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The Guardian |
I like to walk around old cemeteries and read the headstones. Here in Iceland, it has been customary to engrave people’s job titles below their...
The Australian government has proposed a ban on social media for all citizens under 16. Citing the success of recently introduced restrictions on...
We now face, on all fronts, a war not just against the living planet and the common good, but against material reality. Power in the United States...
Last month, the Australian government announced new visa pathways for displaced Palestinians from Gaza and Ukrainians, providing much-needed relief...
There are lies, evasions and manipulations by politicians that, when they come to light, can make the politician in question seem even less...
Did the Democrats really lose because they were too “woke”, too obsessed with minorities, too radical? After defeat, there always comes the battle...
“Shock” suddenly became the most commonly uttered word in habitually nonplussed Washington DC. After Donald Trump had attempted to subvert the...
In the autumn of 2018, I moved to Lisbon for a month-long course at the Universidade de Lisboa. I struggled to find any short-term sublets in the...
Hunger has a crippling influence on a child’s development. It robs them of their focus, energy and ambition. Hungry children in our classrooms are...
The post-mortems of Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump all agree on one thing: that Harris stuck too close to Biden. It was deliberate, pundits...
The Allison Pearson saga is nothing if not a morality tale about the modern media. Among its many learnings are that calling a group of people of...
As pollen counts increase in parts of Australia throughout spring and summer, so too do the number of social media posts spruiking the benefits of...
Do they hand out Nobel prizes for PR? Because the team behind Mark Zuckerberg’s recent metamorphosis deserves one immediately. Not so long ago,...
It is hardly advanced political science to observe that governments are more popular when giving people stuff than when taking it away. Junior...
A closed pub is a sad, sad sight. Where once was life, people talking and laughing, now there is none. OK, bad stuff would have gone on too. I get...
One person turns up surprisingly often at Donald Trump’s side. Not his No 2, JD Vance, nor his wife, Melania, but another man a quarter-century...
Six years ago, when Jeremy Corbyn focused on failing bus services during prime minister’s questions, the then leader of the Labour opposition was...
Free votes on conscience matters are comparatively rare in the UK parliament. But they are almost always about issues of once-in-a-generation...
Joshua Wong, one of Hong Kong’s best-known pro-democracy activists, was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison on Tuesday. He received...
I always worry when I hear politicians or economists talk about how the economy needs to be administered some painful medicine. Inevitably it means...
One night after his now infamous appearance at the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden – where he joked that Black people carve watermelons...
All year, I have been looking forward to the People’s Blockade of the Newcastle coal port. I’ve been so excited to see the colourful array of...
Australia is facing the extreme risk of dangerous concentrations of high pressure and hot air this summer. There is also a strong likelihood of...
The expected defeat of the federal government’s proposed caps on international student numbers provides the entire nation with an important...
You can damn oil companies, abuse cars, insult nimbys, kill cows, befoul art galleries. But you must never, ever criticise the worst offender of...
As the Trump presidency bears down on the world, I hope we can all concur on the prospect of being subjected to regular appearances by Donald...
Reliable and independent sources of news are now threatened by growing alliances of oligarchs and authoritarians. The mainstream media doesn’t use...
No tax change is perfect. Systems can never be customised to take in every set of circumstances. There are always edge cases – people who are...
Defending Beijing’s draconian crackdown on political freedoms in Hong Kong, following the extraordinary protest movement in 2019, the...
Is Elon Musk the dinner party guest from hell? It sure seems that way. Not only is the man desperate for people to laugh at his crass jokes, he...
Is Elon Musk the dinner party guest from hell? It sure seems that way. Not only is the man desperate for people to laugh at his crass jokes, he...
“I hope you’re not going to do something like this,” warns my son on his way to attend a surprise 18th party courageously arranged by his...
Hey y’all: listen up to the chartbusting, pop-pickin’, time-addled DJ: “Yes indeed, Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas is back with a...
Two weeks have passed, and Kamala Harris’s convincing electoral defeat still has Democrats pointing fingers at who – or what – to blame. If only...
In a cost of living crisis, many workers in Australia are doing it tough, but spare a thought for people being paid 65 cents an hour. If you wanted...
“Everyone has stolen from the cash register except the National Front!” exclaimed Marine Le Pen on French TV in 2004, commenting on an...
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has landed on an arresting image to illustrate the waiting-list crisis in its field. If all...
Does accuracy in a movie set in the past actually matter? When one historian pointed out errors in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, the director...
Jack Lang was fond of saying that you should always put your money on self-interest. But when it comes to campaign finance laws, politicians use...
Watch what happens in Swale, as it’s a tale that will be repeated often in the next few years. Here in Kent is a test of Labour’s determination...
Imagine you’re a politician running a country. In front of you there is a proposal that in just nine months would save your society more than...
Curbs on profiteering in the children’s social care sector cannot come soon enough. It is getting on for three years since the Competition and...
As an Israeli airstrike killed at least 30 people in a northern Gaza residential block, Pope Francis called for an investigation into whether...
It sounds too fanciful and too outrageous to be true, but nothing is too outrageous for the world the tech bros have bequeathed us. The BBC has...
US president Joe Biden’s last-gasp decision to permit Ukraine to fire western-made, long-range missiles at military targets deep inside Russian...
In the days following the 2024 election, a cadre of pundits have been eager to call the uncommitted voters’ impact on the presidential race both...
In September 1981, 10 months after Ronald Reagan’s sweeping 44-state victory over Jimmy Carter, 100 leading elected Democratic officials...
I will admit that when I heard there was to be a TV adaptation of Say Nothing, based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s book of the same name, released on...
I walked out of my kitchen on an overcast morning last week, feeling depressed, trying to think my way around the US election result somehow...
The need for a major shake-up of our police service has been spoken about for decades. The last major reform to policing in the 1960s modernised...
“Wormy! Wormy! Come here, Wormy!” I’m seven years old, arms wrapped across my legs like a protective shield, while a group of older kids tease...
By modern standards, I live in a “dog box”. My unit is a 38 sq metre one-bedder on the ground floor of a classic Sydney 1960s red-brick...
The nightmare has arrived. Trump’s “America First” norm-flouting was bad enough the last time around, when a collection of traditional...
Support for seasonal self-love comes from an unexpected quarter: the French daily Libération has issued a plea for us to embrace our “winter...
The most useful lesson of growing up under a dictatorship is that dictatorships are never absolute. Sometimes they are even democracies – ones...
Many observers breathed a sigh of relief earlier this year when the mainstream, pro-EU alliance – of centre-left, centre-right and liberal parties...
How good must it feel to gather up physical manifestations of your anxieties, shove them in a giant papier-mache demon and set fire to them?...
It has been an unprecedented 10 days for the Church of England. The Makin report into abuse by John Smyth, barrister and Church lay reader, was...
Have you ever asked yourself a question along the lines of: “If you had to choose not to eat bread or not to eat potatoes, what would you go...
The next time a waiter takes my order, I’ll ask for an “empty cup of attention”. OK, not really. As if that’s ever on the menu, especially in...
1 When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Last week Donald Trump appointed a director of intelligence who spouts Russian propaganda, a...
All over the country, the lights are going out. The level of need for adult and children’s care is constantly increasing. People are still...
‘The union wants to protect workers. The employer wants to protect workers. How do I choose between them?” So asks one young worker in Union, a...
One of the baleful dimensions of our times is the way that the conversation about what constitutes the good society is framed by the rich and their...
The announcement that Donald Trump has appointed Robert F Kennedy as the US secretary of health and human services has sent shock waves through the...
Share the adventure of a lifetime in this incredible addition to the popular series, Reading with the Stars! It’s almost Christmas and Jamie and...
Things have not being going well for low- and middle-income Britain: wages flatlining, public services crumbling and, as a result, faith in...
German politicians used to know where they were with their voters. If they gave you one term in power, they were likely to offer a second serving...