The wait is almost over. Euro 2025 kicks off on 2 July, with England and Wales among the 16 teams going for glory in Switzerland.
All that is left to do is study the fixtures, consider the permutations and keep track of the results using your essential piece of kit – the Women’s Euro 2025 wallchart.
Why not print out your own, follow the fixtures and fill in the results as the tournament plays out?
Triple Olympic champion Faith Kipyegon of Kenya will attempt to make history by becoming the first woman to run a sub-four minute mile on Thursday, but to do so she must shave nearly eight seconds off her world record.
Already the world record holder in this non-Olympic distance equivalent to 1.6km, Kipyegon will nevertheless have to smash her own benchmark of 4min 07.64sec by gaining almost two seconds per 400m.
No woman has ever attempted the feat, which was first achieved in 1954 by Roger Bannister — in 3min 59.4sec — in what has gone down as one of track running’s most momentous achievements.
In the unofficial race in Paris organised by Nike, 31-year-old Kipyegon will benefit from the wealth of her sponsor’s technological support.
The “Breaking 4” project follows on six years after Eliud Kipchoge’s “Breaking 2” — when the Kenyan became the first man to run a marathon in under two hours.
For the attempt, Kipyegon will sport a custom-made suit as well as new Victory Elite FK shoes. She will also reportedly be accompanied by a team of male pacemakers around the Stade Charlety track.
Despite all this, some believe that the task of trimming nearly eight seconds off her world record time will be beyond the three-time Olympic 1500m gold medallist.
“Spoiler alert. She’s not going to break 4:00. And it’s not going to be particularly close,” said Robert Johnson, co-founder of the specialist site LetsRun.com.
“She was fantastic… To nearly break a world record in your season opener is amazing and shows you why Kipyegon is one of track & field’s all-time greats,” said Johnson.
“If you run 2:29.21 1000m pace for 1609 meters -— otherwise known as a mile — You get 4:00.08.. To break 4:00, Kipyegon would have to run an extra 609 meters faster than what she ran (that) day.”
Kipyegon, nonetheless, has the backing of certain fellow long-distance Olympians, with Norway’s double champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen telling AFP: “I’m really intrigued to see if it’s possible.
Triple Olympic champion Faith Kipyegon of Kenya will attempt to make history by becoming the first woman to run a sub-four minute mile on Thursday, but to do so she must shave nearly eight seconds off her world record.
Already the world record holder in this non-Olympic distance equivalent to 1. 6km, Kipyegon will nevertheless have to smash her own benchmark of 4min 07. 64sec by gaining almost two seconds per 400m.
No woman has ever attempted the feat, which was first achieved in 1954 by Roger Bannister — in 3min 59. 4sec — in what has gone down as one of track running’s most momentous achievements.
In the unofficial race in Paris organised by Nike, 31-year-old Kipyegon will benefit from the wealth of her sponsor’s technological support.
The “Breaking 4” project follows on six years after Eliud Kipchoge’s “Breaking 2” — when the Kenyan became the first man to run a marathon in under two hours.
For the attempt, Kipyegon will sport a custom-made suit as well as new Victory Elite FK shoes. She will also reportedly be accompanied by a team of male pacemakers around the Stade Charlety track.
Despite all this, some believe that the task of trimming nearly eight seconds off her world record time will be beyond the three-time Olympic 1500m gold medallist.
“Spoiler alert. She’s not going to break 4:00. And it’s not going to be particularly close,” said Robert Johnson, co-founder of the specialist site LetsRun. com.
She did a fantastic job, showing why Kipyegon is one of the best in track andamp;;, and nearly breaking a world record in your season opener. Field’s greatest of all time, Johnson said.
“If you run 2:29. 21 1000m pace for 1609 meters -— otherwise known as a mile — You get 4:00. 08. . Kipyegon would need to run an additional 609 meters faster to break 4:00. than what she accomplished that day. ”
However, Kipyegon has the support of some other long-distance Olympians, according to Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen, who stated to AFP: “I’m really interested to see if it’s possible.
An intense 12‑day conflict between Israel and Iran erupted on June 13, 2025, after Israel launched air strikes on Iranian military and nuclear sites, killing key nuclear scientists and military commanders.
More than 200 Israeli fighter jets hit more than 100 nuclear and military facilities along with residential neighbourhoods across Iran.
Iran retaliated with hundreds of ballistic missiles against Israeli cities. In the days that followed, Israel and Iran traded missiles as casualties mounted on both sides.
The United States entered the military clash on June 22 with bunker-buster strikes on Iran’s Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan nuclear facilities.
A fragile ceasefire was brokered by the US on June 24, hours after Iran had fired missiles at its largest airbase in the Middle East, based in Qatar.
According to Iran’s Ministry of Health and Medical Education, thousands of people were injured, hundreds were killed, and public infrastructure was damaged.
As of June 24:
• Total injured: 4,746, including 185 women
• Total people killed: 610, including 49 women and 13 children. The youngest was two months old.
• Injured healthcare workers: 20
• Healthcare workers killed: 5
• Damaged ambulances: 9
• Damaged hospitals: 7
• Damaged health units: 4
• Damaged emergency bases: 6
In Iran, as the bombardment began, thousands of Iranians tried to flee the capital and other major cities towards northern provinces bordering the Caspian Sea.
Nearly nine million people headed out in cars from the major cities, especially Tehran.
Among them was Zein*.
Zein, 34, says he left his home in Tehran and headed to Kelardasht in Mazandaran province, north of the capital, on the Caspian Sea coast. The road trip took nearly 16 hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic out of the city.
“In our area, there are many military zones nearby. Because of the warnings they had given, we didn’t feel safe or have peace of mind,” he says. “I think Tehran felt very panicked, and we were just thinking about getting ourselves out of Tehran and reaching somewhere where we could feel more secure. ”
Unlike his parents’ generation, who lived through the devastation of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, this was Zein’s first time experiencing such intense military conflict.
“The fear of not knowing whether you’ll ever return to your home or not. Whether your home will still be there or not. You have to leave your city with a thousand worries, and in such a terrifying situation, because of the roads, the traffic, and the lack of management, you somehow have to get yourself to safety,” he says.
“And there’s no support – you have to figure everything out on your own. ”
According to Al Jazeera’s Sanad fact-checking agency, Israel and the US launched at least 145 air strikes on Iran.
The actual count may be much higher, as another source, the Armed Conflict Location and Event data (ACLED) tabulated at least 508 air strikes by Israeli forces on Iran.
According to ACLED, Iran attacked Israel at least 120 times. These strikes included ballistic missiles and drones. Many were intercepted with US help and some hit residential areas.
Iran mainly targeted Tel Aviv and areas around it, and one of the significant hits was the Soroka Medical Center – a strike that injured dozens. Among other targets were the Israeli Military Intelligence School, the Ministry of Interior in Haifa, the Weizmann Institute of Science, and an oil refinery and power plants.
According to the Israeli military, Iran launched up to 1,000 ballistic missiles and drones at Israel, and about 90 percent were intercepted.
According to Israel’s Ministry of Health, as of June 24, the number of people killed and injured across Israel was:
Total injured/hospitalised: 3,238
Total people killed: 28
The Iranian missiles and drones that were able to make it past Israel’s interceptors mainly struck neighbourhoods in Tel Aviv and Haifa, where there was damage to apartment buildings.
Many residents affected by the Iranian strikes from Tel Aviv to Haifa were able to escape into bomb shelters.
According to the Reuters news agency, many families with safe rooms spent most of the 12 days there, while others would use public shelters whenever an alert was raised.
*Name changed to protect the identity, at Zein’s request.
In both Tehran and Tel Aviv, residents have faced heightened anxiety in recent days as the threat of missile strikes looms over their communities. Alongside the very real concerns for physical safety, there is growing alarm over the role of misinformation, particularly content generated by artificial intelligence, in shaping public perception.
GeoConfirmed, an online verification platform, has reported an increase in AI-generated misinformation, including fabricated videos of air strikes that never occurred, both in Iran and Israel.
This follows a similar wave of manipulated footage that circulated during recent protests in Los Angeles, which were sparked by a rise in immigration raids in the second-most populous city in the United States.
The developments are part of a broader trend of politically charged events being exploited to spread false or misleading narratives.
The launch of a new AI product by one of the largest tech companies in the world has added to those concerns of detecting fact from fiction.
Late last month, Google’s AI research division, DeepMind, released Veo 3, a tool capable of generating eight-second videos from text prompts. The system, one of the most comprehensive ones currently available for free, produces highly realistic visuals and sound that can be difficult for the average viewer to distinguish from real footage.
To see exactly what it can do, Al Jazeera created a fake video in minutes using a prompt depicting a protester in New York claiming to be paid to attend, a common talking point Republicans historically have used to delegitimise protests, accompanied by footage that appeared to show violent unrest. The final product was nearly indistinguishable from authentic footage.
Al Jazeera also created videos showing fake missile strikes in both Tehran and Tel Aviv using the prompts “show me a bombing in Tel Aviv” and then a similar prompt for Tehran. Veo 3 says on its website that it blocks “harmful requests and results”, but Al Jazeera had no problems making these fake videos.
“I recently created a completely synthetic video of myself speaking at Web Summit using nothing but a single photograph and a few dollars. It fooled my own team, trusted colleagues, and security experts”, said Ben Colman, CEO of deepfake detection firm Reality Defender, in an interview with Al Jazeera.
“If I can do this in minutes, imagine what motivated bad actors are already doing with unlimited time and resources”.
He added, “We’re not preparing for a future threat. We’re already behind in a race that started the moment Veo 3 launched. Robust solutions do exist and work — just not the ones the model makers are offering as the be-all, end-all”.
Google says it is taking the issue seriously.
“We’re committed to developing AI responsibly, and we have clear policies to protect users from harm and govern the use of our AI tools. Any content generated with Google AI includes a SynthID watermark, and we add a visible watermark to Veo videos as well”, a company spokesperson told Al Jazeera.
However, experts say the tool was released before those features were fully implemented, a move some believe was reckless.
Joshua McKenty, CEO of deepfake detection company Polyguard, said that Google rushed the product to market because it had been lagging behind competitors like OpenAI and Microsoft, which have released more user-friendly and publicised tools. Google did not respond to these claims.
“Google’s trying to win an argument that their AI matters when they’ve been losing dramatically”, McKenty said. “They’re like the third horse in a two-horse race. They don’t care about customers. They care about their own shiny tech”.
That sentiment was echoed by Sukrit Venkatagiri, an assistant professor of computer science at Swarthmore College.
“Companies are in a weird bind. If you don’t develop generative AI, you’re seen as falling behind and your stock takes a hit”, he said. “But they also have a responsibility to make these products safe when deployed in the real world. I don’t think anyone cares about that right now. All of these companies are putting profit — or the promise of profit — over safety”.
Google’s own research, published last year, acknowledged the threat generative AI poses.
“The explosion of generative AI-based methods has inflamed these concerns]about misinformation], as they can synthesise highly realistic audio and visual content as well as natural, fluent text at a scale previously impossible without an enormous amount of manual labour”, the study read.
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, has long warned his colleagues in the AI industry against prioritising speed over safety. “I would advocate not moving fast and breaking things”, he told Time in 2023.
He declined Al Jazeera’s request for an interview.
Yet despite such warnings, Google released Veo 3 before fully implementing safeguards, leading to incidents like the one the National Guard had to debunk in Los Angeles after a TikTok account made a fake “day in the life” video of a soldier that said he was preparing for “today’s gassing” — referring to releasing tear gas on protesters.
The implications of Veo 3 extend far beyond protest footage. In the days following its release, several fabricated videos mimicking real news broadcasts circulated on social media, including one of a false report about a home break-in that included CNN graphics.
Another clip falsely claimed that JK Rowling’s yacht sank off the coast of Turkiye after an orca attack, attributing the report to Alejandra Caraballo of Harvard Law’s Cyberlaw Clinic, who built the video to test out the tool.
In a post, Caraballo warned that such tech could mislead older news consumers in particular.
“What’s worrying is how easy it is to repeat. Within ten minutes, I had multiple versions. This makes it harder to detect and easier to spread”, she wrote. “The lack of a chyron]banner on a news broadcast] makes it trivial to add one after the fact to make it look like any particular news channel”.
In our own experiment, we used a prompt to create fake news videos bearing the logos of ABC and NBC, with voices mimicking those of CNN anchors Jake Tapper, Erin Burnett, John Berman, and Anderson Cooper.
“Now, it’s just getting harder and harder to tell fact from fiction”, Caraballo told Al Jazeera. “As someone who’s been researching AI systems for years, even I’m starting to struggle”.
This challenge extends to the public, as well. A study by Penn State University found that 48 percent of consumers were fooled by fake videos circulated via messaging apps or social media.
Contrary to popular belief, younger adults are more susceptible to misinformation than older adults, largely because younger generations rely on social media for news, which lacks the editorial standards and legal oversight of traditional news organisations.
A UNESCO survey from December showed that 62 percent of news influencers do not fact-check information before sharing it.
Google is not alone in developing tools that facilitate the spread of synthetic media. Companies like Deepbrain offer users the ability to create AI-generated avatar videos, though with limitations, as it cannot produce full-scene renders like Veo 3. Deepbrain did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment. Other tools like Synthesia and Dubverse allow video dubbing, primarily for translation.
This growing toolkit offers more opportunities for malicious actors. A recent incident involved a fabricated news segment in which a CBS reporter in Dallas was made to appear to say racist remarks. The software used remains unidentified.
CBS News Texas did not respond to a request for comment.
As synthetic media becomes more prevalent, it poses unique risks that will allow bad actors to push manipulated content that spreads faster than it can be corrected, according to Colman.
If you’ve been thinking of investing in a portable and powerful fan from a reputable brand to help fight the rising temperatures this summer, Louise Thompson has been singing the praises of this Shark model. Hailing it “the best” during the UK’s recent scorcher, Louise pointed fans in the direction of her new favourite fan, which she’s even touted as better than built-in air conditioning.
The Shark FlexBreeze HydroGo that’s captured Louise’s heart is currently up for grabs for £99.99, down from £129.99, on Amazon, or for the same discounted price via Argos, Currys and Shark’s own site.
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Talking about the fan, Louise raved to fans: “Guys I have the best best BEST product find in the world. You are going to thank me with all your heart. This is a portable fan and it CHURNS out cold air. Last night all of our naff British heat problems blew into insignificance.” She went on to say: “This is the best fan and no lugging up and down the stairs. I’m stealing it and poo poo’ing Sam’s built-in air conditioning unit.”
This cordless fan boasts misting and indoor and outdoor cooling while promising low noise output. Its durable, compact, and incredibly lightweight design makes it easy to move from room to room or even take outside when you fancy sunbathing without feeling the sweltering heat.
Thanks to Shark’s HydroGo Evaporating Cooling technology, which produces ultra-fine droplets, this fan lets you enjoy refreshing mist both indoors and outdoors, for complete cooling wherever you go. Built for outdoor durability with rain resistance and resistance to UV damage, this fan promises quiet operation, which offers minimal disturbance; perfect for keeping on while you’re sleeping or working from home.
Able to operate corded or cordless, indoors or outdoors, this Shark FlexBreeze HydroGo airflow lets you feel the breeze up to 20 meters away, at maximum speed, so the whole room can feel the cool air no matter where. Compact and weighing less than 2.1 kg, this portable fan promises grab-and-go cooling without any hassle.
And it’s not just Louise loving this Shark gem, as 5-star reviews pour in. One customer raves: “Behold the Shark Flex Breeze! A portable, rechargeable, powerful and quiet fan that also spouts out a cooling mist! I can now sit inside or outside and never need to peel appendages away from sticky skin. The battery last ages, the water container is sufficiently large and if I felt like taking it to Tescos cafe I can….. I haven’t, but I will if not only to embarrass my wife. Expensive…. possibly…. but I’d take one of these over 3 terrible ones every day. Go on, buy one, you know you want to”!
Another buyer beams: “Small, very quiet and keeps you nice and cool. 5 speeds, plus breeze settings where it flow strengthens and weakens. Amazing as it is, but the mist feature helps keep you cool and really works well. Plus as it’s rechargeable, you can take it outside and use it. What more could you want? I like that the lights go off after a while and so at night, it’s on but not visible”.