‘A map is never neutral’: meet the cartographers who took on centuries of western bias

Equal Earth projection, adopted by the UN last week, provides an alternative to 16th-century Mercator display

Three cartographers have spoken of their astonishment at the UN’s near-universal adoption of a map they created to more accurately show the sizes of Africa and Europe, even though they have received a few complaints from some disgruntled diplomats.

The creators of the Equal Earth projection aimed to provide an alternative to the dominant 16th-century Mercator display, which critics have long faulted for giving the impression that northern hemisphere nations are larger than they are – and therefore subtly reinforcing perceptions of where global strength lies.

Published: September 17, 2026, 10:00 pm

‘The damage was much worse than I had imagined’: the shocking inside story of Salman Rushdie’s survival

After ​the writer was stabbed in a horrific attack, his wife started making a video diary of his recovery. The clips are featured in a new film from Alex Gibney, who drew on Dennis Potter to create a powerful portrait of Rushdie’s tumultuous life

Eliza Griffiths was at home in New York, drinking a second cup of coffee one August morning in 2022, when her phone rang. She answered it to a frantic friend, who told her the man she had married just a year earlier, and who had set off the previous night for a speaking engagement nearly 400 miles away, had been hurt. “What kind of hurt?” she panicked. Turning on the television, she was assaulted by blurry images of chaos on stage as audience members surged to the rescue. Her husband, Sir Salman Rushdie, had been stabbed multiple times and was fighting for his life.

Within days of desperately chartering a plane to fly her to Rushdie’s hospital bedside, not knowing if he was alive or dead, Griffiths – a poet and photographer who works under her full name Rachel Eliza Griffiths – had begun to make a video diary recording his treatment and recovery. “When it had become likely that I was going to survive,” says Rushdie drily, “I said to Eliza we need to make a record of this. By which I meant something very modest: maybe she would take a picture of me on her iPhone every couple of days just to document the recovery, but Eliza had bigger ideas.”

Published: September 17, 2026, 9:00 pm

Experience: I survived being buried in an avalanche

I was at the mercy of the mountain, heading towards a 20-metre drop, about to discover what it felt like to die

Growing up in Sweden, I was as comfortable on skis as I was walking on my feet. As a teenager, I became a professional free skier, a style that features jumps and tricks. In my 20s, I moved into content creation. Now, at 38, I spend the winter months filming extreme ski videos with my photographer wife, Sofia.

In March this year, we’d been staying at the base of the Lyngen Alps, northern Norway. Nonstop rain had prevented us from filming but, finally, we had fresh powder and clear skies. The plan was for me to go up the mountain with a friend, Lovisa, and make our way down as the sun was setting. Sofia would film us from the bottom using a drone.

Published: September 17, 2026, 9:00 pm

Scientists are fighting a longer mosquito season with ... more mosquitoes

Nearly half a million more of the insects are being released in California – they’re all male and carry a bacterium

The box arrived in the San Gabriel Valley, just east of Los Angeles, filled with more than two dozen paper tubes about the size of toilet paper rolls.

“All 25 tubes are here,” said Tristan Hallum, who oversees scientific programs for the San Gabriel Valley mosquito and vector control district.

Published: September 17, 2026, 8:00 am

Robert Kraft, once the NFL’s good guy, is just another billionaire silencing Macklemore | Howard Bryant

The Patriots owner’s decision to ban the rapper from performing at the team’s stadium brings back memories of the blackballing of Colin Kaepernick

Six years ago, in the middle of a “racial reckoning” that never was, a White House that had begun out of control reached its chaotic apex. Federal officials were sweeping citizens off American streets in unmarked vehicles, surrounding the Lincoln Memorial with armed guards and rolling military vehicles through residential neighborhoods in a fascist reaction to protests against the murder of George Floyd. It was at this point that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, realizing it had all gone too far, appeared on a Zoom and admitted his league was “wrong” for not listening to its players when they had protested against police brutality.

The implication was clear: more than any other sports league, the NFL was harshest in its reaction to the protests that began with Trayvon Martin in 2012 and continued with Ferguson, Baltimore and Colin Kaepernick. By blackballing Kaepernick, sitting by while broadcast partners refused to air the national anthem to undermine the protests, and, most embarrassingly, Goodell’s draconian announcement that teams would be subject to fines if players showed dissent, the NFL had proven itself to act in the most un-American of ways.

Howard Bryant is the author of 11 books, including Full Dissidence: Notes from an Uneven Playing Field, and Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America. He also writes on Substack

Published: September 17, 2026, 6:14 am

Beck: ‘What does a devil’s haircut look like? Anything with a lot of architecture and wild flights of fancy’

The genre-fluid singer answers your questions on being funky v lonesome, his infamous MTV interview with Thurston Moore and why he said yes to performing with a chain-smoking alcoholic robot

• Read Alexis Petridis’s 5* review of new album Ride Lonesome

You’ve been performing since the late 80s. What keeps you going? AmongstTheWaves
It’s a good question. I don’t really know any other life. I’ve spent a lot of my time trying to create a body of work, and out of that, maybe there’s a few songs at the end that are not bad. So I just keep going down into the mine, trying to come back with a couple of things worth keeping. It’s a lot of digging. If I had to stop and get a job painting houses or something, I would still make songs just for myself, because that’s how it started.

You tend to alternate between styles from album to album. What do you feel is closer to your intrinsic self, funky Beck or lonesome Beck? Mazzini
Probably lonesome. But the other side of things gets me out of my shell, stops me from being a little too ponderous, which I’m apt to do. The other side of what I do – Loser or Odelay – was more of a fluke. At the time that was what people liked. Now it’s kind of reversed – they prefer the more introspective, quiet songs, and stuff that’s a little more genreless. I don’t have any songs that they play at weddings, like Uptown Funk. I remember telling Mark Ronson, “Hey, you made a wedding song.” He was like, “Yeah, finally.” That’s a very elite category of song.

Published: September 17, 2026, 7:00 am

‘Run! Get away!’: witnesses recount Israeli ‘double tap’ strike that killed child and medic in Gaza

When Mohammad Abdul Zinati, 15, rushed to help a man wounded in a bomb attack, he had no time to react before he too was hit

Mohammad Abdul Zinati was walking home from school through the rubble of Salah Khalaf Street, in northern Gaza City, when he stopped at a supermarket where a group of classmates and friends had gathered.

Shortly before 3:30pm, an explosion tore through the air. Along with several others, Mohammad rushed into the street to see what had happened.

Published: September 17, 2026, 10:00 pm

Revealed: how Russia uses mobile ‘super-app’ Max to spy on its citizens

Research shows tens of millions of people are being forced to use platform that amounts to ‘backdoor’ on their device

Over the past 18 months, tens of millions of Russians have been forced to install a new app on their phones – a violet-blue button designed for messaging and payments, called Max.

Authorities have touted it as a patriotic alternative to Telegram and WhatsApp; Russian glitterati have promoted it in rap videos and comic routines. This summer, it became the country’s most-used messaging app.

Published: September 17, 2026, 11:00 pm

Russians go to polls against backdrop of Ukraine war and Putin’s tightening grip

President’s United Russia party faces no meaningful opposition after liberal anti-war party barred from ballot

• Revealed: how Russia uses mobile ‘super-app’ Max to spy on its citizens

Russians are going to the polls to elect a new State Duma in a tightly controlled vote stripped of meaningful competition and with little doubt about the result.

Vladimir Putin’s United Russia is expected to extend the grip on parliament it has held for 23 years, alongside a handful of nominal opposition parties that reliably vote with the Kremlin on the issues that matter. The three-day vote begins on Friday, with results expected after polls close on Sunday.

Published: September 17, 2026, 7:00 pm

Ilhan Omar brings bill to make ICE ‘pay the price’ for terrorizing communities

Make ICE Pay Act would block nearly $140bn in funding and redirect money to places reeling from Trump crackdown

The US congresswoman Ilhan Omar is set to introduce a bill that would make federal immigration agencies “pay the price” for terrorising vulnerable communities, blocking nearly $140bn in funding and redirecting it to local recovery efforts, the Guardian has learned.

The Make ICE Pay Act, due to be introduced on Thursday, targets funding previously designated for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) under Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Published: September 17, 2026, 4:00 am

Global leaders urged to join initiative to fight extreme inequality

More than 1,500 academics and economists sign letter, calling growing gap between richest and poorest ‘a policy choice that can be reversed’

More than 1,500 academics and economists from 100-plus countries are urging global leaders to join an initiative against extreme inequality, calling current unfairness “a policy choice that can be reversed”.

Before the UN general assembly in New York next week, the experts have signed an open letter backing the International Panel on Inequality (IPI).

Published: September 17, 2026, 11:00 pm

South Korea will not send military to support US war on Iran, defying Trump pressure

Seoul resolves recent speculation over sending military to strait of Hormuz, saying ‘there won’t be deployment that would involve or enter war’

South Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, has said he will ⁠not deploy the military to the ⁠Middle East in a way ​that could draw the country into conflict, resisting calls from Donald Trump to support his war in Iran.

“There won’t be deployment that would involve or enter war. I can tell you that very clearly,” Lee said at a ⁠news conference on Friday. “We won’t deploy military assets in any form to that end.”

Published: September 17, 2026, 10:54 pm

RFK Jr promises anti-vaxxers a ‘friend at the White House’ amid deadly measles outbreak

The US health secretary added that he would’ve made sweeping changes ‘on day one’ but he had to follow the law

As the death toll from the worst measles outbreak in decades rises, Robert F Kennedy Jr headlined the Washington DC conference of the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense, which he led for nearly a decade.

“Let me be clear. You have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House,” Kennedy, now serving as secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), told anti-vaccine activists at the conference in a nearly hour-and-a-half-long speech. He urged patience, saying that he would’ve made sweeping changes “on day one” but that he had to follow the law in order to make permanent change.

Published: September 17, 2026, 12:59 pm

LA woman charged with murder over bus crash that preceded deadly helicopter plunge

Bailee Lynn Rios, 36, accused of driving on wrong side of road to cause fatal crash NBC news helicopter was covering

A California woman was allegedly driving under the influence when she sped down the wrong side of the road, ran a red light and plowed her SUV into a Los Angeles metro bus on Tuesday, killing two passengers, prosecutors say, in a tragedy compounded when a news helicopter covering the crash plummeted from the sky, killing three.

Bailee Lynn Rios, 36, has been charged with two counts of murder over the deaths of the two people on the bus, identified as Daniel Castillo, 46, and Gage Weida, 31. Rios was being held on $4.1m bail and is set to be arraigned on 18 September. Online court records did not list a lawyer who might speak on her behalf, and the public defender’s office did not immediately return a message about whether it was representing her.

Published: September 17, 2026, 5:34 pm

YouTube star Ms Rachel to match Macklemore’s $1m Palestine aid donation

Educator talks of ‘moral obligation’ and urges ‘every wealthy white celebrity’ to make similar donation

YouTube star Ms Rachel has said she is matching rapper Macklemore’s $1m donation to organizations supporting Palestinians, calling on other public figures to follow suit.

Macklemore, who was fired as the opening act on Ed Sheeran’s tour after saying “Free Palestine” on stage at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, pledged to donate the entirety of his earnings from Sheeran’s tour to several organizations focused on the Palestinian people.

Published: September 17, 2026, 6:00 pm

‘Forcing a reckoning’: How Asia is preparing for a ‘supersized’ El Niño

From Sri Lanka to South Korea, governments are preparing for droughts, wildfires, typhoons and floods – with climate plans facing their biggest challenge to date

Asian governments are rushing preparations for the most severe El Niño weather event on record, with hundreds of millions of people bracing for multiple crises at once as extreme heat, heavy rain and food shortages hit the region.

Fuelled by exceptionally warm ocean conditions across the tropical Pacific – and developing alongside the human-driven climate crisis – El Niño is virtually guaranteed to grow to a very strong intensity towards the end of this year and into 2027.

Published: September 17, 2026, 4:57 pm

No hope, no vote … how most of Delhi’s sex workers are being struck off electoral rolls

Modi’s bid to ‘purify’ voter lists has affected a third of the city’s residents. In the GB Road red light district, those who lack permanent homes and documents are among the hardest hit

Rows of hardware and car-part shops line Garstin Bastion Road, with faded signs crammed together above their shutters. By day, the street is one of Old Delhi’s busiest commercial thoroughfares. But as dusk falls, GB Road, as it is known locally, transforms into one of the city’s most notorious red-light districts.

An estimated 2,800 sex workers live and work in brothels that occupy the upper floors of the dilapidated buildings, their entrances tucked behind narrow stairways and unmarked doors. Women sit on plastic stools beneath the stairways, calling out to men passing on the street, while others watch from windows above, their eyes following the movement below before customers are directed upstairs.

Published: September 17, 2026, 8:00 pm

FBI warned ICE agents could be targeted by fake ‘tradwife’ dating profiles, memo reveals

Exclusive: Internal FBI memo, reviewed by the Guardian, said women wanted to dox and ‘embarrass’ agents, but provided few details

The FBI internally warned that a group of women were creating fake online dating accounts with “tradwife” aesthetics in an effort to lure US immigration agents and “dox” them.

The FBI in Chicago disseminated a brief memo to other law enforcement officials across the US on the potential threat to agents in February, warning that “as of late January 2026, a small group of women allegedly were creating fictitious online dating profiles with the purpose of attracting and then doxxing law enforcement participating in immigration enforcement”. The report, which was shared with the Guardian, provided few details about the alleged scheme and did not explain the source of the information.

Published: September 17, 2026, 7:00 am

Accused Oregon serial killer indicted in connection with death of sixth woman

Grand jury indicts Jesse Calhoun, 41, on charge of first-degree manslaughter in the death of Elizabeth Gibson

An Oregon man accused of killing five women has been indicted in connection with the death of a sixth woman, officials announced this week.

Jesse Calhoun was indicted by a grand jury on a charge of first-degree manslaughter in the death of Elizabeth “Libby” Gibson, said the Multnomah county district attorney on Wednesday. Calhoun is accused of causing Gibson’s death and acting “unlawfully and recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life”.

Published: September 17, 2026, 12:00 pm

No Land to Stand On by Mahmoud Khalil review – a searing account of political imprisonment

The Palestinian Columbia student snatched by ICE writes about his Kafkaesque ordeal with a quiet fury

Mahmoud Khalil was completing a master’s degree at Columbia University when, in March 2025, plain-clothed officers from the Department of Homeland Security snatched him from his home in New York and took him to an immigration detention centre; he was then transferred to another facility in Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles away. As a green card holder, Khalil has permanent US residency, but secretary of state Marco Rubio had determined that his continued presence in the country would have “adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”, and sought his deportation under a legal provision dating back to the McCarthy era. Khalil was released on bail in June 2024 after a federal judge ruled his detention unconstitutional, but the Trump administration is still trying to have him removed.

Khalil – who was born to Palestinian parents in a refugee camp in Syria – had been targeted because of his advocacy on behalf of pro-Palestinian protesters during campus protests over Columbia University’s links to Israel. They were calling for Columbia to cut its ties with Israeli academic institutions and companies profiting from Israel’s onslaught on Gaza; in response, the university called in the NYPD. There was no suggestion that Khalil had done anything unlawful, and no criminal charges were brought against him; the government had simply identified him as an influential pro-Palestinian voice on campus, and for that reason alone they wanted him gone. He spent a total of 104 days in detention, missing the birth of his son.

Published: September 17, 2026, 11:00 pm

MobLand season two review – why is Pierce Brosnan’s tedious crime drama so obsessed with testicle jokes?

This Guy-Ritchie-directed gangland drama is deathly dull. It’s a charm-free watch with awful characters and humour so genital-based that at one point Helen Mirren yells a penis joke at a sausage

MobLand. It sounds like a regional nightclub. Or a boyband. But it’s not. It’s a Paramount+ crime drama starring Pierce Brosnan as an Irishman unable to speak in a convincing Irish accent. This is his tragedy. His cross to bear. And now it’s ours, too, because MobLand is back for a second series, with Brosnan – as the veteran gang boss Conrad Harrigan – once again battling other gang bosses while attempting to say things like “Oi love ye loike a tramp loves paraffin” without his vowels shrivelling into tiny raisins of pseudo-Hibernian shame. Does he succeed? Oi tink not! But there are bigger problems afoot, to be sure.

Created by Ronan “Top Boy” Bennett and directed by Guy Ritchie, the first series of the London-set MobLand (feel the width of that capitalised L!) was a sustained roar of nothing much; a rumble through every possible modern gangster drama cliche in the Every Modern Gangster Drama Cliche book. You know the sort of thing: car chases through suspiciously empty city streets; convoluted drug deals with mumbling eastern Europeans; tiny-eyed endomorphs in flat caps bellowing “Oi” in slow motion as they hurtle through the air to the strains of something unconscionable by Kasabian.

Published: September 17, 2026, 9:00 pm

Is the tie dead? Fashion connoisseurs hope not as House of Lords relaxes rules

Switch to ‘business attire’ is a sign of the times, but formal neckwear still has its place, say some of Savile Row’s finest-dressed

The House of Lords has long been derided as a stuffy relic of the past. But now its benches, usually filled with haughtily dressed men, could soon resemble something more akin to “dress-down Friday”.

One of the nation’s most storied chambers of power has enacted a rule change: men are no longer required to wear a tie in the House of Lords. Instead, they should opt for “business attire”.

Published: September 17, 2026, 10:00 pm

‘Like a Bond villain’s lair’: I climbed the Dolomites to the world’s most spectacular mountain hut

Perched above the clouds in northern Italy, Santnerpass refuge doesn’t just look stunning. It’s a marvel of eco-building – and vegetarian cuisine

‘I think my boots are falling apart!” shouts Nigel just as we hit the pinnacles, a whole range of them jutting up and out from the mountainside, all thrillingly tall, spiky and knobbled. Through them we painstakingly step, fingers aching in gloves, heads sweating in helmets – squashing up narrow chimneys, squeezing through mighty boulders and inching along slender ledges on a twisting path that’s only just discernible through swathes of sharp white scree.

I know how Nigel’s boots are feeling: the going is far harder than I was expecting. This is only the first day of our annual trip to the Dolomites, a vast range of breathtaking sawtooth peaks in northern Italy, but my head’s already full of the thought I have every year as we start out: “If only you’d got fitter.”

Published: September 17, 2026, 11:00 pm

Neither foam nor feathers - the perfect pillow for my neck and back is filled with buckwheat hulls

A small cotton tube stuffed with buckwheat hulls gave me firm, cool support that adapts to how I sleep

• I thought I found the perfect pillow. Could these three unseat my favorite?

• Sign up for the Filter US newsletter, your weekly guide to buying fewer, better things

I used to fight with my pillow all night. I would squash it, fold it, flip it over and shove my hand underneath for extra height. Still, I would wake with a tight neck that only my morning yoga practice could straighten out.

When I sleep, I start on my back, but end up sleeping on my side. Finding a pillow that doesn’t give me back or neck pain is a challenge, especially because I have wide shoulders and prefer a very firm bed. For me, a squishy pillow made little sense.

Published: September 17, 2026, 7:15 am

Is Trump’s AI obsession walking the world into disaster? – podcast

Tech bosses have called for a slowdown in artificial intelligence and the creation of formal guardrails from the US government. But why is President Trump unmoved by the doomsday predictions, dismissing them as a ‘hoax’? What lies behind his embrace of the AI industry? Jonathan Freedland speaks to the Guardian US tech editor, Blake Montgomery

Watch Jonathan Freedland on our new Politics Weekly YouTube channel

Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com

Listen to the latest season of Black Box

Published: September 17, 2026, 9:00 pm

Bad news this week for Trump – but Fox viewers might have missed it | Margaret Sullivan

The network continues to cater to its presidential ‘audience of one’, downplaying his supreme court loss and more

Two breaking stories roiled US politics this week and immediately got big play on most news sites.

The supreme court surprisingly rejected – for now – Donald Trump’s attempted restrictions on mail-in ballots, a blow to Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections.

Published: September 17, 2026, 5:00 am

The spectre of ‘remigration’ is haunting Europe. Slovenia in 1992 gives us a blueprint for this state terror | Miha Mazzini

In February that year, the Slovenian government officially deleted 25,000 citizens, turning them overnight into illegal immigrants

So much of your daily life – your job, your health, your home – hinges on the fact that your name is in a government database. Are you a legal citizen of your country, with everything that entails? You are, until an anonymous bureaucrat hits a key one night and strips it all away, turning you into an illegal immigrant. It happened in Slovenia in 1992.

“I took my son to register for secondary school. The clerk rifled through the papers, then stared at me as if refusing to see the boy standing right next to me. Finally, she said: ‘But you don’t have a son. He doesn’t exist.’” I can’t forget the look on the face of the woman who was telling me this story. It was a mixture of deep hurt and bewilderment, with a pause after every sentence, as if she were walking through a minefield. During the research for my book Erased, I compiled countless stories like this: stories I once would have thought impossible.

Miha Mazzini is a writer, film-maker and anthropologist

Published: September 17, 2026, 9:00 pm

Trump’s love of fossil fuels is about more than money | Moira Donegan

The US decision to remove limits on coal and gas plant emissions is rooted in a perception of manliness in these industries

You can impress a certain kind of person at a party by reciting the fact that there are more yoga instructors in the US than there are coalminers. In fact, the disparity is greater than this catchy phrasing suggests: there are actually more yoga instructors in the US than there are people employed in the entirety of the coalmining industry, miners and otherwise. It’s not even especially close: about 38,000 people in the US work in coal, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared to about 100,000 yoga instructors who are registered with the Yoga Alliance, an industry group.

If you looked only at the numbers, you might think a politician would be incentivized to talk about the interests of the yoga industry, about the dignity that yoga jobs give to American families, or about the need to foster growth in the yoga industry, more than they talk about these things for coal; after all, yoga, not coal, is putting food on the table in more American households. But no politician would ever talk about the interests of yoga teachers, or wax poetic about their role in the American dream, the way they do with coal miners; if they did, they’d be laughed out of the room. And we all know why: yoga is thought of as decadent, cosmopolitan and feminine, while coal mining is imagined as hardscrabble, honorable and masculine.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

Published: September 17, 2026, 3:00 am

Watching NAZA was like peering through a window – and seeing the machinery of killing in Gaza | Mahmoud Mushtaha

For so long I wondered why I survived while family and friends were killed. Now I know the only difference between life and death may have been an AI algorithm

The lights go down, and for a moment I forget I’m watching a screen. It fills with a rooftop in Tel Aviv at night, black and grey. The camera pans down. Through windows, we see people watching screens of their own – couples holding each other close, following the news, eating food. They appear absorbed in their own worlds, and why wouldn’t they be?

That’s the thing I can’t get past as a Palestinian journalist from Gaza, watching this apparent tranquillity: this must be it – this must be what safety actually looks like. Just an evening uninterrupted, with no military aircraft flying overhead or drones buzzing incessantly. Meanwhile, men and women on the rooftop above them calmly talk about how they decided how many Palestinian civilians would die on any given night.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Published: September 17, 2026, 5:30 am

Trump says the US doesn’t need Canada. But it’s the source of key minerals for the military | Vince Beiser

Trump himself has acknowledged the US need for Canadian aluminum – and has largely exempted metals from new tariffs

As trade talks with Canada shambled toward collapse in late August, Donald Trump brayed on Truth Social: “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” But in fact, Canada, like China, has something the US needs badly: critical metals that undergird modern military technology.

Canada is the United States’s biggest foreign source of minerals, supplying about $47bin worth each year. Sixty per cent of all the aluminum the US uses each year, for instance, comes from Canada, where mighty, remote rivers provide smelting plants vast quantities of cheap, low-carbon electricity. The US military uses the lightweight metal for everything from shell casings to ship hulls and aircraft fuselage. The Pentagon’s cutting-edge F-35 fighter jet’s airframe is about 40% aluminum. “This country desperately needs aluminum,” Trump complained last month. “We get it all from Canada for the most part, and we need it badly.”

Published: September 17, 2026, 6:00 am

Ben Jennings on the collapse of Ed Sheeran’s tour – cartoon

Continue reading...

Published: September 17, 2026, 10:08 am

The Guardian view on the Nepal-Tibet floods: a spur to action on climate | Editorial

New research links last month’s disaster to fossil fuel pollution. Supporting disaster-hit countries must be at the centre of climate politics

Following a familiar pattern, coverage of the glacier collapse on the Nepal-Tibet border three weeks ago has subsided with the initial shock. But while the world’s attention has shifted, Nepal remains in the midst of an appalling tragedy. As well as at least 1,300 people who are known to have been killed, more than 5,000 are missing, some of them trapped in tunnels linked to the 13 hydropower plants that were damaged by the floods. On Wednesday four bodies were recovered from one of these tunnels, with searches ongoing. Families of the missing people are desperate for news.

Last week the country’s foreign minister, Shisir Khanal, said that it would ask the UN’s loss and damage fund for $20m (£15m) towards a total rebuilding cost of around $5bn (£3.75bn) – including the replacement of up to 20,000 homes. The first academic study linking the disaster to the climate crisis will now be added to that application. Scientists at Imperial College London, along with international collaborators on the World Weather Attribution project, found that a number of drivers of the glacier fall had been made worse by atmospheric heating. While not the sole cause, fossil fuel pollution was judged to have destabilised the geology of the mountain environment.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Published: September 17, 2026, 10:47 am

The Guardian view on EU-Canada relations: strategic ambition with lessons for Britain | Editorial

Mark Carney’s response to the challenges posed by an unreliable US president contains a clarity of vision that is lacking in post-Brexit Britain

There is no “associate membership” of the European Union, nor any blueprint for what such a thing might involve. It is a political hypothesis, describing a relationship of intimate strategic alignment with the EU, stopping short of actual membership, in ways that are significant but undefined.

This week, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, invited Canada to be the first country to enjoy this putative status. In her state of the union speech, she spoke of a future relationship elevated “to the highest level possible”, reflecting an affinity of interests and values. Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, reciprocated the sentiment in a speech on Wednesday. Addressing the European parliament, he said the two sides should secure “strategic autonomy through deep cooperation” across a broad spectrum of interests: trade, defence, industrial capacity, science, space and AI. He proposed Canadian participation in the EU’s Erasmus student exchange programme and Horizon research scheme.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Published: September 17, 2026, 10:48 am

Josh Allen shines again as Bills celebrate new home with slugfest victory over Lions

• Detroit Lions 31-41 Buffalo Bills

• Bills QB throws three TDs and rushes for two

• Jared Goff excellent in defeat for Lions

Josh Allen quickly put his stamp on the Buffalo Bills’ new stadium, which has been dubbed “The House that Allen built.”

Allen threw three touchdown passes and ran for two scores, and the Bills beat the Detroit Lions 41-31 on Thursday night in the first regular-season game at Highmark Stadium.

Published: September 17, 2026, 8:55 pm

Premier League: 10 things to look out for this weekend

Spurs and Villa meet in desperation derby and Andoni Iraola faces test on south-coast return

• Premier League top scorers: check the latest standings

Chelsea have not won this west London derby since Brentford’s first Premier League season. Each visit since October 2021’s 1-0 win, Ben Chilwell the scorer, has been a draw. This season has continued the divergence between the clubs’ respective approaches, Brentford’s solidity and continuity compared to Chelsea attempting their latest reboot. Kevin Schade, after two well-taken goals at Bournemouth, will fancy facing a defence not yet attuned to Xabi Alonso’s configurations. Only one team has won a Premier League title with a defensive trio: Chelsea’s last title team, in 2016-17 under Antonio Conte. Alonso’s attack has been rather more successful, presenting another challenge for Jannik Schuster. Replacing Nathan Collins, the 20-year-old central defender had a tough examination from Bournemouth’s Evanilson on his first Premier League start, emerging with credit. For Chelsea, João Pedro has registered three goals and three assists, but doubts surrounding his fitness could lead to Danny Welbeck’s first league start. John Brewin

Brentford v Chelsea, Friday 8pm (all times BST)

Tottenham v Aston Villa, Saturday 3pm

Published: September 17, 2026, 4:01 pm

Sports quiz of the week: records, hazards, complaints and boring events

Have you followed the big stories in football, cricket, motor racing, tennis, cycling, golf, athletics and American football?

Published: September 18, 2026, 12:00 am

Bill Belichick’s son resigns after investigation into UNC football turmoil

• Steve Belichick steps down as defensive coordinator

• Inquiry finds ‘certain actions’ disregarded school values

• GM Michael Lombardi resigned earlier this month

North Carolina defensive coordinator Steve Belichick, the son of the team’s head coach Bill Belichick, has resigned as the school concludes an investigation into its football program.

The school released a statement Thursday morning saying Steve Belichick’s resignation would be effective in late October at the conclusion of a medical leave, which was announced early in preseason camp.

Published: September 17, 2026, 7:46 am

Knicks halt sales after pricing ‘mistake’ puts season opener tickets above $1,000

• Get-in for game v LeBron James’s 76ers spiked to $1,408

• MSG Sports to restart sales and refund fans who paid

The New York Knicks said on Thursday they are pausing ticket sales after a mistake caused them to be listed at prices that were too high.

The NBA champions put individual game tickets for the 2026-27 season on sale this week. The get-in price for the 20 October season opener against the Philadelphia 76ers was more than $1,000.

Published: September 17, 2026, 1:03 pm

LeBron James once raged against the machine. Increasingly, he helps prop it up

LeBron James was once one of the world’s most outspoken athletes. Now he’s plugging a predictions market and an authoritarian leader

There was a time when LeBron James’s views on abuses of political power were considered dangerous enough that Donald Trump’s allies told him to shut up and dribble. But over time, James has become less outspoken. After he built a reputation as a voice on social issues and human rights, anti-government protesters in Hong Kong burned his jersey over what they saw as his lack of support for their campaign. Alongside plenty of other US athletes, he has barely spoken on politics during Trump’s second term in power. There was the recent dismal sight of him promoting a prediction market (although at least he kept his clothes on). Now he is happily associating with – and helping promote – an authoritarian leader.

On Sunday, Angola’s president, João Lourenço, welcomed two of the most famous people in America – James and Will Smith – to his presidential palace.

Published: September 17, 2026, 2:00 am

Two years and one World Cup down, Mauricio Pochettino is still assessing

The US manager’s first squad of the 2030 World Cup cycle leans heavily on youth, injecting intrigue into the four-game window.

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In the moments after the USMNT’s 4-1 crash-out in the last 16 at this summer’s World Cup, Mauricio Pochettino took the podium for what many assumed would be his last press conference as the US head coach. I had a question for him: “Would you consider your tenure here a success?” His answer was full of the usual platitudes, but one thing did stand out. He said, more or less, that he and his staff had finally gotten a good idea of the player pool.

It struck me as bizarre at the time. By almost every account, Pochettino had been brought in to win the game that he’d just lost. Given just two and a half years to get it done, his job had never really been to evaluate the player pool; it had been to maximize results with the tools at hand, something he did with varying levels of success. And now, in the shadow of arguably the most disappointing result in US men’s history, we were finding out that it had been a fact-finding mission? And there were suggestions that he was leaving?

Published: September 17, 2026, 10:15 am

Kluivert and Rayan rock Real Sociedad as Bournemouth win on European bow

The first goal that AFC Bournemouth ever scored in Europe could be heard out on the Bay of Biscay. A tradition from Real Sociedad’s old Atotxa ground, once lost but now recovered at Anoeta, dictates that a single flare is set off every time the visitors score while two are lit when the home team do; that way those out to sea know the score. And so it was that at 21.41 on a Thursday night in September 2026, Justin Kluivert found the net and a man named Juan Iturralde ran out into the street to let everyone know what had happened.

Back in Dorset and high in Anoeta, where 2,000 Bournemouth fans sang their way through this most special of occasions, they knew. They had waited their whole lives for this and it was a nice way to mark the history they made, their arrival announced to Europe with fireworks and a 2-1 victory in San Sebastián, the city where it all began for Andoni Iraola, the manager who brought them here.

Published: September 17, 2026, 2:14 pm

There’s a long history of athletes pooing themselves mid-race – why, and how can you avoid it?

Since the ancient Olympics, athletes like Hyrox competitor Joanna Wietrzyk have experienced runner’s diarrhoea. What does the science say about extreme exercise’s ‘mechanical jostling of the intestines’?

Soiling yourself in public sounds like a bad dream. But the Australian athlete Joanna Wietrzyk has now apologised for doing just that at the Hyrox games in Beijing on Saturday.

Wietrzyk won the fitness race but not before using communal equipment with faecal matter visibly running down her legs – and muddying Hyrox’s reputation.

Published: September 17, 2026, 7:00 pm

House Republican releases campaign ad critical of Trump’s immigration policies

María Elvira Salazar says some enforcement has ‘gone too far’ as GOP seeks distance from Trump before midterms

A Republican congresswoman has released a campaign ad criticizing Donald Trump’s approach to immigration enforcement, in the latest sign that a key plank of the president’s 2024 re-election campaign has become a liability for his congressional allies ahead of November’s midterm elections.

“Mr President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Florida’s María Elvira Salazar says in a 30-second ad. “In July, 50% of the 50,000 people that were detained had no criminal record. Be careful what your advisers are telling you about immigration policy.”

Published: September 17, 2026, 8:37 am

Judge orders Trump administration to give 30 days’ notice before moving to demolish Kennedy Center

Ruling comes amid demolition threats by Donald Trump after being stymied from adding his name to centre

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to give at least 30 days’ notice before moving to demolish the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after the US president warned that it could be “ripped down”.

The US district judge Christopher Cooper issued the order on Thursday after lawyers for the Democratic congresswoman Joyce Beatty submitted evidence of Trump’s comments and sought clarification over whether the building could be closed or bulldozed.

Published: September 17, 2026, 11:28 am

New lawsuit alleges Epstein possessed ‘child sexual abuse material of countless children’

Two women who filed suit against Epstein estate ask court to order program to notify potential victims

Jeffrey Epstein’s estate is facing a new lawsuit filed by two women who allege that Epstein possessed child sexual abuse material (CSAM) of them. They want a judge to order that a program be set up to identify and notify all individuals whose “unlawful sexualized images” might have been in Epstein’s collection, and are also seeking monetary damages.

The complaint was filed this week in the US district court for the southern district of New York on behalf of two plaintiffs, who are anonymous in the filing but described as survivors of Epstein’s CSAM crimes. The lawsuit was filed against Epstein’s former lawyer Darren Indyke and Epstein’s former accountant Richard Kahn, who are being sued in their capacities as co-executors of Epstein’s estate. Attorneys for Indyke and Kahn, who have both said that they had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes during their employment, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the complaint on Wednesday.

Published: September 17, 2026, 9:22 am

US court sentences ex-Syrian official who ran notorious ‘punishment wing’ to 60 years

Samir Ousman al-Sheikh, part of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, was in charge of Adra prison where prisoners were tortured

This article contains descriptions of torture.

A US federal court in Los Angeles sentenced a former Syrian government official who ran one of the country’s most infamous prisons to 60 years in prison on Thursday – the most significant punishment handed to an official of ousted president Bashar al-Assad’s regime by a foreign court and to a defendant present in person.

Published: September 17, 2026, 5:37 pm

Indonesia gets its first aircraft carrier amid debate over cost and military ambitions

The gift from Italy has sparked fierce debate among defence analysts and opposition politicians who question its true cost and purpose

Indonesia has received its first aircraft carrier, a former Italian warship that the government says will strengthen the archipelagic nation’s maritime security and disaster response capabilities.

The 41-year-old former ITS Giuseppe Garibaldi, with capacity for short takeoff and vertical landing aircraft and helicopters, arrived Friday morning at a naval base in North Jakarta’s Tanjung Priok port, where it was welcomed with a military ceremony.

Published: September 17, 2026, 9:04 pm

New cat species identified for first time in more than a century in Bolivia

New species of wild feline was discovered in Bolivia’s Yungas forest that is smaller than the average domestic ⁠cat

A diminutive wild cat that inhabits Bolivia’s ⁠cloud forest has been identified as a previously unknown species, marking the first time a new living feline species has been formally named and described in more than a century.

The cat, called tilcayo by local communities, is part of a group called tiger ⁠cats found across much of South ⁠America. It was found in Bolivia’s ​lush Yungas forest, a mountainous region where forests are often covered by clouds and surrounded by high humidity, according to researchers. It measures about 18in (46cm) long and weighs about 3lb (1.4kg), making it smaller than the average domestic ⁠cat.

Published: September 17, 2026, 1:43 pm

US passenger duct-taped to plane seat says: ‘I don’t remember any of it’

After being read charges, Layne Lundeen said: ‘I assaulted a police officer? Is that what it says? I don’t have my glasses’

An American Airlines passenger who was duct-taped to his seat following an alleged outburst including racial and homophobic slurs said that he does not recall the incident.

On 3 September, 67-year old Layne Lundeen was restrained in his first-class seat with duct tape and zip ties over alleged unruly behavior. The American Airline Flight 618 was originally traveling from Dallas, Texas, to Newark, New Jersey, and was diverted to the Baltimore/Washington Thurgood Marshall airport in an emergency landing.

Published: September 17, 2026, 9:49 am

Improved air quality linked to better mental development in toddlers, study finds

Long-term research in New York shows efforts to reduce air pollution associated with higher cognitive test scores

Improvements in air pollution are leading to brighter, smarter toddlers, according to a new study from Columbia University in New York.

For more than two decades, Prof Frederica Perera and a team from the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health measured the air pollution exposure of pregnant women and the development of their children in the disadvantaged communities of northern Manhattan and the South Bronx. More than 1,100 children were assessed when they were one, two and three years old.

Published: September 17, 2026, 10:00 pm

Trump officials move to dismantle key protection for US endangered species

Fish and Wildlife Service memo calls for change in what it means to ‘take’ an endangered species

More than 1,600 critically imperiled species protected under the US Endangered Species Act (ESA) face losing further federal protections following a new reinterpretation of the 1973 law by the Donald Trump administration.

A September 14 memo distributed to Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) field offices by FWS director Brian Nesvik calls for a reinterpretation of what it means to “take” an endangered species. Under the ESA, “take” is defined as “to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct”.

Published: September 17, 2026, 2:28 pm

‘It bloody works’: why the world’s oldest cheddar-maker uses a ‘milk-source’ heat pump

Barber’s Farmhouse Cheesemakers can draw enough heat from cows’ fresh milk to bring water close to the boil, slashing carbon emissions

In many ways, the world’s oldest cheddar-maker hews to tradition. Since 1833, Barber’s Farmhouse Cheesemakers has operated from the rolling green pastures of south-west England, milking grass-fed cows and fermenting the milk with microbial starters passed down for generations. That heritage has led to award-winning cheese, now popular across continents.

But when it comes to reducing its planet-warming emissions, Barber’s is on the cutting edge. In 2024, the company began to use new ultra-efficient heat pumps from the UK startup Arkaya Energy. The devices quickly cool milk to keep it fresh, and simultaneously heat water used in milking operations, replacing conventional chillers and electric-resistance heaters.

Published: September 17, 2026, 5:00 am

Outcry as Michigan high school asks girls to share details of menstrual cycles

Students required to disclose information if they wish to make up swimming days lost because of their periods

A Michigan high school is facing scrutiny after parents raised concerns over a gym class policy requiring female students to disclose information about their menstrual cycles if they want to make up swimming days missed because of their periods.

Under the policy, which appears in a Lakeview high school gym syllabus, female students who miss swimming because of their periods must have a parent submit a written note or email identifying the length of their menstrual cycle before they can make up the missed days.

Published: September 17, 2026, 11:53 am

Ohio mother of 16 children rescued from ‘deplorable’ conditions pleads not guilty to child neglect

Attorney also says Elizabeth Siders, 34, has been almost continuously pregnant since 15 without regular healthcare

An Ohio mother whose 16 children were rescued from appalling conditions pleaded not guilty to child endangerment and neglect charges in court on Wednesday.

Elizabeth Siders, 34, is one of four family members, including her husband, Gary Siders Jr, charged with 16 charges of child endangerment and neglect after investigators found the children, who were 17 months to 18 years old, in “deplorable conditions” at the decrepit family home in the tiny village of Hamden in July.

Published: September 17, 2026, 10:15 am

Jury convicts woman of negligent homicide in death of TV reporter

Danette Colbert and an accomplice, Rickey White, were also convicted of racketeering in death of Telemundo reporter

A Louisiana jury convicted a woman of negligent homicide on Thursday in the death of a Telemundo TV reporter who had been visiting New Orleans to cover the Super Bowl, according to the Jefferson parish district attorney’s office.

Danette Colbert, 49, was also convicted of racketeering, as was her accomplice, 35-year-old Rickey White, according to Paul Purpura, a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office. Racketeering carries up to a 50-year sentence in Louisiana.

Published: September 17, 2026, 6:27 pm

Sweden’s PM resigns after centre-left bloc wins slim majority in election

Ulf Kristersson has stood down from his post, paving way for Social Democrats leader to form a government

Sweden’s centre-right prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, has stood down, clearing the way for Magdalena Andersson, the Social Democrats leader, to attempt to form a government.

In a victory speech on Thursday, Andersson said the Swedish people had “voted for a new direction for our country, voted for unity and against division”.

Published: September 17, 2026, 8:28 am

Charles sounded 'giddily elated' after Diana’s death, claims Earl Spencer

In latest extracts from upcoming memoir, Diana’s brother suggests some in Buckingham Palace were ‘relieved’ at her death

The brother of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, has claimed in published extracts of his new memoir that King Charles sounded “giddily elated – like a lottery winner” in a phone call to him immediately after her death.

Earl Spencer also says he believed Buckingham Palace wanted William and Harry and himself to walk behind Diana’s coffin because the then prince was “adamant” he was going to walk and palace officials feared “members of the public might shout abuse at him”.

Published: September 17, 2026, 11:47 am

Canada’s Carney embraces EU associate membership proposal

After Trump describes the tie-up as ‘laughable’, PM says majority of Canadians support closer ties with bloc

Mark Carney has welcomed the goal of Canada becoming the EU’s first associate member, calling for “deep cooperation” between Europe and his country to secure their sovereignty, after Donald Trump derided the idea as “laughable”.

In an address to the European parliament in Strasbourg, the Canadian prime minister said polling showed that an overwhelming majority of Canadians supported much closer ties with Europe. “Canada welcomes this idea,” he said, referring to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s pitch that Canada should become the EU’s first associate member.

Published: September 17, 2026, 5:15 am

Revolut reportedly facing $3m ransom demand after hackers steal hundreds of customers’ data

Europe’s largest financial technology company confirmed it had fallen victim to an impersonation scam last week

Revolut is facing a reported $3m (£2.2m) ransom demand after hackers posing as government officials accessed the data of hundreds of the bank’s cryptocurrency customers, including one victim who says he fears for his safety.

Europe’s largest financial technology company confirmed last weekend that it had fallen victim to an impersonation scam in which hackers compromised an Italian government email system to contact Revolut staff and request personal customer details.

Published: September 17, 2026, 8:58 am

Paul, John... and Yvonne? The French novelist asking: what if a woman had written the Beatles’ greatest hits?

Celebrated thriller writer Michel Bussi explains why the plot of his new novel Code Yesterday isn’t so far fetched, saying ‘I wanted to give women revenge’

Relations between France and England have rarely looked brighter. The recent loan of the Bayeux tapestry has become a symbol of a renewed friendship between the two countries, evidenced further by the numerous smiles exchanged on the occasion between prime minister Andy Burnham and French president Emmanuel Macron. A new book released in France at the start of this month, however, could soon darken the sunny skies of a revitalised entente cordiale.

In Code Yesterday, author Michel Bussi proposes that every single song credited to the Beatles was in fact written by a woman … of French descent.

Published: September 17, 2026, 11:00 pm

Feeling overwhelmed by the AI doom loop? Here’s the essential reading list to make sense of it all

It’s a chaotic time in an industry that’s reshaping our lives – Guardian reporters and experts recommend the books that help explain how we got here, and where we’re heading

Have you been feeling trapped in an endless cycle of artificial intelligence hype and panic? You’re not alone.

It’s a chaotic time to make sense of the industry that’s reshaping our lives, whether or not we like it. Last week, another AI company employee publicly resigned, warning the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade”. Despite these dire warnings, AI companies have seen “otherworldly” surges in revenue and driven the US stock markets to new highs as they continue to push AI tools into everything from public school classrooms to law enforcement agencies, as well as rushing to put up new datacenters across the country.

Published: September 17, 2026, 4:00 am

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story review – it’s like Ryan Murphy’s new series was written by adolescent boys

The latest Monster instalment, about the 1892 Borden axe murders, is packed with periods and beheadings, and feels like it was made up as they went along

Okaaay – here’s what I think must have happened. Some time in the past year or two, Ryan Murphy discovered that women menstruate. Incredulous but enthralled, he rushed off to share the news with his soon equally incredulous and enthralled little friends. After confirming the basics they all looked at each other for a moment in silence as they contemplated this crazy, secret habit of the wimminz. And then Ryan said: “You guys? We have got to make a show about this!” The others nodded in fervent agreement and off they all ran.

The result is the utterly bonkers, blood-soaked, borderline-fetishistic fever dream that is The Lizzie Borden Story – the latest entry in Murphy’s popular anthology series Monster. This one is written by Ian Brennan and directed in the main by Max Winkler, the pairing responsible for the series’ previous offering, last year’s lamentable The Ed Gein Story. As, I presume, a gesture to the sex of this one’s subject, there is a female director for two of the Lizzie Borden episodes – Sarah Adina Smith – but it doesn’t really dent the vibe. Think: the gleeful disgust of a roomful of adolescent boys being taught about the female reproductive system in PSHE. It is now an eight-hour miniseries starring Rebecca Hall. We live in strange times.

Published: September 17, 2026, 8:42 am

South Park – I mean, South America – is back, with no Donald Trump in sight (yet)

After adopting the president’s fondness for renaming things ‘America’, the season 29 premiere sees Trey Parker and Matt Stone use e-bikes to critique the ruination of the US

South Park has been renamed South America. That was the main news ahead of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s animated series returning for its 29th season, which seemed like it could be a one-off promotional gag – or another Trump-related storyline after last year’s scorching imitation of the US president’s “renaming” of the Gulf of Mexico and more recently Lake Ontario.

It turns out that neither is exactly the case, at least not so far. The season premiere doesn’t see the South Park sign scribbled over by the president’s dumb-guy sharpie pen. But it’s not just a passing sight gag, either. The six-episode season opens with the renaming already a fait accompli, not even commented on.

Published: September 17, 2026, 12:54 am

Beabadoobee: Pylon review – voice of a generation’s surprisingly relatable rampage through rock star rage

(Dirty Hit)
The Filipino-British songwriter’s fourth album sprinkles 90s alt fuzz with disarmingly sweet melodies and an impressive host of guests including Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Turnstile’s Brendan Yates

Last month, the Guardian published a feature about the demise of the monoculture. It suggested that streaming services, personalised algorithms and the declining influence of radio and television meant we now live in a world where stardom isn’t as universal as it once was. It used Sam Fender and Olivia Dean’s single Rein Me In as an example: here was a song that spent a record-breaking 23 weeks at No 1 yet hadn’t attained anything like the ubiquity you would once have expected: to judge by social media, plenty of people seemed to have never knowingly heard it.

If you were looking to advance this theory, you might alight on the career of Beatrice Laus, the 26-year-old British-Filipino singer-songwriter better known as Beabadoobee. To a certain cohort, primarily female and in their late teens and early 20s, she is not just a huge star, but a genuinely iconic figure. The latter is an over-used adjective in 2026, but if social media abounds with tutorials advising female fans how to copy your style and imitate your makeup – if you can be personally held partly responsible for the 2021 outbreak of adolescent girls drawing fake freckles on their faces in imitation of your own – then it probably fits, whether it discomfits Laus or not. The lyrics of Satellite, the closing track on her fourth album Pylon, suggests it does: “I give the generation a new infatuation,” she sings. “If only I knew how to cope with the times.”

Published: September 17, 2026, 4:00 am

My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy audiobook review – gripping vision of a fearless writer

A fictional British author in Paris sets out to explore Stein through the lens of her own friendships, in this inventive, perfectly paced portrait

It is late 2024, and an unnamed British author living in Paris is trying to write an essay on Gertrude Stein, the modernist writer and art collector. The author has been distracted by her friend Eva’s cat, who is lost and whose name is “it” in lower case, which inevitably leads to confusion – has Eva lost her cat or her mind? (Her other friend, Fanny, has rechristened the cat Bob, to make talking about him easier.)

The Pennsylvania-born Stein was painted by Picasso, hung out with Hemingway and wrote strange, stream-of-consciousness prose long before James Joyce embarked on his masterwork Ulysses. Commercial success didn’t come until she was in her 60s with The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, a biography of her partner and one of her more accessible books. Our narrator is an admirer of Stein’s work, yet she can be exasperated by it. “Sometimes, when I read her baffling and beguiling writing I want to smack it in the chops. [Stein] longed for her readers to find her, yet there was a part of her that could not bear to be found.”

Published: September 17, 2026, 7:00 am

The New Dark Ages by James Marriott review – a grandiose but superficial defence of reading

What is it that makes books so magical? The Times columnist somehow forgets to tell us in this lofty polemic

While other kids watched cartoons, Times columnist James Marriott would spend his school holidays in bed with piles of books – “a mammoth effort of attention, perhaps the greatest I ever made” – under the spell of his father, a teacher who inculcated in him a literary zeal “not exactly common in the north of England in the early 2000s”.

Twenty-five years on, Marriott fears smartphones have all but killed reading for everyone. He had to get rid of his own – “George Eliot is no match” – and now, watching the rest of us scroll, he worries not only that we will lose the ability to appreciate Middlemarch, but that we risk falling prey to tyrants and anti-vaxxers forging “a world very different to the one we have known … mystical, tribal and autocratic”.

Published: September 17, 2026, 1:00 am

Ireland to boycott Eurovision again over Israeli participation and ongoing Gaza deaths

Ireland joins joins Dutch broadcaster in refusing to take part in 2027 song contest, in second consecutive year of protests

Ireland is to boycott Eurovision for the second year running over the “appalling” ongoing killing in Gaza, the national broadcaster has said.

Ireland was one of five countries, along with Iceland, the Netherlands, Spain and Slovenia, that refused to take part in the competition this year in protest against Israel’s participation.

Published: September 17, 2026, 10:32 am

Why stop at Wuthering Heights: House of the Damned? Bring on Mrs Dalloway’s Rampage!

It isn’t just Winnie the Pooh – now the star of Blood & Honey II. Budget shockers are treating any story with expired copyright as ripe for murderous exploitation

It is significant that, at this point in our cultural journey, we have become accustomed to film producers jumping on every single property as it enters public domain, so they can make a cheap and exploitative horror film about it. We have seen Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. We’ve seen Bambi: The Reckoning. We’ve seen the six separate horror movies (including Mouseboat Massacre and Mouse of Horrors) that are based on Steamboat Willie. This is just the world we live in now.

But if you zoom out even a tiny amount, it all starts to look a little silly. Not because it suggests the paying public has a fondness for inarguably bad horror films based on loose interpretations of recognisable figures, but because it’s missing the bigger picture. In other words, while producers are watching eagerly for the next newly out-of-copyright property to exploit (by the way, Babar the Elephant will enter the public domain in January), there is an entire ocean of public domain work just sitting there to be desecrated.

Published: September 17, 2026, 4:00 am

Sky’s the limit! Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater – in pictures

The always revelatory dance company is at Sadler’s Wells in London this month with two programmes, celebrating their legacy and presenting ‘heavenly’ new works

Published: September 17, 2026, 2:29 am

Spermageddon, ‘greedy jobs’ and abject fear: why birth rates are plummeting – and why it matters

The author of Generation Maybe, Camilla Cavendish, explains the many reasons people are having fewer children, from dating apps to unaffordable housing and the climate crisis

Generation Maybe is the most tactful possible title for Camilla Cavendish’s bracing new book – because the trend she’s describing is anything but a “maybe”. “The wave of childlessness that is sweeping the globe is extraordinary,” she writes. It’s in the UK, where the fertility rate hit 1.39 children per woman in 2025, the lowest on record. It’s across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, visible in so many measures – nearly half of Canadian women surveyed in their 40s said they’d had fewer children than they would have liked. But it’s also a global story. “The UAE, Chile and Tamil Nadu in India have even lower birthrates than Germany,” Cavendish writes. “China is growing old before it gets rich, and Russia has maintained its population size purely by annexing Crimea and parts of Ukraine.” In fact, when it comes to falling populations, “only the Black Death in the 14th century is comparable to what is happening now”.

When I meet her in central London, Cavendish is tailored, self-possessed, you might even say poised, but very open – she never gives an opinion without asking yours, she talks very freely about her family and she is upfront about what she sees as her faults. Now 58, she started her career at McKinsey, the mega-management consultancy, having done PPE at Oxford at the same time as David Cameron, for whom she worked as policy director when he was in government and to whom she remains intensely loyal (every time his name comes up, we have a fight).

Published: September 17, 2026, 2:00 am

I’m nearly 30, a virgin and feel lonely. The manosphere is trying to draw me in – where else can I seek assurance? | Leading questions

The manosphere says this type of suffering is targeted neglect, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But your suffering gives you the ability to make your part of the world better.

• Read more Leading questions

I’m approaching 30 and I’m still a kissless virgin.

I’ve suffered with depression and anxiety since childhood and my family isn’t the most functional or supportive. I don’t really have friends either, as I find it hard to connect with others due to being bullied and feeling that I’m not worthwhile or wanted. I was also homeschooled from 14 and moved to a different part of the country at 15 and a few more times since then, so I feel quite rootless and alienated.

Published: September 17, 2026, 8:00 am

Sick of sandwiches? Perfect packed lunches – from savoury muffins to bento boxes

After the long hot summer, I’m enjoying September’s back-to-school vibes – and the excuse to create delicious lunches to take to work

• Sign up here for our weekly food newsletter, Feast

After an August spent mostly on the road, I’ve found myself unexpectedly enjoying the back-to-school feeling that arrives with September. Usually, I greet it with the sort of enthusiasm reserved for a tax return, but, having been away for so long, it’s actually been rather nice coming home. Of course, there are all the usual inevitable resolutions and to-do lists: go to bed earlier, eat better, take lunch to work. Admirable stuff, although I suspect a summer of one too many honeycomb ice-creams and an irresponsible amount of Irish brown bread and salty butter may also have something to do with it. Taking a packed lunch is, in any case, an all-round win, because eating out is increasingly expensive, and food bought in cafes and restaurants tends to be richer and saltier than a homemade equivalent. Depressingly, school and college canteens don’t fare much better, either.

But a packed lunch needn’t mean a sad sandwich or last night’s tubbed-up leftovers. Nena Foster’s courgette, olive and halloumi muffins are a very good argument for taking your lunch with you: nutrient-dense without being remotely worthy, they work just as well in an adult’s lunchbox as in a child’s, and they freeze brilliantly, too. Add a flask of pumpkin soup or Tom Hunt’s sweetcorn chowder for an excellent autumn lunch.

Published: September 17, 2026, 6:02 am

You be the judge: should my brother have told me the money I lent him was for his holiday?

Ayaan thought she was lending money for something essential. Ahmed says the lender doesn’t get to dictate what it’s spent on. You decide who is on the money

• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

I thought I was lending Ahmed money for something vital, not a trip to Greece

Published: September 17, 2026, 12:15 am

‘Amazing community’: how people are making new friends and connections as adults

As concern about loneliness and social isolation grows, we spoke to people who have joined groups and set up activities

Amid growing concern about loneliness and social isolation, new research from the Institute for Public Policy Research found the number of young people in England with no close friends has risen fivefold since 2014, with one in 20 now reporting having none at all.

Making new friends as an adult is not always easy. We spoke to people who have taken deliberate steps to make new connections about what worked for them.

Published: September 17, 2026, 6:53 am

Socialist hotels – in pictures

Socialist Hotels is the first photography book to focus solely on the architecture of hospitality in Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet landscape. These state-constructed buildings were used by visiting government workers and ordinary citizens. Today they are a fascinating legacy of a social and cultural idiosyncrasy.

• Socialist Hotels by Elena Amabili is published by FUEL

Published: September 17, 2026, 1:00 am

‘We left everything behind’: 125,000 people displaced as war reignites in Yemen

Fierce fighting has forced people to abandon their homes, leaving everything behind to seek shelter in refugee camps

• The rapid Houthi advance in Yemen: why it matters and what’s at stake

Abandoning their homes and cramming into cars, Yemeni families have fled in their thousands from a lightning advance along the Red Sea coastal plains and up the rugged hills towards the mountaintop city of Taiz as the war returned in dramatic form this month.

“We fled a large, comfortable home, and here we are struggling to find a plastic sheet and wooden poles,” said one of the displaced, Asma Taleb, a woman in her 50s who fled her home last week with her two sons and five grandchildren.

Published: September 17, 2026, 1:37 am

A harvest ballgown and a West Bank raid: photos of the day – Thursday

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

Published: September 17, 2026, 7:38 am