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‘They are isolated … they are alone’: Zelenskyy on Russia, Putin’s lies – and fighting back
In a wide-ranging interview, an upbeat Ukrainian president also discusses Donald Trump, King Charles, and how Kyiv is prepared to share its experience of drone warfare with the west Sitting down with the Guardian in London, Volodymyr Zelenskyy seems cheerful. More than four years after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion, he believes Europe’s biggest war since 1945 appears to be slowly turning in Ukraine’s favour. The military situation is the most promising it has been for Kyiv for two and a half years, Zelenskyy says. “We can’t say Russia is losing this war. But we can say they are losing the initiative each day, day by day,” he insists. Over the past week the Kremlin has suffered a series of setbacks. Long-range Ukrainian drones have hit Putin’s home city of St Petersburg, setting fire to oil terminals and sending smoke billowing above the skyline. Similar attacks have crippled occupied Crimea. A key supply road is littered with burning lorries and tankers and the peninsula seized by Russia in 2014 is experiencing severe fuel shortages. Continue reading...
Young people need money because our system is rigged. Here’s a way to give it to them | Polly Toynbee
One plan would see young workers offered early access to a slice of future pensions. It’s not perfect, but we need bold ideas While we wait with nail-biting anxiety for the voters of Makerfield to decide the fate of the country, the prospect of renewal at the top provides a fertile time for breeding ideas and confronting great problems. Alan Milburn’s searing analysis of the first generation ever to do worse financially than their parents did at their age opens the door to people with solutions to this crisis. Now is the time to bring them out. Among the thinktanks, voluntary sector and business organisations coming forward with ideas, this week the Social Market Foundation (SMF) is offering an inventive plan to help ease the growing inequality between those young people gifted some wealth and the majority who have none. We are now in the time of the “great wealth transfer”, with an estimated £5.5tn to be passed down by the baby boomer generation in the UK over the next three decades. My lucky generation had everything for free. Ordinary salaries bought homes easily and property values rocketed to make homeowners wealthy beyond all expectations, even as the UK has gotten relatively poorer compared to other European and North American countries. Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...
‘We want to see him in Ukraine’: Zelenskyy hopes to invite King Charles on state visit
Exclusive: Ukrainian leader says he has ‘a very good relationship’ with British monarch, who has supported his country Zelenskyy hopes Reform UK councils will allow Ukraine flags to be flown again Volodymyr Zelenskyy has revealed that he plans to invite King Charles on a state visit to Ukraine as early as this year, which would make him the most senior royal to travel to Kyiv since Russia’s full-scale invasion. The Ukrainian president said he had a close relationship with the king, whom he has met on numerous occasions, including when he gave a public show of support after Zelenskyy’s explosive visit to the White House last year. Continue reading...
Parents caring for seriously ill children in UK could get financial support under ‘Hugh’s law’
Proposals considered by government would strengthen protections for parents forced to become full-time carers Thousands of parents who are forced to become full-time carers after their child becomes seriously ill would be entitled to financial support and job protections under new “Hugh’s law” proposals being floated by the government. Hugh’s law is named after Hugh Menai-Davis, who was six when he died in 2021 just under a year after being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and undergoing 10 months of intensive treatment, much of it in hospital. Continue reading...
World’s first wind-powered underwater datacentre starts operating in China
Datacentre off Shanghai coast uses less power and water than land-based equivalent The world’s first wind-powered underwater datacentre has started operations off the coast of Shanghai, as China presses forwards with solutions for energy challenges created by the country’s artificial intelligence boom. The Shanghai Lingang undersea datacentre demonstration project, which launched in May, has a capacity of 24 megawatts. It is a joint effort between HiCloud Technology and China Communications Construction, a state-owned company. Continue reading...
Ministers could ban London councils ‘dumping’ homeless families miles away
Measures being considered to crack down on practice that has grown as a result of Britain’s housing crisis London councils could be banned from “dumping” homeless families hundreds of miles across England under measures being considered by ministers, the Guardian has learned. MPs said vulnerable people, including women fleeing abuse, were being “coerced” into choosing between rough sleeping or moving to cheap, sparsely furnished properties in some of the poorest parts of the country. Continue reading...
‘You’re treated like this is the end’: Meet the dementia rebels – diagnosed and determined to change people’s minds
Few things are more feared than a dementia diagnosis. Now people living with the condition are fighting against damaging stereotypes and demanding proper medical support When Maxine Linnell, 78, a retired psychotherapist living in Leicestershire, learned that she had dementia four years ago, the diagnosis proved less challenging than some people’s reactions. “What was striking was how many people’s attitudes changed almost immediately … they stop seeing you as a person and see only dementia, some professionals included. Like this is the end and everything after will be devastating.” The assumption that you go overnight from diagnosis to late-stage dementia isn’t confined to family and friends. Julie Hayden, a nurse and social worker from Yorkshire, was diagnosed nine years ago at the age of 54, long after sensing that something was wrong but being constantly told that it was depression or menopause; her doctors still associated dementia with old age and didn’t consider that she might have had young onset. “At the point of diagnosis,” she recalls, “most of us are told: ‘Well, it’s dementia, nothing we can do about that. Best go away and get your end of life affairs in order.’” Continue reading...
Ping-pong sponges, ‘black smokers’ and floating somethings: the secrets of the deep sea
The bottom of the ocean has barely been explored, but every journey to the deep reveals wondrous new lifeforms. As underwater mining gains momentum, we risk destroying one of the Earth’s last great wildernesses On 8 March 2018, at 1.20am, Malaysian Airlines flight 370 veered off its scheduled route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. An hour later, military radar spotted the plane heading west over the Andaman Sea. Six or seven hours later, it is presumed to have crashed somewhere over the southern Indian Ocean, one of the least studied bodies of water in the world. Just how little we knew about this part of the ocean became clear during the subsequent search for the missing aircraft. Before a proper underwater search could even begin, a vast stretch of seafloor had to be mapped. Over the next three years, a team of ships from Australia, China and Malaysia scanned the bottom with a combination of submersible robots and ship-borne sonar. Together, they charted a swath of ocean roughly 1,500 miles long and 150 miles wide, encompassing an area the size of France. The maps produced from these scans revealed a lost world, full of undersea canyons, crevasses, volcanic plateaux and a single, enormous cliff taller than the Swiss Alps. Even the abyssal plains, thought to be some of the flattest areas on the planet, were home to previously uncharted hills. Continue reading...
Is Switzerland tired of prosperity? I can think of no other reason for our next foolish referendum | Joseph de Weck
Capping the population at 10 million is a far-right fantasy. It would dismantle the openness that has made the country rich Zürich on a Sunday morning can feel like the day after Armageddon: so empty, so calm, despite being Switzerland’s biggest city. But then the church bells erupt across the lake basin, and a jogger trots by like a polite deer in aerodynamic sunglasses, and one knows that all is fine in this proudly impeccable place, where little is left to chance and the authorities even track the city’s pigeons with GPS. Swiss people know they are lucky. A highly diversified economy keeps salaries high and income inequality comparatively low. A British friend once remarked that our supermarkets feel like the gourmet hall at Harrods. The state makes business easy. Hiking paths are maintained by armies of volunteers. The flip side is our reputation for being a nation of humourless control freaks, but there are benefits to trains running on time. In a restless world, Switzerland remains a place where one can exhale. Joseph de Weck is an associate fellow with the German Council on Foreign Relations and writes for Guardian Europe from Zürich and Paris Continue reading...
‘We were going off the cliff’: Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil on inventing grunge – and losing Chris Cornell and Kurt Cobain
As he publishes a memoir, the pioneering guitarist talks about rejecting spandex and hair metal, his fears for breakthrough hit Black Hole Sun – and completing nine unfinished Soundgarden songs Kim Thayil has always felt like an outsider. For example: the Soundgarden guitarist has lived in Seattle, a city infamously addicted to coffee, for more than four decades, but only started drinking the stuff himself during lockdown. “I was pretty against-the-grain to my Seattle friends, who always wanted to meet up at coffee shops,” he grins, cradling a freshly brewed cup of java in his kitchen. “My girlfriend in the 80s and 90s even worked at the original branch of Starbucks and made coffee with a French press every morning. But I drank tea, because my parents are Indian.” Thayil’s Indian heritage also set him apart from his peers. In his new memoir, A Screaming Life, he writes that when he and bassist Hiro Yamamoto formed Soundgarden in 1984, the group was “two-thirds Asian”, and that “as liberal and accepting as the punk scene was, it was still largely white, and I was ever aware of that”. Nevertheless, Soundgarden went on to become pioneers of Seattle’s grunge movement, a multiplatinum-selling, critically acclaimed, Grammy-winning group whose breakthrough hit, Black Hole Sun, transcended their gnarly milieu to become an enduring anthem. Continue reading...
NBA finals: Wembanyama silences Garden’s party as Spurs beat Knicks in Game 3
As it happened: Spurs 115-111 Knicks Knicks lead best-of-seven series 2-1 Trump given hostile reception by New York crowd The spectacle at Madison Square Garden on Monday night was such that the basketball almost took a back seat to everything else. The president in the suites. The mayor in the crowd. Movie stars along the sideline. The culmination of days of talk over $10,000 tickets, heightened security and cancelled watch parties alongside the anticipation for New York City’s first home NBA finals game since 25 June 1999. By the end of the game, Victor Wembanyama had given New York something fresh to talk about. The San Antonio Spurs snapped the Knicks’ 13-game postseason winning streak with a 115-111 victory, playing spoiler to the Garden’s party and cutting the deficit to 2-1 in this year’s finals. Game 4 is Wednesday in New York. Continue reading...
BYD and Alibaba among big names aiding China’s military, Pentagon says
Updated Pentagon list includes swathe of China’s top technology firms in move that could inflame tensions between the countries The US added Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, internet search provider Baidu and automaker BYD to a list of companies it believes are aiding Beijing’s military, in a move that could inflame tensions between the countries. The long-awaited update released on Monday supersedes a list from early 2025, and comes less than a month after Donald Trump met China’s Xi Jinping on a visit to Beijing, where the two leaders maintained a delicate trade war truce. Continue reading...
Izakaya economics: Japan’s traditional night out fights tooth and ale for survival
Hard times – and British-style pubs – are squeezing restaurant-bars that once thrived in cities everywhere. Can they innovate to keep pace with change? From rowdy spit-and-sawdust joints to dimly lit high-end eateries, from chains equipped with tablets to family-run holes in the wall, Japan’s izakaya restaurant-bars are as varied as the cuisine they serve. They are also a bellwether, reflecting strength and shifts in the wider economy. Now that economy is squeezing them harder than ever, pushing closures to record rates. The damage is spread unevenly: amid the struggles, some flourish, while a chain of unlikely alternatives expands. Continue reading...
Gordon S Wood, Pulitzer-prize winning historian, dies after being struck by a car in Rhode Island
A renowned academic, Wood was hit by a car as he was crossing a supermarket’s parking lot and later died of the injuries Gordon S Wood, a Pulitzer prize-winning author and historian, was killed on Sunday when he was struck by a car in a supermarket parking lot in Rhode Island. Wood, 92, won the Pulitzer in 1993 in the history category for The Radicalism of the American Revolution, a landmark tome that advanced the theory of the break with Britain being at least as much of an internal social and political transformation as a desire to be rid of colonial masters. This story was amended on 8 June 2026 to correct the Pulitzer prize-winning book’s title to The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Continue reading...
French star Patrick Bruel held by police investigating new sexual assault allegations
Two new rape complaints have been filed against the 67-year-old singer and actor, who denies the claims French singer and actor Patrick Bruel, facing sexual assault allegations from multiple women, was taken into police custody on Monday, as two new rape complaints were filed against him. The 67-year-old, a major figure in French pop culture with multiple top-selling albums and more than 40 film appearances, is being questioned about 13 victims, the prosecutor’s office in the western Paris suburb of Nanterre said in a statement. Agence France-Presse contributed to this report Continue reading...
Donald Trump given hostile reception as New York crowd boos and jeers president at NBA finals
President attends Spurs v Knicks game at MSG Knicks aiming to win first title since 1973 Donald Trump was loudly booed when he was shown on the video screens at Madison Square Garden on Monday night before Game 3 of the NBA finals between the San Antonio Spurs and New York Knicks. Trump was shown on the jumbotron while the Star-Spangled Banner was being sung before the game, and jeers and boos broke out around the arena. The president was shown for a little over eight seconds and held a salute the whole time with a smile on his face. A few seconds later, the video board showed Knicks players in line and the boos turned to cheers. Continue reading...
ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan suspended amid sexual misconduct inquiry
Khan, a prominent British lawyer, has repeatedly denied the allegations which first emerged in 2024 The chief prosecutor of the international criminal court, Karim Khan, has been suspended after a disciplinary process triggered by sexual abuse allegations against him reached a conclusion. The ICC’s governing body announced the decision on Monday evening after its executive committee voted to refer the proceedings against Khan to a special session of the court’s member states for them to consider his future. Continue reading...
We’re only halfway through 2026. Here’s how to get through the next six months | Jess Harwood
It feels like decades See more of Jess Harwood’s cartoons here Continue reading...
Kane Evans: former NRL player finally ‘free’ after coming out as gay
Evans becomes first men’s player to come out since Ian Roberts in 1995 Former Roosters and Eels player had struggled with suicidal thoughts Former prop forward Kane Evans says a weight has lifted from his shoulders after he became only the second male NRL player to come out as gay. In an emotional interview with Channel Nine’s 100% Footy, the 131-time NRL player said he had struggled with addiction, suicidal thoughts and experienced homelessness as he grappled with his sexuality. “I had three goals in life,” Evans said. “And it was to play NRL, to buy my parents a house, and then I wanted to top myself, because I was living in denial from a young age. I know that I’m gay. But I went down every other avenue to sort of build up these walls. To be someone, to escape who I am.” Continue reading...
NBA finals 2026 Game 3: San Antonio Spurs v New York Knicks – live buildup
Knicks host Spurs with 2-0 lead in best-of-seven series Trump to attend first NBA finals in New York since 1999 How New York Knicks finals fever reached Rikers Island Reach out to Bryan on Bluesky or by email Bryan will be here shortly. In the meantime here’s the Guardian’s Stateside with Kai and Carter episode on an NBA finals even a billionaire can’t ruin. Continue reading...
Pilot ‘hyperlocal’ job support scheme in England shows promising signs of effectiveness
Government-funded JobsPlus trial in 10 neighbourhoods could be scalable nationwide, evaluation shows We would like to hear from young people in the UK about their job-hunting experiences A government-funded pilot of “hyperlocal” job support in 10 neighbourhoods across England has shown “promising early signs of effectiveness”, including for young people, and could be scalable nationwide, a new evaluation has shown. The JobsPlus scheme, backed by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Youth Futures Foundation, an independent non-profit organisation, focuses intensive support in a small area of predominantly social housing. Echoing a similar, long-established scheme in the US, “community champions” at each site help to engage hard-to-reach people in the local area. Continue reading...
Family courts show ‘widespread’ gender bias and victim-blaming, report finds
Exclusive: Analysis shows 72.5% of 91 judgments in England and Wales contained judicial victim-blaming, with mothers scrutinised more intensely A report has found “widespread and concerning evidence” of bias and victim-blaming in the family courts – primarily disadvantaging women. The report, Scratching the Surface: Victim-Blaming and Bias in Family Court Judgments, by the nonprofit organisation Right to Equality, will be shared with MPs on Tuesday at an event in parliament. Continue reading...