Keyword – Sport
Trefwoorden – World Cup 2026, Sport, Football, World Cup, Aramco, Saudi Arabia and sport
Title – Aramco’s petrodollar backing of World Cup leaves stain of sportswashing | World Cup 2026 | The Guardian
Author – Oscar Berglund
Link – Aramco’s petrodollar backing of World Cup leaves stain of sportswashing | World Cup 2026 | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T10:39:10.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/jun/22/aramco-petrodollar-world-cup-football-sportswashing-the-hotspot

I f you have watched the World Cup, you may have seen the big signs announcing Aramco as the tournament’s “energy partner”. This Saudi Arabian fossil fuel company also happens to be the world’s single largest corporate polluter while Saudi Arabia has, for decades, been the greatest stumbling block in international climate change negotiations. Aramco’s sponsorship is one aspect of Fifa’s increasing sportswashing that has angered fans around the world.

This cosy relationship between modern football and the polluting industries has a long history that can be divided into three periods. First was when the game grew in British society as a tool to order and discipline workers and then became a cultural export of the British empire and capitalism. In the Factory Act of 1850, workers won the right to have Saturday afternoons free from work from 2pm, which is why the traditional kick-off is 3pm.

European industrialism, militarism and colonialism further exported football across the globe and industrialisation in Britain helped create the conditions for competitions, with their need for order, discipline and structure. Football spread from England and Scotland to the industrial areas of north-east France, north-west Germany and around the ports of France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.

Then came the postwar period when football was professionalised and increasingly dominated by clubs in the industrial cities. These clubs were often closely linked to the car industry, with the most evident examples being Juventus’s links with Fiat and Wolfsburg’s with Volkswagen. The economic regulations that governed football made elite men’s football a lot more spread out than it is today.

At European level, after the early dominance of Real Madrid, Milan, Inter and Benfica, there was a period of “Eurosclerosis” with a decline in playing standards and the finals of the European Cup being contested between smaller clubs from smaller cities with less global appeal, such as Malmö.

This relative equality was challenging to the big clubs and they started to push for changes to the competition and for more power within their leagues, especially in England, Italy and Spain.

Finally, with the establishment of the Champions League and the Premier League in the early 1990s, football became increasingly globalised. This opened up the sport to new forms of fossil capital investments, often in favour of the biggest clubs in the most attractive cities.

The 1990s had nine European club champions from nine cities, but only three clubs have won the Champions League who were not part of the 14 elite clubs that pushed for its expansion in the late 1990s. Those three all entered the elite level with the help of petrodollar investments: Chelsea with Roman Abramovich, Manchester City with Sheikh Mansour of the United Arab Emirates royal family and Paris Saint-Germain with Qatar Sports Investments, a subsidiary of the Qatari government. Meanwhile, for those who fail to compete, bankruptcy has become much more common .

There is now only one way for a club to enter the elite level of men’s football in Europe and that is investment from a petrostate, further locking in the carbon intensity of the sport and embedding fossil fuels as a crucial part of the biggest culture in the world. Fossil capital remains strong, despite most people now understanding that fossil fuels drive climate change and are a threat to civilisation.

So in order to justify delaying a green transition, fossil fuel companies need them to become a necessary evil, so embedded that we can not imagine life, let alone an enjoyable life, without them. This is where sportswashing comes into the picture and where football – and Fifa – play a very important role.

For every petrostate or oil magnate that buys a football club, for every event or club sponsored by a fossil-fuel company and for every airline logo on the shirt of our favourite players, the dominance of fossil capital becomes that little bit more embedded and makes it harder to imagine the game, and the world, without it.

So, as we love our beautiful game, we come to accept the necessary evil of fossil capital to keep it alive and flourishing. Aramco has bought into the World Cup in order to sell us the idea that we have no choice but to continue to burn fossil fuels. Don’t buy it.

Oscar Berglund is a senior lecturer in international public and social policy at the University of Bristol and a co-author of the report Football and climate change: A preview of the 2026 Fifa World Cup

This is an extract from our newsletter, The Hotspot. To subscribe just visit this page and follow the instructions.

Keyword – Football
Trefwoorden – World Cup 2026, Cape Verde
Title – Cape Verdeans what are your thoughts on Cape Verde’s World Cup 2026 performance so far? | World Cup 2026 | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/guardian-community-team
Link – Cape Verdeans what are your thoughts on Cape Verde’s World Cup 2026 performance so far? | World Cup 2026 | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T10:23:06.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/jun/22/cape-verdeans-thoughts-world-cup-2026-performance-so-far

Cape Verde is enjoying a fairytale World Cup , with their performance becoming the story of the tournament.

There was the shock 0-0 draw with Spain in their tournament debut. Then on Sunday, there was another when they drew 2-2 with two-time champions Uruguay in Miami. This now puts them in serious contention for a place in the knockouts.

We would like to hear from Cape Verdeans in the UK and across the globe. What are your thoughts on your nation’s performance so far in the World Cup? Have you been celebrating their progress? Where will you be watching Cape Verde’s next match against Saudi Arabia on Saturday?

Keyword – Games
Trefwoorden – Games, Fighting games, Sports games, Culture, MMA
Title – UFC 6 review: a bloody, brilliant MMA fighting game | Games | The Guardian
Author – Kirk McKeand
Link – UFC 6 review: a bloody, brilliant MMA fighting game | Games | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-17T09:00:28.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/jun/17/ufc-6-review-mma-fighting-game-ea-sports

B ecoming a professional fighter takes years of repetition, drilling techniques and training footwork until everything is instinctual. Your body needs an automatic answer for every limb, from every angle. In MMA , which encompasses every martial art, it’s even harder.

EA Sports’ UFC 6 realistically captures the grind of this brutal discipline. Throw on Career Mode and you spend most of your time working on combos and techniques. It’s all about making the complex controls feel second nature, increasing the effectiveness of every strike thrown by your fighter. With simulated six-week-long training camps between bouts, you can sometimes spar 12 times before a fight that could be over in a matter of seconds.

It’s an authentic fighter experience. In real life, these athletes spend relatively little time actually trying to take each other’s heads off with a shin, and most of their time training. In a game, however, it’s a bit of a slog. Once you’ve proven that you can ace these drills you can skip them, but you get fewer benefits. And it’s still laborious, as is tending to your inevitable injuries.

Happily, the fighting itself is excellent. UFC games have had a bit of a rock-’em’-sock-’em quality to them, but this latest instalment does a great job at creating more natural animations, flowing beautifully between the different levels submissions, wrestling, and stand-up — of an MMA fight. It looks almost worryingly realistic, too. From the pores on their skin to the wrinkles on the soles of their feet, these character models are the most detailed I’ve seen in a sports fighter, as impressive as Fight Night was when we saw HD video games for the first time. You can even tell who’s a standup fighter and who’s a wrestler by who has the most disfigured ears.

Every fight takes its toll on their bodies, too, with bruises and cuts appearing in direct response to your strikes. Blood droplets fly through the air and stain the canvas. When you land a knockout punch, the slow motion replay cranks up the volume so you hear the crunch of bone on bone and see cheeks wobble like a basset hound barking at a hairdryer.

A welcome new addition is The Legacy, a story mode that mythologises the rise of an up and coming fictional wrestler who’s trying to escape the shadow of his famous father, while brewing up a rivalry with another prospect at the same gym. It’s fully acted-out melodrama, your very own Rocky story, shining a light on how violence occasionally spills outside the Octagon and stains careers; inbetween fights, you attend press conferences and respond to provocations on social media.

The story does a great job of pulling you along for the first few hours as you go from rivals to friends and back to rivals again. It gets you invested in the action and raises the stakes, but the narrative climaxes near the beginning of your UFC career and then fizzles out. It feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to keep you engaged when you reach the top and have to defend your belts. Nonetheless, between the fluid fighting and the story-mode razzmatazz, this is the best version yet of EA’s fight-sim series.

UFC 6 is out now; £69.99

Keyword – Film
Trefwoorden – Film, Horror films, Culture, World news, Sexuality
Title – Shadows of Willow Cabin review – secrets fester beneath horny hookup in low budget horror | Film | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/philhoad
Link – Shadows of Willow Cabin review – secrets fester beneath horny hookup in low budget horror | Film | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T08:00:50.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jun/22/shadows-of-willow-cabin-review

T he best elevated horror makes a metaphor out of its writhing emotional subtext, but writer-director Joe Fria sadly can’t make the leap in this low-budget debut that undoubtedly has issues on its mind: repressed homosexuality, compulsive hookups and generational trauma. For much of the film the horror elements abruptly waylay what is otherwise a fraught two-handed gay drama.

After meeting on the apps, middle-aged English teacher Albert (Bryan Bellomo) and lithe paramedic Devon (John Brodsky) are finally getting cosy at Willow Cabin – the former’s childhood summer getaway, named for a line in Twelfth Night. But secrets fester beneath this ostensibly horny hookup. In Albert’s case, he has a wife and son – and this spot, which once belonged to his uncle, is where he first explored the other side of his sexuality, with his cousin. As for Devon, Albert is the latest in a long line of unfulfilling liaisons with married men, thanks to the emotional damage inflicted by his abusive dad. While both of them are candid to a point, the sporadic phantom eruptions inside the cabin suggest they’ve not got everything out of their systems.

Painstakingly seeping out in 114 minutes full of circuitous and sometimes cheesy dialogue, Shadows of Willow Cabin if nothing else feels highly personal. But Fria takes too long to move beyond pantomime gothic and find a deeper rooting for what verges on a compelling saga of familial shame and damage. And the claustrophobic bounds undeniably wring visual inventiveness out of Fria: he lights interiors to match the mood, giving them a pallid wash as the atmosphere sours. And on a couple of occasions, he breaks out the revolving shot Alfonso Cuarón used in Roma and lets the sound outside the shack do its work.

While Brodsky’s outbursts belong with the film’s erratic fright-night side, beyond the cultured exterior Bellomo has a pugnacious set to his jaw that lends substance to this would-be primer in escaping the binds of the past. A pity then that Fria couldn’t fully manifest his themes in a killer conceit – though a closet monster probably would have been pushing it.

Shadows of Willow Cabin is on digital platforms from 29 June.

Keyword – World news
Trefwoorden – Netherlands, Amsterdam, Europe weather, Europe, Climate crisis, Environment
Title – From mobile jungles to shadow art: how Dutch people try to beat the heat | Netherlands | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/senay-boztas
Link – From mobile jungles to shadow art: how Dutch people try to beat the heat | Netherlands | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T04:00:50.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/22/from-mobile-jungles-to-shadow-art-how-dutch-people-try-to-beat-the-heat

H ouseholds in Amsterdam are being urged to hang their curtains outside their windows as health experts recommend simple hacks to moderate the heatwave rolling across the Netherlands , where homes were built for old-fashioned damp and coldish northern European weather.

In a viral social media post last week, Eline Coolen, the heat coordinator at the city’s public health institute, urged sweaty city-dwellers to rig up temporary curtain rails or drape curtains or sheets outside to stop the sun’s rays reaching their large windows.

The government, meanwhile, has activated a national heatwave plan , with advice on caring for elderly and vulnerable people, and researchers are trialling everything from fake trees to shadow art to cool down pavements and pedestrians.

“In Dutch houses, but also in many houses in northern Europe , you have very big windows,” said Coolen. “We have always built for the winter, when you want as much sun and warmth in your house as possible.

“But every year in Amsterdam alone, 110 people die because of the heat – and that could rise to as many as 600 in the future without serious measures.”

Inspired by the sheets that appear draped over windows in Amsterdam-Noord, where she lives, and a recent trip to Barcelona where people mounted blinds on their balconies, she urged people online to make DIY adjustments – because if you can stop the sun touching your windows, there will be less heat transfer into your house.

It’s a matter of physics, according to Bert Blocken, a professor of mechanical engineering at Heriot-Watt University, who believes in alternatives to energy-guzzling air conditioning.

“Most of the time we spend indoors, even on very beautiful, sunny days, because we’re working or we’re sleeping, when we also recover from heatwaves,” he said.

“We need to keep our buildings cool, ideally without active cooling devices. The climate adaptation of individual buildings is important but still today, many are built with large, glazed facades that generate a lot of heat.”

A huge body of research showed the best way to keep a building cool was simply to keep out the sun, he said. If architects considered a textile striped canopy ugly, there were modern, retractable outdoor blinds.

“The ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans did this tens of centuries ago, but sometimes we’re very good at forgetting lessons from the past,” Blocken said. “If I were mayor, my first executive order would be to apply exterior solar shading on all buildings.”

There are three levels of action, according to RIVM, the Netherlands’ national public health institute: behaviour, housing and urban design. Werner Hagens, coordinator of the Dutch heatwave plan, said new research had shown that simple awareness campaigns appeared to reduce deaths during heatwaves .

“You can make changes in the area, more green spaces, you can make changes in the building, like screens and maybe other cooling mechanisms, but you can also give perspectives on how people inside them can minimise heat,” he said. “These temperatures can form a risk for people in vulnerable health … and it reduces the risks.”

A study by the homeowner association Vereniging Eigen Huis found that 23% of people surveyed felt their homes were too hot in a heatwave, although four in five had tried to do what they could to cool them down.

Blocken said that while building owners could whitewash flat roofs and invest in outside blinds, greenery was key: not only green roofs and facades, but large parks, trees and green spaces.

Fake trees, pergolas covered with greenery and mobile “jungle blocks” can all help pedestrians stay cool and even slightly moderate temperatures , according to Jeroen Kluck, a professor of climate resilient cities at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.

“There’s always a reason not to do it: there’s limited public space, there’s no more money,” he said. “But it makes the city more attractive, liveble on hot days and it increases biodiversity. If you make shadow, with a nice place to sit underneath and plants that can survive a bit of drought, it all helps.”

Sandra Phlippen, an economist and head of climate strategy at ABN Amro, said it made economic sense for local governments and businesses to invest. “One night of sleep loss [costs] close to €200 [£173],” she said.

“Imagine a street where there are 100 people living, everybody sleeps terribly for three nights because of a heatwave and the next day they’re unproductive. That’s your investment in trees for the whole year.”

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 – Czechia, Public service broadcasting, Television industry, Radio industry, Media, Europe, World news
Title – Thousands of staff at Czech public broadcasters strike over funding plans | Czechia | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/anna-koslerova
Link – Thousands of staff at Czech public broadcasters strike over funding plans | Czechia | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T04:00:50.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/22/czech-television-radio-public-broadcasters-strike-industrial-action-funding-plans

Thousands of public service media employees in Czechia are holding a 24-hour strike after the government of the billionaire prime minister, Andrej Babiš, pushed ahead with controversial plans to change the way the country’s public broadcasters are funded.

Monday’s industrial action by staff at Czech Television and Czech Radio marks the biggest escalation yet in a months-long confrontation between the broadcasters and Babiš’s populist administration .

“The reforms have been prepared without consultation and without guarantees for the independence of public service media,” said Pavla Kubálková, a member of Czech Television’s strike committee. “A large part of society remembers what the news looked like when politicians chose the content before 1989. We don’t want to go back there.”

The legislation, approved by the cabinet last week, would scrap the licence fee system and finance Czech Television and Czech Radio through an annual state-budget allocation.

According to the broadcasters, the changes would in effect return funding to 2008 levels, cutting about £14.3m from Czech Radio’s annual budget and £35.8m from Czech Television’s, despite the nearly two decades of inflation since then. Executives say the reductions would force hundreds of job losses and substantial cuts to programming.

But the dispute is not just about money. Kubálková said it had evolved into a broader fight over the future independence of public service media amid concerns that direct funding from the state would expose broadcasters to political pressure. “What matters most to us is preserving independence and the direct relationship between Czech Television and its viewers,” she said.

“The employees of both broadcasters are ready to defend their service to citizens, and we are determined to continue with even more vigorous protests,” she added. “We will do everything we can to defend public service media in their current form.”

Her concerns were reinforced last week when Josef Nerušil, an MP for the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) party, which is part of the governing coalition, appeared to suggest that changes to funding should eventually lead to greater scrutiny of what public broadcasters air.

“The point is to change the funding,” Nerušil told Czech Radio. “But if we’re talking about what public service media should broadcast, then of course, in a further step, we want to get to a broader discussion.”

He added that the aim was “to control not only the financial side but also the content side”. The MP then accused the broadcasters of political bias.

Presenting the legislation last week, the culture minister, Oto Klempíř, said the broadcasters should prove they could operate more efficiently with less money. In written comments to the Guardian, he rejected claims that the funding proposal threatened the independence of public service media.

“Moving funding into the state budget changes nothing about the independence of Czech Television or Czech Radio,” Klempíř said. “Their legal status, the way their governing councils are appointed, their powers and the guarantees of editorial freedom remain unchanged.”

He argued that the changes only affected the method of financing and noted that “an increasing number of European countries already fund public service media from public budgets. This is not a Czech experiment but a broader trend.”

Babiš has also rejected suggestions that the changes threaten editorial independence. “We want you to save money, and you’re not,” the prime minister told a public broadcaster journalist at a press conference.

Both broadcasters have reacted with alarm to the changes. Hynek Chudárek, the head of Czech Television, said the legislation would “effectively liquidate” parts of the broadcaster, while Czech Radio’s director general, René Zavoral, said cuts would hit regional reporting, children’s programming and foreign correspondents.

The strike will be felt across both broadcasters. Czech Television said all channels except its children’s service would be affected, along with its websites, streaming platform and social media output. Czech Radio plans to merge some stations and alter programming schedules, with presenters explaining the changes on air.

“The strike is a way of showing audiences what they stand to lose,” said Jan Herget, a member of Czech Radio’s strike committee.

Media scholars say the dispute is unprecedented in recent Czech history. “A strike in Czech public service media is a highly unusual event,” said Marína Urbániková, an associate professor of media studies at Charles University and Masaryk University.

She noted that Czech Television had not experienced a comparable strike since 2001, when journalists protested against political interference in the appointment of the broadcaster’s director general.

František Talíř of the Christian Democrats, who chairs the parliamentary media committee, said on Czech Television: “We’re going to the barricades because this is a direct attack on Czech Television and Czech Radio.” The opposition would use every means to block the bill, he said, warning that the country was “copying Slovakia’s path”, referring to Czechia’s neighbour, where the government last year dissolved the public broadcaster RTVS.

Zdeněk Hřib, the leader of the opposition Pirate party and a former mayor of Prague, said the funding plans would take the country “back not one year but at least 36 years, to when we had state media”.

His party has referred the changes to the European Commission and the Council of Europe’s Venice commission, arguing that they may breach European standards designed to safeguard the independence of public service media.

Those concerns have also drawn the attention of international media freedom groups. In a joint statement, a coalition led by the International Press Institute said the bill risked “financially weakening the broadcasters, eroding safeguards for their financial independence and violating the European Media Freedom Act”, and called on the European Commission to scrutinise the plans.

Keyword – Books
Trefwoorden – Fiction, Books, Culture
Title – The Leveret By Anna Goldreich review – a hare mends the pain of baby loss | Fiction | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/lara-feigel
Link – The Leveret By Anna Goldreich review – a hare mends the pain of baby loss | Fiction | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T08:00:50.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/22/the-leveret-by-anna-goldreich-review-a-hare-mends-the-pain-of-baby-loss

Birth. “A detaching, a loosening of something, then the pain of it.” A small, curled and crinkled creature is wrested from that pain. But then, instead of the long-awaited cry of a newborn: silence.

This is the background of Anna Goldreich’s highly accomplished, calmly devastating first novel The Leveret, a book that asks us to see late miscarriage as the death it feels like for many mothers. Since this miscarriage, six months ago, Clare has felt everyone, including her partner Phoebe, impatiently expecting her to get on with her life. But she remains floored by loss, stuck waiting for that first cry.

In a drastic attempt at change, the couple has moved to a cottage in the rural village where Phoebe grew up. Phoebe is busy helping her farmer parents with the lambing while Clare sits in the house day after day, failing to eat. Pregnancy had been the first time Clare had developed a sense of herself as a real person with a physical body – not just the “floating head” she’d conceived herself to be. The determined physicality of the growing baby had pulled her into a more fleshy awareness of herself. Now she finds herself unreal again – until she discovers an abandoned baby hare under a hedge.

Goldreich writes the scene as a second birth, full of the pulsating life that the first birth lacked. Clare reaches through bramble thorns, “and through the pain, through the tearing, there is softness. My hand over a head, fingers spread out on a back … Her. Pulling her up from the undergrowth, though the space I have opened for her, bringing her out to meet me.” Like the stillborn baby that she nuzzled in the hospital, Clare finds herself licking the hare’s face clean with her tongue, and feels pulled back into life.

It’s an extraordinary scene, written with absolute conviction, and from this point Goldreich succeeds in making the moments between Clare and the baby hare she names Isla eerily moving, even as they become more disturbing. Goldreich keeps three simultaneous possibilities in play for the reader: the hare as a symptom of mental illness; the hare as a desperate but uncannily sane attempt at self-cure on Clare’s part; the hare as a means to access the ultimate truth that we are all creatures in need of contact with the earth. For weeks, the leveret sleeps in Clare’s arms and is carried around in a sling. Then Isla becomes wilder, and Clare desperately clings to the delusion that these are mere rebellious antics, trapping the hare in a domesticity it can’t survive as she tracks Isla’s changing height on the doorframe and talks about her mother as Isla’s “granny”.

The Leveret is a slight book in some ways. Goldreich attempts to make it polyphonic by alternating chapters from Clare and Phoebe, but the sections in Phoebe’s voice don’t take flight. There’s a suggestion that Phoebe doesn’t share the kind of linguistic eloquence Clare thinks with – that she may, indeed, not think verbally at all. This presents a literary challenge of a kind many writers have grappled with; Phoebe’s love for Clare is all the more affecting for being haltingly expressed, but the frequent line breaks in these sections feel weakly uncertain. Nonetheless, Goldreich is so astonishingly good at bringing both the original miscarriage and Clare’s relationship with the hare to visceral life that this is ultimately rather a triumphant first novel. The need for new models of our relationship to nature animates so much writing today, and Goldreich’s approach here is mischievous and elegantly undogmatic.

Ultimately, it’s up to Phoebe to claim Clare back for human love. The book leaves it ambiguous as to whether Clare has saved the hare’s life or blighted its chances; but Isla has restored to Clare some of the physical reality that motherhood had promised, and it may be that the very failure of the project with Isla is part of that. In a moment of extremity, Phoebe lets out “a strange cry from the depths of some poor creature, a hoarse sound, cutting through the wind”, allowing for a moving realisation of the mammalian physicality still possible in the love between Clare and Phoebe.

Lara Feigel is the author of Custody: The Secret History of Mothers (William Collins). The Leveret by Anna Goldreich is published by Hamish Hamilton (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

Keyword – Football
Trefwoorden – World Cup 2026, World Cup, France, Iraq, Football, Sport
Title – France v Iraq: World Cup 2026 – live | World Cup 2026 | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/timdelisle
Link – France v Iraq: World Cup 2026 – live | World Cup 2026 | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T19:58:37.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/football/live/2026/jun/22/france-v-iraq-world-cup-2026-live-updates

Latest on Birthgate. There’s been a climbdown from L’Equipe, one of whose presenters said, à propos Jérémy Doku, that there was no point in a father witnessing the birth of his child. More importantly, the Doku baby has now arrived. It’s a boy called Praise, born in London – which means he will have the option of playing for England, should he become a footballer too.

Preamble

Evening everyone and welcome to the Kylian Mbappé show. He’s the captain of France, he’s the biggest name in a team full of stars, in fact the biggest name in this World Cup among all those who have yet to turn 38. He needs four more goals to share the all-time World Cup record which Lionel Messi has just set. And Mbappé is already the GOAT in terms of goals per match, among those who have scored at more than one World Cup. He has 14 from 15, just pipping Pelé, who has 12 from 14, staying well clear of Messi, who has 18 from 28, and possibly enraging Cristiano Ronaldo, who has only eight from 23.

Tonight, in Philadelphia, Mbappé will win his 100th cap. The stage is set, but it still takes two to tango. Can Iraq emulate Iran by pulling off a triumphant 0-0? They have never won a point at a World Cup, so it will be a surprise if they manage it against a team as good as France . But they love a challenge and don’t mind a bit of hard work: it took them 21 qualifiers to get here, more than any other nation. And in the Australian Graham Arnold, they have a manager so prone to positive thinking that when others talk of a group of death, he sees only a “group of excitement”.

Mbappé works hard too. France have played only once, against Senegal, but he has watched that game twice. Maybe he was trying to work out why it took them more than an hour to find the net, albeit against a gifted team. The final score, 3-1, may have flattered France, whose defence looked brittle with William Saliba at left centre-back rather than right, where he’s so commanding for Arsenal.

The Iraqis, on the other hand, can feel rather insulted by their first result, a 4-1 defeat to Norway. They were level for much of the first half, spirited and sparky throughout, and had 11 shots, only one fewer than their opponents. They might well have grabbed that elusive point if their finishing had been calmer – or if Erling Haaland had changed sides, as your old school coach would surely have insisted.

The kick-off is at 5pm in Philly, which is 10pm BST. Back soon with the teams.

Keyword – World news
Trefwoorden – Colombia, Americas, Human rights, World news, The far right
Title – ‘Institutional threat’: election of far-right leader raises fears for democracy in Colombia | Colombia | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/tiago-rogero
Link – ‘Institutional threat’: election of far-right leader raises fears for democracy in Colombia | Colombia | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T16:29:48.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/22/election-far-right-leader-fears-democracy-colombia-espriella-trump

When more than 20 women accused a Colombian evangelical pastor in 2012 of sexually abusing them, the defendant’s lawyer sought to discredit the allegations by telling the court that they were “ trepadoras ” – a pejorative term meaning social climbers.

He ultimately secured his client’s acquittal – although the case remains under review by the supreme court – but footage of the remark resurfaced during Colombia’s presidential campaign, sparking outrage among many progressive voters.

On Sunday, that lawyer was elected Colombia’s next president.

Abelardo de la Espriella, who calls himself “El Tigre” (The Tiger), a millionaire who launched his legal career defending paramilitary leaders and has never held public office, defeated the leftwing senator Iván Cepeda by a razor-thin margin of just 250,000 votes out of an electorate of 41 million.

On 7 August, he will replace Gustavo Petro, the country’s first and only leftist president, marking a sharp swing back to the right for the country – and De la Espriella is seen as considerably further to the right than Colombia’s long line of conservative presidents.

Although De la Espriella said in his victory speech that he would respect the constitution and the rights of “all Colombians”, the election of a 47-year-old self-styled “outsider” who promised to “disembowel” the left, use lethal force against protesters and kill criminals like “rats and cockroaches”, has left many analysts and activists concerned about the risks he could pose to Colombian democracy.

“It frightens me,” said Catalina Ruiz-Navarro, a co-founder and editor of the feminist magazine Volcánicas. “Despite Colombia’s strong institutions, we’re facing an institutional threat unlike anything we’ve experienced before.”

His election is also the latest confirmation of a far-right wave sweeping presidential elections across Latin America.

An outspoken admirer of the US president, Donald Trump, who endorsed his campaign, De la Espriella has drawn inspiration from him and other conservative leaders in the region, particularly El Salvador’s populist autocrat, Nayib Bukele.

Colombia’s next president has vowed to emulate Bukele’s controversial crackdown on gangs in an effort to confront the decades-long armed conflict, in which criminal groups fight each other – and the military – for control of territory and cocaine trafficking routes, fuelling killings, forced displacement, massacres and kidnappings.

Inspired by Brazil’s Bolsonaro family, he has turned Colombia’s national football shirt into a symbol of the far right . From Argentina’s Javier Milei, De la Espriella borrowed the feline mascot – a lion in the Argentine’s case – and the promise to take a “chainsaw” to the state, shrinking it by 40%.

Some analysts see cuts on that scale as particularly concerning, arguing that they could trigger an economic crisis and – given that the state already struggles to maintain a presence across large parts of the country – inadvertently strengthen criminal groups by creating a vacuum for them to fill.

“We’ve never confronted a threat of this magnitude,” said Ana Bejarano Ricaurte, a lawyer and co-director of El Veinte, a legal advocacy organisation that defends freedom of expression. “He has promised a regressive agenda in terms of civil rights and fundamental rights: an anti-abortion agenda, an anti-LGBTQ+ agenda … He has vowed to withdraw Colombia from the inter-American human rights system, which has been the guiding light for the protection of human rights here.

“He has embraced an almost tailor-made formula for rightwing populism in Latin America.”

De la Espriella was born in the capital, Bogotá, but grew up in the department of Córdoba, in Colombia’s Caribbean.

The son of a former Liberal state congressman and lawyer who twice unsuccessfully sought election as governor, De la Espriella followed in his father’s legal footsteps, initially taking on small civil and labour cases.

The turning point came in the early 2000s, when paramilitaries – private armies created by rightwing landowners to fight leftwing guerrilla groups – began negotiating their demobilisation with the government. De la Espriella entered the talks as a “member of civil society”, but soon became the lawyer for some of the militia’s leaders.

As his profile grew, he took on other high-profile clients, including the pastor Álvaro Gámez, who was accused of abusing female followers; the head of a financial pyramid scheme allegedly used to launder drug-trafficking money ; and Alex Saab , accused by US authorities of being the main financial frontman for Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela.

His campaign said it was “his success in the courts … that laid the foundations of his fortune” and allowed him to expand into other ventures, including rum, wine, menswear, construction and agribusiness. He has also published five books and recorded two albums on which he croons popular classics. An investigation by the Colombian news outlet La Silla Vacía reported that, apart from his law firm, most of his other businesses were operating at a loss .

He spent years in Miami and obtained US citizenship in 2023; he also holds Italian citizenship. On social media, he frequently showcased his lavish lifestyle , including yacht trips and private jet travel between his various homes.

In July last year, a month after the rightwing senator and presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot during a campaign event – he died in August – De la Espriella announced that he would run for president to fight “with an iron fist the corrupt, unpunished criminals and all those who threaten Colombia’s existence”.

With heavy investment in social media, he gradually won the backing of influencers and footballers . His rallies resembled pop concerts , with drone shows, giant screens flooded with AI-generated videos , and songs . De la Espriella appeared in a bulletproof vest behind bulletproof glass ; the vehicle that carried him to his victory speech, fitted with a transparent armoured enclosure, drew comparisons with the popemobile and was nicknamed the “tigermobile” .

Rather than distributing campaign merchandise to supporters, he sold everything from $6 stickers and $17 keyrings to a roaring tiger-head statue painted in the colours of the Colombian flag for $640 and a $5,800 watch .

De la Espriella promised to withdraw the country from the UN, to extradite Petro to the US, to build 10 maximum-security “mega-prisons”, to legalise civilian gun ownership, and to “capture or kill” 10 major crime leaders within his first three months in office. He also supports fossil fuel extraction, fracking and a loosening of environmental licensing requirements.

With minimal legislative support, the president-elect has vowed to issue 90 executive decrees on his first day in office, a governing style reminiscent of neighbouring Ecuador’s far-right president, Daniel Noboa, who has been widely criticised for his extensive use of presidential decrees, particularly states of emergency .

“Those 90 decrees De la Espriella has promised may be illegal and can eventually be challenged in court, but by the time the courts resolve the issue, the rights in question may already have been lost. We have seen that happen in the US,” said Ruiz-Navarro.

Over the years, De la Espriella filed more than 100 lawsuits against journalists. “He has tried to silence anyone who says something he disagrees with,” said Ricaurte.

An atheist who became a devout Catholic after the death of a relative, Colombia’s next president has been accused of homophobia for mockingly imitating a gay candidate and of sexism on multiple occasions . In a statement, he said that under his government, “no person will be persecuted, discriminated against or excluded because of their sexual orientation, personal convictions or way of life”.

Ricaurte said his rhetoric was “misogynistic and full of hatred and exclusion, and it’s not that people voted for him despite that rhetoric. People voted for him because of it. And that is a deeply alarming sign for the health of our nation.”