New York mayor’s remarks at city hall to come just hours before Trump is set to deliver address at Mount Rushmore
Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, is expected to deliver a speech on Friday morning to mark America’s 250th birthday.
The address, scheduled to begin at 10am local time and streamed live, will be delivered from behind George Washington’s desk in New York city hall. Mamdani will be surrounded by recently naturalized citizens.
Continue reading...Visitors can get free peek at works by one of UK’s most significant 20th-century artists and one of his successors
Swifts screech overhead, hares lope along the grassy paths and butterflies flutter in the woodland fringe. There is an orchard; there are chickens, beehives. It seems simply a lovely, if conventional, slice of English countryside – until you happen upon striking sculptures fashioned out of chunks of reclaimed steel or machinery parts salvaged from factories, shipyards and farms.
The pieces are the stars of a show called Heavy Metal, which brings together work by one of the UK’s most significant 20th-century artists, Anthony Caro, and one of his successors, James Capper.
Continue reading...Exclusive: As well as citing personal reasons, Ridley says she is making way for a successor ‘to work alongside new leader’
Hollie Ridley, Labour’s general secretary, is to step down this autumn after two years in the job, she has announced to party staff.
Ridley, an ally of Keir Starmer who ran Labour’s field operations in the 2024 general win election, said in an internal email she would stand down after the party’s annual conference in September.
Continue reading...Suspect is said to have tried to pass as a man during attack apparently targeting Ukrainian-born oligarch
The main suspect in a bomb attack in Monaco this week is a woman who has been spotted in Germany, a judicial source in Monaco told Reuters on Friday.
Three people were wounded on Monday evening in a parcel bomb explosion in the wealthy principality, which was believed to be an attack on a Ukrainian-born oligarch.
Continue reading...Weekend’s high temperatures and humidity ‘virtually impossible’ without climate crisis, researchers say
The scorching heat blanketing much of the US this week would have been “virtually impossible” if not for the climate crisis, researchers have found, warning that the high temperatures could threaten Independence Day celebrations and World Cup matches this weekend.
“The climate the country has today is fundamentally different to the one it had when the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence,” said Theodore Keeping, extreme weather and wildfire researcher at Imperial College London, in a press release.
Continue reading...Ebony Bell convicted and handed community work order following assault on senator and second ‘gratuitous act of violence’ while on bail
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A woman has been handed a community work order for punching Lidia Thorpe outside the MCG over claims the independent senator disrespected her mother.
Ebony Bell was initially told to undertake an anger management course after her 2024 attack on Thorpe, but committed a second “gratuitous act of violence” while on bail, the Melbourne magistrates court was told in June.
Continue reading...In today’s newsletter: As official celebrations spotlight a narrow cast of white heroes, communities across the US are reclaiming the histories that Freedom 250 leaves out
Good morning, and a very happy 250th birthday to the United States of America. If you prefer to celebrate with cage fighting on the White House lawn, an IndyCar rally through the streets of Washington DC, or simply by watching the president do his lonely bop to YMCA at a sparsely attended state fair, so much the better.
It takes a special kind of someone to make the semiquincentennial birthday of a nation of 349 million people, from a whole variety of backgrounds, all about himself. But he wouldn’t be the only one centred on a very particular (white, male, Christian-centric) view of how the nation came to be.
UK news | Women from Black and Asian backgrounds are less likely than their white counterparts to receive an epidural while giving birth, research has revealed.
Ukraine | Ukraine and Russia have promised fresh assaults after Moscow launched a huge barrage on Kyiv, killing at least 27 people, tearing open apartment buildings and sending tens of thousands of people to shelters.
UK news | Criminal investigators in the UK say they have uncovered a “truly international network” of organised drug-facilitated sexual assault in which victims are sedated before being raped and sexually assaulted.
UK politics | Keir Starmer has formally apologised for the British state’s role in past forced adoptions after decades of campaigning by mothers and children affected.
World news | A rescue team pulled a 43-year-old security guard alive from a collapsed basement, ending an operation that became a symbol of hope after the devastation of twin earthquakes that struck Venezuela.
Continue reading...Huge scale of funeral for supreme leader across five cities is intended to relay message of resistance to rest of the world
In the small hours of Friday the police roadblocks, stalls, posters and army vans were starting to appear across Tehran as millions of Iranians prepared to attend the long-delayed six-day funeral ceremony for Ali Khamenei’s, Iran’s supreme leader for 36 turbulent years.
Khamenei was killed in the opening salvo of the US-Israeli attack on the country in February, and the funeral is intended to be an epic display of personal mourning, national power, resilience and social cohesion. Small groups of mourners carrying flags were gathering along the roads festooned with the red fist, the symbol of the funeral alongside the slogan “We must rise”. At a ceremony dedicated to the families of martyrs, Khamenei’s coffin was displayed.
Continue reading...Premier apologised over organised crime in some of Victoria’s largest construction projects, in op-ed that claimed a royal commission would not solve the issue
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Jacinta Allan has admitted that criminals have infiltrated some of Victoria’s largest construction projects – but has again rejected growing calls for a royal commission into alleged corruption involving unions and labour hire companies.
In an opinion piece published in the Age on Thursday night, the premier wrote that “we now know that criminals operated on some of Victoria’s construction sites” during projects dubbed by the Labor government as the Big Build.
Continue reading...State opposition tells court it will not take any steps to disendorse MP while legal proceedings under way
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A Victorian Liberal MP who sued her party to stave off a meeting that will determine her political future has been handed a temporary lifeline.
Moira Deeming launched an eleventh-hour supreme court challenge against the Victorian Liberal party president, Brian Loughnane, and the party on Friday morning, seeking a temporary injunction to stop the meeting.
Continue reading...President says Washington’s relationship with Nato is ‘not reciprocal’ and ‘they were not there for us’ in Iran war
Donald Trump has said it is “ridiculous” for the US to continue its “one sided” relationship with Nato, less than a week before a summit of the military alliance in Ankara.
Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that “They were not there for us!!!” and Washington’s relationship with Nato “is not reciprocal”.
Continue reading...Researchers say Stelios Kouloglou’s device was compromised after he joined European parliamentary committee
NSO Group’s hacking software was repeatedly used against a member of the European parliament while he was conducting an investigation of spyware abuses in Europe, according to a new report.
Researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto said they could not attribute the attacks against Stelios Kouloglou to any particular government operator of Pegasus spyware. But their investigation found the attack against the Greek now-former MEP bore the hallmarks of a previous hacking campaign against exiled Russian and Belarusian journalists in Europe.
Continue reading...From Times Square to the Norwegian parliament and even in fighter jet cockpits, the choreographed row is everywhere
The fans have done it, in their thousands, in the stadiums. The players have done it on the pitch. Pretty much anyone who was there did it in New York’s Times Square. Norwegian MPs did it in parliament.
Prince Sverre Magnus, third in line to the Norwegian throne, rowed in an Oslo subway carriage. Care home residents in their 90s rowed in rural Norway and Norwegian Royal Air Force pilots rowed in their F-35 fighter jets.
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