Habitually, 200 metres gold for Usain Bolt has tended to be won at a canter but the world’s fastest man believes it will be his toughest task in the sprint treble he has undertaken.
During the autumn in Kenya, David Rudisha was disillusioned at the knock-on effects of two years battling back from injury and the 800 metres world record holder was reluctant to return to training.
The Shoreham air display crash has had a particular impact on Bournemouth, which on the same evening was into the third day of its own far larger air festival.
Ah, those pictures of David Cameron and his delightful wife on the beach in Cornwall. What a perfect vision of England in the summertime, a couple chillaxing, appealingly dishevelled after a bracing early morning swim under a battleship grey sky. How lucky we are to have a Prime Minister of such vitality and homely appeal, who wears a £35 polo shirt with insouciant style, and who chooses the prosaic delights of the north Cornish coast for his holidaymaking.
I expected Andy Hall to sound jumpy when we spoke on the phone yesterday morning. He has just been indicted by a Thai court, and faces seven years in prison, on top of an £8m fine. The crime? In 2012, Hall met and interviewed workers at a factory belonging to Natural Fruit, a Thai pineapple-processing firm, for a report on their labour conditions. Disgusting, was the summary.
Death. It comes to us all, the great leveller and the one great certainty. Yet when it comes to talking about it we Brits are often as silent as … well, the grave. We can be morbid, or squeamish, or embarrassed about discussing grief or contemplating our own mortality – and actually, such nervousness extends to anything to do with our frail human bodies. Sickness, mental health or disability also have a tendency to make us clam up; while modern society is making strides in destigmatising such things... Читать дальше...
I wouldn’t want to rush anybody here, but 70 years after VE Day, is it time to jettison a defining belief from the national psyche and accept that Britain is a far less civilised country than Germany?
It was a crappily-ever-after ending to the hacking scandal for users of ‘cheat on your spouse, because life is short’ website Ashley Madison as details of their adulterous curiosities were leaked for the world to see this week. Anonymous hackers known as the Impact group released the data for more than 33 million users under the moralistic premise of targeting companies profiting from the “pain of others, secrets and lies,” and the individuals who utilise the service.
Jeremy Corbyn has made some sensible and laudable suggestions on tackling the scourge of sexual harassment: the extension of a scheme tested in Bradford to register the number plates of men who shout at women in the street, and the creation of a police hotline for reporting harassment and assault staffed exclusively by women, is especially encouraging. But a pilot scheme of women-only train carriages after 10pm? Not so much.
A few weeks ago, my dog Hallie was put down. My family had had her since I was about eight years old, so she’d been around for a long while. She had been getting old, losing her mind a bit, barking at all hours and her joints didn't work like they used to. So, my mum took her to the vets and they put her to sleep.
I received my job offer from the British Army on February 27th 2003, aged 16. Twenty days later, the war in Iraq began and the job I'd signed up for became a lot different to what I’d envisioned. By the end of March, 27 members of our military had been killed.
I feel for Jeremy Corbyn. Not for the extraordinary summer he has enjoyed: I am sure he has been having the time of his life, fired by adrenalin, as he heads towards his astonishing victory. But I pity him for what lies ahead, as he settles into the ghastly task of leading the Labour Party in opposition – a role for which he is so utterly unsuited. I suspect he will hate every miserable minute of it.
Labour is trying to accomplish the impossible: become electable while shunning voters. Thanks to Labour’s decision to purge its own supporters - a process predicated, in Harriet Harman’s words, on “letting the public in to see our arguments” and enabling the public to be “brutally honest about what they think of us and what they want from us” – it now risks descending into an anti-democratic farce. Harman’s announcement today seemed to concede that as many as 100,000 voters could have been blocked from the leadership vote. Читать дальше...
Iain Duncan Smith's speech on disability benefits yesterday was like a greatest hits compilation, delivered in a week where his record as a cabinet minister is taking some flak. The Quiet Man is back, but he's still not for turning.
Does Greg Rutherford have a case for being Britain’s most underrated sportsman? In a stadium where he had previously been criticised for underperforming, he silenced his doubters once and for all to become only the fifth Briton to hold the Olympic, world, European and Commonwealth titles at the same time.
Greg Rutherford has won the gold medal for Great Britain in the men's long jump at the World Athletics Championships in Beijing.
A darkened hall, a box of hammers, and a pair of hands – this was enough to draw a capacity crowd to Sir Andras Schiff’s late-night recital of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Composed to cure a rich patron’s insomnia, this extraordinary work makes supreme demands on technique, imagination, and memory, and great pianists are drawn to it like climbers to Everest.
Yesterday on a delayed flight from North Carolina, one girl was having the worst day ever. Not only was her boyfriend breaking up with her over his indiscretion with another woman, but, to add insult to injury, the whole argument was going viral on Twitter as a woman sitting in the opposite row live-tweeted the whole event.
Attractive and educated women may be more likely to report being “100 per cent heterosexual”, a new study has claimed.
Reams of paper and considerably more 1s and 0s have been sacrificed on the altar of this crucial sticking point: Do the 600,000 eligible voters (some of them so freshly minted they still have that 'new car' smell) go for values or power? Will the wider and future general electorate go for principles or polish? And most important of all, why has Labour yet to choose a woman as the party's leader, decades after the Tories did the same with dear old Maggie?
People are often surprised when they discover that I love One Direction. Maybe its because I spent my teen years obsessively cataloguing Rolling Stones singles, or maybe its because I took Milton seriously at university. Maybe its simply because I’m not twelve years old with H A R R Y scribbled across my forehead in permanent marker.
The winner of the funniest joke at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe has been revealed. But of all the hilarious one-liners that have been cracked in comedy venues across the city, not everyone is impressed with Darren Walsh’s “I just deleted all the German names off my phone. It’s Hans-free.”
A champion hammer thrower reportedly paid for a taxi home with his gold medal after getting drunk during a night out celebrating his World Athletics Championships triumph.
Markets around the globe have tumbled, billionaires have lost billions, companies and shareholders have suffered, and the emerging markets have had a shocking start to the week.
Whether you're going for sun, sea and sand or culture – or both – it's a good moment to take advantage of favourable exchange rates
