Figure of £40.8bn buried in EU’s 2020 accounts dismissed by UK as not reflecting amount it will payThe UK’s Brexit “divorce bill” is €47.5bn (£40.8bn) according to estimates from Brussels that are higher than the government’s forecasts.The first tranche, €6.8bn, is due for payment by the end of the year. Continue reading...

Friday: western Sydney residents feel ‘scapegoated’ amid police crackdown. Plus: Tokyo Olympics bans spectatorsGood morning. Western Sydney residents say they are being “scapegoated” as New South Wales police announced a major compliance crackdown, including 100 extra officers and mounted police. Cumberland City councillor Kun Huang argued the police operation was harsher on the western suburbs than it had been in more affluent parts of Sydney. NSW recorded 38 new local Covid cases on Thursday – the highest daily number since the Sydney outbreak began. Of those 20 people were in the community for part or all of their infectious period. Gladys Berejiklian, said the daily case numbers were “too high” but that it was still “achievable” for the lockdown to end next Friday, “assuming everybody does the right thing”. Meanwhile, the Therapeutic Goods Administration said the death of a woman from a very rare blood clotting condition was “likely” linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine – Australia’s third death related to the shot.Ash Barty has produced one of the highest quality big-match performances of her career, outplaying the former champion Angelique Kerber 6-3, 7-6 (3) to reach her first Wimbledon final. Barty loves grass. She won the girls’ title here as a 15-year-old a decade ago, has a game that is perfectly suited to the fast, low bounce and has frequently said she spends much of the season counting down the days until the grass arrives again. While Barty tends to be wary of revealing too many of her ambitions, before this tournament she made it clear that winning the title was an ultimate goal. Continue reading...

Joe Biden has said the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan after 20 years of war will conclude on 31 August and added there will be no ‘mission accomplished’ moment to celebrate. ‘We did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build,’ the US president said. ’It is the right and the responsibility of the Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country.’His remarks come as the Taliban makes advances in the country, which some senior Afghan officials have blamed on the abrupt departure of US troops

More than four in 10 Australians think Chinese are coming and analysts say that’s partly due to government’s ‘drums of war’ rhetoric

Keane Flynn-Harling, 16, was stabbed to death on Monday night in LambethA 29-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of murder after a teenager was stabbed to death in south London, the Metropolitan police has said.The boy, who has been named as 16-year-old Keane Flynn-Harling, was discovered suffering from stab injuries on Monday night in Lambeth. Continue reading...

Seven reportedly killed as angry civilians seize suspects following a brazen killing surrounded by claims of foreign involvementSix people, including one US citizen, have been arrested and seven reportedly killed as Haitian security forces pursued the gunmen responsible for the assassination of the Caribbean country’s president, Jovenel Moïse.As Haiti reeled following the first assassination of a serving president in the Americas since John F Kennedy’s 1963 shooting, there were chaotic scenes in the capital, Port-au-Prince, on Thursday. Angry civilians reportedly apprehended two male suspects while police laid siege to two buildings in which other suspected assassins were supposedly holed up. Continue reading...

Politicians must respond to the latest warnings that climate science has underestimated risksLast week’s shockingly high temperatures in the northwestern US and Canada were – and are – very frightening. Heat and the fires it caused killed hundreds of people, and are estimated to have killed a billion sea creatures. Daily temperature records were smashed by more than 5C (9F) in some places. In Lytton, British Columbia, the heat reached 49.6C (121F). The wildfires that consumed the town produced their own thunderstorms, alongside thousands of lightning strikes.An initial study shows human activity made this heat dome – in which a ridge of high pressure acts as a lid preventing warm air from escaping – at least 150 times more likely. The World Weather Attribution Group of scientists, who use computer climate models to assess global heating trends and extreme weather, have warned that last week exceeded even their worst-case scenarios. While it has long been recognised that the climate system has thresholds or tipping points beyond which humans stand to lose control of what happens, scientists did not hide their alarm that an usually cool part of the Pacific northwest had been turned into a furnace. One climatologist said the prospect opened up by the heat dome “blows my mind”. Continue reading...

South Africa’s justice minister says former president could be paroled after four months of 15-month sentenceSouth Africa’s former president Jacob Zuma, whose decision to hand himself in to police to serve a 15-month jail term has been greeted as a victory for the troubled country’s efforts to enforce the rule of law, could be free in four months, the justice minister has said.The minister, Ronald Lamola, told journalists outside the prison where Zuma was being held on Thursday that the former leader would be eligible for parole either because his sentence was less than two years or for medical reasons. Continue reading...

Italians are excited for the Euro 2020 final against England: ‘If we play with the heart, we will win’Tens of thousands of English football fans at Wembley tried to send a message to Italy on Wednesday night: Sunday’s Euro 2020 final will be hell for the Azzurri. Italians heard the deafening cheers of the home support loud and clear, but that chant, “It’s coming home”, screamed at the top of English lungs does not seem to have affected them greatly. They are far from intimidated.“It’s coming home? Maybe the English fans meant ‘it’s coming to Rome’,” said Giovanni Mapelli, 14, from Monticello Brianza, near Milan, who plays for a local football team. Since England won a place in the final, he and his brother have been mocking his England-born-and-raised mother. Continue reading...

For more than 20 years, Aboriginal photographer Wayne Quilliam has captured significant Indigenous events across Australia, from the national apology to the Stolen Generations to the Garma, Barunga and Yeperenye festivals. In his travels through country, Quilliam often visits communities to teach Indigenous youth how to capture their own lives through a lens. His book, Culture is Life, is a modern, photographic celebration of the diversity of Indigenous Australians Continue reading...

An already struggling and chaotic Haiti is reeling from the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, followed by a reported gun battle in which authorities said police killed four of the murder suspects. Officials have pledged to find all those responsible for the raid on Moïse’s house before dawn on Wednesday. The government has declared a two-week state of emergency to help it hunt the assassins.

Two-week state of emergency declared as officers reportedly kill four suspects in gun battle after Jovenel Moïse’s deathA struggling and chaotic Haiti is reeling from the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse followed by a reported gun battle in which authorities said police killed four of the murder suspects, detained two others and freed three officers who were being held hostage.With Port-au-Prince’s airport still closed and residents asked to remain at home, rumours and speculation continued to swirl around the murky circumstances of Moïse’s murder. Continue reading...

Resolution is passed to launch legal action, but Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán remains defiantThe European parliament has denounced a Hungarian law that bans gay people from appearing in educational materials or primetime TV as “a clear breach” of equality.In a resolution voted in Strasbourg on Thursday by a resounding majority, MEPs condemned “in the strongest possible terms” the Hungarian law as “a clear breach of the EU’s values, principles and law”, while urging the European Commission to launch a fast-track legal case against Viktor Orbán’s government. Continue reading...

Lashkar Gah still under control of government forces but local activist says city is under siegeAs Boris Johnson announced the end of Britain’s military mission in Afghanistan, Taliban fighters pressed in on the capital of Helmand province, once the centre of the UK’s presence there.Militants are less than a mile from Lashkar Gah, now also home to tens of thousands of people who fled the fighting or Taliban rule across the rest of the province, local officials said. Continue reading...

Members of Exiled Writers Ink respond in horror to Priti Patel’s plans to create offshore centres to process asylum seekers. Plus Dr Liz Curran pleads with the UK not to follow Australia’s dehumanising policy and Pat Beesley wonders when we stopped treating refugees like human beingsWe are refugee and migrant writers living in Britain who are members of Exiled Writers Ink, and we are horrified at Priti Patel’s new proposals for dealing with refugees and asylum seekers (Priti Patel to reveal proposals for offshore centres for asylum seekers, 5 July). Having suffered intolerable ordeals to reach the UK, undergoing pain or terror, whether in our countries of origin or on our journeys, we need to be treated with humanity, decency and respect.The bill should exercise compassion rather than criminalise refugees simply because they are forced to deploy unconventional methods to enter the country. The reason for the dangerous and illegal journeys into the UK is the draconian system that prevents refugees from entering this country through legal means. Crucially, Patel needs to be aware of the grave danger of returning migrants to their home countries, given that numerous regimes would be only too pleased to receive the deportees in order to kill them. Continue reading...

As Todd Haynes unveils his documentary about them, we rate the best work of a band who overturned and reinvented rock’n’rollThe Velvets recorded two versions of Ride Into the Sun: a fabulous 1969 instrumental laden with fuzz guitar and a hushed 1970 vocal take backed by organ. Somewhere between the two lies one of their great lost songs; Lou Reed’s disappointingly flat 1972 solo version doesn’t do it justice at all. Continue reading...

Speechwriter for Kofi Annan at the United Nations who drew on his experience as a commentator for British newspapersIn 1998 Edward Mortimer, who has died aged 77, joined the staff of the UN secretary general Kofi Annan as chief speechwriter and later director of communications. Since the UN’s foundation at the end of the second world war, its leadership had often lacked breadth and depth of vision, with the exception of the eight years under the Swede Dag Hammarskjöld until his death in a plane crash in Africa in 1961.Like him, Annan, who was from Ghana, believed that the UN represented more than the sum of its member states, and could act as a prime mover in undertaking initiatives. Now, once more, the words of the secretary general mattered, moved, provoked and were remembered, and Mortimer had a key role in making that happen. Continue reading...

He may have an impressive film CV, but the actor is destined to be remembered as The Office’s resident dork. He talks about why he was perfect for the role, his new movie, Don’t Tell a Soul – and his love for Steve CooganSome actors associated with a signature role will tire of talking about it. No such preciousness from Rainn Wilson, who appears on camera from his Los Angeles home wearing a grey T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Scranton”. That Pennsylvania city provided the setting for the US version of the mockumentary sitcom The Office, which ran for nine widely adored, award-winning series. Wilson earned three Emmy nominations for playing the livid, disagreeable Dwight, the Rust Belt equivalent of Mackenzie Crook’s Gareth. Today’s beard and baseball cap, as well as his chipper demeanour, banishes all memory of the pasty face, DIY haircut and startled expression he wore in that show.Wilson has starred in everything from Juno to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and the Jason Statham shark thriller The Meg, but he knows that any conversation will inevitably lead back to The Office. “Dwight is the part I’m best known for and always will be,” says the 55-year-old. “And that’s fine with me.” First, though, there is his new thriller to discuss. In Don’t Tell a Soul, a cross between A Simple Plan and Paranoid Park, he plays an unassuming security guard who gives chase after encountering two teenage brothers (Fionn Whitehead and Jack Dylan Grazer) stealing from a house in rural Kentucky. During the pursuit, he plunges into a hole in the forest floor, which leaves the boys with absolute power over him. The question is not whether they will use it, but how. Continue reading...

Labour says ‘washing hands’ of conflict now could lead to bloodier war and wider Taliban controlBoris Johnson has announced the end of Britain’s military mission in Afghanistan following a hasty and secretive exit of the last remaining troops 20 years after the post 9/11 invasion that started the “war on terror”.The prime minister confirmed to MPs that the intervention, which claimed the lives of 457 British soldiers, would end even as the insurgent Taliban were rapidly gaining territory in rural areas, as UK, US and other forces withdrew. Continue reading...

Details of assassination of President Jovenel Moïse emerge as political uncertainty grips nationDisturbing details of the murder of Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse, are emerging as the Caribbean country grapples with the fallout from what was officially the first assassination of a serving president in the Americas since the shooting of John F Kennedy in 1963.Moïse, who had been facing mounting public anger over what critics called his reluctance to relinquish power, was shot dead in the early hours of Wednesday at his home in a wealthy suburb of the capital, Port-au-Prince. The first lady, Martine Moïse, was wounded and evacuated to Miami where she is reportedly in a stable condition. Continue reading...

Conservative Rupert Matthews claims BLM ‘wants to defund the police and has put officers in hospital’The police and crime commissioner for Leicestershire has said he has banned his staff from communicating with Black Lives Matter groups.In a diary-style article for Conservative Home, Rupert Matthews wrote that on his third day in office he told his staff not to have any contact with BLM. Continue reading...

The actor best known as Boycie on his school skiffle band, novelty Christmas single, early days as an estate agent and being called backstage by Bill WymanI grew up with the skiffle artists of the 50s such as the Vipers and Lonnie Donegan. You could play most of the songs if you had a guitar, so we formed a band: Johnny and the Bandit. That sort of music was banned at my school, so we had to practise in the changing rooms. The acoustics were good because it was quite echoey. We had a couple of guitars, a banjo and even a washboard. I was the singer. We thought we were the business. Plus, we were doing something illegal, which made it even more exciting. Continue reading...

Court in Rome hears lawyers say authorities moved too little, too late to tackle pandemic

Líra Könyv made to pay £600 for failing to clearly indicate the story featured ‘a family that is different than a normal family’A bookshop chain in Hungary has been fined for selling a children’s story depicting a day in the life of a child with same-sex parents, with officials condemning the picture book for featuring such families.The picture book, Micsoda család!, is a Hungarian translation combining two titles by US author Lawrence Schimel and illustrator Elīna Brasliņa: Early One Morning, which shows a young boy’s morning with his two mothers, and Bedtime, Not Playtime!, in which a young girl with two fathers is reluctant to go to sleep. Continue reading...

Prosecutors granted more time to prepare cases against those arrested under sweeping national security lawProsecutors have been granted another months-long delay to the trial of 47 pro-democracy politicians, activists, and campaigners in Hong Kong who held pre-election primaries declared illegal under its sweeping national security law.A court on Thursday was originally expected to hear an application to transfer the case to a higher court with powers to order longer jail sentences, but prosecutors instead requested an 11-week adjournment, saying they needed more time to prepare, local media reported. Continue reading...

Locals say they’re being treated more harshly than those in the eastern suburbs where the outbreak started

Prime minister says even the most ‘optimistic scenarios’ in the original vaccine rollout plan would not have helped NSW now

New rules to come into effect from 19 July potentially opening up many tourist hotspots to English holidaymakers

Fans share jokes and clips including a stadium rendition of Whole Again and mocking Boris Johnson’s shirtAs sure as night follows day, social media memes follow a big sporting event, and so England fans on Wednesday night enjoyed sharing jokes and clips of events around the Euro 2020 semi-final win almost as much as the victory itself.Mason Mount was showered with praise after this video clip of him giving his shirt to a young girl in the Wembley crowd took off on social media. Her emotional reaction summed up how many England fans must have felt after such a long wait to reach a major tournament final again. Continue reading...

Dozens of WeChat accounts have been blocked and deleted without warningAn online clampdown of social media accounts associated with China’s campus LGBTQ movement has sparked outrage, solidarity and backlash against the authorities’ treatment of the country’s sexual and gender minorities.Dozens of WeChat accounts run by LGBTQ university students were blocked and then deleted on Tuesday, without warning. Some of the accounts – a mix of registered student clubs and unofficial grassroots groups – had operated for years as safe spaces for China’s LGBTQ youth, with tens of thousands of followers. Continue reading...

After our GCSEs, my first girlfriend and I took our tent to Reading festival and found levity in a very difficult yearThere is a peculiar romance to British summer music festivals. Some kind of consequence-free hedonism emerges when you combine bouts of torrential rain with the rancid stench of overflowing chemical toilets, the stomach-fizz of morning beers, and the itch of last night’s glitter pressed into your unwashed skin. It makes for the perfect conditions to distract the head and, for once, indulge the heart.It was the summer of 2010 when I camped out at Reading festival, the August blow-out that 16-year-olds from the UK’s south-east use as a putrid marker of their transition from secondary school to college; from adolescence to something approaching young adulthood. Continue reading...

New cases for NSW, Queensland and Northern Territory as Sydney remains in lockdown. This blog is now closed

After playing psychopaths and priests, the actor is starring in an almost unbearably tragic role. He discusses bullies, broodiness and blockbustersJames Norton’s latest film, Nowhere Special, has a premise so tragic it should be completely unfilmable. He plays John, a 35-year-old single father who is given a few months to live, and has to find a new family for his three-year-old son. Even before you factor in the incredible performance by Daniel Lamont, who was only four when the film was shot, it sounds too obviously a tear-jerker, especially from Uberto Pasolini, a director known for Still Life, a very finely drawn, understated film in 2013, which comes at death from a much more oblique angle.In fact, the film slips deftly past any obvious poignance to create something much more complicated, with arresting performances from Norton and his tiny co-star. “Credit must be given to the director,” Norton insists, on Zoom from his home in London. “He said: ‘I don’t want this to be brutally sad, I want this to be about life as much as it is about death.’” This you might characterise as a standard actorly response, generous and modest. Then there’s more: “My taste is aligned to that kind of performance. But the subject is so charged and universal, you feel the responsibility sometimes as an actor to show that you recognise how operatic and sad this is. Every time, I would give him a performance that was big, and schmaltzy and gooey, and he was like: ‘Yeah, I know you really liked that, but I’m not going to use it.’” Continue reading...

Dozens have died seeking reforms to African kingdom where many are dubious about authorities’ offer of talksAuthorities in Eswatini have promised a “national dialogue” in an attempt to avert further unrest after dozens died and hundreds of businesses were burned down in weeks of protest in Africa’s only remaining absolute monarchy.The move has been greeted with scepticism by opposition leaders and analysts, with fears of further violence in the landlocked country of 1.3 million if there are no significant reforms to the autocratic political system. Continue reading...

Gladys Berejiklian urges people to restrict movement and not visit family members unnecessarily during Sydney lockdown, as Queensland records two coronavirus cases

Families spread across rich and poor countries are acutely aware of relatives’ lack of access to vaccineFor months she had been dreaming of it and finally Susheela Moonsamy was able to do it: get together with her relatives and give them a big hug. Throughout the pandemic she had only seen her siblings, nieces and nephews fully “masked up” at socially distanced gatherings. But a few weeks ago, as their home state of California pressed on with its efficient vaccination rollout, they could have a proper reunion.“It was such an emotional experience, we all hugged each other; and with tears in our eyes, we thanked God for being with us and giving us the opportunity to see each other close up again and actually touch each other,” she says. “We never valued a hug from our family members that much before.” Continue reading...

This Italian adaptation of London’s 1909 novel follows the ascent of a proletarian novelist to popular success which proves a bitter disappointmentThe terrible loneliness of success is the subject of this absorbing movie, equal in some strange way to the loneliness of failure; it’s also about the secret and shameful feeling that failure is the one truthful state of being, which the successful person has had to renounce. Martin Eden is also about capitalism and enterprise and the great 20th-century promise that hard work and an audacious gamble on a certain career path at the start of one’s life can carry anyone, however lowly born, on to riches. And more importantly, it is about the dizzying promise that the mass communication made possible by commerce will make art itself lucrative: that actually writing novels, capturing the imagination of millions, could exalt you to heroic celebrity.Martin Eden is a free adaptation of the 1909 novel by Jack London, author of The Call of the Wild and himself one of the first authors to make a fortune from writing. Director and co-writer Pietro Marcello has transplanted the action from California to Naples, but kept the English name of his hero. The action is interspersed with archive footage, some evidently colourised, some shot by Marcello himself; although set before the first world war, these dreamlike archive moments are taken from any time in the century, evidently up to the 1960s and 70s, as if Martin’s story has been a premonition of popular history. Marcello used this newsreel-collagist technique in his recent documentary For Lucio, about singer-songwriter Lucio Dalla. Continue reading...

A container ship anchored at Dubai’s Jebel Ali port caught fire, causing a huge explosion that sent tremors across the United Arab Emirates’ commercial hub. The explosion was seen kilometres away and unleashed a shock wave through the city

David Beckham, Adele and Dua Lipa salute team’s achievement as fans party in the wake of Euro 2020 semi final victory over DenmarkEngland fans are 90 minutes away from seeing the men’s national team win a major tournament for the first time in more than half a century after Harry Kane sent the Three Lions to the Euro 2020 final.After the captain scored the winning goal on the rebound after his extra-time penalty had been saved,60,000 fans in Wembley were sent into delirium along with millions of fans around the country. Continue reading...

I quit my job for a transatlantic romance and spent June and July getting drunk with my English girlfriend as her friends got hitchedMost transatlantic romances are, out of necessity, brief: a chance meeting, an expensive visit apiece, followed by an eventual admission of defeat. But this one, begun in the winter of 1990 while I was living in New York, wasn’t quite over with. After that second expensive visit, I booked another flight to London for early June. It seemed unlikely that the magazine where I worked would give me the whole summer off for the sake of love, so I quit.I had just turned 27, and I thought it might be the last opportunity to do something grossly irresponsible, to ignore consequences, to take an extended romantic holiday – featuring plenty of travel, sex and alcohol – before going home to start paying for my choices. I fully expected the relationship to spring a leak at some point; my new English girlfriend had made it pretty clear that a strong part of my appeal was my sell-by date. Continue reading...

In 2003, the destruction of one particular statue in Baghdad made worldwide headlines and came to be a symbol of western victory in Iraq. But there was so much more to it – or rather, so much lessThe abiding image of the Iraq war in 2003 was the toppling of a statue of the country’s dictator, Saddam Hussein. It was an image relayed across the world as a symbol of victory for the American-led coalition, and liberation for the Iraqi people. But was that the truth? Putting up a statue is an attempt to create a story about history. During the invasion of Iraq, the pulling down of a statue was also an attempt to create a story about history. The story of Saddam’s statue shows both the possibilities, and the limits, of making a myth.Operation Iraqi Freedom, as it was called by those running it, began on 20 March 2003. It was led by the US at the head of a “coalition of the willing”, including troops from Australia, Poland and the UK. President George W Bush claimed that the aims of the operation were clear: “to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people”. He continued: “The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder … It is a fight for the security of our nation and the peace of the world, and we will accept no outcome but victory.” This justification for war was hotly disputed at the time, and has been ever since. Continue reading...

With its spires, castle and monuments, the Scottish capital’s glorious panorama is world famous. Now a looming new addition has appeared – and is causing outrage

The 1921 attack was one of the worst episodes of racist violence in US history, with as many as 300 Black people killed. Now Phoebe Stubblefield, a descendent of survivors, is helping to recover the bodiesPhoebe Stubblefield’s parents were born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She spent summers there as a child. Yet she did not hear about the Tulsa race massacre until she was nearly 30. The event in 1921, which was shrouded in secrecy for decades, was one of the worst episodes of racist violence in US history; hundreds of people were killed in the racially motivated attack on a peaceful, prosperous Black community.Neither the Black community who bore the brunt of it nor their white neighbours who perpetrated it spoke publicly of the massacre. Indeed, for the next 75 years, there was no official recognition that it had even occurred. Like many of those connected to the incident, Stubblefield’s family barely mentioned it. She remembers her mother’s response when she first brought it up: “She said: ‘Oh yeah, your Aunt Anna lost her house.’ That was the complete family history regarding the Tulsa race massacre. And I was like: ‘Who’s Aunt Anna?’” Continue reading...

Police say another two attackers have been detained and that assailants will be ‘killed or captured’Haiti’s security forces have killed four members of a group of “mercenaries” who assassinated President Jovenel Moïse in his home, police chief Leon Charles has said.“The police is still in combat with the assailants,” Charles said in a televised briefing late on Wednesday, “We blocked them en route as they left the scene of the crime. Since then, we have been battling with them.” Two of the attackers had been detained. Of the rest he said: “They will be killed or captured”. Continue reading...

Verdict on Bob Loughman’s parliamentary boycott is uncharted political territory for the Pacific island nationNext week Vanuatu’s court of appeal will sit to decide the political fate of the prime minister, Bob Loughman, and 18 other MPs. The supreme court ruled in June that they had vacated their seats after a three-day boycott of parliament by the government side.Even in a country accustomed to political intrigue and surprise, it is a precarious moment. So how did we get here, who are the key players and what might happen next? Continue reading...

Fiery blast on container ship was powerful enough to be seen from space by satelliteA container ship anchored at Dubai’s port caught fire late on Wednesday, causing a huge explosion that sent tremors across the United Arab Emirates’ commercial hub.The blaze sent up giant orange flames on a vessel at the crucial Jebel Ali port, the busiest in the Middle East, and unleashed a shock wave through the skyscraper-studded city, causing walls and windows to shake in neighbourhoods as far as 25 kilometres (15 miles) away. Continue reading...

Footballers now have to match the ‘immortals of 1966’ after reaching their first final for 55 yearsThe joy of England’s footballers reaching a major final for the first time in 55 years is given due justice on the front pages of the papers – along with a sense of relief that the team finally managed to do the job.The Mirror’s headline is simply “Finally” noting that Harry Kane’s winning goal means that “after 55 years of hurt Harry and his heroes beat the Danes … now to match the heroes of 1966”. Continue reading...

You can’t move frictionlessly from being in a relationship to being close friends, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. Something needs to changeI’m living with my ex-partner after mutually deciding to break up a few weeks ago. We rent a two-bed house and have a cat. The issue is my ex wants to stay in this living situation for the next few months and has no urgency to find alternative accommodation. I feel the urgency but don’t know what to do and whether to move back with my parents or stick it out.I feel this is very unhealthy and the ritualistic habits developed over time are still happening … dinner, sleeping in the same bed, cleaning duties, shopping. Am I unrealistic in thinking that we should have some physical distance between us, or is this normal? I’m not sure what to do. It may sound selfish but I don’t want to be the one with all the upheaval, especially as I have worked so hard to make this house a home.