gshc2020.com

“Hacks” won several comedy awards, including best comedy series, actress in a comedy series for Jean Smart, supporting actress in a comedy series for Hannah Einbinder and directing in a comedy series for Lucia Aniello’s work on the final episode. “Shrinking” took home awards for best streaming comedy ensemble, actor in a comedy series for Jason Segel, supporting actor in a comedy series for Harrison Ford and guest actor in a comedy series for Michael J. Fox.

“Beef” dominated the limited series and TV movie categories, earning five awards, including for best limited series, actor in a limited series for Oscar Isaac and supporting actor in a limited series for Charles Melton. Lee Sung Jin also won for directing the episode “Oh, The Comfort, The Inexpressible Comfort.”

Elsewhere, Keri Russell won actress in a drama series for her work in “The Diplomat,” Macaulay Culkin won guest actor in a drama series for “Fallout,” Vince Gilligan won writing in a drama series for “Pluribus” (specifically, the episode “We Is Us”), Christina Ricci won guest actress in a comedy series for “Wednesday” and “The Comeback” won for writing in a comedy series, with Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King being recognized for the episode “Valerie Does It All.”

In the nonfiction and variety programming categories, “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” won for talk or variety series, “The Muppet Show” won for stand-up or variety special, “John Candy: I Like Me” won for documentary TV movie and “Lost Women of Alaska” won for docuseries or nonfiction series.

“Tonight’s winners represent the extraordinary range of talent and storytelling that continues to make television such a powerful medium,” Astra Awards EVP Matt Weis said in a statement. “From established icons to exciting new voices, we’re proud to celebrate the artists and creative teams whose work has entertained, surprised and connected with audiences over the past year.”

The Astra Awards are voted on by the Hollywood Creative Alliance, honoring the best achievements in television from the past year. As previously announced, Troy Kotsur, William H. Macy, Cedric the Entertainer, Jason Ritter, Shawn Hatosy and Natalie Alyn Lind were all recognized with special achievement awards. %!s()

The defence minister, Shinjiro Koizumi, will meet his counterpart and deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, on Tuesday, with discussions focused on Australia’s acquisition of Japan’s Mogami-class frigates and enhanced security cooperation.

Koizumi is considered a potential future prime minister of Japan. His father, Junichiro Koizumi, was prime minister from 2001 to 2006.

Koizumi’s visit comes after a week in which Albanese defended himself over comments made on the Bush Deep podcast, released last month.

He was discussing a pair of Japanese melons presented by Takaichi during a visit to Canberra earlier this year, and, while appearing to make hand gestures in front of his chest, said “she brought two, as you do”.

Host Nikki Osborne joked: “She came in looking like Pamela Anderson.”

Facing days of criticism from the opposition and in the media, Albanese has insisted his hand gestures and a comment about melons were misinterpreted and were not innuendo about breasts.

The opposition criticised Albanese for putting at risk close relations with one of Australia’s most important partners in Asia.

Public comments from Japan’s ambassador to Australia on Wednesday suggested Takaichi’s government wanted to avoid a diplomatic incident over the comments, which were initially not controversial but soon sparked strong criticism, including by a former envoy to Australia.

Japan’s government refrained from public comments on the issue until Wednesday, when its current ambassador to Australia Kazuhiro Suzuki released a statement not raising any further issue with Albanese’s conduct.

Suzuki noted Takaichi had visited Australia in May – shortly before the interview in question – and had been hosted for dinner by Albanese “in a very relaxed atmosphere, and we believe it helped build a personal trust relationship between the two leaders”.

Albanese had earlier apologised for comments about Australian signer Kylie Minogue made in the same appearance.

A Japanese diplomatic cable sent in July, and leaked during the controversy, blamed “sensationalised reporting in the Australian media” and said Tokyo believed there was no “ill intention” in Albanese’s actions.

The visit comes as part of a five-day trip which will include a stop in India.

“Our relationship with Japan continues to go from strength to strength, and I look forward to welcoming my good friend, minister Koizumi back to Australia this week,” Marles told Guardian Australia.

“Together we will progress efforts to enhance defence cooperation and support our shared commitment to regional security, building on the joint statement announced by our prime ministers in May.

“This includes in the areas of co-developing and co-producing defence capabilities, advanced weapons testing, enhanced training and exercises, and increased information and intelligence cooperation.”

Takaichi has faced mounting political challenges, including on policies to help with the cost of living, and has seen sliding support in opinion polls in recent months.

Koizumi was criticised by China at the weekend for visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, dedicated to Japan’s war dead. Visits to the shrine by senior politicians are regularly criticised by Japan’s neighbours including China and South Korea, who suggest they are symbolic of a lack of remorse for Japan’s actions during the second world war.

In August last year, Labor agreed to buy Japan’s Mogami‑class frigates for the Royal Australian Navy.

Australia will spend $10bn over a decade to buy three of the frigates, with the first expected to be delivered in December 2029. %!s()

The 29-year-old from Gorseinon near Swansea started his career with Glamorgan but left in 2018 and is now at Derbyshire.

"I am massively proud and passionate of my heritage and Welsh cricket," said Donald.

"I left Glamorgan a long time ago but love to keep a track of Welsh cricket even if I'm doing it with a Trent Rockets shirt on."

And Donald is quick to remind people it is the England and Wales Cricket Board.

"I'm always correcting people that I'm playing as a Welshman, not an Englishman, and it's something I'll always push.

"Glamorgan and Wales have a special place in my heart and there'll always be that attachment to Welsh cricket.

"I'm looking forward to hopefully flying the flag at Lord's and getting a trophy."

Donald is hoping to be part of a successful Trent Rockets side in front of a capacity crowd in London.

"It's going to be exciting to roll out in Lord's in front of a full crowd in a final," he said.

"Lifting a trophy would be a huge moment. For myself and my career, it'd be up there.

"I want to try and soak the day in, because they come and go quickly and careers are short."

Donald was picked up in the auction by Trent Rockets and experienced a successful T20 Blast campaign with Derbyshire.

He was the sixth highest runs scorer with 489 in the 20-overs tournament, but it was his astonishing strike of 230 that stood out.

"It's an obvious strength of mine, and this format [The Hundred] is compressed even more," said Donald.

"It's more important you're efficient with your balls and that's something that seems to have worked over the past few years.

"The format is different for the players, probably more so than people realise because it is so much faster."

After being forced to wait his chance with the Rockets' international line-up, Donald came in for injured England batter Tom Banton and kept up that strike rate when Rockets topped the table.

"I've been fortunate enough to get a chance, which is difficult with these teams," said Donald.

"To be able to have played a small part in this and feel I've finally put my stamp at this level has been important.

"I'm lucky to have landed at Trent Rockets, it's an unbelievable place to be involved.

"It is tough to get in the side and hold a spot down, but when you get a chance you're desperate to take it with both hands.

"As you go up the levels, you've got to take opportunities you get.

"I feel like I've been around the block a bit. I'm probably in the best position to kind of cope with that and be ready for my chance."

Donald knows he is in his position because of his county career.

"I love Derbyshire and it's nice to feel settled, they've been amazing since I moved there," said Donald.

"My game has gone from strength to strength and I've got a lot to thank [director of cricket] Mickey Arthur and the club for.

"I feel so valued. Getting the opportunity to captain in white ball cricket is a massive feather in my cap and something I always wanted to do."

Donald was a Glamorgan prodigy who seemed destined for senior international honours when playing for England Under-19s.

That never quite materialised, but a decade on Donald has not given up hopes of a call-up in white-ball cricket.

"The landscape's changed since I made my first-class debut," said Donald.

"You now have franchise cricket and these opportunities around the world to play in front of massive crowds on the biggest stage with the best players and that's a massive draw.

"Any county cricketer who comes through the system says Test cricket is the pinnacle and wanting to get a cap for England is definitely up there.

"I'm not sure I could sit here with a straight face and say I'm probably in the mix to do it in red ball.

"However this [Hundred] platform, and certainly white-ball cricket, I'm excited to see where it takes me."

After The Hundred Donald will play in a 10-over league in Canada after being involved in that format in Abu Dhabi last year.

He hopes to be involved in lucrative 20-over tournaments in UAE, Australia, South Africa and Pakistan, while the Indian Premier League (IPL) is the holy grail for franchise cricketers.

"I've always felt I've had an ability to do it at franchise level and levels above, and it's nice to feel I'm showing that now," said Donald.

"Hopefully a few doors will start to open, certainly on the franchise circuit, and then you never know with the England white ball stuff.

"All I can do is keep knocking at the door and, most importantly, performing on every stage and in every opportunity I get."

Given his qualities, it is no surprise Donald is a big supporter of The Hundred concept which has divided cricket fans.

"It is safe to say the standard has gone up this year, especially with the overseas players we have," said Donald.

"Guys who play in leagues around the world can't speak highly enough of The Hundred.

"You're playing with the best players in the world in front of massive crowds on TV.

"As a professional sportsman, it feels like the pinnacle right now in terms of English T20, or close to T20."

Donald also believes it has succeeded off the field.

"The Hundred has achieved a lot of what it's set out to be," he said.

"It's been obvious to see how many families and kids are in grounds throughout the school holidays.

"The product is great entertainment, although it's not perfect."

Donald hopes The Hundred can continue to co-exist alongside the T20 Blast and the 50-over One Day Cup.

"The Hundred is here to stay and hopefully supporting the county game," he said.

"While the Blast has probably had a little bit of heat over the last few years, it's a great competition with good overseas players and teams.

"It's a good proving ground, a great product itself which is well followed and well organised.

"The Hundred is a separate entity but the Blast and Metro-Bank [One Day Cup] competitions are good and county cricket is brilliant.

"There is a good will there where The Hundred can coexist and benefit the other domestic tournaments."

One thing Donald will be doing on Sunday is committing to his running between the wickets.

Earlier this month, he was in supreme form with 23 from 10 balls when he was inexplicably run out against MI London after failing to ground his bat.

"I pride myself as a relatively switched-on bloke, so to have done that has hurt my ego," said Donald, who was relieved the Rockets won by six wickets.

"This is probably a good place to get on record my apology.

"Not only do I apologise to Pete Moores and Sam Billings (Trent Rockets head coach and captain), I apologise to all my coaches from under-9s and all the way through, because that's the first rule, everyone knows to run your bat in.

"Doing that on television in a big game, when I was in good form, was pretty dumb and I have learned my lesson.

"I've seen a few clips of that online, it's tough to get rid of, and everyone since has been telling me not to forget to run my bat in this weekend.

"So that'll be first on my list. You might see me diving into the crease on Sunday!"

Donald will be hoping that will not be necessary at the home of cricket where he will aim to provide the Welsh firepower for Trent Rockets. %!s()

Today, amid record-low water levels on the Danube, the rock has not only emerged from the water, but surfaced almost in its entirety, along with the sandy riverbed on which it rests, astonishing geologists and government scientists sent to examine it. And, much as the rock was said to warn, Hungary is now facing an unprecedented energy crisis that has forced the country to shut down all but one of its Danube-cooled nuclear reactors for the first time in 44 years.

The Guardian travelled for more than 100 miles (160km) along the banks of the Danube, the EU’s longest river, which sustains the 10 countries it crosses, visiting villages and towns where residents are struggling to secure drinking water and farmers are fighting to keep their crops alive.

Pócsmegyer

Last week, the Hungarian prime minister, Péter Magyar, warned that the economic damage caused by this year’s drought was expected to surpass that of the historic dry spell that devastated Hungary’s farmland in 2022.

While the full extent of the losses is still difficult to assess, István Somogyi, a 56-year-old farmer from Pócsmegyer, a village on the Danube, in Pest County, has already done his calculations.

“I’ve lost nearly 50% of my harvest this year and it could go up to 70%,” he said. “It’s gone. Everything has dried up. Since I started farming this land after the end of communist rule, I’ve never seen a catastrophe like this.”

Somogyi said the unprecedented crisis did not come out of nowhere, and that the heatwaves and droughts of previous years had already offered a warning. Scientists say that human-caused climate breakdown is making every heatwave in the world more intense and more likely to happen.

“You could see this coming,” he said. “The harvest was already poor last year. But we were lucky because the Danube stayed high. Despite the intense heat, there was still enough water in the soil. This time, there is no hope of saving our crops.”

On the near-deserted roads running alongside the river, families with children sought relief in the Danube’s shallow waters, while, not far away, military water tankers were siphoning water from rural wells, hauling vital supplies to the storage pools that feed the local grid.

Szentendre

Across the river from Pócsmegyer, on the opposite bank of the Danube, lies Szentendre, a town known for its community of artists. During the most intense days of the heatwave, some evening performances have been held by candlelight in an effort to reduce electricity consumption.

Here, in recent weeks, vast, desert-like islands have emerged. The exposed riverbed is cracked like a mosaic of hard, dry clay, baked by suffocating heat that has pushed temperatures in Budapest close to 42C, with overnight temperatures hitting a high of 28C. Europe is warming faster than any other continent, with intense summer heat and prolonged drought being amplified by the deepening human-caused climate crisis. Extreme conditions continue to fuel wildfires and strain water supplies.

In some stretches of the Danube near Szentendre, it is now possible to walk through it with the water barely reaching above your ankles.

“Swimming and navigation are banned here,” said László Balázs, 44, head of the local river rescue service. “But people escaping the heat still enter the water, unaware it can suddenly drop into deep pools where they risk drowning.”

At the end of June, Budapest police (BRFK) said three people had gone missing in the Danube over a single weekend. Water police later recovered one body near Iváncsa, while searches continued downstream for the other two missing swimmers.

The drought and resulting disruption to energy supplies have also left some Hungarian towns struggling with shortages of drinking water. In a room inside Szentendre’s tourist information office, thousands of bottles of water are stored ready to be distributed, particularly to elderly and vulnerable residents.

“About 4,000 to 5,000 households were left without water,” said József Gulyás, 62, Szentendre’s deputy mayor. “We distributed 25 tonnes of water and received about 100 emergency calls a day. We had never experienced anything so serious. Elderly women would hug the officers delivering water and burst into tears.”

Budapest

Driving from north to south, towards the Hungarian capital, Budapest, where the level of the Danube under normal conditions reaches an average height of 2 to 3 metres, and can rise as high as 8 metres, intense summer heat and continuing drought conditions caused the river to fall to a record low of just 14-19 cm on 4 August.

The water levels have fallen so dramatically that, as the Danube has retreated, it has revealed a succession of relics long hidden beneath its waters, including the remains of a woolly mammoth, a bridge destroyed after the second world war in Budapest, a Nazi warship and an unexploded British bomb.

The water is so low in the capital that on 28 July, at about 4.30pm, Gábor Kürti, president of the Magyar Kerékpárosklub (Hungarian cyclists’ club) and owner of a cargo bike company, left his office in central Budapest, jumped on his bicycle and, in an unprecedented feat, rode for 30km along the exposed bed of the Danube, with his journey quickly going viral on social media.

“I wanted to show that if you can cycle along the bed of the Danube for 30km, it means that, because of this climate emergency, we have literally hit rock bottom,” he told the Guardian.

Riding his KTM X-Strada 20 gravel bike, Kürti set off from the mouth of the Szilas stream (Szilas-patak) and made his way across fine gravel, large pebbles, hard-packed sand and mud, eventually reaching the ferry terminal at Vác about three hours later.

“For many people it was an extraordinary adventure. For me, it was heartbreaking,” he said. “Cycling through parts of the river where, as a child, I used to swim or go kayaking, and which I could now cross on a bicycle, filled me with an indescribable sadness. It was like looking at the scene of a terrible accident. Throughout that journey, the scale of the catastrophe was unfolding before my eyes.”

Nagytétény

Kürti took the Guardian into what, until only a few months ago, was the striking floodplain forest in Nagytétény named Kis-Háros-sziget, a protected area home to climbing plants, wild vines and several families of European beavers.

The river is reached by walking across ground that would normally lie several metres beneath the water. Here, one branch of the Danube has receded so dramatically that it came to an abrupt halt, blocked by an exposed riverbed left behind by the drought.

Its dry, clay-like surface looks like an image from a future shaped by the escalating human-caused climate crisis. Yet this is happening now. Passersby walk across what was once the river, their feet sinking into patches of mud. Kayakers struggle to make their way through the remaining shallow channels; many eventually give up, lift their kayaks on to their shoulders and walk home.

Hungarian authorities have been pumping water into large areas of the country’s nature reserves such as the one in Nagytétény, to keep marshlands from drying out as the drought intensifies.

Paks

Continuing south, the road finally reaches Paks, home to Hungary’s nuclear power plant, its towers rising above the horizon. Here, municipal workers have been working weekends to keep more than 700 threatened trees alive and water the town’s flowerbeds.

“I’ve been doing this job for 18 years,” said Szilvia Farkas, 39, who is employed by Dunakom Zrt in Paks, owned entirely by the municipality, to plant and water trees and plants. “I have never seen so much vegetation dry out in all my years doing this job, and I have never worked as hard as I have this year to try to keep it alive.”

Dunakom Zrt uses its own drilled well for water extraction. In addition, the company is able to extract water from a decantation basin. The public is not permitted to use tap water for irrigation at the moment; instead, residents collect greywater and use it to water their gardens.

In the country’s more marginalised and deprived areas, the water crisis has compounded longstanding problems for thousands of people who were already living in difficult conditions before the drought, struggling with inadequate access to running water and sewage systems.

Géza Orsós Renáta, 43, who lives with her four children in a small farmhouse on the outskirts of Paks, has never had access to running water. Orsós, who also works for Dunakom Zrt, helping to water public green spaces drying out in the heat, has long relied on water from a neighbour.

“Even in winter, we have to pump water and heat it in large bowls so we can wash,” she said. “Now a friend brings us water once a week. But it is becoming unbearable.”

Driving back from Paks, tall, swollen clouds occasionally gather on the horizon in the clear skies above Budapest, appearing to promise the return of rain, only to fade by evening, dashing the hopes of an entire country.

For now, people can do little but cling to the hope that the Rock of Starvation will disappear once more beneath the currents of the Danube, returning to the depths of the river and becoming little more than a legend again.

But Somogyi, who grew up hearing the story of the boulder passed down through generations, and who is now witnessing the consequences of the warning it was said to foretell, knows it will not.

“The drought will return next year,” he said. “That is the trend. And there isn’t much that we can do.” %!s()