Estonian athlete Henry Räppo won the Ironman Tallinn 70.3 for the second year running. In the women's race, Italy's Marta Bernardi took victory, with Liis Kapten finishing third.

A book of condolences has been opened at the Stenbock House in memory of former prime minister Siim Kallas, who passed away at the start of the weekend, aged 77.

A book of condolences has been opened at the Stenbock House in memory of former prime minister Siim Kallas, who passed away at the start of the weekend, aged 77.

Estonian politician Siim Kallas, a former prime minister, foreign minister and vice president of the European Commission who also held several other senior positions, died overnight Friday into Saturday.

The Level 2 storm which hit Estonia on Saturday has started to subside, though strong winds and rain are still forecast for Sunday.

The impending arrival of Saturday's storm saw kitesurfers head out to catch the wind and the waves ahead of it making landfall.

Nädala eest Suurbritannias Birminghamis lõppenud kergejõustiku EM kütab ikka veel kirgi. Tšehhil jäi esmakordselt pärast 1994. aasta EMil medaliarve avamata ning nüüd käib riigis nõiajaht, et leida süüdlased. 1999. aasta MMil 800 meetri jooksus kulla võitnud Ludmila Formanová arvates ei pea põhjust kaugelt otsima.

Ukraina iseseisvuspäevale, mis on igal aastal 24. augustil, eelneb päev varem Ukraina riigilipu päev. Seda tähistatakse riigi sinise ja kollase lipu austamiseks.

Mykhailo Fedorov has also called for wartime elections to be held in Ukraine.

A government minister says people have been taking risks by going into the water, with 301 deaths since 19 June.

Industry body Energy UK says the current support for households most in need does not go far enough.

Customers say the disruption to virtually all UK CrossCountry services is the "worst case scenario".

LONDON — Britain is still lagging behind Australia when it comes to assisted dying. But one Labour MP who has seen the debate in both countries is hoping she can push forward a thwarted attempt at change in the U.K. “If I had six months to live and I was facing a potentially very frightening, very painful, very uncomfortable death, I would want to be able to have the choice to choose to end my life surrounded by my family,” Lauren Edwards, who became an MP in 2024 — and hails from Melbourne, Australia, tells POLITICO in an interview. Edwards’ support for assisted dying is shaped in part by the laws in Victoria, where she still has family. In 2017, it became the first Australian state to legalize assisted dying for people expected to die within six months, or 12 months for those with neurodegenerative diseases, and who face unacceptable suffering.  Though Edwards argues her own legislation is “preferable and has stronger safeguards” than the Australian model — unbearable suffering is not a criterion for eligibility in her bill — she found it helpful to see how assisted dying has worked in practice the last time British MPs tackled this issue. It’s an experience from which many in Labour still bear the scars — and on which new Prime Minister Andy Burnham already appears to have drawn a line in the sand. Stepping forward  MPs passed fellow Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill last year by 314 votes to 291. But it failed to become law after delays in the U.K.’s House of Lords. Now Edwards is reintroducing the bill — and is adamant that the groundbreaking social change can succeed this time around. It means that next month, the House of Commons will once again be thrust into a divisive vote on a matter of conscience, deciding whether to legalize assisted dying in England and Wales for terminally ill adults judged as having fewer than six months left to live. “When Kim’s bill came up, I did have conversations with my dad about how things have gone in Australia,” Edwards says. The situation reassured her compared to “more extreme examples” like Canada, where a terminal condition is not required for patients to be eligible, but instead an irreversible, “advanced state of decline” and “unbearable physical or mental suffering.” Next year, Canadian eligibility for assisted dying is set to be expanded to include individuals whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness, though this change has been repeatedly delayed. Sense-checking the legislation with family down under was “really important” when weighing up whether to support Leadbeater’s earlier proposals, she says. Edwards has Australian friends who have settled in Britain too — and contrasts a friend able to attend his mother’s assisted death in Australia with British families currently worried about prosecution for helping relatives to die. U.K. law punishes the offense with up to 14 years in prison. Lauren Edwards argues her own legislation is “preferable and has stronger safeguards” than the Australian model. | House of Commons “[The] status quo is not neutral. It is not benign,” Edwards argues. “It is a situation where, if we don’t make this legislative change, unfortunately, we will be allowing that pain, fear and isolation.” In October 2024, an independent review of assisted dying in Victoria by the state Department of Health’s Centre for Evaluation and Research Evidence found the system to be safe and “operating as intended” with “no reports of ineligible individuals” accessing substances to end their lives. However, access to assisted dying varies across the vast state — which is only slightly smaller than the entire U.K. — and just “a few practitioners” deliver the majority of care. Victoria has been urged to press the central Australian government for more funding. Choice of priorities Back in the U.K., the main political parties have agreed that the decision to legalize assisted dying should be a matter for parliament, rather than any one administration. MPs were not whipped to vote in any particular way on Leadbeater’s bill, and the issue is treated as a matter of conscience. But there was tacit endorsement for the most recent attempted overhaul from the top of Keir Starmer’s government. Before entering No. 10, Starmer promised broadcaster Esther Rantzen — who has stage four lung cancer — that he’d make time for a vote in parliament. Leadbeater’s bill also received technical support from civil servants in the Department for Health and Social Care and the Ministry of Justice to ensure its workability. New Prime Minister Andy Burnham appears to have other ideas. Burnham was not an MP when assisted dying passed the Commons last year and abstained in a 2015 vote during a previous stint in parliament. More strikingly, when asked about his stance on the issue last month, Burnham said “the fixing of the funding of palliative care and social care” needs to happen first — and argued it would be “very challenging” to introduce assisted dying without substantial progress on these two running policy sores. Edwards remains bullish. She commends the PM’s commitment to sustainably funding social care — Burnham has kicked off cross-party talks on the issue and asked for a speedier inquiry — and she insists his professed skepticism hasn’t put her off. “It’s really important that we consider them together,” Edwards says of social care and assisted dying. “I don’t think that there is a reason to delay” changing the law, she argues, highlighting £125 million provided by Starmer’s government for adult and children’s hospices. (A Public Accounts Committee report said this one-off funding did not directly pay for service delivery or solve financial problems facing the sector.) Edwards’ bill has a four-year implementation period. That means if it becomes law next year, assisted dying wouldn’t be permitted until 2031. She believes the two systems can work on a “dual track” and that poor palliative care won’t incentivize people to access assisted dying.  “I don’t necessarily think that lack of care is a motivator for this option,” she argues. “I think it’s a last resort when physical suffering really can’t be relieved.” Yvette Cooper speaks during a visit to a care home in London on July 29, 2026. | Pool photo by Kirsty Wigglesworth via WPA/Getty Images From MPs to peers A majority of Starmer’s Cabinet backed the bill last time, including Health Secretary Yvette Cooper and Justice Secretary Alex Norris — but only 12 MPs need to switch sides for the bill to fall, making the margins tight. Indeed, suspended Labour MP Karl Turner told POLITICO he’ll vote against the bill after abstaining last June. “People’s views are largely what I expect them to be when we next vote on this,” Edwards argues. “We haven’t seen any significant moves away from people who were supportive of the bill.” Then there is the substantive question of the House of Lords. Edwards condemns the “small minority” of peers she blames for filibustering the previous bill. She said she is happy to work with peers on good faith amendments in the “scrutiny process” this time around. The pro-assisted dying camp will be relying on a little-used pair of laws — the Parliament Acts — which would, in narrow circumstances, allow a bill to be passed despite being deadlocked or defeated by peers in the House of Lords again. “I want to get it back to [peers] ASAP so that they will have the maximum amount of time to finish the job of scrutinizing,” Edwards says. An impassioned opposition campaign last time around argued Leadbeater’s bill was not safe. The Royal College of Psychiatrists, while neutral on the principle of assisted dying, said it could not support her plans due to a lack of clarity about their profession’s role in the process and whether adequate resources are in place. While Edwards may struggle to win over Burnham, she hopes to “sit down and have a conversation” with the prime minister before MPs return from recess in September. One open question remains: how Starmer himself will vote. As prime minister, he voted for it, but didn’t explain his reasoning. Now freed from the constraints of government, Edwards hopes Starmer will make an intervention.  “He has a well-known legal background, is very considered and is obviously a really crucial voice,” she says. Starmer’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked the U.S. for about 5 percent of its remaining Patriot inventory in a meeting with Mike Pence, the former vice president said Sunday. Speaking from Kyiv during an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union,” Pence told host Dana Bash that Ukraine is “winning the war” with Russia, but Zelenskyy has expressed concerns about the upcoming winter season. “One of the things President Zelenskyy made clear to me,” Pence said, “is that he fully expects that as winter approaches, sooner than later, that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will start to strike not just children’s schools and hospitals as he did this week, not just a shopping mall taking more than a dozen lives, but that he’ll start to strike that energy infrastructure to try and essentially impose the deep winter cold on the people of Ukraine.” Pence was in Ukraine for an Independence Day prayer breakfast, which he spoke at, alongside former special envoy Keith Kellogg. If the U.S. could spare 5 percent of its missile defense system, Pence said Zelenskyy told him, then “he believes that would get them through the winter months.” But the ongoing war with Iran has depleted the U.S.’s supply, and U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker told Fox Business earlier this month that production would not solve the immediate shortage. Still, Pence said Sunday the moment could be an “opportunity” for U.S. allies — like South Korea. The relationship between the U.S. and South Korea has become strained in recent days after President Donald Trump instructed the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” joint military exercises in light of North Korea being “unthreatening and respectful” and his “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un.” Pence on Sunday seemed to imply South Korea could begin rebuilding a strong relationship with the U.S. if it were to help Ukraine. “South Korea has interceptors that are very sophisticated, and with some of the back and forth between the president and South Korea this week, this might be an opportunity for President Lee [Jae Myung] to step forward, make those interceptors available to the United States to deploy either in the Middle East or here in Ukraine,” Pence said. North Korea has provided troops to fight alongside Russian troops against Ukraine. Pence also praised Trump for his actions against Iran and said he believes it will be “essential” that the military remain in the region. “I think the time is going to come sooner rather than later when the president and our ally Israel are going to have to go in and finish the job,” Pence said. The former vice president also offered advice for issues closer to home. Following the collapse of a trade deal with Canada, Pence urged Trump to “drive a hard bargain” but to avoid a trade war. “The last thing we need right now as our economy is getting back to its feet is a trade war with Canada,” he said. “My hope is, for the sake of American families and for the sake of the American economy, that what we’re looking at here is negotiation and not confrontation in a trade war.”

Winds reaching around 120 km/h swept through Forlì in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, overturning four light aircraft.

Race cars take over central Washington, DC, as the Trump-created Freedom 250 Grand Prix debuts.

Embassy in London says Andrey Kelin left last month after seven years in diplomatic postRussia has withdrawn its ambassador to the UK, it has emerged, as the Kremlin continues to try to put pressure on Britain over its support for Ukraine.Andrey Kelin left last month after seven years in the diplomatic post, according to the Russian embassy in London. Continue reading...

President sharply criticises proposal, saying ‘elections right now are a tsunami for the state that will split Ukraine’Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said holding elections in Ukraine during wartime would risk splitting the country at a time when Russia is amassing ballistic missiles and considering whether to mobilise an extra 300,000 soldiers.The Ukrainian president, responding for the first time to a demand made by the sacked former defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov, sharply criticised an idea that he said was impractical given Russia appeared to have no interest in a ceasefire. Continue reading...

The revival of de Gaulle’s legendary role in the second world war coincides with an increasing number of claims to his legacy

British officials reveal sweeping Brussels negotiating plan drawn up in former premier’s last days in office