It’s just after 9pm and lilac hues have spread across Dorset skies, shadows extending over a panorama of marquee tops. Perfect conditions for the first night of End of the Road, whose Friday headliners – Black Midi, Battles and Fleet Foxes among them – are minutes away from stepping on stage. Yet, rather than slipping through the masses to grab a good spot, I’ve been back at my tent for an hour already. Having unfolded a stool in the last of the sun, simmering lentils and a mug full of boxed cab-sav for company, my one-year-old daughter, Nancy, has finally nodded off in the tent, unaware of earlier negotiations between her parents. After an afternoon watching bands from a lower-decibel distance as a family, it’s my wife who’s out tonight, enjoying her child-free break for freedom. Although, with the Pixies – a band beloved since teen years but never seen live – top billing on Saturday night, I felt confident in my call as “White Winter Hymnal” carried on the breeze. We’re a day into our first festival as a family of three, an experience already proving quite a journey. As a sometimes music journalist, I’d covered events across Europe over the past decade, adept at negotiating stage splits, balancing reporting duties and life-affirming experiences with willing accomplices. Of these, End of the Road has remained a regular fixture, an informal end-of-summer meet-up with industry colleagues and friends – as well as my chosen stag-do destination. With a one-year-old in tow, this year would mark a stark contrast. From the freshly purchased family-sized tent – the subject of substantial research and investment, and an attempt to win over a camping-averse wife – to the travel cot, buggy, strings of fairy lighting, endless layers, toys and first-aid trappings for every eventuality, the baggage was endless. Shoulders ablaze, I’d carried it all in as my wife kept our daughter entertained. Stepping into my role as responsible dad, I’d practised the tent’s set-up at home prior to arrival and, with a tangible sense of optimism about the weekend ahead, started separating pegs from poles. Yet, with the tent almost up, something unsettled me. What was that smell? Unzipping the bedroom it hit me. My earlier garden practice run had provided the perfect sheltered toilet for a visiting fox –  evidence of which no amount of wet-wipe scrubbing could remove, resulting in a showdown with the reluctant camper and a smell that would accent a weekend in which expectations were continuously lowered. After my wife crashed back in on Friday night, earlier than anticipated and hamstrung by a fast-developing cold, we wondered if we were up to the challenge. Nancy was having a nice time, happy tracking insects in the long grass or studiously inspecting the contents of her snack bag. But could this equally have been any other field? Had we been too exhausted and distracted to embrace the experience? By contrast, our camping companions had brought their five-year-old, who enthusiastically shared stories about favourite bands and the wicker dragonfly he’d crafted, as his dad talked about the surprise sets he’d happened upon the previous night. Perhaps we’d just taken all of this on too soon. The next morning, I nudged Nancy’s buggy around the site, stopping at the kids’ area, where a neckerchiefed uke player offered up nursery rhymes with instruments for children, which were seized upon with pleasure. Various childless friends were never far away, entertaining our daughter in bursts. Later, after reuniting with my wife, a highlight was bobbing to Los Bitchos’ buoyant afternoon performance with Nancy held aloft, as was a brief glimpse of Jockstrap packing out a small stage in the woods. Yet other moments – flailing nappy changes amid aghast onlookers, straying too close to the stage with a buggy as the light faded and the crowd surged – presented a sharp learning curve. Still feeling under the weather, my wife headed back to the tent with Nancy as the Pixies arrived, Frank Black’s substantial presence now underscored by a pang of guilt. After checking in and being signed off to stay out, I’d joined an excitable crowd for an unannounced late-night set at the Tipi stage, which, after turning out to be one of the tiny handful of bands I’d already seen that day – again sounded another minor chord on my tiny violin. As the skies cleared, we’d discovered corners along the way we’d otherwise never have seen and met a similarly dazed yet determined community of parents With my wife’s health deteriorating further overnight – diminishing her perception of fox piss, at least – we made the call to leave on Sunday morning and I hauled everything back to the car. On the long drive home, and hours before Covid would be confirmed, it had to be asked: had this been fun for anyone concerned? Was this festival too aptly named for a new dad trying to reconcile past and present lives? This all happened in the summer of 2022 and, unfazed, we tried again this year – albeit at the even smaller scale and decidedly family-friendly Kite Festival in Oxfordshire. While Nancy’s advanced age presented new challenges – tentative first steps now a confident swagger – her inquisitiveness also marked her out as the perfect festival companion. Expectations now firmly in check, we let ourselves be led by circumstance and proximity, stopping for whatever drew the eye rather than dashing from act to act, allowing us to slow down and see the world through her eyes. Occasionally we tag-teamed the lineup, each picking a couple of acts to witness unhindered by short attention spans (my wife took former PM John Major’s packed-out talk in the big top, I took Suede). Under the hot sun, our meeting point at the shaded children’s area also helped keep Nancy from turning pink in the sun. Clapping furiously at the end of shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves’s morning debate, her grasp on Labour’s manifesto pledges seems better than most – although this mimicry of crowd behaviour proves an endearing feature at later events, too. An uncontrollable tantrum during Michael Gove’s appearance at a panel discussion saw us quickly extract ourselves from the tent, drawing smiles from an audience impressed by the effectiveness of her heckle. Further priceless memories included dancing together at Candi Staton’s sundown set, Nancy with a brioche in each hand – ear defenders askew – visibly finding her feet. The following day the skies suddenly broke, with an electrical storm closing all stages, sending Birkenstock-clad families sprinting for cover. The one attendee thrilled by it all was Nancy, who careered around cackling as security attempted to keep punters from the marquee’s lightning-conducting metal poles. As the skies cleared, we’d discovered corners along the way we’d otherwise never have seen and met a similarly dazed yet determined community of parents. We still hadn’t nailed the performative kids-at-festivals thing – there was no trolley adorned with decoration or whimsical outfits – but felt comfortable that we’d struck the right balance, fulfilled by a shared experience led by the spontaneity of a child’s impulses. It marked a shift from any naive attempt to carry on with our lives as normal. An alternative, of course, is to leave your family at home. A couple of weeks ago I joined 250,000 others at Glastonbury, my own spontaneity given breathing space once more. Thrilling, yes, but also a weekend that at times left me seeking my small festival companion among the other attendees. I was temporarily overcome watching a daughter on the shoulders of her father as he introduced her to a favourite band, excitedly explaining each musician’s role. “How old? I’ve got one a similar age,” was shared with various others. Yet it was also at Glastonbury, as the temperature nudged into the thirties, that I spotted another dad – fixed grin but dead behind the eyes – pushing three irritable kids in a trolley up a shadeless slope. I nod my solidarity, before skipping off to the bar – relieved, this time, that’s not me. Bumping into Joe Goddard from Hot Chip, whose bandmates collectively call their kids the Micro Chips, he says that of all the children he knows, it’s those who have always been dragged to festivals who have proved the most rounded. Something that resonates with me as the Glastonbury hangover subsides and – reunited with my family – I start looking forward to carving out new shared experiences in crowded fields once more. 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PARIS LA DÉFENSE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 19, 2023--

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Oleksandr Usyk’s next fight has been made official, as the Ukrainian defends the unified heavyweight titles against Daniel Dubois in Poland in August. Usyk, 36, will put the belts on the line against the 25-year-old Briton at the Tarczynski Arena in Wroclaw on 26 August. The bout came together following the collapse of talks between Usyk and WBC champion Fury, who were expected to clash in London in April. A fight between the undefeated pair, to crown an undisputed champion, is still on the cards, with Saudi Arabia the frontrunner to host the contest this winter. However, many in boxing doubt that the fight will materialise. In any case, Usyk’s focus is now on Dubois, who is the mandatory challenger to the WBA title, which Usyk holds alongside the WBO, IBF and IBO belts. “Ready for my chance!” Dubois wrote on social media. “I hope you are @usykaa.” Usyk simply wrote: “See you 26 august.” Dubois has a professional record of 19-1 with 18 knockout wins, while the sole defeat of his pro career came in 2020, when he suffered a fractured eye socket en route to a TKO loss to Joe Joyce. Last time out, Dubois recovered from multiple knockdowns to stop Kevin Lerena in December. Meanwhile, Usyk is 20-0 as a pro with 13 KO wins. The Olympic gold medalist most recently fought Anthony Joshua in August, outpointing the Briton for the second fight in a row. With that result last summer, the southpaw retained the unified titles that he took from “AJ” in the pair’s first clash. Click here to subscribe to The Independent’s Sport YouTube channel for all the latest sports videos. Read More Tyson Fury’s ‘game-changing’ return to be announced in ‘next week or so’, Frank Warren says Tyson Fury reacts to footage of Anthony Joshua using mattress as heavy bag Anthony Joshua and Deontay Wilder’s teams meet in London for talks over Saudi Arabia fight

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What happens when you put two of the world’s most outspoken commentators together? Two-and-a-half hours of self-congratulation, tedious repetition and outright lies, it transpires. Tucker Carlson jetted off to Romania to join Andrew Tate for a sit-down chat at his home on the outskirts of Bucharest, where the influencer remains under house arrest. Last month, the 36-year-old king of toxic masculinity was charged with rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal gang to exploit women. However, he offered Carlson and his loyal ‘Tucker on Twitter’ viewers a very different version of the allegations against him. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter The former Fox News poster boy asked the self-styled “top G” to explain the accusations made against him. Tate responded by saying he’d been charged with “convincing” women to get TikTok. “I'm charged with being the head of an organised criminal group, which is in charge of recruiting girls to make TikTok videos, to steal the money from the TikTok views,” he told his sympathetic interviewer. He then elaborated: “The overall charge is that there's an organised criminal group [...], I'm the head of it. My brother is below me, and we use the loverboy method to convince women to do TikTok videos to make money so that we can steal the TikTok money.” What he means by the so-called “loverboy method” is when a man seduces young, vulnerable girls and boys over a period of time in order to sexually exploit them later on. "So, just to be clear, you are not accused of pandering, of pimping, of forcing women to have sex with anybody?" Carlson then asked. "No,” Tate replied. “Not forcing them to have sex, not for restraining their movement, not stopping them from living a full life, but the fact that we are somehow convincing them to have TikTok." We’d like to take this opportunity to “be clear” ourselves. Tate and his brother Tristan, 34, are charged with some of the most serious crimes imaginable. Last month, Tate was served with legal papers by lawyers representing four of his alleged victims who have accused him of rape and sexual assault. The four women, in their late 20s and early 30s, are pursuing civil proceedings against the former kickboxer over alleged offences occurring between 2013 and 2016 while he was still living in the UK, The Guardian reports. The legal letter sets out the four women’s accusations against him, including violent rapes, serious physical assaults, and controlling and coercive behaviour. One of the women claimed that after meeting Tate in 2014, he brutally assaulted her. She said: “While having sex, he began to choke me and choked me so hard that I lost consciousness. I thought I was going to die. When I woke up, he was continuing to rape me. It is difficult to say that because it is so upsetting, but that is what it was.” Meanwhile in Romania, prosecutors also confirmed last month that seven women had come forward with allegations against the Tate brothers, including some who say they were “misled” by “false claims of marriage and love”. The pair are accused of forming an organised crime group in early 2021 to commit human trafficking in Romania, the UK, the US and other countries. The alleged victims were later taken to buildings in Romania’s Ilfov county where they were intimidated, placed under constant surveillance and control and forced into debt, a statement from the prosecutors said. The two men then allegedly forced the women to engage in pornography which was later shared on social media. One of the alleged victims says she was raped twice in March 2022, according to the statement. Both Tate and Tristan vehemently deny the accusations against them and, in his interview with Carlson, the former went so far as to say they’d been fabricated by the media. He told the right-wing host: “The girls have come forward and said, ‘This is insane, you've just picked us because we're near Andrew and we're his friends’.” He continued: “But they (meaning the powers that be) are like, ‘Nope, you’re a victim, no matter what you say. We’re deciding you’re a victim.” He went on to accuse the “media machine” of offering thousands of pounds in bribes to anyone willing to badmouth the Tates. “The media machine, which works hands in hands with the justice machine [...] offered bribes effectively,” he told Carlson. “They'd call up and say, if you have anything bad to say about Andrew, we can pay you $50,000 for the story.” Suffice it to say, lawyers for four of the victims would categorically rubbish his outlandish claims. After serving the 36-year-old with the legal papers, one of the representatives for the women said: “Despite Tate’s outrageous claims that these women aren’t even real, on reading the papers, he should now recall how real they are. “Talk of the ‘Matrix’ and ‘false flags’ hold no weight in court. The survivors look forward to seeing him there.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi says that relations with the United States can move forward if the Biden administration demonstrates it wants to return to the 2015 nuclear deal, and a first step should be easing sanctions