Every day, visitors from around the world make their way to the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art — not necessarily for the galleries inside, but for a statue of a fictional boxer from South Philadelphia.

The bronze figure of Rocky Balboa — arms raised in victory, clad in boxing trunks and boots — has become a point of pilgrimage for people around the world.

For decades, the museum kept an uncomfortable distance from this kind of devotion. Now, it is embracing it — and inviting Rocky in.

Opening this weekend, “Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments” examines how a fictional fighter became a real-world symbol, placing the statue within the sweep of art history and Philadelphia’s identity. The exhibition is the brainchild of guest curator Paul Farber, who spent years exploring the meaning of the statue and public monuments — including through his NPR podcasts — before bringing the conversation into the museum.

The exhibition spans more than 2,000 years of boxing imagery, tracing a thread of human struggle that Louis Marchesano, the museum’s deputy director of curatorial affairs and conservation, said helps explain Rocky’s enduring pull.

“The common theme that runs throughout 2,000 years of boxing imagery is that people respond to the body under struggle, a conflict in much the same way today as they did 2,500 years ago,” Marchesano said. “It’s not simply about watching two people beat each other up — it’s about endurance, internal fortitude and internal struggle.”

When the bronze statue was left on the steps after filming the “Rocky” movies, the museum fought to have it removed. It was eventually relocated to South Philadelphia before returning to the bottom of the steps in 2006. It was welcomed back, but never fully embraced. The city owns the spot where the statue sits — not the museum.

“The museum has had — and I hate to say this, no pun intended — a rocky relationship with the statue,” Marchesano said.

“It took us decades to come to terms with it,” he added. “But I’m glad that we did.”

According to the Philadelphia Visitor Center, about 4 million people visit the steps each year — rivaling the nearby Liberty Bell in annual foot traffic.

David Muller, a wrestling coach from France who recently brought his students to the steps, said he thinks Balboa’s trials and travails are “good for the next generation.”

“The movie ‘Rocky’ is important for the mind of sport and the mind of life,” Muller said, after running with them up the steps as they raised their hands at the top, smiling and punching the air like boxers.

Kate Tarchalska traveled from Poland with family and made the statue one of their stops.

“He was my hero when I was younger,” she said. “And now I am so glad I could be in the same spot as him.”

Suraj Kumar, visiting his aunt in Philadelphia from St. Louis, made a point to photograph the statue to share with his father, who first introduced him to the films when he was growing up in Bengaluru, India.

“When I got to know this statue is here, I was like, I really have to come down here,” he said.

One gallery places Rocky in the global boxing fever of the 1970s, featuring works by Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol — all created during a time when boxing had the world’s attention.

“In the 1970s, we knew minute by minute who the heavyweight champion of the world was,” Marchesano said. “The artists in this gallery are responding to that global frenzy. Sylvester Stallone, in ‘Rocky,’ was doing the same — thinking about internal and external struggle.”

Another gallery turns to Philadelphia itself, presenting photographs of the Blue Horizon boxing gym and a section on Joe Frazier, whose real-life story at least partially inspired Rocky.

“Without Joe Frazier, Rocky doesn’t exist,” Marchesano said.

When the exhibition closes in August, the statue inside will move to a permanent home at the top of the museum’s steps — a place it has never officially held. The statue currently outside remains on loan from Stallone.

Rocky’s longtime spot at the bottom of the steps won’t be empty — a statue of Frazier will replace it.

The nursery caters for children between the ages of four months and four years

A Cambridgeshire nursery where children “grow and thrive” has been handed a Strong Standard and Expected Standard Ofsted rating. In a glowing report published on April 20, the staff at Little Seedlings Nursery in Hampton Vale, Peterborough, were described as “excellent role models”.

Ofsted visited the nursery on West Lake Avenue in February this year. The nursery, a “purpose built term-time nursery” for children between the ages of four months and four years said it offers the “highest level of early year’s education” through their child-centred approach.

The report by Ofsted said that “children enjoy close, nurturing interactions with staff during story time”. The report said: “For example, they snuggle in as they turn the pages of the book and lift the flaps to see what is hiding underneath.”

Inspectors found that children “develop a positive sense of belonging” at the nursery where they “grow and thrive” in a “stimulating environment”.

The report said that staff are “excellent role models” who form “secure attachments” with the children. The report said: “They reinforce routines through daily practice, including snack time, group activities and outdoor play. Children listen carefully and follow instructions, for example, they are encouraged to help tidy up and wash their hands before they eat.”

Inspectors praised the nursery for having a “high level of support for children with SEND” which “is what makes this setting unique”.

The report continued: “Children’s individual needs are treated with the utmost importance. Leaders and staff are committed to the early identification of children’s needs.”

Headteacher, Paula Chamberlain said: “Our Little Seedlings Nursery at Hampton Vale Primary Academy, part of The Four C’s Trust, is celebrating a remarkable achievement following it’s recent Ofsted inspection, earning high praise under the newly introduced framework, making it one of the first early years settings in the area to be assessed in this way.

“As Headteacher, I couldn’t be prouder of the outcome for the Nursery, particularly given recent developments within the setting. Our nursery was one of only two settings in Peterborough to secure the government grant to expand and one of these rooms has only been open for 5 months, so this really is a huge achievement.

“To achieve this so soon after expanding, and under a brand-new framework, is an incredible testament to the dedication of our staff and the wonderful children and families we work with.”

The report also highlighted that staff are “respectful, compassionate and kind” and even “sing softly to babies as they rock them to sleep”.

The inspection concluded that all children make secure progress and overall are prepared for the next stage in their learning and transition seamlessly into the next room.

To improve, Ofsted asked leaders to help staff to fully understand the learning intent behind planned activities so that children can engage in more purposeful learning, and strengthen the training, coaching and monitoring of staff to improve the curriculum and quality of the teaching further.

“Our nursery team now looks ahead to continuing its development, building on this success while maintaining the high standards recognised in the inspection”, Ms Chamberlain added.

ENID, Okla. (AP) — Raeann Hunt scrambled to her cellar as a tornado bore down on her Oklahoma community.

“It is headed right for us,” she recalled thinking, as she peeked outside, unable to contain her curiosity.

Huddled inside the dark 8-by-8 foot (2.44-by-2.44 meters) concrete shelter with her husband, brother-in-law and a neighbor, she heard roaring, metal slapping on the door and glass breaking.

Afterward, they emerged unscathed, but found the windows smashed out of the one-story brick home in Enid and the roof badly damaged.

The scene was repeated Thursday night across the city of about 50,000 people about 85 miles north of Oklahoma City as the EF-4 tornado hit. It was on the ground for 9 miles (14.48 kilometers), packing winds of 170 to 175 mph and measuring 500 yards across at its widest, said Rick Smith, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

For those 30 to 40 minutes, at least 40 homes were damaged, some blown off their foundations. But no one was killed and only minor injuries were reported.

“People around here have a plan,” Hunt explained, noting that residents of this tornado-alley state are trained to either take shelter in a room near the center of their home or get underground.

Basements aren’t common in Oklahoma because of the red clay soil and elevated water tables that make it difficult and expensive to install them, but many homes — like Hunt’s — have storm cellars or safe rooms with reinforced concrete walls where people can take cover.

People here also know to flip on the TV and set up weather alerts on their phones — particularly in the springtime, when the risk of violent twisters is highest.

“Especially in Oklahoma, we have great meteorologists,” said Justin Hunt of Enid, who described the storm’s aftermath as a “disaster.”

Storm leaves rubble in its wake

The incident was reported on Plodder Lane, which runs from Farnworth to Over Hulton on the afternoon of Thursday, April 23.

In a brief statement, Greater Manchester Police confirmed that a man had been arrested on that day in that location.

Speaking on Friday, a GMP spokesperson said: “We can confirm an arrest of a male on suspicion of assaulting an emergency worker on Plodder Lane yesterday, April 23.”

No other arrests have been reported in connection with the incident and at the time of going to press no charges have been announced.

Anyone with any further information or concerns can call police on 101 or 999 in the event of an emergency as soon as it is safe to do so.

Alternatively, members of the public can call independent charity Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111

WASHINGTON (AP) — Just as the Senate prepared to launch into a late-night vote series, Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana went to the floor to vent.

Frustrated and seemingly exhausted Wednesday, Kennedy said he wanted more time to debate his amendments to a budget resolution to fund immigration enforcement agencies. But he had another complaint.

“Frankly I am worried about the health of some of our members,” Kennedy said as 9 p.m. approached. “Not that they’re in bad health, but it’s hard to stay up all night.”

More than 6 hours later, just past 3:30 a.m., senators wrapped up another marathon voting session on amendments and filed out of the chamber, dazed, tired and resigned to soon doing it all again.

It’s a complaint as old as the Congress, with leaders in both major political parties often turning to the torturous grind of an overnight session to exhaust members, overcome objections and push legislation to passage. But it’s a scenario that is playing out again and again, nearly business as usual, as the House and the Senate fracture and careen from one crisis to the next.

Lawmakers say it’s a symptom of a broken Congress that leaders are increasingly forced to govern in the dead of night.

“The dysfunction is getting worse,” said Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, who has been in Congress for 14 years. Lawmakers have become “less mature,” he said, as a growing number act only in their own self-interest and hold up bills or delay proceedings.

“It’s not a healthy lifestyle,” Cramer said, for the country or the lawmakers. “There’s less concern for the team effort.”

Late-night fights have become the norm

In the last few weeks, Congress has repeatedly debated pressing national issues at night — leading to confusion and turmoil in both chambers.

Much of the drama has centered, as it increasingly does, on government funding.

In late March, Senate Republicans struck a deal with Democrats to reopen most of the Department of Homeland Security, including the Transportation Security Administration, while Democrats continued to block money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol after the shootings of two protesters in Minneapolis. It was a breakthrough, and Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., passed the spending bill by voice vote — meaning there were no objections on either side — just past 2 a.m.

Senators then flew home for a two-week recess, leaving final passage to the House. But House lawmakers who were asleep when the final Senate agreement was announced woke up and angrily rejected it, saying they wouldn’t pass legislation that didn’t include funding for the immigration enforcement agencies. Senators were then forced to figure out a new plan for reopening the department, and it remains unresolved.

House GOP leaders kept members in session well past midnight last week while trying and ultimately failing to pass different versions of a foreign surveillance bill. Scrambling to pass an extension of the law ahead of a Monday deadline, leaders eventually cobbled together a 10-day extension past 2 a.m.

Members of both parties were exasperated by the last-minute mayhem.

“Who the hell is running this place?” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass. He said Republicans threw the bill together “on the back of a napkin in the back room in the middle of the night.”

“Just about everyone agrees that this is serious stuff, the kind of debate that Congress ought to have in the open,” McGovern said.

Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles, a Republican and member of the House Freedom Caucus who opposed the leadership bills, said the outcome was predictable.

“We warned them that this was gonna happen,” Ogles said. “Unfortunately, here we are at 2 in the morning.”

Time-consuming partisan bills push Senate into late nights

The late-night vote series in the Senate this week was part of an arcane, complicated process called budget reconciliation that GOP leaders are using to try to fund the two immigration enforcement agencies that Democrats continue to block. It’s become the default mode of governing for majorities in Congress as bipartisanship on major issues fades away.

Reconciliation allows the Senate majority to bypass the filibuster and pass budget-related bills along party lines. First, though, they have to get through two lengthy series of votes — and that’s where the dreaded “vote-a-rama” comes in.

The process is open-ended, which means lawmakers in both parties can offer as many amendments as they want to put the other side on record — or, as Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska describes it, “to make each other miserable.”

Leaders generally hold the votes in the middle of the night, as they did Wednesday into Thursday, in hopes of exhausting both sides and forcing senators to stay on the floor and vote quickly. But instead of waiting around between amendment votes, Murkowski walked back and forth between the chamber and her “hideaway,” a small office each senator has in the Capitol building.

“I’m at 14,291 steps,” she said just after 11 p.m., looking at her smartwatch, which was also telling her that her bedtime was approaching. She said if she couldn’t sleep, she might as well get more exercise.

Senators went through the same reconciliation process last year, in extremes, as they labored for weeks to pass President Donald Trump’s package of spending and tax cuts, which he dubbed One Big Beautiful Bill.

The bill had barely enough Republican support to pass, and the Senate and the House held nearly back-to-back all-night sessions to pass it by Trump’s July 4 deadline. In the Senate, GOP leaders kept the long vote series open for hours on end as they worked to win support from Murkowski and others.

“It’s insane,” Murkowski said of the late nights. “My mom always said, ‘Nothing good happens after midnight.’”

Overnights are not new but become more common

Overnight votes are certainly nothing new in Congress. The Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature health care law, passed the Senate in the early hours of Christmas Eve in 2009 after weeks of negotiations, just in time for senators to get home for the holidays. Countless other big bills have been passed in the dead of night, as well.

But lawmakers say the after-dark routine has gotten worse and more frequent.

“Part of what’s changed here is there’s a lot of heavy lifting that you have to do to get a bill passed,” said Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, who has served in Congress since 1981, when he was elected to the House. “I think at some point you’ve got to have a forcing mechanism, and one of the easiest is to stay up until the wee hours so that everybody is basically trying not to fall asleep on national TV.”

Democratic Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey, a relative newcomer to the Senate elected in 2024, said there’s an eventual question of whether anyone is watching.

In the middle of the night, he said: “Are the American people paying attention? How do we get the message out?”

Still, he said, it’s important that lawmakers get their work done at any hour, especially when there is a war going on with Iran and lawmakers take long stretches away from Washington.

“I don’t mind being here,” Kim said.

Tshering Sherpa, chief executive officer of the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, a local NGO in the Everest region, echoed the same message, adding that it was more than just the villagers at risk should Imja burst. Spring is peak visitor season here, with trekkers, tourists and climbers all arriving in the area.

Michael Hewson at MCH Market Insights said: “It’s important not to have too high an expectation in what will be Meg O’Neill’s first earnings announcement as chief executive, but it should set the tone for what is to come next, and while BP has its fair share of problems, the fact that she’s joining the business after such a weak fourth quarter, when it posted a 3.4 billion US dollar loss, I would suspect the bar is quite low.”

You could be forgiven for thinking everyone in Russia either supports the war in Ukraine or is too scared to do anything about it. A dominant narrative is that Russian civil society is passive, complicit or has been quashed to the point of being neutralised.

Some elements of this may be true. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian citizens criticising the war or expressing an anti-war position have faced severe prison sentences. These fall under expanded war censorship laws that target the spread of alleged “false information” or the “discrediting of the army”. But this is not the full picture.

For the past two years, I have been researching Russian anti-war resistance. This has involved conducting interviews with activists and other people who left Russia following the outbreak of war and are now scattered across the world. Instead of disappearing into exile, many of these people are mobilising to voice their opposition to the war and resist the regime in Moscow.

Some exiled Russians are sending money and letters of solidarity to political prisoners in Russia and their families. Others have coordinated legal aid to support anti-war defendants inside Russia and are lobbying western governments to distinguish between the Kremlin and Russian civil society.

At the same time, elite exiled Russian opposition figures including Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Vladimir Kara-Murza, have worked to form the Platform for Dialogue with Russian Democratic Forces. This is a consultative body in the parliamentary arm of the Council of Europe that, established in 2026, aims to give Russia’s opposition an international voice.

During my research, I have also come across exiled Russians who have been running independent Russian-language media through Telegram channels and YouTube. Though in recent months, Russia’s telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, has severely restricted access to these platforms. It has done so in an attempt to censor outside information and force Russians to adopt the state-controlled Max app.

I have encountered instances of anti-war Russians abroad helping people inside the country escape mobilisation by offering shelter and safe routes out of Russia. One of my interviewees, a 22-year-old Russian now living abroad, had even established transnational networks across Europe, the Caucasus and Russia to help criminally prosecuted anti-war Russians flee the country before standing trial.

Indigenous diaspora networks have also informed local communities in regions of Russia where there are large ethnic minority populations such as Tuva, Tatarstan, Buriyatia and Chelyabinsk about the realities of the war. These include the use of underage soldiers and heavy recruitment from ethnic minority regions.

But they also include the extent of Russian and Ukrainian casualties, which Russia’s government has provided almost no official data on. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, an American thinktank, said in early 2026 that Russian forces had suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties since the start of the war.

These Indigenous networks have posted videos on platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and Facebook, as well as messages on Telegram and Signal, to counter official state narratives about the war. Moscow has justified its war in Ukraine by saying it is protecting Russian-speaking citizens there, standing up to western expansionism and returning Russia to its former great power glory.

Meanwhile, anti-LGBTQ+ laws introduced in December 2022 have prohibited any perceived propaganda about non-traditional relationships in Russia. This was followed by a Russian supreme court decision in 2023 to designate the “international LGBT movement” as an extremist organisation. This ruling has made any association or support for LGBTQ+ communities a criminal offence.

In response to this clampdown, exiled Russians have stood in solidarity with LGBTQ+ compatriots inside the country who have faced discrimination. My research has uncovered cases of people providing shelter and safe routes out of the country, creating digital safe spaces for Russian LGBTQ+ communities and lobbying for the protection of these communities in European countries.

Russian resistance

Russians do not fall into a single, neat, complicit mass. Since the start of the war, a diverse resistance movement has worked to counter the Kremlin’s authoritarian practices and propaganda. It reflects a broader variety of voices, values and stances than is currently possible in Russia, offering a crucial insight into the future political aspirations and hopes of ordinary Russians.

This movement will not overthrow the Russian government. But the ability to deliver regime change should not be the only measure of resistance. The movement is challenging the narrative that all Russians support the war, while also helping keep democratic political ideas alive for Russians inside the country for when change becomes possible.

As one of my respondents told me: “We have to stay in touch with supporters in Russia and plan for transition. There will be no time to strategise, so the plan has to happen now. We try to do as much as possible to be prepared.”

The resistance of exiled Russian dissidents matters not just for understanding Russia today. It also tells us how opposition survives in authoritarian regimes more broadly, highlighting the role that diasporas can play in sustaining democratic civil society transnationally.

Dissent does not disappear when it is crushed at home. It relocates, adapts and reconfigures across borders.