Tag Archives: europe

South Africa v Australia: first men’s cricket Test, day four – live

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10th over, Australia 71-1 (Maddinson 48, Labuschagne 5) The Maddo Express keeps rolling, loaded heavy with receipts. South Africa turn to spin, Maddinson puts one foot down the track and lofts Harmer down the ground for six. This is a spectacle. Follows up with a couple more hits down the ground for two runs apiece. His score keeps rattling the loose shingle numbers on the board.

9th over, Australia 59-1 (Maddinson 37, Labuschagne 4) Another edge, Labuschagne this time, getting lucky against Jansen, down through the cordon for three runs, hauled back just in time. That brings Maddinson back on strike… and he immediately whacks another one! Again width, and he plays the same shot he kept trying in the first innings, except that this time he hits the ball. Top edgy, over the cordon, four.

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Ukraine says Russia violated Trump’s ‘energy ceasefire’ – Europe live

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Kyiv power plant among the facilities hit after US president claims ‘energy ceasefire’, while Kremlin yet to confirm any deal

Addressing the conference virtually, Ukrainian president Volydymyr Zelenskyy commented on Trump’s “sudden but very important” energy ceasefire declaration over the weekend.

He said it is clear that Putin “does not read Truth social”, the site that the US president posted his ceasefire declaration on.

Russia wants to ruin the existing security architecture in Europe to make sure that Russian domination comes back to where it was before 1989. We have no doubt about it.

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UK politics live: Tories accuse Burnham of being ‘dangerous and divisive’ after he confirms Russian interference in Brexit campaign

Shadow minister says referendum was a ‘legitimate vote’ and PM is seeking to ‘reopen debate’ with statement on Russia’s involvement

Good morning. The last time Andy Burnham gave a statement to MPs after a recess, it went on for more than three hours. This prompted Kemi Badenoch to make a lewd joke later about the PM’s stamina (which she repeated at a party conference reception with an additional line about how she just had to “sit back and lie there”.) Today we are getting another post-recess, potentially wide-ranging statement from the PM, but the mood might not be so cordial.

Quite a lot has happened since MPs were last in the chamber almost a month ago, and they will want to ask the PM about issues like the cost of living, North Sea oil and gas, the Iran war and Ukraine. We have not been told yet exactly what Burnham’s statement will cover. But, as Aletha Adu reports, Burnham will talk about Brexit, restating what he told Labour’s conference about how he thinks it has done more harm than good and making the case for trying to find a better, closer relationship with the EU.

The result is the result, and I think the prime minister has been very clear that he’s talking about attempts to interfere. The security minister has spoken about this before. I’m confident that both the British people and the British state are able to respond to and defend against these types of threats, but we need to be very honest that those threats exist.

That Brexit referendum was a legitimate vote. People voted in this country in record numbers to leave the European Union. And I actually think it’s very dangerous and divisive of the prime minister to reopen this debate in such an explosive fashion.

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A Fidai Film review – Palestinian collage film transforms suppressed footage into works of art

Using archive material of destroyed houses, terrorised children and dead bodies, Kamal Aljafari adds humanity to the reels by overlaying poems by Palestinian authors

In Arabic, “fidai” means someone willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Borrowing this word, which is at times used in a military context, for his collage film, Palestinian film-maker Kamal Aljafari stages a potent uprising of images against the tide of propaganda and historical erasure. Much of the film draws on archive materials once housed in the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut. In 1982, during the Lebanese civil war, Israeli forces raided the centre and seized the archive. Most of these documents on Palestinian history – books, newspapers, audiovisual artefacts – are believed to still be in the hands of the Israeli army.

Obtained through clandestine means, the footage that resurfaces in Aljafari’s film bears the physical traces of political suppression. The images are scratched, grainy and pixelated, yet through the power of montage they evoke startling visual parallels that point to the relentless violence endured by Palestinians through the decades. Black-and-white film taken during the British mandate show soldiers patrolling the streets and inflicting violence upon the Indigenous population; similar acts then committed by Israeli forces. In place of a chronological order, the editing builds a sense of continuity through recurring images. Time and time again, we see torn-down houses, terrorised children and the bodies of Palestinians murdered by occupation forces.

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The Weight of Angels by John Boyne review – what if Oscar Wilde had lived?

The great Irish writer died, a broken man, at only 46. Imagining a second act for him is a great idea – but the results are sentimental and unconvincing

In 1895, four days after the opening of The Importance of Being Earnest, the Marquess of Queensberry left a card at Oscar Wilde’s club that publicly accused him of “posing as a somdomite”. Instead of instigating the libel case that led to his imprisonment and early death in a Paris hotel just five years later, what would have happened if Wilde had simply torn that card up? John Boyne’s new novel sets out to answer that intriguing question.

For starters, Boyne contrives a fate for Wilde’s beloved Lord Alfred Douglas which entertainingly redistributes the details of the real Wilde’s life before, during and after his time in Reading jail. This sets up the novel’s cat-and-mouse game with the history it is reimagining. Wilde himself, conveniently released from marriage by the early death of his wife, is then free to live not as a tortured, scandal-haunted genius, but as a randy, wisecracking, party-going queen. The upside of this is that Oscar gets to swap bons mots with a crowded cast list of celebrities; the downside is that he shows little sign of the troubled and radical mind that produced the real Wilde’s late journalism and fiction, never mind the subversive linguistic pyrotechnics of The Importance.

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