known.Marshall has recently become embroiled in controversy following last week’s…

Andy Murray hinted he is entering the “final months” of his tennis career after sealing his second win of 2024 with a set-less victory over Denis Shapovalov in the first round of the Dubai Open. .The three-time Grand Slam champion, who was forced to fend off retirement rumors after a series of losses in the first round, looked set for another early exit when top-10 player Shapovalov took the first set.Murray struggled to break the 24-year-old Canadian opponent’s serve but produced a trademark brave performance in the second set to take the lead in the tie-break and then kept his…

Name: England’s strongest man.Age: 26.Appearance: Very large.AKA: Paddy Haynes, from Adderbury, Oxfordshire.How strong do you have to be to be England’s strongest man? Strong enough to roll up a frying pan.What does that even mean? Exactly what it sounds like: to demonstrate his strongman prowess on BBC Radio Oxfordshire, Haynes put a frying pan over his knee and rolled it up like a burrito.A rubber frying pan? No, an ordinary metal frying pan.OK, so how strong is that? Not quite strong enough to be Britain’s strongest man – Haynes finished 10th in that competition in January.Who won it? Tom Stoltman.…

Toni Minichiello, who coached Jessica Ennis-Hill to Olympic heptathlon title, was handed a lifetime ban in August 2022 Not eligible for public funding. An investigation found Toni Minichiello engaged in “sexual physical conduct” with athletes and an independent case management panel issued a lifetime ban from athletics.Sport England, which funds elite sport at the Olympic and Paralympic Games, convened a panel to consider Minichiello’s eligibility for public funding following the ban. The panel’s initial ruling on the funding was challenged by Minichiello, but UK Sport announced on Monday that the appeals panel found Minichiello’s conduct amounted to misconduct and brought…

Packages arrive at my house more than I’d like to admit. Whether they contain cosmetics, swimwear, T-shirts or socks, the sight of a brown cardboard box makes me feel two things: excitement for the new thing and guilt over its environmental impacts.Often the packaging feels excessive: boxes inside bigger boxes, things wrapped in bubble wrap or corrugated cardboard. And while compostable satchels are becoming more common, they’re not perfect solutions.It’s easy to blame the fashion industry’s ever increasing environmental impacts on the rise of online shopping and pervasive digital marketing. Alongside reports of higher rates of returns, exploitation in distribution…

Nearly 60 years after “Mary Poppins Returns” premiered, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has upgraded its age rating to PG.According to the Daily Mail, the film’s rating has been upgraded from a U (indicating no content that may offend or harm) to a recommendation for parental guidance due to the use of discriminatory language.It was changed as a derogatory term for the Khoikhoi people, one of the earliest inhabitants of southern Africa.The classifier draws on the terminology used by the character Admiral Boom – first to refer to people who are not on screen, and then to the…