Mako Nishimura fought her way into the Japanese underworld, but drug addiction and the slow demise of organised crime gangs almost destroyed her In almost 40 years, Mako Nishimura never lost a fight. She told me this as if it were as obvious as night following day. Nishimura is 5ft-nothing and slight of build. She is also probably the only woman ever to have been a full-fledged yakuza, a member of Japan’s feared and rule-bound criminal underworld. She must have defeated many male gangsters. How, I asked her, did she do it? “First the legs,” she said, hands clasped, maintaining the calm demeanour of a village priest. “You cut him down with a club or a plank of wood.” Then you get to work. Nishimura’s relaxed attitude to violence – you suspect, speaking to her, that it’s a little more than that – is what first caught the attention of yakuza members in 1986, when she was a 19-year-old runaway and former juvenile-prison inmate living in Gifu, a city near Nagoya. One night that year, Nishimura received a phone call. A pregnant friend named Aya was in trouble. Nishimura grabbed a baseball bat, ran down the street and found Aya surrounded by five men. When one of them kicked Aya in the belly, Nishimura yelled for her friend to run, then went for the attackers with her bat. Continue reading...

The US, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia – some of the highest oil-producing nations and major greenhouse gas emitters – opposed the measure The UN has voted 141-8 to adopt a resolution backing a world court opinion that countries have a legal obligation to address climate change, with the US – which is the world’s biggest historical emitter – among the small group opposing it. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said Wednesday’s general assembly vote, in which 28 countries abstained, underscored that governments are responsible for protecting citizens from the “escalating climate crisis”. Continue reading...

Kyiv learns of five scenarios Russia has drawn up and will increase forces in the north, says Zelenskyy; Ukraine’s attacks heap pressure on Russian oil refining. What we know on day 1,548 Ukraine will send reinforcements to its northern regions and step up diplomatic pressure on Belarus to counter what Kyiv believes are Russian plans to launch a new offensive north of the capital, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said. Kyiv knew of five scenarios Russia had drawn up, Ukraine’s president added. “We analysed in detail the available data from our intelligence agencies on Russia’s planning of offensive operations in the Chernihiv-Kyiv direction,” Zelenskiy said. “Our forces in this sector will be increased.” Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s top army commander, said Kyiv had data that the Russian general staff was actively calculating and planning offensive operations from the north. The dictator Alexander Lukashenko allowed Russian troops to march on Ukraine from Belarus in 2022. Zelenskyy said it was “already tiresome that there is constantly such a threat to Ukraine that the Russians may at some point drag Belarus into an expansion of the war. They should understand there will be consequences for them and they will be significant.” In the initial full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine successfully repelled a huge Russian armoured column that attempted to attack Kyiv from the north. Ukraine’s border guards spokesperson, Andriy Demchenko, told Ukrinform news agency on Wednesday: “As of now, we haven’t detected any movement of equipment or personnel directly at our border, but of course, we can see the pressure Russia is putting on Belarus.” Virtually all major oil refineries in central Russia have been forced to halt or scale back fuel output following Ukrainian drone attacks in recent days, Reuters has reported, citing official data and its own sources. The combined capacity of refineries that have fully or partially shut down exceeds 83m tonnes per year, or about 238,000 tonnes per day, accounting for around a quarter of Russia’s total refining capacity. The share of the refineries in Russia’s fuel output is over 30% for gasoline and about 25% for diesel. Moscow has introduced a gasoline exports ban, while the Ukrainian strikes have reduced Russia’s crude oil exports – adding pressure to Moscow’s federal budget, where oil and gas accounts for roughly a quarter of revenue. Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, spoke to Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday as the UK government scrambled to reverse a public relations disaster over its latest package of sanctions on Russian oil and gas. After a storm of negative publicity and a row in parliament, Starmer and ministers were forced to spend Wednesday explaining why the package initially exempts diesel and jet fuel made in other countries using Russian oil. Starmer insisted sanctions on those products would be phased in to keep the market stable. However, Ukrainian officials expressed disappointment, write Peter Walker and Luke Harding. One former senior government figure described western sanctions policy against Russia as “too little too late”. They added: “I’m not sure I understand the logic behind this British decision. The only way Ukraine can stop the war is to put physical sanctions on Russia and destroy its infrastructure.” Zelenskyy said Ukraine had been in contact with Britain on Wednesday and said the issue of sanctions was “always very sensitive … We conveyed our signals on the matter to London. We expect that everything will be discussed this week on a bilateral level.” Zelenskyy later posted that he had spoken to Starmer by telephone and thanked him for the support provided for Ukraine. The two sides were “working to reinvigorate substantive diplomacy”. No 10 said Starmer had “reaffirmed the UK’s steadfast support for Ukraine”. A spokesperson added that “as a result of the UK’s actions to date, there will be less Russian oil on the market, with Russia weaker as a result”. The EU is set to disburse €3.2bn to Ukraine next month, the first such payment under a giant loan approved in April, Brussels said on Wednesday. Continue reading...

US and Taiwanese presidents have not spoken directly since Washington shifted diplomatic recognition to Beijing from Taipei in 1979 US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would speak with Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te, an unprecedented move for a US leader that could roil US relations with China. US and Taiwanese presidents have not spoken directly since Washington shifted diplomatic recognition to Beijing from Taipei in 1979. Continue reading...

Surveillance that misses a haemorrhagic fever or fails to consider endemic risks at a departure port will be blind to something far more dangerous Vaccine to tackle Ebola outbreak will take six to nine months, WHO says Two rare disease outbreaks within two weeks – Andes hantavirus and Bundibugyo Ebola – have caused deaths and triggered costly international responses. Together they expose a gap not in our ability to respond, but in our willingness to anticipate, prevent and use precaution. The hantavirus outbreak on a cruise expedition in the south Atlantic played out slowly. Three weeks passed between the death of one passenger on 11 April and the linkage to hantavirus on 2 May. In that time, passengers onboard the MV Hondius continued their itinerary, having been advised that the man had probably died of natural causes. They toured remote islands and ate together at the same tables. More than 30 passengers disembarked at St Helena and flew in different directions. Continue reading...

Everlee Wihongi was detained at Los Angeles airport on 10 April after she had returned to US from a family trip There have been numerous disturbing moments during New Zealander Everlee Wihongi’s ongoing detention in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but there is one that stands out, her mother says. When detainees are transferred between facilities they are required to remove their assigned uniforms and put on the clothes they wore the day they were detained, Betty Wihongi, tells the Guardian from Wisconsin, her home of nearly 30 years. Continue reading...

Manager relishes ‘challenge’ of Champions League return McGinn credits ‘great coach’ MacPhee after set-piece joy For Aston Villa, the Europa League must only be the beginning, Unai Emery insisted after winning the trophy for a fifth time. Beating Freiburg 3-0 on Wednesday evening brought Villa’s first major piece silverware since the League Cup in 1996, but Emery is determined this should not be the summit of their achievements. He again rejected the tag of “king of the Europa League”, preferring to focus on “now” and, by implication, the future. “Next year we will play in Champions League and this is the challenge,” the Aston Villa manager said. “The best teams in the world are there and it will challenge us a lot. The Premier League is the most difficult league in the world. To be fighting top seven, top five, top four is something very difficult. Hopefully we can be close with teams like City and Arsenal. Continue reading...

Cannes film festival: Sachs’ film about an HIV-positive actor in the homophobic Reagan-era 80s is well-intended, but Malek’s mannered performance is hard to love This film from writer-director Ira Sachs gives us premium-strength, undiluted Rami Malek – but I have to say that his overripe performance and self-conscious mannerisms here are perhaps even more oppressively insistent for being conveyed relatively quietly in spoken dialogue. And not quietly at all in the singing scenes. Malek is a performer whose style is as distinctive as those of John Malkovich or Jeff Goldblum. But it works best with a light touch in the direction and material. Things never really come together here. The Man I Love is a film about gay culture in 1980s New York, at the height of the reactionary homophobia of Reagan’s America, with HIV-positive men coming to terms with their condition and with the callous bigotry of the political zeitgeist. In one hospital scene, we see the authorities’ icily unsympathetic attitude. Malek plays Jimmy George, a much admired and charismatic actor and performance artist in New York who has just emerged from a three-week stay in hospital after a life-threatening HIV-related crisis. Now he is starring in a new stage piece based on André Brassard’s 1974 film Once Upon a Time in the East, playing the stormy and defiant Hélène, who sings with a band. Continue reading...

Unai Emery has reconfirmed his status as master of the competition, but will now want to set his sights higher There are two ways to win a final. You can win it by the odd goal, amid a frenzy of anxiety so the final whistle comes as a relief. Or you can win it as a procession, flexing your superiority, so the final whistle is almost resented for spoiling the fun. For Aston Villa, this was very much the latter. If their fans had dreamed the previous night of how they might win the game, they could barely have come up with something so satisfying and emphatic. It’s true that Villa have a budget around 2.8 times that of Freiburg, and that they have been strong favourites in almost every game in the Europa League this season. But then in the Premier League they’re often fighting against sides with far greater resources. The poles of European and domestic football may have flipped, but that is not their fault nor, at least for now, their concern. They have not been a successful enough club – at least in the past 100 years – to decline to fully celebrate any trophy that comes their way. A second European success, 44 years after the first, is history. Continue reading...

Demonstration, held at historic location where the ‘Mississippi Plan’ was enacted, comes as southern states race to dilute Black voting power Thousands of Mississippians, along with allies from other southern states, gathered at the state’s War Memorial Building auditorium on Wednesday in support of voting rights. It was the latest in a series of actions protesting the supreme court’s recent decision gutting the provision of the Voting Rights Act preventing racial discrimination, and held on a site integral to the state’s history of Black disenfranchisement. Section 2 “stopped states, counties, cities, from passing redistricting maps that discriminate against Black voters and it led to the biggest growth of Black political power since Reconstruction”, said Amir Badat, the southern states director at the voting rights group Fair Fight Action. Continue reading...

Chancellor launches ‘Great British summer savings scheme’ after Keir Starmer postpones fuel duty increase Planned fuel duty rise to be scrapped, says Keir Starmer Rachel Reeves is to promise free summer bus rides for children and cut tariffs on some food imports, as part of a package of measures aimed at easing the costs of the Iran conflict. The chancellor will give a statement in the House of Commons on Thursday, outlining her latest plans for cushioning the blow to consumers from an expected rise in inflation later this year. Continue reading...

Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite operations company, with extensive contracts with US, to go public next month SpaceX unveiled its plans to list publicly on the US stock market Wednesday, disclosing its investor prospectus and revealing details about its financials for the first time. Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite operations company will go public next month at a valuation of around $1.75tn. The company, which is the world’s most prominent rocket maker and which has extensive contracts with the US government, confidentially filed for an IPO last month. The filing allowed for a period of regulatory review before the details became public. Continue reading...

Where would you like your statue, Mr Emery? Even before this emphatic triumph, Aston Villa supporters could hardly have held their manager in greater esteem. But now Emery, in winning the competition for a record fifth time, has delivered the thing he always wanted, a trophy to show for his transformative body of work. Those who were not around for Rotterdam in 1982 will always cherish Istanbul in 2026. Thomas Tuchel had it right a few years ago when he suggested Uefa may as well rename the Europa League the Unai Emery trophy. Just like 82, it was Villa in white against German opponents in red, this time Freiburg and Youri Tielemans, Emi Buendía and Morgan Rogers the goalscorers. All three goals were sparkling, Tielemans and Buendía scoring beauties to put Villa in the box seat, before Rogers got in on the act. It felt like a procession from the moment Buendía curled a left-foot peach into the top corner with the final kick of the first half and, as a contest, it was a non-event from the moment Rogers struck. Mind you, try telling that to the Villa faithful Continue reading...

1st T20i: England, 140-3, bt New Zealand, 136-7, by seven wkts Capsey finishes unbeaten on 74 with 16 balls remaining England got off to a winning start in their Twenty20 series against New Zealand after Alice Capsey struck an unbeaten 74 from 51 balls – her highest score for England, and her first T20i half-century since July 2024. Capsey has generally batted at No 3 for England but on this occasion was promoted to open in place of Danni Wyatt-Hodge, missing this series due to the imminent birth of her first child. She made full use of the extra time available to her, smoking three sixes and seven fours as England chased down their 137-run target with three wickets and 16 balls to spare. Continue reading...

Police say 64-year-old was attacked after confrontation near Battersea Bridge A murder investigation has been launched after a bus driver died after an assault on Battersea Bridge in London, police said. Sergei Krajev, 64, died in hospital on Tuesday after the incident in the early hours of Monday morning. Police believe he was attacked following a confrontation on the pavement near the bus, which was stationary at the time. Gary Jones, 32, was arrested at the scene. He was later charged with causing grievous bodily harm and appeared at Wimbledon magistrates court. He has been remanded in custody. Jones will next appear at Kingston crown court on 15 June, the Metropolitan police said. The family of Krajev paid tribute to him, saying: “We feel fortunate to have had such a wonderful husband, father and grandfather in our lives. Continue reading...

Four-time MVP agreed to one-year deal with Steelers Rodgers is reuniting with ex-Packers coach McCarthy Aaron Rodgers has said that the 2026 season will be the final one of his NFL career. “Yes. This is it,” the Steelers quarterback told reporters in Pittsburgh on Wednesday when asked if the upcoming campaign would be his last. Continue reading...

Director of Armageddon and Transformers to team up with Universal Pictures for drama based on recent events Michael Bay is set to direct a military drama based on the recent rescue of two US crew members who crashed in Iran. According to Deadline, the director of action films such as Armageddon and Transformers will work with Universal Pictures to bring the story to the screen. In April, two soldiers were rescued after their fighter jet was downed, something Donald Trump called “one of most daring search-and-rescue operations in US history”. Continue reading...

International student Rodiyat Alabede, 22, died due to a ‘perfect storm’ of lax safety protocols, advocates say Patient advocates in Canada have called for a new investigation into the death of a young woman who was donating blood plasma, describing a “perfect storm” of lax safety protocols and poorly trained staff and warning of “systemic issues” at plasma donation sites across the country. Rodiyat Alabede, an international student at the University of Winnipeg, died of cardiac arrest shortly after a plasma donation in October 2025 at a facility operated by the Spanish healthcare company Grifols. An initial investigation by Health Canada found no links between the plasma donation and her death. Continue reading...

Diplomats mount salvage operation after ‘clumsy’ announcement upsets Kyiv The UK was last night desperately trying to reassure Kyiv its new sanctions policy on Russia did not weaken restrictions, after Ukrainian officials warned the change could help Moscow fund its war efforts. While Downing Street insisted the decision to allow the temporary import of Russian oil and jet fuel was only one element of a tougher overall sanctions package, a British minister conceded that the matter had been handled “clumsily”. Continue reading...

Announcement made due to computer error at Radio Caroline’s main studio in Essex A radio station has apologised for “any distress caused” after accidentally announcing that King Charles had died. The erroneous announcement was made on Tuesday afternoon due to a computer error at Radio Caroline’s main studio in Essex. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Greater Manchester understood to support home secretary’s push to limit legal and illegal migration Andy Burnham is backing Shabana Mahmood’s controversial changes to the immigration system, his allies have said, in a blow to those in Labour who hope to soften them. The Greater Manchester mayor is understood to be keen to reframe the changes but supportive of the home secretary’s attempts to limit legal and illegal migration, which have been criticised by some senior Labour MPs as un-British and mimicking Trump. Continue reading...

Climate change is pushing starving grey whales to San Francisco Bay, where ship strikes led to 40% of 21 deaths Ferries, cargo ships and tankers cut through choppy waters in the San Francisco Bay on Tuesday as a whale surfaced nearby, its spout barely visible against the white caps. Until now, whales could easily go unnoticed by mariners, but an AI-powered detection network launched this week is designed to track them day and night. The system, called WhaleSpotter, scans the bay around the clock for whale blows and heat signatures up to 2 nautical miles away, alerting mariners to slow down or reroute when whales are nearby. Continue reading...

Friendlies against Denmark and Chile still going ahead Team staff who are based in DRC ‘leaving in next hours’ The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have cancelled their three-day World Cup preparation training camp and a planned farewell to fans in the capital, Kinshasa, because of an outbreak of Ebola in the east of the country. Preparations will take place elsewhere after an outbreak of a rare type of Ebola known as Bundibugyo, which is thought to have killed more than 130 people and caused nearly 600 suspected cases. The World Health Organization has declared it a public health emergency of international concern. Continue reading...

Far-right figure Itamar Ben-Gvir shares footage of himself taunting bound international detainees Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has sparked a diplomatic crisis by publishing footage of Israeli security forces abusing international activists who were detained as they tried to sail to Gaza with aid. There was a rapid and furious response from countries whose citizens were on board the boats, including the UK, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Ireland, in many cases delivered in person from the top of government. Continue reading...

While there is no denying the magnitude of his achievements, his legacy is also tied up in politics, propaganda and hard power Well, that’s that then. Put out more flags. Mount the iconic Jedi‑style woollen cardigan in the club museum. He really does seem to be done this time. In the absence of formal denials, it now seems highly likely the scheduled final year of Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City contract will be spent trawling the high-concept food ateliers of the Iberian peninsula, debating spatial architecture with a Slovenian Cluedo grandmaster over hummingbird martinis, and generally recharging after a decade of unceasing devotion to victory. Continue reading...