Day: May 31, 2025

Once rivalling film premieres for theatrics, could Smyths’ revival of the midnight launch tap into a desire for shared real-world experience?

There was a time when certain shops would resemble nightclubs at about midnight: a long queue of excitable people, some of them perhaps too young to be out that late, discussing the excitement that awaits inside.

The sight of throngs of gamers looking to get their hands on the latest hardware when the clock strikes 12 is growing increasingly rare. But if you happen to walk by a Smyths toy shop at midnight on 4 June, you may encounter a blast from the past: excitable people, most in their teens or 20s, possibly discussing Mario Kart.

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Biometrics app not ready, meaning travellers through Port of Dover will have to exit vehicles to have identity verified

British citizens who travel frequently to the EU face having their fingerprints individually checked each time they cross the border into the Schengen area because of delays in developing an app to verify biometrics digitally, it has emerged.

It will be “business as usual” this summer but “a big change” in travel will be phased in from November, Doug Bannister, the chief executive of the Port of Dover has said.

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Threat by Israel Katz comes as Donald Trump claims a ceasefire is ‘very close’

• Hamas ‘thoroughly reviewing’ Israel’s response to US ceasefire proposal

Israel has said Hamas must accept a hostage deal in Gaza or “be annihilated”, as Donald Trump announced that a ceasefire agreement was “very close”.

It comes amid dire conditions on the ground, with the United Nations warning that Gaza’s entire population was at risk of famine.

It’s the only defined area – a country or defined territory within a country – where you have the entire population at risk of famine.

Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha), has described the difficulties faced by the UN in delivering humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip as an “an operational straitjacket”. Laerke said the mission to deliver aid was “in an operational straitjacket that makes it one of the most obstructed aid operations not only in the world today, but in recent history”. Once truckloads entered Gaza, they were often “swarmed by desperate people”, he said.

Israel will not allow a planned meeting in the Palestinian administrative capital of Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, to go ahead, an Israeli official said on Saturday, after media reported that Arab ministers planning to attend had been stopped from coming. The delegation included ministers from Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Palestinian Authority officials said.

Israeli airstrikes have struck western Syria, the Israeli military and Syrian state media have said, and reportedly one civilian has been killed in the first such attack on the country in nearly a month. “A strike from Israeli occupation aircraft targeted sites close to the village of Zama in the Jableh countryside south of Latakia,” state television said.

Foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said on Saturday that Iran considers nuclear weapons “unacceptable”, reiterating the country’s longstanding position amid delicate negotiations with the United States. Iran has held five rounds of talks with the US in search of a new nuclear agreement to replace the deal with major powers Trump abandoned during his first term in 2018.

The commander of Kurdish forces that control northeast Syria said on Friday that his group is in direct contact with Turkey and that he would be open to improving ties, including by meeting Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

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