2026/08/18 Daily Edition

Eclipse witnessed by tens of millions across western Europe as enthusiasts gather along path of totality Solar eclipse 2026 across Europe: in pictures Cruise ships, quiet towns and an all-day festival: millions flock to eclipse viewing spots across Europe in Land’s End, Cornwall The roads and car parks of west and north Cornwall are clogged as people gather to watch the solar eclipse...

Denise Dresser, who was previously the C.E.O. of Slack, is the latest in a string of executives to leave the artificial intelligence start-up.

Beginning in Russia’s remote Arctic north, the eclipse traced an arc over much of western Europe – with the best views in Spain, Iceland and Greenland It was a moment of awe shared by millions across Europe: an eclipse that blocked out the sun, plunging parts of the continent into a daytime darkness in which temperatures dropped and birds suddenly went quiet. Wednesday’s eclipse began in Russia’s remote Arctic north, going on to trace an arc over much of western Europe. From the UK to northern Italy, tens of millions of people turned to the sky as the light of the setting sun was almost completely blocked out...

Each year the Guardian runs a competition to find the invertebrate of the year. To They each nominate an incredible invertebrate that you might never have heard of, and argue why their choice should be crowned the winner. Vote for your favourite now and the winner will be crowned on 17 August Invertebrate of the year 2026: vote for your favourite Support the Guardian: theguardian.com/sciencepod..

Some see them as sinister or hunt them for ritual use but these birds play a vital role in nature's cycle.

Two British tourists ​who were killed in a helicopter crash ​in Greece while on their honeymoon have been named.

The top of the world is warming faster than any other region. For 20 years, the Arctic Report Card chronicled the extraordinary transformation.

Andy Green, a 64-year-old retired Royal Air Force pilot from Britain, was already the only person to break the sound barrier on land. “The ground comes at you very, very quickly,” he said.

Canada is seeking a deal to dodge further economic pain at the hands of the Trump administration on midnight Tuesday. But at what cost?

My child and I were bonding over our hit-and-miss approach to reaping crops. But with heatwaves pushing more of Britain into drought, it’s starting to feel like a luxury we can’t afford For the first time in my life, I live in a home that has real outdoor space. What a concept! There are no downsides to a garden. Back in spring, I made grand plans – I watched all the TikToks, I bought seeds and trays and pots and grow bags, I ordered soil, a trowel and a watering can. I knew what I was after: super-tiny-scale subsistence farming with a side of Zen. A little fruit, a little veg, lots of flowers to attract pollinators. And I knew I wanted my elder child to gain an understanding of how things come to be and how to cope if and when they fail. We love a tomato side salad, so that was the first thing we attempted. The seedlings flourished and then died in the first heatwave of the season. An omen, surely. The dahlias, ranunculus and freesias refused to grow, let alone bloom. My enthusiasm began to wane...

The family of a Palestinian-American man remain holed up in his West Bank home for more than a week, after Israeli settlers laid siege to the house and the Israeli army then turned it into a closed military area.

BBC Verify breaks down what the party says it wants to do to cut the benefits bill - and how realistic it is.

US president says conversations with Kim Jong Un at a 'positive' stage and slams Seoul for refusing to join war on Iran.

A vivid and hopeful study of how culture endures in the midst of extreme violence Towards the end of her subtly piercing book about art in wartime, Charlotte Higgins recounts an autumn visit to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, in the north-east of the country, a short drive from the Russian border. In a tranquil park, she sees a man standing in a stream, making stones balance on top of each other in a teetering tower – “a metaphor of life in that city,” she writes, “that would have seemed too obvious for a novel”. Still, as a good novelist would, Higgins doesn’t seem to beg telling details from a place so much as have them leap to her open eye and ear. The cartoons a boy is watching that fall silent in a power cut, allowing the distant boom of explosions on the frontline to be heard. A cityscape tattooed on a young poet’s arm that cuts off suddenly where skin from his leg was grafted after he was torn up by shrapnel. Cataracts of larkspur, as Higgins describes them, in a field in the frontline Donbas region, “pouring down the hill, pooling at the bottom into a great lake of blooms … Larkspur thrives on ground where there has been recent disturbance.”..

Tupac Shakur was shot dead in an act of "revenge", Las Vegas jury heard on Monday, as the legendary West Coast rapper's assassination trial got underway more than three decades after his death.

FIFA’s Director of Operations Kevin Lamour has been dismissed from his post. He had strongly criticised Gianni Infantino and his plan to set up a commercial company.

The Chinese government announced new border regulations in late July in a move seen as expanding state control over its citizens. The new rules, which come into effect on September 15, tighten checks on travellers and provide new grounds for restricting Chinese citizens from leaving the country, including exit bans of up to three years in some cases.

Andy Burnham’s doubts about Zoom interviews apply more widely to a hiring process being transformed by AI Almost half of UK jobseekers have found themselves pitching to an AI bot, according to recent research, leading many to give up in frustration. As one despairing applicant lamented in the pages of the Guardian a few months ago: “The hiring process has become so mechanised, both figuratively and literally, that it’s hard to believe that the people who end up getting hired aren’t merely the best at gaming the system.” For young people especially, experiencing repeated rejection without interacting with a single human being is alienating as well as disappointing. It was encouraging, therefore, to hear Andy Burnham voice concerns about online recruitment processes on a recent employment-focused podcast. Describing the jobseeking environment for young people as “harsh”, the prime minister criticised the widespread use of interviews on Zoom and Microsoft Teams, and questioned whether applicants could properly convey their personal qualities without a face-to-face meeting. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please..

Open letter signed by 40 academics including Nobel winner Joseph Stiglitz and Kate Pickett, co-author of The Spirit Level Forty prominent progressive academics are urging Andy Burnham’s government to join a new global push to tackle inequality. The experts include Nobel winner Joseph Stiglitz, University College London professor Mariana Mazzucato, vice-chancellor of the London School of Economics Larry Kramer, and Kate Pickett, co-author of The Spirit Level...

The PM’s net zero pragmatism may please some voters, but as parts of the country go up in flames, it’s an increasingly hard sell When the siren sounded on Friday night, my first thought was fire. Weeks of unrelenting sun in the normally soggy Peak District, where I was visiting my mum, have bleached green valleys a dangerously dry, crispy blond. One of her neighbours had earlier pointed out an ominous cloud of smoke on the horizon, coming from one of the wildfires raging all summer on the moor. When that harsh, discordant shriek blared from every mobile phone in the house, I was half-braced for an evacuation order, not what turned out to be a faintly melodramatic warning to the nation to lay off the barbecues. A false alarm, of sorts, but one that felt uneasily like a wake-up call...

Many buyers wait in hope of better deal, although there are hotspots in Scotland and northern England Half of homes in Great Britain are taking longer to sell than last year as volatile conditions in the mortgage market amid the Iran war prompt buyers to “wait and see” if they can get a better deal, according to a report. As the Middle East conflict continues to unfold, the property platform Zoopla said homes in 180 out of 363 local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales were taking longer to sell compared with a year ago...

Pangram excels at distinguishing chatbot-generated words from human writing. But it’s not reliable for spotting artificial images.

The change, which has been welcomed by campaign groups, will come into effect in England from April.

Trump’s new order targeting ‘birth tourism’ faces an uphill legal battle after an earlier Supreme Court defeat.

Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said the 60-day negotiation deadline set out under the June Iran-US memorandum of understanding for a lasting settlement had been rendered null and void by "violations" committed by Washington. After meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, US envoy Jared Kushner said Monday he hoped to see the start of Hamas's disarmament within "30 days". Follow the latest developments.

Cameroon’s women’s football team received a hero’s welcome in Yaounde after winning its first Women’s Africa Cup

Nearly a decade after fighting ended in northern Iraq, the climate crisis has brought extreme heat and a water shortage, making life almost impossible The first thing that strikes visitors arriving in Faka, a small village in Sinjar district, northern Iraq, is the silence. No children play in the streets. No shops are open. Roofless houses stretch across the hillside, their walls pockmarked by shellfire, while weeds and wild grasses grow through collapsed living rooms. A decade after Islamic State (IS) swept across the region, war remains visible everywhere. But according to the people who returned, another enemy has quietly taken its place. Rajab Mohammed says the problem in his village of Faka is no longer Islamic State but water and jobs..

German authorities seize dinghies and life jackets during their first raids under a new law that cracks down on smuggling.

The boy shot and killed a schoolmate at a junior high school before fatally turning the gun on himself, the mayor of Zamboanga City said.

In Chocó, a predominantly Afro-Colombian and Indigenous region, “pain, hunger and homelessness await” survivors of last week’s earthquake, the governor says.

Many hoped that the march of technology would usher in an egalitarian utopia – but some foresaw the threat it would pose to liberal society. Why did nobody listen? One of the stranger things about this dizzying, headlong moment in time is that it doesn’t have much of a past. Everything is about the future of this, the future of that: the future of work, the future of humanity, the future of the planet. It’s as if everyone is screaming (some ecstatically, most terror-stricken): robots are taking over the world! Meanwhile, you can’t put down your phone, unplug, delete your AI apps, tell Zoom to piss off; it feels as if you are racing toward something, and can’t stop, or look back, or think straight. But of course this weird moment in history does have a past. It comes from somewhere. It wasn’t inevitable. Things could have turned out differently. They still can. And if you look back, one thing you’ll see is that a lot of people saw this all coming. They foresaw our present when it was still the future. They thought it might turn out fabulously, a computer utopia. And they worried it might turn out disastrously. Above all, they issued warning after warning about the rise of what I call the artificial state, the replacement of the liberal democratic nation-state, the consent of the governed, with the rule of people by machines. They warned of a future in which democratic deliberation would be replaced by prediction by calculation, the public sphere would be supplanted by data-driven commerce, and drones would take the place of the demos. Why didn’t anyone listen? The new underworld is made up of innocent and well-intentioned people who work with slide rules and calculating machines and computers which can retain an almost infinite number of bits of information as well as sort, categorise, and reproduce this information at the press of a button. Most of these people are highly educated, many of them are PhDs, and none that I have met have malignant political designs on the American public. They may, however, radically reconstruct the American political system, build a new politics, and even modify revered and venerable American institutions – facts of which they are blissfully innocent...

Government plans network of nearly 200 specialist services to help those facing mental health crises.

Decades after being sexually abused, the author and doctor Frank Spinelli believed he had moved on emotionally. But alcohol destroyed his sense of security. He describes how he confronted his shame Not so long ago, Frank Spinelli seemed to have sorted out his life. He was happily married, working as a doctor and had a sideline writing medical thrillers. He thought he had dealt with the sexual abuse he had suffered as a child – not only had he helped bring the man who groomed and abused him to justice, but also he had written a memoir about it. “I felt that I had closure,” he says. “I had the good fortune of working with some amazing therapists and I believed I had done the work and moved past it and I was a healed person.” Little did he know that his recovery was fragile. The Covid pandemic took away his routine and structure: “All the external pillars that were tightly holding me together – the engagements at the office, the work trips.” Two years earlier, he and his husband had moved from Manhattan to a leafy suburb, from where he is speaking to me over a video call today. He was dealing with uncertainty and felt isolated. “We know one thing about shame: shame breeds in isolation.”..

Official results show incumbent receiving about 60 percent of votes, compared with ⁠38 percent for his main challenger.

Mayor Khymer Adan Olaso says the casualties in Zamboanga were both students and included the gunman.

At least 20 injured and dozens of fuel tankers destroyed as flames rip through warehouse near northern Kurdish city.

US President Donald Trump has revealed North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un has responded ‘very positively’

Thousands mourned Jason Arday in central London, and voiced anger over the Cambridge professor’s media treatment.

The 89-year-old - one of Europe's longest-serving monarchs - is suffering from a rare blood condition.

Trump said the US will "substantially reduce" joint military exercises with South Korea, citing his "very good relationship" with Kim Jong Un.

An MoD spokesperson responds by saying Britain stands "shoulder to shoulder" with Ukraine.

Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema won a second term on Tuesday after campaigning on his record of economic recovery, including a major debt restructuring deal. The 64-year-old faces pressure to deliver more jobs and opportunities as critics accuse his government of failing to ease poverty and becoming less tolerant of dissent.

Mark Carney will need to sell Canadians on any concessions made to the US as negotiators scramble to reach a deal to avoid Trump’s latest tariffs.

The Trump administration on Monday paused construction of a contentious border project in Texas' Big Bend National Park, as the head of Customs and Border Protection travelled to the area to assess the plans amid fierce bipartisan opposition over their potential impact on the remote landscape.

More than 800mm of rain was recorded in the South Korean city of Geoje, which triggered a landslide that killed one person Torrential downpours that have pounded southern parts of South Korea have killed one person and injured four others, officials have confirmed. Heavy rains have been recorded in South Gyeongsang province, including the city of Geoje, where the 800-mm deluge triggered a landslide, the interior and safety ministry said...

US president says Iran should 'put up the white flag of surrender' as the two nations’ MoU expired on Monday.

FIFA's third-highest-ranking official Kevin Lamour has left his post, the organisation confirmed Monday, after publicly criticising president Gianni Infantino's plan to sell stakes in major competitions to private investors. The departure comes as Infantino faces growing scrutiny over his leadership of world football's governing body.