Newsflash: 27th June - Last drinks for Arkea - B&B? And No Tao in the Tour.. Again
Tensions around team sponsorships are intensifying in the WorldTour. Lotto Dstny secured a last-minute deal to stay afloat for the Tour de France, but its future beyond 2025 remains uncertain. Arkea-B&B Hotels faces a steeper drop, with both main sponsors withdrawing, and the team needing new backers urgently by 2026.
The Tour de France start list has taken more hits. Tao Geoghegan Hart (Lidl-Trek) and David Gaudu (Groupama-FDJ) have withdrawn, as both were unable to regain their race form in time. Benoît Cosnefroy also remains sidelined, further thinning the French hopes at their home Grand Tour.
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News.com.au
7 hours ago
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In an arts centre slash club in Venice's least touristy neighbourhood they gather. A high school teacher. A receptionist from a small hotel. A university researcher. They are here for one reason – to tell one of the richest men in the world where he can shove his superyacht. In a matter of weeks the grassroots No Space For Bezos campaign, spearheaded by everyday locals, has become a global story and the wedding this weekend of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez has become a tipping point. The brewing public anger and antipathy towards tech billionaires has truly boiled over and they have become the bad guys of 2025. It's not just about Bezos but also Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley's 0.0001 per cent of the one per cent with their competing rockets that definitely aren't compensating for something. Not that long ago these men were being hailed as visionaries and hoodie wearing prophets the subject of fawning Time covers but who are now some of the most publicly hated people on earth who don't have their nuclear stockpiles. (Yet.) The techno-oligarchy? The Bezos wedding has crystallised the global turn against them. In an increasingly polarised world where we are all segregated in our filter bubbles, there is, shock horror, a very clear trend in sentiment. 74 per cent of Americans disapprove of Zuckerberg and 67 per cent disapprove of Bezos, according to polling commissioned by the Tech Oversight Project this month. Musk is disliked by 57 per cent of Americans, according to a survey from The Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research at around the same time. Around the world, the campaigns against them is only growing. In Marion in South Australia a proposal for a Tesla battery factory saw about 950 people going to the hassle of lodging submissions to try and block it. Such was the vehemence, the Guardian reported, official records had to be redacted, with the paperwork including comments like 'Elon Musk and Tesla are a [redacted] on humanity', 'Elon Musk is a full blown [redacted],' and 'Elon Musk is a [redacted] human being and a [redacted]!'. In London, for much of this year, real-looking ads began appearing at bus stops with slogans like 'ELON MUSK IS A BELLEND. Signed, the UK'. They are the brainchild of a British group called Everybody Hates Elon that grew out of a 'ranty group chat' into such a force the New Yorker recently profiled them. In April, a private donor provided the group with a Tesla and invited the public to smash it. One hundred people turned up. 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This week, Everyone Hates Elon joined in on the action, banding together with Greenpeace to take over Venice's famed San Marco square with an enormous banner reading 'If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay more tax'. At the time of writing, the anti-Bezos movement appears to be winning. In a matter of weeks the group of everyday Venetians have forced a man with more money than Midas armed with a tungsten Amex to, at the 11th hour, rip up his plans and move the reception to a far less historic backup venue. (Think more concrete by the cubic tonne and less Cannaregio-ish.) This weekend the Bezos-Sanchezes will be forced to toast one another in a building in the city's Arsenale area, full of warehouses, and not the majestic 16th-century Scuola Grande della Misericordia after protesters threatened to block canal access with hundreds of inflatable crocodiles. 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News.com.au
8 hours ago
- News.com.au
UN conference seeks foreign aid rally as Trump cuts bite
Spain will host a UN conference next week seeking fresh backing for development aid as swingeing cuts led by US President Donald Trump and global turmoil hinder progress on fighting poverty, hunger and climate change. French President Emmanuel Macron, South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa and Daniel Noboa of Ecuador will headline the around 70 heads of state and government in the southern city of Seville from June 30 to July 3. But a US snub at the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development underlines the challenges of corralling international support for the sector. Joining the leaders are UN chief Antonio Guterres, more than 4,000 representatives from businesses, civil society and financial institutions, including World Bank head Ajay Banga. Such development-focused gatherings are rare -- and the urgency is high as the world's wealthiest countries tighten their purse strings and development goals set for 2030 slip from reach. Guterres has estimated the funding gap for aid at $4 trillion per year. Trump's evisceration of funding for USAID -- by far the world's top foreign aid contributor -- has dealt a hammer blow to humanitarian campaigns. Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium are among the other rich nations that have announced recent aid cuts as economic and security priorities shift and national budgets are squeezed. From fighting AIDS in southern Africa to educating displaced Rohingya children in Bangladesh, the retreat is having an instant impact. The UN refugee agency has announced it will slash 3,500 jobs as funds dried up, affecting tens of millions of the world's most vulnerable citizens. International cooperation is already under increasing strain during devastating conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, while Trump's unpredictable tariff war plunges global trade into disarray. - Debt burden - Reforming international finance and alleviating the huge debt burden under which low-income countries sag are key points for discussion. The budgets of many developing nations are constrained by servicing debt, which surged after the Covid-19 pandemic, curbing critical investment in health, education and infrastructure. According to a recent report commissioned by the late Pope Francis and coordinated by Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, 3.3 billion people live in countries that fork out more on interest payments than on health. Critics have singled out US-based bulwarks of the post-World War II international financial system, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, for reform. Seville represents "a unique opportunity to reform an international financial system that is outdated, dysfunctional and unfair", Guterres said. At a preparatory meeting at UN headquarters in New York in June, countries except the United States unanimously agreed a text to be adopted in Seville. The document reaffirms commitment to achieving the 2030 UN sustainable development goals on eliminating poverty, hunger and promoting gender equality. It focuses on reforming tax systems, notably by improving the Global South's representation within international financial institutions. The text also calls on development banks to triple their lending capacity, urges lenders to ensure predictable finance for essential social spending and for more cooperation against tax evasion. The United States said it opposed initiatives that encroach on national sovereignty, interfere with international financial institutions and include "sex-based preferences". - Lack of ambition? - While the European Union celebrated achieving a consensus, NGOs have criticised the commitment for lacking ambition. For Mariana Paoli, global advocacy lead at Christian Aid, the text "weakens key commitments on debt and fossil fuel subsidies -- despite urgent calls from the Global South". "Shielded by US obstructionism, the Global North continues to block reform. This isn't leadership -- it's denial." Previous failures by rich countries to keep their promises have eroded trust. After promising to deliver $100 billion of climate finance a year to poorer nations by 2020, they only hit the target in 2022. Acrimonious negotiations at last year's UN climate summit in Azerbaijan ended with rich countries pledging $300 billion in annual climate finance by 2035, decried as too low by activists and developing nations. Independent experts have estimated the needs upwards of $1 trillion per year. Spain will be the first developed country to host the UN development finance conference. The inaugural edition took place in Mexico in 2002, followed by Qatar in 2008 and Ethiopia in 2015.
