Research reveals huge disparity between perceived and actual willingness of public to contribute to fixing climate
Politicians and policymakers significantly underestimate the public’s willingness to contribute to climate action, limiting the ambition and scope of green policies, according to research.
Delegates at the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) were asked to estimate what percentage of the global population would say they were willing to give 1% of their income to help fix climate change. The average estimate was 37%, but recent research found the true figure is 69%.
Candidate defeats Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns to lead Greens in England and Wales with vision for ‘eco-populism’ movement
Zack Polanski has won the election to lead the Green party in England and Wales, with a big mandate for the party to adopt his vision to become a mass membership “eco-populism” movement directly taking on Reform UK.
Polanski, who was the party’s deputy leader and is a Green member of the London Assembly, defeated Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns by 20,411 to 3,705 votes in a ballot of party members. Ramsay and Chowns, who were standing as a co-leadership team, are two of the Greens’ four MPs.
The unprecedented find has shifted archaeological understanding about the first civilisations in the Americas
Archaeologists in Peru have discovered a multicoloured three-dimensional mural that could date back 4,000 years, in an unprecedented find that has shifted archaeological understanding about the first civilisations in the Americas.
The centrepiece of the three-by-six metre mural is a stylistic depiction of a large bird of prey with outstretched wings, its head adorned with three-dimensional diamond motifs that visually align the south and north faces of the mural. It is covered with high-relief friezes and features designs painted in blue, yellow, red and black.
A festival atmosphere in Sunderland, Salford and York may succeed in inspiring the next generation of England stars
The streets of Eccles have given little away on the face of it over the past two Saturdays. Local residents are going about their business, the nearby canal path is full of walkers and runners, and there is a slumberous Saturday morning feel: until you turn into the Salford Community Stadium.
The Women’s Rugby World Cup has made a strong start with decent crowds and good viewing figures. But there was a concerted effort to go beyond familiar territory in this tournament and lay down some roots in the north of England, too. The early signs suggest that may well have been achieved.
Allen, who directed Trump in 1998 film Celebrity, adds that he disagrees with his politics but ‘if he would let me direct him now that he’s president, I could do wonders’
Woody Allen has said he was impressed by the acting abilities of Donald Trump when he directed the now-president in the 1998 film Celebrity.
Speaking on Bill Maher’s Club Random, Allen said Trump was “a pleasure to work with and a very good actor”.
Italy goalkeeper joins for €35m and signs five-year deal
Ederson helped City win 18 major honours in eight years
Manchester City have confirmed the signing of Gianluigi Donnarumma from Paris Saint-Germain as Ederson ends his eight-year stint at the club with a move to Fenerbahce.
Donnarumma has signed for an undisclosed fee, understood to be in the region of €35m (£30.4m), committing himself to a five-year contract. The Italy international will wear the No 99 shirt at City.
Sighting by James Webb space telescope of black hole with sparse halo of material could upend theories of the universe
An ancient and “nearly naked” black hole that astronomers believe may have been created in the first fraction of a second after the big bang has been spotted by the James Webb space telescope.
If confirmed as a so-called primordial black hole, a theoretical class of object predicted to exist by Stephen Hawking but never before seen, the discovery would upend prevailing theories of the universe.
Andrea Berta’s first transfer window since taking over as sporting director has been busy. Headline moves for Viktor Gyökeres and Eberechi Eze have given Mikel Arteta the firepower and creativity he asked for, while Martín Zubimendi has added class to midfield. The arrival of Cristhian Mosquera, Christian Nørgaard, Noni Madueke and Kepa Arrizabalaga has also added depth to Arsenal’s squad that is already being called on after a series of early season injuries, while the late signing of the exciting Ecuador defender, Piero Hincapié, should prove to be a shrewd addition. Ed Aarons
Festivals are increasingly seen as a family holiday and many have kids areas – even nannies. We brave the hot tents and random ravers to see what they’re like
As a DJ plays MJ Cole’s UK garage classic Crazy Love, adults across London’s Cross the Tracks festival lift up little children in brightly coloured ear-defenders to dance. A smile spreads across my baby son’s face as he bounces his body, finding something that looks like rhythm. Later that day, my daughter snuggles into my chest in her carrier as I dance to songs by Ezra Collective that she has heard in the car many times.
My mum took me to Reading festival when I was 16 and as I’ve grown up there have been new ones to match the seasons of my life. Then came motherhood: last year I became a single parent to a pair of delicious, curious, boisterous twin babies. But I don’t want to stop indulging my inner child alongside my actual children, and I’m determined to keep music festivals in my life.
I am there so often that the man who runs the recyclables aisle knows my name – and he is seriously unimpressed with my offerings
You know a lot of things have gone wrong for you when the guy at the municipal dump knows your name. It basically means you’re bereaved or getting divorced – because if you’re just a regular, organised person who goes to the dump a lot, you’re in and out of there like a ghost.
So anyway, I wouldn’t call it a friendship, between me and the guy in the recyclable items aisle; it’s more of a Tom and Jerry thing. I try to leave stuff where it might find a new home, and he tries to get me to put it in landfill. I say, “But sir, it’s a brand new commode, there are people who’d bite your hand off for one of these,” and he says, “Give it back to the NHS,” and I say, “Do you think I haven’t tried that?”. And he shakes his head, and I put it in landfill, but then wait until his back is turned and run back with three Zimmer frames.
Legal experts say charges against Afghanistan war veteran Bajun Mavalwalla II mark an escalation in the Trump administration’s crackdown on first amendment rights
The arrest of a US army veteran who protested against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has raised alarms among legal experts and fellow veterans familiar with his service in Afghanistan.
Bajun Mavalwalla II – a former army sergeant who survived a roadside bomb blast on a special operations missionin Afghanistan – was charged in July with “conspiracy to impede or injure officers” after joining a demonstration against federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Spokane, Washington.
A man grapples with an overwhelming desire to remove his leg in a lingering psychological interrogation from Norwegian film-maker Viljar Bøe
Norwegian director Viljar Bøe has been hacking out an interesting niche for himself in the horror genre, specialising in a variety grounded more in psychology than supernatural jiggery pokery. For example, Good Boy from 2022 revolved around a man and his “dog” (who is obviously a guy in a dog costume) acting like a mutt at all times. Similarly, his new feature features a character called Amir (Freddy Singh) with a psychological fixation that’s so unusual he feels he must keep it a secret from his girlfriend and all acquaintances: he has body integrity dysphoria (BID), which in his case means he has an overwhelming desire to amputate his left leg even though there’s nothing physically wrong with it.
Amir lives with his super-nice, cheerful girlfriend Kim (Julie Abrahamsen) in hyper-tolerant, Scandi-socialist quasi-utopia Norway, so when he drunkenly tries to self-amputate, everyone just assumes it was a suicide attempt and showers him with understanding and support. His old friend Jonas (Viggo Solomon) even offers him an office job, but Amir is so obsessed with his leg he constantly haunts the chainsaw aisle at his local DIY shop. After seeing an interview on TV with Rikke (Louise Waage Anda), a young woman who is open about her own BID (she wants to be blind), Amir seeks her out for advice. Soon, the two of them are having a sort of platonic affair, with Amir storing his cache of paintings depicting himself as an amputee that he doesn’t dare let Kim see.
From the firing of the labor statistics chief to plans for a new census, the president’s moves serve to entrench authoritarianism
In 1937, Joseph Stalin commissioned a sweeping census of the Soviet Union. The data reflected some uncomfortable facts – in particular, the dampening of population growth in areas devastated by the 1933 famine – and so Stalin’s government suppressed the release of the survey results. Several high-level government statistical workers responsible for the census were subsequently imprisoned and apparently executed. Though the Soviet authorities would proudly trumpet national statistics that glorified the USSR’s achievements, any numbers that did not fit the preferred narrative were buried.
A few weeks ago, following the release of “disappointing” jobs data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Donald Trump fired the commissioner of labor statistics, Dr Erika McEntarfer, and claimed the numbers were “rigged”. He also announced his intention to commission an unprecedented off-schedule census of the US population (these happen every 10 years and the next one should be in 2030) with an emphasis that this census “will not count illegal immigrants”. The real goal is presumably to deliver a set of population estimates that could be used to reapportion congressional seats and districts ahead of the 2026 mid-term elections and ensure conditions favorable to Republican control of Congress – though it is not clear there is sufficient time or support from Congress to make this happen. The administration is also reportedly “updating” the National Climate Assessments and various important sources of data on topics related to climate and public health have disappeared. In addition to all this, Trump’s justice department launched an investigation into the crime statistics of the DC Metropolitan Police, alleging that the widely reported decline in 2024 DC violent crime rates – the lowest total number of recorded violent crimes city-wide in 30 years – are a distortion, fueled by falsified or manipulated statistics. One might say that the charge of “fake data” is just a close cousin of the “fake news” and all of this is par for the course for an administration that insists an alternate reality is the truth. But this pattern may also beget a specifically troubling (and quintessentially Soviet) state of affairs: the public belief that all “political” data are fake, that one generally cannot trust statistics. We must resist this paradigm shift, because it mainly serves to entrench authoritarianism.
Daniel Malinsky is an assistant professor of biostatistics in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University
One of the world’s most prominent hedge fund billionaires has warned that rising inequality is turning the US into an autocratic state and condemned business leaders for failing to speak out against Donald Trump’s policies.
Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, said “gaps in wealth” and a collapse in trust were driving “more extreme” policies in the US.
The price of gold has hit a fresh record high, as investors seek out safe-haven assets to protect against inflationary and geopolitical risks.
Gold rose above $3,500 (£2,614) an ounce in Asia, surpassing its April peak. It has nearly doubled in value since early 2023. The rally comes as the US dollar has weakened and some central banks add to their gold holdings, ditching US government bonds, known as US treasuries.
After landmark flop The Heretic, the director was considering ‘immolating myself on Hollywood Boulevard’ in 1977. But a new documentary premiering at Venice calls for its redemption
‘Evokes not terror but laughter.” “A movie for morons, a total cheesy rip-off that makes not one minute of coherent sense.” “The stupidest major movie ever made.” These were some of the milder responses from reviewers to Exorcist II: The Heretic, one of the most notorious disasters in Hollywood history, on its release in 1977. Its director, John Boorman, says he felt utterly humiliated and close to despair. “I considered my choices. The first was to commit suicide. The second was to defect to Russia,” the chastened director told one interviewer. He asked another if he could atone for his film by “immolating myself on Hollywood Boulevard”.
What was the problem? Audiences had, most likely, been looking for shock and horror, revolving heads and vomit, but Boorman gave them metaphysics and surrealism instead – and they weren’t standing for it. That’s why many jeered, laughed, hurled popcorn at the screen, and even – according to William Friedkin, director of the original Exorcist, who called the sequel a “horrible picture” – chased studio executives down the street. Viewers were nonplussed by a plot that had Linda Blair’s Regan, the traumatised girl from the first movie, now turned into an all-American tap dancing teenager. For some reason, she is undergoing a course of hypnotic therapy on a Bakelite “synchroniser” machine operated by a brusque, no-nonsense psychiatrist played by Louise Fletcher (Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).
Tens of thousands of foreign students are to be contacted directly by the government and warned that they will be removed from the UK if they overstay their visas.
The Home Office has launched the new campaign in response to what it has called an “alarming” spike in the number of international students arriving legally on student visas then claiming asylum when they expire.
All plants need a little light in their lives, but some can thrive even in the shadiest spots
What’s the problem?
We moved house two years ago, and some rooms in our new home have very little natural light. The plants we brought with us aren’t thriving. What houseplants can cope with low light levels?
Diagnosis
Many popular houseplants, especially those that need bright, indirect light, will struggle in dimly lit spaces. Symptoms like yellowing leaves, leggy growth and overall decline are common when plants aren’t getting enough light to photosynthesise properly. But all is not lost. Several houseplants are far more tolerant of low light and can thrive in shadier spots. The key is selecting species that originate from environments where filtered light is the norm.
Putin’s invasion has seen Ukrainian book lovers recoil from Russian literary dominance, by a range of means
One day this summer, the Ukrainian artist Stanislav Turina took two of his books to his garden near Kyiv. One was a volume of poems by Alexander Pushkin.
But Turina – a voracious reader, never without a couple of books in his backpack – had no plans to pick it up again.
Shanghai-based developer Posh Cat Studio focused on the satisfying thrill of solving life’s small mysteries in this cosy crime caper
As the latest generation of 18-year-olds is about to find out, starting university is an experience fraught with minor as well as major problems. Oversleeping and missing lectures, forgetting where your study group is meeting, mislaying your books – a lot of your time is spent looking for things.
It is these small mysteries that concern Little Problems, a cute detective game, in which the protagonist, Mary, must use her sleuthing abilities to make it through each day as a new student . Created by Indonesian designer Melisa, who has chosen to go by her first name only, the idea comes from her love of detective stories, but also her wish to take violence out of the genre.
The arts and politics are bound to mix, but they are not the same thing. In the cold war, Soviet artists performed in the west. Should the Russian soprano, who has condemned the Ukraine invasion, be blocked from singing in London?
It is one of my very earliest concert memories. In October 1965, my father drove us to Manchester to hear Mstislav Rostropovich play in the Free Trade Hall. Rostropovich played Dvořák’s cello concerto with the Moscow Philharmonic, who began the concert with a symphony by Tikhon Khrennikov and ended it with one by Brahms. I was smitten by Rostropovich’s noble playing. I had never heard a musician like him before.
This was, though, a concert taking place slap-bang in the middle of the cold war. The Cuban missile crisis had taken place less than three years earlier. The Berlin Wall was still fairly new. The Vietnam war was deepening. That summer I had read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. The movie version of Le Carré’s novel, with Richard Burton, was due out by the year’s end.
The 38-year-old is in the US Open quarter-finals, but his body has lately struggled in the latter stages of grand slams
Almost every time Novak Djokovic has competed in a grand slam tournament this year, a record has fallen. In New York alone, he became the oldest man in more than three decades to reach the fourth round of the US Open, then he repeated the trick by winning that fourth-round match. Djokovic’s straight-sets victory against Jan-Lennard Struff established the 38-year-old as the oldest man in the open era to reach the quarter-finals of all four grand slam tournaments in a calendar year.
Djokovic’s late-career achievements are unprecedented but, for a player who has won every single significant trophy, only more big trophies will satiate those boundless ambitions. Once again, he has plotted his path back to the late rounds of a grand slam tournament full of hopes that fortune will fall his way, allowing him to pull off his greatest achievement: a 25th grand slam title.
Six Palestinian media workers, four of them Al Jazeera journalists, were killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike on their tent by Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital on 10 August. Here, some of their families pay tribute
Foreign minister says move is not aimed at Israeli people but ‘ensuring their government respects international and humanitarian law’
At least 63,633 Palestinian people have been killed and 160,914 others injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza since 7 October 2023, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.
At least 76 Palestinian people, including 12 aid seekers, were killed in the last 24 hours alone, the ministry said.
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