Archive July 1, 2025

Jason Manford hits out at hotel’s ‘ridiculous policy’ after being forced to share room

Comedian Jason Manford hits out at a Bournemouth hotel for selling his room to another guest after he arrived ‘late’

Jason Manford hits out at hotel’s ‘ridiculous policy’ after being forced to share room(Image: JasonManford/x)

Jason Manford hit out at a hotel’s ‘ridiculous policy’ after he had to share a room with a friend because it was overbooked. The comedian, 44, was in Bournemouth on Saturday before his A Manford All Seasons show but the staff at the hotel told him the place was overbooked for the night.

Staff at the Village Hotel told Jason his room was sold to someone else as he arrived late. Because of the issue, he was forced to share a room with his friend Steve. “So we got to our hotel tonight in Bournemouth and it’s fully booked. We were like, ‘Fine, that’s good – well done you’,” he said.

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Jason Manford
Jason shared his room with a friend after the hotel was overbooked(Image: JasonManford/x)

“They went, ‘No, no, as in like without you’. So me and Steve, obviously [we’re] in separate rooms. And then we just discovered that basically if it’s fully booked it means that, [you have to share].

“Okay, don’t worry, it is what it is, these things happen – all that b******t! I mean we spent all day together! Oh, well, at least we’ve got a nice view of the car park. Oh well, these things happen and all that. Worse things happen at sea. But Village Hotel, just beware, if you are booking and it’s a busy day in a busy city…

“I mean, we’re lucky that [our booking] was two rooms because that fella coming behind us, a doctor as well, and no room for him. He just had to walk out, and like and there’s no rooms anywhere in Bournemouth tonight. Naughty that, naughty. I’ve heard of aeroplanes doing it, but I’ve never known in 25 years of touring, a hotel doing it. That’s not on, that is not on. “

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Jason Manford
He reminded fans it wasn’t the staff’s fault(Image: JasonManford/x)

He then showed the bedroom he was staying in and added: “So we’ve managed to make best of our situation. But that poor doctor, maybe he could sleep on the floor! Anyway, good night. ” In the caption, he said: “What’s your minimum expectation when you book a room at @Villagehotelsup? Staff were lovely but policy stinks! “

Jason returned to social media the next day to reveal the hotel management had been in touch and asked him to remove the video. He refused to take down the video and said he wanted to warn people about the company’s practice. Jason also reminded fans it wasn’t the staff’s fault, but the company’s itself.

“What I will say is it’s not the staff’s fault. And this is the problem with these big companies. That is somebody in an office, making a policy that makes them more money, but they don’t have to deal with the s**t,” he said to the camera.

Jason Manford
He returned to social media and revealed the hotel had been in touch(Image: JasonManford/x)

“I didn’t kick off, but I can imagine people would. So the staff then have to deal with upset customers and getting vitriol in heightened emotional situations. So I’m not going to take the video down, because I think it’s right that people know that’s what your company are doing.

“And I’m going to leave it up as a bit of support for the staff, who aren’t being paid as much as the person who made the decision is and how much that person is making out of this ridiculous policy. So bear that in mind if these things do happen, same with an aeroplane. We’ve all been there, we’ve all been in a moment where the person we’re in contact with is the person that’s going to get it.

“But we have to take a step back sometimes, just remember that person is just doing their job and they don’t like it either. In fact that’s what the manager said to me last night, ‘I don’t like this either, I hate it’. It takes a video like this and us talking about it for them, hopefully to have a little look at their policies and think maybe this is not in the best interest of our staff and certainly not of the customer. “

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‘Underdogs’ Wales happy to be written off at Euro 2025

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Wales’ players say they are happy to be written off at Euro 2025 as they bid to cause an upset in Switzerland.

Having been drawn against defending champions England and formidable opponents in France and the Netherlands, Opta gives Wales just a 9% chance of getting out of their group, a 2% chance of reaching the semi-final and a 1% chance of reaching the final.

Wales are the lowest-ranked side at Euro 2025, their first major tournament, and have never beaten a side ranked in the world’s top 10.

Opta suggests Wales have a 71% chance of finishing bottom of their qualifying group, but Wales’ players say they are comfortable with being dismissed.

“You want to come to a major tournament, and you want to play against the best teams,” defender Gemma Evans told BBC Sport Wales.

“We are fine with the group. We’re fine with outside noise, or people who don’t have any faith in us or are underestimating us.

Wales kick off their tournament on Saturday, 5 July against the Netherlands and midfielder Rachel Rowe says the players are ready to show they belong on the biggest stage.

“The pressure comes from within our group and what our expectations are of ourselves,” Rowe explained.

“I think we’re fully focused on doing the nation proud and doing ourselves proud first and foremost.

Striker Elise Hughes says “it is a Wales thing”, to embrace the tag of underdogs.

“When you qualify for a major tournament there’s only 16 teams here, and that’s 16 of the best in Europe,” she said.

“Any group that you go into is going to be tough. Ours is obviously particularly tough.

“But yeah, it’s a Wales thing to do. It’s a Wales thing to be an underdog – we are relishing that opportunity.

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Coleen Nolan’s son Shane announces he’s going to be a dad – a week after his brother’s baby joy

Coleen Nolan’s son, Shane, has announced that he is going to be a dad in a sweet Instagram post.

Shane, 36, took to social media on Tuesday to share the joyful news as he posted a baby scan of his unborn child. Alongside the sweet snaps, he penned: “Is there ever a right time to tell people ? But we think you should probably know, this family is just getting bigger baby.

“The most amazing feeling , we’re all so happy and we can’t wait to meet the newest member. @kimberley. s. 6 you literally are Wonder Woman and you impress and make me fall in love with you more each day. Roll on November. “

The excited dad-to-be shared more pictures of himself and Kimberly on the beach looking more loved-up than ever.

Coleen Nolan’s son, Shane, has announced that he is going to be a dad (@iamshanenolan/Instagram)

Kimberly looked gorgeous in a neon pink mini dress which hugged her blossoming baby bump to perfection. Meanwhile, Shane looked suave in a black short-sleeved shirt and beige shorts. The pair also posed with Kimberly’s 12-year-old daughter.

The sweet news comes just one week after Coleen announced that her son Jake is also expecting a baby. The Loose Women star revealed in her latest newsletter for the Mirror that her family is set to become even bigger with the edition of a new grandchild.

Jake, who Coleen shares with her ex-husband Shane Richie, surprised his mum with the new that he and his partner Georgia are expecting a baby.

Shane shared a baby scan of his unborn child
Shane shared a baby scan of his unborn child (@iamshanenolan/Instagram)

Coleen revealed she’s been enjoying a week full of family surprises, including the early return of her daughter Ciara and her fiancé from her travels, her sister Maureen’s 70th birthday party and her sister Denise’s wedding. The Nolan Sisters star said: “The cherry on the cake was a visit from my son Jake and his partner Georgia.

“I can finally reveal that I’m going to be a grandmother again, as they’re expecting a baby at the end of the year. On Saturday, a few of us got together at my house for the gender reveal and, just as I said, ‘I think it’s a boy’, Jake let off the confetti gun and turned the living room blue. I couldn’t be more thrilled about having a grandson. “

Coleen shares Shane and Jake, 31, from her first marriage to Shane while Ciara’s father is her second husband Ray Fensome, who she divorced in 2018. It’s been a big year for Coleen with her daughter announcing her engagement in April.

Coleen has three children, Jake, Ciara and Shane Jr (left to right)
Jake is also set to become a dad this year (Coleen Nolan/Instagram)

Ciara revealed her boyfriend Max popped the question while in Vietnam. The Loose Women star’s daughter posted a photo of the couple holding hands as she showed off her new engagement ring. “This happened last night xxxx,” she captioned a photo of the ring. “It was like a fairytale and I can’t wait to spend forever with you @maxxiness I love you xxx. “

Coleen then shared a photo of the happy couple announcing the news to her followers. She wrote: “Well what can I say… I’m so so delighted that @maxxinnes has asked my beautiful girl @ciarafensome to marry him. I love them both sooooo much. Miss them even more! Can’t wait to see them. Off to buy a hat. “

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The Devil Wears Prada sequel starts production – but this key character won’t return

Iconic film The Devil Wears Prada is in the works for a second sequel after almost 20 years, but a famous face won’t be returning as part of the star-studded cast.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is confirmed but one character won’t be coming back(Image: Barry Wetcher)

After years of speculation and some hints in between, it has finally been confirmed. The Devil Wears Prada will have a second sequel, but a controversial character won’t be returning.

A sequel to The Devil Wears Prada is on its way after almost two decades since its debut. The happy news was shared by 20th Century Studios, who surprised viewers by also saying that production had already begun.

As reported by Entertainment Weekly, the famous cast will consist of Hollywood and returning stars, Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci. Of course, the storyline will be directed by David Frankel and written by Aline Brosh McKenna. However, one face that won’t be reprising his role is Adrian Grenier.

Grenier portrayed Nate Cooper in the 2006 film, Andy Sachs’ (Anna Hathaway) boyfriend from university. At the beginning of the film, both were portrayed as a happy couple with professional careers, Andy as a journalist at Runway magazine under Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) and Nate as a sous chef.

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caption: Andy, Nate and friends in Devil Wears Prada
Adrien Grenier, known for his character as Nate Cooper, won’t return for The Devil Wears Prada 2

Throughout the film, his relationship with Andy became tricky as her career took off, creating a few fights as well as a temporary breakup, following her late arrival at his birthday celebration.

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Even though the couple ended up reconciling, viewers labelled Nate’s character as the “true villain” for his lack of support. Towards the end of the film, the couple goes their separate ways, as Andy pursues her career in New York, and Nate takes a job in Boston.

Fans expressed their excitement amid the sequel news. Some were happy that Nate’s character wouldn’t interfere with Andy’s career, but others were hoping he would make a return.

A fan commented: “The real villain of the film. Jarlsberg was more important to him than Andy. ” A second one, added: “Good, and he can take his burnt grilled cheese with him. ”

Another viewer wrote on X: “Nate never was the real villain in devil wears prada and if you think he was, you completely missed the point of the story. ”

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“Nate Cooper will be missed in ‘THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2’. Adrian Grenier’s character was special in the film, the fun will be incomplete without him! ”

During the cast’s 2021 reunion, Grenier spoke about his character being considered the villain of the story. He said: “All those memes that came out were shocking to me. It hadn’t occurred to me until I started to really think about it, and perhaps it was because I was as immature as Nate was at the time and in many ways he’s very selfish and self-involved, it was all about him, he wasn’t extending himself to support Andy in her career.”

“At the end of the day, it’s just a birthday, right? It’s not the end of the world,” he added. The actor explained that he didn’t realise how immature his actions were until he came much older and had “time to reflect and much deliberation.”

The 2006 film was adapted from former Vogue assistant Lauren Weisberger’s book of the same name. She worked for Anna Wintour, Vogue’s former Editor-in-Chief, who recently stepped down from her position in the iconic magazine after 37 years.

A release date is yet to be announced. However, according to the reports, the movie is expected to be released in 2026.

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Opposition leader Nika Gvaramia jailed in Georgia amid deepening crackdown

A court in Georgia has sentenced prominent opposition figure Nika Gvaramia to eight months in prison, amid a deepening crackdown on critics of the ruling Georgian Dream party.

Gvaramia, the co-leader of the opposition Akhali party, was also barred from holding office for two years.

The court imposed the sentence on Tuesday over his refusal to cooperate with a parliamentary commission tasked with investigating alleged wrongdoing under ex-President Mikheil Saakashvili, a pro-Western reformer currently serving a 12-and-a-half-year prison term.

Several other leading opponents of Georgian Dream have been jailed on similar charges to Gvaramia, including Giorgi Vashadze, a former deputy justice minister, who received a seven-month prison sentence last week.

The crackdown has led to growing accusations against the governing party that it is trampling on democracy amid continuing protests in the wake of last year’s disputed elections.

Speaking to the AFP news agency on Tuesday, Gvaramia’s lawyer Dito Sadzaglishvili said the verdict against his client was “unlawful” and “part of the government’s attempt to crush all dissent in Georgia”.

Growing criticism

The British government on Monday denounced the crackdown on opposition figures and summoned the country’s charge d’affaires.

“The imprisonment of prominent opposition leaders is the latest attempt by the Georgian government to crack down on freedoms and stifle dissent,” the United Kingdom’s Foreign Office said.

“The UK Government will not hesitate to consider further action should Georgia not return to respecting and upholding democracy, freedoms and human rights,” it added.

The NGO Amnesty International also criticised the government, saying last week in reaction to Vashadze’s sentencing that it had “serious concerns over the misuse of legislative, policing and other powers to silence government critics in Georgia”.

The human rights organisation specifically took aim at the parliamentary commission linked to the arrests of opposition figures.

“With its status disputed, the commission has been instrumentalised to target former public officials for their principled opposition,” said Denis Krivosheev, Amnesty’s deputy director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

A police officer handcuffs politician Giorgi Vashadze in Tbilisi, Georgia, on June 24, 2025 [Mariam Nikuradze/AP Photo]

After Georgian Dream claimed victory in a contested election in October, the European Union candidate nation experienced mass protests.

Critics accuse the government of undermining democracy and of bringing the country close to Moscow, allegations the governing party denies.

The EU has said some 80 percent of the population supports Georgia’s bid to join the bloc, a commitment enshrined in its constitution.

Why are ties between Azerbaijan and Russia fraying?

In 2001, a man was stabbed to death near a lakeside restaurant in Yekaterinburg, an urban centre in Russia’s Ural Mountains region.

With his dying breath, he whispered the names of his alleged killers to the police, local media claimed.

The man and his presumed murderers were ethnic Azeris, Turkic-speaking Muslims whose families fled to Russia in the 1990s after the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Azeri region dominated by ethnic Armenians.

But it took Russian authorities 24 years to identify and detain the presumed suspects – even though they ran the restaurant and never went into hiding.

Two alleged suspects died while being rounded up on Friday. One suffered a “heart attack” while the other suspect’s cause of death “is being established”, according to Russian prosecutors.

They also purported that the suspects were part of “a criminal group” allegedly involved in other murders and the sale of counterfeit alcohol that killed 44 people in 2021.

The prosecutors provided no answers as to why the presumed “criminals” were at large for so long – and did not elaborate on the apparently brutal manner in which they were detained.

The deaths triggered a diplomatic storm that may contribute to a tectonic shift in the strategic South Caucasus region, Russia’s former stamping ground, where Azerbaijan won Nagorno-Karabakh back in 2020, and Turkiye is regaining its centuries-old clout.

Azerbaijan slams Russia’s ‘unacceptable violence’

The spat has so far resulted in the arrest of two Russian intelligence officers in Azerbaijan, the shutdown of a Kremlin-funded media outlet there, and the cancellation of “cultural events” sponsored by Moscow.

Russian police and intelligence officers used “unacceptable violence” that killed two brothers, Ziyaddin Safarov and Gusein Safarov, and left their relatives severely injured, Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Saturday.

One of the injured men reportedly said masked officers began breaking his front door at dawn, frightening his children.

The officers “turned the house upside down and kept beating us for an hour without asking anything”, Mohammed Safarov told the MediaAzNews website.

He said his elderly father was also beaten and electrocuted for hours and claimed they were both requested to “volunteer” to fight Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Other Azeri media outlets published photos of bruises and wounds the men claimed were caused by Russian officers.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday, in response to a question about Azerbaijan’s reactions,  “We sincerely regret such decisions”.

He added, “We believe that everything that’s happening (in Yekaterinburg) is related to the work of law enforcement agencies, and this cannot and should not be a reason for such a reaction. ”

But Emil Mustafayev, a political analyst based in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, said the incident highlighted a xenophobic strain in Russia.

“The killing of Azeris is a link in the chain of tendentious politics where ethnic minorities are used as a lightning rod,” he said. “This is not just a tragedy, this is a symptom of a deep sickness of the Russian society. ”

The Azeri diaspora in Russia is at least two million strong, but they face discrimination, police brutality and hate attacks.

“The Kremlin has long ago mastered a trick – when domestic dissent is on the rise, there is a need to switch attention to ‘the enemies from within’, be that Ukrainians, Tajiks, Uzbeks or, like now, Azeris,” Mustafayev added.

The Kremlin uses state propaganda, police brutality and the taciturn approval of top officials to create an atmosphere of violence against migrants that is “seen as normal, as inevitable”, he said.

Back in the 1990s, Azeri migrants nearly monopolised fruit trade and mini-bus transportation in Russian urban centres.

Many still run countless shops selling vegetables and flowers.

“We are the boogeymen, cops always need to check our documents and need no excuse to harass us and call us names even after they see my Russian passport,” an ethnic Azeri owner of a flower shop near a major railway station in Moscow told Al Jazeera, on condition of anonymity.

Until the early 2000s, the Azeris “undoubtedly were the number one” most-hated ethnic minority in Russia, until the arrival of labour migrants from Russia’s North Caucasus and ex-Soviet Central Asia, said Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University.

Since then, some ultra-nationalists and skinheads who considered Azeris their main enemies joined law enforcement agencies, he added.

“So, the cruelty in Yekaterinburg may have been caused by” the decades-old hatred, Mitrokhin told Al Jazeera.

Strained ties

Other geopolitical factors contributed to anti-Azeri sentiments in Russia.

In 2020, Azerbaijan put an end to the seemingly unsolvable political deadlock over Nagorno-Karabakh.

“The success undoubtedly became possible thanks to Turkiye’s military aid,” Alisher Ilkhamov, head of Central Asia Due Diligence, a think tank in London, told Al Jazeera.

Baku bought advanced Turkish-made Bayraktar drones that could easily strike large groups of Armenian and separatist soldiers, together with their trenches, tanks and trucks.

An Azeri-Turkish alliance emerged, “allowing Baku to get rid of Moscow’s obtrusive ‘peacekeeping’ mission and depriving it of a chance to manipulate the Azeri-Armenian conflict to keep both [Azerbaijan and Armenia] in its political orbit”, he said.

The alliance tarnished Moscow’s clout in South Caucasus, while Baku sympathised with Kyiv in the Russian-Ukrainian war, he said.

Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev also accused Russia of obstructing an investigation into the downing of an Azeri passenger plane over Chechnya last December.

The plane was apparently hit by panicking Russian air defence forces during a Ukrainian drone attack on Grozny, Chechnya’s administrative capital.

Aliyev also refused to take part in the May 9 parade on Moscow’s iconic Red Square to commemorate Russia’s role in defeating Nazi Germany in 1945.

Baku fiercely resists the Kremlin’s campaign to forcibly enlist Azeri labour migrants to join Russia’s war effort in Ukraine.