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Once a year, Dutch kids, parents and teachers take part in a walking festival, heading out for four nights in a single week to explore their neighbourhoods, exercise and make friends. It’s a tradition that seems to be genuinely transformative
I shouldn’t have been surprised that the rain didn’t stop the Dutch kids. All day it had been thunderstorming, and the forecast didn’t look so great for the evening. And yet at 5pm, hundreds of kids started arriving – many by bike – with their parents to Amsterdam’s Westerpark, a beloved city park that caters to a more residential area of the capital. Today, it functions as a starting point: volunteers coordinate registration, and groups of children gather, decked out in raincoats and eager to embark on either a 5km or a 10km excursion around the surrounding neighbourhoods.
It’s the second night of Avondvierdaagse (which literally means “four-day evening walk”) , organised by a group of neighbourhood volunteers. It’s not a race, but if children complete every night, they get medals, a bouquet of flowers and, if they’re lucky, a lot of sweets. It’s not just Amsterdam; across villages, towns and cities in the Netherlands, hundreds of thousands of Dutch people are doing the same: every year, kids spend four evenings in early summer exploring their neighbourhoods with their school friends and parents as part of the Week van de Avond4daagse. Some places had celebrated earlier; others were walking the following week. A variation of the tradition has even made its way to Suriname, one of the Dutch former colonies. There are also four-day cycling and swimming events. According to the Royal Dutch Walking Association (KWbN), which helps coordinate the events, half a million people take part every year, in 700 locations across the country, powered by tens of thousands of volunteers.
Continue reading...Tue, 16 Jun 2026 04:00:45 GMT
Brooklyn Peltz Beckham appears in a new ad for DoorDash, just months after attacking the family brand’s love of self-promotion. Where will it all end?
I see Brooklyn Beckham is on his DoorDash privacy tour. After Prince Harry and Meghan “stepped away” from royal family duties, they embarked on what South Park famously designated their worldwide privacy tour. When Brooklyn stepped away from Beckham family duties – which oddly appear to involve a regal level of shared mission, public appearances and emotional repression – he declared that he wished only for privacy.
And so to his DoorDash ad, which dropped on Monday. Brooklyn is becoming quite the Greta Garbo of food delivery service ads, having previously done a collaboration with Uber Eats. But this latest one for DoorDash, owner of Deliveroo, is an eyecatcher. “You’re probably wondering,” he begins – and honestly, he’d be amazed at what I’m actually wondering. “You’re probably wondering why I’m watching the Fifa World Cup 2026 at home,” smirks Brooklyn, throwing down several World Cup tickets on a table that also features items including some letters. “It’s a long story,” he chuckles, before viewers are … tantalised, I think it is? … with the caption slogan: “It’s complicated. More soon.”
Continue reading...Tue, 16 Jun 2026 10:30:20 GMT
It’s a decade since the MP for Batley and Spen was killed by a far-right extremist. Her sister Kim Leadbeater, who took over her parliamentary seat, explains what lessons are still to be learned.
Jo Cox was a Labour MP for Batley and Spen, the place where she had grown up and had known her whole life. She was firmly pro-Europe, a passionate campaigner for social justice - and the mother of two young children, five and three years old. On 16 June 2016, at the height of a toxic Brexit campaign, Jo was murdered by a far-right extremist. He shot and stabbed her several times outside Birstall library in West Yorkshire, shouting “This is for Britain.” She was 41 years old.
Her sister Kim Leadbeater and her family set up the Jo Cox Foundation in her honour, and took on her former constituency. But a decade later, with far-right ideas increasingly mainstream and far-right violence more common, Leadbeater tells Nosheen Iqbal what lessons we can all learn from the tragedy.
Thumbnail image credit:
James Manning/PA Wire
Jo Cox Foundation/PA Wire
Tue, 16 Jun 2026 08:52:34 GMT
I’ve met many hardcore, violent fans, but the hostage-negotiating, cocaine-smuggling, Marxist-Leninist Alessandro Casolari still stood out
I had heard the name Alessandro Casolari on and off for years. From 2016 onwards, when I was researching my book on Italy’s ultras – a cross between English football hooligans and Hells Angels – the nickname “Caso” kept coming up. In the late 80s and early 90s, he had led the ultras in Ferrara, whose football club is known as Spal.
A red-brick city in northern Italy between Bologna and Venice, Ferrara has always felt sidelined, languishing in a marshy land of fog and floods. I used to go there quite often, drawn by its festivals and famous writers and film directors. A few years ago, when I started writing another book, about the Po River, I hung out there again, but I never bumped into Caso.
Continue reading...Tue, 16 Jun 2026 04:00:45 GMT
The UK has its own progressive policies such as the second home and ‘mansion’ taxes. So why isn’t the PM shouting it from the rooftops?
In April, to mark the day on which Americans are expected to file their taxes, the New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, filmed himself on Billionaires’ Row, an enclave of super-tall apartment buildings just south of Central Park. When he took office, he said, he would tax the rich, and now, outside the hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin’s $238m penthouse, he was ready to make good on his pledge. “Today, we’re taxing the rich,” he said with a flamboyant smile, zooming his face into the camera. It was the opening to a short film unashamedly titled Happy Tax Day, New York.
He went into battle armed with stats. According to Mark Levine, NYC’s comptroller (a senior financial executive), the pied-à-terre tax on second homes will raise about $500m annually fromabout 11,200 properties.
Anna Minton is reader in architecture at the University of East London. Her new book, Superprime: The Sterilisation of the City, will be published by Penguin next year
Continue reading...Tue, 16 Jun 2026 07:00:48 GMT
Some titles that once backed the Tories now ‘flirting with Farage’ as they try to gauge where readers stand
It was a Mail on Sunday headline with all the ferocity usually reserved for general elections, directed squarely at a political opponent. But in this case, the traditionally Conservative-supporting title was not targeting Labour.
The party in its crosshairs was Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, the vehemently rightwing outfit that regards Nigel Farage’s Reform UK as too weak on deporting migrants.
Continue reading...Tue, 16 Jun 2026 06:00:46 GMT
US president also tells press at G7 that Netanyahu has to be ‘more responsible with respect to Lebanon’
You can follow all the latest developments from the G7 summit in our Europe live blog:
We will be including any Iran-related news from the summit in our Middle East crisis live blog.
Continue reading...Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:00:46 GMT
US president confirms he will meet with Ukrainian leader again later today
… and given the delay this morning, the meeting may or may not have happened already – guess we will find out at some point during the day.
in Évian-les-Bains
Continue reading...Tue, 16 Jun 2026 10:52:47 GMT
Labour MP warns of voices fanning hatred on eve of 10th anniversary of the murder of her sister, the MP Jo Cox
• How the murder of my sister changed Britain – podcast
Political hatred and division in the UK is probably worse now than during the Brexit referendum, when Jo Cox was murdered, says Kim Leadbeater, Cox’s sister who is now also a Labour MP.
Speaking to the Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast Leadbeater, who was elected to the same Yorkshire seat held by Cox in a 2021 byelection, said everyone in public life had a responsibility to try and ease tensions.
Continue reading...Tue, 16 Jun 2026 05:00:46 GMT
No 10 is worried about retaliation from White House over restrictions on under-16s’ internet use
Ministers have embarked on a concerted lobbying operation to prevent a backlash from the Trump administration to the under-16s social media ban announced by Keir Starmer.
Officials said they had spent weeks trying to reassure senior Trump officials and the US president himself that the restrictions were not specifically aimed at US technology companies.
Continue reading...Tue, 16 Jun 2026 08:05:09 GMT