CHELTENHAM, England (AP) — The deaths of four horses at the Cheltenham Festival — including one after the prestigious Gold Cup — underline the need for the racing industry to provide better equine care, a leading animal welfare charity said Saturday.
Hansard suffered a fatal injury when pulled up in a race on Tuesday, HMS Seahorse and Saint Le Fort died following falls on Wednesday and Friday, respectively, while 12-year-old Envoi Allen collapsed and died after competing in the grueling Gold Cup on Friday.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said the four deaths took the number of horses to have lost their lives in competitive racing in Britain this year to 24.
“The scale of fatalities reiterate the urgency that lessons must be learned, including what caused the loss of life, decision-making during the race, and any future means of prevention,” the RSPCA said.
“We continue to engage,” it added, “with the industry to advocate for further improvements, including the introduction of greater safety measures, and improvements for equine welfare both on and off the track. Given the wealth and expertise within the sector, we remain hopeful that there remains significant scope to do more to meaningfully improve equine welfare.”
The RSPCA said horses deserve "to have every possible step taken to improve their safety and welfare” given the money events like the Cheltenham Festival and the upcoming Grand National generate.
“We will keep engaging with the racing industry to encourage continual welfare improvements,” the charity said, “and explore further measures to protect horses from injury and death, and promote good welfare throughout their lives.”
James Given, the British Horseracing Authority’s director of equine regulation safety and welfare, described the latest deaths as devastating and said all would be subject to in-depth examination as part of the regulator’s standard procedure.
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Apolon De Charnie, ridden by Paul Townsend, goes past the winning post to win the JCB Triumph Hurdle on the 2026 Cheltenham Festival in Cheltenham, England, Friday, March 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Dave Shopland)
BERLIN (AP) — Jürgen Habermas, whose work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the world’s most influential philosophers and a key intellectual figure in his native Germany, has died. He was 96.
Habermas’ publisher, Suhrkamp, said he died on Saturday in Starnberg, near Munich.
Habermas frequently weighed in on political matters over several decades. His extensive writing crossed the boundaries of academic and philosophical disciplines, providing a vision of modern society and social interaction. His best-known works included the two-volume “Theory of Communicative Action.”
Habermas, who was 15 at the time of Nazi Germany’s defeat, later recalled the dawn of a new era in 1945 and his coming to terms with the reality of Nazi crimes as something without which he wouldn’t have found his way into philosophy and social theory. He recalled that “you saw suddenly that it was a politically criminal system in which you had lived.”
He had an ambivalent relationship with the left-wing student movement of the late 1960s in Germany and beyond, engaging with it but also warning at the time against the danger of what he called “left-wing fascism” — a reaction to a firebrand speech by a student leader that he later said was “slightly out of place.” He would later recognize the movement as having driven a “fundamental liberalization” of German society.
In the 1980s, Habermas was a prominent figure in the so-called “Historians’ Dispute,” in which Berlin historian Ernst Nolte and others called for a new perspective on the Third Reich and German identity. They tended to compare what happened under Adolf Hitler to atrocities carried out by other governments, such as the deaths of millions in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Habermas and other opponents contended that the conservative historians were trying to lessen the magnitude of Nazi crimes through such comparisons.
Habermas supported the rise to power of center-left Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in 1998. He was critical of the “technocratic” approach and perceived lack of political vision of Schröder’s conservative successor, Angela Merkel, complaining in 2016 of the paralyzing effects on public opinion of “the foam blanket of Merkel’s policy of sending people to sleep.”
He was particularly critical of the “limited interest” shown by German politicians, business leaders and media in “shaping a politically effective Europe.” In 2017, he praised the newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron’s laying out of plans for European reform, saying that “the way he speaks about Europe makes a difference.”
Habermas was born on June 18, 1929, in Duesseldorf and grew up in nearby Gummersbach, where his father headed the local chamber of commerce. He became a member of the Deutsches Jungvolk, a section of the Hitler Youth for younger boys, at 10.
He was born with a cleft palate that required repeated operations as a child, an experience that helped inform his later thinking about language.
Habermas said he had experienced the importance of spoken language as “a layer of commonality without which we as individuals cannot exist” and recalled struggling to make himself understood. He also spoke of the “superiority of the written word” and said that “the written form conceals the flaws of the oral.”
FILE - In this Nov. 7, 2006 photo German philosopher Juergen Habermas is seen in Koenigswinter near Bonn, Germany. (AP Photo/Hermann J. Knippertz, File)
