Riders’ union expresses fury about Volta a PortugalTarling died after collision with non-race vehicleThe professional cycling community has reacted with fury to the death of the teenage Welsh rider, Finlay Tarling, in the Volta a Portugal, with a leading former professional describing the race’s safety measures as “catastrophic”.Tarling, the younger brother of the Netcompany Ineos professional Josh Tarling, was in collision with a non-race vehicle driving towards the peloton while he competed in the Portuguese race’s eighth stage. The 19-year-old’s death on Friday has led to a surge of anger, with the riders’ union, the Cyclistes Professionnels Associés (CPA), describing itself as “furious”. Continue reading...

16 Aug 2026 17:40 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

As chief US diplomat, Rubio could do great good. His pandering and neglect are a disgrace we shouldn’t ignoreViewed from the state department in Washington DC, the world is on fire – but record heatwaves are not to blame. The unresolved Iran war has badly burned Donald Trump. His military campaign conclusively failed, energy and food prices are still rising, and a Republican rout in November’s midterm elections looms. Humiliatingly, Israel this week flatly rejected his latest Gaza peace proposals, days after Trump congratulated himself on a “historic breakthrough”. In Europe, Russia’s attacks on Nato allies grow increasingly brazen, threatening a wider escalation. The Ukraine war, which Trump vowed to end, is now well into its fifth year, with civilians on both sides caught in the killing fields. And these are just the bigger firestorms. There are plenty more.Rarely has the need for effective, professional diplomacy been more pressing. So step forward Marco Rubio, US secretary of state and chief American diplomat. These are challenges that, if successfully tackled, could propel the 55-year-old son of Cuban immigrants and the former US senator for Florida into pole position in the 2028 Republican presidential nomination race. Here is a chance for Rubio to defy critics who dismiss him as a lickspittle and Trump dogsbody, and transform himself into respected global statesman. His boss mocked him as “little Marco” and a “loser” when they were election rivals in 2016. (Rubio called him a conman.) Now is Rubio’s opportunity to go big, be brave and prove he’s a winner. Continue reading...

16 Aug 2026 05:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

The hottest ticket in theatreland will soon be Cate Blanchett in Electra/Persona. Caged female rage continues to capture audiencesIt feels like a very Greek summer here in the UK. The ground is scorched, it last rained months ago, and the giant publicity machine for Christopher Nolan’s billion-dollar-grossing The Odyssey – from red-carpet frocks to professorial disapproval – is a Charybdis, swallowing all other cultural events in its gaping maw. Mere Mortals – San Francisco Ballet’s astonishing work inspired by the story of Pandora – runs in Edinburgh this month before going to Sadler’s Wells in September. And Greek tragedy continues to fill London’s theatres.Last week, I went to see Simon Stone’s reworking of Aeschylus’s Oresteia at the Bridge theatre in south London, and it was packed. Even on a Thursday afternoon, there was a huge audience for the story of a family who turn on one another, wreaking intergenerational violence until their whole house lies in tatters and madness. Partly that is because of the excellent cast: David Morrissey and Mary-Louise Parker play Christopher and Montie – a modern Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, their marital squabbles fizzing back and forth until he cracks and she snaps. Their children are the ones who will have to try to reconcile the impossible: duty to their murdered father, respect to their murderous mother. Continue reading...

16 Aug 2026 07:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

The veil is slowly being lifted on the forced or coerced migration – ‘blackbirding’ – of Pacific Islanders for labourWhat’s in a name? If that name happens to be Townsville, the coastal north-east Queensland city, the answer is: slavery.While he scarcely went to the place that still bears his name, Robert Towns, the 19th century British-born Australian colonist, has largely been warmly and sentimentally regarded as a genteel, civic-minded merchant and entrepreneur. Like so many bastards of Australian colonisation, history has coddled him in soft biography, and continues to celebrate him in nomenclature and statuary. Continue reading...

15 Aug 2026 20:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Five years since the Taliban returned to power, life – especially for women – is awful. We must keep the people’s stories alive and hope they will be free againThere are fewer and fewer stories coming out of the land of my birth. Before, I would open Instagram and see my cousins, lip-syncing to trending videos, posing with flowers at a rose garden or at a trendy cafe in their coolest outfits, keeping a record of their lives. I would hear British-Afghan friends talk about their recent trips to the provinces, towns and cities of their foremothers and the buzz of learning about their heritage. I would eagerly await the latest music video from Afghanistan’s many pop stars, all vying to become the hottest track played at weddings, not just in Afghanistan but all over the world. Afghanistan, its culture, and people felt closer back then.Five years ago today, the brittle peace of the fragile new democracy was shattered by the withdrawal of western military, diplomatic and charitable groups that had intervened in the country’s fate since 2001. Overnight, on Sunday, 15 August 2021, Afghanistan was undone and abandoned.Nelufar Hedayat is an Afghan-British journalist, and the presenter and co-director of the documentary In Real Life: the God ThievesDo 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 click here. Continue reading...

15 Aug 2026 05:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

She second-guessed herself and was eager to please. She ‘felt frozen’ when she believed she displeased someoneThe modern mind is a column where experts discuss mental health issues they are seeing in their workAli* initially came to therapy for disordered eating. She was a young and diffident woman. She described recurrent cycles of restricted eating followed by attempts to exercise it away. We used cognitive behavioural therapy for eating disorders to unpick her “food rules” – the underlying beliefs which can drive eating disorders, such as “the less I eat the better” or “carbs are bad”.As we worked on understanding and shifting her beliefs and behaviours around food, we noticed that most of her assumptions around eating, shape and weight coincided with the start of her relationship with her ex-partner. She told me he was a “gym junkie” and spent hours working out and encouraged her to do the same. “He got angry if I ate carbs,” she said, “and created a couples meal plan for us so I could shred and look hot when we were out together.” Continue reading...

16 Aug 2026 15:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Despite the recent hearings in Congress, we seem to be even further from the goal of understanding Covid-19’s origin’s than we have ever beenAs a microbiologist and infectious disease clinician, it has been tough to watch the recent devolution of public discourse on Covid-19 origins. It has been especially difficult for me to read the comments of Anthony Fauci about the origins debate in his now-public diary. And it has been painful to watch the televised spectacle hosted by the US senator Rand Paul on 29 July involving a hostile interrogation of Fauci.Despite many early pleas, including my own, for a dispassionate, objective assessment of what we know, don’t know and need to know about Covid-19 origins, we seem to be even further from this goal now than we have ever been – plagued by politicization, polarization and illogical thinking.David Relman is a professor of medicine and microbiology at Stanford University. He was an inaugural member of the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity and president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America Continue reading...

15 Aug 2026 10:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN