by Peter Walker Political correspondent on (#5SEZ2)
Bodies in 28 countries file appeal for waiver of intellectual property agreement and end to ‘grossly unjust’ distribution of jabsNursing unions in 28 countries have filed a formal appeal with the United Nations over the refusal of the UK, EU and others to temporarily waive patents for Covid vaccines, saying this has cost huge numbers of lives in developing nations.The letter, sent on Monday on behalf of unions representing more than 2.5 million healthcare workers, said staff have witnessed at first hand the “staggering numbers of deaths and the immense suffering caused by political inaction”. Continue reading...
Instead of drafting legal papers, award-winning group make short films intended to explain assault on judiciaryIt was a summer day in 2017 when Sylwia Gregorczyk-Abram, a 34-year-old lawyer, heard a crazy idea.She had been messaged by a legal acquaintance, Michał Wawrykiewicz, who like her was worried about changes that Poland’s nationalist government was introducing to the judicial system. He wondered how they could convince people that the independence of the judiciary was not some abstract nicety but the firm ground underpinning democracy. Continue reading...
by Daniel Boffey in Banja Luka, Bosnia-Herzegovina on (#5SEY5)
Exclusive: Milorad Dodik dismisses fears Serb separatists are planning breakup of Bosnia-HerzegovinaThe Bosnian Serb leader accused of risking war by pursuing the breakup of Bosnia-Herzegovina has dismissed the threat of western sanctions and hinted at an imminent summit with Vladimir Putin, saying: “I was not elected to be a coward”.In an interview with the Guardian, Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of the tripartite leadership of Bosnia-Herzegovina, said he would not be deterred by the outcry from London, Washington, Berlin and Brussels. Continue reading...
Troops will join Australian-led force that also includes Papua New Guinea.Fiji will contribute 50 troops to an Australian-led peacekeeping force in Solomon Islands after anti-government rioting that razed parts of the capital, Honiara, the Fijian prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, has said.The Fijian contingent will lift the number of peacekeepers to about 200 troops and police officers, mostly Australian with a contribution of at least 34 personnel from Papua New Guinea. Continue reading...
Leader of royalist Funcinpec party was overthrown as prime minister by Hun Sen, who has ruled country as a despot ever sinceCambodia’s former prime minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh, the king’s half-brother who spent his later years in the political shadow of his one-time rival prime minister Hun Sen, has died in France. He was 77.The information minister, Khieu Kanharith, said he had received the information from the royal palace. The prince, whose royalist political party won elections in 1993, was ousted in a 1997 coup by coalition partner Hun Sen, who remains Cambodia’s authoritarian leader today. Continue reading...
by Dan Sabbagh Defence and security correspondent on (#5SESA)
Pact covers Iran as well as cybersecurity, despite controversy over use of Israeli firm NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware in UKBritain and Israel will sign a 10-year trade and defence pact in London on Monday, promising cooperation on issues such as cybersecurity and a joint commitment to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.The agreement was announced by Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, and her Israeli counterpart Yair Lapid, despite evidence that spyware made by Israeli company NSO Group had probably been used to spy on two British lawyers advising the ex-wife of the ruler of Dubai, Princess Haya. Continue reading...
Figures show that 93% of those charged over protests are under 25 and many therefore not eligible to access current UK visa schemeMore than nine in 10 people who have faced protest charges in Hong Kong are too young to access a UK visa scheme dedicated to helping Hongkongers flee to Britain, according to advocates and MPs calling for new laws to assist them.The release of the figures on Sunday by the advocacy group Hong Kong Watch comes before a parliamentary debate this week on proposed migration law amendments that would widen the pathway for people with British national (overseas) (BNO) status to resettle in the UK. Continue reading...
Exclusive: Gérald Darmanin says UK ministers must stop saying one thing in private while insulting his country in publicThe French interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, has said British ministers including his counterpart, Priti Patel, should stop saying one thing in private while insulting his country in public if there is to be a solution to the crisis in the Channel.In an interview with the Guardian, Darmanin strongly criticised what he called “double talk” coming out of London and said France was not a “vassal” of the UK. Continue reading...
The fashion maverick, also creative head at Louis Vuitton, had been suffering from an aggressive form of cancer for two yearsFashion designer Virgil Abloh has died after suffering from cancer, it has been announced.The 41-year-old, who was the creative director for Louis Vuitton and Off-White, had cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare, aggressive form of the disease, according to an announcement on his official Instagram page. Continue reading...
Without a resale royalty scheme, struggling artists are missing out on much needed money for their workThis month New Zealand artist Ayesha Green watched in surprise as one of her artworks fetched $48,000 at auction – $29,000 more than she sold it for just a year earlier. The hammer price was sizeable for an artist who describes herself as somewhere between emerging and mid-career, and if the country had a resale royalty scheme for artists in place, Green would have taken home a healthy paycheque to put towards her practice.But, like all local artists whose work sells at auction, Green gets nothing. Continue reading...
Expect more wintry conditions says Met Office, after three people killed and half a million households left without powerA minus 10C Arctic blast is forecast to follow the blizzards and close to 100mph winds of Storm Arwen which left half a million households temporarily without power at the weekend and killed three people.A cold weather alert issued by the UK Health Security Agency will remain in place until Monday after swathes of the north of England, Scotland, Wales, the south-west and the Midlands were left without electricity. Gales caused transport disruption and damage to buildings, while heavy snow led to lorries getting stuck and ploughs being used in a number of areas. The Met Office said that as the storm was clearing towards Europe temperatures would drop to the coldest of the season so far. Continue reading...
After overcoming personal tragedy, the rapper has clawed her way back – with a politically potent debut EP dedicated to First Nations womenBaarka didn’t come to mess around. Born Chloe Quayle, the 26-year-old rapper was a former teenage ice addict who did three stints in jail – during her last, five years ago, she gave birth to her third child.Now the Malyangapa Barkindji woman has clawed her way back from what she describes as “the pits of hell” and is on the verge of releasing her debut EP, Blak Matriarchy, through Briggs’ Bad Apples Music. She has been celebrated by GQ as “the new matriarch of Australian rap”; and has her face plastered on billboards across New York, Los Angeles and London as part of YouTube’s Black Voices Music Class of 2022. (“I nearly fainted when I saw [pictures of it],” Barkaa says when we meet over Zoom. “The amount of pride that came from my family and my community ... It was a huge honour.”) Continue reading...
by Peter Walker Political correspondent on (#5SECQ)
Shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy says joint policies needed to prevent more dying in Channel crossingsBoth the UK and France are “engaging in a blame game” over people making perilous Channel crossings in small boats, Labour has said, rather than sitting down together to try to work out a way to prevent more deaths.The diplomatic spat between the countries, which saw France disinvite Priti Patel from a meeting of EU ministers in Calais on Sunday, after Boris Johnson tweeted a letter on the issue to Emmanuel Macron before the French president had received it, was “simply unconscionable”, Lisa Nandy said. Continue reading...
Mediterranean street food, modernist marvels and politically inspired nightlife are some of the surprises chosen by this writer and film-makerInspired by the city’s activists and creatives, journalist and film-maker Alex King moved to Athens in 2017 to chronicle attempts to breathe new life into a city worn down by crisis. Continue reading...
The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical conceptsWhich British monarchs would have survived their illness or wounding if today’s medical knowledge had existed then? (Bonus question: which monarchs would we have had but for illnesses that are now easily preventable?) Jane ShawSend new questions to nq@theguardian.com. Continue reading...
A Spanish trans woman’s memoirs, a Mumbai gangster drama, Israeli sisters in trouble… the Covid era is a rich moment for TV drama. Critics from Spain to South Korea tell us about the biggest shows in their countries Continue reading...
Two British film-makers have shone a light on a campaigning lawyer and her clients in an expose of misogyny and dangerous politicsOnce, not that long ago, Kubra and Arzu were healthy young Turkish mothers, looking forward to raising their children. Today, sadly, this is no longer all these charismatic, determined women have in common. They are now both among the many damaged survivors of violent attacks at the hands of husbands who believed it was their right to inflict potentially lethal injury on their wives.This autumn, the two mothers are the impressive stars of Dying to Divorce, a British-made documentary, out last week, that has just been selected to represent Britain at the Oscars as the official entry in the Best International Feature Film category. The film is a startling, sensitively made exposé of the murderous misogyny and dangerous politics behind an epidemic of femicide in Turkey, a country where an astonishing one in three women is subjected to some form of domestic violence. Continue reading...
Brexit solved with a slogan ‘take back control’ has left the UK with a border that is now harder to controlAt the Spectator magazine’s parliamentarian of the year awards, the swankiest shindig in the political calendar, one of the gongs went to Nadhim Zahawi. He received a big cheer from an audience heavily populated with Tory MPs and ministers when he used his acceptance speech to remark: “How did a boy from Iraq end up on these shores without a word of English at the age of 11 and become the secretary of state for education? This is the greatest country of the world, my friends.”On the same day, just a few hours earlier, at least 27 souls, among them a pregnant woman and several children, had also tried to make it to these shores only to die in the attempt. Less fortunate than Mr Zahawi, they and their dreams of making a better life in “the greatest country of the world” were drowned as they risked the treacherous crossing from the coast of northern France to that of southern England. We will never know if a future cabinet minister might have been among them. Continue reading...
Gaga rules in Ridley Scott’s at times ridiculous drama based on the true-life sagas of the Italian fashion dynasty“The most Gucci of them all” is how Patrizia Reggiani described herself in a 2014 interview and, judging by this entertainingly ripe, comedically tinged tragedy, she has a point. Variously known as “Lady Gucci” and “Black Widow”, Reggiani became the centre of a very 1990s scandal involving lust, money, fashion, murder… and a clairvoyant. To that tabloid-friendly cocktail, Ridley Scott’s latest “true story” potboiler adds a dash of pop superstardom, with Lady Gaga (Oscar- nominated for her close-to-home performance in A Star Is Born) relishing the chance to find the human cracks beneath a larger-than-life, femme fatale surface.Adapted by screenwriters Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna from the nonfiction book by Sara Gay Forden, House of Gucci charts a crowd-pleasing course from the Milanese party scene of the 1970s to a high-profile, end-of-the-century trial. At its heart is the doomed romance between Patrizia and Maurizio Gucci, the latter played behind stylishly studious glasses by cinema’s sexy nerd de nos jours, Adam Driver. “I want to see how this story goes,” says Patrizia, embarking upon a twisted fairytale romance with the grandson of Guccio Gucci that starts with masked balls and talk of midnight chimes and pumpkins and ends with family back-stabbings, jealous rages and deadly rivalries. Continue reading...
Most of the people who reach the UK after risking their lives in small boats have their claims for asylum approvedLast week’s tragedy in the Channel has reopened the debate on how to stop people making dangerous crossings, with the solutions presented by the government focused on how to police the waters.Less has been said about where those people come from, with most fleeing conflicts and persecution. About two-thirds of people arriving on small boats between January 2020 and May 2021 were from Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Syria. Many also came from Eritrea, from where 80% of asylum applications were approved. Continue reading...
by Justine Landis-Hanley (now) and Mostafa Rachwani ( on (#5SDTC)
Two passengers who tested positive in NSW overnight have the new Covid variant; Mark McGowan ‘won’t hesitate’ to keep WA border shut; UK, Germany and Italy detect cases; Victoria records 1,061 Covid cases and four deaths; NSW reports 185 cases and no deaths; three cases in Queensland and seven in ACT; $10m Australia Day ad campaign criticised. Follow all the day’s news live
The democratically elected leader faces years in jail if she is found guilty on charges that also include corruption, fraud and breaking Covid rulesOusted Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi is braced to hear the verdict in her trial for incitement against the country’s military rulers, the first in a catalogue of cases that could see her jailed for the rest of her life.The Nobel laureate has been detained since the generals ousted her democratically elected government on 1 February, and she is expected to find out about her sentence on Tuesday. Continue reading...
A poor harvest season and booming demand has prompted Quebec’s syrup ‘cartel’ to release around 22,000 tonnes of the luscious liquidMaple syrup producers have been forced to raid the world’s only stockpile of the highly valued sweet treat, as surging worldwide demand combined with an unusually short harvest season in 2021.The Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, sometimes referred to as the “Opec of maple syrup”, has released about 22m kilograms of syrup from its strategic reserve to cover a shortfall driven by a short and warm spring in 2021, Canada’s NPR reported. Continue reading...
by Patrick Butler Social policy editor on (#5SDVK)
Regulator to investigate Fashion for Relief after charity for young Londoners says promised sum never paidA charity whose patron is the mayor of London says the fashion charity founded by the supermodel Naomi Campbell owes it tens of thousands of pounds.The Mayor’s Fund for London, whose figurehead is the current mayor, Sadiq Khan, says it is owed £50,000 from a pop-up shop created by Campbell’s Fashion for Relief two years ago to raise money for the mayor’s causes.This article was updated on 27 November to include a statement from Fashion for Relief Continue reading...
The federal project offers women up to $5,000 to help escape violence, but workers say getting the money is too onerous and complexVulnerable women attempting to escape domestic violence are being offered “false hope” by a government program that potentially could be putting them at greater risk, frontline service workers say.The two-year $145m escaping violence payment trial was billed as a one-off payment of up to $5,000 to “help women establish a life free of violence”. It was announced as part of the government’s “landmark $1.1bn women’s safety package” in the May budget. Continue reading...
by Luke Harding in Dunkirk, Nechirvan Mando in Ranya, on (#5SDQ7)
The names and stories of 10 people who died in the Channel, including a mother and her three childrenAccording to his friends, Harem Pirot was an excellent swimmer. In the summer of 2019 he and a neighbour Anas Muhammad set off from their home in the Iraqi Kurdistan town of Ranya to nearby Lake Dukan, a popular picnic and boating spot.“Harem was a really good person. He could swim well in deep water,” Anas said yesterday. “Our families knew each other well. A great guy. He was 25.” Continue reading...
Spike in drug use has caused problems across Tongan society, with arrests doubling in two years and children severely affectedAfter more than four decades spent living in New Zealand, Ned Cook knew it was time to return to his home country of Tonga.His country was in the grip of a methamphetamine epidemic that was ripping families apart and overrunning the country’s hospitals and jails. Cook, a trained drug and alcohol abuse counsellor, with a history of drug abuse himself, had been preparing for years to return to Tonga to combat it. Continue reading...
In a taste of things to come, a secret Office of National Assessment report worried the ‘carbon dioxide problem’ would hurt the nation’s coal industryThe report was stamped CONFIDENTIAL twice on each page, with the customary warning it should “not be released to any other government except Britain, Canada, NZ and US”.About 40 years ago this week, the spooks at Australia’s intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments (ONA), delivered the 17-page report to prime minister Malcolm Fraser. Continue reading...
Contrary to claims of failed responsibility of Indigenous parents, we in fact are calling for greater responsibility. We want to change this country for the betterAs I write this article, my children are stealing cars and robbing houses, I suppose. I am an Indigenous father – so, doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about me as a parent, and about my children’s capacity to understand right from wrong?I know you sense the sarcasm in this. Well, a great, great majority of Australians would. But there is a certain type of person I am implicating here. The type who have an ignorance so deeply ingrained, that it is a wonder they haven’t wandered off into the dark recesses of our colonial history and followed each other off the edge of a cliff. Shouldn’t they be extinct?Proportionately, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future. These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness. Continue reading...
Among the makeshift tents near the French beaches, we ask what drives people to make the perilous journey in small boats and what could prevent more deathsThere was a time when, if you googled the phrase “Dunkirk, small boats”, reports of one of Britain’s finest hours would stack up in the results. Not last week. The beaches near Dunkirk have now become synonymous not with the embarkation point of dramatic rescue but of despairing tragedy.Details of the 27 people, among them seven women and three children, who drowned in the Channel on Wednesday have been very slow to emerge, their anonymity itself an indication of their desperation. The first to be named was a Kurdish woman from northern Iraq, Maryam Nuri Mohamed Amin, a newly engaged student, who was WhatsApp messaging her fiance, who lives in the UK, when the group’s dinghy started deflating. The 24-year-old had travelled through Germany and France to join Mohammed Karzan in the UK, paying people smugglers thousands of euros to get across the Channel in the absence of other possible routes. Karzan said that he had been in continuous contact with his fiancee and was tracking her GPS coordinates. “After four hours and 18 minutes from the moment she went into that boat,” he said, “then I lost her.” Continue reading...
So often in debates about asylum, statistics are used out of context to back up a politically motivated point, or as fuel in the government’s culture war against asylum seekers. Here are the key statistics about the UK’s asylum system in context13,210. The number of people the UK granted protection to via asylum or resettlement routes in the year to September 2021 This is significantly lower than before the pandemic hit in March 2020.64%. The proportion of initial asylum applications that were successful in the year ending September 2021. This rate has increased in recent years. In addition, almost half of unsuccessful applications are granted on appeal.17th. The UK’s ranking against EU countries in terms of the number of asylum applications it gets, adjusted for population. The UK’s asylum application per capita rate is almost half the EU average. Germany received 122,015 asylum applications in the year ending March 2021; France, 93,475.37,562. The number of asylum applications in the UK in the year ending September 2021. This is 18% higher than last year, which saw a dip as a result of the pandemic, and less than half the peak of 84,312 that was seen in the early 2000s.25,700. The number of people who have arrived in the UK so far this year after making the dangerous Channel crossing in small boats. This is three times the total number who arrived via this route in 2020.83,733. The number of people awaiting an initial decision on their asylum application at the end of September 2021. Delays in the asylum system have increased rapidly since 2018: this is 41% higher than a year ago.86%. The proportion of refugees worldwide who live in low-income countries neighbouring their country of origin. A very small proportion choose to travel to Europe. The UK is home to just 1% of the 26.4 million refugees who have been forcibly displaced from their home country across the world. Around half of the world’s refugees are under the age of 18.£39.63. The amount that people seeking asylum get per week to subsist on in the UK. In France, it’s £42.84, and in Germany £65.63. In Germany, they are allowed to work 3 months from making their applications, in France it’s 6 months. In the UK they’re not allowed to work at all regardless of how long it takes for their application to be processed. Continue reading...
Statement says Chinese player’s responses to chief of sport body were ‘clearly’ influenced by othersThe Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) has said it remains “deeply concerned” about the Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, weeks after she disappeared following her allegations against a high-ranking Chinese former politician.The WTA said in an email statement on Saturday that its chief executive, Steve Simon, had attempted to contact Peng through “various communication channels” including two emails. It said it was concerned about her welfare and ability to communicate freely and that her responses were “clearly” influenced by others. Continue reading...
The first cases of the new B.1.1.529 Covid variant have been identified in the UK. Two people found to be infected with the Omicron variant are self-isolating, according to the health secretary, Sajid Javid
Details from 50 newly released letters echo scenes between Winston and Julia in the dystopian novelThe feeling of longing for a lost love can be powerful, and George Orwell makes full use of it in his work. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, his great dystopian novel, the hero Winston Smith’s memories of walks taken with Julia, the woman he can never have, give the story its humanity.Now a stash of largely unseen private correspondence, handed over to an academic archive on Friday by the author’s son, reveal just how large a role romantic nostalgia played in Orwell’s own life. The contents are also proof that the writer was an unlikely but enthusiastic ice-skater. Continue reading...
While working on a book about missing persons, Francisco Garcia received a message that turned his life upside down. Here he reflects on love, loss and the enduring promise of reunionDespite the cold, it had been a decent day. Late March is sometimes like that in London. More winter than spring, the grass often still frozen half solid underfoot. It’s rarely a time that speaks too loudly of renewal. This year wasn’t any different, as far as I can remember. The occasion that afternoon was a friend’s 30th birthday party, if that’s what you’d call a few faintly desultory beers in a barren Peckham Rye Park.Back at home, my partner and I had settled down to watch a florid period drama. About half an hour in, that’s when it happened: the moment my life changed. My phone lit up with an unfamiliar name on Facebook Messenger. “Hello Francisco, this might be a shock. It’s your father’s family in Spain. Twenty years may have passed, but we have always remembered you.” Continue reading...
Second walkout on London Underground in two days amid dispute over night-time drivers’ rotaPlans to restart night tube services on London Underground will be disrupted by strike action on Saturday.Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) union will walk out at 8.30pm on the Victoria and Central lines, over a continuing dispute over the drivers’ rota for night services.8.30pm 27 November –4.29am 28 November Central and Victoria.8.30pm 3 December – 4.29am 4 December Central and Victoria.8.30pm 4 December – 4.29am 5 December Central and Victoria.8.30pm 10 December – 4.29am 11 December Central and Victoria.8.30pm 11 December – 4.29am 12 December Central and Victoria.8.30pm 17 December – 4.29am 18 December Central and Victoria.4.30am 18 December – 4.29am 19 December Central, Jubilee, Northern, Piccadilly and Victoria. Continue reading...
The African American artist has been making powerful, political work since the late 70s. As a new exhibition in Edinburgh shows, she still has plenty to sayHowardena Pindell’s art can seem as if it were made by two separate people. There are the huge canvases where stencilled dots or tiny, hole-punched discs of paper amass like drifts of leaves, which she began making while working as MoMA’s first African American curator in 1970s New York. And then there’s the work that has challenged social injustice with a gut-punch directness since the 80s.It is clear, though, speaking with the 78-year-old ahead of her first UK solo exhibition in a public gallery, that her swirling abstract constellations are not entirely devoid of politics. As a young curator, she’d seen artists with museum day jobs give up their creative lives. Not her. She found time for painting because “the racism [at MoMA at the time] meant I was left out of certain activities. I loved being an artist and I had the stamina to work at night.” Continue reading...
From the Super Bowl to groundbreaking cinema: we jump down the rabbit hole, via a detour to Britney SpearsA new documentary, Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson, has revisited the infamous “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl half-time show, when Justin Timberlake exposed one of Janet Jackson’s breasts – and nipple adornment – for about a half a second, causing America to lose its collective mind in a manner that was unfathomable then and remains unfathomable now. Continue reading...
Two people have died after being hit by falling trees as Storm Arwen brought winds of almost 100mph to parts of the UK overnight. The extreme conditions led to the closure of roads and forced planes to abort landing
by Susan Smith-Richardson and Lauren Burke on (#5SDAH)
The state’s policy of ‘Massive Resistance’ exemplifies the incendiary combination of race and education in the USNot long after Patricia Turner and a handful of Black students desegregated Norview junior high school in Norfolk, Virginia, she realized a big difference between her new white school and her former Black school. That February of 1959, she didn’t have to wear a coat in class to stay warm, because Norview was heated.She hadn’t noticed the difference earlier because of the steady volley of racism directed at her, Turner said. A teacher put her papers in a separate box and returned them wearing rubber gloves. (He later wrote her an apology letter.) And her fellow students spat on her.A crowd gathers for an NAACP rally in May 1961 at the Prince Edward county courthouse in Farmville, Virginia, marking the seventh anniversary of the supreme court’s school desegregation ruling. Continue reading...
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