NEWS RSS Streams

PM’s contortions over the Manchester City verdicts have landed him with an early test of what he wants to stand for. Realpolitik, or real values?

It’s coming for you. It’s coming for you. Oh Andy Burnham, the hugely problematic relationship between principle and realpolitik in post-cash Britain. It’s coming for you. We are going all in on football chat these days, aren’t we? Football populism, football blokeyness, the stylings of the football everyman. That was certainly the horse the prime minister rode in on a few months ago. And right now it’s a horse that’s still very much snorting around the cabinet room, and threatening to run right over the top of him.

Also: fresh plot twists. Previous governments have been thrown into early-term crisis by things such as war, sex scandals and economic meltdown. But never, and historians will have time to pore over this in the coming decades, by the urgent need to overpay for Jack Grealish. “The ramifications of this are MASSIVE,” the man on the radio said on Thursday morning. And he was right. There are ramifications here. And the ramifications, well, Clive, they’re massive. In this case the man on the radio was discussing the United Kingdom’s multilayered geopolitical meltdown through the prism of whether this means Spurs are less or more likely to get relegated. And to be fair there are very few global events that can’t be better understood through a Spurs-in-crisis lens.

Continue reading...

Sunday’s poll pits the leftist incumbent Lula against the son of a former far-right president convicted of staging a coup

• ‘No one disrespects Our Lady’: fears for Brazil’s patron saint grip country ahead of election

Shortly after his controversial speech to the United Nations general assembly in September, Donald Trump gathered a dozen like-minded Latin American leaders and boasted that rightwing candidates had won all seven presidential elections held in the region since he began his second term.

“Everybody I’ve endorsed has won,” the US president said in New York to most of the leaders of the Shield of the Americas, an anti-drug cartel coalition of 15 countries governed by the right or far right.

Continue reading...

The party says its proposals would stop prisoners being released early and cut crime.

US singer Zach Bryan wore a ‘Free Palestine’ shirt while performing at Gillette Stadium, owned by Robert Kraft.

Families who lived through one of the Troubles’ worst flashpoints fear its legacy is reaching another generation.

Who is really in charge? The people or the markets? 

In the first episode of Radical Thinking, a new series from the Guardian, senior economics commentator Aditya Chakrabortty speaks to the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. 

In an extended interview, we hear what it was like during the Eurocrisis when he went head to head with those who wanted to stop his economic changes. And, what does he make of Andy Burnham's plans to 'rewire' the UK economy? 

Radical Thinking will be published every Saturday in the Politics Weekly feed

Continue reading...

Asteroids named after scientists to recognise work  Yahoo News Canada

Asteroids named after scientists to recognise work  Yahoo News Canada

Probe ⁠under way to ​determine 'all the ⁠circumstances', including motive, UAE's prosecutor general says.

Hammersmith and Fulham says it faces ‘biggest financial challenge in living memory’ as government cuts bite

A flagship Labour authority has warned it may have to impose a 150% council tax rise on residents to maintain current services following central government cuts under a new funding settlement.

Hammersmith and Fulham council’s cabinet has concluded in a report due to be published on Monday that such a rise would cost Band D households an additional £29.11 a week in 2027/28.

Continue reading...

Citizen environmentalists create online platform that flags spills in real time and highlights repeatedly polluted spots

The easy thing for the people who live on the banks of the River Dart in Devon might have been to grumble and groan about the sewage spills that blight their beloved waterway.

Instead, citizen environmentalists in the area have created a unique online platform that flags up spills in real time, highlights spots that are repeatedly polluted, and sets out where improvement work is planned – and where it isn’t.

Continue reading...

Five multiple-choice questions – set by children – to test your knowledge, and a chance to submit your own junior brainteasers for future quizzes

• ​Submit a question

Molly Oldfield hosts Everything Under the Sun, a podcast answering children’s questions. Do check out her books, Everything Under the Sun and Everything Under the Sun: Quiz Book, as well as her new title, Everything Under the Sun: All Around the World.

Continue reading...

A love of food and a taste for bloodthirsty action collide as a very angry chef gets caught up in a brutal turf war between warring restaurants in LA

Has foodie culture gone too far? It’s a truism that to get to a lasagne recipe now, you have to wade through an essay about someone’s childhood in Tuscany. We talk about food sentimentally, consume TV about it fetishistically, slavering over slow-motion shots of chopped pepper falling on to stainless steel. We enjoy judging the food of others. We talk about the provenance of our ingredients with a kind of purity fixation. It strikes me that there’s a totalitarianism to it.

So it was bracing to watch Get Jiro (from Sunday 4 October, HBO Max), an adult animation that pairs a love of food with a taste for ultraviolence. It’s the story of a sushi chef, caught up in a bloodthirsty turf war between warring restaurants. It is set in a dystopian near-future Los Angeles, in which all human desires “including companionship, travel and sex, can be experienced … virtually”. (The episodes I’ve seen don’t go into this, explaining for example how chiropody could be experienced virtually, but that’s beside the point.)

Continue reading...

Sadler’s Wells East, London
An interrogater tries to get to the bottom of a surreal scandal while green screen actors meddle with the story in Jess and Morgs’ inventive production

What audiences remember most from a political interview, a voiceover tells the prime minister (Kennedy Muntanga) as he prepares to face his TV interrogator (Rebecca Bassett-Graham, coiffed à la Emily Maitlis), is less the words themselves than the tone of voice and the tenor of the body. Muntanga is on point, then: his arms sweep, his fingers beetle and his hands spread out, as if he were wordlessly fielding fly-by questions and offering open statements. It’s the moves and the staging that count.

This setup lands right in the zone for creative duo Jess and Morgs (Jessica Wright and Morgann Runacre-Temple), whose turf is a congenial mix of choreography, film and theatre. In Deepfake, along with writer Jeff James, they explore the various unravellings of an encounter in which the interviewer tries to find the truth behind a surreal – but maybe real? – story in which the PM was seen variously spattered with yellow paint, with his flies undone, and partaking in a ritual involving a deer’s head.

Continue reading...

As Michael Sheen prepares to bring Owain Glyndŵr to life on stage, our writer walks the peaceful national trail named after the last Welsh Prince of Wales

Between the treetops, I can see the towers of a distant mist-shrouded castle. Is it possible I could make contact with the spirit of the great Welsh hero Owain Glyndŵr so soon, at the very start of our hike? We are not even on the actual trail of Glyndŵr’s Way. I’ve had to make a detour to find accommodation that takes dogs, as Stevie the terrier is with me. The Castle Inn at Knucklas is a mile off the route, and two miles or so from the pretty border town of Knighton – where the 135-mile (217km) Glyndŵr’s Way officially begins.

The towers slide away behind trees and a railway viaduct emerges. The medieval castle ruins, it turns out, are believed to have been plundered to build the viaduct in the 1860s, and the builders dropped in a couple of crenelated towers to honour the origins of the stone. I fear this may be an early omen: the spirit of Glyndŵr will be as elusive as the man himself was in his lifetime.

Continue reading...