News (old posts, page 860)

Jess Cartner-Morley on fashion: travel trousers – the gateway drug to smart comfy dressing

Smart casual’s comfier cousin lets you glide seamlessly from a long plane journey and into a work meeting

Forget smart casual. These days it’s smart comfy that I want. Smart casual was about making smart clothes look more relaxed; smart comfy is about making them feel more relaxed.

Smart comfy might not sound all that different to smart casual, but it is nothing short of a whole new perspective on getting dressed. Smart casual was about how to look smart, without looking stuffy. It was about how you looked to other people, more than how you felt in yourself. The goal was to appear chill, not to feel chill.

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Parenting is not just for pronatalists: the progressive case for raising kids

Child rearing in our current world is a stubborn act of hope. If the left doesn’t see it that way, conservatives fill the void

A few months ago, I was at a playground just a couple of blocks from our home in Washington DC, when a mom I barely knew turned to me mid-conversation and said: “I think I might be the deep state.”

It was mid-March. Doge was tearing through the city, dismantling federal agencies at dizzying speed. Donald Trump, re-elected on a promise to “shatter the deep state”, had fired thousands of longtime civil servants in his first weeks back in office.

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Mourners left waiting as court orders halt to former Zambian president’s funeral

Halt to burial in Johannesburg is latest chapter in feud Edgar Lungu had with his successor Hakainde Hichilema

The funeral of the former Zambian president Edgar Lungu has been stopped while mourners waited in a cathedral in Johannesburg, as an extraordinary feud Lungu had with his successor continues to play out after his death.

A high court judge in Pretoria ordered a halt to Lungu’s burial at the Cathedral of Christ the King in central Johannesburg on Wednesday morning, following a last-minute request by by Zambia’s attorney general. Lungu’s black-clad wife arrived at the cathedral, visibly upset, shortly after the judge’s order and a mass was held instead.

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Trump and Hegseth admit doubts over Iran’s nuclear sites damage by US strikes

President calls intelligence ‘inconclusive’ while defence secretary describes harm to facilities as ‘moderate to severe’

Donald Trump and the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, have admitted to some doubt over the scale of the damage inflicted on Iran’s nuclear sites by the US bombing at the weekend, after a leaked Pentagon assessment said the Iranian programme had been set back by only a few months.

“The intelligence was very inconclusive,” Trump told journalists at a Nato summit in The Hague, introducing an element of uncertainty for the first time after several days of emphatic declarations that the destruction had been total. “The intelligence says we don’t know. It could’ve been very severe. That’s what the intelligence suggests.”

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Hull teenager becomes second Briton ever to join professional sumo stable

Nicholas Tarasenko, 15, gets rare chance to break into professional sumo ranks after winning amateur tournaments and learning Japanese

A teenager from Hull has arrived in Japan to pursue his dream of becoming a grand champion sumo wrestler, as only the second Briton to win a place at one of the ancient sport’s professional stables.

Nicholas Tarasenko, 15, left Yorkshire for Japan straight after finishing his GCSEs, to become the first British hopeful to join a stable since Nathan Strange – a Londoner who fought under the ring name Hidenokuni – in 1989.

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