US news | The Guardian

The ‘remoaner elite’, the civil service, the BBC, universities, unions, refugees: anything is blamed but Brexit itselfIt lasts no more than a second, but it is a moment for the ages. Interviewed on BBC Newsnight on Monday, Nigel Farage made a confession that, by rights, should end the debate that has split this country down the middle for much of the last decade. A month ahead of the seventh anniversary of the 2016 vote that took Britain out of the European Union, Farage said three words of striking simplicity and truth: “Brexit has failed.”You can watch the clip over and over, for it is something to behold. Here is the arch-Brexiter himself, the man who dedicated his life to the cause of rupture from the EU, admitting it has been a disaster. Of course, as we shall see, he and his fellow Brexiters do not blame that failure on the idea itself, but it’s the admission that counts. It offers grounds for modest celebration: now, at last, the contours of an emerging national consensus are visible, as remainers and leavers alike can join in agreement that this thing has not worked. And yet it comes at a price, one that also became darkly visible this week.Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnistJoin Jonathan Freedland and Marina Hyde for a Guardian Live event in London on Thursday 1 June. Book in-person or livestream tickets here Continue reading...

Salman Rushdie gave a surprise speech at the Pen America gala in New York City, his first public appearance since he was attacked on stage last August. Rushdie joked that it was 'nice to be back – as opposed to not being back, which was also an option'. The author, whose writing led to death threats from Iran in the 1980s, was stabbed in the neck and torso as he was about to give a lecture in western New York

Florida governor, expected to announce run soon, tells fundraising event Trump does not have ‘serious chance’ of being electedThe rightwing governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, reportedly told top donors only he, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are “credible” candidates for president in 2024 – and he is the only Republican who can beat the incumbent Democrat.“You have basically three people at this point that are credible in this whole thing,” DeSantis said during a call on Thursday run by a fundraising committee, the New York Times said, adding that a reporter was listening. Continue reading...

Republican Mike Gallagher, leading delegation to London, says world is in ‘window of maximum danger’Beijing wants to “subordinate and humiliate” the west, according to the Republican chair of a newly created China committee in Congress who is leading a delegation of hawkish US politicians on a two-day trip to the UK.Mike Gallagher argued that China, under President Xi Jinping, believed in “the inevitable demise of capitalism”, and said he hoped to better understand how far British politicians of all parties shared his committee’s concerns. Continue reading...

Aric Hutchinson says Samantha Miller ‘wanted the night to never end’ before she was killed by an alleged drunk driverThe widower of the woman killed by an alleged drunk driver on their wedding night has spoken about losing his wife, describing her as an “amazing human being who should never have been taken”.In an interview with ABC, Aric Hutchinson broke down as he struggled to recall the incident that killed Samantha Miller, 34, and severely injured him moments after they left their wedding reception in South Carolina last month. Continue reading...

Fani Willis prepared her team for remote work during that time, expected to be the window for indictmentsThe Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia signalled Thursday that charging decisions in the case may come starting the final week of July, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.The indication from the prosecutor, Fani Willis, first came during a meeting with her full team where she told them to make preparations to work remotely during the final week of July and through the first weeks of August, the people said. Continue reading...

The decaying parliament building – and the hypocrisy of those who should be fixing it – says a lot about a nation that’s seen better daysBritain increasingly feels like a terribly old country. We keep hearing its pipework hasn’t been properly overhauled since the Victorian age, so its own sewage laps at its shores and courses through its rivers. Earlier this month we crowned our oldest ever new monarch, a man who looked a picture of melancholy pretty much throughout, even if media sycophancy made it verboten to categorise the mood as anything other than joyous renewal. The country is overwhelmingly governed in the interests of older voters at the expense of the young. And this week, the latest update on the literally crumbling Houses of Parliament warned that the building is so comprehensively knackered it could be destroyed before renovation is agreed upon, let alone begun. This would be the only conceivable occasion on which this cohort of politicians could be described as bringing the house down.Even the sewage crisis has been folded into the nostalgia myths that some find more comfortable than dealing with the present. “I remember as a child in south Wales swimming in sewage,” reminisced the Conservative MP Damian Green this week. “Jackson’s Bay in Barry used to be a sewage outlet where we all went and paddled and swam...”Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnistThis June, Marina Hyde will join fellow columnists at three Guardian Live events in Leeds, Brighton and London. Readers can join these events in person and the London event will be livestreamed Continue reading...

Rourke’s propulsive basslines worked in perfect tandem with Johnny Marr’s guitar parts to create the Smiths’ singular sound• Andy Rourke, bassist for the Smiths, dies aged 59

A worker at the rental chain demanded to see the American man’s passport, apparently unaware that the island is part of the USThe US rental car giant Hertz has apologized and pledged to retrain its staff after an employee denied a Puerto Rican customer a prepaid vehicle on the mistaken belief that he was from a foreign country and needed a passport.During the encounter with the customer at New Orleans’s Louis Armstrong international airport, the Hertz employee also called over a law enforcement officer even though Puerto Rico has been a US territory since 1898 and has a (non-voting) member of Congress, according to a stunning report the CBS correspondent David Begnaud published on Twitter and Instagram late Saturday. Continue reading...

Ex-prisoners get caught up in the state’s accelerated voter fraud enforcement after officials help them enroll to voteJust as it had been all day, courtroom 3C at the Alachua county courthouse was mostly empty when members of the jury filed in on Tuesday evening. John Boyd Rivers, a mason who once laid the bricks of the courthouse, stood up to hear whether or not they would convict him on two counts of voter fraud.Judge James Colaw read the verdict on the first charge: not guilty. Then he read the verdict on the second: guilty. Rivers stood quietly as he listened, a small hole visible in the red long-sleeve shirt he wore to court over khaki pants and work boots. Continue reading...

For all the fine words, the current piecemeal system of donations is not enough to sustain Ukrainian efforts to retake their landAs you read this, the young men and women of Ukraine’s newly trained and equipped brigades are preparing for their spring – more likely summer offensive operations. Despite huge pressure from their allies to demonstrate that the equipment and ammunition that have been committed can be converted into serious territorial gains, Ukrainian officials are at pains to assert that this coming campaign is unlikely to be decisive. Instead, gains are more likely to be slow and incremental than sweeping and extensive.Over the past year Ukraine has been forced to fight a war of attrition at truly punishing cost. Wars of attrition such as this are never quick, and it is naive to believe that it will be over soon. There is no room for the idea that “it will all be over by Christmas”; it won’t. And probably not the Christmas afterwards either. Sustaining this effort into the medium- (one to three years) and long-term ( two to 10 years) will require a prodigious industrial effort, and a step-change in the supply of military equipment, far greater than what we have already seen. Whatever the situation is at the end of this summer’s series of operations, Russia is not going away. The threat from the east will persist.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

Taylor Swift has flagged her sympathies with this community, so why is her Eras tour visiting US states enacting repressive laws without comment?Look what an overly aggressive security guard made Taylor Swift do. Over the weekend, the singer won praise for calling out a guard, mid-performance, who was being rough with a female fan.However, as a queer Swiftie, I can’t help but wish she would channel that same energy and her enormous platform into denouncing the record number of anti-LGBTQ+ laws being introduced across the US. Since starting in March, Swift’s Eras tour has taken her to numerous states that have ushered in some of the most extreme anti-LGBTQ+ bills in decades, including Florida, Tennessee and Texas. Yet the singer has stayed silent. Continue reading...

White former marine accused of killing Black street performer has raised more than $2m for his legal defense fundWhen New York City authorities charged Daniel Penny with second-degree manslaughter after placing fellow subway rider Jordan Neely in a deadly chokehold, his case quickly became a flashpoint in rightwing discourse on crime and vigilantism – and the broader culture war playing out in the US in advance of the 2024 election.Penny, a white former Marine, soon raised more than $1m for his legal defense in the killing of Neely, an unhoused Black man. The sum now exceeds $2.5m. Continue reading...

While one side is happy to defecate on the floor, the other side has no choice but to clean up the messThey say that negotiating with a toddler is like a hostage situation: only one side of the discussion wants to defuse the crisis.Welcome to Washington in the post-Trump era, as the United States stares down the barrel of debt default. Continue reading...

Ukraine’s president will attend Hiroshima meeting on Sunday as leaders prepare to target exports to Russia. Plus, humanity’s first record of kissing

You don’t have to particularly like Harry and Meghan to be disturbed by the constant vitriol directed against themThey nearly died! They made the whole thing up! The royal family was trying to Diana them! They’re incorrigible attention-seekers who exaggerated to try and get British taxpayers to pay for their security costs!Public reaction to news that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and the duchess’s mother had been in a “near catastrophic” car chase with paparazzi in New York on Tuesday evening has been divided, to say the least. Some people seem to think that the severity of the incident has been inflated in an effort to drum up sympathetic PR for the Sussexes, at a time when they’re mired in several lawsuits about their privacy and security. Conservative commentator Megyn Kelly, for example, accused the pair of “exaggerating, because they like being in the public eye”.Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist Continue reading...

Will MLS really stop at 30 clubs if Mohamed Mansour, the British-Egyptian billionaire and Conservative party treasurer, is willing to pay a $500m expansion fee for a club in San Diego?A soccer commissioner, an Egyptian billionaire and a Native American tribal leader walk into a bar. Hmm, let’s try that again. OK, they walked onto a stage in San Diego on Thursday to plant a flag in Major League Soccer’s latest frontier: the city beat Las Vegas to become the 30th team in American soccer’s top division beginning in 2025, after this ownership group paid a record expansion fee of $500m for the privilege.The aforementioned Egyptian, Mohamed Mansour – a dual British citizen who is the senior treasurer for the UK’s Conservative party – and the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation, a local casino-operating tribe, partnering to launch a California-based football team sounds like something only Thomas Pynchon could conceive of, as clever people on Twitter have noted. It’s not the movie star and athlete-leaden ownership group of the NWSL’s Angel City FC in Los Angeles. But Mansour, who owns a global youth football development academy called Right to Dream, brings a unique proposition to the league. It was all feted at a splashy media event on Thursday at Snapdragon Stadium awash with local politicians, football supporters’ groups, business leaders and an astonishing number of suit-with-dress-sneakers ensembles. Continue reading...

Far-right Republican congresswoman makes remarks after confrontation with Democratic congressman Jamaal BowmanThe far-right Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene told reporters being called a white supremacist was the same as a Black person being called the N-word.Speaking on Thursday about a confrontation outside the Capitol the day before with the Democratic congressman Jamaal Bowman, Greene said: “Jamaal Bowman [was] shouting at the top of his lungs, cursing, calling me a horrible … calling me a white supremacist which I take great offense to that. Continue reading...

‘Inconsistencies in how we value equipment’ could lead to more weapons being sent to Kyiv to defend against Russian forcesThe Pentagon overestimated the value of the ammunition, missiles and other equipment it sent to Ukraine by about $3bn, an error that may lead the way for more weapons being sent to Kyiv for its defense against Russian forces.The error was the result of assigning a higher-than-warranted value on weaponry that was taken from US stocks and then shipped to Ukraine, two senior defense officials said on Thursday. Continue reading...

Republican gives positive remarks to reporters as 11 Democratic senators sign letter to Biden urging him to use 14th amendment to avoid default

Unanimous vote by 17 dancers marks the first time Actors Equity association represents strip club workersAfter months of late-night picketing in North Hollywood, the dancers of the Star Garden Topless Dive Bar have become the only unionized strippers in the US.Their victory was finalized with a unanimous vote by 17 dancers in favor of unionization on Thursday morning , and marks the first time that the Actors Equity association, a century-old union for stage actors, singers and dancers, will represent strip club workers, the union said. Continue reading...

The CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour said she strongly disagreed with her network's decision to host a town hall event with Donald Trump last week and had had 'a very robust exchange of views' with Chris Licht, the chief executive under fire for approving and then defending the decision to stage it. 'I would have dropped the mic at ‘nasty person’, but then that’s me, she said at Columbia Journalism School in New York. Trump called the CNN moderator, Kaitlan Collins, a 'nasty person', one of number of raucous moments during the event

After several mass shootings this year, 26% of Americans believe guns are the number one public health threatA quarter of Americans now believe guns are the number one public health threat, according to new polling.According to the Axios/Ipsos American Health Index, 26% of Americans believe access to guns is the top threat to public health. Around 25% believe opioids and fentanyl are the top concern. Continue reading...

The San Francisco district attorney has alleged Nima Momeni planned to kill Lee and left him to ‘slowly die’The man accused of fatally stabbing Cash App founder Bob Lee has pleaded not guilty to murder.Nima Momeni, 38, was arraigned on Thursday in a San Francisco courtroom on a single murder charge in Lee’s death last month. Continue reading...

Beneath the mental fragility that led to the Sixers’ humiliating playoff exit is a gutless, joyless organization that is betraying their devoted fans. Only a scorched-earth rebuild will doSixers fans, answer me this: are you better off today than you were 10 years ago? It’s the same question posed by out-party politicians since time immemorial, but Sunday’s spectacular face-plant against the Boston Celtics that prompted Tuesday’s sacking of head coach Doc Rivers demands a far more wholesale inquest of Philadelphia’s once-proud basketball team. And the picture is not a pleasant one.With a three-games-to-two lead over their archrivals in the Eastern Conference semi-finals – needing one win from two cracks for the team’s first trip to the NBA’s final four in more than two decades – the Sixers let the Celtics off the hook in Game 6 and were blown out of the gym in Sunday’s decider. Boston star Jayson Tatum, whom Philadelphia passed over after trading up for Markelle Fultz in the 2017 draft, gored them for 51 points – the most in a Game 7 in NBA history. In a city where sports famously mean a little too much, the Mother’s Day Massacre will leave scars. Continue reading...

D’Arcy Drollinger will receive $55,000 stipend in 18-month role to ensure city’s drag history is ‘shared, honored and preserved’Anti-trans legislation is roiling the nation. Bills prohibiting drag performances are cropping up in statehouses. Violence and vitriol are turning children’s drag story hour events into headline-news protests.San Francisco is fighting back by naming the nation’s first drag laureate, an ambassador-style position designed to represent the city’s famous LGBTQ+ community at a time when rights are under attack. Continue reading...

There’s no shortage of people who want more children. But under the Conservatives, parenthood is punishedMiriam Cates, MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, launched her own culture war at the National Conservative populist rave this week. Her central point, which she called “existential”, was the need to stop the falling birthrate, which she said was threatening British culture. “If you want to be a national conservative, you need a nation to conserve … As conservatives we want to preserve our nation and our heritage.”On the baby drought, I agree with her, but for very different reasons. I share none of her explanations nor her remedies – though I agree the lack of babies is “a symptom of a serious societal malaise”.Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Florida governor is seen as main challenger to Donald Trump for Republican nomination but is currently a distant second in pollsThe rightwing Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, will officially begin his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination next week, it was widely reported on Thursday.According to Reuters, DeSantis, 44, is expected to file Federal Election Commission paperwork declaring his candidacy next Thursday, 25 May, to coincide with a donor meeting in Miami, with a more formal launch the following week. Continue reading...

Influential anchor tells Columbia commencement address she had ‘very robust exchange of views’ with channel boss Chris LichtThe CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour has strongly criticized her own network for hosting a town-hall event with Donald Trump last week, saying she had “a very robust exchange of views” with Chris Licht, the chief executive under fire for approving and then defending the decision to stage it.Amanpour, giving the commencement address at Columbia Journalism School in New York on Wednesday, said in comments reported by Variety and other outlets: “We know Trump and his tendencies – everyone does. He just seizes the stage and dominates. Continue reading...

Child died following a ‘medical emergency’, Customs and Border Protection says, a week after a teen died in custody in FloridaAn eight-year old girl died after being detained by border patrol agents in Texas, as the death toll among desperate people seeking refuge in the US continues to mount.According to a statement by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the child died following a “medical emergency” while held with her family at a detention facility in Harlingen, a city in the Rio Grande valley.This article was amended on 18 May 2023 to correct the name of the city of Safety Harbor. Continue reading...

California representative targeted after the release of the Durham report, which investigated FBI inquiry into Trump and RussiaAdam Schiff said he was “not backing down”, after a Republican from Florida filed a motion to expel the California representative from Congress.Referring to the failure the same day of a motion to expel George Santos, the New York fabulist indicted on multiple criminal counts, Schiff said: “When Democrats do something for the right reason, [Republicans] use the precedent to do something for the wrong reason.” Continue reading...

Report shows fathers are responsible for 70% of child killings when parents split up, but new laws mandate joint custodyEarly one day last year, Kellie Elliott stopped by her estranged husband Shane’s house outside Camden in western Ohio. Her 13-year-old son, Caleb, and 10-year-old daughter, Gracie, had spent the weekend there, but they hadn’t turned up for school that snowy morning of 25 January 2022.Elliott didn’t dare approach the front door because she was fearful of Shane, whom she was divorcing. He had subjected her and her children to violent outbursts for years, behavior which she had reported to authorities without meaningful effect. Continue reading...

At home I double dip. And triple dip. And lick the spoon again. I’m sure I’m in good companyI have filthy habits. They’re not unusual habits, or even unusually filthy. You probably have them too. But in the right environment, they can look so terribly, terribly wrong. That environment is a TV studio. Recently, for reasons I must for the moment remain coy about, I found myself cooking against the clock before a phalanx of TV cameras. I should have been focused solely on the tasks at hand. Instead, the words banging around inside my head were: whatever you do don’t lick your fingers. And don’t lick that spoon you’re stirring the pot with. And for god’s sake wash your hands after handling ingredients.At home, that voice is never in my head. I break all these rules while cooking, and more. While I know newspaper columnists often mistakenly think they are merely giving voice to something that is a shared experience when it really isn’t, on this I’m sure I’m in very good and very extensive company. The fact is, home cooks are not the same as the people who get paid for it, and hooray for that. Professional kitchens have important personal hygiene rules, and 19 different colour-coded plastic chopping boards. In those places it’s a new spoon every time. Or, at least, it should be. Continue reading...

When treated purely as historical fact, the slave trade can be dismissed as an evil of the past – the reality is very differentHow do we teach the painful history of transatlantic slavery? As a series of distinct facts relating to the past? Or, to paraphrase the great Toni Morrison, as a weight working itself out in our lives? The former has, we are slowly coming to admit, led to collective amnesia. In this forgetting, the families, institutions, cities and countries that grew rich through the enslavement of Africans could perform a neat excision of this diseased part of themselves.When, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, protesters pulled down the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston, something else broke too: the neat lens through which history is understood as events that occurred in another time whose reverberations are dimmed in the present and which we have no power to redress. Continue reading...

Group of women accused lender of helping facilitate US financier’s sex trafficking operationsDeutsche Bank has agreed to pay $75m (£60m) to settle a lawsuit brought by a group of women who accused the German lender of helping facilitate Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operations.The settlement is expected to draw a line under legal claims related to Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Epstein, who became a client in 2013 after he was dropped by JP Morgan. Continue reading...

Republicans want to force spending cuts by threat instead of legislating – and the cuts they’re asking for are appallingThe shamelessness and recklessness of today’s Republican party seems to know no bounds. As the deadline for raising the debt ceiling or defaulting rapidly approaches, the party continues to hold the country hostage, telling Democrats: give us what we want – things we cannot get by going through normal democratic processes – or we will pitch the global economy off a cliff.Democrats in Congress are doing their best to get their Republican colleagues to behave rationally, but it’s notoriously difficult to negotiate with terrorists. The Republicans want major spending cuts, but they want to force those cuts through by threat instead of having to legislate normally. And the cuts they’re asking for are appalling: they include slashing funds to things like cancer research, rental assistance for the poor, support for schools with large numbers of low-income students, and pay for Americans in uniform. The Republican bill would end Biden’s attempt at student loan debt relief, repeal tax breaks for renewables and clean energy while increasing reliance on fossil fuels, raise already-onerous work requirements to receive food stamps and welfare benefits, and decrease the efficiency and abilities of the IRS. Continue reading...

Representative Jim Jordan will call on Covid truthers and January 6 skeptics in his inquiry into the politicization of federal law enforcementWitnesses set to testify to Congress about the “weaponisation” of the US government on Thursday have links to far-right groups and a history of supporting conspiracy theories about coronavirus vaccines and the January 6 insurrection, a congressional watchdog has warned.In February, Republicans in the House of Representatives created a panel on what they say is the politicisation of the FBI and justice department against conservatives. Critics saw it as an attempt to entangle Joe Biden in spurious investigations ahead of next year’s election. Continue reading...

Ukraine war and China’s Taiwan ambitions are expected to dominate G7 discussions, but Fumio Kishida will have a powerful backdrop. Plus, the rise and fall of Rudy GiulianiGood morning.The war in Ukraine and Chinese aggression towards Taiwan will dominate G7 discussions this week, but the host, Fumio Kishida, the Japanese prime minister, is expected to carve out time to push for a pledge on nuclear weapons when leaders meet in Hiroshima, the first place on Earth targeted by an atomic bomb.What has Kishida said in the run-up to the summit? He spoke of his desire for “a world without nuclear weapons”, although campaigners point to the failure by Japan – part of the US nuclear umbrella – to sign a 2021 UN treaty banning the possession and use of nuclear weapons. “I believe the first step toward any nuclear disarmament effort is to provide a first-hand experience of the consequences of the atomic bombing and to firmly convey the reality,” Kishida said of the planned group visit to the peace museum.What has Biden said in response to the criticism? The president said: “I’ll be in constant contact with my team while I’m at the G7 and be in close touch with speaker McCarthy and other leaders as well. What I have done in anticipation that we won’t get it all done till I get back is, I’ve cut my trip short in order to be [here] for the final negotiations and sign the deal with the majority leader.”What has McCarthy said? Speaking to CNBC, he said: “I think at the end of the day we do not have a debt default. The thing I’m confident about is now we have a structure to find a way to come to a conclusion. The timeline is very tight. But we’re going to make sure we’re in the room and get this done.” Continue reading...

It is time to end the international embarrassment of the US being the only major country that does not guarantee healthcareLet’s be clear. The current healthcare system in the United States is totally broken, dysfunctional and cruel. It is a system which spends twice as much per capita as any other major country, while 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured, one out of four Americans cannot afford the cost of the prescription drugs their doctors prescribe, and where over 60,000 die each year because they don’t get to a doctor on time.It is a system in which our life expectancy is lower than almost all other major countries and is actually declining, a system in which working class and low-income Americans die at least ten years younger than wealthier Americans.Bernie Sanders is a US Senator and the ranking member of the Senate budget committee. He represents the state of Vermont Continue reading...

Advanced money-laundering techniques and clandestine precursor imports combine to stoke the opioid crisis – can the US stem the flow?For a few days in April, news sites across Latin America were running Instagram photos of a glamorous blond woman enjoying trips around the world.There were pictures of Ana Gabriela Rubio Zea, 32, posing in a blue dress and Yves Saint Laurent handbag outside San Miguel de Allende, ice skating in a miniskirt in Central Park and laughing in the Forbidden City. Continue reading...

The US and China have a complex relationship, yet the movie business is one area where the two nations have enjoyed collaboration. But in the last few years, even this partnership has become more competitive. However, as the two countries' political relationship grows more rancorous, China is opening the door to US blockbusters once again. The whole thing is starting to resemble a romance straight out of the movies. So why is China's film industry so dependent on Hollywood? Continue reading...

In an adapted extract from his new memoir, the former NFL player reflects on coming to terms with his queerness in college and the life-altering conversation that gave him salvationBack in Texas, everyone I knew had strong feelings about homosexuality. If you were straight, you would use slurs like faggot and pussy boy and rant about masculinity and manhood – things no teenage boy knows anything about. If you were gay, you had to fight for your freedom and sometimes even your life. I only knew of one openly gay kid at Creekview; our lockers were near each other’s junior year. Sometimes I would catch him at his locker, not opening it, not rushing to class, not coming or going, just standing there, staring off into the distance and trying to breathe, hiding in plain sight.I hid at Creekview, too, I guess, acting happy when I was spiraling, being popular when I was filled with self-loathing.This is an adapted excerpt from The Yards Between Us by RK Russell. Available to buy now Continue reading...

This weekend’s Arab League summit will embolden the regime to continue its crimes, including the forced disappearances of hundreds of thousands of innocent SyriansWhen the protests first started in Syria in 2011, my father changed. He was very calm. He told me: “I had hoped my whole life that this would happen, but I never thought I would witness it. Even if I don’t get to see victory for the Syrian people, it is enough for me that I have been there at the beginning.”I can’t help but think of these words today. Continue reading...

The president had no mandate to dismantle France’s social model. His contempt for the people risks opening the door to extremismAs France was commemorating the end of the second world war in Europe this month, Emmanuel Macron cut an isolated figure on a near-empty Champs-Elysées, surrounded by steel security barriers to prevent any member of the public from getting within shouting, let alone pot-banging, distance.For the first time, and by police order the French people were barrred from a large area ringing the official 8 May remembrance of the liberation. Six years after his first presidential victory and a year after winning a second term in the Elysée, Macron can scarcely show his face in public without being booed, heckled or insulted.Rokhaya Diallo is a French writer, journalist, film director and activist Continue reading...