2026/08/20 Daily Edition

England’s Cotswolds region offers bucolic splendor, cultural riches, ancient woodlands and Neolithic monuments, not to mention excellent shopping and dining.

President Trump’s decision to curtail the military exercises came as allies question the U.S. commitment to longstanding alliances.

Clément Vandenkerckhove was born to Belgium’s Prince Laurent before his marriage. He is now a prince himself, though he is not expected to have royal duties.

By now we know that charity, generosity and compassion are virtues that the US president doesn’t seem to have even in trace amounts Many years ago, in the crowded corridor of a Manhattan hotel, I was surprised to find myself standing face-to-face with Imelda Marcos, then the first lady of the Philippines. At that time, she was said to possess 3,000 pairs of shoes. I desperately longed to ask the wife of the dictatorial president Ferdinand Marcos why anyone could need all those shoes. And more importantly, why would someone spend so much of her country’s wealth on stiletto heels when so many citizens were so desperately poor? But natural reticence, good manners or simply fear prevailed, and I walked away...

Assembly George Square, Edinburgh The US comic’s troupe tell the tale of a special guest’s romantic encounter, in this case Travis’s frontman – but their incoherence makes for a scatty if fun show It’s a lovely format for improv: a special guest tells David Magidoff the story of some romantic (mis)adventure from their past, and Magidoff and pals turn it into an extemporised musical. Shades of Improbable theatre’s tender and funny Lifegame, many moons ago – although Making Love is more knockabout than that. Between musicians and improvisers, US actor and comedian Magidoff assembles no fewer than nine bodies on stage. It’s a lot, populating the stage with a surfeit of comic ideas, occasionally at the expense of the affaire du coeur that Travis frontman Fran Healy has offered up as raw material. Magidoff is a Travis fanboy; he has Healy sing two songs, and gets starry-eyed about it, before the show proper begins. In conversation, the genial Healy then volunteers a droll story of teenage infidelity, a drunken tryst with a girl from another part of Glasgow, which he wrongly thinks will insulate him from discovery. The improvisers, led by Magidoff, then take over, goofing into being several scenes in which young Fran and his pal cop off with two Protestant schoolgirls, then must face the music when their misdemeanour is exposed. At Assembly George Square, Edinburgh, until 23 August All our Edinburgh festival reviews..

On its anniversary, the author of a new book about the album explains the complex legacy and masterful musicianship of the 1986 classic It was the summer of 1984 and things weren’t going well for Paul Simon. The year prior, a blockbuster Simon and Garfunkel tour ended in bickering. Meanwhile, even though the 1980 single Late in the Evening reached the US Top 10, Simon’s last two albums had not sold very well, and his marriage to Carrie Fisher was starting to unravel. In the midst of all that the 43-year-old folk icon was steadily working on building a beach home out on the far end of Long Island. Many of Simon’s pilgrimages from Manhattan out to Montauk were soundtracked by a bootleg tape of accordion-heavy mbaqanga, a South African music style with jazz rhythms and bright guitar chords, he had received from a friend. It was on those drives that the seeds of Graceland, the crown jewel of Simon’s discography, were planted. “Many of us, in that day and age, found a moment of self-reflection – of being able to go deep inside ourselves – when we were in the car on these road trips,” said Ashley Kahn, whose new book, Days of Miracle and Wonder, follows the gestation process of Graceland. “If it wasn’t the radio, it was cassettes.”..

Led by a stellar cast of gen-Z newcomers, Alex Ullom’s directorial debut is an expertly crafted nightmare about a road trip gone wrong Time loops often feel like the movies’ favorite zany stylistic trick: Bill Murray plotting to win Andie MacDowell’s heart, a college student solving the mystery of her own grizzly murder, or as a ruse for Anne Hathaway to face off with a T rex. The excellent new indie horror film It Ends takes a different approach with its nightmarish depiction of a carful of friends stuck in an endlessly repeating day. It’s less of the moony japes of Groundhog Day or Palm Springs than an arthouse spin on the Prometheus myth, with the unfortunate souls of the film cursed not with death but with the torture of eternal life. After helping their friend move into a new apartment, a crew of aimless twentysomethings take a late-night drive to get food, but after GPS leads them deeper and deeper into a desolate forest, it’s clear that they have lost their way. When they pull over, they are set upon by a group of people that look eerily similar to them – young people who are dressed like they stepped out to the corner store and couldn’t find their way back. “They look scared,” one character says with a pained expression. “Why are they scared?”..

From feelgood romances to heated interactions, here are the films that best capture the seasonal moment Let’s begin at the end. 2 September 1962: the final night of the summer vacation; one last big blowout before adult life intervenes. George Lucas’s rambunctious salute to footloose youth paints vivid vignettes of Modesto, California, rocking around the clock with its loose-knit gaggle of characters. But this has one eye on the meter and knows that time is running short...

As her band hits the road, the metal trailblazer answers your questions on sexualisation in show business, finding inspiration in dreams and Spinal Tap moments on tour You wrote Bring Me to Life when you were 19. When you perform it now, how do you relate to the younger you? becgoldsmith I was in an abusive relationship, so Bring Me to Life was partly about processing the reality of that abuse and asking myself, what are you gonna do about it? Like, pick yourself up. I wrote it when I was crushing on my [now] husband, but the theme is about a quest for something bigger: opening your heart, finding more depth. It’s very empowering to perform it now in huge places; I’m very proud of the 19-year-old me that wrote it. Artists often reveal their influences through the songs they choose to cover. You’ve performed both It’s a Fire and Glory Box by Portishead. What drew you to those songs? VerulamiumParkRanger Beth Gibbons was one of my greatest vocal and musical inspirations. In the 90s when I was a young teen really feeling music I loved Portishead, Massive Attack and the whole trip-hop vibe. It was dark and cool, really different. Beth’s vocals have a way of teetering on an emotional crack, on the edge of wild, barely restrained emotion but never belting, which I always thought was so cool and enticing. I could happily do an entire album of nothing but Portishead covers...

From a cake-baking Elton John to possibly the most horrible man in the world, comedians reveal how they get in character – and how far they can push things In the Covid lockdowns, I was drawing all these silly things, and one day I drew Elton John as a scone. It brought me lots of joy. I love Elton John and everything he’s about – his music and his outfits – and my first job as a musician was in a bar in Soho, where I used to play his back catalogue. I turned the drawing into a very silly character, just for my enjoyment...

Promoted club have targeted players 6ft and above ‘Physicality is a big part of what you need to compete’ Frank Lampard has urged his Coventry players to impose themselves on the Premier League, calling on his side to ensure they have no regrets after Friday’s curtain-raiser against Arsenal. Coventry play their first top-flight game in 25 years at the home of the champions, four months after celebrating the Championship title. Lampard, who last managed in the Premier League with Chelsea three years ago, acknowledges there is a step up in class to navigate, but wants his players to embrace the challenge in front of them...

Joanna Boydell steps down after widespread criticism over company’s handling of guest safety issues Business live – latest updates The boss of Travelodge has resigned after a backlash over security failings at the hotel chain, including a case where a domestic abuser was given a key to a woman’s room before assaulting her. In a company statement on Thursday, Travelodge said Joanna Boydell had stepped down and been temporarily replaced by its finance chief, Ray Reidy. The company has launched a formal search for a permanent substitute...

Despite policy victories over Flock, Americans are finding themselves under similar monitoring by a new company – or unable to remove the original cameras Activists in Colorado thought they would be celebrating a victory against mass surveillance in December when the Longmont city council decided to let a contract with Flock Safety lapse. But that excitement was cut short only months later when lawmakers voted to approve a new vendor to install automated license plate readers (ALPRs) on the city’s streets...

The death toll from a ferry disaster in Zimbabwe last week rose to 94 on Tuesday, police said, with the recovery of two more bodies. Local Government Minister Daniel Garwe said Tuesday that the sinking was the "result of negligence and human error by the captain of the boat", and launched an investigation. FRANCE 24's Sharon Mazingaizo reports.

A revealing Prime Video documentary out Thursday explores the stubbornness, childhood scars and siege mentality still driving Novak Djokovic at 39 The moment comes roughly 20 minutes into the thoughtfully done Prime Video documentary, Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter, where Djokovic, winner of 24 grand slam titles and owner of the most-ever total weeks atop the ATP rankings (428), gets to the core of what has driven him to tennis royalty. Djokovic can rightfully claim the title of the greatest male tennis player who has ever lived (“It is as clear as it gets – he is the best of all time,” Andre Agassi says in the doc) but how tennis fans feel about him has always been more complex than the universal love adorned on contemporaries Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal...

If multiple antidepressants haven’t helped, there are other avenues to explore.

After a summer that has seen England and Wales experience the driest July since records began, rain is finally on the horizon. But with reservoirs at ‘exceptionally low’ levels, will there be enough rain to replenish stocks? Madeleine Finlay hears from Dr Anna Murgatroyd, a lecturer in hydrology at Newcastle University, about how much rain we need to see us through next summer, why we’re now at increased risk of floods, and what we can all be doing to take better care of our water supplies..

UEFA, AFC and CONCACAF understood to be considering no-confidence vote against FIFA's President Gianni Infantino.

Sunday’s match against Rennes moved at short notice Parc des Princes surface poses risk to ‘safety of players’ Paris Saint-Germain’s Ligue 1 opener against Rennes has been relocated at short notice, because of damage to their pitch following extreme heat this summer. Sunday’s match will now take place at Rennes’ Roazhon Park ground, the LFP (Ligue de Football Professionel) competitions committee announced late on Wednesday...

Fashion site also broke rules on labelling by using terms ‘leather’ or ‘suede’ for synthetic products The British online fashion seller Boohoo has been fined €2.3m (£2m) by France’s consumer watchdog ⁠for deceptive ⁠practices ​such as offering fake discounts. The Manchester-based firm, whose parent company renamed itself Debenhams Group last year, was found to have exaggerated the discounts it was offering, giving shoppers a false impression ⁠of the savings they were making, ​according to the directorate-general for competition, ‌consumer affairs and ‌fraud control...

More than 300 companies are displaying humanoid robots, industrial machines, service robots and other forms of embodied artificial intelligence at the Beijing's 2026 World Robot Conference. The five-day event kicked off on August 19, coinciding with Unitree's stock-market debut. The company, China's best-known humanoid robot maker, saw shares increase nearly six-fold on opening day. The conference comes as robotics emerges as a new front in the US-China rivalry.

South Korea has held a nationwide drill simulating an air raid to coincide with joint military exercises with the US.

Fans say Infantino has ‘lost the right to lead’ Statement also calls for Fifa to be reformed Fans’ groups worldwide have launched a petition calling for the resignation of Gianni Infantino as Fifa president and for wholesale reform of the organisation. Infantino is under mounting pressure after being forced to abandon plans to seek private investment to run Fifa tournaments, including the men’s and women’s World Cups...

After a chaotic season under four different coaches, Forest fans will be hoping Oliver Glasner can bring some stability Guardian writers’ predicted position: 11th (NB: this is not necessarily Will Unwin’s prediction but the average of our writers’ tips) Last season’s position: 16th..

US national deficit has doubled over the past decade with spending growing under Trump and Biden US gross national debt tops $40tn for first time Sign up for the US Breaking News email As the third leg of NBC’s Sunday Night Football crew alongside play-by-play man Al Michaels and the tart-tongued analyst Cris Collinsworth, Michele Tafoya was a paragon of deference and neutrality for 11 years as an NFL sideline reporter, dutifully relating boilerplate tactics, talking points and injury updates when she wasn’t nodding along to softball interviews or fumbling through hammy production gimmicks for viewers who might have been too offline to get the bit. She was almost pathologically committed to not doing anything to draw attention to herself or her gender in an era when sideline reporting was a fast track to national celebrity. Even her football takes hewed to the middle. (“New Orleans doesn’t want to lose to Atlanta twice in a season …”) Anyone who says they saw the 61-year-old emerging as a rightwing firebrand was watching a different game...

Lebanon handed over former General Adel Issa, as Syria steps up its pursuit of wanted members of the former regime.

Democrats have called World Liberty Trust Company a stark example of corruption but officials claim there is no insider dealing Two fundamentals underpin the business model of a new crypto bank partly owned by the Trump family, cryptocurrency experts tell the Guardian. World Liberty Trust Company received conditional approval this month from the US office of the comptroller of the currency (OCC) to start a bank. An entity affiliated with Donald Trump and his family members owns about 38% of the company. The agency is led by a political appointee of the US president...

French firm says the acquisition of Huel will help it grow in the nutritional sector.

Netanyahu’s government is using anti-Muslim fear to rally a Western right increasingly receptive to its message.

Six months into Prime Minister Tariq Rahman’s term, Bangladesh faces an energy crisis and rising prices.

Updates from Headingley; play starts 11am BST Day one report | Sign up for the Spin | Mail Jim In fact, that’s quite a decent, if soggy, rabbit hole to head down for an OBO discussion. The Butterfly Effect of rain delays. Which games and whose careers might have looked significantly different if the wet stuff hadn’t fallen at a particular time or other? I’ll wrack my brains, right now I’m just thinking of Tim Henman v Goran Ivanišević in the 2001 Wimbledon Semi Final:..

The U.S. debt has surpassed $40 trillion. And, a new census report on noncitizen voting that President Trump is touting has ties to a think tank aligned with him, raising concerns among experts.

The overall performance in 2025 was heavily influenced by developments in the beef sector which saw prices rise to record levels.

The bodies of two Belgian mountaineers who went missing in the Swiss Alps more than three decades ago have been found in a melting glacier.

A tanker has been boarded by six gunmen off the coast of Yemen.

Paris Saint-Germain moves its opening league game to Rennes after heatwave causes damage to pitch at Parc des Princes.

Just last year, Prince Harry said he couldn’t imagine ever bringing his family back to Britain.

Clément Vandenkerckhove was quietly brought into Prince Laurent's family at a town hall ceremony.

Siblings Cody and Kaleigh Brendle have grown up with the right to community integration. Now, they worry those protections for people with disabilities like them are being eroded.

One of the most famous dishes across West Africa is Jollof Rice — fragrant rice cooked down with spices, tomatoes and meat. But which version is best? A traveling festival aims to find out.

Al Jazeera exposes atrocities committed against the Rohingya ethnic minority group during Myanmar’s civil war.

The Taliban navigates a complex web of global trade and security alliances without gaining full political recognition.

The foreign minister says in an interview that Turkish military officials had visited the airbase as part of training.

Americans are backing progressives not because they want socialism, but because they want candidates who will fight for the working class Most discussions about the Democratic party in this election cycle focus on the remarkable rise of progressive Democrats, such as the Florida state representative Angie Nixon, a democratic socialist who scored an upset win in the Democratic US Senate primary on Tuesday. But an equally big story is the remarkable decline of corporate Democrats...

Police confirm Mutotwe Kafwaya's death after growing demands for information about his whereabouts.

Improvements in fire management however could mitigate increases by more than 70%, study shows Wildfires are projected to burn 39% more of Europe by the end of the century even in the best-case scenario for stopping the planet from heating, a study has found, unless action is taken to manage them better. The increase in hot, dry and windy weather that leads to small fires turning into raging infernos is to engulf more of Europe as carbon pollution pushes temperatures higher. In the worst-case scenario the researchers modelled, which would see global heating reach 3.6C above preindustrial levels, the burnt area would almost triple...

Australia's top diplomat Penny Wong on Thursday said relations with Israel were "difficult" after it dropped a probe into the killing of aid worker Lalzawmi "Zomi" Frankcom and her colleagues in Gaza. Australian national Frankcom was among a group of seven World Central Kitchen staff killed in April 2024 when their aid convoy was hit by an Israeli air strike. Their deaths triggered global outrage and a renewed push to ensure the safety of aid workers in Gaza.

The company’s fortunes cratered as demand for Covid-19 vaccines plummeted. But it was busy working on something else.

At least a half-dozen federal agencies have taken action against the state that has long led the nation in environmental protections.

The suspected launch on Thursday comes a day after North Korea shrugged off a U.S. decision to scale back military drills with South Korea in an apparent bid to resume diplomacy.

Moscow is taking advantage of Ukraine’s depleted stock of interceptors and is intensifying attacks, worsening the civilian death toll.

HRW calls for sanctions and suspension of military aid as dozens of Palestinian communities are at risk of erasure.

After years of pounding power plants and cities, Russia’s air war has taken aim at Ukraine’s supermarket warehouses.

Inflation deterring shoppers from spending, especially in the US, says sportswear fashion chain Sports fashion retailer JD has slashed its profit forecasts as cost-of-living pressures, fuelled by the US war on Iran, weighed on sales of trainers. JD Sports, which sells a range of sports brands including Nike and Adidas, said widespread inflation had hit shoppers’ wallets, resulting in falling sales across important markets such as the US, where it struggled to quickly shift trainers and other footwear...

Some women who entered Spain's North African enclave of Ceuta on July 30 as part of a mass migrant crossing say the hardships of ​sleeping rough as they wait to be registered are compounded by the threat and fear of sexual harassment. Authorities say that between 5,000 and 8,000 people remain in the enclave, more than two weeks after 72,000 people crossed from Morocco ⁠in a deadly border surge.

In the fast-growing field of data annotation, workers in a small city in south India train A.I. to improve how it performs tasks traditionally done by people.

For weeks, there has been no diplomatic progress, but also no full-scale fighting, as both sides seem to believe they can hold out longer than the other.

Eager cruise passengers zipping around New York's southern shores rush to the starboard bow: a humpback whale is up for air, a breathtaking sighting set against Manhattan's iconic skyline. Such scenes are no longer uncommon in the city's waterways, sparking excitement for animal lovers but also forcing new policy efforts to protect whales venturing into one of the busiest port regions in the United States.

NPR's Leila Fadel speaks with Bloomberg's Stacey Vanek Smith about why the U.S. Treasury acted to push down long-term bond yields and how that relates to the ballooning U.S. debt.

The federal debt is growing even faster than expected. Just paying interest on the $40 trillion balance is now the government's second-largest expense, outpacing everything but Social Security.