Far from No 10, Nigel Farage has been amassing power in the sprawling, networked space where 21st-century politics happens
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With a buzz of activity in parliament and mandatory back-to-school metaphors, a new political season opens in Westminster, but is that where politics really happens? Yes, in terms of people making policy and law in buildings that are world-famous for that purpose, the SW1 postcode is where it is at.
But the heart of the machine beats with a weak pulse. The UK state is heavily centralised by the standards of most democracies, yet the people at the centre don’t feel powerful. Ministers can’t enforce bin collections in remote areas or call a halt to Middle East wars but they are made to feel answerable for all that is ill in the world, from hyperlocal to geopolitical.
Age ties in with theory tree was planted in 19th century by landowner known as ‘the man who saved Hadrian’s Wall’
Scientists have for the first time confirmed the age of the felled Sycamore Gap tree, adding weight to a theory that it was planted in the late 19th century by a landowner hailed as “the man who saved Hadrian’s Wall”.
Historic England published the conclusion of an investigation by a team of experts who carried out the first dendrochronological – or tree-ring counting – analysis of the tree.
System gives patients, their loved ones and NHS staff the right to request a care review
Martha’s rule, which lets NHS patients request a review of their care, is now in operation in every acute hospital in England, health service bosses disclosed on Thursday.
The system has helped hundreds of people receive potentially life-saving improvements to their treatment since its rollout began last year. It has led directly to patients being moved to intensive care or receiving drugs they needed, such as antibiotics, or benefiting from other vital interventions.
She was the morality crusader who became a figure of ridicule. Now Whitehouse is the subject of a new production starring Maxine Peake. We meet the gay feminist playwright who wrote it
The morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse was a trigger warning long before the term was used. From the 1960s onwards she pursued the BBC over sex and swearing on television and brought private prosecutions against the publisher of Gay News and the director of Howard Brenton’s play, The Romans in Britain, for what she viewed respectively as blasphemy and gross indecency.
So, when Maxine Peake plays the Christian cultural vigilante in The Last Stand of Mrs Mary Whitehouse at the Nottingham Playhouse this week, will there be a warning about its content?
Inspired by her favourite Italian detective Montalbano, our Roman sleuth tracks down the perfect summer dish
As he breaks three eggs into a glass bowl, Lt Columbo tells Joanna Ferris: “I’m the worst cook in the world, but there’s one thing I do terrific, and that’s an omelette.” The episode is Murder By the Book, and Columbo has taken Joanna, the wife of murder victim Jim Ferris, home to save her from more relentless questioning by his colleagues. Of course, we already know it was Jim’s less talented writing partner, naughty Ken Franklin, who did it.
At first, Joanna resists Columbo’s offer of something to eat, but he gently gets on with it, in his trademark raincoat: he cracks the eggs into a bowl, picks out a bit of shell that inadvertently falls into the bowl and asks Joanna where he can get a bowl for the empty shells balanced in his hands. It is a perfect scene and perfect Columbo: bumbling and absolutely certain, attentive to needs and tiny details.
Wildfires were 30% more intense than would have been expected without global heating, scientists say
The extreme weather that fuelled “astonishing” blazes across Spain and Portugal last month was made 40 times more likely by climate breakdown, early analysis suggests.
The deadly wildfires, which torched 500,000 hectares (1.2m acres) of the Iberian peninsula in a matter of weeks, were also 30% more intense than scientists would have expected in a world without climate change, according to researchers from the World Weather Attribution network.
Kirsten Smith was 19 when she first tried heroin; within a few years she was in prison. She says she willingly made bad choices and wants society to stop treating addiction as a disease
Kirsten Smith was 16 when a boy from school injected her with morphine, 18 when she and a date Googled how to crush up and inject themselves with oxycodone, and 19 when she first shot up heroin. Living in Knoxville, Tennessee and modelling herself on Pulp Fiction’s freewheeling Mia Wallace, Smith spent her days experimenting with alcohol, cannabis, ecstasy, mushrooms, LSD and benzodiazepines. She read Kurt Vonnegut and the Beats, and wrote poems on an actual typewriter while listening to the Velvet Underground. For Smith, as for thousands of Americans who came of age in the early 2000s, drug use was a seemingly harmless lifestyle choice.
That is, until she ran out of money. After Smith dropped out of high school and started regularly using heroin, she was caught stealing credit cards and chequebooks from a boyfriend’s wealthy parents, from a family friend at church and from her grandmother. On probation for two years, and forced by her parents into a month-long stay at an addiction treatment facility, Smith felt, for the first time, ashamed.
E-bikes can legally travel at 15.5mph. But the fastest the police have seized was capable of 70mph. What will stop the rise of these souped-up and potentially fatal vehicles?
A busy Wednesday morning on Bishopsgate in London and Sgt Stuart Ford of the City of London police is pointing out possible offenders. “He’s not pedalling,” he says, indicating a man on a bike on the other side of the road. “Still not pedalling, but he is going downhill, he might be all right. I’d still pull him over and have a look.”
Not today, though, because the non-pedalling possible offender is heading north, while Ford’s team – two members of the cycle response unit he set up two years ago and leads – are facing south on the opposite side of the road. A lot of the unit’s work centres on illegal e-bikes; they have seized 212 so far this year.
Isotope analysis finds copper ore came from Yangtze River basin while statue could be a repurposed Tang Dynasty tomb guardian
The great bronze statue of a winged lion perched atop one of two granite columns in Venice’s St Mark’s Square has watched over the city for centuries.
But Italian scientists have now found evidence to suggest the iconic statue was at least in part made in China, and possibly ended up in Venice via the Silk Road after being brought back by the father and uncle of the merchant and explorer Marco Polo.
We should always be suspicious when states try to define a national culture – especially when the arts are in crisis
Sweden is often associated with a large and efficient bureaucratic apparatus. It is also often associated with minimalist interiors furnished by simple pale woods such as birch and pine. It was therefore fitting that, after two years of preparation, the Swedish cultural canon committee presented – in an anatomical theatre from the 17th century – its list of 100 works, ideas and brands that define Swedishness. In direct contrast to the anonymous grey conference rooms usually favoured by Swedish government officials, this unusual list was unveiled in a rather un-Swedish fashion. The contradiction is striking. It says something about how we think about culture, nationhood and identity today – not just in Sweden, but across the west. It also tells us why this canon is doomed to fail and yet for its creators, unfortunately, it has already succeeded.
Originally a pet project of the far-right Sweden Democrats, the canon was commissioned by the sitting rightwing coalition, a minority government dependent on the Sweden Democrats’ parliamentary support. Since the canon committee’s creation in 2023, the tone in Swedish media has been critical. Some have voiced a worry that the project is authoritarian in nature, some have questioned the legitimacy and purpose of the list and others have bickered over the contents of the list itself.
Gabriel V Rindborg is a writer and cultural critic based in Stockholm
An investigation has been launched and a childcare educator has been stood down after a grandparent mistakenly picked up and took home the wrong toddler from a Sydney daycare centre.
The grandfather arrived to collect his grandchild from First Steps Learning Academy in Bangor on Monday afternoon, only to reportedly be given the wrong child.
Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem said she hoped it would encourage people in the US illegally to self-deport
The Trump administration purposefully chose a notorious Louisiana prison to hold immigration detainees as a way to encourage people in the US illegally to self-deport, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary Kristi Noem said Wednesday.
A complex inside the Louisiana state penitentiary, an immense rural prison better known as Angola, will be used to detain those whom Noem described as the “worst of the worst” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detainees. Noem was speaking to reporters as she stood on the grounds of the facility near a new sign reading, “Louisiana Lockup.”
Naomi Osaka is back to her resilient ways. On Wednesday night she turned back 11th-seeded Karolina Muchova for a 6-4, 7-6 quarter-final victory at Arthur Ashe Stadium in just under two hours’ time. The former world No 1, who is just two years removed from watching the tournament from the stands, now finds herself back in a major semi-final for the first time since giving birth to her daughter, Shai, and well on her way toward reprising her mantle as a women’s tour standard-bearer.
The two-time US Open champion enters Thursday’s matchup against Wimbledon finalist Amanda Anisimova as the sentimental favorite. All four times that the Japanese has reached a grand slam quarter-final in her still-young career, she has gone on to win it all. Throughout this year’s US Open, she has not only sustained flashes of the belligerent game that gave rise to her hardcourt dominance. She’s shown she can move with the best of them and bide her time in long rallies and lash a winner when the moment’s right.
Irfaan Ali will be tasked with turning the profits of Guyana’s 2019 oil boom into prosperity for its citizens
Guyana’s president, Irfaan Ali, has proclaimed victory in this week’s general and regional elections after his party won more than 240,000 votes and seven of the country’s ten electoral districts.
“The results are all out there, as published by the Guyana elections commission. The numbers are clear. The people have spoken in an overwhelming way. We have won these elections with a remarkable margin,” he told the Guardian on Wednesday.
Portrait of a Lady by the Italian master Giuseppe Ghislandi handed over by daughter of the late Nazi financier Friedrich Kadgien
Authorities in Argentina have recovered an 18th-century painting stolen more than 80 years ago by the Nazis from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, a week after it was spotted by chance in a real estate listing.
The painting, the long-lost Portrait of a Lady (Contessa Colleoni) by the Italian master Giuseppe Ghislandi, was looted in the second world war. It was handed over on Wednesday to the Argentinian judiciary by the daughter of the late Nazi financier Friedrich Kadgien, Patricia Kadgien, who has been under house arrest with her husband since Tuesday.
Decision marks major victory for school after White House accused it of not addressing harassment of Jewish students
A federal judge on Wednesday ruled Donald Trump’s administration unlawfully terminated about $2.2bn in grants awarded to Harvard University and can no longer cut off research funding to the Ivy League school.
The decision by US district judge Allison Burroughs in Boston marked a major legal victory for Harvard as it seeks to cut a deal that could bring an end to the White House’s multi-front conflict with the country’s oldest and richest university.
American beats Polish rival 6-4, 6-3 to make semi-finals
Meeting with Karolina Muchova or Naomi Osaka up next
Amanda Anisimova conjured the performance of her career on Wednesday afternoon in New York, banishing the ghosts of her Wimbledon nightmare with a sensational 6-4, 6-3 quarter-final victory against second-seeded Iga Swiatek in 1hr 36min. Less than eight weeks after she had been double-bagelled by the Polish star in the final at the All England Club, the 24-year-old American struck back with fearless ball-striking and nerveless resolve to reach her first US Open semi-final.
Swiatek, a six-time major champion and the 2022 US Open winner, looked intent on reprising the script when she broke immediately to extend her personal run to 13 consecutive games in the rivalry. But the eighth-seeded Anisimova struck back on her third break point, finishing with a thumping forehand overhead that drew a roar from the Arthur Ashe crowd and ensured this would bear no resemblance to the rout in July. “Honestly, when I wasn’t able to hold in that first game, I was really, like, OK, here we go,” Anisimova admitted afterwards. “Winning that first game kind of took some stress off my shoulders. Once I got it, I was easing into the match.”
Considering Cymru head coach Craig Bellamy is so patriotic that he lives in a house constructed entirely of Fragrant Spring daffodil bulbs, thinks the long-running BBC soap opera Pobol y Cwm is a documentary and has Dafydd Iwan’s stirring anthem Yma o Hyd as his ringtone, it was no surprise he was impressed by the journey undertaken by Wales fan John McAllister to get to his nation’s World Cup qualifier in Kazakhstan. Currently sitting second in Group J, a point behind North Macedonia but with Belgium three points further back with two games in hand, Wednesday afternoon’s match in Astana is a fairly must-win one for Wales. Anything less than three points would prove a crushing disappointment for McAllister, who set off for the Kazakh capital from Barry five weeks ago and has taken in 11 football matches, no end of foreign boozers, a heavy metal gig and some Irish stranger’s stag do as he travelled around 5,000 kilometres east across four time zones and 12 countries on a series of 17 trains, 11 buses and one plane (a flight he’d rather have not taken but was unable to avoid).
I am definitely used to playing in hot temperatures now in Italy” – recalled England midfielder Ruben Loftus-Cheek reckons he can handle the heat – which is handy given Thomas Tuchel’s side may have to play in dangerously scorching conditions at the Geopolitics World Cup next year.
I only read Big Website of course (ahem) but I did chance upon this piece in yesterday’s Estadios de España on Atlético Madrid’s B team and their new stadium. Yes, it’s international fortnight and I’m bored already. Apparently, in 1999, they finished second in the Segunda División but obviously couldn’t be promoted to La Liga as Atlético Madrid were already there. And, to make things worse, just a year later, Atlético Madrid were relegated to the Segunda División in 2000 so the B team were forced to go down into the third tier!” – Noble Francis.
The photo of Arsenal players celebrating their 1971 FA Cup win (yesterday’s Memory Lane – full email edition) was well captioned. The only info missing was, who is that dude in the background giving off Saturday Night Fever vibes? We deserve to know” – Jim Scullion.
I can’t tell you how relieved I am to finally see the back of the transfer window. My brain was so saturated with rumours, cliches and transfer jargon that I lost the ability to distinguish between a deal sheet and a sh!t deal. I simply couldn’t deal with this sheet anymore” – Peter Oh.
Judge said tech giant had monopoly but let it keep Chrome and Android; critics cried foul while Wall Street cheered
A judge ruled on Tuesday that Google would not be forced to sell its Chrome browser or the Android operating system, saving the tech giant from the most severe penalties sought by the US government. The same judge had ruled in favor of US prosecutors nearly a year ago, finding that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly with its namesake search engine.
Groups critical of Google’s dominance in the internet search and online advertising industry are furious. They contend the judge missed an opportunity to enact meaningful change in an industry that has suffocated under the crushing weight of its heaviest player. Tech industry groups and investors, by contrast, are thrilled. Shares in Alphabet, Google’s parent company, have risen 9% since Tuesday afternoon.
Australian De Minaur loses again at quarter-final stage
Félix Auger-Aliassime continued his sublime return to form at the US Open with another demonstration of his growing maturity as he held his nerve in the decisive moments of a messy, nerve-racking four-hour tussle to defeat the eighth seed Alex de Minaur 4-6, 7-6 (7), 7-5, 7-6 (4) and reach the semi-finals in New York.
By pulling off one of the most significant victories of his career, Auger‑Aliassime has now reached the US Open semi-finals for a second time in his career, four years after his first semi-final in 2021. “It feels amazing. Four years ago, it feels like more, honestly,” he said. “It was a tough couple of years but it feels even better now to be back in the semi-finals.”
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi lead the provocative Saltburn director’s unconventional adaptation of the novel
The first trailer for Emerald Fennell’s new take on Wuthering Heights promises a more erotically charged take on the classic Emily Brontë novel.
Fennell, who won an Oscar for her screenplay for Promising Young Woman, directs Australian actors Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Catherine and Heathcliff. The supporting cast includes Hong Chau, Martin Clunes and the Adolescence breakout star Owen Cooper.
Musician says he has ‘no choice’ after being ‘burnt out by any and all connections’ to his former bandmates
Morrissey has announced that he “has no choice” but to put up for sale the entirety of his business interests in the Smiths “to any interested party/investor”.
The deal, made in apparent seriousness on his website, Morrissey Solo, in a post titled “A Soul for Sale”, would include the band’s name and artwork, which he created, as well as his share of merchandising rights, lyrical and musical compositions, synchronisation, recordings and publishing contractual rights.
Researchers say low- and no-calorie sweeteners appear to affect thinking and memory in middle age
Sweeteners found in yoghurts and fizzy drinks can damage people’s ability to think and remember, and appear to cause “long-term harm” to health, research has found.
People who consumed the largest amount of sweeteners such as aspartame and saccharin saw a 62% faster decline in their cognitive powers – the equivalent to their having aged 1.6 years, researchers say.
News of Lady Mary’s divorce is presented with impeccable seriousness in a watchable outing that shouldn’t be the last
Grand finale? Oh please. Let’s get real; there is no reason why this particular brand of gibbering, wittering, blithering and surreally enjoyable nonsense shouldn’t go on for ever, like Frank Sinatra’s farewell tour or shortbread manufacture in the Scottish Highlands. Both of the previous Downton films had a sentimental last-hurrah message that didn’t preclude another one dropping off the production line. We could make the next film Downton Abbey: The Royal Finale and the one after that Downton Abbey: The Imperial Finale.
The last but one film finished on a funereal drone shot of Downton Abbey at sunset and the one after that was subtitled “A New Era” – but this one, it seems, has taken us back to the very end of the old era, inviting us to swoon loyally at the passing of something special and yet also at the same time doff our caps at the bluebloods’ insouciant gift for survival. There is something entertainingly outrageous in the pure tongue-in-cheek craziness of this new film’s opening sequence; it could almost count as a dadaist dream sequence. I don’t think anything in the TV show or the movies had anything as mickey-takingly bizarre.
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