World news | The Guardian

• Tom Barrack, 73, among three men charged in New York• Billionaire allegedly tried to influence US foreign policy

Boris Johnson speaks to taoiseach hours before he publishes a blueprint aimed at re-engineering protocolBoris Johnson has called on the EU to “address the serious issues that have arisen” with Brexit in Northern Ireland just hours before he publishes a blueprint aimed at re-engineering the protocol he signed up to in 2019.He was speaking to Micheál Martin on the eve of the publication by the Brexit minister, David Frost, of a “command paper” on the Northern Ireland protocol. Continue reading...

Priti Patel strikes deal as number of people making voyage this year reaches 8,452, eclipsing 2020’s totalThe UK taxpayer is to hand over a further €62.7m (£55m) to France to fund another clampdown on small-boat crossings of the Channel, the Home Office has revealed.The home secretary, Priti Patel, agreed to pay the sum as part of a deal reached with the French interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, on Tuesday. Continue reading...

According to epidemiologists, meeting outside helps minimise infection risks but heat itself has a negligible effect on the virus

Judge condemns chain’s ‘complete lack of risk assessment’ over seating fault that led to death of Ateeq Rafiq in 2018Cinema chain Vue has been fined £750,000 for safety breaches after a filmgoer died when he became trapped under a cinema chair leg-rest in 2018.Ateeq Rafiq, 24, died in hospital after his neck became stuck under the powered chair, which was found to have blown a fuse in its control box, as he searched for his phone and keys after watching a movie. Continue reading...

Exclusive: officers in England no longer have to verify whether new arrivals have received a negative Covid test

Readers respond to the government’s plan to impose a statute of limitations on prosecutions for crimes committed in the Northern Ireland conflictMy sister Maxine Hambleton was murdered in the Birmingham pub bombings in 1974. The decision by Boris Johnson’s government to introduce a statute of limitations on atrocities linked to the bizarrely named “Troubles” (Report, 14 July) is yet another punch in the face for the victims of terrorism linked to Ireland.Once an amnesty is granted to terrorists and murderers, we can forget about the rule of law. Our government will have replaced it with the rule of the gun and the bomb. History shows that when you allow murderous zealots the opportunity to slaughter without any repercussions, they revel in that weakness. Continue reading...

The west is acting like the empires of old and failing to help poor people stand on their own two feet, says Benny DembitzerThe debate in the Guardian (Outrage aimed at No 10 as MPs back £4bn cut to foreign aid budget, 13 July; Letters, 15 July) over the past few days has only contributed to the continuation of a fundamental error that is literally costing millions of lives in the global south. None of the politicians or correspondents who have intervened in the discussions have emphasised the profound conflict between aid and development. The two are usually presented as synonymous – they are not.Because we have nurtured very little development to enable poor people in poor countries to stand on their own two feet, we have had to give them more aid. We have not helped them develop their own agency. We have not enabled them to develop agriculture to meet their own needs, encouraged governments to undertake land reform, educated women farmers, facilitated local seed multiplication or created local agricultural colleges. Continue reading...

Government expected to bar unjabbed from some indoor venues and launch ‘green pass’ for travel

Sir Jeremy Farrar says ‘no reason other than political manoeuvring’ for delay until spring 2022

Authorities say woman in her 50s died at home and is the fifth fatality linked to the current Delta outbreak in NSWA woman in her 50s from south-western Sydney has died of Covid with police investigating what is the fifth death linked to the current Delta outbreak.The death was announced on Monday afternoon after emergency services discovered her body earlier in the day when attending a home in Green Valley. Officers had responded to reports of a “concern for welfare”. Continue reading...

19 July 1976: More than 20 African and Arab countries withdraw from the Games in protest at New Zealand’s sporting links with apartheid South AfricaThe United Nations secretary-general, Dr Waldheim and the Commonwealth secretary-general, Mr Shridath Ramphal, last night urged African nations to end their boycott of the Olympic Games in Montreal.In separate statements issued after a meeting at the UN headquarters in New York, they also called for efforts by the International Olympic Committee and all nations to resolve what Mr Ramphal called “issues of legitimate concern to African and other States.” Continue reading...

Incessant foreign meddling and corrupt elites have ensured life for Haitians remains mired in violence and poverty. President Moïse’s assassination marks an escalating catastropheThe Haitian political activist Marie Antoinette Duclair appears to have been unaware that two men on a motorbike were following her car through the badly lit streets of Port-au-Prince.Her passenger on the night of 29 June was a journalist, Diego Charles. They had been attending a meeting, and she was now, at 11 o’clock at night, dropping him at his home in the Christ-Roi area of Haiti’s capital. Continue reading...

Everyone needs some novelty right now, so our writer is tackling a new activity each week. First, he gets dragged perilously quickly around a lakeI used to ride bendy buses without holding on to the poles, pretending I was in Point Break. Pathetic. Yet the fantasy returned recently, after I decided to stop taking life for granted and try something new every week. To kick off, I wondered if it was possible for a hapless urbanite to learn to surf, ideally in less than an hour. No, said a few professionals, suggesting I try wakeboarding instead. I didn’t know what that was. Neither did anyone I know. “Is that when they pour water over your face to extract information?” asked my girlfriend, with insufficient concern.“No, but it is an extreme sport,” chuckles Dave Novell, the water sports manager at Liquid Leisure in Windsor, the largest aquapark in Europe. Banana boats zip around us at a large freshwater lake set in lush countryside. How so? Wakeboarding involves being strapped to a plank, then towed by what looks like a coat hanger, attached to either a speedboat or an overhead cable system that whips you around at 19mph (30km/h). Continue reading...

US army special forces veteran Michael Taylor was sentenced to two years and his son Peter for one year and eight monthsA Tokyo court has handed down the first sentences related to Carlos Ghosn’s arrest and escape from Japan, imprisoning US army special forces veteran Michael Taylor for two years and his son Peter for one year and eight months for helping the former Nissan chairman flee to Lebanon.“This case enabled Ghosn, a defendant of serious crime, to escape overseas,” Hideo Nirei, the chief judge, said while explaining the judgment. “One year and a half has passed, but there is no prospect of the trial being held.” Continue reading...

The £37bn system is facing rapidly rising cases and waning compliance as social distancing rules are lifted in England

All-female militias in Syria have swelled in numbers in response to Turkish incursions. The comradeship and life outside traditional gender roles is proving appealing to manyZeynab Serekaniye, a Kurdish woman with a gap-toothed smile and a warm demeanor, never imagined she’d join a militia.The 26-year-old grew up in Ras al-Ayn, a town in north-east Syria. The only girl in a family of five, she liked to fight and wear boys’ clothing. But when her brothers got to attend school and she did not, Serekaniye did not challenge the decision. She knew it was the reality for girls in the region. Ras al-Ayn, Arabic for “head of the spring”, was a green and placid place, so Serekaniye settled down to a life of farming vegetables with her mother. Continue reading...

Our society is changing and farmers are dealing with the most difficult aspects of it

The court has heard at least one witness expected to say they saw the Australian soldier murder a farmer by kicking the handcuffed man off a cliff and then ordering him shot, an allegation Roberts-Smith deniesBen Roberts-Smith’s Covid-derailed defamation trial will resume in a week, with the federal court to hear from four Afghan witnesses from a village where the ex-SAS soldier is alleged to have murdered an unarmed civilian in 2012. Roberts-Smith strenuously denies the allegation.But beyond those witnesses, the already delayed trial almost certainly faces further postponement because of Sydney’s uncontrolled coronavirus outbreak. Continue reading...

Once-grand Canfranc was known as the Titanic of the mountains, but fell into disrepair thanks to fire, derailment and warIt earned the nickname “Titanic of the mountains”, but now the monumental and ill-fated train station at Canfranc is to get a new life as a five-star hotel, 51 years after the international rail link across the Pyrenees closed.The story of Canfranc, a village more than 1,000 metres (3,280ft) above sea level on the Franco-Spanish frontier, is one of vainglorious ambition and abject failure, of incompetence and corruption, of intrigue, smuggling and a century-long run of bad luck. Continue reading...

Editorial in official newspaper calls on youth to follow ‘traditional lifestyles’ and stick to ‘superior’ languageYoung North Koreans have been warned to adhere to the country’s standard language and follow “traditional lifestyles” as part of the regime’s campaign to stamp out cultural influences from neighbouring South Korea.In an editorial published on Sunday, the Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the ruling Workers’ party, railed against the creeping influence of the South on everything from hairstyles to the spoken word. Continue reading...

Westergaard was known for drawing a caricature of the prophet Muhammad which sparked outrage around the Muslim worldDanish artist Kurt Westergaard, known for drawing a caricature of the prophet Muhammad that sparked outrage around the Muslim world, has died at the age 86, his family told Danish media on Sunday.Westergaard died in his sleep after a long period of ill health, his family told newspaper Berlingske. Continue reading...

Team 29 is the latest victim of Kremlin crackdown on organisations it considers ‘undesirable’A rights group in Russia has announced it is shutting down, citing fears its members and supporters may be prosecuted after authorities blocked its website for allegedly publishing content from an “undesirable” organisation.Team 29 – an association of lawyers and journalists specialising in treason and espionage cases and freedom of information issues – said on Sunday that Russian authorities accused it of spreading content from a Czech non-governmental organisation that had been declared “undesirable” in Russia. Continue reading...

Long-running rallies against Thailand’s prime minister have morphed into wider anger at coronavirus vaccine failures amid a surge in cases

Home Office sources say place where body of 24-year-old from Sudan found at Crowne Plaza is crime scenePolice are investigating after a young Sudanese asylum seeker was found dead in the early hours of Sunday in a hotel near Heathrow airport.The man, understood to be 24 years old and to have been in the UK for four months after spending several months sleeping under a bridge in Calais, was found dead just before 1am on Sunday at the Crowne Plaza hotel near Heathrow which the Home Office uses to accommodate asylum seekers. Continue reading...

Analysis: making fully vaccinated travellers returning from places with lower infection rates quarantine, while the virus runs wild here, is difficult to comprehend

Allowing businesses to ban item of clothing at work will exclude Muslim women and encourage Islamophobia, critics sayTurkey’s cabinet ministers have criticised a European Union court’s decision to allow employers to ban headscarves from their workplaces, saying it is “a blow to the rights of Muslim women” and that it would “grant legitimacy to racism”.The EU’s highest court, the European court of justice (ECJ), on Thursday ruled that private employers can ban workers from wearing religious symbols, including headscarves in their workplaces. Continue reading...

LNP women’s conference will rally support for an anti-abortion bill, urge more action on Brittany Higgins’s allegations and push against quotas

On 2 March 2017, Cecilio Pineda Birto made a broadcast about alleged corruption. Hours later he was deadThe hitmen came for Cecilio Pineda Birto as he swung in a hammock at a carwash, waiting for his pickup to be cleaned.The 38-year-old freelance reporter was shot dead on 2 March 2017 in Ciudad Altamirano, a town in the southern Mexican region of Tierra Caliente – a battleground for rival organised crime factions. Continue reading...

American shareholders get go-ahead after witnesses allege Arconic managers knew cladding was unsafeUS shareholders in the Grenfell Tower cladding firm Arconic can proceed with a lawsuit against the company, a court has ruled, after witnesses said managers knew the cladding performed badly in fire safety tests but was being used on high-rise buildings anyway.A group of US investors say they incurred financial losses when Arconic’s Reynobond PE cladding was implicated in the Grenfell fire in 2017, which left 72 people dead. Continue reading...

Actor starred with springer spaniels Snowbear, Dora and Rosy in The Souvenir Part IIIt is one of the most sought-after prizes in the movie world; not the celebrated Cannes Palme d’Or for best film, awarded on Saturday night to French entry Titane, but its animal alternative, the Palm Dog.This year’s coveted leather collar award conferred for the best canine performance on screen was given to Tilda Swinton’s three springer spaniels as the prize celebrated its 20th anniversary – its 103rd in dog years. Continue reading...

Pope.L started out doing performance art because it was cheap, once crawling through a city in a Superman outfit. Now all the big museums want his often racially charged work. As a rare show opens in Britain, he looks backFor a long time, if anyone ever asked for his contact details, Pope.L would produce a business card proclaiming him to be “The Friendliest Black Artist in America”. Sure enough, when he pops up on a video call from his ramshackle studio in Chicago, the performance artist and painter is amenable and thoughtful. In trucker cap and checked shirt, he shifts between smiles and pensive frowns as we track his journey from “difficult” childhood to one of America’s foremost artists, whose work deals with race, economics and language.In 2019, he was given a retrospective that, in an exceptional move, spread across both the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York. The exhibition showcased his 40 years of endurance crawls, guerrilla performances, sculpture and text paintings. Those text paintings are now the focus of Notations, Holes and Humour, a show that just opened at Modern Art in London, his first British exhibition in over a decade. Continue reading...

When should you open the windows, wear a mask and take a lateral flow test? As we enter the ‘personal responsibility’ era, here’s an expert guideFreedom day is here, at least for those of us who live in England, and we’re back in the place nobody wants to be. On one hand: yay, freedom. On the other: an uneasy sense that the relaxation of restrictions has very little to do with the data, and very much more to do with a government that is bored of imposing Covid-related restrictions.So we arrive on the unwanted (by me) territory of personal responsibility. Which freedoms should you grab with both hands, which should you foreswear for the time being, which should you exercise caution around? How should informed, polite, civic-minded and reasonable sorts conduct themselves? Expertise provided here is from Greg Fell, the director of public health in Sheffield; Prof Christina Pagel, the director of the clinical operational research unit at University College London, which applies advanced analytical methods to problems in healthcare; and Debora Robertson, the co-author of Manners: A Modern Field Guide. Continue reading...

Eye-catching new buildings will be in short supply when the Tokyo Olympics open next week. Instead, most venues are repurposed – some from the city’s transformative 1964 GamesWhat if the Olympics were upstaged by a cat? It’s a real danger. Considerable interest has recently been generated by a 3D-animated giant calico creature that mews and wiggles from a newly installed billboard at passengers coming and going from Tokyo’s Shinjuku station. It’s hard to detect similar excitement about the architectural offering at the city’s Olympic Games, which are due to open a year late on 23 July.Nor is it likely to match the impact of the city’s last Olympics in 1964. This was, according to the New York Times, “a debutante ball for democratic postwar Japan”, one that “crowned Tokyo’s 20-year transformation from a firebombed ruin to an ultramodern megalopolis”. It was a festival of construction and design as well as sport: not just the striking Olympic facilities, but also the elevated highways that made Tokyo into the law-abiding version of Blade Runner that it is today – and the first of Japan’s famous bullet trains. Continue reading...

The Orange Is the New Black actor on how playing a therapist in the revived HBO drama helped her cope with the loss of her motherNine years ago, Uzo Aduba had a Sliding Doors moment. She decided to give up acting, mere hours before landing her life-changing role. “I made my mind up to quit on Friday 14 September 2012,” she recalls, the date etched on her memory. “I was planning to call my agent on the Monday and tell them ‘I’m done, I’m not doing this any more.’ But at 5.43pm that evening, I got the call to come and play Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren in Orange Is the New Black. It was nuts. It always makes me think of that line from The Godfather Part III: ‘Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.’”Thank goodness they did, because the 40-year-old has since become a triple Emmy-winner. Born in Boston to Nigerian parents, Uzoamaka Aduba studied classical singing at university before becoming an actor. After a decade of acclaimed stage work and TV bit-parts, she eventually broke through to win multiple awards for the Netflix prison hit Orange Is the New Black. More followed last year for her turn as trailblazing US politician Shirley Chisholm in the Hulu/BBC series Mrs America. Continue reading...

Military build-up continues ‘like never before’ on both sides of 2,100-mile border despite high-level talksIt was described as a dialogue, the first high-level meeting in months between the Indian and Chinese foreign ministers to address the ongoing border aggressions that have pushed the two nuclear-armed countries to the brink of war.But those hoping Wednesday’s meeting would help break a year-long stalemate during which 200,000 troops have built up on both sides of the Himalayan frontier were to be left unsatisfied. Continue reading...

Thousands took to the streets last week in unprecedented protests. Our writer meets some of those trying to force changeThere’s a man from the government playing love songs in the park. Orlando Fuentes has a table, an awning against the hard Caribbean sun, and a sound system from which floats Silvio Rodríguez’s Cita con Ángeles. A woman says that she can’t listen, that it’s a beautiful song ruined by being played at too many government rallies.After 16 months of pandemic and a week of unprecedented protests, the Cuban government wants to soothe the anger. Music is being played in parks across the country. Continue reading...

The acclaimed documentary-maker on his six-part portrait of Ernest Hemingway, his 40‑year career, and working during a golden age of storytellingKen Burns, 67, is a veteran and celebrated American film-maker who has made more than 30 documentaries in a career lasting more than 40 years. Among them is a much lauded history of the American civil war and an equally rapturously received history of the Vietnam war. His six-part documentary on Ernest Hemingway is currently on BBC Four and iPlayer and there is a forthcoming series on Muhammad Ali.What attracted you to Ernest Hemingway as a subject?

The award-winning Turkish-British writer, whose new book explores love and politics in Cyprus and London, talks about generational trauma, food in exile and how heavy metal helps her writeIf trees could talk, what might they tell us? “Well,” says the Turkish-British writer Elif Shafak, smiling at me over a cup of mint tea, her long hair a little damp from the rain. “They live a lot longer than us. So they see a lot more than we do. Perhaps they can help us to have a calmer, wiser angle on things.” In unison, we turn our heads towards the window. We’re both slightly anxious, I think, Shafak because she arrived for our meeting a tiny bit late, and me because this cafe in Holland Park is so noisy and crowded (we can’t sit outside because yet another violent summer squall has just blown in). A sycamore or horse chestnut-induced sense of perspective could be just what the pair of us need.Shafak, who is sometimes described as Turkey’s most famous female writer, has a reputation for outspokenness. A fierce advocate for equality and freedom of speech, her views have brought her into conflict with the increasingly repressive government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In person, however, you get no immediate sense of this. Gentle and warm, her voice is never emphatic; she smiles with her (green) eyes as well as her mouth. And while her new novel, The Island of Missing Trees – her first since the Booker-shortlisted 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World – is certainly political, its themes to do with violence and loss, it’s also a passionate love story, one of whose most important characters just happens to be – yes – a gentle and sagacious tree. Continue reading...

Premier widens who can leave Fairfield, Canterbury-Bankstown and Liverpool to include all authorised workers, as long as they get tested regularly

Seven terminates contract and British far-right figure expected to leave country after joking about plans to breach quarantine rulesBritish far-right figure Katie Hopkins has been dumped as a cast member of Seven’s Big Brother VIP and will leave the country after breaching her contract, Guardian Australia can reveal.Hopkins, 46, broadcast a live video from what she claimed was a Sydney hotel room on Saturday morning, describing Covid-19 lockdowns as “the greatest hoax in human history” while joking about elaborate plans to breach quarantine rules. Continue reading...

Rally outside home of Conservative Richard Drax demands reparations for 200 years of trade in BarbadosProtesters demanded yesterday that a Conservative MP should hand over his 621-acre sugar plantation to the people of Barbados as compensation for his family’s 200 years of slave owning and trading on the island. Richard Drax, the MP for Dorset South, has said the role of his ancestors was “deeply, deeply regrettable” but resists demands for reparations.As part of this year’s Tolpuddle Festival, a rally organised by Stand Up to Racism, Dorset, at the gates of the Drax family estate highlighted the family’s historic role in slavery. The festival celebrates the Tolpuddle Martyrs, poorly paid farm workers, who were transported in 1834 for organising trade union activities. Continue reading...

Everyone from small farms to McDonald’s is getting involved in regenerative agriculture. Could it point the way to a better future for farming?A pheasant struts around the Garden of Eden. The pheasant is, well, a pheasant, a male, with those long, jaunty tail feathers; the Garden of Eden is the semi-serious name given by Dan Cox, a 39-year-old chef turned farmer, to a patch of land about half the size of a football pitch on his farm in south-east Cornwall. Cox began working on it in 2017 and it is his experiment to create a growing space in complete harmony with nature, but also productive and bountiful with some of the most delicious vegetables you will ever taste.Cox looks at the pheasant, which is picking at his seeds and shoots, and squints. “They’re like colourful Chinese chickens that have been bred for stupidity and flying upwards,” he says. “There’s nothing good about them. They don’t taste nice. They’re not supposed to be here. They’re very aggressive. You’re going about your business in your garden and the cocks are coming and attacking you. Crazy! Something’s gone wrong, something’s been removed from the system somewhere to allow that thing to flourish in the first place.” Continue reading...

Varosha, once a chic resort, is being rebuilt in the latest move of Turkey’s power play in the eastern Mediterranean“Do you want to ride or walk?” asks Seyki Mindik. The municipal employee points under the fierce July sun towards the multicoloured bicycles stacked within view of the police barrier at the entrance to Varosha. “There is so much to see. Tourists love it here.”Not so long ago the very notion of the eastern Mediterranean’s most famous ghost town being resurrected as a 21st-century theme park would have been unthinkable. For more than four decades there has been almost no movement among ruins of war left to rot with the passage of time. Continue reading...

Infection linked to MCG reported in Mildura in regional Victoria; all authorised workers from south-west Sydney now able to leave to go to work after NSW government consulted with ‘business and stakeholders’. Follow the latest developments live

A new six-part documentary series follows the community of big-wave surfers at Praia do Norte in Nazaré, Portugal, and hunt for ocean’s EverestIt started as a picture. In 2005, Dino Casimiro, a sports teacher in the fishing village of Nazaré, Portugal, snapped a photo of what he had long observed from the seaside cliffs: swells in the Atlantic the size of buildings, so feared and unpredictable it seemed everyone in town knew of someone who had been lost at sea. The image was stark, magnetic – a wave that appears at level with the cliff, the whitewater break like a cumulus cloud. “I immediately thought that I need to do something,” he recalls in 100 Foot Wave, a new documentary series for HBO. So Casimiro emailed the photo to American surfer Garrett McNamara with a simple question: could you come see if my wave is that big?McNamara, 53, would know; a pioneer of big-wave surfing, in which jet skis tow a surfer in and out of pounding swells, he had pushed the boundaries of what’s considered surf-able throughout the 2000s. He’d won the Tow Surfing World Cup in Maui in 2002, traveled from California to Tahiti, surfed the tsunami of a calving glacier in Alaska. And he was looking for what seemed an unfathomable prize: a 100ft wave, the ocean’s Everest, potentially possible under fluke conditions at a few spots in the world. In 2010, five years after Casimiro’s offer, McNamara and his now wife and manager, Nicole, went straight from the airport to the Nazaré’s 17th-century lighthouse, long abandoned. It was stormy, so windy the crew could barely open their car doors. “When we pulled up and saw the waves,” Nicole told the Guardian, “Garrett just looked at the kid” – a videographer sent by the town’s city hall – “and said ‘Do not turn off the camera.’ And every day it was just a constant reminder of ‘Film this, film this, film this – because we knew what we found was super special.” Continue reading...

As women and children lose out on programmes that could change their lives, Britain’s reputation has been diminishedBukola Onyishi was delighted when she found out that the British government was going to help her realise a dream in one of the poorest parts of Nigeria. With a grant agreement that was meant to last for three years, she was finally going to be able to launch a female empowerment programme for the women of Bauchi state in the country’s north-east, many of whom had fled the militant Islamist group Boko Haram and were now living in abject poverty in camps for the internally displaced.“The grant made us very happy,” says Onyishi, country director for Women for Women International. “[Bauchi] was the right place to be.” Setting it up was not easy: Onyishi and her colleagues had a job to persuade community elders of the project’s value, encountering deep-seated patriarchal beliefs that surprised even her in their obstinacy. But they came round in the end, and the first 12-month empowerment programme began, teaching 1,200 carefully selected women about everything from their basic human rights to numeracy and business skills. Continue reading...

Russian hacking, smear campaigns and livestreamed massacres are the price of Mark Zuckerberg’s quest for connectivity, grippingly probed by two New York Times journalistsHow many books are there about Facebook? I’ve lost count. Many of them belong to the genre of the “insider” story – by an early investor in the company, perhaps; or by a supposed intimate of its founder and Supreme Leader; or by an ex-employee with a bad conscience for the societal damage for which he (and it’s always a he, by the way) has been responsible; or (occasionally) by a vigorous critic of social media such as Siva Vaidhyanathan or Franklin Foer.I’ve read most of these and so approached An Ugly Truth with a degree of scepticism on account of its subtitle: “Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination”. But this book is different. For one thing, its co-authors are not “insiders”, but a pair of experienced New York Times journalists who were members of a team nominated in 2019 for a Pulitzer prize. Much more importantly, though, they claim to have conducted over 1,000 hours of interviews with 400-odd people, including Facebook executives, former and current employees and their families, friends and classmates, plus investors and advisers to Facebook, and lawyers and activists who have been fighting the company for a long time. So if this is an “insider” account, it’s better sourced than all of its predecessors in the genre. Continue reading...

The teenage skateboarder heads a list from Great Britain taking part in debut sports at a decidedly odd Olympic GamesThe Olympics is happening – and for that we can only be grateful. But these Games, the 32nd of the modern era, are likely to be odd ones in, for the first time, an odd-numbered year. Some of the dominant characters of the past decade will be absent, either retired or finally showing human fallibility: so no Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps or Mo Farah. Nor will there be many fans. International supporters have been banned from entering Japan, while spectators will be barred from most events.But Simone Biles, the gravity-scoffing US gymnast will be there, as will her compatriot, swimmer Katie Ledecky, the closest the world has seen to an actual mermaid. And giving Tokyo 2020 (as it is still called) a much-needed pep, the Olympics will welcome five new sports: skateboarding, karate, surfing, sport climbing and BMX freestyle. That eyebrows might be raised at a couple of these even being “sports” is now moot; the International Olympic Committee has decreed it, so best deal with it, grandad. Continue reading...

For all the corruption of recent years, Cyril Ramaphosa’s ‘rainbow nation’ can still make good on Nelson Mandela’s valuesToday is the anniversary of the birthday of Nelson Mandela, the first president of a free South Africa and a global symbol of tolerance, sacrifice, integrity and the battle against racism.When, in 2009, the UN declared 18 July a day to honour Mandela’s values, South Africa was still seen worldwide as a success story. The “rainbow nation” had overcome the violent racial oppression of its past and was fighting apartheid’s toxic legacy of economic inequality. It had one of the most progressive constitutions in the world and a steady record of economic growth. The challenges the new democracy faced were all too evident, but South Africa’s recent history seemed a message of hope for us all nonetheless. Continue reading...