Keyword – Science
Trefwoorden – Astronomy
Title – Starwatch: how to spot Hercules the hero, jewel of the summer skies | Astronomy | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/dr-stuart-clark
Link – Starwatch: how to spot Hercules the hero, jewel of the summer skies | Astronomy | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T05:00:51.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jun/22/starwatch-how-to-spot-hercules-the-hero-jewel-of-the-summer-skies

H ercules, the hero, is a jewel of the summer skies but one that requires a little bit of sleuthing to track down. The chart shows the view looking high in the southern sky from London at 11pm on Monday. The view, however, remains essentially unchanged all week.

The easiest way to locate Hercules is to identify the bright star Vega in Lyra, the lyre, and orange Arcturus in Boötes, the herdsman. Hercules lies between these beacons. Look for the four modest stars that form a lop-sided square: this is the keystone asterism, marking the body of Hercules.

From there, you can trace the hero’s arms and legs, and realise just how big the constellation is. Of the 88 modern constellations recognised by the International Astronomical Union, Hercules is the fifth largest by area.

In Greek mythology, Heracles – the name Hercules is the Roman equivalent – was the son of Zeus and the mortal Alcmene. In an attempt to tame his volatile nature, he was set 12 labours by King Eurystheus. These tasks took him to distant lands and the underworld.

Hercules was one of the 48 constellations listed by Ptolemy in the second century. From the southern hemisphere, it can be seen low in the northern sky during the evening.

Keyword – Fashion
Trefwoorden – Fashion, Life and style, Retail industry, Business
Title – ‘How am I supposed to know if it’s cute on me?’ The strange death of the changing room | Fashion | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/chloe-mac-donnell
Link – ‘How am I supposed to know if it’s cute on me?’ The strange death of the changing room | Fashion | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-19T09:06:36.000Z
Category – Lifestyle
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2026/jun/19/changing-rooms-high-street-shops

I s the changing room dead? According to the teenage fashion mecca, Brandy Melville, it is. The brand has closed all its fitting rooms across stores in the UK, US and Canada, with shoppers taking to social media lamenting the change.

“Why does Brandy hate [its] customers?” one TikTok user questioned. “How am I supposed to know if it’s cute on me???!” another exclaimed.

The closure follows similar moves by retailers, including Sainsbury’s in the UK, which permanently closed all of its changing rooms in 2025, and the charity shop chain Goodwill in the US that shuttered its rooms in 2023.

While Sainsbury’s said the decision was motivated by the need to “simplify tasks in stores”and Goodwill cited unmanageable staffing expenses, Brandy Melville has yet to confirm its rationale. Online, there are reports of employees blaming an uptick in shoplifting, while others credit “the gum issue” – a well-documented trend on TikTok of customers using chewing gum to hold its flimsy changing room curtains together for privacy. Genius but grim.

The decision to remove the option of trying clothes on instore comes at a time when the British high street is in crisis. Everything from inflation and geopolitical events to online shopping has left many shops struggling. In April British retailers reported the highest year-on-year decline in sales in more than 40 years. Boarded up buildings have quickly become commonplace in towns and cities, while shoplifting figures in the UK are at an all-time high . Removing a changing room often means brands can reduce the number of staff they need, including security, while also increasing the availability of floor space to flog stock.

The surge in online shopping but also secondhand platforms such as Vinted also means we have become more accustomed to buying without trying, in the latter case, sometimes without even the hope/expectation of sending back if something doesn’t fit. Technology is also a factor. Retailers such as Uniqlo offer tools that let you input your measurements to determine what size you are in each garment, while AI-driven 3D body scans and virtual try-on services are also being deployed by the likes of Asos .

The retail consultant Catherine Shuttleworth credits the decline to the changing behaviour of consumers. Traditionally a user would try on a piece in a changing room and then buy it in-store. But now Shuttleworth points out shoppers are using changing rooms with a sort of try now, buy online later approach, a method some brands are not keen to indulge.

Then there’s also the experience of the actual room/cubby hole, many of which are so small you can barely outstretch your arms. Add to the mix glaring overhead lights that seem designed to highlight every insecurity, plus the fact you often have to get redressed to fetch an alternative size yourself – it’s enough to leave you wishing you’d just splurged on next day delivery instead. “Why squeeze into a hot and sweaty space when you can try on in the comfort of your own room?” asks Shuttleworth.

But while Brandy Melville fans bid farewell to the changing room, some stores are championing them. While designer stores have always made changing rooms part of the luxury journey – on London’s Bond Street complimentary flutes of champagne and tiny biscuits are regularly doled out – more mid-tier brands are now following suit. At Rixo’s flagship store in west London, you’ll find a coffee kiosk and cocktail bar. Plus, individual pods feature lots of flattering natural light. Elevated changing rooms are also part of Zara’s plan as it attempts to shift its image from fast-fashion brand to a more premium destination. At its new revamped store on Oxford Street the changing room section has been widened and features individual wood panelled rooms while sensory tags alert staff to what items are being tried on, meaning they can aid shoppers and replenish stock quicker.

After-all, a changing room isn’t just about seeing how an item of clothing fits. The fictional world has regularly riffed on this. In Pretty Woman, after originally being snubbed by a luxury store’s sales assistants, Vivian (Julia Roberts) returns laden down with designer bags to deliver the memorable line “You work on commission, right? Big mistake. Big. Huge!” In Sex and The City, Carrie emerges from a changing room in her underwear to ask for a different size only to be greeted by Natasha who has just married Carrie’s ex Mr Big. Plus, who doesn’t have that scene from Bridesmaids burned into their memory.

As anyone who has ever grappled with an insubstantial curtain will tell you, it’s a space to experiment with your style, to try on something you can’t even afford “just for fun” and most of importantly, especially for teenagers, an excuse to hang out with friends in front of a mirror rather than behind a screen.

To read the complete version of this newsletter – complete with this week’s trending topics in The Measure and your wardrobe dilemmas solved – subscribe to receive Fashion Statement in your inbox every Thursday.

Keyword – Sport
Trefwoorden – Tennis, Sport, Emma Raducanu, Serena Williams, Katie Boulter
Title – Sell-out crowds and joy: how Queen’s Club women’s tournament outshone the men | Tennis | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/tumaini-carayol
Link – Sell-out crowds and joy: how Queen’s Club women’s tournament outshone the men | Tennis | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-21T04:00:20.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/jun/21/sell-out-crowds-and-joy-how-queens-club-womens-tournament-outshone-the-men

O ne of the more amusing sights at the Queen’s Club tournament each year comes before even entering the grounds. On the first day of play on Monday, a deluge of spectators invariably descend on Barons Court station, just 150 metres from the entrance.

So many people passing through a tiny London Underground station naturally means long queues at the barriers. That congestion is not helped by many of them pausing comically in front of the gates to search frantically for their bank cards or try desperately to unlock their phones.

The Queen’s Club crowd may not exactly be the target audience of the Lawn Tennis Association’s mission to open up the sport to all parts of society, but the attendance each year is truly impressive.

This year, general sale tickets for the men’s tournament sold out in less than a day. Its enduring popularity has felt even more significant over the past week given one of its weakest fields with just one top 10 player, Alex de Minaur, in the draw.

It is the latest example of the injury crisis that has swept the men’s tour over the past year, with so many young players dealing with significant injuries. The absences of Carlos Alcaraz and Jack Draper were huge blows, but injuries to Lorenzo Musetti, Rafael Jódar and Holger Rune also weakened the draw.

The UK’s more comprehensive tax laws for international players also mean the Halle tournament, which had seven of the top 11 players this week, will hold an advantage over London for years to come.

The understated nature of the men’s event has only further highlighted the wild success of the women’s event, which exploded into action a week earlier as the site of one of the most significant stories of the year with the return of Serena Williams to doubles alongside Victoria Mboko, after four years in retirement.

That spectacle ended on a sad note, with Mboko slipping badly in her first-round match and tearing a medial collateral ligament. Still, as the event progressed, it showcased two of the more impressive days for British players over the past few years as Katie Boulter toppled Elena Rybakina, the world No 2 and reigning Australian Open champion, to reach the semi-finals. That was before Emma Raducanu won two matches in a day to reach her biggest final since winning the US Open in 2021.

The LTA can often serve as a punchbag for all sorts of frustrations within British tennis, the latest being the decision not to award the defending champion Tatjana Maria a main‑draw wildcard, so it is important to commend the organisation when it gets things right. It was a brilliant choice to finally bring women’s tennis back to Queen’s Club after a 52-year absence and in spectacular fashion.

The organisers certainly had to navigate some tricky issues. Not all members at the Queen’s Club, which functions as a private tennis club for about 49 weeks of the year, were pleased with the prospect of another week of professional players encroaching on their turf. Others, meanwhile, had legitimate concerns about British tennis being too London‑centric. There were smaller questions about whether the men would object to playing on courts with a week of wear and tear.

The tournament last year was a great success, but any lingering reservations this year were surely dismissed by the sight of Williams marching out on to the court for the first time in her career.

Between Williams, Raducanu and Boulter, last week played out as a series of joyful moments in west London and the atmosphere in each of their matches was unforgettable. Donna Vekic, a lucky loser, eventually defeated Raducanu to lift the biggest title of her career.

Women’s tennis is the most successful women’s sport in the world, but not all events attract great crowds. Here, the women’s tournament sold more than 70,000 tickets and was at 98% capacity during the whole week, selling out on five of its seven days. About 9,000 fans packing out the stadium each day, even in the middle of working days, was a magnificent sight.

The LTA has also taken steps to address the dramatic prize‑money gap between its events, with the tournament increasing the prize money by more than a third this year, making its total purse of $1,915,000 (£1,443,000) the second highest for a standalone WTA 500 event on the tour.

By comparison, the German Open in Berlin this week, in which nine of the top 10 players entered, has a prize money pool of $1,206,446.

With the prize money for the Queen’s Club men’s tournament standing at €2,583,330, its increase of 2.4% in line with other ATP 500 events, the gap is still large but it has narrowed.

It is not a stretch to say that, in certain ways, the women’s Queen’s Club tournament completely overshadowed the men’s this year. This is just its second year of existence, meaning the tournament’s growing profile will allow it to build momentum with the goal of properly establishing it as a self-sufficient staple of the British summer sporting calendar and one of the best individual WTA tournaments on the tour.

Keyword – Life and style
Trefwoorden – Life and style, Health & wellbeing, Guardian Careers, Relationships, Work & careers
Title – Chasing life goals is a recipe for disaster – so try these tiny experiments instead | Life and style | The Guardian
Author – Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Link – Chasing life goals is a recipe for disaster – so try these tiny experiments instead | Life and style | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-21T05:00:21.000Z
Category – Lifestyle
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/jun/21/improve-career-health-relationships-experimental-mindset

E very January, millions of us sit down and write our goals for the year. By March, most of them have been abandoned. So we set new ones in spring, and when September rolls around, we do it again. New season, fresh start, same cycle – and plenty of beating ourselves up along the way. I lived this cycle for years. When I was working at Google as a digital health executive, I was a champion goal-setter with quarterly OKRs (objectives and key results) and a running list of personal goals I would review every week. On paper, it worked. I was successful by most external measures. But I had this persistent feeling that I was running just to stay in the same place, like the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.

After retraining as a neuroscientist and studying how the brain learns, I started to understand why. Goals work brilliantly under very specific conditions. You want to buy a car that fits three kids and costs under £25,000? Set a goal, do the research, buy the car. The destination is known and the path is clear.

But most of the things we care about don’t work like that. Figuring out what kind of career makes you feel alive. Becoming the kind of parent you didn’t have a model for. Working out what “healthy” looks like for you. The destination keeps shifting as you grow.

That’s why chasing goals doesn’t work for life’s most important questions – career, relationships, health. It’s like locking in your answer before you have understood the question. And when we cling to a destination and try to push through the uncertainty, we set ourselves up for frustration and self-blame.

The experimental mindset

Scientists have a different relationship to uncertainty. They work with it. They wonder whether something will work, then design experiments to find out. Whatever the outcome, their only goal is to learn.

This is what I call the “experimental mindset”. It makes use of your brain’s natural ability to generate predictions about what will happen next, and to learn when those predictions turn out to be wrong. Most of us experience this as failure and try to avoid that feeling – so we stick to the plan, we double down.

The experimental mindset does the opposite. Instead of asking, “Am I there yet?”, you ask, “What can I learn?” This helps you to try new approaches, pay attention to what actually happens, and change direction when the evidence points somewhere new. The life you end up building is yours, not a copy-paste of someone else’s blueprint for success.

So what does this look like when you’re weighing up whether to leave a job, if a relationship has a future, or how to rebuild your social life after a big move? It all starts with designing a tiny experiment.

How to design a tiny experiment

All good experimentation begins with observation. Start by spending a bit of time observing your own life. I like to pretend I’m an anthropologist for 24 hours, taking field notes. What gives me energy? What drains it? Who are the people I love talking to? What are the ideas I can’t stop thinking about? Jot it all down on your phone or in a notebook.

Having coached thousands of people through this process, I can guarantee that you will spot areas of your life that are ripe for experimentation: routines you have been running on autopilot, such as checking your phone before you get out of bed, saying yes to every meeting invite, eating lunch at your desk because that’s what everyone does; commitments you have been accepting as part of the job, or part of the relationship; habits that are sabotaging your health. Those observations become the starting point for your first experiment.

The great news is you don’t need a lab. If you strip an experiment down to its most essential features, it is just two decisions: something to test and a trial period.

In effect, every experiment can be reduced to one line: “I will [action] for [duration].” That’s it. That’s your protocol. You’re not committing to a big goal. You’re running a tiny experiment.

Your career as a laboratory

We spend a huge part of our lives at work, and our career is deeply tied to our sense of identity, which makes it feel like a high-stakes area to experiment with. Add economic uncertainty to the mix and for most of us the instinct is: “I can’t afford to try things.”

But staying stuck in the wrong career is also costly: it costs us time, energy and the chance to figure out what we want. So rather than waiting until you feel ready to make a big change, try something small enough that it doesn’t feel like a risk:

“I will spend 30 minutes a day reading newsletters.”

“For a month, I will block out one afternoon a week for deep creative work.”

“I will have three coffee chats with people in jobs I’m curious about this quarter.”

None of these require overhauling your life, yet they can lead to unexpected opportunities. For instance, I committed to writing a weekly newsletter for 20 weeks. That experiment led to a consulting business and an online community of people interested in those ideas, which led to writing my first book. At no point did I set a goal to become an author, but that experiment opened doors I wouldn’t have known to look for.

Experimenting in relationships

We fall into patterns with the people closest to us – who calls whom, what you talk about, how you spend time together – and those patterns can calcify without anyone intentionally choosing them.

Applying an experimental mindset here is about noticing those defaults and testing whether something different might be better – for example, replacing one weekly catchup call with doing an activity together for six weeks, or contacting one person you’ve lost touch with each week for a month.

You won’t know which of these will help, but that’s the point. Each experiment teaches you something about what helps nurture the relationships that matter most to you and what doesn’t.

The same mindset works for romantic relationships. A friend of mine was single and, instead of setting the goal of finding a partner by the end of the year, he ran a series of experiments: trying singles events; asking friends for introductions; testing different apps. Framing each one as an experiment rather than a pass-or-fail audition gave him a chance to notice what he was drawn to. Instead of asking himself, “Was that person The One?”, he would reflect on what he had enjoyed and what he had learned about himself. It took the pressure off and helped him figure out what he really wanted, which turned out to be less about finding someone impressive and more about finding someone with whom he could talk honestly.

And you don’t have to experiment on your own. Parents can design experiments with their children, such as replacing screentime before bed with reading together for two weeks, or letting a teenager cook dinner once a month. Couples can test new date-night ideas; friends can commit to trying something new at the same time. In fact, some of the most rewarding experiments are the ones you run with someone else.

What does ‘healthy’ look like for you?

Wellness is the area most saturated with one-size-fits-all goals: 10,000 steps, eight glasses of water, lose X pounds by summer. And we either white-knuckle our way through them or feel like failures when we can’t stick to them.

And this is where the gap between generic advice and individual reality is often widest. What works for one person’s body, schedule and stress levels is completely different from what works for another’s. Yet we keep importing other people’s goals as if they were universal prescriptions.

The experimental mindset can help reframe your entire relationship to wellness: instead of adopting someone else’s definition of healthy and forcing yourself to comply, you run experiments to figure out what works for your body, your mind and your life.

Even something that looks like a straightforward goal, such as running a marathon, can benefit from an experimental approach. You don’t know how your body will respond to the training, what nutrition you need on long runs, or how to handle fatigue. The finish line might be fixed, but everything between here and there is experimentation.

Whether you are training for a marathon or just trying to sleep better, the approach is the same: rather than following a formulaic plan with borrowed goals, you design your own:

“I will exercise in the morning instead of the evening for two weeks.”

“I will go to bed at the same time every night for 10 days.”

“I will cut out processed food for a month.”

Each iteration will give you real data about your own body rather than following someone else’s rules. Over time, those experiments will add up to a definition of “healthy” that’s built around you.

Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World by Anne-Laure Le Cunff is published by Profile at £10.99 . To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply . Delivery charges may apply

Keyword – Opinion
Trefwoorden – Mark Rothko, Painting, Art, Culture, Italy, Europe, World news
Title – I challenge the Rothko naysayers to stand in front of his monumental art and not feel awe | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/rhiannon-lucy-cosslett
Link – I challenge the Rothko naysayers to stand in front of his monumental art and not feel awe | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-21T07:00:24.000Z
Category – Opinion
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/21/rothko-monumental-florence-exhibition-renaissance-religious-art

A s an unbaptised agnostic raised with no religion, the closest I ever really come to a spiritual experience is when I’m standing in front of an artwork. Last week I went to Florence to do exactly that, drawn there not by Michelangelo’s David or Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, but by the works of Mark Rothko, that titan of US abstract expressionism whose work seems, on the surface at least, distinctly secular and un-Florentine. Yet seeing Renaissance art there had a profound impact on Rothko and his painting, as the exhibition Rothko in Florence makes strikingly explicit. Taking place at Palazzo Strozzi and two other satellite sites, it has been curated by his son, Christopher, and the author and independent curator Elena Geuna.

Is it embarrassing to admit that when confronted with the first large canvas I was drawn to I felt tearful? It was an emotion born of appreciation and astonishment but also – and this startled me – a feeling of gratitude. I felt profoundly lucky to be there, in front of this painting, not long after a time in my life where for various reasons I had been not been feeling all that fortunate at all. To have the chance to take in the paint on the monumental canvas, and absorb the ways the colours – purples, reds, oranges, yellows, blues – blend and in places seem to glow felt hugely significant to me personally. And then, as I continued to look – and as ever with Rothko – I stopped thinking about myself at all.

That’s the beauty of his art, especially in these self-referential times: the way it encourages the identity to break down and dissolve in the face of its contemplation. In that sense, its underpinnings are not so different from those of religious art; in this casting off of the self, then comes awe and wonder.

It is art as meditation, as secular worship. I felt it especially the next day at the former San Marco monastery, where the cells were frescoed by the great Fra Angelico with religious scenes for the private contemplation and worship of each monk. Rothko was overwhelmed when he saw these, having finally got to Florence aged 47, and wanted his own colour field paintings to provoke a similarly intense, spiritual response.

At San Marco some of these frescoes have been paired with works by Rothko in juxtapositions that highlight not only a subtle shared visual language, but their strikingly similar rationale. Rothko spoke of a painting being an experience , and believed in the importance of its quiet contemplation. The spiritual aspect to his practice seems most obvious in the form of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, a non-denominational place of worship that features 14 of his works in varying shades of black. But here, on a far smaller scale, and in a more uplifting colour palette, was a kind of holiness. My father, who was with me, was similarly moved.

Rothko probably wouldn’t have loved the distinctly un-monastic noise levels at the Palazzo Strozzi, nor the fact that groups of Italian schoolchildren were often looking through their phone screens. Yet when I eavesdropped on their interactions with the tour guide their responses were perceptive and authentic. “I love the yellow,” one teenage boy said. “Why do you think he chose it?” Rothko’s works are apparently being embraced by younger people. It has been suggested that they offer a refuge from the unceasing visual bombardment of infinite scroll. I think it goes beyond that, though: it is a search for greater meaning.

I got Rothko wrong when I was young. When I wrote about the 2008 Tate Modern retrospective, I did a whole pretentious bit referencing Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and the concept of original nihilation. These days I am older and don’t reach so much for theory. The dissolving, floaty response I feel is not so nihilistic. Yes, there’s an element of dissociation, but it isn’t frightening: instead there is a feeling of wholeness. Beatific joy is still possible if you know where to look, and though the schoolkids looked differently, they got it.

I won’t justify my belief in Rothko’s greatness. People who hate, or perhaps are threatened, by his paintings continue to object, and you can try arguing with them, but really all you can do is to recommend that they go and stand in front of one. Perhaps you won’t feel as overcome as I did, but I can guarantee that you will feel something. Afterwards, at the Duomo, I lit a candle for my brother, as I always do, and watched the glowing flame flicker and blur, merging with the darkness around it, ancient. That, I thought. That’s how it feels.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist

Keyword – News
Trefwoorden – Toy Story 5, Animation in film, Pixar, Technology, Film, Culture, Children, Society, Walt Disney Company
Title – To the tablet and beyond: does Toy Story 5 go hard enough on technology? | Toy Story 5 | The Guardian
Author – Jesse Hassenger
Link – To the tablet and beyond: does Toy Story 5 go hard enough on technology? | Toy Story 5 | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-21T05:00:21.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/21/toy-story-5-go-hard-enough-on-technology

For more than 30 years, Pixar’s signature Toy Story series has been entertaining children while giving voice to their parents’ anxieties. This is especially pronounced in the film’s sequels, as the living toys who dedicate their lives to the happiness of their owner/child experience all different sorts of potential and parent-paralleled obsolescence, from physical wear-and-tear and a child reaching young adulthood to the toy equivalent of empty-nesting (still hanging around the playroom but no longer anyone’s favourite). It’s only natural – maybe even a little belated – that Toy Story 5 would address the encroachment of technology, which continues to make its way to children earlier and earlier. So many years after the tech breakthroughs that allowed Toy Story to become the first computer-animated feature, and Pixar to become a household name in family entertainment, has the formerly Steve Jobs-owned company turned against the kind of innovation that built its success?

The movie arrives at a conspicuous juncture in the sometimes-uneasy relationship between humans, their children and their tech. According to Pew Research , the majority of kids under 12 are using tablets and/or smartphones, even as links between screen time and mental health difficulties continue to be studied. More school districts in the US are tightening rules on devices. Parenting in 2026 involves making a series of difficult, imperfect decisions about how to further regulate screen time. It’s only natural that Toy Story 5 would reflect this, even if it’s not entirely clear when the movie itself is taking place. (The human characters have clearly not aged seven full years since 2019’s Toy Story 4.)

For the non-human characters in the movie, tech – personified by a child-friendly “Lilypad” tablet nicknamed Lily – threatens to supplant their role as a child’s go-to plaything. This is a particularly traumatic experience for Jessie (Joan Cusack), the seemingly inanimate, secretly soulful favourite toy of eight-year-old Bonnie. Bonnie is lured in by Lily’s simple but transfixing games, and real-world parents are invited to share Jessie’s panic and dismay that children Bonnie’s age are more likely to stare at screens than imagine their own adventures to project upon the vessels of more traditional playthings. Of course, whatever its creative virtues, Toy Story 5 will also become content for those young eyes. After a run in theaters, it will be distributed on Disney+, a popular streaming app available on tablets everywhere.

Whether because of their tech roots or the trademark nuance they bring to these issues (most likely both), the film-makers behind Toy Story 5 haven’t created an anti-tech screed. One band of landfill-clogging capitalism-enabled plastic toys – nostalgic and adorable though they may be – is not necessarily positioned as morally superior to a more complicated yet also more practical configuration of the same non-biodegradable polymers. The differences (or lack thereof) are underlined when Jessie meets and eventually befriends some outdated devices who share her understandable neuroses about being discarded. What are these iterations of tech if not their own form of toys, ready for humans to project their own wants and needs on to them before facing eventual discarding?

Indeed, while the new tablet is shown to have a hypnotising, even deadening effect on Bonnie, its most nefarious emotional results are human-generated. Bonnie’s parents buy her a tablet because of its social utility; she is having trouble making friends, and not only do many children her age have tablets, it also functions as a nascent social media. It does not bring her on to an open internet full of randos and creeps and their horrible posts (which is a whole other set of dangers the movie does not get into), but the film does depict it as a medium ready-made for bullying, even if a user’s group chat is limited to other children from their dance class. At the same time, tech does play a role in a complicated effort to make Bonnie a more compatible IRL friend, even if their bond pointedly involves continuing imaginary and toy-based play, rather than everyone sequestering themselves on their respective devices, as seen during an ill-fated sleepover earlier in the film.

This is all thoughtful and fair-minded; anyone expecting the middle-aged Pixar brain trust to produce an addled grownup screed against children and their damn tech – while extolling the virtues of their beloved fake plastic icons of yesteryear – will be pleasantly surprised. Pleasant surprises are typical of the Pixar storytelling style – grab the viewers with a great hook (the toys versus their new nemesis, the screens) and then deepen the story they thought they were getting until it is about something else (the positive impact parents hope to make on their children’s lives, even when it may be fleeting). That was true, too, of Pixar’s previous film Hoppers , from earlier this year. It starts off about a teenage girl’s attempts to save a local pond ecosystem, and winds up as a race to prevent all-out war between animals and humanity.

The problem with this approach of late – especially in Hoppers but also present in Toy Story 5 – is that these nuances start to feel mathematically, rather than emotionally, derived. Pixar film-makers are directors and writers and designers, yes, but there’s also an engineering side to their work that seems to love the big swings of inventive technology while resisting same-scaled gestures for their characters. Hence Jessie can’t rebel too hard against tech (or at least cannot have that rebellion fully validated), and Mabel, the budding activist from Hoppers, must remain in a friendly tug-of-war with developers and local politicians, rather than fully rebuking them. Some of these story turns play less like acts of radical empathy than a form of pointy-headed both-sides-ing.

To a degree, these are just the basic building blocks of good mainstream drama – unlikely allegiances, lead characters whose assumptions are challenged, seeming villains who gain nuance with further exploration. But it is precisely the would-be value-neutral conditions of modern tech that makes it so insidious in a child’s hands. To make the addictive quality of bad touchscreen games secondary to havoc wreaked by bad friends, especially when that havoc is entirely enabled by tech, seems like an optimistic view, especially in an era where deepfakes lead to disinformation and AI exhausts water supplies because tech guys insist the tech requires immediate acquiescence from humanity.

Toy Story 5 isn’t exactly suffused with move-fast-and-break-things tech-bro cheerleading. The film wittily acknowledges both the haplessness of many parenting decisions – Bonnie’s parents admit that getting their child a tablet may be a bad idea, and essentially offer their own shruggy emoticon, unsure of what else to try – and the fact that screen fixations know no demographic limitations. (At one point, there is an offhand gag about a grown adult spending minutes on end fussing with his virtual-meeting backgrounds, amusing himself and likely no one else.) In that sense, it’s true to modern parenting: I regret letting my child look at YouTube too early, and I also look at my phone too often. We do what we can to mitigate these hard-to-erase bad decisions and move forward.

Yet, on a bigger-picture level, there is not much satisfaction in a movie about how tech does not have to be that dangerous, and can even be pretty endearing, just so long as parents are just the right combination of ambivalent, flawed and oblivious, yet emotionally available in others. The movie seems to sense this discomfort: its big emotional wallop doesn’t have much to do with tech, but rather the same insecurities Jessie has felt since Toy Story 2. The tech may change, the movie implies, but the fundamentals of guiding a child and imprinting your best moments into their memories remains universal.

That may be wishful thinking. Part of the nefariousness of tech is the way it introduces new guiding forces into a child’s life, unbidden and often unqualified. It may not be the purview of Toy Story 5 (or Toy Story 6) to tell a story about Bonnie taking advice from YouTubers spewing nonsense, or training herself away from reading and toward short-form video, or relying on chatbots to perform simple tests incorrectly. But as much as Pixar acknowledges that toys may not have a future, their faith in the partnership between humans and tech may belong in the past.

Keyword – World news
Trefwoorden – France, Paris, Europe weather, Extreme heat, Italy, Spain, Europe, World news, Environment
Title – France cancels events and restricts alcohol consumption amid brutal heatwave | France | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/jonhenley
Link – France cancels events and restricts alcohol consumption amid brutal heatwave | France | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-21T15:11:37.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/21/france-cancels-events-restricts-alcohol-consumption-music-festival-heatwave

Authorities in France have placed more than a third of the country under a red heat alert, cancelled some outdoor sports events and restricted alcohol consumption at the nationwide Fête de la Musique event amid a brutal heatwave forecast to push temperatures above 40C.

Level 1 or 2 heat alerts were issued on Sunday for about 53 million people, just over 75% of the population. A record 35 of the country’s 96 mainland departments were put on danger-to-life red alert, with another 45 under an orange warning.

France’s ecology minister, Mathieu Lefèvre, said on Sunday that 14 more departments would be on red alert on Monday. “We do not see temperatures falling before the end of the week,” he said, demanding “great prudence and a great many precautions”.

The national meteorological service Météo-France said: “Very high temperatures are setting in for the long term,” with a heatwave of “exceptional severity and duration” likely to break monthly and possibly all-time records.

It warned that temperatures could exceed 40C in many places on Sunday, with some areas facing rises to 42C or beyond from Monday. The national heat index, an average of day- and night-time highs at 30 weather stations nationwide, is expected to hit its highest ever level, the forecasters added.

Sunday’s Fête de la Musique is a nationwide summer solstice celebration held every year in which musicians take over the streets with free performances and revellers party into the night. This year’s festival is a particular source of heat-related health concerns, especially in Paris , Lyon and other major cities.

France’s culture minister, Catherine Pégard, urged “extreme vigilance” and said it should be up to local authorities to decide whether festivities should be cancelled or take place with suitable precautions. Most have opted for the latter.

Several towns have cancelled pre-7pm performances or moved them indoors. Many have introduced alcohol restrictions, with drinking banned on the street and in public spaces in areas on red alert and no alcohol on sale at municipally organised events.

In Paris, which is under a red warning, stronger drinks including high-alcohol beers, fortified wines and spirits have been banned along the banks of the Seine and the Canal St-Martin, to reduce the risk of people falling in. However, drinking at licensed bars and cafes and their terraces – where many gigs take place – is permitted.

Nearly 5,000 police have been deployed across the capital for the day and evening, as well as 2,500 emergency and health service workers. Paris city hall has installed more than 1,300 free public water fountains, while more than 1,500 local shops have signed up for a scheme promising to fill personal water bottles without charge.

France’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, convened a government heat crisis meeting on Saturday and planned another on Sunday, ordering ministers to urgently plan for better adapting France to further heatwaves in the future.

Scientists have said that as Earth continues to warm, extreme heat events historically confined to high summer will become more frequent, more intense and last longer, as well as happening earlier and later in the year.

The French education minister, Édouard Geffray, said on Sunday that more than 800 schools across the country had already announced they would not open on Monday because of the extreme heat, while another 1,800 were rescheduling classes and end-of-year exams.

Jean Castex, the head of the state rail service SNCF, advised “more vulnerable passengers” to avoid taking the train and postpone journeys if possible, warning that air-conditioning systems and other rail infrastructure were being “heavily tested” by the conditions.

Authorities reported on Sunday that four children aged between 11 and 17 had drowned in swimming accidents around the country on Saturday, including two in the Doubs River in the eastern town of Besançon, where swimming has been banned.

The heatwave is not confined to France. In Italy , authorities expanded heat warnings for Sunday from seven to eight cities in northern and central parts of the country, out of the 27 cities monitored nationally by the health ministry.

In Spain , the national weather agency, Aemet, has issued red warnings for northern regions. Temperatures of between 40C and 42C are forecast in the major river valleys and inland areas such as Andalucía and Extremadura, rising to nearly 44C by Tuesday.

In the UK, the Met Office said baking heat could last until at least Thursday, sparking health alerts and concerns for vulnerable people. Forecasters have said there is “growing confidence” this week could break the record for the hottest UK June temperature of 35.6C, which was set in Southampton in 1976.

Keyword – Global development
Trefwoorden – Global development, Aids and HIV, Africa, Ebola, USAID
Title – Africa can end Aids on its own terms. Will the world back us to finish the job? | Jean Kaseya and Amma Adomaa Twum-Amoah | The Guardian
Author – Jean Kaseya and Amma Adomaa Twum-Amoah
Link – Africa can end Aids on its own terms. Will the world back us to finish the job? | Jean Kaseya and Amma Adomaa Twum-Amoah | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T06:00:52.000Z
Category – Opinion
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jun/22/africa-can-end-aids-hiv-own-terms-world-global-support

T he Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak now being fought across the region shows again what Africa already knows. When an emergency arrives, the continent cannot wait on distant supply chains or other people’s goodwill. It must make and move the things that keep its people alive. The fight to end Aids by 2030 runs on the same truth.

Africa has earned the right to set the terms of that fight. Over two decades the continent helped turn the epidemic around. Aids-related deaths have fallen by 59% since 2010 and new infections by 68%. Nearly 22 million Africans are alive today on daily treatment. Keeping them alive is a permanent commitment.

That obligation now meets a hard fact. External health aid to Africa was estimated to have fallen by 70% between 2021 and 2025. The model that brought the response this far, in which Africa delivered while others financed and directed, is ending whether or not anyone plans for it. The only real choice is whether the continent leads the transition or absorbs the shock.

The Common Africa Position for this week’s 2026 High-Level Meeting at the UN in New York on HIV/Aids is Africa’s answer. Agreed across member states, experts and institutions, it speaks with one voice. It is built on the Africa Health Security and Sovereignty agenda, which heads of state adopted to treat health as a matter of sovereignty rather than charity. The political declaration should take it forward. It rests on three main demands.

It begins with money. Domestic HIV financing has risen over the past decade, and now it has to rise faster, moving inside national budgets, primary healthcare, universal health coverage and social protection, where it can last. Finance and health ministers will have to plan that shift together.

International solidarity is still needed, above all in countries facing conflict and fiscal strain, but the terms have changed. Every dollar should back one national plan, one budget, and one monitoring framework. Africa CDC’s target is concrete: at least 20 countries financing half or more of their own health spending by 2030. Partners are asked to fund that future, not to run it.

Then comes access. No continent can lead a public health emergency response while depending on distant factories for the medicines that decide who lives. Africa needs reliable supply of antiretrovirals, diagnostics, and innovative prevention tools such as long-acting pre-exposure antiretroviral prophylaxis (eg, lenacapavir), and it needs to make more of them locally. Innovation that does not reach people is innovation that misses the goal and one-off donations of ARV supply will not build a factory.

Lenacapavir could reach 9 to 11 million people and accelerate progress towards ending Aids by 2030, but only at a price an African budget can bear.

On price and supply – the African pooled procurement mechanism (APPM), led by Africa CDC, turns scattered demand into a continent’s bargaining power.

The African Medicines Agency supports African manufacturing of health products. The continent’s aim is to locally manufacture at least 60% of its health product needs by 2040. That takes political commitment to promote manufacturing and a permanent, binding route for real technology transfer to African manufacturers.

Then come the systems that hold it together. The Aids response is won in clinics and communities, not in communiques. People do not experience their health in vertical programmes, so HIV care has to be folded into primary healthcare, with testing, treatment and maternal health reaching people through one door rather than a dozen. Communities living with HIV have led this response from the start, and need funding and formal standing to keep doing so. Rights belong at the centre too.

Stigma, gender-based violence and punitive laws keep people from care, and a serious declaration will defend the dignity of everyone who needs these services, including migrants and refugees. The data must be African as well, held in country-owned systems under African control. The systems also have to hold under pressure, so that the next outbreak, as with the one the continent is fighting now, does not erase a decade of progress.

The direction is already set. The 2026 political declaration should meet it: finance the transition, secure access to the science, defend rights, and build a global health order that answers to African leadership rather than around it.

For 25 years the world asked whether Africa could deliver the Aids response. It can, and it has. The question this June is different. It is whether the world will back Africa to finish the job on African terms, or spend another generation managing the continent’s dependence. The continent has made its choice. The declaration should make the same one.

Dr Jean Kaseya is director general, Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention ; and H E ambassador Amma Adomaa Twum-Amoah is commissioner for the African Union department of health, humanitarian affairs and social development Union Commission

Keyword – Global
Trefwoorden – Newsletter sign-up
Title – Sign up to The Hotspot | Newsletter sign-up | The Guardian
Author – Guardian Staff
Link – Sign up to The Hotspot | Newsletter sign-up | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-04-02T16:20:03.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/global/2026/apr/02/sign-up-to-the-hotspot

Keyword – UK news
Trefwoorden – Rail transport, Bedfordshire, Train crashes, Transport, UK news
Title – Train driver killed in Bedford crash named as family pay tribute | Rail transport | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/donna-ferguson,https://www.theguardian.com/profile/harry-taylor
Link – Train driver killed in Bedford crash named as family pay tribute | Rail transport | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-21T16:47:49.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/21/major-disruption-after-bedford-train-crash-to-continue-for-at-least-a-week

Police have named the driver killed in the Bedford train crash on Friday, as his family paid tribute to him.

British Transport police said Shaun Burton, 60, was the East Midlands Railway driver killed in the collision between two trains on the line between Bedford and Luton that also left 100 people injured.

In a statement released on Sunday, Burton’s family said: “We are devastated by his loss. Our thoughts are also with those affected by this incident.”

Aslef, the train drivers’ union, also paid tribute to Burton. Its general secretary, Dave Calfe, described him as “dedicated to the job, and devoted to his colleagues and enormously popular at his depot”.

“Shaun, a driver at East Midlands Railway, joined the railway relatively late in life. He loved public transport – he used to work on buses and coaches – before he became a train driver seven years ago … The railway family grieves his passing; no one should go off to work in the morning and not come home. Our thoughts are with his family and friends tonight.”

The managing director of East Midlands Railway, Will Rogers, said Burton was a “dedicated railway professional” who had “touched the lives of colleagues and passengers alike”.

Rogers said the company’s “deepest condolences” are with Burton’s family. He added: “Shaun was known for his quick-wit, kind, generous and intelligent nature, and for always having a smile on his face.

“He was a well-respected colleague both in his role as a driver, and in his previous role as a train manager, often acting as a trusted adviser and available to share his wisdom, support and guidance to others.

“He will be greatly missed by all who knew him.”

Earlier on Sunday, Network Rail said it expected major disruption on the rail line to continue for at least a week.

Engineers are working to remove the track’s overhead electrical wires and construct a temporary access road to the crash site.

This will enable two 110-tonne cranes to lift the damaged trains and carriages on to trailers to remove them by road, allowing engineers to assess any damage to the track and complete the necessary repairs.

The line between Bedford and Luton will remain closed for the rest of the week, with a limited rail replacement bus service in operation instead. There will be no services between Bedford and London St Pancras station.

A limited service will begin to run north from St Pancras as far as Luton from Monday, but there will be no services north of Luton on the busy commuter Thameslink line. Luton airport express services have been cancelled and a rail replacement bus will operate between Luton airport and Luton.

Investigations into the crash are continuing, but the managing director of Network Rail’s eastern region, Ellie Burrows, said “current indications are that this was a tragic isolated incident”.

Removing the two trains is a “complex and challenging task”, she said, adding that services through the area would be disrupted for most of the week and people should only travel if absolutely necessary.

More than 80 passengers were treated in hospital on Friday night. As of Saturday morning, 28 were still in hospital, nine of them in a critical condition .

The Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) said on Saturday that its inspectors were continuing to gather evidence at the scene, which is just south of the Elstow interchange between the A421 and the A6. An update would be provided “in the coming days”, the organisation said.

The trains involved were the 4.40pm Friday service from Corby to St Pancras and the 3.50pm departure from Nottingham to the same destination.

The front of the Corby train was crushed when it crashed into the rear of the Nottingham train, and it also sustained damage to its rear carriages when they were shunted into the ones in front.

The chief constable of British Transport Police, Lucy D’Orsi, said people in Bedfordshire had shown “immense kindness to those stranded on trains and casualties”.

One person from Elstow, who did not wish to be named, said a friend’s son had had a full view of the crash site from his home. “There was loads of people throwing out water and food over the fence. They did everything they could to try and help those people,” she said.

Network Rail said that while the Midland mainline was closed at Bedford, train operators would accept tickets for affected EMR customers on any alternative route. If customers decide to travel on EMR once the line is reopened, their connecting ticket on other operators will be valid on that day too.

Journey planning apps and websites are being updated to reflect the changes to the timetable but may take a few hours to do so, Network Rail said. Customers are advised to check live travel updates before they travel.