Oasis ‘shocked and saddened’ after man dies at Wembley Stadium concert
A man has died after falling at London’s Wembley Stadium during an Oasis concert on Saturday.
Officers at the stadium responded to an incident at 10:19pm alongside medics at the venue and the London Ambulance Service after reports that someone had been injured.
“A man – aged in his 40s – was found with injuries consistent with a fall. He was sadly pronounced dead at the scene,” the Metropolitan Police said in a statement.
According to reports, the man was in the upper tier of Wembley before he fell while watching the sell-out reunion.
Oasis said in a statement: “We are shocked and saddened to hear of the tragic death of a fan at the show last night.
“Oasis would like to extend our sincere condolences to the family and friends of the person involved.”
The Met have called on people who witnessed the incident, or who knowingly or unknowingly took mobile phone footage of it to come forward.
The brothers were performing at Wembley Stadium as part of Oasis’s ongoing reunion tour, which has seen hundreds of thousands in the UK witness Noel and Liam Gallagher’s much-anticipated return.
Oasis will tour Scotland, Ireland, Canada and the United States before they return to London for two final dates at Wembley.
Police said in their statement: “At around 22:19hrs on Saturday, 2 August, officers on duty at Wembley Stadium for the Oasis concert responded alongside venue medics and the London Ambulance Service to reports that a person had been injured.
“A man – aged in his 40s – was found with injuries consistent with a fall. He was sadly pronounced dead at the scene.
“The stadium was busy, and we believe it is likely a number of people witnessed the incident, or may knowingly or unknowingly have caught it on mobile phone video footage.
“If you have any information that could help us to confirm what happened, please call 101, quoting 7985/02AUG.”
Flares thrown during protest outside hotel housing asylum seekers
Flares have been let off and an arrest made during a demonstration outside a hotel used to accommodate asylum seekers in London.
A mixture of men wearing face masks and families with children waved flags and listened to speeches outside the Britannia International Hotel in Canary Wharf on Sunday.
Protesters jeered at people going in and out of the hotel, and officers were forced to step in after flares were let off in the crowd, the Metropolitan Police said.
A man was arrested on suspicion of assaulting an emergency worker after an officer was pushed.
Onlookers chanted “shame” towards the police as he was carried away.
Tourists, shoppers and guests at a nearby hotel stopped to take pictures of the demonstration.
A spokesperson for the Met said: “At one point, officers intervened after flares were let off in the crowd. Several people were searched. No further flares were found.
“One man was arrested on suspicion of assaulting an emergency worker after an officer was pushed. He was taken into custody.
“Officers remain in the area to provide reassurance to local residents and businesses, to ensure that any further protest takes place peacefully, and to respond to any incidents.”
It is the latest in a series of demonstrations over the use of hotels to house asylum seekers.
On Saturday, the force made nine arrests after rival groups gathered outside the Thistle City Barbican Hotel in Islington, north London.
A protest and counter-protest also took place outside the New Bridge Hotel in Newcastle and four people were arrested on suspicion of public order offences, Northumbria Police said.
Scotland Yard said plans were in place to “respond to any protest activity in the vicinity of other hotels in London being used to accommodate asylum seekers”.
Elsewhere, Essex Police placed a number of restrictions on a planned protest in Epping on Sunday evening.
The force ordered that the demonstration should finish by 8.30pm and must take place in designated areas outside the Bell Hotel, which has been the focus of a series of protests over the last few weeks.
Police have also placed requirements on the removal of face coverings until 3am on Monday and have the power to direct anyone committing or suspected of committing anti-social behaviour to leave the area until 8am on Monday.
Jess Phillips: Nigel Farage would enable ‘modern day Jimmy Saviles’
Jess Phillips has joined criticism of Reform UK’s pledge to repeal the Online Safety Act, suggesting such a move would empower “modern-day Jimmy Saviles”.
Ms Phillips, the Home Office minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, appeared to accuse Nigel Farage of being more concerned about “clicks for his monetised social media accounts” than children’s safety online.
She backed her colleague Peter Kyle after his row with the Reform UK leader last week.
The Technology Secretary said Mr Farage was putting himself on the side of “extreme pornographers” and people like Savile by opposing the law.
Under rules that came into effect on July 25 as part of the act, online platforms such as social media sites and search engines must take steps to prevent children from accessing harmful content such as pornography or material that encourages suicide.
Mr Farage has said the legislation threatens freedom of speech and open debate.
Writing in The Times, Ms Phillips said: “Farage said it’s the biggest threat to freedom of speech in our lifetimes.
“My colleague Peter Kyle said he was siding with modern-day Jimmy Saviles preying on children online.”
She said she would like to speak to Mr Farage about “one of those modern-day Saviles, Alexander McCartney”.
McCartney, who posed as a teenage girl to befriend young females from across the globe on Snapchat and other platforms before blackmailing them, “just needed a computer” to reach his targets, Ms Phillips wrote.
Believed to be one of the world’s most prolific online offenders, McCartney abused at least 70 children online and drove one girl to suicide.
Ms Phillips said the Online Safety Act exists to try to provide a “basic minimum of protection, and make it harder for paedophiles to prey on children at will”.
She said police have told her that paedophile networks use “normal websites where their parents assume they’re safe” to coerce and blackmail young people.
“Perhaps Nigel Farage doesn’t worry about that — there’s no political advantage in it, and no clicks for his monetised social media accounts. But I do.
“I worry about what it means now and what it will mean when boys reared on a diet of ultraviolent online child abuse are adult men having children of their own. I can’t ignore that, neither can Peter Kyle, and, most importantly, nor can millions of parents across the country.
“I defy Nigel Farage to tell me what any of that has to do with free speech.
“I defy him to meet even one parent who has lost a daughter to suicide because she was being blackmailed online and tell them that is just the price of civil liberties. Maybe he’d feel differently after that kind of meeting, or maybe he wouldn’t care.”
Her comments echo those of Mr Kyle, who said last week: “Make no mistake about it, if people like Jimmy Savile were alive today, he’d be perpetrating his crimes online. And Nigel Farage is saying that he’s on their side.”
Mr Farage demanded an apology from the Technology Secretary, who refused to withdraw the remarks.
Does Sydney Sweeney want to be the actor Gen Z loves to hate?
Right now, everyone is losing their minds over Sydney Sweeney’s ad campaign for American Eagle denim. The 27-year-old actor who starred in Euphoria and The White Lotus has collaborated on a range of wide-legged jeans… and sparked global outrage.
In her advert, she introduces the new Sydney Jeans by saying: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality, and even eye colour.”
Once the camera has panned provocatively across the denim, as well as her blonde hair and her blue eyes, she declares: “My jeans are blue.”
In case you missed the not-so-subtle appeal to all-Americanness and the play on the word “jeans”, a voiceover then states: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” In the clip, the word “genes” is crossed out and replaced with “jeans”, which The Atlantic dismissed as “a garden-variety dad pun”.
The campaign has sparked an almighty backlash – and a debate about race and beauty standards – with some claiming the phrase “great jeans”, coupled with Sweeney’s references to her hair and eye colour, recall white supremacy and eugenics, the discredited, racist belief once popularised by the Nazis that the human race can be improved through selective breeding.
The backlash was swift. Grammy-winning musician Doja Cat was seemingly so incensed by the ad that she recreated it, reciting Sweeney’s words in an exaggerated southern US accent, and changing the slogan to: “My jeans are blee.”
Sayantani DasGupta, senior lecturer in the discipline of narrative medicine at Columbia University, is in no doubt that the ad is imbued with eugenic messaging. “A woman of colour would not have been hired for this advertisement,” she says.
Seemingly in a bid to do some damage control, American Eagle has since posted an image of a mixed-race model in their apparel, along with the caption: “AE has great jeans.” When that didn’t calm things down, it shared a written post saying: “‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’ is and always was about the jeans. her jeans. Her story. We’ll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way. Great jeans look good on everyone.”
Unfortunately, the reputational harm had already been done. Or has it? After all, it is credited with helping boost American Eagle sales by $400m in a single day.
While there would have been many, many meetings before this commercial got signed off – and it’s hard to believe no one spoke up and flagged the connotations as a potential issue – to place the blame squarely on American Eagle is a mistake. Because it risks underestimating Sweeney, who, in recent years, has apparently not only chosen to lean into a hyper-sexualised image of herself, but also taken the active decision to make controversy her personal brand.
It really began in 2022, after Sweeney posted a series of images and videos from her mother’s 60th birthday party – in which, viewers claimed, her “family members” could be seen wearing Maga caps and “Blue Lives Matter” tees. Her brother Trent was quick to defend the attire, stating that the hats actually read “Make 60 Great Again”, before she herself commented on the public’s “misinterpretations” of the situation.
She told Variety at the time: “There were so many misinterpretations. The people in the pictures weren’t even my family […] The people who brought the things that people were upset about were actually my mom’s friends from LA who have kids that are walking outside in the Pride parade, and they thought it would be funny to wear because they were coming to Idaho.” Hilarious.
More recently still, she was embroiled in another internet row over her “bathwater soap”. Apparently, due to huge demand, an unexpected collab came about because “when your fans start asking for your bathwater, you can either ignore it, or turn it into a bar of Dr. Squatch soap”.
Some rightly pointed out how gross this was from a hygiene point of view (I don’t know about you, but I will not be lathering someone’s scummy bath suds on me – no matter how famous they are), while others claimed it was a feminist triumph.
Then came the bizarre campaign for Sweeney’s new lingerie line, reportedly backed by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, whose wedding to Lauren Sanchez she attended in June. It’s not what she’s selling that is the issue here, though – nor is it necessarily her partnership with a man equally shrouded in controversy. It’s that the promotional video for it was heavily influenced by Lolita.
Prancing around on an estate lawn, dodging sprinklers in a cotton teddy and knickers, with dewy makeup and sunglasses, which may as well have been heart-shaped, not only infantilises Sweeney, but glorifies the lore around Vladimir Nabokov’s transgressive story of a paedophile who grooms an underage girl, and proceeds to justify his actions. This isn’t marketed towards the wearer – it’s marketed towards men.
And it’s this part of her rebrand that is really confusing. Sweeney has spoken in the past of how she had “no control” over how people sexualised her body, and how it has made her uncomfortable, detracting from her art. There are so many unnecessary nude scenes in Euphoria, it’s more a showcase for her boobs than her acting abilities – which, by the way, she does have. Similarly, Saturday Night Live viewers focused more on her low-cut dress than her comedic delivery when she hosted the show in 2024.
Yet, in the American Eagle campaign, she is going full throttle – not just by “embracing” her sexuality and the ridiculous narrative around her body, but also the right-wing messaging.
So, what’s it all for? Is it to remain relevant (she’s had a number of acting gigs of late, but season three of Euphoria has been on ice for some time)? Is it simply a case of “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade”? Or is this true-blue, all-American version her authentic self?
There’s a lot of nuance to this – and I’m not saying that women shouldn’t have the right to do and say as they please. Equality is to allow women the freedom to do just that. But when that freedom is only enjoyed by a select few who can afford to use the world as their playground without a second thought of the wider implications of their behaviour, it doesn’t sit right with me – even less so when what they say and do has racial undertones.
What’s equally frustrating is that Sweeney is talented. She’s also a certain level of famous that doesn’t require this kind of sellout behaviour; she’s not some influencer desperate for brand partnerships.
Will the real Sydney Sweeney please stand up – for her sake, as much as ours?
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Men charged in connection with alleged rape of 12-year-old
Two men have been charged in connection with the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton, Warwickshire.
Ahmad Mulakhil, 23, was arrested on 26 July and charged the next day with rape, Warwickshire Police said.
He appeared at Coventry Magistrates’ Court on Monday and has been remanded in custody.
Mohammad Kabir, 23, was arrested in Nuneaton on Thursday, the force said.
He was charged with kidnap, strangulation, and aiding and abetting rape of a girl under 13.
He appeared at Coventry Magistrates’ Court on Saturday and has also been remanded in custody.
Both men will next appear at Warwick Crown Court on 26 August.
Officers are appealing to anyone who was in the Cheveral Street area between 8.30pm and 9.45pm on 22 July and may have seen anything of interest to come forward.
People can give information by calling 101 and quoting incident number 418 of 22 July.
Warwickshire Police did not deny a Mail on Sunday report which said both Mulakhil and Kabir are asylum seekers.
In a statement, the force said that once someone is charged with an offence, it follows national guidance, which “does not include sharing ethnicity or immigration status”.
The force said: “Our neighbourhood officers work every day with local community partners.
“When something significant happens, we brief these partners and local elected officials on the circumstances of the crime, the investigation, the work being undertaken to arrest those responsible and how local people and partners can help a concerned community.
“Where relevant, sensitive information around locations, details of the crime and policing activity to catch offenders can be shared, with a warning that this is sensitive or confidential information and disclosure by those being briefed could affect future court hearings.
“We work to hold offenders to account and will always do everything in our power to present a robust case to the courts and protect the integrity of court proceedings.”
Naked, masked man caught on camera walking street at night
Police are investigating after a video emerged of a naked man walking a street at night, wearing only a mask and trainers.
The footage has been widely shared on social media.
It is thought to have been filmed in the seaside Lancashire town of Lytham.
The video shows the man wearing only the black mask and a pair of black‑and‑white trainers as he walks along a row of houses.
Lancashire Police said the incident took place around 12.50am on 18 July.
It happened in the area of Westby Street, Cleveland Road and Bannister Street.
“We are aware of a concerning video circulating on social media of a naked male wearing a face covering walking around Lytham in the early hours of the morning,” a police spokesman said.
“This incident was not initially reported to police and has only been brought to our attention after it has been viewed on Facebook.
“Fylde Rural Task Force are currently conducting CCTV and house‑to‑house inquiries and would like to reassure you that we are taking this matter seriously.”
Officers urged anyone with information or relevant CCTV to contact FyldeRTF@lancashire.police.uk.