Patrick Branco Ruivo to leave post after decision contrary to France’s ‘value of equality’ sparked outrage and strike
The head of the operating company that runs the Eiffel Tower is to step down after a row over female staff being ordered to stay out of sight during a visit by a Hindu religious group.
Patrick Branco Ruivo will leave his job at the end of the year, the Eiffel Tower Operating Company (Sete) announced in a statement on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Designer’s latest work takes bold steps away from the fashion house’s brand, creating a show that felt like an event
“I want to land on a vibe.” This was how Dior designer Jonathan Anderson, one year into what is arguably the biggest job in fashion, summed up his assignment before his latest show. Expounding on chiffon and buttons with the intensity of a barrister delivering a closing speech in the high court, ruffling his hair as if his mind might at any moment explode with ideas, Anderson brings more brainpower to the pursuit of the vibe than the superficial phrasing suggests.
The vibe is coming in to land. This Dior show felt like an event, which is the bar Christian Dior set for his successors back in 1947, when his New Look silhouette made front pages all over the world. Overnight, trees had emerged out of the circular pond in the Tuileries Garden in Paris, and – thanks to the deep pockets of owners LVMH – a magical mist conjured to swirl around them, lending a cinematic grandeur to the slender catwalk spanning the water. (The trees will be replanted elsewhere in the gardens, after the show.)
Continue reading...With the midterms looming, and after the Epstein files and the war on Iran, Trump superfans are losing faith in their lame duck president
It took a dead child sex offender and a disastrous war to do it, but it looks as though the Maga faithful are slowly beginning to lose confidence in dear leader. As Donald Trump’s approval ratings drop to record lows, some of his most fervent supporters are turning on him.
See, as exhibit one, Trisha Hope, who was once a proud member of the Front Row Joes, a group of Trump superfans who follow the president to rallies around the country. They have custom-made T-shirts! They have branded baseball caps! They even have the attention of Trump himself, who frequently shouts out the group. He did once accidentally call them the “front row Jacks and Joes”, but who can expect a man of his calibre to pay attention to the plebs, eh?
Continue reading...More than 200 arrested while teachers join protest over class sizes, exhausting timetables and staff shortages
French teenagers blockading their schools in protest at class sizes, teacher shortages and long timetables have clashed with police, as politicians traded verbal blows over how to respond.
Demonstrations that began in Paris last week have escalated and spread across France, with the authorities reporting the arrest of 164 people on Monday.
Continue reading...President of Marine Le Pen’s far-right party faces calls to resign over comments he allegedly wrote as a teenager
Jordan Bardella, the head of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN), has claimed a “total war” is being waged against his party as he faces a political storm after the publication of antisemitic comments he allegedly wrote as a young party member.
Bardella, who is facing calls from political opponents to resign, said on Tuesday that the report by the investigative website Mediapart was false. To a standing ovation from his party’s lawmakers and senators at a meeting in parliament, he said the report was an attempt to damage his party as Le Pen tops the polls before the 2027 presidential election.
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This time last week, Football Daily romanticised a continental renaissance of sorts. The arrival of Jürgen Klopp, Zinedine Zidane and Xavi Hernández on the international management scene piqued our interest. We were also impressed by the clanging brass stones of Roberto Mancini, who returned to the Italy ejector-seat three years after abruptly pulling the lever and abandoning his country in order to take the Saudi riyal. Two games in and it’s time to appraise the respective early efforts of this glitzy A-list quartet of trophy-hoarding aristocrats, one of whom has had a somewhat chastening introduction to life in the international lane. Oh Jürgen!
Continue reading...President says he will ‘never stifle’ AI development while unveiling sweeping tool to access federal government sites
For some context, it’s worth remembering that Smith had a two-volume report of his findings as a result of his criminal investigations – that resulted in two indictments against the president after his first term. The first focused on Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, while the second on the president’s retention of classified documents.
However, in February, a Trump-appointed federal judge permanently barred the justice department from releasing the second volume of Smith’s report.
Continue reading...Mike Lee objected to the safeguard against the demolition of any presidential memorial Congress designates
A Republican senator has blocked a bipartisan bill that would have prevented Donald Trump from demolishing the Kennedy Center without the approval of Congress.
Mike Lee, of Utah, objected on Monday night when the Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley asked the Senate to pass the Protecting Presidential Memorials Act by unanimous consent. The bill, co-written with the Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski, would have banned the demolition of any presidential memorial designated by Congress, including the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, unless lawmakers explicitly approved it.
Continue reading...Our use of cleaning products has increased since the pandemic, but do we understand what they could be doing to our health? The journalist Rebecca Seal recently wrote for the Guardian about the potential impacts of the many chemicals we now use in our homes. She tells Madeleine Finlay how social media has also played a role in transforming our cleaning habits, why the impact of indoor air pollution is so hard to study, and what the current evidence is that cleaning products may be causing harm
Continue reading...DAMASCUS (ANP) - De EU wil haar relatie met Syrië uitbreiden en intensiveren. Dat zei EU-buitenlandchef Kaja Kallas dinsdag in de Syrische hoofdstad Damascus. Na de val van het Assad-regime in december 2024 heeft de EU al snel de economische sancties tegen Syrië opgeheven, zei Kallas. Dat is eind mei 2025 gebeurd. "Nu willen we nog meer investeringen mobiliseren en ons partnerschap naar een hoger niveau tillen."
Kallas heeft aan de Syrische minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Asaad al-Shaibani voorgesteld om dit jaar technische besprekingen te voeren over politieke en veiligheidskwesties, en over herstel en wederopbouw, zei Kallas tijdens een gezamenlijke persconferentie. Die besprekingen gelden wat Kallas betreft als de voorbereidingen op politieke besprekingen tussen de EU en Syrië voor de zomer van 2027.
"Maar dat hangt ook in grote mate af van Syrië", voegde ze daaraan toe, zonder daar verder op in te gaan.
On commodified, automated intelligence. “If any of these things shake out and we make it out of the near-future, the best you can hope for is a universal basic income, pegged to a meaningful percentage of existing compute.” (God that’s bleak.)
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James Webb Space Telescope posted a photo:
Seeing double… or quadruple!
In this Webb image of galaxy cluster MACS J0454.1-0300, we can see the brilliant golden galaxies that make up the cluster and several orange galaxies clustered on one side of the image. The orange galaxies are not part of the galaxy cluster, but rather galaxies much farther away whose light has been bent and magnified by gravitational lensing. This phenomenon occurs when the enormous mass of a foreground object such as a galaxy cluster bends and magnifies the light from a more distant object in the background.
In addition to making galaxies look stretched out or bent, gravitational lensing can also make us see double — or quadruple. Under certain conditions, multiple images of the same galaxy can appear. It’s rare to see four or more images of the same galaxy, as this requires the position of the background object and the shape of the massive foreground object to be just so. This happened twice in this image of MACS J0454.1-0300, marking the first time researchers have spotted this more than once in the same galaxy cluster.
Read more: esawebb.org/images/potm2609a/
Image Description: A massive galaxy cluster, made of many golden elliptical galaxies with the largest, brightest one in the center. Heavily distorted orange galaxies appear all around the cluster, the largest concentrated in a large arc around the cluster's center; these are images of very distant galaxies, created by gravitational lensing. A few galaxies are large and bluish-white in color; bright, nearby stars are the same color.
Niklas Roy is fascinated by the convergence of art and technology. From robotics to gaming systems, the Berlin-based artist and inventor creates quirky yet thought-provoking sculptures and installations that investigate relationships between creativity, science, and tech. His mechanical contraptions are often infused with a lighthearted twist that prompts viewers to think critically and get involved. And his most recent project draws on one of the most fundamental types of technology humans have ever developed: telling time.
“Glashütte Trash Clock” is named for the town in Saxony, Germany, where the artist participated in a residency this year. It’s also the birthplace of the nation’s renowned watchmaking industry. “Glashütte is synonymous with precision and centuries-old watchmaking craft, and I wanted to make the opposite,” Roy says.
The artist only used items and materials he could scrounge up locally, including tape, zip ties, hot glue, cardboard, a yardstick, pieces of plastic, and other random objects. “It runs for about half an hour, features a paperclip-escapement, a glass bottle gong, and a ‘random complication’ (which answers the fundamental question, ‘Now or Never?’).”
For those of us who know a bit less about how timepieces function, an escapement is a tiny mechanism common in pendulum clocks that releases a gear as it moves, helping to advance the hands. The gong is the acoustic instrument you hear, usually struck hourly but sometimes on the half-hour. And the random complication isn’t actually a clock reference at all—it has to do with games and chance. While we perceive the passing of time as steady, predictable, and methodical, the added existential element generates a playful tension and a sense of wonder.
See more of Roy’s work on Instagram.
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