2026/08/27 Daily Edition

Rahul Gandhi sat in a dharna after Sahil Lochab, a 19-year-old who lost his eyesight after being hit by pellets during the protest, said the police had refused to register an FIR on his complaint

More than three quarters of all wildfires in the U.S. are caused by human behavior including accidents, negligence and arson.

Asian-American lawmakers in the US Congress have condemned a right-wing podcast that called for the forced internment of Chinese-Americans during a hypothetical war with Beijing, warning that such rhetoric fuelled hate against the community. The joint statement was released by congresswomen Grace Meng, chairwoman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (Capac), and Judy Chu, Capac’s chairwoman emerita, as well as congressman Ted Lieu, vice-chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. The...

The Reading Festival has begun and continues until Sunday, before tens of thousands leave on Monday.

The authorities accused the man of attacking César Gastélum, a young influencer, during a livestream in Sinaloa this month.

The controversial performer was investigated after chanting at an Al Quds Day demonstration in London.

"Dolly worked up until the day she died," her manager says, as her upcoming projects are revealed.

From quiet acts of generosity and life-changing gigs to singing for a professional puppeteer, Dolly Parton has had a profound impact on readers’ lives • Photo gallery: fans pay tribute to Dolly Parton I had the opportunity to meet her when I volunteered to work the Country Music Awards in the late 70s. Me and three other kids had Dolly all to ourselves for about 20 minutes. I remember with disbelief how she took several unhurried minutes with each of us and gave us her undivided attention for that time. She had no reason to do this. She was just as genuine as they come. Her philanthropy was exceptional. Her talent speaks for itself. I miss her already. Larry Lipman, Tennessee..

A welcome return to watch Cambridge brought back a whole lot of memories, nostalgia and contemplation On 11 February 1989, Cambridge United beat Hartlepool 6-0. My memories of the game are faint. The internet can’t even tell me who scored – perhaps Laurie Ryan got a couple. I do recall walking past some Hartlepool fans on Coldham’s Common who were peering into a brook. “Looking for a new centre forward?” Not a terrible joke from my dad as we walked past. There was polite laughter at least...

This week’s settlement without liability was pragmatic, but it doesn’t change the inevitability of further lawsuits around the world Not many people would count paying $18bn they didn’t expect to when they woke up that morning as a victory. Yet for Meta, the owners of Facebook and Instagram, the agreement with 52 US attorneys general to settle claims that it designed its products to be addictive to children, and misled people about their safety, could be described as a win of sorts. Meta denies wrongdoing, and the amount it plans to pay will be spread over a decade. Some of it is contingent on other big tech firms not named in its case coughing up too. The cash is chump change for Meta, which made around $60bn in profit last year. More damaging to the tech giant in the long run could be the agreement to unwind some of the mechanics it has spent two decades perfecting to keep us on its platforms. Chris Stokel-Walker is the author of TikTok Boom: The Inside Story of the World’s Favourite App..

An inquest has opened into the death of a British woman who became trapped in a wildfire while on holiday in Spain.

Officials from Iran and Qatar met on Thursday in Tehran for diplomatic talks on the strategic Strait of Hormuz, as a US naval blockade chokes oil supplies to Iran amid a domestic shortfall. The meetings follow a week of intense diplomacy in Iran involving separate meetings with officials from Oman and Pakistani seeking ways to end the war and reopen Hormuz.

Everton forward would cost in region of £80m Omar Marmoush set to join Savio in moving to Spurs Manchester City have identified Everton’s Iliman Ndiaye as a potential target following the £75m departure of Savio to Tottenham, with the Merseyside club valuing the wide forward in the region of £80m. With Omar Marmoush also expected to join Spurs for around £50m, Enzo Maresca wants to strengthen his attacking options. He is an admirer of Ndiaye, who has played 44 times for Senegal. He is contracted to Everton until 2029. City agreed a €37.5m (£34m) deal for the Palmeiras winger Allan Elias on Monday, and are also monitoring Liverpool’s Cody Gakpo...

Ratko Mladic was one of the most notorious figures of a war that killed over 100,000 people in the 1990s. He commanded his troops to "scorch the brains" of the Bosnian Muslims and boasted of being a "Serbian God."

Legislatures in nearly a dozen states have voted to legalize use of the technology, which can help homeowners reduce their rising electricity costs.

In a disrupted job market people are turning to heritage crafts such as bookbinding, metalwork and boatbuilding It’s a bleak moment for young people entering the workforce for the first time. For decades, a university degree seemed to promise a stable career – but entry-level white-collar jobs across almost all sectors are being disrupted by AI. Budding accountants, software engineers and junior lawyers increasingly find themselves displaced by cheap automation. Even creative fields are struggling against AI tech that can produce artwork, lengthy prose or complex design briefs in seconds...

Just under one million young people in the UK are not in education, employment or training (Neet).

Other social media firms are yet to respond, while the debate from campaigners is far from over.

An alleged underworld kingpin wrapped up his testimony at a high profile South African corruption enquiry on Wednesday. Vusimusi “Cat” Matlala returned to the witness stand before the Madlanga Commission looking into allegations including accusations that a suspended deputy police chief took kickbacks from criminals. Eunice Masson has more.

The killing of at least eight women in a week has sparked outrage in Cameroon.

The Treasure of Villena is a unique trove of almost ten kilos of gold, bowls, bottles and bracelets dating back to the Bronze Age.

In Italy, the government has drafted an update to its traffic code to fine pedestrians caught staring at their screens while crossing the road. The measure, set to be approved by mid-October, comes after several court rulings that have held careless pedestrians responsible for accidents.

Earth’s shadow will appear to be a reddish ‘blood moon’ due to the way sunlight is scattered by the atmosphere A near total lunar eclipse will be visible across large swathes of North and South America on Thursday night with millions of people expected to be able to see one of nature’s marvels. Lunar eclipses occur when Earth moves between the sun and the moon and its shadow is cast on to the lunar surface. Thursday night’s event will see 96% of the moon darkened by the Earth’s shadow at its peak moment...

Saudi football federation says it supports Infantino's ​'efforts' as he garners support to remain in power as president.

Settler violence threatens to collapse the fragile Palestinian economy.

Bag, camera and pipe belonging to 86-year-old are latest relics uncovered as glaciers melt due to global heating An 86-year-old mountaineer has been reunited with his backpack and climbing equipment after they emerged from a melting glacier in Austria – more than 60 years after he was forced to leave them there. Items including an ice axe, camera and a pipe dating from the 1950s or 1960s were discovered on the Sulztalferner glacier in Austria’s Tyrol region, at an altitude of 2,955 metres (9,700ft) above sea level, by a hiker in July...

It is not immediately known how many of the 50-plus mainly gold objects from the Treasure of Villena were taken.

Dinusha's 133 not out, his second century of the match and third in four innings, helps the hosts avoid defeat.

Foreign ministry warns against 'terrorism' of firing long-range British cruise missiles at targets in Russia.

Atletico Madrid rule out a transfer to the La Liga rivals for Alvarez, who is also reportedly being targeted by Arsenal.

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, John Brewin and Dan Bardell as Spurs win and Celtic lose in disastrous fashion in Europe Rate, review, share on Apple Podcasts and join the conversation on email. On the podcast today; decent wins for Spurs and Newcastle in the Carabao against two of the form sides in the Championship. There was a debut strike from Sávio, who looked very happy, while Newcastle welcomed Nico González as they rebuild their midfield. Spurs and Newcaste play each other on Saturday evening...

New satellite imagery added to scientists’ understanding of the events that precipitated the deadly flooding in Nepal and Tibet.

A general during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, he was convicted in the killing of some 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica, Europe’s deadliest massacre since World War II.

Former Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic, convicted of genocide in the 1992-95 ​war ‌in Bosnia, has died in ​the United Nations detention centre in ​The ​Hague after suffering several strokes, according to local media.

The pioneering Japanese artist talked openly about how her mental health and neurodivergence informed her creativity, paving the way for the likes of Turner prize winner Nnena Kalu Yayoi Kusama – who has died at the age of 97 – was 10 when she first started experiencing vivid hallucinations consisting of visual and aural disturbances, which she described as “flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots”. A drawing from 1939, of a woman in a kimono assumed to be her mother, shows her obliterated by those dots; they would become Kusama’s artistic obsession. She hallucinated flowers, too. “I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe”, she once said, when asked about that recurring motif. “I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness.” For Kusama, art making was a means of survival. “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live”, she said in a 2012 interview. In so doing, she became one of the most acclaimed and admired contemporary artists, staging happenings and influencing the pop art movement as a pioneering figure in the New York avant-garde. Her exhibitions and major retrospectives draw huge crowds. In 2022, due to enormous public demand, Tate Modern in London extended her Infinity Mirror Rooms show for a whole extra year (it ended up running until 2024)...

Company that runs Manchester, Stansted and East Midlands airports says passenger safety is unaffected Business live – latest updates Three UK airports have been hit by a “cybersecurity incident” in which the data of about 8.7 million customers was accessed, Manchester Airport Group (Mag) has said. The company, which operates Manchester Airport, London Stansted and East Midlands airport, said that “at no point has passenger safety or aviation security been compromised” during the incident and that neither Mag nor the system hacked held customers’ bank or payment details...

Al Jazeera reports from hospital in Kathmandu, after flash floods swept through several districts in Nepal.

Ivory Coast legend Toure takes Slovan Bratislava into the group phase two months after joining the Slovakian club.

The Iran war has reached its endgame: a costly stalemate. Six months after US and Israeli ⁠forces attacked Iran, killing its supreme leader and maiming his son and successor, the Iranian government is under economic siege, but it still holds power and believes it has time on its side. A threat by US President Donald Trump to impose crippling new sanctions on Iran faces a fundamental problem: Tehran is betting he will not take the final step to break the stalemate – aggressively enforcing...

The show was "rested" after co-host Andrew Flintoff was injured in a crash during filming in 2022.

The former presenter of BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour died earlier this year, eight days after the collision.

Ahead of the release of her 13th solo album, the fantastically titled Chakzilla, we rank the best of a sublime catalogue of funk, slow jams and tears-on-the-dancefloor disco Chaka Khan had harsh words for the “assholes” at her then record company, Warner Bros, who she felt under-promoted 1992’s The Woman I Am, her first album in four years. Listening to Love You All My Lifetime’s cocktail of funk and contemporary R&B, you wonder if she didn’t have a point. There’s no obvious reason why it wasn’t huge hit...

Letters obtained by Guardian and AP contradict testimony that 2019 visit to Samoa had ‘nothing to do with vaccines’ Newly obtained documents indicate that the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, lied during two congressional hearings last year, telling lawmakers who held the key to his confirmation that a 2019 visit to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines”. Letters obtained by the Guardian and the Associated Press contradict that testimony. In one he wrote to the Samoan prime minister before the trip, Kennedy explicitly said he wanted to study the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in the Pacific island nation. In it, he used the words vaccine or vaccination eight times...

Reform and the Conservatives are willing to mislead the public, but as environment secretary, I believe we must be honest – and act boldly This long, hot summer has brought our third drought in five years and the driest July in almost two centuries. We’ve seen wildfires burn down homes and now face the risk of flash floods as we move into autumn. It should be a wake-up call for those saying that concerns about the climate crisis are overblown; that we should simply sit back and do nothing; or row back on attempts to restore our natural environment. As the new environment secretary, I won’t let that happen. No one who has experienced this summer in the UK should be in any doubt that our climate is already changing. We know the future holds warmer, wetter winters, hotter, drier summers, and more extreme weather. Angela Eagle is the secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs..

French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu is in the French island of Mayotte for a two-day visit, accompanied by six ministers. On the agenda are discussions about the island’s reconstruction, more than a year and a half after Cyclone Chido struck. Lecornu says he shares the impatience of the people of Mayotte and wants to “provide solutions”.

A glacier collapse high in the Himalayas on Wednesday triggered catastrophic flooding along the Nepal-Tibet border.

The outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola in Uganda is over but it is still not under control in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo. The Congolese government says there have been more than 2,700 deaths and more than 5,600 cases of Ebola and that transmission remains active.

France 24's Leela Jacinto takes a look at how the extreme geography of Nepal and Tibet, dominated by the Himilaya mountains, contributed to the initial confusion over the cause of catastrophic floods that have killed at least 180 people - now believed to be the result of a glacial collapse.

Artists, scholars and fans celebrated Ms. Kusama as a cultural giant who helped bring Japanese art to the masses.

(Reprise) The crossover star’s introspective sixth album is full of memories of his mother, who died in 2025, bringing his dextrous guitar to songs rooted in tradition and yearning On the face of it, 2025 was a landmark year for Billy Strings. His fifth album, Highway Prayers, won him his third Grammy. The first bluegrass album in more than 22 years to debut at the top of the US album sales chart, it confirmed him as the genre’s biggest crossover star in decades. He was feted by everyone from Bob Dylan to Post Malone to Willie Nelson, the latter describing him as “the John Coltrane of bluegrass”, a pretty impressive soubriquet in anyone’s book. As the New York Times noted, he was now capable of filling the arena-sized venues that his idols – Doc Watson, Clarence White, Tony Rice, Béla Fleck – could never have dreamed of performing in, packing them out with an audience that look less like traditional bluegrass aficionados than Deadheads: a vast, mobile, hippy-ish army that call themselves Goats. They’re presumably drawn by the ease with which Strings occupies the no man’s land between country and expansive, psychedelically informed improvisation, his willingness to put acoustic guitar through umpteen effects pedals and stretch out songs for 20 minutes on stage. It’s a side of Strings’ music that’s only hinted at on Highway Prayers’ follow-up: as Burn the Other End and Lucid Daydream draw to an end, they briefly unravel into a kind of abstraction that you can imagine as a jumping-off point for heady, out-there exploration live. But So Much for Goodbyes is an album more concerned with introspection, and understandably so. In the midst of 2025’s successes, Strings’ mother died of an overdose. His chaotic upbringing is a matter of record. His father died of a heroin overdose when he was two, both his mother and his stepfather were addicted to meth and he left home at 14 on the grounds that “there was no food in the house and my parents were strung out”. But Strings said he had “no idea” she had relapsed, and her death seeps into every corner of the album: its title and cover art – based on a collage his mother was working on the night she died; the concluding instrumental that bears her name, Debra’s Waltz; the songs that, on the surface, appear to have nothing to do with her passing...

Analysis by Institute for Policy Studies found that between 2019 and 2025, CEO compensation increased 41.4% The average CEO of the US’s 100 largest, lowest-paying corporations earned 614 times more than their average worker last year, according to an analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). IPS’s latest executive excess report analyzed compensation at the 100 S&P 500 corporations with the lowest median worker pay. Between 2019 and 2025, CEO compensation increased 41.4%, unadjusted for inflation, twice as much as the median worker pay increased at these firms during the same period, at 20.7%...

Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani has been a key mediator in the conflict, even as his country has blamed Tehran for hundreds of missile and drone attacks.

The actor fully embraced his physical talents and outsized personality with a line in theatrical baddies teetering deliciously on the edge of serious and silly • Tim Curry, star of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Stephen King’s It, dies aged 80 • Tim Curry on sexuality, surviving a stroke – and 50 years of stardom • Clowns, corsets and kings: Tim Curry – a life in pictures As Dr Frank-N-Furter, the gender-nonconforming alien mad scientist who presides over Richard O’Brien’s glam rock musical, admits two innocents to his gothic castle and induces them into all sorts of delicious naughtiness, Curry is so thrillingly liberated as to seem a menace. An irresistibly appealing menace. Apparently able to arch both eyebrows and curl his lips in every direction all at once, Curry wraps his mouth around the double-entendres and belts out the lyrics with lip-smacking relish, and fully fleshes out this avatar of sexual confidence. The film earned one of the original cult fandoms, the stage musical endures and many other actors have pulled on Frank’s corset and high heels – but the role indelibly and for ever belongs to Curry...

With dots that dizzied the viewer, the giddy sensory overload of seeing the grandest installations of her octopuses and giant pumpkins was hard to resist • Yayoi Kusama, Japanese artist who became a global superstar, dies aged 97 • A life in pictures I once had an argument about Yayoi Kusama with Peter Gabriel. Not in person – I’ve never met the prog rock hero. But after I recorded some critical comments on her work for the BBC, I watched the segment only to see Gabriel passionately defending her. My onscreen cynicism seemed harsh indeed compared with his soulful appreciation of all those dots. My scepticism about Kusama started the first time I saw her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The context is significant because after a big dose of Jackson Pollock’s looping, tangled forests of colour and line (colour as line), Piet Mondrian’s pulsing Broadway Boogie Woogie and other great abstract art, Kusama’s dots appeared to me static, planned, predictable. I wasn’t excited or moved...

BVB are re-energised while Leverkusen have stabilised but the question remains: can anyone stop the champions? The Franz Beckenbauer Supercup has a modicum more intensity than most of its European equivalents. There are many reasons for this. The Bundesliga’s traditional season curtain-raiser pitting league champions against cup winners is not played on neutral territory, giving it the feeling of a domestic game with proper stakes. German fans would also never accept it taking place on foreign soil, as the Borussia Dortmund managing director, Carsten Cramer, reiterated in clear terms over the course of the weekend. It feels like a match, rather than a showpiece. It had one other factor to ratchet up the adrenaline this year. It was the sense that the two teams that most expect to be the season’s best, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, were the participants, with last term’s second-placed side hosting the champions. There was enough in the game to suggest that the latter might be able inconvenience the former, as Bayern held on to win the season’s first trophy after BVB followed a thoroughly dominant first half from the visitors with a vastly improved second period of their own in reply...

Close to 500 people have become ill with salmonella linked to imported eggs, say UK authorities who are investigating more clusters.

Hundreds have fallen ill with salmonella infections in an outbreak linked to imported eggs.

A Jerusalem court said the Jewish attacker was having a psychotic episode when he assaulted the nun, in an incident which caused outrage.

After two decades at Guantánamo Bay, trials for four alleged 9/11 conspirators have been set for 2028.

Updates from County Championship day one England v Pakistan: second Test, day one – join our OBO Get in touch with Tanya on email or BTL Shackles Gloucestershire’s Joe Phillips with his sixth ball. An early wicket at Scarborough on the mottled outfield grass, Adam Lyth obligingly nudging behind. Yorks 5-1...