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ITV is cancelling the TV talent show before it ‘fizzles out with a whimper’. After a decade of plummeting ratings, we remember its highs, lows … and Chico Time

Kristian Pulkownik, 33, is yet to formally apply for bail after he was arrested on Saturday following a so-called freedom marchAn alleged Sydney anti-lockdown protester accused of punching a police horse called Tobruk will remain behind bars after refusing a Covid test that was a prerequiste for him to appear in court.Kristian Pulkownik, 33, is yet to formally apply for bail after he was arrested on Saturday following a march in Sydney’s city centre where thousands of people defied coronavirus restrictions to attend. Continue reading...

People coming to the aid of the Wet’suwet’en nation to stop a pipeline are using direct action that is prompting terror chargesThe night of 28 November, Samantha Brooks, 24, hunched over the railway tracks near Bellingham, Washington, about 32km (20 miles) south of the Canada-US border and installed a “shunt,” according to trial documents obtained by the Guardian.Related: Dakota access pipeline: court strikes down permits in victory for Standing Rock Sioux Continue reading...

Catholic church had denied 13-year-old girl sexually assaulted and killed in 1955 a funeral due to arcane ruleThere had never been so many people at a funeral in the history of Montedoro, a village suspended in time among wheat fields and abandoned sulphur mines in central Sicily.Its 1,500 inhabitants had waited for this moment for more than half a century, and on Wednesday gathered in hundreds in solemn prayer in the village church around a small white coffin. Continue reading...

Fourteen questions on general knowledge and topical news trivia plus a few jokes every Thursday – how will you fare?Have you been enjoying the Olympics? Then why not go for gold yourself with the challenge of the Thursday quiz. A mix of general knowledge and topical trivia questions, all laced with a smattering of jokes, the ever-present Kate Bush, the odd irritating anagram, and a hidden Doctor Who Easter egg for you to find. It is just for fun, but let us know how you get on in the comments.The Thursday quiz, No 14 Continue reading...

Different restrictions for different local government areas leads to confusion – and that’s a disaster for compliance

Health experts say surge in cases amid Olympics could overload hospitals unless action taken

Foreign secretary says government will not ‘hold country back’ because some are not getting vaccinated

Former No 10 adviser pressed for appointment to be hurried through, saying he had ‘ordered it’ from PM

The inflammatory condition causes swelling of the limbs and affects more people in the UK than Parkinson’s or MS. For years it has been overlooked, but now awareness is finally growingFive weeks after being diagnosed with cervical cancer, Corinne Singleton was declared to be in remission. She skipped out of the oncology ward that day, ready to make the most of her retirement. Little did she know that her health challenges were far from over. “To be honest,” says Singleton, five years later, “the cancer was a breeze compared with the lymphoedema.”About a month into her recovery, Singleton, 60, noticed some unusual swelling of her upper thigh. “I just thought I must have banged it,” she says. When it persisted after two weeks, she realised, with a sinking feeling, what was the likely cause. She had learned about lymphoedema early on in her treatment for cancer, as a possible side effect of radiotherapy. “I remembered thinking: ‘I hope I don’t get that one’,” she says. Continue reading...

In the last month, devastating weather extremes have hit regions across the world. From flash floods in Belgium to deadly temperatures in the US, from wildfires in Siberia to landslides in India, it has been an unprecedented period of chaotic weather. Climate scientists have long predicted that human-caused climate disruption would lead to more flooding, heatwaves, droughts, storms and other forms of extreme weather, but even they have been shocked by the scale of these scenes

Fuelled by summer heatwaves, wildfires have swept through more than 1.5m hectares of Yakutia’s swampy coniferous taiga, with more than a month still to go in Siberia‘s annual fire season Continue reading...

Photographer Maroussia Mbaye spoke to women who said crushing social stigma, poverty and lack of traditional support systems had left them with no choice but to commit infanticideMbeubeuss is one of the biggest rubbish tips in Africa and Senegal’s largest open cemetery for murdered children. In the past three years, the bodies of 32 infants have been recovered from the site by the waste-pickers who work there.Looking at the high rate of infanticide in Senegal, it seems the main reasons for it are shame about pregnancy outside marriage and a loss of traditional support for young women. Continue reading...

Flights have reportedly been cancelled and checkpoints set up to verify travellers’ health status amid Delta

The fanboy director’s exhaustive doc follows Ron and Russell Mael over their 50-year career as pop’s great arch humoristsOver a whopping two hours and 20 minutes, film-maker Edgar Wright consummates a gigantic act of fanboy love for the glam art-pop duo Sparks, who hailed from California but found fame in Britain on Top of the Pops in the 1970s. Fronted by brothers Ron and Russell Mael, Sparks have continued recording and touring through good times and bad while amassing a fanatical following. Ron is the deadpan one at the piano with the Chaplin/Hitler moustache, and Russell the more extravagant and dishy lead singer.Related: ‘We have a hostility to being boring’: Sparks, still flying in their 70s Continue reading...

With Finland now open to vaccinated travellers, the 20,000 pristine islands off its south-west coast make for an appealing post-pandemic tourFinland has dealt with the pandemic much better than a lot of other countries. It still has one of the lowest rates of both confirmed cases (about 103,851 at time of writing) and coronavirus-related deaths (currently 982) in Europe, a feat many have attributed to a strategy of rapid lockdowns and stringent travel restrictions.It did all this in typical Finnish style: without shouting about it. Perhaps this quiet demeanour is related to the country’s deep connection with the natural world, where shouting usually isn’t necessary. More than 90% of Finland is either forest or water, and the country’s jokamiehenoikeus (right to roam) gives anyone living in or visiting Finland access to all that nature, including a lot of privately owned land. Continue reading...

Activists fear a ‘dangerous precedent’ being set as Copenhagen uses a report that deems Damascus safe to deny residency statusDenmark’s attempt to return hundreds of Syrians to Damascus after deeming the city safe will “set a dangerous precedent” for other countries to do the same, say lawyers who are preparing to take the Danish government to the European court of human rights (ECHR) over the issue.Authorities in Denmark began rejecting Syrian refugees’ applications for renewal of temporary residency status last summer, and justified the move because a report had found the security situation in some parts of the country had “improved significantly”. About 1,200 people from Damascus currently living in Denmark are believed to be affected by the policy. Continue reading...

Melvin Van Peebles and Perry Henzell made seminal 70s films – now their kids have recovered their fathers’ would-be classicsJustine Henzell and Mario Van Peebles both know what it’s like to grow up on movie sets as the child of a groundbreaking director. Henzell was six in 1972 when her father, Perry, finished The Harder They Come, Jamaica’s first full-length feature, starring the reggae legend Jimmy Cliff as a fugitive whose musical success coincides with his criminal notoriety. Van Peebles even starred in his father Melvin’s third film, the 1971 underground hit Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which is credited with inspiring the Blaxploitation genre.As adults, each of them has now had a hand in rescuing and restoring great movies by their fathers that might otherwise have been lost or neglected: Henzell’s more ruminative second feature No Place Like Home, which was lost for more than 20 years, and Van Peebles’s stylish, Nouvelle Vague-tinged 1967 debut The Story of a Three-Day Pass, overlooked at the time and later overshadowed by the more incendiary Sweetback. Henzell laughs when I remark on her father’s momentum in getting started on his second feature so quickly after the first. “He may have had momentum but he had no money,” says the 55-year-old, the ocean lapping at the Saint Elizabeth, Jamaica, shoreline behind her. “The film was shot in fits and starts as the cash came in. He was completely broke after The Harder They Come. He’d been carrying those cans around the world himself trying to sell it. The film still hadn’t repaid its investors and here he was making something even more experimental.” Continue reading...

If cellular agriculture is going to improve on the industrial system it is displacing, it needs to grow without passing the cost on to workers, consumers and the environmentAmericans will eat about 2bn chicken nuggets this year, give or take a few hundred million. This deep-fried staple is a way of profiting off the bits that are left after the breast, legs and wings are lopped off the 9 billion or so factory-farmed chickens slaughtered in the US every year. Like much else that is ubiquitous in contemporary life, the production of nuggets is controlled by a small group of massive companies that are responsible for a litany of social and ecological harms. And, like many of the commodities produced by this system, they are of dubious quality, cheap, appealing and easy to consume. Nuggets are not even primarily meat, but mostly fat and assorted viscera – including epithelium, bone, nerve and connective tissue – made palatable through ultra-processing. As the political economists Raj Patel and Jason Moore have argued, they are a homogenised, bite-size avatar of how capitalism extracts as much value as possible from human and nonhuman life and labour.But if chicken nuggets are emblematic of modern capitalism, then they are ripe for disruption. Perhaps their most promising challenger is a radically different sort of meat: edible tissue grown in vitro from animal stem cells, a process called cellular agriculture. The sales pitch for the technology is classic Silicon Valley: unseat an obsolete technology – in this case, animals – and do well by doing good. Continue reading...

Shelters swept away as activists say people stuck in Cox’s Bazar are highly vulnerable to the ‘rapidly changing climate’At least six Rohingya refugees were killed by landslides or drowned in flooding after rain inundated refugee camps in Bangladesh over recent days, deepening the despair among those living there.Knee-deep waters coursed through the camps, battering fragile shelters made of bamboo and tarpaulin and making at least 5,000 people homeless, according to the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR). Continue reading...

To find out the true production cost of a garment is a tortuous process. Here is what you need to know to buy clothes with a clear conscienceWhat is the true cost of a Zara hoodie? In April 2019, David Hachfeld of the Swiss NGO Public Eye, along with a team of researchers and the Clean Clothes Campaign, attempted to find out. They chose to analyse a black, oversized top from Zara’s flagship Join Life sustainability line, which was printed with lyrics made famous by Aretha Franklin: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T: find out what it means to me”. It was an apt choice, because the idea was to work out whether any respect had been paid to the workers involved in the garment’s production, and how much of the hoodie’s average retail price, €26.66 (£22.70), went into their pockets.This was no simple assignment. It took several people six months, involved badgering Zara’s parent company, Inditex, over email, slowly getting limited information in return, and interviewing dozens of sources on the ground in Izmir, Turkey, where the garment was made. The researchers analysed financial results and trading data, and consulted with experts in pricing and production. It was, Hachfeld says on the phone, with dry understatement, “quite a huge project”. Continue reading...

State premiers including Victoria’s Daniel Andrews have criticised the lockdown settings in NSW as too lax

The final season of the longest running animated series in the US will air in 2022Arthur, the longest running children’s animated series in the US, will soon come to an end.PBS Kids plans to end the beloved television show after 25 seasons, said an original developer of the show during a podcast released on Wednesday. The final season will air in 2022. Continue reading...

Report finds the country’s main grocers, Woolworths and Foodstuffs, make huge profits compared with their international counterpartsNew Zealand’s government will consider breaking up its supermarket duopoly to secure more affordable food prices for shoppers, after a new report that found the grocers were making huge profits and charging some of the highest prices in the OECD.David Clark, the commerce and consumer affairs minister, said on Thursday the government would “do whatever it takes to make sure New Zealanders get a fair deal at the checkout”. Continue reading...

DPP reveals police were given rape allegation advice in June, contradicting claims by police commissioner and home affairs minister that case is with public prosecutorThe ACT director of public prosecutions says the Brittany Higgins investigation is currently back in the hands of the Australian federal police, contradicting both the AFP commissioner, Reece Kershaw, and the home affairs minister, Karen Andrews.During an appearance at the National Press Club on Wednesday, Kershaw was asked for an update on the Higgins matter. Continue reading...

A magistrate will look at whether possible failings in the alert system led to the country’s worst floods in decadesA Belgian judge has opened an investigation for possible manslaughter over floods there that claimed 38 lives, the prosecutors office in the city of Liege announced.The investigating magistrate has the task of identifying who might be responsible for “involuntary homicide by lack of foresight or precaution” the prosecutors office said in a statement on Wednesday. Continue reading...

As infections soar to record highs and the vaccine rollout languishes, some fear there is no end in sight for the pandemic

Observers fear pandemic could be responsible for deaths, adding intrigue to freedom protests taking place in Cuba and USFive mostly elderly and retired Cuban military generals have died in recent days in mysterious circumstances, the country’s communist regime has confirmed, adding intrigue to a new round of freedom protests taking place in the island and US.Related: Leftwing rural teacher Pedro Castillo sworn in as president of Peru Continue reading...

The band’s bassist for more than 50 years, who had recently suffered a hip injury, died in his sleep at his Texas homeDusty Hill, bassist for ZZ Top, has died at the age of 72.Hill, who had recently suffered a hip injury, died in his sleep, as confirmed by a statement on Instagram from bandmates Billy Gibbons and Frank Beard. Continue reading...

Castillo vows to govern ‘for the people and with the people’ but will face deeply divided CongressA rural school teacher who has never held public office has been sworn in as Peru’s new president pledging to govern “with the people and for the people” in a ceremony steeped in historic symbolism on Peru’s bicentenary of independence from Spain.Wearing his typical wide-brimmed straw hat, Pedro Castillo promised to make sweeping changes to the country in his inaugural speech, he paid homage to Peru’s indigenous people and teachers and vowed to combat corruption, rein in monopolies and boost public spending on education and health. Continue reading...

Police speak with wealthy billboard operator who depicted French president as Nazi leaderEmmanuel Macron is taking legal action against a wealthy billboard operator who displayed posters depicting him as Adolf Hitler.Lawyers for the French president are suing after the large images appeared in the Var in the south of France. Continue reading...

Days after PM’s overthrow fears grow that Kais Saied will undo democratic gains achieved by Arab springTunisia’s president has launched a purge of senior officials, including prosecutors and judges, and taken on judicial powers, days after overthrowing the prime minister and imposing emergency law.Kais Saied’s crackdown has dragged the country deeper into uncertainty days after its elected parliament was suspended for a month in a shock move that brought a decade of faltering democracy to a sudden halt. Continue reading...

Health secretary’s comments came after a week of declining cases ended with 4,000 increase in one day

After weeks of resistance, Scott Morrison announced a rise in the disaster payment as well as a top-up for those on welfare payments

Find pushes back by hundreds of thousands of years start of stone-tool industry associated with Homo erectusArchaeologists in Morocco have announced the discovery of north Africa’s oldest stone age hand-axe manufacturing site, dating back 1.3m years, an international team has reported.The find pushes back by hundreds of thousands of years the start date in north Africa of the Acheulian stone-tool industry, associated with the human ancestor Homo erectus, researchers told journalists in Rabat on Wednesday. Continue reading...

Two men were standing by to film murder of Dutch journalist as part of plan to post footage online, say policeFootage of the Dutch crime reporter Peter R de Vries taken shortly after he had been shot in the head in central Amsterdam is thought to have been filmed and posted on the internet by those involved in his murder.Investigators believe two men had been standing ready and waiting for De Vries before he was attacked as part of a plan to film his body and post the images on the internet in order to attract maximum publicity. Continue reading...

Guardians of the Galaxy’s James Gunn is a good directorial fit for the humour and freaky violence of DC’s bad-guy jamboreeDC’s new Suicide Squad movie announces itself as different from the coolly received first film from 2016 simply by adding “The” to the title, maybe sneakily trying for an unacknowledged rebrand or reboot. James Gunn, also in charge of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, is brought on board as director and co-writer. This second Squad outing (if you don’t count last year’s standalone Harley Quinn adventure Birds of Prey) is a long, loud, often enjoyable and amusing film that blitzes your eyeballs and eardrums and covers all the bases. There is Guardians-style comedy mixing humans and talking animals, there is freaky violence – including what I have to say is a gruesomely impressive interior-anatomical shot, showing a knife plunging into the still-beating heart – and there is colossal CGI spectacle for the final act in which a giant thing runs rampant in a city, while the gang look up at it; a trope that has become almost legally mandatory for superhero movies.Viola Davis once again brings a touch of class to the Suicide Squad franchise as the chillingly manipulative security chief Amanda Waller who now springs supervillain Bloodsport (Idris Elba) from jail so that he can head up an elite new crew of misfits, desperadoes and undesirables. These include Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), the ironically belligerent Peacemaker (John Cena), King Shark – a great big talking shark in Hulk-ish stretchy shorts – voiced by Sylvester Stallone, Ratcatcher II (Daniela Melchior), who commands an army of rats wherever she goes, and Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), who fires molten polka-dots at the enemy, revving himself up for the task by imagining that this is his overbearing mother. There is also a kind of B-team of Squadders whose job is to be hilariously expendable. Continue reading...

The craft store had acquired the 3,600-year-old artefact for its Bible museum, but court says it had been smuggled and should be returned to IraqA rare and ancient tablet showing part of the epic of Gilgamesh, which had been acquired by Christian arts and crafts retailer Hobby Lobby for display in its museum of biblical artefacts, has been seized by the US government.The Department of Justice (DoJ) alleges that the 3,600-year-old “Gilgamesh Dream Tablet”, which originated in a region that is now part of Iraq, was acquired in 2003 by an American antiquities dealer, “encrusted with dirt and unreadable”, from the family member of a London coin dealer. Once it had arrived in the US, and been cleaned, experts realised that it showed a portion of the Gilgamesh epic, one of the world’s oldest works of literature, in the Akkadian language. Continue reading...

Extent of arcane practice known as crown consent in Scotland has until now been unknown to the publicThe Scottish government has given the Queen advanced access to at least 67 parliamentary bills deemed to affect her public powers, private property or personal interests under an arcane custom inherited from Westminster.The Queen’s consent procedure, which critics have called anti-democratic, has been used repeatedly by the monarch in recent decades to secretly lobby for changes to proposed UK legislation before it is passed by parliament. Continue reading...

Luchino Visconti emerges badly from this desperately sad documentary about the exploitation of his Death in Venice child star Björn AndrésenThis documentary tells us how the most beautiful boy in the world became its saddest man, his life damaged by the exploitative abuse that the movie business incidentally hands out to all those beautiful girls in the world without anyone caring or making documentaries about them.Related: ‘Death in Venice screwed up my life’ – the tragic story of Visconti’s ‘beautiful boy’ Continue reading...

Photographer unhappy about model railway version of viral picture she took at Berlin lakesideA woman whose photograph of a naked man in pursuit of a wild boar at a Berlin lakeside went viral has said she might take legal action against a company that has immortalised the spectacle for model railway enthusiasts.Adele Landauer, an actor and charisma coach, told German media she resented the fact that others were making money from her snapshot, which went around the world last August. Continue reading...

Author accused of repeating ‘lazy inaccuracies’ about businessman’s role in Russian politics and societyRoman Abramovich’s lawyer said it was defamatory to describe the businessman as having “a corrupt relationship” with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and that he had acted “covertly at his direction” in key business deals such as the purchase of Chelsea football club.Speaking on the first morning of a preliminary hearing of a high court libel claim against a bestselling book about the modern Kremlin, Hugh Tomlinson QC said the 54-year-old billionaire said he did not “bring this claim lightly” and understood it could be characterised as “an attack on public interest journalism”. Continue reading...

In a dense new docuseries, the personal and political journey of Barack Obama is explored along with the difficult tightrope he was forced to walkThe date was 10 February 2007 and the air was cold. Barack Obama, a US senator without deep political experience, stood before the old state capitol in Springfield, Illinois, where Abraham Lincoln began his career, and announced his daring candidacy for president of the United States.But on that same day, a State of the Black Union conference was taking place in Virginia. Al Sharpton, a civil rights leader and former presidential candidate, told the gathering: “I wish Obama had announced here ’cos Lincoln did not free us. The abolitionist movement freed us. We’ve got to quit giving the wrong people credit for our history.” Continue reading...

Loosening of international travel restrictions will let millions more people visit friends and family in England

Activists say Lifta, abandoned during the 1948 war, must be preserved in the face of Israeli construction plansThe ancient Palestinian village of Lifta sits on a quiet hillside minutes from Jerusalem’s bustling modern centre. Abandoned when its residents fled during the 1948 war, it has been left unchanged – frozen in time – ever since.Today, however, its overgrown domed stone houses with arched windows, built during the early Ottoman Empire and resting on even older ruins dating back to the Iron Age, are at risk of being demolished to make way for a luxurious resort of villas, hotels and shops. Continue reading...

Landscape surrounding Snowdonia in Gwynedd is 32nd site in UK to get prestigious global statusThe slate landscape of north-west Wales, said to have “roofed the 19th century world” as its quarries exported slate across the globe, has become the UK’s newest Unesco world heritage site.The landscape surrounding Snowdonia in the county of Gwynedd was awarded the prestigious global status – already enjoyed by sites such as the Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu in Peru, and the Grand Canyon in the US – by the World Heritage Committee meeting in China. Continue reading...

Special rapporteur urges security council to call for ceasefire amid fears Covid will spread across wider region

Many of us are holidaying close to home this year and opting for camping, having never tried it before. Readers recall the cold, wet, wild and wonderful experiences they have had under canvasAfter 18 months of lockdown and seeing nothing but buildings and city life, I needed to get away. I’d dreamed of visiting the Outer Hebrides for years and decided to take the plunge in May 2021, walking and camping solo along the Hebridean Way – my first time camping as an adult. I woke up to stunning beach views and I loved the freedom. But it wasn’t always easy: some nights I had to hold my tent up against the winds at 3am, and carrying all my kit on my back was horrendous at times. But I wouldn’t change a thing. My aim for the trip was to get back in touch with my homeland and endure the camping – but it turns out I love camping! It won’t be long before I’m on my way back to the Outer Hebrides – but with a lighter rucksack and a better inflatable mat this time. Bev Mackenzie, freelance copywriter, Bristol Continue reading...

Female member wins appeal to be allowed to take part in traditional Bavarian summer eventA German court has ruled that women cannot be excluded from a traditional event in which fishermen compete to catch the biggest fish in a stream that runs through a Bavarian town.The state court in Memmingen said the group that organises the town’s Fischertag, or fishermen’s day, must allow female members to participate in the climax of the annual summer event, which features people jumping into a stream with nets to catch trout. Whoever catches the biggest fish is crowned the “fishermen’s king”. Continue reading...

Potential witnesses reportedly distracted by visit of Jean-Claude Van Damme to nearby opticians