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Five-time Tour de France champion Tadej Pogacar will not race again this season after suffering injuries including a neck fracture at the Vuelta a Espana.

The injury, which he suffered last month on the race’s eighth stage, means the Slovenian will miss out on the chance to defend his title at the upcoming World Championships.

He crashed out of the Vuelta from a dominant position as race leader and required surgery on a broken collarbone, suffered a concussion, a “stable” fracture in his neck and multiple abrasions.

The 27-year-old, who was aiming to complete the set of Grand Tour titles, adding the Vuelta to his single Giro d’Italia victory and Tour de France wins, was due to defend his rainbow jersey at the World Championships in Montreal later this month.

“Of course, this isn’t the way I wanted my season to finish,” Pogacar said in a statement released by his team, UAE Team Emirates-XRG.

“Right now, the most important thing is to recover properly and give my body the time it needs.

“It has been a season with many special moments and I’m proud of what we achieved together. Now I’ll focus on getting healthy, supporting the guys from home, and coming back next year ready for what’s ahead.”

In October, Pogacar was due to defend his title at the European Championships in Ljubljana, in his home country, and in the Il Lombardia – the final one-day Monument race of the season.

The team said that the decision not to race again until 2027 would allow him to return to full health “without placing a timeline on his return to competition”.

UAE Team Emirates-XRG also announced their leading rider had agreed to extend his contract by two years, until 2032.

Islamabad, Pakistan – Staff nurse Razia Noreen was at a medicine cupboard on the nursery ward of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), Islamabad’s largest public-sector hospital. She was two doors from the babies in her care, preparing the morning’s injections.

As she shut the cupboard door, she saw through the nursery’s glass panel a light too sharp and too red to be anything ordinary. She did not wait to understand what it was.

It was 6:38am on Wednesday, August 26. Elsewhere in the ward, her colleague, Sister Nasreen, was already running out, shouting for help.

At 56 seconds past 6:38am, according to security camera timestamps later logged by a government inquiry committee, Noreen rushed into the nursery.

Eight seconds later, she emerged carrying a baby. She tried to go back in. She could not. By 6:40am, the room was gone, swallowed by smoke so thick that the security cameras could no longer see through it.

Noreen was recalling this eight days later, in a plain office beside the hostel warden’s room at PIMS, dressed in a pale pink shalwar kameez, her dupatta loose over one shoulder.

“There was a proper blast,” she told Al Jazeera. “Everything turned to smoke.”

Fifteen newborns had been in that nursery. Fourteen died. The baby Noreen carried out was the only one who lived.

On Thursday, Noreen was given an award by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif for her courage. But for the nurse, the trauma of that Wednesday morning was still raw.

Barely two hours after meeting the prime minister, she sat down and talked, at length, about what happened inside.

‘Save the babies’

Noreen had been on duty since 8pm the previous night, working a routine dawn medication round with Sister Nasreen, with less than two hours left before the end of her shift.

When she saw the light through the nursery glass, she says she did not stop to work out what it was.

“I just told my sister nurse, save the babies,” she told Al Jazeera. “I went in. I didn’t think about what would happen next.”

Noreen said the fire was coming out of the side of the air-conditioning unit facing her.

“The AC was right in front of me, and the fire was coming out of its side,” she said. “We don’t know what was happening behind it. That’s just what I saw.”

The government’s interim inquiry, submitted on August 28, states that the precise cause of the fire “is not yet conclusively established”, with evidence pointing variously to the air conditioner, an incubator or an electrical short circuit.

Inside the nursery, Noreen reached the nearest baby. There was no time to choose between 15. She carried the infant out and handed her to Dr Abdul Rehman, a doctor who had been inserting a feeding tube in the next room and emerged into the corridor moments after her. Then she turned back.

“I thought I’d get five, six, seven, eight more of them out,” she said. “But the fire was moving faster than I was.”

A second doctor, Dr Rimsha, who had been doing rounds nearby and saw the same light Noreen had, followed her in.

The two of them, and later Sister Nasreen, tried to crawl back through the smoke below the worst of the heat. A sudden loss of power plunged the room into darkness. They could not get through.

Noreen’s phone, left behind on the medication table when she ran in, sat inside the burned ward overnight. Hospital guards found it and returned it to her the next afternoon. Its case is still scorched and cracked.

Noreen, Dr Rimsha and Sister Nasreen instead moved to where a separate rescue team was lowering babies from an adjoining gynaecology ward. They stood there catching newborns and running them to the neonatal intensive care unit until the smoke became too thick to remain.

The government’s inquiry later found that the available evidence “does not support generalised allegations that front-line medical and nursing staff simply abandoned the newborns”.

Ask Noreen what a nurse is to a newborn separated from its mother, and she has one answer: its first mother.

“A mother who gives birth endures a pain no one else can stand in for,” she said. “But once a baby is in our hands, no one else is watching over it the way we are, checking their oxygen, their feeding, whether they’re breathing right, every two hours, whatever else is happening around us. That is why we are their first mother.”

‘I am very happy with the children’

Noreen, 38, has spent 21 years in government nursing, the last 17 of them at PIMS. She trained in Karachi right after school, at the age of 17, before a transfer brought her to PIMS in 2009. She has never married.

“Thank God, I am very happy with the children,” she said, when asked about it directly.

Born in Punjab’s city of Sahiwal, she was one of seven children. Her father, Victor John, was a pastor; he died when she was in the eighth grade. Two of her sisters have died; a third, also a nurse, lives in Lahore.

Her mother, 83, a retired government school teacher who is hard of hearing, lives in Lahore with one of Noreen’s brothers.

Noreen herself has lived in the PIMS staff hostel, across from the ward where she works, for most of the past two decades.

With her own phone trapped inside the burning ward, Noreen could not call her family herself.

Noreen’s niece happened to be staying with her that week. It was the niece the warden found, and who got word to the family in Lahore: Noreen was safe.

‘It’s always the two of us’

On the morning of the fire, Noreen and Sister Nasreen were the only two nurses on duty in a nursery holding 15 babies, backed by two doctors, one of them two rooms away. She says it was not an unusual night.

“Sometimes there are 20 babies, sometimes 25,” she said. “It’s always the two of us.”

Doctors on her ward work 36-hour shifts, she said, arriving at 8am and going off duty at 2pm the following day.

Handover between nursing shifts, checking each baby’s medication, feeding and vital signs, takes roughly 45 minutes given the numbers involved. The cost of drugs can also run to tens of thousands of Pakistani rupees per injection, all provided by PIMS to its patients.

“Sometimes we get a break, sometimes we don’t,” she said. “When the workload is heavy, even the water we carry with us goes back home untouched.”

No fire drill had been run in the nursery before August 26, not even after an earlier fire at a nearby PIMS hostel in July.

Asked what is required after an incident like this, she does not hesitate.

“We should all have proper drills. If a fire starts, everyone needs to already know what to do.”

She lists what should follow: extinguishers within reach, cross-ventilation to clear smoke, and a rehearsed evacuation route for babies who cannot walk or call out for help.

‘Golden letters in history’

Until the fire, almost nobody outside her own ward knew her name, Noreen says.

“I have almost no presence in the main hospital,” she said. “Nobody there knows who I am. I work in the nursery, in my own department. I never imagined that saving one baby would take me this far.”

She travelled on Thursday to meet the prime minister in a car the government sent.

During the meeting, Sharif called her “the nation’s daughter” and said her act would be remembered “in golden letters” in Pakistan’s history.

He confirmed Noreen will formally receive the country’s Sitara-i-Khidmat (Star of Service) award at a ceremony on March 23, and handed her a cheque for 10 million Pakistani rupees ($36,000).

She used the meeting to say what she had already told her own colleagues privately.

“My fellow nurses work with just as much dedication,” she said. “This was a very heartbreaking incident.”

‘I haven’t slept since that day’

Eight days on, Noreen is unwell. She has had a fever of 102 to 103 degrees Fahrenheit (38.9C to 39.4C) on and off, and a cough she says came from smoke she breathed in from the fire that morning — a morning she will never forget. She takes an antibiotic and sleeping tablets at night. Neither has worked as it should.

“I haven’t slept, not since that day,” she said. “I take the tablets, I drink the cough syrup, but sleep doesn’t come. I close my eyes, and I open them again.”

Asked whether the same dawn shift keeps replaying in her mind, she did not need the question finished.

“The whole incident. The same babies. The mothers’ screams, and the babies’ screams, how they must have screamed. Those are the things that don’t let me sleep.”

She was signed off on medical rest only the day before this interview. Colleagues have been steadying her since.

“I would just start crying, sitting there,” she said. “They supported me like I was a child.”

But the nights are still hers alone.

“It comes back to the same thing,” she said. “When I’m in the hostel, when I’m alone, it all comes back.”

‘That, I regret’

The baby Noreen carried out — she hasn’t been named yet, according to the nurse — remains in the neonatal intensive care unit a week on.

Born preterm at just over a kilogramme (2 pounds, 3 ounces), the baby was already unwell before the fire. She remains critical.

Noreen met the baby’s parents for the first time the day before the meeting with the prime minister.

“She [the baby’s mother Asifa] hugged me and thanked me, and cried, and I cried with her,” Noreen said, “because for the rest of the children, my heart is still exactly where it was.”

She has told the mother the same thing she tells herself.

“I said, look, your child survived such a huge storm, she will survive what comes next, too. You pray, and I will pray.”

Asked what she would tell other nurses, Noreen urged them to work with honesty and without conditions.

“When you work somewhere with honesty, the reward comes eventually,” she said. “It came to me after 21 years. Work with the same loyalty. That is our real strength.”

Then, unprompted, she returned to the 14 babies who died.

“I do regret it,” she said. “I could not save the rest of the children. That, I regret.”

A NEW theme park deal is letting you buy a 2027 annual pass which includes visiting for the rest of 2026 for free.

Merlin – who operates 20 top UK attractions including all the major theme parks – has launched a mega September deal on their annual passes.

Anyone buying a Gold or Platinum Merlin Annual Pass for 2027 can visit all of the attractions for free for the rest of the year.

This means three extra months free on top of the 12 months of 2027.

Merlin 2027 Annual Passes with FREE 2026 access

It also includes some of the top events including Fright Nights at Thorpe Park and Alton Towers‘ Scarefest, along with Christmas at Legoland.

The Gold Merlin Annual Pass includes 485 days of attraction access as well as additional extras worth £250.

PLAY ON

Alton Towers to offer guests FREE second day tickets to the theme park this summer

CHEAP THRILLS

Short break deals at UK theme parks where you can stay on-site from £34.13pp

This includes free parking and 20 per cent off food, drink and shops.

There are some exclusions, such as Alton Tower Fireworks, and from November 6-8.

Opt for the Platinum Merlin Annual Pass and it includes all of the above AND even more perks worth more than £500.

This includes a free Fastrack per visit, as well as four Bring a Friend tickets per year and a free Coke Freestyle cup that comes with two refills.

Not only that, but there are no exclusion dates (apart from some paid-for events).

The Gold Merlin Annual Pass currently costs £239 (or £19.99 a month), which works out to just 50p a visit.

Merlin 2027 Annual Passes with FREE 2026 access

The Platinum Merlin Annual Pass costs £299 (or £24.99 per month), which works out to

The deal is on offer until the end of the Month (September 30).

Here are the full list of attractions included in the passes:

• Alton Towers
• Thorpe Park
• Chessington World of Adventures Resort
• Legoland Windsor Resort
• Cadbury World
• The London Eye
• Warwick Castle
• Madame Tussauds
• The Dungeons (London, Edinburgh, York)
• Shrek’s Adenture! London
• Legoland Discovery Centres (Birmingham, Manchester)
• Sea Life (Manchester, Blackpool, Brighton, Weymouth, Great Yarmouth, Hunstanton, Scarborough, Loch Lomond)

Dolly Parton has been laid to rest in a private ceremony.

The immediate family of the country western star who died last week gathered at Woodlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum in Nashville on Friday morning.

Parton was buried alongside her husband of almost 60 years, Carl Dean, who died in March 2025. The bronze crypt plate mounted at the mausoleum had the star’s name engraved on it before she died, alongside her husband’s name and a depiction of her Tennessee home.

In a social media post, Amelia Young from Nashville’s NewsChannel 5 shared photos of Parton’s burial site and said that the cemetery had set out velvet ropes and guest books so fans could visit Parton and pay their respects.

“Dolly’s fans and friends from around the world are encouraged to pay tribute to Dolly on social media tagging @dollyparton,” according to the cemetery’s obituary. In lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations to be made to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.

Woodlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum is Nashville’s largest cemetery, where many other country western stars have been interred including George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Eddy Arnold, Marty Robbins and Porter Wagoner — Parton’s former mentor, for whom she wrote “I Will Always Love You” as a professional farewell when she went solo in 1973.

Parton’s great-niece Lainey Parton shared a tribute following the funeral, writing on Instagram, “This is a really hard post for me to make. I wanted to wait until after my granny was laid to rest yesterday before I tried to put any of this into words.

“From the time I was little, my granny always had a way of making me feel like I was enough. She never made my dreams feel too big or made me feel like I couldn’t do something. She believed in me before I even knew how to believe in myself.

“Most people can think of at least one bad memory with everyone in their family. I honestly can’t think of one with her.

“Because she couldn’t have kids of her own, she always made us feel like we were hers. She loved us that way, and I’ll forever be grateful for that.

“One memory I’ll always hold onto is when she asked me to sing with her on her @smokymountaindna album. I was a freshman in high school and SO nervous. But she had a way of making me feel like nothing bad could happen. She made me feel safe, confident, and like I belonged right there beside her. …

“She didn’t just tell me to chase my dreams, she helped me get there.”

Parton died peacefully last week, her nephew Bryan Seaver announced in a news release shared with The Times. Seaver also announced her death in a video shared to the singer’s Instagram page. Parton was 80.

In a statement, a representative for the country music icon said: “After bravely facing a brief battle with cancer, Dolly departed her Earthly life today at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center surrounded by loved ones.”

The type of cancer was not specified.

Receiver Allen Robinson II spent one season with the Rams. It didn’t go the way L.A. fans had hoped when the former Pro Bowl receiver signed a three-year, $46.5 million deal with the then-reigning Super Bowl champions.

Still, Robinson had some positive takeaways from that portion of his career to share during a video he posted to Instagram on Monday announcing his retirement from the NFL after 11 seasons.

“I learned a lot about football from Coach [Sean] McVay and Cooper Kupp and the guys I was around to be able to then use for the rest of my career,” Robinson said.

The video, titled “No More Sundays,” was posted on Robinson’s 33rd birthday. It shows Robinson watching film from every stop during his football career — from his days as “a kid in Detroit trying to be like Randy Moss” to his final NFL season with his hometown Lions in 2024. It and ends with him turning off the projector and literally hanging up his cleats.

Robinson played three seasons at Penn State and led the Big Ten Conference in receptions and receiving yards in 2012 and 2013 and receiving touchdowns in 2012. The 6-foot-3 player was selected by the Jacksonville Jaguars in the second round of the 2014 draft and made the Pro Bowl in his second season.

During the first game of his fourth year with Jacksonville, Robinson tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee and missed the rest of the season. He signed with the Chicago Bears before the 2018 season and had four productive years there, which led to his contract with the Rams.

Robinson was expected to be an upgrade over veteran receiver Robert Woods, who was subsequently traded to the Tennessee Titans soon after the Robinson deal, but wasn’t able to achieve his previous levels of success. He wasn’t able to establish a rapport with veteran quarterback Matthew Stafford, who did not throw passes during offseason workouts or part of training camp because of a right elbow condition.

A foot injury caused Robinson to miss the final seven games of the season. He finished the year with 33 catches for 339 yards and three touchdowns. During the offseason, the Rams traded Robinson and a seventh-round draft pick (No. 251 overall) to the Pittsburgh Steelers for that team’s seventh-round pick (No. 234 overall). The Rams were on the hook for about $10 million of Robinson’s salary.

“I did get injured, so I didn’t have a full season in L.A.,” Robinson said. “But I think I learned a lot about myself, being able to just kind of persevere, go through adversity and being able to mentally grow up. I can say that my career wouldn’t be what it was if I didn’t have a lot of those learning moments.”

Robinson finishes his career with 565 receptions for 7,058 yards and 43 touchdowns. He and former NFL cornerback Prince Amukamara started the “Press Release” football podcast last year. In addition, Robinson has hosted several youth football programs over the years.

“Football gave me more than I ever could’ve imagined,” Robinson wrote on Instagram. “It challenged me, shaped me, humbled me, and rewarded me in ways I’ll carry for the rest of my life. I came, I saw, I conquered and I leave with nothing but gratitude.

“The memories, the relationships, the victories, the lessons, they’ll stay with me forever! Thank you for every moment, every cheer, every lesson, and every opportunity.”