This page was generated from the Guardian UK RSS feed at Sun 19 Jan 2025 07:51:01 PM GMT. It updates every two hours.
Sun, 19 Jan 2025 19:42:23 GMT
Romi Gonen, Emily Damari and Doron Steinbrecher released by Hamas and have crossed border into Israel
Hamas releases first three hostages after ceasefire deal
Israeli tanks continued to shell areas in Gaza as the scheduled time of 8.30am (0630 GMT) for the ceasefire to take effect passed, Reuters reports.
Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said in a brief televised address on Sunday that the political echelon had directed the military to delay implementation and that it retained freedom to continue attacks in the Gaza Strip as long as the ceasefire had not taken effect.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 19:18:26 GMT
The deal has made it possible to hope that the nightmares of the Israeli hostages and the people of Gaza can begin to end
Israel-Gaza war – live updates
From a ridge on the western edge of Sderot, the ruins of Gaza loom. Less than a kilometre separates the Israeli town and the outskirts of the Palestinian territory, but after 471 days of war, the other side of the fence from Sderot’s shrubby green dunes resembles a dystopian parallel universe.
A few minutes before a long-awaited ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict was supposed to begin at 8.30am local time (0630 GMT) on Sunday, the morning quiet was shattered by an Israeli airstrike on Beit Hanoun, the Gaza town visible from the ridge.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 19:21:43 GMT
Emily Damari, Romi Gonen and Doron Steinbrecher return to Israel after 15 months in captivity
Israel-Gaza war – live updates
Three women held hostage by Hamas in tunnels beneath Gaza during 15 months of devastating conflict, including the joint British national Emily Damari, have been dramatically released and reunited with their mothers in the first act of a ceasefire deal aimed at ending the conflict.
Damari, 28, Romi Gonen, 24 and Doron Steinbrecher, 31, were handed over to the International Committee for the Red Cross in Gaza on Sunday afternoon, ending a protracted ordeal that began with their violent abduction by Hamas on 7 October 2023.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 15:58:21 GMT
Three-phase deal requires new negotiations to advance and is highly vulnerable amid little trust between the sides
Israel-Gaza war – live updates
The hours-long delay in implementing the Gaza ceasefire agreement is not a good omen for a deal that many fear could be doomed to failure as it moves through its challenging three phases.
While it is a truism that all negotiations to end conflicts rely on cautious trust building and are highly vulnerable to spoilers, the deal to end 15 months of fighting in Gaza that followed Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023 is more obviously fraught than most.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 19:41:54 GMT
President-elect says order would give company extra 90 days to find buyer and suggests that US take a 50% stake
TikTok said on Sunday that it was restoring services in the US after Donald Trump pledged earlier in the day to give the video app a reprieve on its US ban.
Trump wrote on Truth Social that after taking office on Monday he would sign an executive order allowing the Chinese-owned video app additional time to find a buyer before facing a total shutdown, and proposing that the US or an American firm take a 50% ownership stake.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 14:58:02 GMT
Exclusive: Restoration fund in England could be ‘siphoned off’ to be used for general government spending, not repairing rivers
Rachel Reeves’s Treasury is looking to keep millions of pounds levied on polluting water companies in fines that were meant to be earmarked for sewage cleanup, the Guardian has learned.
The £11m water restoration fund was announced before the election last year, with projects bidding for the cash to improve waterways and repair damage done by sewage pollution in areas where fines have been imposed.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 17:09:04 GMT
Cheryl Bennett has been paid substantial damages after fake clip taken when she was canvassing for Labour was viewed millions of times
A teacher subjected to a torrent of abuse after doctored footage falsely alleged she used a racist slur while canvassing for the Labour party has said she was forced into hiding and feared it would ruin her career.
Cheryl Bennett, a PE teacher from Wednesbury in the West Midlands, was helping her colleague, Qasim Mughal, hand out Labour leaflets during the local elections in May last year when she was recorded on a household security camera.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 18:44:49 GMT
Amir Hossein Maghsoudloo’s five-year jail term increased after prosecutor’s objection, according to reports
An Iranian court has sentenced the popular singer Amir Hossein Maghsoudloo, known as Tataloo, to death on appeal after he was convicted of blasphemy, according to local media reports.
“The supreme court accepted the prosecutor’s objection” to a previous five-year jail term on offences including blasphemy, the reformist newspaper Etemad reported on Sunday.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 13:09:24 GMT
Says reporter ‘mocked’ Serbia fans and insulted him
Novak Djokovic will boycott on-court interviews at the Australian Open and media appearances with Channel Nine until he receives an apology from the Australian television network after its reporter “made a mockery” of Serbian fans and “made insulting and offensive comments” towards him.
Djokovic had been due to speak with Jim Courier for the on-court interview after advancing into the quarter-finals, but after a brief off-mic conversation with Courier Djokovic instead took the mic and briefly addressed the crowd before signing autographs and leaving the court.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 18:12:30 GMT
Former Labour leader and former shadow chancellor due to be interviewed under caution following protest in London
Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell were due to be interviewed under caution by police after a pro-Palestine march in central London on Saturday.
Nine people have been charged with public order offences after protesters allegedly breached conditions as they marched through the city, allegedly breaking through a police line in the process.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 17:19:16 GMT
Twenty others injured in violence involving National Liberation Army rebels in north-east region
More than 80 people have been killed in fighting involving rebels from the leftwing National Liberation Army (ELN) in some of the worst violence to hit the country’s north-east region in recent years.
Twenty others have been injured, according to William Villamizar, governor of North Santander, where many of the killings occurred.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 16:00:04 GMT
Liverpool Black History Research Group accused America’s oldest private investment bank of sanitising its history
The links between the founders of the US’s most prestigious investment bank and enslavement have come under scrutiny after a campaign by historians in Liverpool.
Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH) is Wall Street’s oldest private investment bank, known for the role alumni have played in shaping US politics and the global economic order, with former partners including Prescott Bush, patriarch of the Bush political dynasty.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 15:12:14 GMT
Newspapers had reported that new president might veto UK pick, as ministers brace for a turbulent four years
Donald Trump will not block the appointment of Peter Mandelson as British ambassador to the US, according to a London-based ally of the president-elect, as ministers brace for a turbulent four years of British-American relations.
Greg Swenson, the head of the UK branch of Republicans Overseas, told the BBC on Sunday he did not believe Trump would prevent the Labour peer from taking up his post in Washington, despite reports to the contrary.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 15:35:35 GMT
Asset triples in price from $20 per token to more than $70, with at least $24bn in trading as of Sunday morning
Donald Trump has launched a cryptocurrency “meme coin” ahead of his inauguration for a second term as US president, called $Trump.
He announced the launch on Truth Social and X on Friday night. The asset has since soared in value, more than tripling in price from about $20 per token to more than $70, with at least $24bn in trading volume as of Sunday morning and more than $14bn in market capitalization.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 18:22:20 GMT
His pick for secretary of state may have given measured assessment of world affairs, but ‘crazy’ Trump will call the shots
Western allies of the US are braced for the return of Donald Trump, still hoping for the best, but largely unprepared for what may prove to be a chaotic and disorientating worst.
The run-up to his inauguration has sent out a catherine wheel of signals as Trump turned up the volume on tariffs against Canada, China and Mexico, vowed to buy – and if not, invade – Greenland and the Panama canal, and used his leverage to press Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a Gaza ceasefire that the Israeli PM had resisted since May.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 13:00:01 GMT
The annual gathering of the globally minded is looking forlorn in the light of Trump 2.0 and trade rows
This year’s week-long gabfest in the Alpine resort of Davos, which kicks off on Monday, will be held under the banner: “A Call for Collaboration in the Intelligent Age”.
Given that it will open as Donald Trump is inaugurated with a promise to jack up import tariffs, trash the Paris climate agreement and put an anti-vaxxer in charge of the US health system, hopes of either collaboration or intelligence being much on display in 2025 appear bleak.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 17:00:05 GMT
Overwhelmed by loss but buoyed by friends and strangers alike, Angelenos who lost their homes prepare to rebuild their lives
Until last Tuesday, Ryan and Endea Marrone lived with their two young sons in Altadena, California, in a picturesque two-bedroom home tucked into the base of the San Gabriel mountains. Behind the house, Ryan, a music producer, had created a mini recording studio, where he adorned the walls with pictures that his kids drew for him. Their wooded neighborhood was tight-knit: it was a community that wasn’t populated by the ultra-wealthy, where many homeowners had lived for decades and still exchanged holiday presents and housewarming gifts.
Now, a week later, the Marrones’ home – and their surrounding neighborhood – are all ash. The only thing that remains of their house is the chimney, singed black from flames and smoke. The front steps lead to a huge, leveled expanse of charred debris. Everything, from their sons’ Legos, to a school art project, to a photo from Ryan and Endea’s first date, was completely incinerated.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 14:00:01 GMT
Never heard of your lower trapezius? Don’t know your rotator cuff from your neck flexor? To alleviate common injuries, it’s time to get to know them
Killer abs, beefy biceps and perky pecs are classic signifiers of strong, well-exercised bodies, but not many people walk into a gym with a goal of building up their teres minor. This more low-key muscle, along with several others, is often underappreciated and weak, even among fitness fans. Neglecting such muscles as the teres minor can cause overuse of other muscles to compensate, or a lack of stability around a joint, which can lead to common painful injuries. And as anyone currently in musculo-skeletal pain knows all too well, it’s preferable to build up these forgotten muscles before you end up on the physiotherapist’s waiting list with an agonising shoulder, hip or lower back. Here are those elusive muscle groups to look out for.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 16:38:08 GMT
The controversial comedian makes a plea for empathy from the returning president in a strong week for the show
Saturday Night Live returns from holiday hiatus with MSNBC coverage of the impending presidential inauguration. Rachel Maddow (Sarah Sherman) presides over a panel of liberal pundits – including her doppelganger Chris Hayes (Andrew Dismukes) – essentially “the Avengers for your aunt”.
The panel promises not to let crazy a Trump outburst distract them from the real news like las time around, only to breathlessly report on the president-elect’s incoming comments and tweets, including a plan to trade Kentucky for Italy, sending Don Jr to purchase the Emerald City from Wicked, challenging China’s president to a fight in the UFC octagon, and a declaration of war on sharks.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 16:25:46 GMT
‘A home for the promiscuous music lover” is how the London contemporary music festival (LCMF) describes itself, but in fact it is a festival that has no permanent home of its own. Over the past 12 years it has led a peripatetic life around some unlikely London venues. The 2024 festival last month was based in Hackney, but one event was left until the new year, and that took place in the Wigmore Hall, bringing the slightly chaotic and distinctly anarchic character of the LCMF to one of the capital’s most respectable concert halls while halving the average age of the audience there in the process.
The concert ended with the world premiere of Éliane Radigue and Carol Robinson’s Occam Delta XXIII, a collaborative drone piece for baritone saxophone, trombone and percussion, inspired by the colours and wave patterns of the North sea. Here it was performed from memory and with immense concentration (there is no written score) by members of Ensemble Klang.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 13:00:02 GMT
Our writer explores the possibilities, with surprising results…
My friend walks into the village hall, scene of my son’s third birthday party, a mixture of panic and incredulity creeping across his face. “I didn’t realise we were dressing up,” he says, taking in my outfit. I feel myself blush. I’m wearing a mint-green tulle midi dress with sheer sleeves that balloon precociously and a tiered skirt that puffs out in such a way as to give me the appearance of either a Quality Street or a three-year-old at her own birthday party. It’s not, if I’m entirely honest, the most practical of outfits for serving chocolate cake to 18 sticky-handed toddlers but, as I blurt out to my friend, keen to dispel any confusion, the avant-garde look wasn’t actually my choice: it was AI’s.
I love quirky clothes. Different cuts, unusual fabrics, bold colours, exciting textures. My wardrobe is my identity, my refuge, my hobby, my happy place. Or, at least, it was. Recently – since having my second baby – I’ve struggled to get dressed. Paralysed by choice, I am beset by decision fatigue every time I approach my (admittedly groaning) closet. With a three-year-old and a six-month-old to wrangle into clobber, too, the overwhelm has joined forces with lack of time. This morning I was hurling clothes at my body while the youngest screamed for his nap. The steady spoliation of my personal style continues apace, now stained with breast milk and squashed banana.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 14:00:05 GMT
This is a very English wonder, fusing the arcane symbolism of northern England with then modern ideas from Renaissance Italy
Bolsover Castle, topped with turrets, sits at the crest of a hill with the best view in Derbyshire. You could be forgiven for thinking it must be the home of a medieval knight, if not a wizard. But really it’s a gothic, chivalric, romantic recreation of a medieval castle, constructed by a 17th-century aristocrat. He was so pleased with his “new castle” that he took it for his title, becoming Duke of Newcastle.
The castle seems pretty wondrous to me, not least because it determined my choice of career. As a teenager, I read about it in a book describing a treasure hunt undertaken in the 1960s by the architectural historian Mark Girouard. He was looking for traces of the lost houses designed by the Smythsons, a talented family of master masons and designers in Elizabethan England. Their work at Bolsover formed the climax of his quest, and through several lucky breaks I ended up working there myself in my first proper job as assistant inspector of ancient monuments for English Heritage.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 15:30:03 GMT
A Black couple have moved into a gated suburban enclave and the white folk around them are worried. Who are they, and could they be connected to the sudden appearance of a grubby shack nearby? Who lives in that shack, for that matter, and will this blight on their rarefied landscape grow, multiply and encroach?
The racialised fear of the invading outsider is under scrutiny here, and the rich Black couple, Sihle (Sifiso Mazibuko) and Bonolo (Mimî M Khayisa), are torn in their stance toward the shack and the threat it is seen to pose. Proprietorial white neighbours Chris (Scott Sparrow) and Lynette (Olivia Darnley) insist their panic is tied to community responsibility, while the jittery Andrew (Kai Luke Brummer) and Jess (Robyn Rainsford) overtly imply that any – Black? – squatters nearby will bring down the price of their property.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 15:00:04 GMT
From showers to unlocked rooms, types of spaces offered to mothers wanting to express have been a source of dismay
An employment judge has ruled that a healthcare worker suffered “harassment related to sex” after a suitable private space for her to express breast milk was not provided to her by an NHS health board.
Robyn Gibbins told an employment tribunal that she was not given a room that she could lock and felt let down by the trust in Cardiff. A trust spokesperson said the Cardiff and Vale university health board was committed to ensuring all colleagues are treated respectfully, with dignity and without discrimination or prejudice.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 12:07:33 GMT
Manchester United footballer known as The King of Old Trafford and one of Scotland’s most outstanding players
The footballer Denis Law, who has died aged 84, was a Manchester United legend and one of the finest attackers of his, or any other, era. With United in the 1960s he won a European Cup, two First Division titles and an FA Cup, while for his country, Scotland, he racked up 55 caps, scoring 30 goals.
Law had the great player’s ability to do something sudden and unexpected. His ball control was immaculate, his reading of the game exemplary, his passing precise, and his bicycle kicks revealed him as an acrobat. Also possessed of a fiery disposition, he was prepared to give and take hard knocks as the price of his fearless demeanour.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 19:37:15 GMT
Updates from the 6.45pm GMT kick-off at the Etihad
1 min: And we’re off at the Etihad Stadium. Manchester United are immediately on the front foot, letting a shot off within the first few seconds. That’s an early warning sign for the home side.
There’s a moment of silence for former Manchester City player Tony Book and Manchester United and Manchester man Denis Law. Both of whom died in the past week.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 18:42:45 GMT
Nobody left early. Nobody stopped singing. Nobody grizzled or grumbled or booed or barracked. Ipswich have spent long enough out of this walled garden not to take its pleasures for granted, even if those pleasures occasionally include getting spanked 6-0 by the quadruple champions. Equally, this is a result the rest of the Premier League will not thank them for.
Since Sammie Szmodics sensationally squeezed them ahead at the Etihad Stadium in August, Ipswich have now given up 10 unanswered goals to Manchester City in 173 minutes of football. And if that was partly stage fright, here they were more complicit: a collapse up there with their worst performances of the season, perhaps even playing an edgy City back into some kind of form.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 16:29:04 GMT
On a sombre afternoon graced by a piper’s rendition of Flower of Scotland and a poetic tribute to the great man, Manchester United went down dismally in their first game since Friday’s passing of Denis Law.
Ruben Amorim’s 15th match piloting United enters the record books as a seventh defeat. Afterwards his declaration was damning, branding his side as the poorest “maybe in the history of Manchester United”.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 16:33:55 GMT
The defiance came far too late. Whether it was the two goals that gave a glimmer of respectability to Tottenham’s latest defeat or Ange Postecoglou’s belief in his ability to arrest a decline, the sight and sound of their fightback was futile. Spurs were the gift that Everton and David Moyes needed.
The final scoreline flattered the losing side. Everton – a team that had scored 15 league goals all season before Spurs arrived – were three up at half-time and lamenting the fact it wasn’t six. Spurs were abject in every regard. They improved after the break, though only after Dominic Calvert-Lewin could have made it four and not enough to prey on Everton’s fragile confidence until Richarlison poked home in the 92nd minute. This was no spirited recovery from a team without a win in six Premier League games. This was unacceptable, even accounting for the lengthy injury list that Postecoglou highlighted afterwards.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 19:32:48 GMT
Saracens 24 Castres 32
Jamie George is a doubt for England’s Six Nations opener against Ireland in Dublin after limping out of Saracens’ Champions Cup defeat by Castres with a hamstring injury to cap a miserable week for the former national captain.
George, who was replaced by Maro Itoje as England captain last Tuesday, was introduced as a second-half replacement here but could do little to stop Saracens letting the match slip through their fingers, ensuring they face an away fixture at Toulon in the last 16.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 10:26:32 GMT
British No1 forced to retire in match against Alcaraz
Jack Draper called his hip injury at the Australian Open a “ticking time bomb” and insisted that he must prioritise his recovery to avoid a long-term injury after being forced to retire from his fourth-round match against Carlos Alcaraz.
After battling through three brilliant five-set wins to reach the second week for the first time in his career, Draper was forced to retire against Alcaraz on Sunday while trailing 7-5, 6-1. “I had tendinitis in my hip, which I had to get MRI looked at and stuff,” he said. “I have had a history of problems in that area. It hasn’t gone away. I’m still dealing with that. Obviously in the preseason, it [went] into my back and I couldn’t walk and it was really difficult. I have come here and I have been managing that.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 13:31:28 GMT
Captain confident tourists can succeed in T20 format
Heather Knight said that England’s strength in the Twenty20 format will give them the best chance of rescuing their Ashes chances with their series hopes hanging by a thread after three successive one‑day international defeats.
England need to win all three T20s, which begin on Monday in Sydney, to stand any chance of regaining the Ashes, but their captain is confident they can pull off the feat.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 15:11:59 GMT
Englishman wins event he used to skip school to watch
Tempestuous Tyrrell, the Dubai winner. Beware the angry golfer. Say what you like about Tyrrell Hatton’s frequent tantrums – and plenty do – but the Englishman’s ability can never be called into question. Hatton will surge back into the top 10 of the world on account of his Dubai Desert Classic victory, with a Ryder Cup return at Bethpage this year already looking a formality.
Many have disappeared from view after switching to LIV Golf. Hatton, by contrast, can still mix it with the best. This marks his second DP World Tour success since joining the rebel circuit in early 2024. Even the emergence of Rory McIlroy from the Sunday shadows was insufficient to knock Hatton off stride at the Emirates Club.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 12:28:17 GMT
Across the world, societies are reverting to oligarchies. How to resist? Fight for democracy with all we’ve got
Seldom in recent history has class war been waged so blatantly. Generally, billionaires and hectomillionaires employ concierges to attack the poor on their behalf. But now, freed from shame and embarrassment, they no longer hide their involvement. In the US, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, will lead the federal assault on the middle and working classes: seeking to slash public spending and the public protections defending people from predatory capital.
He shares responsibility for the Department of Government Efficiency with another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy. They have been recruiting further billionaires to oversee cuts across government. These plutocrats will not be paid. They will wage their class war pro bono, out of the goodness of their hearts.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 16:40:53 GMT
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 14:06:38 GMT
When you attend your local choir or yoga class, just stop and think – where are the disabled adults?
In what passes for the national conversation, our social care crisis tends to be reduced to a handful of factors so familiar they now feel like cliches. Just about all of them are centred on older people, the pressures on financially broken local councils from an ageing society and people having to sell their homes to pay for residential care. All these things, of course, are urgent and hugely significant – but they exclude a huge part of society for whom care is just as important. The reason why that happens is not hard to work out: it reflects a set of ingrained, almost Victorian prejudices – and, without wanting to sound too melodramatic, the last frontier of the struggle for human rights.
Just under 50% of care spending in England goes on support for disabled adults of working age, and more than two-thirds of that money is dedicated to people with learning disabilities. What this part of the social care picture has in common with help for older people is pretty clear: years of austerity, recruitment problems tied to low-paid jobs (made worse by Brexit), and the endless failures of successive governments to tackle a huge list of systemic problems. But the failings of care for disabled people have their own specifics: nonexistent local planning for the transition from childhood to life as an adult, no conception of successful grownup lives that does not involve paid work, and a national habit that is completely toxic: shutting away far too many disabled people, to the point where they simply cannot participate in society.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist. His memoir Maybe I’m Amazed, about his autistic son James and how music became their shared language, is published in March. For more information, visit maybeimamazed.substack.com
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 13:00:02 GMT
As US users mourn their ‘Chinese spy’ being taken away, my algorithm is busy serving me queer chickens and pastry content
As the US TikTok ban looms, users of the app there have been posting farewell messages for their “Chinese spy”, satirising the security concerns behind the ban as they offer up heartfelt appreciations of the ultra-targeted content on their For You pages.
There is a lot, they claim, to be grateful for: their “Chinese spies” have soothed and amused them, steered them towards splitting with unsuitable partners and toxic workplaces, helped them recover from divorce, changed their political perspectives and sometimes their entire lives. “My ‘Chinese spy’ was brave enough to tell me I’m an autistic lesbian and I should leave my husband. And I don’t know if anyone will care about me that much ever again,” reads a typical post, over dramatic footage of the grieving author. A commenter below claims the algorithm knew they were gay four years before they knew themselves; another says the app accurately diagnosed them with a skin condition that two dermatologists missed. Other people are just grateful for pizza recipes and hotel room hacks.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 12:16:25 GMT
A new paper has found that social capital ‘is the cake, not the icing’ of a strong, well functioning economy
Windfarms, train lines, science labs – when policymakers think about the ingredients for kickstarting the UK’s sagging economy, they tend to imagine tangible bits of infrastructure. But two of the UK’s most eminent public economists have banded together to urge Rachel Reeves to reconsider another dimension of the UK’s makeup: social capital.
Andy Haldane is the former chief economist at the Bank of England, now chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts. David Halpern is the man behind the so-called nudge unit, which brought behavioural economics into the policy mainstream.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 10:00:02 GMT
As Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos attempt to reshape our reality, my advice is to avoid their toxic platforms and wait it out
Wow! That escalated quickly. Last time I filed my supposedly funny column, only two weeks ago, Los Angeles wasn’t on fire; Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t abandoned the guardrails that restrict neo-fascist lies, or “free speech” as they are now known; the US hadn’t threatened to invade Canada and Greenland; Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson hadn’t declared the sniff-conked sunbed fraudster Tommy Robinson the new Nelson Mandela; and the next US president, though already an adjudicated sexual abuser, wasn’t actually a convicted felon who would have been in prison were he not in the White House. Jesus! I only popped out for some (oat) milk.
Twenty or so years ago, I had a friend whose flat was clearly infested by hundreds of rats that she never saw. We’d come in, put the Happy Shopper bags on the kitchen table, go to the loo, and return to see the sacks shredded and everything attractive to rodents disappeared into the cavity walls. Either that or there was a really hungry flatmate who was usually out whenever my friend was in. And wasn’t paying any rent. And left tiny oblong droppings under the units.
Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf this year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 11:00:07 GMT
The president was supposed to defeat Donald Trump and end the threat he posed to our democracy. Yet, here we are
“You had one job.”
As we bid farewell to the 46th president of the United States, I can’t get that Ocean’s 11-inspired internet meme out of my head.
Mehdi Hasan is the editor-in-chief and CEO of the media company Zeteo
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 08:00:02 GMT
Don’t rush to mourn the end of a liberal international order that too often put order before liberalism
The historian Steven Shapin opened his account of The Scientific Revolution with the line: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” It is tempting to say much the same about the “liberal international order” (LIO), that “there is no such thing as the liberal international order and there are hundreds of books about it”. And this column, too.
There was a Scientific Revolution. And there has been since the Second World War a global framework that has helped order international relations. But whether that framework can be described as “liberal” or embodies what champions of the LIO claim it does – “an open world connected by the free flow of people, goods, ideas and capital” that was, in the words of Antony Blinken, the outgoing US secretary of state, “America’s greatest contribution to peace and progress” – is questionable.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 17:30:06 GMT
A&E nurses should not be delivering care in hallways. The result is increased suffering
Testimony from nurses regarding the overwhelming pressure on A&E departments across the UK has rightly shocked the public and the health secretary, Wes Streeting. The alarming yet unavoidable conclusion of a new report from the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) is that “corridor care”, as treatment given in hallways or other unsuitable areas is known, has been normalised to a disturbing degree.
The accounts of 5,408 nurses came in response to a survey launched before Christmas to counter the lack of official data and national oversight of rising A&E pressures. It reveals the increased medical risks that follow from patients being treated away from wards, for example due to the lack of access in these spaces to supplies, including oxygen. Nurses also explained the psychological distress caused. Lack of bodily privacy, dignity and having to receive life-changing information in unsuitable conditions were among patient experiences described. Nurses reported trying to look after people in cupboards and even toilets as well as hallways. More than two-thirds said they delivered care in an unsuitable setting on a daily basis.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 17:30:06 GMT
The global south needs a fairer deal than this one, in which it funds the lifestyle and wealth of the global north
The World Bank calculated last month that the rich world earned more than $1.4tn (£1.15tn) in loan repayments from the developing world in 2023, with the sums likely to top $2tn a year by 2030. Rich countries have in effect become the world’s bankers, squeezing debtors in the global south. Poorer nations are forced to borrow in rich-world currencies to pay for their energy and food, while their exports consist mainly of low-value goods compared with their imports.
Colonial patterns of extraction plainly did not disappear with the withdrawal of troops, flags and bureaucrats. Whether a debt crisis in the developing world occurs depends on decisions beyond its control. The risk increases if US interest rates rise and if poor nations’ exports – often priced by commodity speculators or wealthy-world buyers – fail to generate enough dollar reserves to stabilise their exchange rates.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 17:29:01 GMT
Responding to an article by Polly Toynbee, Prof Sophie Watson highlights the social benefits of the workplace, while Pete Dorey takes issue with ‘labour market flexibility’. Plus letters from Ian Arnott, Maddy Gray, Dr Kirstine Oswald and David Mayle
I was surprised to read such a partisan argument on working from home by Polly Toynbee, whose articles I often appreciate (Labour has been sucked into the WFH culture war. It should know better, 14 January). Yes, there are certainly advantages – mitigating the environmental effects of commuter travel, flexibility of hours particularly for working parents, and so on.
But it is a far more complex picture. For many people – particularly for young or single people – the workplace is an important place of social connection. It also makes possible informal connections that can enhance creativity, mitigate tensions that can arise through email communication, make possible the creation of new networks, and countless other benefits.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 17:24:52 GMT
Under the fifth Industrial Revolution, human labour may no longer be able to bargain for a share of wealth and political power, writes Simon Steyne
• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 08:00:01 GMT
Francesca Osowska, the outgoing chief executive of NatureScot, says more needs to be done for Scotland to hit target of restoring 30% of natural environment by 2030
Scotland faces a significant challenge to meet its pledges on protecting nature without more funding and a shift in attitudes, a senior conservation figure has warned.
Francesca Osowska, the outgoing chief executive of the agency NatureScot, said greater urgency and action was needed to meet a promise to restore 30% of Scotland’s natural environment by 2030.
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Sat, 18 Jan 2025 16:00:34 GMT
Environmentalists are braced for new construction on the president’s signature border wall – and the damage that would wreak
During Donald Trump’s first presidential term, he began an ambitious and costly border militarization program, including the construction of over 450 miles of wall that severed wildlife corridors and fragmented ecosystems in some of the country’s most remote and biodiverse regions. With his second inauguration on Monday, environmentalists are bracing for any new phase of construction that could exacerbate the ecological toll of the border wall.
“It’s an absolute travesty and a disaster for border wildlife,” said Margaret Wilder, a human-environment geographer and political ecologist at the University of Arizona, regarding the environmental impact of the existing border wall and the prospect of renewed construction. She said the wall harmed efforts “after many decades of binational cooperation between the US and Mexico to protect this fragile and biodiverse region. I don’t think Americans realize what is at stake.”
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Sat, 18 Jan 2025 07:00:20 GMT
More sightings may be a positive sign for growing population but also indicative of effect of climate change
The slap of an enormous tail upon grey waters as a humpback whale leaps from the sea is becoming an increasingly possible – although still rare – natural thrill around Britain.
The 30-tonne, 15 metre-long migratory giants are being spotted in growing numbers and locations this winter from Kent to the Isles of Scilly.
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Fri, 17 Jan 2025 15:32:16 GMT
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 10:00:04 GMT
Exclusive: Social housing finance ‘crisis’ has already led 37% of local authorities to cut back on repairs and maintenance
More than a quarter of English councils expect to have to sell homes to balance their housing budgets while over a third have cut back on repairs and maintenance in what has been described as a crisis in social housing finance.
Based on responses from 76 stockholding councils, which manage their own social homes, the study found that nine in 10 expect to use emergency funds to try to balance the books in the next few years, and 71% say they are likely to delay or cancel ongoing housing projects.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 16:33:19 GMT
Analysts say use of ‘flexibilities’ to avoid penalties shows that zero-emissions mandate does not need to be relaxed
No carmaker in the UK will have to pay fines for missing electric car sales targets in 2024, according to analysis.
All but one carmaker sold enough cars, or will be able to use so-called flexibilities, to avoid steep fines under the zero-emissions vehicle (ZEV) mandate, according to estimates by T&E, a campaign group that focuses on transport and environment issues. One carmaker, Japan’s Suzuki, will have to buy credits from rivals to avoid fines.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 14:00:07 GMT
Station was crown jewel of Jeremy Hunt’s strategy to populate the UK with dozens of local TV stations
At midnight on Sunday, London Live, the capital’s dedicated TV channel and crown jewel of Jeremy Hunt’s strategy to populate the UK with dozens of local TV stations, will cease broadcasting after a little over a decade.
Back in 2010, the then Conservative culture secretary’s local TV plan was criticised as financially unviable by much of the media industry, but London was the exception.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 17:12:10 GMT
Conservative MP who dedicated her energies to the rights of the consumer
Sally Oppenheim-Barnes, who has died aged 96, was the former Conservative minister of state for consumer affairs and a politician with an intuitive understanding of what was of concern to the public in general and her constituents in particular. She had recognised the growing importance of the rights of the customer in the booming Britain of the 1960s and on arrival in the House of Commons in 1970 immediately set about making the subject her own.
She was a bright, brash, assertive woman who made full use of three years’ Rada training for the stage and who was famed for an eye-catching wardrobe, wrist-rattling jewellery and a large helmet of blond hair that would not have been out of place on the set of Dallas. She knew what she wanted and set out to get it, and having decided on a political career (early marriage and motherhood having put paid to acting), she took advice on how to proceed.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 13:00:03 GMT
Exclusive: Complaints said report was 'inaccurate’ and biased in favour of ousted Sheikh Hasina’s government
A group of MPs has withdrawn a controversial report into Bangladesh after complaints that it was biased in favour of the ousted government of Sheikh Hasina.
The all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on the Commonwealth issued a report on Bangladesh last November that criticised the current regime in Dhaka but was accused of significant inaccuracies.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 06:00:46 GMT
Treasury officials claim there was no panic in No 11 before the economic numbers finally turned in their favour
After a rollercoaster week which began with Keir Starmer being asked if he still had confidence in his chancellor of the exchequer and ended with the stock market smashing all previous records, the sense of relief surging through Downing Street and the Treasury on Friday afternoon bordered on elation.
The teams that surround the prime minister and his neighbour at No 11, Rachel Reeves, are made up mainly of untried novices in the hard business of running a government. They are only just learning how quickly moods, including their own, can go from one extreme to the other. “It is weird,” said one. “Truly bloody weird at times.”
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 12:00:10 GMT
The Duke of Sussex and the former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson are the last two claimants still suing
An extraordinary personal legal battle which has been years in preparation is to pit one of the most famous members of the British royal family against the world’s best-known media baron this week. On Tuesday Prince Harry’s lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper group, owners of the Sun and the now defunct News of the World, will officially begin at the High Court in London.
Fifth in line to the throne, King Charles’s younger son lives in self-imposed exile in California, but is due to appear in court in person once the case gets fully under way next month. The Duke of Sussex, 40, is suing News Group Newspapers (NGN), over claims that journalists on his popular titles worked unlawfully with private investigators, delving into his private life, between 1996 and 2011. He sees himself as the last man standing in a struggle to get the newspapers to take legal responsibility for the crimes he and others have alleged. Another surviving case brought by Lord Watson, the former Labour deputy leader, will be heard alongside the Prince’s.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 12:00:05 GMT
Extracts from Mitford’s papers published but many more archives concerning British fascists remain concealed
Myths and suspicions have swirled around Unity Mitford ever since she decided to move to Munich to pursue her infatuation with Adolf Hitler. Were they lovers? Did she have his baby? Why was MI5 forbidden from speaking to her when she returned to Britain?
Now, after extracts from the socialite’s diaries were published on Saturday , censorship campaigners and authors say the gatekeepers of Britain’s official archives should end their increasingly secretive approach to historical documents.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 11:00:05 GMT
Imaginations of science fiction community used to help policymakers prepare for potential crises in Britain
It’s a scenario that would make Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, shudder: a future where self-driving cars are the norm but a catastrophic electronic breakdown traps thousands of people inside them.
This dystopian vision of the future was one sketched out by science fiction writers at an event this week where experts were asked to prepare Britain for threats ranging from pandemics to cyber and nuclear attacks.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 12:00:10 GMT
CPS lead says she is not deterred from similar cases after Ryan Wellings, who was accused of causing partner’s suicide, was found not guilty of killing her
The not guilty verdict in the trial of a man accused of driving a young mother to suicide will not deter future manslaughter charges, with more such prosecutions already in the pipeline, a senior prosecutor has said.
Ryan Wellings, 30, was acquitted of the manslaughter of 23-year-old Kiena Dawes, who had left a note on her phone saying Wellings “killed me”. While he was jailed for six and a half years for assault and coercive and controlling behaviour, Dawes’s mother said: “Justice has not been done in the way we all hoped.”
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 13:42:24 GMT
Taskforce to act as ‘security camera of the Baltic’ after string of suspected sabotage incidents on critical infrastructure
A Nato flotilla likened to “the security camera of the Baltic” has assembled off the coast of Estonia as the military alliance seeks to protect European undersea cables and pipelines from sabotage.
In a move that ratchets up a struggle with Russia over the seabed that has remained largely covert until now, a Dutch frigate and naval research ship, as well as a German minesweeper have all arrived in Tallinn under a thick January sea fog.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 05:00:45 GMT
The machinations of Elon Musk and the incoming US president loom large in the minds of politicians and voters
A Donald Trump-shaped shadow is looming over the campaign for Germany’s snap elections next month, with unprecedented US interference on behalf of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland and a startling degree of attention from the incoming US administration scrambling the political landscape.
In a country that puts a premium on stability, Trump’s second term is forcing all parties to revamp fundamental stances, with responses ranging from opportunistic fealty to still wan-looking resistance. The stakes for Berlin could hardly be higher.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 17:40:02 GMT
Statue returns near former spot 22 years after removal in apparent attempt to rehabilitate Francisco Pizzaro’s legacy
An imposing bronze statue of Francisco Pizarro, Peru’s Spanish conqueror, has been returned to a spot near its former location in Lima’s main square, 22 years after it was removed, in an apparent attempt to rehabilitate the conquistador’s controversial legacy.
Weighing 7 tonnes and standing 5 metres tall, the Italian Renaissance-inspired sculpture of Pizarro astride a horse with his sword drawn was re-inaugurated on Saturday as part of celebrations marking the 490th anniversary of the Peruvian capital city’s foundation.
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Sat, 18 Jan 2025 20:28:29 GMT
Crews make progress but strong winds anticipated in Los Angles basin next week, carrying potential peril
Another round of fire-provoking Santa Ana winds are anticipated to sweep across the Los Angeles basin next week, carrying new peril as the area continues to assess the damage of the wildfires that devastated the Pacific Palisades and Altadena communities 10 days ago.
“We’re looking at more Santa Ana winds … and high fire danger. It could be a prolonged event next week,” said Alex Tardy, meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in San Diego. “The bottom line: we’re in uncharted territory this deep into the winter, or rainy season,” in having barely any rain, he added.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 09:00:03 GMT
The price of gold continues to rise, but who buys it, and where do they keep it? We head to Geneva’s secret vault and meet the dealers
There’s a secrecy to the specifics of our planned rendezvous, when I meet a sharp-suited Egon von Greyerz in Zurich airport’s arrivals hall. Hands shaken, he guides us out of a side entrance towards a car park in a quiet corner of the sprawling complex. Roughly 30,000 people work in and around the site; annually, tens of millions of passengers pass through here. Scarce few are aware of the existence, let alone the precise location, of our intended destination: a high-security, 350sqm vault somewhere deep beneath us. Inside it, vast quantities of gold, much of it belonging to von Greyerz, and a roster of his company’s exceedingly wealthy international clientele.
For more than 25 years, von Greyerz has been in this business: buying, selling and storing precious metals for the super-rich, all the while preaching his golden gospel. “We set certain minimum levels,” he says, “to invest through us: $400,000 to store gold in this Zurich vault, or our similar one in Singapore. We use another deep in the Swiss Alps: you’ll need to invest $5m to have anything there.”
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 13:08:54 GMT
Shipments fell nearly 10% last year with French firms blaming economic and political anxiety, and cheaper drinks
Changing habits and the gloomy state of the world are taking the fizz out of French champagne sales, the producers’ association has said, with shipments down nearly 10% last year.
Consumers in crucial markets such as the US and home country France cut down on the luxury beverage, as economic and political anxiety dampened the party mood.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 15:33:11 GMT
Activist who was convicted of mail fraud in the 1920s influenced Malcolm X and other leader leaders
President Joe Biden on Sunday posthumously pardoned Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who influenced Malcolm X and other civil rights leaders and was convicted of mail fraud in the 1920s. Also receiving pardons were a top Virginia lawmaker and advocates for immigrant rights, criminal justice reform and gun violence prevention.
Congressional leaders had pushed for Biden to pardon Garvey, with supporters arguing that Garvey’s conviction was politically motivated and an effort to silence the increasingly popular leader who spoke of racial pride. After Garvey was convicted, he was deported to Jamaica, where he was born. He died in 1940.
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Sat, 18 Jan 2025 23:14:32 GMT
Former Trump White House adviser says supplication akin to Japanese surrender to allied forces in September 1945
Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House chief strategist, has described the tech titans gathering at Monday’s inauguration as “supplicants” to Donald Trump making “an official surrender”, akin to the Japanese surrender to allied forces on the deck of the USS Missouri in September 1945.
Bannon, who served as architect of Trump’s 2016 presidential win but later fell out with the president-elect after he criticized his intellect and members of his family, told ABC News in an interview airing Sunday that Trump “broke the oligarchs” who had previously been aligned against him.
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Sat, 18 Jan 2025 23:22:25 GMT
Notes among 60 items associated with the singer auctioned off in Nashville
Bob Dylan’s typewritten drafts for his 1965 song Mr Tambourine Man sold for more than £400,000 at auction on Saturday.
The two yellow sheets of paper contain three progressive drafts of the lyrics with annotations on the third draft of the song.
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Sat, 18 Jan 2025 20:13:48 GMT
Unnamed gunman killed Ali Razini and Mohammad Moghisseh before shooting himself, Mezan reports
Two judges have been killed in a shooting on Saturday at the supreme court building in Tehran, Iranian state media have reported.
“This morning, a gunman infiltrated the supreme court in a planned act of assassination of two brave and experienced judges. The two judges were martyred in the act,” the judiciary’s Mizan Online website reported.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 08:00:01 GMT
From weighted blankets and de-puffing masks to sunrise alarm clocks, our self-care buys are sure to brighten your mood
A new year brings fresh starts, but after the indulgent and languid festive season, we’re usually not feeling so hot. Without the twinkly lights and social gatherings to counteract the short days and Baltic temperatures, it’s also natural to feel a little down.
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Sat, 18 Jan 2025 10:00:22 GMT
The host of our Comfort Eating podcast tastes and rates thick chocolate biscuits from UK supermarkets
• Who makes the best crunchy peanut butter?
I am a complete sucker for a chocolate biscuit, one of the most exciting things about a 1980s childhood. Before structured playdates, Roblox and MrBeast videos, our thrills came in a biscuit tin full of Penguins, Clubs and Breakaways. The more chocolatey the chocolate, the better. Bliss.
In recent years, the rise of the posh, extra-chocolatey biscuit has delighted me. An ideal fancy biscuit should feel heavy in the hand, need a good bite to break through the chocolatey shell, it should withstand at least three good dunks in tea, and it should come in a packet with at least one breathlessly outlandish claim along the lines of “most chocolatey yet” or “thickest coating ever”. You should feel instantly joyful when you’re eating the first one. After the third, ideally, you should feel a bit sick.
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Fri, 17 Jan 2025 18:00:03 GMT
Our expert picks the top wetsuits to keep you warm whatever the weather, so you can ride the waves year-round
• The fitness gear that made you fitter
Gone are the days when surfers needed a woolly jumper under their wetsuit – or to wear two wetsuits – to stay warm. Wetsuit tech has come a long way in recent years and now offer far greater protection against the cold. This shift has meant more of us are surfing all year round, even in the chilliest of British winters.
But such innovation has come at a cost, as explained in The Big Sea, a documentary made by two surfers from the north-east of England. The film shows the effects of producing neoprene, the synthetic rubber used to make most surf wetsuits, on the predominantly black and low-income residents of Reserve in Louisiana, where cancer rates are alarmingly high.
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Thu, 16 Jan 2025 15:00:16 GMT
Is Egyptian cotton the holy grail? Should you be buying bamboo? Will silk save your hair? We asked the experts
• The best bedding brands interior designers use at home, from luxury linen to cool cotton
There is a lot of information online about what makes good bedding. Dig into it, however, and you’ll see that most advice comes from the bedding brands themselves, making it tricky to sort facts from marketing hype.
To cut through the noise, we asked independent experts to help demystify some of the most common bedding questions, from decoding thread count to unpacking bamboo’s sustainability credentials. We heard from technical textile consultant Beverley Carter and textile expert and fashion consultant Sarah Denise Cordery. We also consulted sleep gurus James Wilson, AKA the Sleep Geek, and Max Kirsten, known as the Sleep Coach, to find out what has worked for their clients. For a beauty professional’s take on the benefits of silk bedding, we turned to skincare specialist Dr Kemi Fabusiwa.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 16:30:04 GMT
The American author’s anthology of his many physical encounters is a spiritual quest as much as a sensual one
Don’t expect to read Edmund White’s The Loves of My Life with one hand. True, it is subtitled A Sex Memoir, and it hotly reminisces about a few dozen of the 3,000 partners White, who is 85 and still counting, has so far totted up. It does contain some glances at the more esoteric specialities of gay sex, including a scene in which White kneels in an abandoned Manhattan warehouse to imbibe six cans’ worth of warmly recycled beer “from the tap of my date’s microbrewery”. There is also a fortunately terse reference to what in medical shorthand is called a BM. But this coital anthology turns out to be about love and its dreamy spirituality, despite the risque and often risky rutting it describes.
Above all, White’s preoccupation is language, since for him sex initially ignites in the head and is consummated on the page, with bodily pleasure or pain as a merely intermediary stage. The itch of lust, in most of these encounters, soon turns into swooning poetic ardour. “Older queens”, as White says, tutor him in the technical skills that sex requires; to learn about the accompanying emotions, he returns to the Renaissance troubadours, who invented the idea of love in the songs and sonnets they addressed to an inaccessible mistress, “a remote, rather ball-shrinking stand-in for the Virgin Mary”.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 12:00:05 GMT
Revered American musician Will Oldham on recording his new album with some of Nashville’s finest, helping Johnny Cash sing I See a Darkness, and his dismay at US politics
One afternoon in Los Angeles in 2000, only seven years after he began releasing records, Will Oldham met two people who would “stay in my mind for the rest of my life”. The first was a gruff sound engineer, David “Ferg” Ferguson, who had been mentored by “Cowboy” Jack Clement, the renowned Sun Records producer who worked with Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. The second, whom Oldham first saw in Rick Rubin’s studio hallway – “I’ll be unpacking this for the rest of my life” – was Johnny Cash.
“His physical size and his legacy towered over me at first and then steadily, warmly diminished,” Oldham remembers. Oldham had just turned 30; Cash was 68, ailing, but working hard on his third album of later-life covers, American Recordings III: Solitary Man. It included the title track from Oldham’s 1999 breakthrough album, I See a Darkness, his first under the moniker of Bonnie “Prince” Billy (one he’s been embarrassed about in the past, but loves now, “because the spirit of creation of that entity was that it had to be all about fun”).
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 15:00:04 GMT
The third book from the twice Pulitzer prize-nominated American author is a complex portrait of parallel lives on a par with the great Russian novels
Adam Haslett is one of those incandescently smart and elegant authors that the US seems to produce almost accidentally and to excess, names who haven’t quite risen to international literary stardom, but perhaps deserve to: think Jonathan Dee, Garth Risk Hallberg, Lauren Groff or Claire Messud. Haslett’s brilliant debut novel, Union Atlantic, looked into the bleak moral heart of the 2007-8 financial crisis. His second, Imagine Me Gone, was a meditation on fatherhood and depression. Now, with Mothers and Sons, he has written a book that circles around an absence: the alienation of a son – Peter, a lawyer in his 40s – from his mother, Ann, who runs an “intentional community”, a women’s retreat in the hills of Vermont.
This is a novel about practice. Chapter by chapter, we move from Peter’s world in the first person to Ann’s in the third, building up a picture of their lives, the rhythms of their days. Peter is an asylum lawyer in New York, his time spent with the desperate and destitute. His personal life is almost nonexistent – he is lonely, hopeless, trapped by his own past. After a brief and hesitant affair with a schoolfriend, tragedy strikes. He blames his mother for the guilt that has haunted him ever since. Now he buries himself in his cases. “I work – that’s all I do. I get people to tell me their stories, I try to prove what they tell me, then I do it again.” It’s a thankless task, with the state increasingly hostile and his co-workers as harassed and frustrated as he is. “Travelling into one life after another, intimacy without intimacy.” Then a new client arrives, a gay young man, an Albanian. The shame and horror of his story opens up a window into Peter’s own dark past.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 15:04:28 GMT
The curtain rises on a magic show. A woman is sawn in half, and a man is suspended in mid-air when his chair disappears. Left alone on stage by the magician, their conversation reveals the pair are married to one another – and have been for the past 157 years.
Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s Love Life was a “concept” musical avant la lettre: a time-hopping pageant of vignettes in which, at intervals throughout their eternal marriage, Sam and Susan Cooper renegotiate their relationship in the face of each era’s modern concerns – framed by musical commentary from an assortment of vaudeville acts. “Good economics … awfully bad for love” intones a barbershop quartet before Sam insists on scheduling a potential third child around his business trips. Susan’s foray into first-wave feminism, meanwhile, is heralded by a trio of Shirley Temple-like Tots singing about their mothers’ neuroses.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 15:45:42 GMT
Should Kate Cheka be saving the world – or performing comedy? She grew up with a messiah complex, thanks to her feminist, socialist mum and an absentee dad serving in the Tanzanian government. This is a woman reared to make the world a better place, so what’s she doing telling jokes on stage – and winning 2023’s prestigious Funny Women award, no less?
Well, there was once a time – if you can believe it, Gen Z’ers – when we thought art might save the world. Maybe Cheka has come among us to be political comedy’s salvation? Her debut touring show isn’t the finished article, but it showcases a comic unafraid to combine the personal and the polemical, in occasionally provocative ways.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 10:00:04 GMT
Hosts Helen Zaltzman and Olly Mann tell us why their comeback coincides with Trump’s second act – and how they now feel like the punks of the speech-audio world
Gentle podcast-listeners, cast your minds back. To a time before The Rest Is… anything, back when Radio 4 ruled speech audio in an era when any podcast discussion included phrases such as “but what is a podcast?” and “it’s like a radio show on the internet”. Return, in fact, to 2 January 2007, when the first episode of Answer Me This! With Helen & Olly came out.
Answer Me This! – a podcast that had 26-year-old Helen Zaltzman, a book reviewer and comedy club promoter, and 25-year-old Olly Mann, a researcher on BBC Two’s The Culture Show, answering offbeat questions from listeners – might have launched at a time when few people knew what a podcast actually was, but it was a success from the off. There was something about the combination of Zaltzman and Mann’s personalities – Mann, a giggler with a vast knowledge of Disney and musicals; Zaltzman, a more alternative and acerbic wit – that appealed to anyone searching for a funny substitute to radio’s phone-ins or scripted comedy. Like a next-generation The Adam and Joe Show, Answer Me This! was nerdy and warm, celebrating what were then still seen as cult interests, such as Star Wars, with an equal co-host dynamic far from the serious male and giggling female cliche of the time.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 17:43:03 GMT
‘The world has become conservative,’ says designer Miuccia Prada as Milan men’s show tries to resist the algorithm
The day before the US presidential inauguration, it was impossible for Miuccia Prada to avoid the question. When designing her collection, just how much was fashion’s most radical intellectual thinking about Donald Trump?
Speaking backstage at her show on the opening weekend of men’s fashion week in Milan, the 75-year-old designer, who grew up a communist and believed, like many of her generation, that change would come not through capitalism but through revolution, could only laugh. “Is it an answer to what is happening? Yes,” she said. “The world has become conservative.” As for the clothes, it wasn’t so much an autumn/winter 2025 collection as a riposte to “the first season of artificial intelligence”.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 11:00:04 GMT
Across the UK, men are gathering in small groups to share how they really feel. It’s personal, non- judgmental – and potentially life-changing
I am kneeling quite awkwardly on a cushion in a yoga studio in London’s Shoreditch on an unseasonably chilly Wednesday and wondering when exactly will be the optimum time to rearrange my legs. I have an ice-cold mango and passion fruit kombucha beside me and an agonising case of pins and needles. The solution to pins and needles, I learned a few years ago, is to directly confront the agony: pull your legs out from underneath you, bend your toes up as high as they can reach, and yes, it will hurt far more initially, but then the pain subsides. I’d like to do this very much, but sitting opposite me is a man – sitting all around me are men – and it is his turn to talk. He has eight minutes to tell us – all men, all strangers – what has been bothering him lately, or this week, or today, or for his entire lifetime, and right now he is on a roll.
Here in Men’s Circle, if you go over your allotted eight minutes, the facilitator of the group is meant to give a polite little “wrap it up now, mate” cough, so everyone can have a fair turn, but nobody wants to do that with this particular man: after a slow, shy start he’s on a tear and words and feelings and secrets I’m not even sure he knew he was going to say are tumbling out, and it feels rude (and possibly destructive) to do anything to stop him. So I’m just going to keep my legs tucked up until he runs out of breath.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 15:00:03 GMT
Step inside the vibrant home of Cissi Åhlén, known on Instagram for her knack for ‘dopamine decor’
In a quiet corner of Bandhagen, a small neighbourhood on the outskirts of Stockholm, Cissi Åhlén lives with her partner and their nine-year-old son in a home bursting with vibrant colour. The house, a 1957 villa, is a testament to the unspoken connection that can exist between a space and the people who inhabit it.
“We had seen the house for sale online, but weren’t that impressed,” Åhlén admits. “It wasn’t until one morning, on a walk to the park, that we passed by it and we saw the potential. That’s when it clicked.”
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 07:00:47 GMT
Brooke Shields, sexualised child star at just 11, is no stranger to tabloid controversy. Now 59, perhaps now she can tell us how she ended up so… normal?
Brooke Shields was at a party, drifting off. The host, a small man with bare feet, was giving her a tour of his wine cellar and she was losing interest, if she’s being honest – which she is now as a matter of principle, after a lifetime of smiling politely and pretending everything’s fine. Her mind was wandering. They say wine gets better with age, she was thinking, “but isn’t there a moment when it turns to jam? And I said to him, ‘I’m 58 and I’m wondering if…’ I didn’t even get the rest of the sentence out before he said, ‘Oh, I wish you hadn’t told me that.’”
That’s curious, she replied. “I asked him, ‘Did my age make him older?’ I was interested in the psychology of it, that kneejerk reaction.” It was partly, she thinks, her fame – people imprint on a child star, and when they grow up they take it personally. “It felt so indicative of what we do to women, too. And we do the same thing to ourselves – we get caught up, chasing something that’s gone.” It wasn’t the first time somebody had taken offence at the fact she was no longer 15 and she knew it would not be the last, but it was this conversation that inspired her new book about fame, women and the complexity of ageing. She’s called it, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed To Get Old.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 10:00:03 GMT
Observer analysis finds unregulated products being promoted as contraception despite concerns about their accuracy
Apps promising to help women “take control” of their sex lives by predicting the days when they are fertile are putting users at risk of unplanned pregnancy by making misleading claims.
Millions of women in the UK – including 69% of 18-24-year-olds – have used smartphone apps that track their periods. Many also tell them their “fertile window”: the days when they are most and least likely to get pregnant.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 06:00:47 GMT
You’re chasing something that only you can give yourself: a feeling of security and self-worth
The question I’ve been with my partner for more than 25 years and while he’s perfect in pretty much every way, and I love him very much, I have a history – in our relationship – of casual sex and one-night stands. There have been periods of many years when I was monogamous, 10 years in particular during which our two children were born. Although he’s an attentive and selfless lover, he seldom interests me in that way and I still get an overwhelming kick from a one-night stand. I know I’ve damaged him with my behaviour, and that he feels inadequate, but I long for him to agree to marry me. I’ve proposed more than once, but he’s declined on account of my infidelity. Other than this issue, he makes life perfect for me and our family. I wish he knew how much he means to me, but I worry one day he’s just going to leave. How can I fix this?
Philippa’s answer What strikes me most is the contradiction between your deep love and appreciation for your partner and your simultaneous pursuit of sexual experiences outside the relationship. You describe him as “perfect in pretty much every way”, yet you also acknowledge your history of infidelity, which has understandably caused him pain and led to his hesitation about marriage. I want to explore this contradiction, because I sense it holds the key to understanding your inner struggle.
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Tue, 07 Jan 2025 12:01:20 GMT
Is there anything you’d like to know about the fertility crisis? The Guardian’s new video podcast, It’s complicated, will explore some of your questions
It’s increasingly harder to overlook the global fertility crisis. Fertility rates in more economically advantaged countries are in serious decline. This raises concerns for the future of many countries, with some governments beginning campaigns. The issue is even becoming more politicised, as more nations are offering financial incentives for its citizens to start family planning.
We hope to explain the issues that can arise due to this fertility crisis with our new video podcast on The Guardian’s new YouTube channel, It’s Complicated. This particular topic is a complex one, and some of the queries that might arise from it can be influenced by a range of issues, including economic uncertainty, cultural shifts, government policies, environmental concerns, forever chemicals, and hormonal changes. These are a few questions we have but we would like to hear from you.
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Wed, 15 Jan 2025 08:26:25 GMT
We’d like to hear from young people starting out in the creative sector about their experiences of internships
We’d like to find out more about internships in the UK creative sector.
A 2018 report by the Sutton Trust revealed that 86% of interns in the UK’s creative industry were unpaid and we’d like to hear about the opportunities for people trying to enter the sector now.
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Wed, 15 Jan 2025 10:58:53 GMT
As he tours his latest album, I Have Notes, the soft rock star and writer of numerous 60s hits for others will take on your questions
As a songwriter and co-frontman in 10cc, Graham Gouldman etched his name in British pop history, scoring three UK No 1 singles and another eight Top 10 hits as the group defined 70s soft rock. But he had a considerable songwriting catalogue before and afterwards and, ahead of him touring it in March, he will be answering your questions.
Having grown up in Manchester and rotated through a series of local bands, Gouldman was a songwriter for hire in the mid-1960s, penning major hits for the Yardbirds, Herman’s Hermits and the Hollies which weren’t just UK chart successes, but also popular in the US as the British Invasion took hold.
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Mon, 13 Jan 2025 12:18:26 GMT
From mindfulness retreats to monastery stays, tell us about a getaway where you were able to switch off completely – the best tip wins £200 towards a Coolstays break
In an age of constant distraction, silence and stillness are increasingly rare commodities, so it’s hardly surprising that more of us are turning to retreats as a way to get some much-needed breathing space. Whether it’s a meditation retreat, a yoga holiday, a digital detox or a stay in a monastery, we’d love to hear about the places in the UK, Europe or further afield where you go to rest, reset and recharge.
If you have a relevant photo, do send it in – but it’s your words that will be judged for the competition.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 07:00:49 GMT
Beijing has prepared for increased tariffs but its actions will not be enough to offset falling demand from the US
When Donald Trump enters the White House for the second time on 20 January, the view from the Oval Office will look very different to the one he encountered in 2017. A pandemic, the war in Ukraine and a trade war with China have caused ripples through the global economy that are still being felt midway through the decade.
Beijing will be watching closely. Trump has promised to impose tariffs of up to 60% on Chinese imports, partly in retaliation for the flow of fentanyl from China to the US.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 08:00:04 GMT
Collection of seven shorts due out in 2025 tells story of conflict from perspective of animals
The occupying Russian soldiers paid little attention to the elderly woman shuffling through the farmland surrounding the villages outside Kyiv, taking her goat to pasture. But she was focused closely on them. After locating their positions, she headed back home with the goat, and later called her grandson, a soldier in the Ukrainian army, to give the coordinates.
The story is one of seven episodes, based on real events from the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion but lightly fictionalised, that make up a feature film about the war in Ukraine, due out later this year. All seven of the shorts have one thing in common: they tell the story of the conflict from the perspective of animals.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 13:00:03 GMT
Community baselessly demonized by Republicans dread what Trump’s return means for TPS and immigrants
When then president Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security attempted to end temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitians in 2017, Gilbert Fortil had just arrived in Springfield, Ohio.
Fortil, from Gonaïves in northern Haiti, has spent the years since then working to make a new life in Springfield. He has opened a radio station to serve the growing Haitian community, bought and renovated abandoned properties, and been joined by thousands of other Haitians who have helped revive a once-struggling town in western Ohio.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 12:00:06 GMT
Money, Lies, and God exposes a Christian nationalist movement funded by the super-rich seeking to secure their wealth at the expense of others
There is a “real and very, very present” threat to the US from a shadowy collection of rightwing leaders, a new book on the movement behind Donald Trump warns, with the aim being “an end to pluralistic democracy”.
Katherine Stewart, a journalist who specializes in the religious right, spent years researching the money and influence that has aided and encouraged tens of millions of Americans in their worship at the throne of Trump.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 11:00:08 GMT
Volunteers who leave water in the desert describe rising fears of vigilantes and climate peril
It was a blustery day in the Sonoran desert as a group of humanitarian aid volunteers hiked through a vast dusty canyon to leave gallons of bottled water and canned beans in locations where exhausted migrants could find them.
Empty plastic bottles, rusty cans and footprints heading north were among the signs of human activity strewn between the towering saguaro and senita cacti, in an isolated section of the Organ Pipe Cactus national monument – about 20 miles (32km) north of the US-Mexico border.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 10:30:03 GMT
The outgoing US president rallied support for Ukraine but his stance on Gaza delighted no one
When asked about his foreign policy doctrine in 2014, Barack Obama described it as an attempt to “avoid errors”.
“You hit singles, you hit doubles; every once in a while we may be able to hit a home run,” he said.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 11:00:05 GMT
New research into the single-celled organism is providing clues about what the early planet looked like – and raising the prospect that we may not be alone in the universe
For scientists, our earliest ancestor wasn’t Adam or Eve but Luca. Luca didn’t look anything like us – it was a single-celled bacterium-like organism. A recent study by a team of scientists based in the UK has delivered rather shocking news about this illustrious forebear. Despite having lived almost as far back as seems possible, Luca was surprisingly similar to modern bacteria – and what’s more, it apparently lived in a thriving community of other organisms that have left no trace on Earth today.
Luca – short for the last universal common ancestor, the progenitor of all known life on Earth – seems to have been born 4.2bn years ago. Back then our planet was no Eden but something of a hell on Earth: a seething mass of volcanoes pummelled by giant meteorites, and having recovered from a cosmic collision that blasted the world apart and created the moon from some of the fragments. There is good reason why the geological aeon before 4bn years ago is called the Hadean, after the Greek god of the underworld Hades.
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Sat, 18 Jan 2025 19:33:22 GMT
The two presidential camps worked together to bring about the talks that led to the pause in the conflict
It was a subtle, but significant flex of power by Donald Trump’s new envoy to the Middle East. Ten days before tomorrow’s presidential inauguration, he called Israel to announce he was coming to Tel Aviv to meet Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump had demanded a deal to release Israel’s hostages before he took his oath of office, and the man charged with making that happen was Steve Witkoff – a New York property developer confident that a long relationship with Trump could offset a lack of diplomatic experience.
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Sat, 18 Jan 2025 16:00:30 GMT
Although greater awareness of prejudice would suggest we are less bigoted than ever, empirical evidence indicates not
Q&A with Keon West, author of The Science of Racism
Do we still have a problem with racism? If you ask the average person even the most basic question about it – “Does racism still exist?” – half the population will say it doesn’t. According to a recent Guardian poll of British adults, more than half thought ethnic minorities faced less or the same discrimination as White people in most areas of life, such as the news, TV or films, the workplace, access to finance and jobs, and access to university or good schooling. Results in the US are similar. A 2021 Gallup poll revealed that slightly more than half of the White American population believe “racism against Black [people is] widespread in the US”. In the meantime, according to the same poll, slightly less than half of the White American population believe “racism against Whites [is] widespread in the US”. An earlier study (by Michael Norton and Samuel Sommers) showed that a growing number of White Americans believed “reverse racism”, or racism against White people, was the more prevalent form of racial bias.
This kind of division in our society is a massive problem to which those in positions of authority offer no clear answers. Politicians frequently pretend to be experts on a host of issues such as racism – and vaccines, and the climate crisis, and evolution – but they’re not. If they don’t have degrees or past careers in social psychology or climate science or evolutionary biology, then they are no more experts in the topic than you are and are as sharply divided as the rest of us.
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Thu, 16 Jan 2025 14:00:16 GMT
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg’s desperation to be cool as they suck up to Donald Trump is so cringe it makes my skin crawl
I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this but everything seems to be going down the tubes quite fast. And not fun tubes, like at a waterpark. The “ending in shit” kind. The issues are complicated, the reasons diverse, but there are a few culprits who have been making themselves extremely visible.
Alongside those holding political office, tech gragillionnaires (I had to invent a new number) like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg obviously wield huge global influence with their computers and numbers and whatnot. There has been a lot written about them and there will be more, as they continue to shape the world and win favour with Donald Trump. Big, scary, probably ruinous things lie ahead. But I’m here to discuss the smaller part. The insult to injury, the sprinkling of salt in the wound.
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Sat, 18 Jan 2025 05:00:16 GMT
Move fast, break things, sprint to kiss Trump’s ring: Marina Hyde on the tech bro inauguration derby. ‘I get hate from both sides – vegans and carnivores’: James Collier on UPFs, emotional eating and why he created Huel. And “My partner blames a ‘lack of attraction’ for not wanting sex”: Philippa Perry advises one reader
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Fri, 17 Jan 2025 16:19:51 GMT
The Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent Bethan McKernan explains the pact reached between Israel and Hamas to halt fighting
On Friday afternoon, after more than a year of continuous war between Israel and Hamas, the Israeli security cabinet ratified a ceasefire deal to stop the war in Gaza.
The Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent, Bethan McKernan, talks about what it will mean, and how it came about. She discusses, too, the role of Donald Trump – who will once again become US president on Monday – in pushing Israel to the negotiating table over the past weeks.
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Fri, 17 Jan 2025 05:00:24 GMT
Canonisation has long been a way for the Catholic church to shape its image. The Vatican is preparing to anoint its first millennial saint, but how does it decide who is worthy? By Linda Kinstler
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Fri, 17 Jan 2025 05:00:23 GMT
After 15 months of war, a ceasefire deal in Gaza has been reached. In his farewell address to the nation, Joe Biden tried to convince the US public that it was just one of many successes he’d had in the White House. But is that how his time in office will be remembered? Jonathan Freedland speaks to the author Franklin Foer about Biden’s legacy
Archive: CBS, PBS Newshour, CBS Chicago, CNC, WPLG Local 10, BBC
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Fri, 17 Jan 2025 03:00:17 GMT
The Guardian’s health editor Andrew Gregory explores the promises and challenges of revolutionary technology in the fight against cancer
Decades ago, the treatment options for cancer patients could be summed up in three words: cut, burn, poison.
As the Guardian’s health editor, Andrew Gregory, explains, it was a shorthand for the limited choices open to oncologists and their patients – surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy – at a time when a cancer diagnosis was often understood to be a death sentence.
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Thu, 16 Jan 2025 08:59:18 GMT
Why are your favourite products getting smaller but costing the same? From toilet paper rolls to snacks, shrinkflation is the sneaky tactic is affecting many things we buy.
In this video, Neelam Tailor looks into how companies hide shrinkflation and what you can do about it.
After a holiday season where festive treats like Cadbury’s Christmas selection boxes shrank while prices stayed the same, shrinkflation continues to impact shoppers in 2025. Start the year informed and learn how to spot these subtle changes to protect your budget.
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Tue, 14 Jan 2025 09:46:55 GMT
Darren Parkinson is one of about 2 million people living with long Covid in England and Scotland. The illness is having a detrimental impact on his life, stopping him from being the kind of active and involved parent he wants to be to his two children. The Guardian has spent a year with Darren and his family to document his journey as he tries to recover from long Covid and come to terms with his new reality
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Wed, 15 Jan 2025 19:33:11 GMT
Qatar's prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, has announced a ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel, which it is hoped will bring an end to the fighting in Gaza
Gaza ceasefire deal agreed by Hamas and Israel, Qatari PM says
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Tue, 07 Jan 2025 10:47:17 GMT
After 30 years of relentless growth and capitalism, a new trend has emerged in China. The search for a simpler, calmer life is leading some Chinese people to seek a life abroad. The trend is so popular that it’s gained its own internet buzzword: the 'run philosophy'.
Chiang mai, in northern Thailand is the country’s second biggest city. It’s a tourist hotspot popular with backpackers but has recently become an unlikely second home for thousands of Chinese people seeking alternative lifestyles.
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Mon, 23 Dec 2024 08:48:20 GMT
A new Syria is emerging from the shadow of the brutal Assad regime. The Guardian’s Bethan McKernan and Ayman Abu Ramouz meet people celebrating their hard-won freedom, but also those grappling with a traumatic past. The pair travel to the notorious Sednaya prison, where they meet a former prisoner who was liberated by his family just days before
Resistance was not a choice’: how Syria’s unlikely rebel alliance took Aleppo
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Thu, 19 Dec 2024 09:46:44 GMT
Pharmaceutical corporations claim high prices are the cost of innovation, but the reality is far more complicated — and troubling. In 2030, the patents of some of the world’s best-selling drugs will expire, an event called the 'patent cliff', and companies are doubling down on tactics such as 'evergreening' patents and pay-for-delay deals to keep prices high and competition out.
In this video, Neelam Tailor uncovers the shocking strategies big pharma use to game the system, explaining how these moves protect profits but hurt patients
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Thu, 19 Dec 2024 13:29:53 GMT
Using video analysis and satellite imagery, the Guardian has chronicled the destruction of the Jabaliya refugee camp through three offensives since October 2023. Repeated airstrikes and ground operations by Israel, which claims it is used as a Hamas base, have razed the camp to the ground and driven out most of the civilians. Observers have said the systematic destruction of entire neighbourhoods in northern Gaza is part a policy known as the 'generals’ plan', aimed at driving out civilians by declaring certain areas closed military zones
Read more about the destruction of Jabaliya refugee camp
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Tue, 20 Sep 2022 11:06:20 GMT
Style, with substance: what’s really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solved, direct to your inbox every Thursday
Style, with substance: what’s really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solved, delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday
Explore all our newsletters: whether you love film, football, fashion or food, we’ve got something for you
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Fri, 02 Sep 2016 09:27:20 GMT
Be the first to see our latest thought-provoking films, bringing you bold and original storytelling from around the world
Discover the stories behind our latest short films, learn more about our international film-makers, and join us for exclusive documentary events. We’ll also share a selection of our favourite films, from our archives and from further afield, for you to enjoy. Sign up below.
Can’t wait for the next newsletter? Start exploring our archive now.
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Wed, 12 Oct 2022 14:21:58 GMT
From biking adventures to city breaks, get inspiration for your next break – whether in the UK or further afield – with twice-weekly emails from the Guardian’s travel editors. You’ll also receive handpicked offers from Guardian Holidays.
From biking adventures to city breaks, get inspiration for your next break – whether in the UK or further afield – with twice-weekly emails from the Guardian’s travel editors.
You’ll also receive handpicked offers from Guardian Holidays.
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Tue, 09 Jul 2019 08:19:21 GMT
A weekly email from Yotam Ottolenghi, Meera Sodha, Felicity Cloake and Rachel Roddy, featuring the latest recipes and seasonal eating ideas
Each week we’ll send you an exclusive newsletter from our star food writers. We’ll also send you the latest recipes from Yotam Ottolenghi, Nigel Slater, Meera Sodha and all our star cooks, stand-out food features and seasonal eating inspiration, plus restaurant reviews from Grace Dent and Jay Rayner.
Sign up below to start receiving the best of our culinary journalism in one mouth-watering weekly email.
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Sun, 19 Jan 2025 13:17:33 GMT
The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world
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Sat, 18 Jan 2025 17:00:32 GMT
From Rubens to Juno Calypso to Yayoi Kusama , artists have long been drawn to mirrors’ reflective surfaces. More than 150 artworks have been collected in a new book, drawing together sculptures, paintings, installations, photographs and more. “Historically, a mirror in a painting was a lens into another world or visual space,” says the book’s author, artist Michael Petry. “They also allowed artists to show the viewer more than one view point at a time, suggesting the complexity of our world and our relationship to it.” Self-portraits, and increasingly selfies, are a recurring theme. “It is clear that as humans, we are amazingly interested in our own image. It could be mere vanity but also I think mirrors show us the passage of time etched on our faces.”
MirrorMirror: The Reflective Surface in Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson, £45) is out now
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Sat, 18 Jan 2025 23:50:38 GMT
Bright colours and bold stripes, fluffy textures and soft fringes…These lovely scarves are worth the tassel
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Sat, 18 Jan 2025 10:00:22 GMT
The German photographer hopes the image he shot in a public bathroom in Malaysia will inspire others to explore their own ideas of beauty
In 2018, when Jan Schölzel was on the Malaysian archipelago of Langkawi, some days were so humid, he found it difficult to leave his accommodation. “It was the hottest, most humid place I’ve ever been,” says Schölzel, who currently lives in Hanover, Germany. “This must have been one of the cooler days, because we went to visit a waterfall.”
After fish head soup for lunch – a local delicacy – he spent some time in the water before heading to use a nearby bathroom. This image, taken on an iPhone SE, was shot facing the entrance.
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Fri, 17 Jan 2025 18:53:07 GMT
Hunger and hope in Gaza, fires in California and the Australian Open in Melbourne: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists
• Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing
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Fri, 17 Jan 2025 20:30:05 GMT
From humble beginnings in Aberdeen, Denis Law rose to become one of Manchester United’s ‘holy trinity’ and won the Ballon d’Or
Denis Law: United and Scotland legend dies at 84
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