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Irish Daily Mirror
5 hours ago
- Sport
- Irish Daily Mirror
A crazy afternoon of hurling in Dublin with a message for the Class of 2025
IT'S June 21, the Longest Day in Dublin city. I'm standing on Hill 16 next to our household's newly minted veteran of the Leaving Cert. For him, and his Class of 2025, it is 'D-Day Plus One' in the great campaign that starts once school is out forever. But there is nothing to suggest that in little over an hour, we will both remember this sun splashed Saturday as one of our own 'Day of Days.' We are both watching as Dublin hurling captain Chris Crummey trudges from the Croke Park pitch with red flashing in his eyes. The famous words of D-Day and Band of Brothers legend, Captain Dick Winters, drift into my mind on the Clonliffe Road breeze: 'We're paratroopers we're supposed to be surrounded.' Winters was describing the regular fate of his Easy Company troops as they dug into foxholes in the Belgian town of Bastogne to fight the Battle of The Bulge. They were cut off behind enemy lines with no reinforcements, not enough ammunition and dressed in the wrong clothes for winter in northern Europe. Yet 29 days later they would be christened the 'Battered Bastards of Bastogne' by newspapers after defying impossible odds. Back in Croke Park even those odds look a little mean. The Dubs are down to 14 with an hour to play against Limerick, probably the greatest team the game has ever seen. A familiar tale is unspooling: 'We're Dublin hurlers, we're meant to be surrounded'. And then… There are those that dismiss the joining of dots from sport to the great themes of life as 'mythologised guff' and 'hyperbolised nonsense.' They would have it all reduced to GPS data analytics and performance metrics. If that was still your philosophy around 5.30pm in Croke Park last Saturday, you probably needed to check yourself for a pulse. Because here was a day made from the stuff that you can't use to populate a spreadsheet. The script that logic dictated was ripped apart. And instead we got Miracle on 34th Street meets Mission Impossible. To borrow from Monty Python, we witnessed David taking down Goliath and his big brother – with one hand tied behind his back . Hill 16 became a front row seat to watch the Christians devouring the lions in the coliseum. It was General Custer reversing the result at Little Big Horn, Davy Crocket and a band of rag-ball rovers cowboys emerging victorious at the Alamo. The Titanic taking a direct hit from an iceberg, and continuing on its way to New York while shaking a defiant fist at the starry North Atlantic night, shouting: 'Is that all you've got?' Hell, it might even have been as madly improbable as Mayo winning just once! My first experience in Croke Park was watching a 14-man Dublin team beat Offaly in a famous Leinster final with Jimmy Keaveney on the sideline. They wrote a song about it. In time they will write one about this too. Sean Brennan saving from Aaron Gillane at point blank range – like a condemned man catching the firing squad's bullet between his teeth John Hetherton accomplishing a feat of trigonometry that would have NASA scientists scratching their pointy heads, as he located the near impossible coordinates to orbit a moonshot through the narrowest of angles on its way to dock with the stanchion of the Hill 16 net. Cian O'Sullivan dispatching the killshot down the throat of the ravenous great white 'Jaws' as the stricken Dublin vessel looked surely, finally about to slip beneath the waves into the shark infested water. And a half empty Hill 16 shaking like it was September 18th, 2011, all over. High on the mad improbability of it all. Later, as we exited underneath the old railway end terrace, there came one of those spontaneous thunderbursts of sound that take on a uniquely intense quality when trapped inside the concrete husk of a great sporting arena, one that has just witnessed something the walls themselves can scarcely believe. Rolling deafening peals. 'Come On You Boys in Blue.' So often these are the moments that fuse bonds between strangers. And across the generation divide too. I first got the small ball bug working on a paper in Offaly in a previous life, in the time of Whelehan, Dooley and Pilkington. But it has been following the exploits of that next generation that has deepened a love and appreciation for the old game. As we float together from the ground I'm smiling at the memory of once offering that same Leaving Cert veteran walking beside me a plagiarised nugget of wisdom. It was intended to be used if asked to offer any thoughts in a dressing room meeting when his childhood band of brothers were facing their own small brush with seemingly insurmountable odds. As it turned out it was the exact punchline their coach and mentor had in his mind – himself a man who has done more than most to push this boulder of Dublin hurling up the mountain. The original copyright belongs to that other believer in the improbable, Nelson Mandela: 'It is always impossible. Until it is done.' This week as the Class of 2025 mark their rite of passage from those childish dressing rooms, they couldn't take a better code into the perilous world we have made for them. And they will probably never see it lived so well as on an impossibly crazy afternoon of hurling on the longest day in Dublin city.
South Wales Argus
11 hours ago
- General
- South Wales Argus
LOOK: Military parades around Gwent through the years
With Armed Forces Day coming up this weekend, including a special event at Caldicot Castle in Monmouthshire on Saturday, June 28, we thought it would be a good opportunity to take a look through our archives at some of the military parades that have graced the streets of Gwent through the past few decades. Every year, a large number of Remembrance Day parades are held across the five counties that make up Gwent - Newport, Caerphilly, Blaenau Gwent, Torfaen and Monmouthshire - and parades are also held to mark events such as VE Day, VJ Day and marking freedom of the town/city/county. Let us know if you or a member of your family remembers these parades, and if you're planning to celebrate Armed Forces Day this weekend. Band of the Royal Regiment of Wales, T.A. during Newport Mayoral Parade, June 1980 (Image: NQ) British Legion march through Pontypool on September 27, 1986. Picture: Jeffrey F. Morgan (Image: NQ) A civic parade on Godfrey Road, Newport in June, 1990 (Image: NQ) The Ermine Street Guard parade outside the Roman Baths, Caerleon, 1990 (Image: NQ) A memorial parade at Chepstow (Image: NQ) Monmouth Regiment parade in 1989 (Image: NQ) The head of the Royal Regiment of Wales parading through Newport in 1982 (Image: NQ) The salute during the march past of the parade to mark the 2nd birthday of the Cwmbran TA (Image: NQ) Beating the Retreat at Crickhowell Castle July 1986 (Image: NQ) A D-Day memorial commemoration parade was held in Newport to mark the 70th anniversary in 2014. Pictured are veterans marching along the High Street, on their way to the D-Day stone memorial (Image: NQ) Soldiers from A Company, 1st Battalion The Royal Welsh with a memorial stone outside Nantyglo Senior Citizen Hall (Image: NQ)
Spectator
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
No, I'm not going to bloody Glasto
'Are you going to Glasto?' Just the name – in that smug, shortened form – is enough to set my left eyelid twitching, the way it does when I read emails from people who still include pronouns in their signature. 'Glasto', trailing the self-satisfied whiff of BBC executives high-tailing it from Hampstead on a taxpayer-funded jolly, of hedgies glamping in a five-grand-a-night yurt and the sort of inherited wealth that means you crash in a mate's eight-bedroom Old Rectory within the free ticket zone, rather than camping cheek-by-unwashed-jowl with the masses. No, I am not going to Glastonbury. The last time I went – and I can tell you the exact year, because I found the programme while going through some boxes in the attic – was 2004. I think it was the first year the Great Wall went up to stop people scaling the fence and, getting there late on the Wednesday, we had to pitch our tents hard against it – which was like camping in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, though less convivial. That was the year I swore I'd never go again: the crowds were insane (150,000) and just moving between stages took at least two hours. The five days were an exhausting feat of endurance with the odd highlight (James Brown on the Pyramid stage, Orbital headlining the Other Stage on the Sunday night) but it was such a crush to move around the site, you were doing well if you managed to see even a couple of bands a day. Glastonbury also has the worst sanitation of any festival I've ever been to, either as a punter or when I was working for the news teams of Radio 1 and, later, 6 Music. (See Julian Temple-Morris's 2006 documentary for a taster.) It was only bearable back in 2004 because my cousin's band were playing the New Bands stage and I had a backstage pass so could use their loos. (Shamefully, I didn't even watch their set as they clashed with P.J. Harvey.) Apparently there are showers at Glastonbury, but I've never had one – or met anyone who has. This year a whopping 210,000 tickets have been sold. A built-up area of over 200,000 is classed as a city by the Office for National Statistics. From today, Worthy Farm in Somerset will have a temporary population somewhere between that of Reading and Wolverhampton. Even before you look at the line-up, which is lacklustre (my only must-see would be Neil Young, but I have tickets for his Hyde Park concert next month; these days I only go to gigs where I can sleep in my own bed), just the logistics of getting around the site are about as appealing as the SAS selection march over the Brecon Beacons. You can, of course, smoke weed and take shrooms to mitigate the privation – only one of your mates will invariably do a Syd Barrett and require looking after for the rest of the weekend. And depending on the weather, there will be sunburn or trench-foot – or both – to contend with. You should also forget any Alexa Chung-style outfits you had planned; England in June can be extraordinarily cold and unsettled (remember, D-Day had to be postponed). I vaguely recall watching Paul McCartney while I was wrapped in a damp blanket from the Oxfam stall that smelt of the old person who'd died in it. Of course, moaning that Glastonbury isn't what it used to be is all part of the ageing process – I get that. 'What do you mean, you need money, darling?' asked my mother when I wanted her to sub me for my ticket sometime in the late 1990s. 'I didn't pay anything when I went.' She went to the first Glastonbury (then the Pilton Pop Festival, but that moniker was swiftly dropped, presumably being less marketable to Trustafarian twats). They watched Marc Bolan and drank free milk from the dairy. This year a pint of festival cider will cost you around £7, which isn't outrageous – but remember to make it last because the queues for both bars and bogs will be apocalyptic. And good luck finding your friends ever again if you need to head off on your own during the 1975's set for a pee. Apparently there are showers at Glastonbury, but I've never had one – or met anyone who has Even if you can get close enough to the stage – rather than watching on the giant screens – your vision will be obscured by the serried ranks of Palestine flags. One of the most wilful misconceptions about Glastonbury is that it's a lovely crowd of chilled old hippies. Try sticking your head under a standpipe meant for drinking water because you just can't go another day without washing your hair and hear the queue of knit-your-own-Guardian readers erupt with language that would make a paratrooper blush. There's vast cognitive dissonance between the festival giving millions to charities like Greenpeace and the grotesque amounts of rubbish and single-use plastic (mostly in the form of abandoned tents, wellies and ponchos) left behind. This year there's added spice – in addition to the usual 'festival flu' and STDs – with warning of a measles outbreak from the UK Health Security Agency, due to all the unvaccinated Gen Z-ers, born in the wake of the MMR scare. There have also been thousands of cases of Covid reported by people who went to Download earlier this month. But there's no need to spank nearly £400 on a Glastonbury ticket (you can't, in any case – they sold out in 35 minutes). To recreate the experience at home, just do the following: stop washing and use baby wipes instead. Retch every time you open the bathroom door and give yourself a UTI by going for as long as you can without peeing. Throw your phone in a bush. Eat a burrata and butternut squash flatbread wrap and then bin £20. Fail to find your bed and have a couple of hours of fitful sleep outside while playing industrial techno through a tinny speaker. Oh – and, crucially, watch it all on TV. That's really what all those Glasto-goers will be doing anyway.
Time of India
3 days ago
- Science
- Time of India
Axiom-4 mission: Shubhanshu Shukla's SpaceX mission to FINALLY launch past midnight – here's how you can watch
After a string of 'failed dates', the D-Day is finally here – and this time, even the weather is in favor! After multiple delays due to a variety of reasons, the much-anticipated Axiom 4 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) is set to be launched on Wednesday, June 25, at 2.31 am EDT. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now As the 'weather is 90% favorable for liftoff' this time, according to , the mission is set to liftoff from Launch Complex 39A at 's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Axiom-4 mission, which is a SpaceX endeavor and a fully commercial human spaceflight, will be carrying a diverse crew of four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Here's all you need to know about the mission and crew. Mission objectives and significance The Ax-4 mission aims to conduct scientific research and technology demonstrations aboard the ISS. The crew is expected to spend up to 14 days conducting about 60 scientific experiments in microgravity, contributing to advancements in various scientific fields. This mission not only furthers scientific knowledge but also fosters international collaboration in space exploration. This mission, operated by Axiom Space in partnership with SpaceX and NASA, is notable for its diverse crew representing India, Poland, Hungary, and the United States. Each of these nations is participating in a government-sponsored human spaceflight for the first time in over four decades. The diverse crew The Ax-4 crew, representing the United States, India, Poland, and Hungary, is due to ride a brand-new SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to orbit, which will get off the ground with the assistance of the company's two-stage Falcon 9 rocket. The mission aims to conduct microgravity experiments, promote international collaboration in space exploration, and demonstrate the feasibility of commercial space stations. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Peggy Whitson (USA) – Mission commander Peggy Whitson, a veteran NASA astronaut, commands the Ax-4 mission. With a record of 675 days in space, she holds the US record for the most cumulative time spent in space. Her leadership in this mission underscores her extensive experience and commitment to advancing human spaceflight. Shubhanshu Shukla (India) – Mission pilot Group Captain Shubhanshu 'Shuks' Shukla of the Indian Air Force serves as the mission pilot. Born in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, Shukla has over 2,000 flying hours across various aircraft, including the MiG-29 and Su-30 MKI. He is set to become the second Indian to travel to space, following Rakesh Sharma's 1984 mission. This flight marks a significant achievement for India's space endeavors and highlights the country's emerging presence in international space missions. Sławosz Uznański (Poland) – Mission specialist Sławosz Uznański, a European Space Agency (ESA) project astronaut from Poland, is assigned as a mission specialist. Selected from over 22,500 applicants, Uznański represents Poland's first astronaut since 1978. His participation underscores Poland's growing involvement in space exploration and its collaboration with international space agencies. Tibor Kapu (Hungary) – Mission specialist Tibor Kapu, a mechanical engineer, is Hungary's second astronaut to fly to space. Selected through the Hungarian to Orbit (HUNOR) program, Kapu's mission is supported by the Hungarian Space Office and Axiom Space. His participation highlights Hungary's commitment to advancing its space program and contributing to international space research. How to watch the liftoff You can watch the Ax-4 liftoff live on SpaceX's website or social media. As per SpaceX, 'Ax-4 mission to the @Space_Station and weather is 90% favorable for liftoff. Webcast starts at 12:30 a.m. ET.' Meet Shubhanshu Shukla, The First Indian Set For Space in 41 Years | Axiom-4 Mission | NASA | SpaceX
Time of India
4 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Inside Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez wedding: All about the itinerary and cost of the Venetian nuptials
The festivities have kicked off with a stylish (and pretty expensive) splash! Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is set to tie the knot with former news anchor Lauren Sánchez, and the couple has finally kicked off their wedding festivities in Venice. Being hailed as the Wedding of the Century, the couple's Venetian wedding is precisely the sum of several extravagant affairs, spanning three glittering days, and is cloaked in secrecy – an event that blends high society, Hollywood glamour, big fat charity donation cheques, and historic Italian charm dipped in uber rich arragements. The foamy kick-off! Bezos and Sánchez's lavish wedding festivities kicked off with a birthday celebration in Bezos' $500 million mega yacht, Koru, anchored off the coast of Cres Island in Croatia. Imagine an ocean of bubbles, sun-soaked laughter, glamorous swimwear, and the gentle chug of a private yacht transforming into a floating nightclub. This was no casual pre-wedding gathering – it set the tone for a weekend of extravagance that Venice had never seen before. The couple was spotted enjoying the pre-wedding buzz with a foam party, reportedly held in honour of Sánchez's son, Evan, who just turned 19, as hinted by a 'Happy Birthday" banner spotted on the yacht. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Memperdagangkan CFD Emas dengan salah satu spread terendah? IC Markets Mendaftar Undo Donned in a red and black bikini, a pair of chic sunnies, and a wide-brimmed hat, the bride-to-be was seen enjoying herself with her friends and her fiancé. As Bezos complemented her with his casual yet stylish avatar in black beach shorts, sunnies, and a bucket hat, the couple was seen indulging in PDA ahead of their Venetian nuptials. Wedding of the century: The elaborate itinerary The grand weekend began with a welcome dinner infused with Venetian charm at Scuola Grande della Misericordia, the ornate 14th-century confraternity hall donned with Renaissance frescoes. Guests – capped at around 200 to avoid overwhelming the city – arrived via an entire fleet of water taxis, navigating through narrow canals to moor at the ancient site. The guest list? This is where the Hollywood glam and political royalties mix with the tech titans. The heavyweight guest list includes Oprah, Leonardo DiCaprio, Katy Perry, Kim Kardashian, and the Trumps – to name a few! The next morning began with scenic cruises aboard Koru, offering intimate lagoon views and laughter-filled moments amid the dreamy morning light. By afternoon, back on land, guests checked into lavish suites at Venice's five-star icons – the Gritti Palace, Aman Venice, Hotel Danieli, Belmond Cipriani, and the St. Regis – where nightly rates reportedly ranged from $3,200 to over $32,000. The D-Day: The ceremony Time for the big moment! The D-Day, with a dash of drama! Though early rumors hinted at a floating ceremony aboard Koru, Venetian regulations meant the wedding itself likely took place at San Giorgio Maggiore's majestic basilica or again at Scuola Grande, before being moved to the secure Arsenale compound due to geopolitical and security reasons – especially around high-profile attendees like Ivanka Trump On the other hand, the bride-to-be is set to walk down the aisle in custom couture – rumored to have the touch of THE Anna Wintour! Wedding of the 'riches'! The whirlwind weekend has been orchestrated by elite planners Lanza & Baucina (with whispers even of Clooney wedding planners) – from midnight festivities to morning transports, security logistics, and a carefully choreographed canon of events. Around 250 handpicked guests are to be pampered across five of Venice's most opulent hotels, including the legendary Cipriani on Giudecca Island and the Aman Venice – famously chosen by George Clooney for his 2014 wedding to Amal Alamuddin. Over 90 private jets, hundreds of water taxis, and local vendors providing 80% of the amenities – it has been breathtaking, even so logistically. But here comes the million-dollar question – how much is the wedding costing the couple? The full cost of the festivities is expected to soar between €40–48 million (approximately $46.5–$55.6 million), according to Veneto regional president Luca Zaia. But here's the twist! Bezos and Sánchez are determined to 'give back' as they're set to mark and celebrate one of the biggest milestones in their relationship. So, what's the plan? They are apparently purchasing most of their wedding supplies from Venetian merchants, including Laguna B, a Murano glassblower, and Rosa Salva, the city's oldest pastry maker. And the most surprising move? No gifts: instead, guests were invited to donate to Venetian charities, a well-thought nod to temper local backlash and economic scrutiny. One step to a healthier you—join Times Health+ Yoga and feel the change
