Keyword – World news
Trefwoorden – Italy, Feminism, European Union, Vatican, Catholicism, Europe, World news, Abortion, Reproductive rights, Activism, Women’s rights and gender equality, Divorce, Women
Title – Emma Bonino, radical Italian politician who stood up to Vatican, dies aged 78 | Italy | The Guardian
Author – Guardian staff and agencies in Rome
Link – Emma Bonino, radical Italian politician who stood up to Vatican, dies aged 78 | Italy | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-11T09:21:01.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/11/emma-bonino-radical-italian-politician-abortion-divorce-dies

Emma Bonino, the radical Italian politician who led campaigns to legalise abortion and divorce against the objections of the Vatican , has died aged 78.

“Today we lose not only our leader but also one of the most clear-sighted, courageous and free figures in the political history of our country,” the small party she founded, More Europe , said on Facebook on Friday.

Bonino served as a European commissioner and as foreign minister in Italy but was best known as a militant feminist dedicated to political and humanitarian causes. “Her life was a long struggle against everything that denies freedom: against clandestine abortion, world hunger, the stranglehold of party politics, female genital mutilation, punitive justice, genocide, and every form of authoritarianism,” her party said.

A former member of Italy’s Radical party, Bonino commanded respect across the political sphere . Italy’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, paid tribute to her, saying that although their “backgrounds and perspectives differed, that never prevented me from acknowledging her significance and her role in our nation’s public life”.

Even after the Radicals’ political star faded, Bonino remained a key political figure and human rights campaigner active in Italy for more than five decades. With her sharp wit and cutting insights, she appeared frequently on Italian TV. After a cancer diagnosis in 2015, she would appear in public wearing colourful headscarves.

Bonino first got involved in Italian politics after she became pregnant aged 26 and had an abortion, even though it was illegal at that time. “I decided that never, never, never again should anyone have to suffer this humiliation,” she said.

She went on to hand herself in to the police, turning her private “offence” into a ⁠public act of defiance. The arrest ⁠made headlines, fuelling a campaign that eventually ​led to the legalisation of abortion in 1978. It also launched Bonino into parliament with the Radical party, a small but relentless force for civil rights.

During her 50-year political career, Bonino served as foreign minister, trade minister and EU affairs minister in Italian centre-left governments of the 2000s and 2010s. She remained an outspoken supporter of Europe and the rights of refugees and migrants.

“You can look at the fights I have waged with this point of view: I support a democratic liberal order and believe in the centrality of the individual, his rights but also his responsibilities,” she told the Guardian in 2018.

Over the years, Bonino cultivated a deep friendship with the late Pope Francis, despite their conflicting views on key ethical issues, including abortion and euthanasia. Bonino said that during their conversations Francis always encouraged her to bring forward her humanitarian battles, defending those most in need.

When asked what battles she still needed to fight, Bonino would say: “Many, too many. Human rights, world hunger, free scientific research … Ten lives won’t be enough.”

Bonino is survived by her siblings, Domenica and Giovanni, and their children.

Keyword – Music
Trefwoorden – Classical music, Opera, Culture, Music
Title – Our Eyes Looking for God review – exploring the Black British experience in rap, reggae and arias | Classical music | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/alexandra-coghlan
Link – Our Eyes Looking for God review – exploring the Black British experience in rap, reggae and arias | Classical music | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-11T09:11:40.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/sep/11/our-eyes-looking-for-god-review-the-pit-barbican-london

‘T here’s no ocean big enough to hold these black boys’ tears,” a young man sings. But what about a genre big enough? Our Eyes Looking for God – a show that aims to explore the “Black British experience” – finds a framework for the extravagant, baroque emotions, intensities and stories of its subject matter in opera. In many ways it’s a natural fit – or could be.

Created in 2020 by writer, director and activist TD Moyo and award-wining composer Renell Shaw , the piece grows out of Moyo’s personal grief for a brother murdered in south London and the global race rage after George Floyd’s death. Moyo weaves both threads into the story of Liverpool cousins Adjani and Kamal. Adjani’s decision to leave for London sparks a final night of reminiscences, celebrations, farewells and violent tragedy for two boys who – spoiler alert – may already be dead before the action begins.

A libretto by April Koyejo-Audiger sets the tone, colliding the everyday of fried chicken, a Vauxhall Astra and designer aftershave (“Damn I smell great!”) with poetic arabesques of language. Her boys speak of “reverence” and “rites of passage”, conversation melts into meditation and monologue, just as Renell’s score drifts from the spiky thrusts of rap into the nostalgic sway of reggae and aria-adjacent lyricism. Music director and keyboardist Luke Bacchus’s band underpins it all, Meera Raja’s cello coaxing Shane Forbes’ percussion into a duel of soundworlds, Charlie Laffer’s electric guitar a mediator and bridge between.

The same familiar strangeness shapes Amanda Mascarenhas’s set: a streetlamp twisted and sprouted into a metal tree; a car reduced to its own sketched outline. The two become a playground for Adjani (Gamba Cole) and Kamal (Themba Mvula) as well as a trio of backing dancers and singers (Amari Defreitas-Smith, Ibrahim Kanu and Josh Latunji – all from community arts organisation Trybe House ), menacing in bejewelled balaclavas, their movements convulsive, charged.

It’s Cole’s Adjani who holds the stage, alive to every shifting current in score and text. Against his easy charisma, Mvula’s Kamal feels stiff, his forays into the work’s more operatic language a jarring, artificial element within the score’s many musical vernaculars, voice pushed beyond comfort in an amplified context.

Our Eyes Looking for God captures the spirit of opera – its fluidity, extremity and larger-than-life gestures – without actually creating one. This show feels like theatre-plus: a spoken drama that borrows music’s emotional storage-space when required. Nothing wrong with that, but in a story that rejects half-truths and half-measures there’s a commitment that’s missing, a risk still to take.

At the Pit, Barbican, London, until 13 September

Keyword – NO KEYWORD FOUND
Trefwoorden – NO KEYWORD FOUND
Title – Martin Rowson on Donald Trump and the 25th anniversary of 9/11 – cartoon | Martin Rowson | The Guardian
Author – Martin Rowson
Link – Martin Rowson on Donald Trump and the 25th anniversary of 9/11 – cartoon | Martin Rowson | The Guardian
Publish date – Fri 11 Sep 2026 17.54 CESTLast modified on Fri 11 Sep 2026 18.09 CEST
Category – Opinion
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2026/sep/11/martin-rowson-donald-trump-25th-anniversary-9-11-cartoon

Most viewed

Most viewed

Keyword – Football
Trefwoorden – USA, Mauricio Pochettino, World Cup 2030, US sports, World Cup, Tottenham Hotspur, European club football, World Cup 2026, Sport, Football
Title – Pochettino’s ‘different’ vow to the US invites unwelcome speculation | USA | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/jeff-rueter
Link – Pochettino’s ‘different’ vow to the US invites unwelcome speculation | USA | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-11T09:00:02.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/sep/11/mauricio-pochettino-usmnt-tottenham-europe

I hope, in this lifetime, you find someone who loves you the way Mauricio Pochettino loves Tottenham Hotspur. The grip Spurs have on his heart seems the stuff of a literary classic: his imperfect partner who called things off at the first sign of trouble must merely check in on him occasionally to rekindle hopes of a reunion.

Perhaps a bit extreme, but this week’s revelation – that he’d return to Tottenham even if they were relegated and chalking his absence up to imperfect timing, not the part about handing the club a decade-old title – has implicity laid out the terms of his return as United States manager. Others may always have interest in his services, and a certain North London suitor will never get the door slammed in their face outright.

“Now it’s a four-year contract, it’s different,” Pochettino said this week. “We can next season lose the Copa América or the Gold Cup, they’re not happy with us and they can sack us. Or we can say: ‘OK. It’s not in the way that we think.’ Four years is different. Maybe now if someone calls in the future, it’s a different, different type [of thing]. We are excited, we are thinking to spend four years to the next World Cup . But now it’s a long period.”

If you’re a Spurs fan, it warms the heart to revisit last decade’s glory days. If you’re a US fan, you’re quite sick of hearing so much about a team besides the one he’s managing. If you’ve been cursed to support both, this must be a very confusing time. And if you’re US Soccer, you know that you no longer have an ace in the hole to outflank any outside interest.

One can’t undersell the appeal of coaching a World Cup host team, with a direct path to Pot One and raucous support for every match. Already a familiar face to Americans who follow the sport, Pochettino became a genuine sensation in the broader sports landscape. Millions of Americans had parallel thoughts that he, clad handsomely in a $500 safari shirt, resembled Russell Crowe – perhaps tacitly revealing that millions of Americans have long undersold the appeal of Russell Crowe.

Compared to his previous post at Chelsea, the US job offered relative reprieve. Never before has Pochettino been such a prolific fixture on hours-long podcasts. The stop/start cadence of international management is appealing for the football men who have grown weary of the meticulous corporatization of the club game. In that sense, Pochettino is among esteemed company.

Two years after Jürgen Klopp left Liverpool citing mental exhaustion, he has refreshed his tracksuit collection with fresh duds from Die Mannschaft. In his opening press conference, he read aloud to the press his terms of service – and was celebrated for it. Carlo Ancelotti was in no rush to abandon Brazil after a middling tournament, despite real questions about the pool’s depth and quality in midfield. Even Pep Guardiola held talks with Italy immediately after his decade in Manchester.

What’s different about Pochettino from, say, Klopp is his perceived eagerness to return to the club grind. Even atop the Red Bull Football conglomerate, Klopp was quick to brush aside any insinuations about returning to management. Pochettino, by contrast, held talks with Milan about their coaching vacancy immediately before the 2026 World Cup.

There may be a simple answer. Each of Ancelotti, Guardiola, and Klopp – company with which Pochettino is regularly associated – has been the champion of England and Europe. Pochettino, at this stage, has not reached those summits.

Is aiming for a Copa América semi-final more enticing than restoring Tottenham to previous heights? What about reaching a World Cup quarter-final an ocean away from the tens of thousands who soundtracked the previous one? What can US Soccer offer that his caliber of clubs – Tottenham and beyond – can’t exceed?

While Pochettino and his charges have something resembling an excuse for their lack of execution against Belgium, the fact remains that the USMNT were once again eliminated in the last-16. Just like they were under Bob Bradley in 2010. And Jürgen Klinsmann in 2014. And Gregg Berhalter in 2022.

In theory, Pochettino will enter his second cycle in a position of strength having undertaken a thorough examination of the player pool. The fresh faces are no longer MLS journeymen or players in Europe’s lesser divisions. Instead, they’re promising prospects: 16-year-old wonderkid Cavan Sullivan , new Crystal Palace showman Zavier Gozo , highly anticipated La Masia netminder Diego Kochen.

If anything, working the up-and-comers into the established core and identifying sturdier central defenders to partner with Chris Richards should be an incredibly exciting project. The core is in great shape, with this summer’s headliners – Folarin Balogun, Alex Freeman, Richards, and Malik Tillman – all aged 30 or younger in the summer of 2030. There’s plenty of reason to think that the program is better positioned for a deep run at the next World Cup than the 2026.

Actualizing that potential will require a clear vision and a dedicated effort to raise this team’s standard throughout every window of the next four years. Batting eyelashes at past employers hardly projects that level of dedication. And so, for the next four years just like the past one, the biggest question surrounding the USMNT won’t be how far they can go in 2030. It’ll be whether Pochettino will still be the man leading them there.

Keyword – Environment
Trefwoorden – Germany, Environment, Europe, Food, Food science, Science, World news
Title – ‘Fresh from the roof’: the supermarket growing salad a few metres above the tills | Germany | The Guardian
Author – Hannah Docter-Loeb
Link – ‘Fresh from the roof’: the supermarket growing salad a few metres above the tills | Germany | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-11T09:00:01.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/11/supermarket-salad-rooftop-garden-berlin

W alking into the Felix Thomas REWE supermarket in Lankwitz, Berlin, customers are immediately presented with a choice of greens: romaine, rocket, iceberg. But last month, a new option joined the selection: Lankwitz loose-leaf lettuce. A combination of head lettuce, romaine lettuce, Lollo Rosso, and dark green easy leaf lettuce, its yellow packaging makes it stand out in a row of green. But it’s not just the flashy packaging that makes it distinct. Unlike its neighbouring lettuces, which come from regional farms or all the way from Italy, these greens were grown just a few metres away – or rather, a few metres up. “Frisch Vom REWE Dach” or “Fresh from the REWE roof”, the bags read.

Rooftop farms are nothing new: in cities such as Paris , Hong Kong , Copenhagen and New York , similar farms supply food to adjacent food retailers or even restaurants. This model has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation (and its associated costs), minimise the urban heat effect, make use of dead space and perhaps even improve the relationship between buyers and their food.

Germany is also no stranger to rooftop farms. In 2021, REWE and ECF – a Berlin-based agricultural technology company – opened their first green farming market on top of a store in Wiesbaden-Erbenheim, selling basil below. But at 2,760 sq metres, the Lankwitz REWE is now Germany’s largest rooftop farm.

REWE provides the space, location, and distribution channels to sell, and ECF designed and manages the greenhouse. The Lankwitz lettuce has become a selling point of sorts: store manager Felix Thomas says one customer travelled more than 50km just to get their hands on a bag. And the integration of the farm into REWE’s market and corresponding supply chain is novel, says ECF CEO and founder Nicolas Leschke.

The supermarket was clearly designed with the farm in mind: skylights throughout the store offer a window into what’s growing above. “The cool thing about producing locally and on a building is you can create synergy within the building,” Leschke said. The greenhouse is heated through the waste heat of cooling aggregates downstairs, and rainwater is the primary source of water for the greenhouse and plant production. Some of the greenhouse is also powered by sustainable energy – primarily solar.

The operation is meant to be year-round. The farm makes use of hydroponic technologies : the lettuce varieties are grown with very little soil. The whole growing process takes a little over three weeks. Once cut, the greens go straight downstairs to be packaged and sold, both on site and in other stores in the city and region.

“We don’t even have an extra truck on the road that usually is necessary to transport the goods from the producer to the central distribution,” Leschke said.

Prajal Pradhan, an associate professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, who recently published a study on urban agriculture in Europe, sees REWE’s latest rooftop as a step in the right direction.

“There is a disconnection between producers and consumers,” he said. “This is a way to go forward, because you can provide fresh vegetables to urban consumers on site.”

However, he stresses, it should not be an alternative to having a personal or community rooftop garden. He says urban agriculture should be inclusive and find ways to include the whole community, a sentiment echoed by study co-author Stepan Svintsov, a remote sensing expert based in Berlin.

“Getting people together from a dense city and sharing agricultural knowledge among them helps bring the community together,” Svintsov said. REWE currently offers tours to see the facility from outside, but no one can enter the production rooms.

There is a large potential for rooftop farms and the like in Europe . Pradhan, Svintsov and their colleagues’ review looks at the biophysical viability for urban agriculture in European cities: seeing how urban rooftop and ground-based areas are well suited for cultivating vegetables. They found that urban agriculture in European cities could produce up to 20m tonnes of vegetables annually. This translates to about 28% of the continent’s vegetable demand.

Pradhan also previously co-authored a study that showed how a large share of Berlin’s vegetable consumption could be produced within the city. “This [supermarket] could also be an inspiration for other people to do something together,” says Pradhan.

Leschke’s ambitions are bigger than just Berlin. He hopes to build at least 20 supermarket rooftop farms over the next 10 years, and ideally at least one in every REWE region in the next five years.

“If we can produce in Germany year-round, we should,” he said, emphasising the importance of becoming independent of global supply chains.

But for now, that does not seem to be on customers’ minds. At the salad display, a customer eyes the selection, opting for two bags of the Lankwitz lettuce. Another makes a beeline for the local variety. As she explains, she’s making a salad of tomato and mozzarella later, and she likes the idea of using the greenhouse greens. After all, it’s fresh from the roof.

Keyword – Business
Trefwoorden – Manufacturing sector, Oil, Gas, Inflation, US-Israel war on Iran, UK news, Europe, Steel industry, Business, Economics, World news, Commodities
Title – ‘Just worry upon worry’: Europe faces a bleak winter as supply shock pushes factories to the brink | Manufacturing sector | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/alex-daniel,https://www.theguardian.com/profile/lisaocarroll
Link – ‘Just worry upon worry’: Europe faces a bleak winter as supply shock pushes factories to the brink | Manufacturing sector | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-11T09:00:00.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/sep/11/just-worry-upon-worry-europe-faces-a-bleak-winter-as-supply-shock-pushes-factories-to-the-brink

Bridgnorth Aluminium has faced down Brexit, Covid and repeated energy shocks in recent years. But this winter is bringing extra “stress and pressure”, says its head of sales, Adrian Musgrave.

Musgrave’s company makes rolled aluminium, used in packaging, construction and the manufacture of items such as cars and batteries. Like many stretched industrial businesses across Europe , Bridgnorth Aluminium faces a looming threat of soaring energy bills, which Musgrave describes as “just worry upon worry”.

The cost of natural gas has doubled in the past two months, caused by renewed fighting between the US and Iran, reaching a three-year high in the UK and the EU this week. More price rises are likely in the colder months.

Bridgnorth Aluminium, which employs 370 people at its plant in Shropshire in the UK’s industrial heartland, is already feeling the effects. Its combined gas and electricity bill is about £1.1m per month, 18% of its total costs, and rising.

Its biggest contracts include a safety net – once gas prices cross a certain point, customers pay the difference. That threshold was crossed last month – but the question of whether clients will come back concerns Musgrave. “They have to pay because it’s in the contract, but they will obviously not like it,” he says. “When it comes up for renewal it will become an issue.”

Musgrave says the company is not in a place where it would need to make layoffs or temporary shutdowns this winter. Others may not be so lucky – one forecast, by the Item Club, predicted earlier this year that Britain will lose 163,000 jobs in 2026 because of the war, concentrated in manufacturing-heavy regions such as south Wales and the Humber region.

Bridgnorth Aluminium is considering taking a longer Christmas break, or doing planned maintenance – originally scheduled for April – earlier than expected in January, so the factory runs less during times of high prices. “And then the employees are obviously aware,” he says, “so then people begin to worry.”

Gas spikes and shortages

The conflict has disrupted global energy supplies since Iran started attacking ships in the Gulf and choked off access through the strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas passes.

British wholesale gas prices climbed to 205p per therm this week, the highest point since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and up 101% from 102p in June. That is compared with 78p per therm at the end of February. The UK imports about 70% of its gas, leaving it especially vulnerable to price swings.

A shortage of stored gas reserves compounds the issue. Europe is heading into winter with gas stores at their lowest level in over a decade , after the Hormuz disruption stopped countries topping up their reserves through the summer, when prices are normally lower. Storage is now about 67% full, against a seasonal average closer to 80%.

Germany, which holds the largest storage capacity in Europe, is only about half full, and is on course to miss its official 70% storage target this year. The Netherlands is expected to miss its 80% target too.

As one of Europe’s biggest gas consumers, the UK may be especially exposed, with some of the lowest levels of domestic storage capacity and relying instead on pipeline imports from Europe and tankers from the US and Middle East. Chris O’Shea, the chief executive of British Gas owner Centrica, said last month that Britain had “almost no gas in storage” for the coming winter.

Strife in the Mittelstand

Alexander Julius, managing partner of Macrometal Handelsgesellschaft, a steel distributor in Hamburg, says it is competing “against producers in regions where energy costs are often significantly lower and where governments provide direct or indirect industrial support”.

For industries like his, part of Germany’s Mittelstand of medium-sized enterprises, he says energy is not just another item on the cost lines, but “a fundamental production input”. But instead of getting support they are being “hammered by green taxes while energy rises rocket”.

Julius, who is also the president of trade body Eurometal, says companies will go to the wall and work will move to China or India unless something is done to reduce energy costs. Eurometal has warned that manufacturing job losses across Europe could reach 300,000 by the end of the year, driven partly by Chinese competition and compounded by energy costs.

Axel Eggert, director general of the European steel body Eurofer, adds that the high prices “will inevitably lead to production disruptions. Such additional costs cannot simply be absorbed by energy-intensive industries exposed to international competition.

“The longer the crisis lasts, the greater the risk that temporary production cuts become structural, with consequences for investment, employment and, ultimately, the viability of industrial plants in Europe.”

The car industry in Germany has also called for urgent action from Berlin and Brussels, saying “the high energy prices are among the biggest competitive disadvantages of Germany as a business location”, with electricity prices in some cases three times higher than the US.

“Germany, just like the EU, urgently needs a jointly supported energy strategy with low electricity prices and future-proof grid infrastructure,” said a spokesperson for the trade association, the VDA. Building new industries will become “a decisive factor in determining” inward foreign investment in future, they added.

‘It just keeps coming’

The exposure is especially bad for the chemicals sector, where companies rely on gas to power their plants but also as feedstock – the raw material that many products are made from – meaning every spike in prices hits them twice.

Francesco Buzzella, president of Italy’s chemicals trade body Federchimica, says it remains the “primary factor undermining the competitiveness of chemical companies” in the country. Energy now accounts for 18% of the value of everything Italy’s chemical industry produces, up from 14% in 2021 – and could reach 23% if gas and oil prices do not fall. This week oil hit $107 a barrel as the US and Iran continue to trade blows.

Production output in the UK has fallen by 60% since 2021, according to the Chemicals Industry Association, with at least 25 sites closing.

Peter Huntsman, chief executive of the chemicals group Huntsman Corporation, told the Guardian in March that continued high prices could force the closure of the company’s last remaining UK plant , at Wilton on Teesside.

Back in Shropshire, meanwhile, Musgrave says Bridgnorth Aluminium’s owner, the Belgian industrial group Viohalco, wants to invest further in the company’s operations, but the numbers are getting harder to justify.

“They would like to make some significant investments – the UK market for aluminium is quite big, and we would like to be able to sell more at home,” he says.

But energy and other pressures make it “a difficult picture for shareholders to get their head around … The business conditions for investment are really challenging, and changing quite rapidly.

“I’ve been in this business just over 20 years. For the first 10, the macro environment was always pretty stable. But then we had Brexit, which changed things; the energy crisis with Ukraine; Covid; and now this.

“You just think you’re going to get a year where maybe it won’t be too much change,” he adds. “But it just keeps coming.”

Keyword – Film
Trefwoorden – Film, Venice film festival, Culture, Festivals, Film criticism
Title – ‘Danny Boyle, please make another film about drugs’: Venice film festival’s feedback wall takes no prisoners | Film | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/philip-oltermann
Link – ‘Danny Boyle, please make another film about drugs’: Venice film festival’s feedback wall takes no prisoners | Film | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-11T08:59:59.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/sep/11/venice-film-festival-public-feedback-wall-delivers-home-truths

In an industry that is reliant on the fickle vagaries of taste, film festivals exist to establish facts. The reason why film-makers still go through the rigmarole of ferrying their cast to the red carpets of Venice, Cannes or Sundance is the need for empirical evidence of unambiguous quality: a solid-gold prize, a top score on the critics’ grid, a record-timed standing ovation that will convince every doubter that this is a great film .

Film festivals, in turn, need beautiful A-listers to attract coverage and sponsorship, and hence there is a constant risk that these annual events become gigantic hype machines, in which every turkey is a classic and every half-hearted performance a masterclass.

Which is why there may not be a more important institution in world cinema than the Venice film festival’s Ridateci i soldi (“Give us our money back”): a makeshift chipboard wall erected next to the Palazzo del Cinema on which visitors are encouraged – with the blessing of the management – to scribble complaints and hatchet jobs in the most scathing terms possible.

The wall’s 30-year tradition commands that the festival’s director Alberto Barbera has to personally hand out a prize to the meanest diatribe, making Venice’s wall of shame a barrier against hype, an institutionalised pricking of the film world’s own pomposity.

On the Lido this year, there were complaints about the rising cost of entry badges, water taxis and local accommodation (“Maybe by 2030 we’ll have to pay for the oxygen we breathe”), queue lengths, uncomfortable seats and ceiling lights going on in the screening rooms.

Most of the notes dealt with the films themselves, however. There were protests against the inclusion of epic “Russian Oppenheimer” biopic DAU , notorious for reports of behind-the-scenes coercion and humiliation of cast and crew (“This is a disgusting, abusive (!!), pointless film!! Look it up!!!”), appeals to Trainspotting director Danny Boyle (“please make another movie about drugs”), insinuations about Paul Schrader’s child abuse drama The Basics of Philosophy so slanderous they cannot be repeated in print for risk of legal repercussions, and many a wordplay on the spoonerist title of Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard .

Italian titles in the lineup especially came in for drubbings, such as Andrea Pallaoro’s romantic drama The Echo Chamber, based on a script by Bernardo Bertolucci (“He will be turning in his grave”), Luca Guadagnino’s seven-hour documentary Joie de Vivre (“Arrest him!”), and Gerda Taro biopic The Girl with the Leica (“ Insípido !”). It’s hard to imagine similarly buzz-killing language at Venice’s more po-faced competitors in Cannes or Berlin.

“Italian audiences always interact a little more with films,” says John Bleasdale, an Italy-based British critic and novelist. Just as popular actors or directors are often applauded as soon as their names appear in the credits, boos are considered a legitimate expression of taste, he argues. “The boos are vociferous, as is ironic laughter and applause. Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin got booed at Venice, while other films split an audience and half of them boo while the others cheer.”

Ridateci i soldi was created in the late 90s by Gianni Ippoliti, a former football referee and TV presenter who acts as the prize’s one-man jury, in protest against reviews becoming overly enthusiastic. “If you read the reviews, you would believe that all 150 films shown at the festival this year are masterpieces,” he says as he stands guard at the festival’s wall of shame. “That’s not possible.”

The rules are flexible, he explains: “Of course people are also allowed to write something positive, but we find most of the time people who come out of the cinema want to vent their negative feelings.”

The Golden Lion, awarded to the winner of the 21 films in competition, is one of the most sought-after accolades in world cinema. But the Coppa Codacons – a wooden sculpture sponsored by Italy’s consumer watchdog and carved by artist Ferdinando Codognotto that is awarded to the most scathing comment – is the more beautiful object to put on your mantlepiece.

Festival visitor Cristian Poletti won the cup this year for a review in which he suggested a more suitable title for The Echo Chamber might have been “The Echo Bathroom” given how many scenes featured characters bathing. If Bertolucci really wrote the script for this movie, it said, perhaps it was intended to be a shampoo advert instead.

In spite of everything, Poletti says he remains a passionate fan of film festivals. In recent years there have been signs that Hollywood’s big studios are retreating from the festival circuit, aware that social-media campaigns can serve as more effective hype machines and that critical drubbings at Venice or Cannes can establish the wrong kind of irrefutable facts.

“I’ve been coming to Venice since 2015, and I always see 30 to 40 films,” says Poletti. “Even watching a bad movie is better than not watching a movie at all.”

Keyword – Environment
Trefwoorden – Hurricanes, Extreme weather, Hawaii, US news, World news, Environment
Title – Weather tracker: Hurricane Lowell pounds Hawaii’s western islands | Hurricanes | The Guardian
Author – Megan Davies for MetDesk
Link – Weather tracker: Hurricane Lowell pounds Hawaii’s western islands | Hurricanes | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-11T08:05:58.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/11/weather-tracker-hurricane-lowell-pounds-hawaii-western-islands

Hurricane Lowell caused significant damage to Hawaii’s western islands this week. On Tuesday night the centre of Lowell tracked 50 miles (80km) from the island of Ni‘ihau in Kauai county as a category 2 storm with winds of up to 110mph. The strong winds resulted in widespread power outages across Ni’ihau, and the islands of Kauaʻi and O‘ahu.

The event was particularly notable because a tornado watch had been issued for Kauaʻi on Monday night and into Tuesday morning. According to research maps from Iowa State University, it was likely to be the first tornado watch in Hawaii’s history. In the event, a tornado was not documented, however hurricanes can produce tornadoes and most often occur in thunderstorms within rain bands away from the centre of the hurricane. Currently, five named stormed have occurred in the central Pacific with the strong El Niño this year being a key driver in the above normal hurricane season, as noted by the National Weather Service.

In Asia, further heavy rainfall in Japan has caused flooding of roads and subway stations, disrupting services including the main bullet train Tokaido Shinkansen. A record-breaking 104.5mm of rain fell within an hour through Tuesday afternoon in Nagoya. The heavy downfall occurred because of a stationary front and moist air mass associated with tropical depression Krovanh, resulting in extremely unstable conditions. A level-two advisory remained in place for landslides on Friday across the country. Some landslides have already occurred, including one of the main starting points for Mount Fuji on Wednesday, covering three vehicles in debris. No injuries or fatalities were reported.

Heavy rainfall also hit large parts central-southern Europe in recent days. Earlier this week, cooler air pushed south-east across much of the continent, displacing the warm air mass behind southern Europe’s late season heatwave. The boundary between the two air masses, a cold front, reached the Mediterranean by Wednesday. There, the front helped create ideal conditions for violent thunderstorms: cool air moving over the Mediterranean’s unusually warm waters created an unstable atmosphere, while the sea supplied plenty of moisture. As a result, large thunderstorms formed over the waters around Corsica, Sardinia and northern Italy on Wednesday and Thursday, producing torrential rainfall and flash flooding, strong winds, as well as a few tornados.

At a weather station in Veneto, 154.2mm of rain was recorded in just 3.5 hours. The storms pushed north-east into Austria and the Balkans late on Thursday with a few forecast to continue into Friday. However, this wet weather is not expected to persist in the region over the weekend and into the start of next week, with drier and sunnier weather likely to develop.

Keyword – Sport
Trefwoorden – US Open Tennis 2026, Carlos Alcaraz, Sport, Tennis, US Open tennis, US sports, Novak Djokovic, John McEnroe
Title – Five-set tennis is under attack. Killing it would be a colossal unforced error | US Open Tennis 2026 | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/andrew-lawrence
Link – Five-set tennis is under attack. Killing it would be a colossal unforced error | US Open Tennis 2026 | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-11T08:00:05.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/sep/11/us-open-five-set-tennis-shelton-alcaraz-late-night-matches

T uesday night’s quarter-final match between Ben Shelton and Carlos Alcaraz had everything a US Open spectacle could ask for: huge stakes, knife-edge drama, top-shelf competition and an American hero who comes through in the end. The only fault to find was really the matter of time. The first ball wasn’t struck until 11.05 in the evening, and Shelton’s clinching ace didn’t come until 3.33 in the morning – marking, after a total of 4hr 28min on court, the latest-ending US Open match by a whopping 43 minutes.

Somewhat predictably, the discourse among media and fans following the late-night match has swiftly moved on from the USTA’s misadventures in scheduling to a referendum on the five-set match and whether it should be put out to pasture. For the record: that would be a colossal unforced error.

Five-setters aren’t just intrinsic to the grand slam canon. They are a badge of honor in the men’s game, confirmation that a player can and did indeed hack it in the big leagues. John Isner may not have won a major during his time on tour. But his capacity for grinding out marathon matches – not least the three-day, 11-hour epic he played against Nicholas Mahut at Wimbledon in 2010 – is why he remains highly respected by peers and fans alike.

Best-of-five is the exclusive framing device for the best matches in history and an imprimatur of the sport’s most revered champions. (See, The Greatest Match Ever Played or last year’s French Open final .) Even the losers are celebrated merely for having survived and played on to become part of the tale. “People still remember this match but he didn’t know if I was the winner,” Mahut said in 2015. “So, maybe, in 10 years people will think I won the match.”

Five-setters are the mother of sporting crucibles – a test of will, nerve and focus. That holds true as much for the men who play as their spectators. Much of what makes the experience of following tennis so affirming is the global group-watch sessions that take over social media anytime an Australian Open match goes the distance.

Viewers who can’t babysit the full marathon into the night – lest they risk sleeping through their morning alarms or, worse, cheering the exciting points too boisterously and rousing their house and neighbors – get to wake up and find the fifth set still raging as they’re getting ready for work the next day. A skeptic might point to the Australian Open, perhaps more so than any other slam, as a prime reason to abolish the five-setter. But true tennis nerds see the Happy Slam for what it is: a rite of passage. In fact, if they don’t seem surprised by the US Open’s Melbourne hours, it’s because Craig Tiley, formerly the CEO of Tennis Australia, is now running the USTA.

Still, for all the honor and valor there is to be extracted from five-setters, especially as they pile up, there’s no denying the matches exact a physical toll from players that has become harder to ignore as the pressure to maintain a hectic touring calendar puts them at increasing risk of missing tournaments from wear and tear. That tension between tradition and evolution has animated an existential debate around five-setters that has been simmering for years.

Last month, incoming Tennis Australia CEO Andrew Abdo tossed out ideas for a shorter-form game. “Maybe we’re not playing best of five all the way through,” Abdo said at a Melbourne sports conference. “Maybe the point scoring system changes. Maybe there are different permutations to how we engage and entertain audiences without losing the fabric, and what really makes the sport special.”

Abdo’s remarks – which come after Tiley, his predecessor, suggested women play five-set matches – might not have resonated if Novak Djokovic, the slam king who built his reputation on five-set matches, hadn’t first proposed changes to the scoring system that would keep the five sets but dilute the number of games to “ keep the matches within a two-hour window ”. And even though the 24-time major champion was being somewhat facetious – he was specifically asked for an opinion that would inflame fans – it didn’t stop John McEnroe, tennis’ self-righteous conscience, from breaking out his gas canister. “People’s attention spans are shorter than ever,” said McEnroe – famously, the five-set loser of an epic 1980 Wimbledon final canonized as the War of 18-16 .

But those voices, however prominent, have yet to reach a volume that drowns out five-set traditionalists. “Do I love five setters? Absolutely not,” Frances Tiafoe said after hanging on to beat fellow American Alex Michelsen in a five-set quarterfinal he surely would’ve lost if the scoring revolutionists had their way. “When I’m up two sets to love I would love to shake hands and go home. But it’s tennis, man. I grew up watching incredible tennis, incredible five setters. Novak vs Rafa, Federer vs Rafa. Incredible five setters which go on for hours and hours. That is the history of the game.”

The quarter-final between Shelton and Alcaraz wrote another chapter, one that gave Arthur Ashe Stadium the feel of a Queens dive after last call. Shelton, still woozy from outlasting the US Open’s defending champion, beseeched his sister’s employer, Morgan Stanley, to give her the day off from work. (She was due back by 6am.) As he and Alcaraz contested the final points, with Tuesday having turned into Wednesday, custodial workers could be seen and heard tidying up the stadium and grounds for the horde to come after sunrise. On social media, US Open patrons who hung on til the bitter end shared the outrageous surge pricing they encountered for rideshares back home (“ I could get a hotel, bro ”) and posted videos of exhausted ballkids hustling back into the city before school starts “ in three hours ”.

No one’s suggesting the US Open needs a curfew. (That’s Wimbledon’s turf, after all.) There’s a simple fix to the late-night match problem that doesn’t involve fundamentally restructuring the way the men’s game is played. The USTA could just move one of its primetime features to the world’s 13th-largest tennis show court – Louis Armstrong Stadium, right next door to Ashe – and move the start times up to ensure play didn’t extend much past midnight. The start of Shelton-Alcaraz was delayed by Jessica Pegula and Emma Navarro taking three sets to wrap up their quarter-final, which was itself delayed by the afternoon matches ahead of them going long. But that might mean missing out on the filthy lucre that Ashe generates from its doubled capacity and extravagant suites – and god forbid the USTA make slightly less money.

The funny thing about all this panting to change tennis for its own good is that tennis has changed so much already. Electronic line calls, 10-point tiebreaks, on-court coaching, the serve clock – the hidebound sport has proven it can be tweaked for pace and entertainment without a cost to its core integrity.

But what truly makes the talk about abolishing the five-setter so hard to hear, particularly from veterans of those wars, is the fundamental misunderstanding. In other sports, time has a negative correlation. Who among us hasn’t been held hostage by the football game that lumbers on because the coach can’t be bothered to take their timeouts home? Who among us hasn’t been prisoner to a basketball game that would have ended in 30 seconds if it hadn’t been for all the fouling?

In tennis, a match that stretches on for hours and hours isn’t a drag. It’s an obvious marker of quality, an implied reason to tune in. And if engagement is the name of the game, the drama of a fifth act that holds the potential to maintain an audience, capture a new one and – in the case of the Shelton-Alcaraz quarter – extend the primetime viewing window on the West Coast – should be an incentive for those committed to growing the game to embrace the five-setter even tighter, not abolish it.

One can just imagine the lines that would be drawn if the five-set format ever changed: the players who come after having to put up with cranky veterans of those five-set marathons of yesteryear prattling on about how the real legends were forged in my day . That’s no kind of ending for a sport that has a great ending already.