Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine began at the tail end of winter with the Kremlin expecting a quick victory. But with summer at its height and the war dragging on, our Moscow correspondent Andrew Roth took the temperature on the streets of the Russian capital. The majority of Muscovites he talked to were enjoying the good weather and doing their best to turn a blind eye to the mounting casualties, dodge intergenerational arguments over the invasion and focus on having fun in the new normal of life without McDonald’s hamburgers and other now sanctioned western imports.
Women’s football has firmly staked its place as an equal on the pitch in the UK, with the England team doing what their male counterparts have dreamed of for 56 long years and triumphing in a major international tournament. It is sobering to remember that only half a century ago, the FA’s ban on women and girls playing still stood. In the giddy aftermath of Sunday’s win against Germany, our sportswriter Jonathan Liew hails a groundbreaking achievement and reflects on what it took for the squad to raise the Euro 2022 trophy at Wembley. We also bring together a panel of football writers and pundits to look ahead to what the team and the women’s game can achieve now and what needs to be done to cement a lasting change in attitudes to women’s and girls’ football from grassroots up.
The polymath scientist and inventor James Lovelock, who died last week aged 103, will for ever be associated with the Gaia theory that he co-created. The hypothesis that Earth can be viewed as a single biological system changed how we think about our planet. His biographer and our global environment editor, Jonathan Watts, remembers his friend and the contribution he made to how we think about nature and humankind’s effect on it.
We’ve all seen bicycle skeletons poking up from muddy stretches of water; it’s a depressing sight and one that got the writer of our main feature, Jody Rosen, thinking. His investigation of the fatal attraction between canals and bikes takes readers to watery cycle graveyards in Paris, Amsterdam and China to find out what’s behind this mass drowning and bring back an intriguing and surprising tale.
