The president is behaving as if the battleground is the same, but it isn’t. Iran has leverage and knows it

And so to war. Again. After a ceasefire and a hiatus, Donald Trump is now into the second day of a new phase of bombing Iran, with the US military claiming to have struck 170 Iranian targets in the past 48 hours.

This is no surprise. Speaking at the Nato summit in Ankara this week, Donald Trump said he believed the US-Iran memorandum of understanding was “over”. He described Iran’s leaders as “evil, sick people” and threatened renewed military action and even a new blockade of Iranian ports, while also leaving the door open to further negotiations.

Sina Toossi is a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy, where his work focuses on US-Iran relations, US policy toward the Middle East and nuclear issues

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As his bold yet delicate sculptures fill the glass buildings of Brussels for Ireland’s turn at the EU presidency, the Wexford artist discusses working with Björk, his decorator father – and one noisy horse

‘Just so you know,” says Richard Malone before we begin talking, “if you hear any neighing, it’s not me!” The Irish artist is speaking to me from an unusual studio space: a farm in Stradbally, County Laois. It may have the odd equine intruder, hungry for press coverage, but it also boasts huge lambing sheds – the perfect location for Malone to construct his latest five-metre sculptures.

“There’s lovely lambs everywhere and about 20 dogs running around,” he smiles. “Exactly what I’d choose to have around me.”

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Welsh singer and Eurovision entrant’s other hits included Footloose soundtrack smash Holding Out for a Hero

• Alexis Petridis on Bonnie Tyler: She totally eclipsed her power-ballad peers, and created an astonishingly wide variety of pop
• From Swansea clubs to worldwide fame: Bonnie Tyler – a life in pictures

Bonnie Tyler, the Welsh singer whose husky yet commanding voice made songs such as Total Eclipse of the Heart into 1980s classics, has died aged 75.

A message on her Facebook page reads: “Bonnie’s family and team are heartbroken to announce that Bonnie unexpectedly passed away last night in hospital in Portugal as a result of the illness that she was being treated for.”

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Exclusive: Party hoped to mount serious challenge in mayoral race but attention has been diverted to Essex

• UK politics live – latest updates

Reform UK activists have been urged to divert from the Greater Manchester mayoral byelection to support Nigel Farage’s “fake” contest 250 miles away in Clacton.

A WhatsApp message shared with party members in north-west England said: “The message could not be more clear. We now need all of our fantastic activists, branch officers and councillors to come and help us in Clacton.”

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We supposedly stopped at some lovely places – Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica – but all I can remember is lying next to my dad on the bed, willing the ceaseless motion to stop

For readers under the age of 30, Teletext will be a foreign concept. A window into a clunky proto-internet, the TV-based interface allowed viewers to look up data such as the weather, news headlines and sports scores from the comfort of their living rooms. Designed for unused frequencies on the broadcast spectrum, Teletext was a frivolous add-on – something most people didn’t use seriously. But for my dad, it became the portal to our holiday from hell.

When they were growing up, my parents could never afford to travel outside the UK and when they had children and enough money, they vowed to show us the world. That meant, when my mum and my older brother were involved in the planning, a trip around India or to a scorching Greek island. But in 2001 – for reasons lost to time – my dad took the reins of the annual family trip. I can only imagine he was flicking past TV channels when he decided to check the weather on Teletext and came across an advert from the travel agent Thomas Cook for a surprisingly affordable Caribbean cruise. He called the number on screen and paid the deposit right away.

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As a series of star-studded events celebrates Ginsberg’s centennial, the keeper of his estate weighs the genius poetry – and provocative views – of the iconic writer

In 1985 Allen Ginsberg sat his 17-year-old friend, an out gay man named Peter Hale, down and gave some advice: “Get a wife, settle down, and have kids.” At the time, Hale was enrolled in a summer program at Naropa University, a Buddhism-inspired college where Ginsberg, 59, ran the writing program.

“He told me not to live the life of the itinerant poet going around heartbroken, forever unfulfilled,” Hale tells me via video call. Ginsberg was, in Hale’s words, “very much a traditionalist”.

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The plane that French team used after match with Paraguay flew 44 deportation-related flights this year alone

The French men’s national soccer team, whose star Kylian Mbappé is one of the world’s most outspoken athletes against far-right politicians, has been using a charter airplane company that is at the heart of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.

Images of the team posted on social media and flight tracking data show the French team have used Global Crossing Airlines (GlobalX) for at least three domestic flights between their World Cup games and base camp in Boston. That same airline charter company has operated more than half of ICE’s removal flights in 2024 and 2025.

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Some stations in Spain recorded temperatures of up to 44C after western Europe experienced the warmest June on record

France will provide emergency aid for fertiliser purchases and support domestic production, ⁠the government said on Thursday, as Middle East tensions drive up costs for farmers already struggling with ⁠low crop prices ⁠and extreme ​weather, Reuters reported.

World Weather Attribution, a network of climate scientists, said last month that Europe’s June heatwave was the “most severe ever recorded” based on a three-day forecast of average peak temperatures over the region studied, AFP reported.

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Next Labour leader, who is set to be elected unopposed, outlines foreign policy principles largely in line with Starmer

• Burnham promises he will not use party discipline to stifle debate

The waiting list for routine hospital treatment in England has risen for the second month in a row, PA Media reports. PA says:

An estimated 7.28 million treatments were waiting to be carried out at the end of May, relating to 6.16 million patients, NHS figures show.

This is up from 7.22 million treatments and 6.11 million patients at the end of April.

I beg to move that Mr Speaker do issue his warrant to the Clerk of the Crown to make out a new writ for the electing of a member to serve in this present parliament for the county constituency of Clacton in the room of Nigel Paul Farage, who since his election for the said county constituency has been appointed to the office of Steward and Bailiff of His Majesty’s Manor of Northstead in the county of York.

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Ach. Bonnie Tyler is dood, meldt haar familie via haar eigen website. De Welshe zangeres, bekend van liedjes (Total Eclipse of the Heart, Holding out for a Hero), die ze zong met een schor stemgeluid dat ze opliep na een operatie, overleed nadat ze wekenlang in coma lag na een operatie. De wereld is weer een icoon van de jaren '80 met een paar onmiskenbare bangers op de naam verloren. Bonnie werd 75.

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Een 18-jarige verdachte uit Dordrecht is woensdag aangehouden voor het bezit van een vuurwapen. De verdachte plaatste op TikTok een foto van het vuurwapen, waarna een uitgebreid onderzoek volgde.

Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has confirmed what we all suspected about Windows 95: it guessed when a setup program was running. Rather than relying on any special flag or marker, Chen explained that Windows 95 looked at the program's name to determine whether it was a setup application. It did this by checking the app against a list of magic words. If the program name contained one of them, it must be a setup. Chen gave the list: setup, install, inst, imposta, ayarla, and felrak. While modern developers might look in horror at the sheer randomness of the concept – after all, these days it is easy to detect when a package is being disgorged in Windows – things were different in the 1990s, and Microsoft's operating system engineers had to make do with what they had. "The entry for install is redundant with inst," wrote Chen, "because anything that contains 'install' will also contain 'inst'. My guess is that 'install' came first, and then later somebody found that a lot of setup programs were called 'blahinst' for various values of 'blah' so they added an entry for 'inst', but failed to remove the redundant entry for 'install'." If no match was found, the OS also checked the path to the executable for the word "setup." If the conditions were met, Windows 95 could then run its cleanup checks for improperly modified system files. "As a special bonus," added Chen, "Windows 95 does a live file check after any multimedia driver installs via an INF file. I guess the multimedia team discovered that a lot of drivers overwrite system DLLs in their INF files, so they asked for a cleanup pass afterward." It's easy to give modern Windows a hard time for its many irritations, but spare a thought for the Windows 95 engineers, forced to guess whether an app was an installer before sweeping up whatever mess it left behind. ®

PhilT_2013 has added a photo to the pool:

Ise Washi Paper Mill Garden, Japan

etsu2 has added a photo to the pool:

Kyoto-imperial palace.
Fujifilm X-T1

Het was een merkwaardig gezicht afgelopen weekend op de Groene Heuvels: het gehele publiek bij het optreden van IJSLAND op de mainstage verdween van het veld nadat zanger Sef witte mannen vertelde naar achter te gaan.

‘’We hadden verwacht dat vrouwen, queers en mensen van kleur naar voren zouden komen. Maar ja, dat viel een beetje tegen…’’, aldus Sef. Het publiek, dat voor zijn opmerking helemaal los ging in moshpits, sukkelde in kleine plukjes nog wat na aan de bar met een biertje in hun hand.

Zanger Abel leek tijdens de opdracht ietwat ongemakkelijk heen en weer te lopen op het podium, niet zeker of Sef het ook tegen hem had.

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Harrie Jekkers is misschien wel de meest knuffelbare cabaretier van Nederland. Maar dat werd hij pas nadat hij er al een hele carrière als popzanger bij Klein Orkest op had zitten. Dit weekend neemt hij definitief afscheid van het podium en zijn liedjes.

Faithless

Dieselboy

jspeter9191 has added a photo to the pool:

Today(09/07/26) at Tallawong Metro stations, Sydney, Australia.
Peace be with you.