31 h. ago Tour de France 2025: stage one heads for finish and battle for yellow jersey – live

Le Grand Départ, starting and ending at Lille MétropoleAny comments or thoughts? Feel free to email AmyAccording to the Tour’s live coverage, the peloton has stopped at Porte de Paris, one of Lille’s city gates, where an orchestra is playing the Marseillaise, the French national anthem.And the Tour de France 2025 is off! Well, the controlled, 11km slow rollout before the official race starts is on. There are 184 riders taking part and the TV coverage is showing quite a few smiling faces as they parade around during the neutralised start in Lille. Continue reading...

Society

32 h. ago Tour de France 2025: stage one sets battle for yellow jersey but Ganna out – live

Le Grand Départ, starting and ending at Lille MétropoleAny comments or thoughts? Feel free to email AmyAccording to the Tour’s live coverage, the peloton has stopped at Porte de Paris, one of Lille’s city gates, where an orchestra is playing the Marseillaise, the French national anthem.And the Tour de France 2025 is off! Well, the controlled, 11km slow rollout before the official race starts is on. There are 184 riders taking part and the TV coverage is showing quite a few smiling faces as they parade around during the neutralised start in Lille. Continue reading...

Society

5 d. ago The success of Budapest Pride hurt Orbán – but be warned, Europe’s far right is coming for all of our rights | Gordon Cole

Huge crowds defied a ban to party on Saturday, yet authoritarians across the continent are targeting LGBTQ+ people to spread divisionAn animal is at its most dangerous when it is wounded, and the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, was already haemorrhaging supporters before a record number of people took to the streets on Saturday to support Budapest Pride, which his government had legally banned in March.The pulsating, international, love-fuelled parade, which stretched more than a mile through Budapest’s most prominent landmarks, was everything the Hungarian far right hates. And for Orbán and his nationalist party, Fidesz, the public defiance of Pride organisers, European diplomats and those of us who filled the streets in spite of threats of facial-recognition surveillance, arrests and fines has dented his strongman reputation. Continue reading...

Events

1 week ago I’m a queer Palestinian. Stop using my identity as cover for the destruction of Gaza | Jad Salfiti

Rightwingers in Israel and the US claim they are defending LGBTQ+ rights while Gaza’s people are killed. Don’t dare do this in our namePride has never been apolitical, but in recent years, particularly after the Israeli occupation’s onslaught on the Gaza Strip after 7 October 2023, the coalition of queer rights in the west has felt increasingly fractured.In Berlin, the city I call home, Pride events have splintered along political lines as Palestine has been a recurring point of contention. According to organisers of Internationalist Queer Pride Berlin (IQP Berlin), a split between two major alternative Pride events followed an incident in which the initial organisers called police to the event after participants expressed solidarity by chanting “free Palestine”. Meanwhile, at Berlin’s official Pride parade, attenders have previously waved rainbow and Israeli flags as they marched through Berlin alongside an Israeli embassy float.Jad Salfiti is a British-Palestinian video producer a...

Politics

1 week ago Philharmonia Orchestra player’s £150,000 violin stolen from London pub

The violin, which disappeared from the Marquess Tavern in Islington, is around 300 years old.

Economics

2 w. ago Berlioz and Ravel album review – his orchestra is responsive to Mäkelä’s every move

Orchestre de Paris/Mäkelä(Decca)It may be missing that edge-of-your-seat excitement it had at last summer’s Proms, but Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique is full of colour and impact, and the energy keeps fizzing on Ravel’s La ValseKlaus Mäkelä and the Orchestre de Paris gave an unforgettable performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique at the BBC Proms last September, the electric atmosphere of which is not quite replicated on this recording, made in Paris a few months later.It’s all played with consummate skill by an orchestra who are clearly responsive to their conductor’s every move, as they were in Royal Albert Hall, and Mäkelä’s shaping of Berlioz’s music, from the gentle, vibratoless violins at the beginning to the careering witches’ dance of the finale, remains highly coloured and full of impact. Yet it all feels a little clinical; the edge-of-the-seat excitement is missing. Perhaps it has been engineered out: the sound feels over-tweaked, and although the spatial effects at ...

Politics

last month International Pride Orchestra plays outside DC in rebuff to Trump snub at Kennedy Center

LGBTQ+ ensemble was to appear at performing arts center but moved to Maryland after president reorganized venueAn event by the International Pride Orchestra this week swung from classical Gershwin favorites to choral patriotism to high drag in a rebuff to Donald Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center and its subsequent snub of the LBGTQ+ ensemble.The spirited celebration of WorldPride, the peripatetic biennial international festival in support of LGBTQ+ rights which kicks off this month and is taking place in Washington DC, was staged instead at the Strathmore Music Center in Maryland, just north of the capital. Continue reading...

Politics