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The Lang Pacha ceremony is observed by Thais of Chinese descent to give a dignified funeral to the unclaimed dead.

To mark the milestone in his second term, Donald Trump is visiting the site of one of his last campaign events, in Michigan, a battleground state that swung his way in the US election.

Canada’s Liberal Party has won the federal snap election held on Monday, handing Prime Minister Mark Carney a fresh mandate weeks after he replaced Justin Trudeau.

Mark Carney and the Liberal Party’s victory in the Canadian federal elections has set in motion a potential reset of one of the country’s most strained international relationships: with India.

Playing host to two FA Cup semi-finals less than 24 hours apart, as well as more than 150,000 fans, means a busy time for staff at Wembley. We take a look at the preparationsIt takes a great deal of organisation and a lot of staff, working across a variety of roles, to deliver these two huge fixtures. More than 12,000 staff worked at Wembley over the two days. Many worked both days and through the night to ensure everything was in place.Matchday mascots wait to greet the players as they arrive at Wembley for the first of the weekend’s FA Cup semi-finals. Continue reading…

Young Serbians are keen to celebrate the Yugoslav era, and offering tours of their country in vintage Yugos is a fun way of doing it‘Jump in, comrade,” my driver honks and calls out the window of the smallest, boxiest car I’ve ever seen: the communist vintage Yugo. I’m setting off on a tour of Yugoslav-era Belgrade with driver Vojin Žugić from Yugoverse tours, a company in the business of cold-war nostalgia. The car is a time capsule, with its little cube headlights, cranky gear stick and cassette player. Its horn sounds delightfully cheeky, and the smell of diesel and old leather seats is strong. We trundle around the Serbian capital for half a day, taking in communism’s most striking bridges and sites, honking merrily at the many drivers who overtake us. All of them smile and wave, for the Yugo holds fond memories in this part of the world.Driving around the hippodrome next to Ada Bridge, or under the gravity-defying arch of the experimental brutalist Genex tower, it’s easy to get caught up in Žugić’s nostalgia – even though he’s only 24. “I love the feel of the mechanics, the simple geometry,” he says of the car. We park at the tower and take the lift to the top floor at 140 metres for spectacular city views from its spaceship-like windows. When it was designed in 1977, this was architecture of an imagined socialist utopia. Though the concrete is a bit shabby up close, the tower has kept its photogenic appeal. Just like our Yugo. Continue reading…

The Patrick Melrose author brings his trademark dark wit and flinty compassion to this wide-ranging sequelEdward St Aubyn’s previous novel, 2021’s Double Blind, was something of a challenge even for his devotees. Leaving aside the usual gripe that he is never quite as compelling without the shield of his authorial alter ego Patrick Melrose, the obsessive nature of the book’s inquiry into bioethics, narcosis, psychotherapy, oncology, venture capitalism and inheritance made too heady a cocktail to be more than sipped, a few pages at a time. I struggled with it until the very last scene, a charity bash where a schizophrenic young man takes his first terrified steps in employment as a waiter and happens upon a woman who, unknown to both, is intimately related to him. Their chance encounter was intensely moving and tautly suspenseful – you felt an immediate longing to know what would befall them.That longing is now answered in Parallel Lines, which picks up the narrative five years later and reintroduces its cast of interestingly troubled characters. Francis, a botanist pursuing a rewilding project on a Sussex country estate, has now joined an NGO in Ecuador trying to save the Amazonian rainforest. He’s also raising a son with his wife, Olivia, a writer producing a radio series on natural disasters and wondering whether Francis can resist the amorous lures of his philanthropist boss. Olivia’s best friend, Lucy, is in the throes of treatment for a brain tumour, the traumatic reverberations from which have forced her boyfriend – wild man plutocrat and drug fiend Hunter – to seek refuge with “compassion burnout” at an Italian monastery, where he’s hosted by a gentle abbot, Guido. Continue reading…

A poetic new exhibition of dreamlike black and white images captures the country’s contemplative beauty, from lonely Torii gates to sprawling temple trees Continue reading…