New independent watchdog signed into law in watershed moment for English football
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The Herald Scotland
44 minutes ago
- The Herald Scotland
Is it time The Open returned to Donald Trump's Turnberry?
Donald Trump is due to visit his Scottish golf courses, including those at Trump International in Aberdeenshire, later this week and is expected to receive a frosty reception from protestors. This will not deter him from pushing the case for Turnberry, while officials here will seize the opportunity to parlay with the President on matters such as trade tariffs and the offshore oil industry. Read more: The punters who piled into Rory McIlroy overnight on Saturday to overhaul Scheffler's four-shot lead following the Irishman's spirited performance in the third round took a calculated gamble and lost. Betting on the eventual return of The Open to Turnberry is an equally tricky proposition. 'You see the scale of their setup here [at Royal Portrush] and we've got some work to do on the road, rail and accommodation infrastructure around Turnberry," Mr Darbon told reporters last week. 'We've explicitly not taken it out of our pool of venues but we'd need to address those logistical challenges should we return.' Asked directly if the resort's ownership will impact the decision on Turnberry, Mr Darbon said this is a "somewhat hypothetical question" unless these other issues are addressed. 'I met a couple of months ago with Eric Trump and some of the leadership from the Trump golf organisation and from Turnberry," he added. "We had a really good discussion. Read more: 'I think they understand clearly where we're coming from. We talked through some of the challenges that we have so we've got a good dialogue with them.' While a bit short of a resounding endorsement this is a softening in the R&A's stance under previous chief executive Martin Slumbers, who suggested on numerous occasions that the famed Ailsa course would not host The Open while under the ownership of Donald Trump. Speaking to the Golf Channel the month before retiring from the R&A in December 2024, Mr Slumbers said: 'We will not be taking any events there until we are comfortable that the whole dialogue will be about golf. 'That situation is something we're still not comfortable with at the moment, but that could evolve in the coming years.' Looking ahead to later this week, my colleague Brian Taylor put forward his views a few days ago as to whether the UK Prime Minister or Scotland's First Minister should be more concerned about meeting with President Trump on his forthcoming trip. Both are scheduled to do so. Read more: Brian's conclusion? Well, both meetings offer opportunities: "A chance to convince this most mercurial leader that he should change tack on tariffs, that global trade is in jeopardy. Or, at least, a chance to try." Yet both Keir Starmer and John Swinney can expect criticism for engaging with Mr Trump. I'll leave the political optics for others to wrangle with but I can't help imagining the moment when First Minister Swinney broaches the subject of Scotch whisky exports to the US, which are being disrupted by higher tariffs. I'd lay a wager that "The Open" and "Turnberry" are among the first 20 words in President Trump's response. The final tally has yet to be verified, but based on advance ticket sales the R&A estimated back in April crowds totalling 278,000 throughout last week's competition on the Dunluce links at Royal Portrush. When confirmed – let's be realistic, it will be confirmed – this will be the second-best attended Open in history after some 290,000 people descended on St Andrews in 2022 for its 150th anniversary. More than 258,000 fans attended last year's tournament at Royal Troon, making it third on the all-time list. Read more: Size matters in the modern model of this historic competition, and numbers such as those above dwarf the roughly 123,000 spectators who made the trip to Turnberry when the Ayrshire resort last hosted The Open. With the exception of 2020 and 2021 – when the event was cancelled and the following year restricted by Covid containment measures – Turnberry has by far the lowest attendance record of the last 17 years. The next closest is Muirfield in 2013 (142,000), another hopeful hampered by logistics which is vying for a slot after being reinstated to The Open rota in 2017. Put another way, crowd numbers in all of the last four years since the pandemic have comfortably more than doubled the turnout at Turnberry in 2009. 'That's really important for us because not only do we want to showcase this wonderful championship to as many people as possible, but it's important for us in terms of our commercial model because everything that we generate from The Open, we then reinvest back into the game all around the world," Mr Darbon said earlier this year. In this he clearly agrees with his predecessor Mr Slumbers, who was fond of saying that "big-time sport needs a big-time crowd". Questions of capacity appear to have overtaken politics in the quest to return The Open to Turnberry.
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Ukraine-Russia war latest: Zelensky says new peace talks in Turkey tomorrow after previous fail to end conflict
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story. The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it. Your support makes all the difference.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Hunter Biden takes on George Clooney and presidential debate in interview
Hunter Biden has given a profanity-laced, three-hour interview to the US outlet Channel 5 that is remarkable for its no-holds attack on actor George Clooney, denial that he was the source of cocaine found in the White House and thoughts on why his father bombed in his debate with Donald Trump before dropping out of his presidential re-election run. 'Fuck him!' the younger Biden said of Clooney, whose remarkable New York Times opinion piece last July called on the Democratic party for which the actor is a financial donor to find a new presidential nominee. 'Fuck him and everybody around him. I don't have to be fucking nice.' Referring to comments from the well-known film director that Clooney is not a 'movie star', Biden continued: 'I agree with Quentin Tarantino. Fucking George Clooney is not a fucking actor. He is fucking like … I don't know what he is. He's a brand.' Biden questioned why anyone had to listen to Clooney despite his friendship with Barack Obama, a former Democratic president, and his 'really great place in Lake Como'. 'What do you have to do with fucking anything?' Biden said, speaking rhetorically about Clooney. 'What right do you have to step on a man who's given … his fucking life to the service of this country and decide that you, George Clooney, are going to take out basically a full page ad in the fucking New York Times.' Hunter Biden shared with the Channel 5 outlet his belief that Clooney was upset at Joe Biden, 82, because the former president had criticized the international criminal court (ICC)'s decision to obtain an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on war crime charges. The human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, who is married to the actor, was one of the legal experts who recommended that the ICC seek that warrant. 'He was bitching to the White House staff, the senior staff that he was so angry that the president would criticize the arrest warrant,' Hunter Biden said. 'He was very, very angry that my dad did not pay homage to her or something.' Biden's interview to Channel 5, a popular YouTube channel created by Andrew Callaghan, comes as US House Republicans pursue investigations into his father's presidency. Congressional Republicans have been claiming that the former president's closest advisers covered up a physical and mental decline during his presidency, and criticizing his pre-emptive pardons of family members, including Hunter, after Trump threatened to prosecute his opponents as he captured the Oval Office again in November. 'It's good to see that Hunter has taken some time to process the election, look inward, and hold himself accountable for how his family's insular, dare I say arrogant at times, approach to politics led to this catastrophic outcome we're all now living with,' said Tommy Vietor, a former Obama White House official, posted on Twitter/X. Hunter Biden acknowledged that Joe Biden had an 'absolutely horrible' debate against Trump before his father dropped out of the 2024 presidential race exactly a year ago on Monday and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris to succeed him. Hunter Biden said his father had to drop out or see fellow Democrats fight him 'every step of the way'. Among the reasons for the poor debate performance were that his father – 81 at the time – was 'tired as shit', Hunter Biden said. 'They give him Ambien to be able to sleep. He gets up on the stage and looks like he's a deer in the headlights, and it feeds into every fucking story that anybody wants to tell.' Sign up to Headlines US Get the most important US headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning after newsletter promotion After Trump's second presidency began in January, the FBI reopened an investigation into who left cocaine in a White House locker in 2023. Suspicions have fallen on Hunter Biden, whose past struggles with substance abuse have been well documented. But Hunter Biden denied the cocaine found in the White House was his, asserting he has been clean and sober since June 2019. 'Why would I bring cocaine into the White House and stick it into a cubby outside … the situation room in the West Wing?' he asked. The 55-year-old's Channel 5 interview comes weeks after his father embarked on a series of interviews, including with the New York Times, aimed at convincing the public that Harris's loss to Trump in 2024 was not his fault. Asked about his business dealings, which resulted in federal tax evasion charges and illegal handgun possession that were later vacated by his father's pardon, Biden pointed to his work as a board member at the national rail network Amtrak and the US-UN World Food Program.
