The Guardian · 6h ago
Young people ‘expected’ to engage with new work support, says McFadden
Exclusive: Work and pensions secretary echoes Andy Burnham as he announces funds to stop families in England losing benefitsYoung people will be expected to engage with new support to find work, Pat McFadden has said, as he announced parents receiving benefits could get £4,500 a year if their child starts an apprenticeship.Speaking to the Guardian, the work and pensions secretary echoed the comments of Andy Burnham when he suggested that access to support would be conditional on young people properly participating in the support that would be provided. To help with that, the new funds announced would stop families losing benefits when teenagers take up apprenticeships. Continue reading...
The Guardian · 6h ago
Why migraines are often undiagnosed | Letters
Dr Sally Cheseldine reflects on the experience of people who cannot articulate their pain and the significance of cravingsDuring my clinical career, I noticed that migraine was rarely diagnosed in individuals with severe intellectual disabilities or autism who were non-verbal and therefore unable to say that they had a sore head (Letters, 24 July). Instead, there was a high level of damaging head-banging, something that others say they feel tempted to do if they don’t have access to rapid pain relief for their migraine.I was interested in the suggestion that cravings for cheese might be caused by migraine (The truth about migraines: what causes them – and how to find relief, 19 July). Cheese contains tryptophan, and it was shown in the 1990s (McDougle et al) that people with severe autism who had very low levels of tryptophan showed dramatic increases of several stereotypic behaviours, including banging. Continue reading...
The Guardian · 6h ago
‘Above all, it’s the symbolism that matters’ – Polly Toynbee answered your questions on Andy Burnham’s first week
After seven days in charge, how is the new UK PM doing? You asked our political columnist about electoral reform, social care and more.SonOfTheDesert asks: Given that nothing in this world ever turns out quite as intended, and that good intentions in politics are always hit by unforeseen misfortune, which of the commitments that Burnham has made so far do you think is most likely to fall by the wayside between now and 2029?Polly says:I think I will answer your question the other way round, if you don’t mind. Which of his good intentions will he keep? There may be a lot of wishful thinking involved in my answer, because I am making the most of this no doubt brief time of hope and optimism.By the time of the next election he will have devolved power and created more mayors to cover every area to make sure it reaches everywhere. Unfortunately this does not much engage the public, who are pretty clueless on who does what anyway. It won’t always have good results, as Reform run many councils: governments lose local power the longer they are in office. But there may be a magic in his Manchesterism that ignites a new enthusiasm for the local: people might actually bother voting for their councils when they see it makes a real difference who wins.It’s not the communications that changed, it’s the great communicator. It’s not the words, it’s the sentiment and determination behind them. Keir Starmer’s dull delivery didn’t matter: the lack of underlying passion and purpose did.Briefing? It will go on, forever. Because you never know who that mystery “senior source” is, it can never be challenged or chased down. The PM can storm about it, but the 24-hour hungry media will flam up what the door man said, for lack of anything else. Or plain make it up sometimes ( Never the Guardian, only the hostile media). Continue reading...
ESPN · 6h ago
Team USA Olympic stock watch: Why we're monitoring these 11 NBA players
Whose Olympic stock has risen and fallen? Let's analyze 11 players based on their performances over the second half of the 2025-26 season and postseason.
The Guardian · 7h ago
Black people’s risk factors for stroke ‘rising faster than for white people’
Exclusive: King’s College London analysis finds diabetes and hypertension are more common in Black African and Caribbean peopleStroke risk factors including high blood pressure and diabetes are rising faster among people from Black African and Caribbean backgrounds compared with their white counterparts, according to analysis.Researchers at King’s College London analysed data from more than 8,500 adults over a 30-year period from the South London Stroke Register, one of the longest-running population-based stroke registers in the world. Continue reading...
The Guardian · 7h ago
‘He liked to get people’s blood boiling’: metal masters Mastodon on the loss of bandmate Brent Hinds – and his shocking words before his death
The Grammy-winning band had an acrimonious rift with Hinds – then he died in a motorbike crash. They explain how they’re paying tribute on their new album, and why their love for each other never endedMastodon are near the end of a tour where they’re playing 22 shows in 14 different European countries during a record-breaking heatwave, when they video-call me outside a Bordeaux venue. Bassist and co-lead singer Troy Sanders says the experience has been “31 days of musical bliss”. He’s not being sarcastic, either.“Things are super energetic, even at day 31,” he insists. “We’re contemplating even staying in Europe for a few days when this tour is over, because we’re enjoying ourselves so much.” It’s pleasantly surprising to see Sanders and drummer/co-vocalist Brann Dailor, sat to his left, in such high spirits, given the anguish and unrest they’ve endured over the last 18 months. Continue reading...
BBC · 7h ago
Powell says student loan system at top of in-tray
She says she stands by past comments that the interest charged on Plan 2 loans is "egregious".
The Guardian · 12h ago
Spies in the sky: how worried should we be about the arrival of AI-enabled smart lamp-posts?
The new breed of camera-equipped streetlights has the potential to fight crime and track down missing persons. Or will it just take Britain one step closer to a surveillance state?How would you feel if your neighbourhood lamp-posts could recognise your number plate, and also your face? Maybe you wouldn’t mind, given how long we’ve had automatic number plate recognition and CCTV. What about if that lamp-post could power itself through its own solar panels, and perhaps find another use for any extra power generated – that would be good, right? This is what Conflow Power Group (CPG) in Warwickshire claims for its iLamps, the first of their kind in the UK.What if lamp-posts had the potential to incorporate new AI capability – gait analysis, suspicious behaviours – that you haven’t even heard of? This is what the organisation Big Brother Watch worries about. And what if the home secretary had explicitly said she believed in a “panopticon state” – that is, a state that could watch you at all times (as Shabana Mahmood already has) – and what if she still had a job when the lamp-post eyes got their updates? Or what if the next home secretary was even keener on hyper-surveillance (hard to imagine), and the street apparatus was already in place? What about all the data this would harvest – who would own it? Continue reading...
The Guardian · 12h ago
Why has Christopher Nolan got rid of all the sex in The Odyssey? | Zoe Williams
It’s a bit of a mystery why it takes Odysseus so long to get home if he’s not shacking up with Calypso and others ... I did not walk into Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey intending to pick holes. If there was zero sexual chemistry between Odysseus and Circe, who was I to say that’s not how it went in the poem? I was most likely thinking of a feminist retelling (Madeline Miller’s novel Circe), rather than Homer, anyway.Nevertheless, even allowing for metaphor and whatnot, even factoring in that Circe’s passion for Odysseus is (almost?) definitely a rumination on the double standards of godliness, in which the guy gods are allowed to sleep with whichever mortals they please, but the lady ones are not supposed to (I don’t think?), I am sure something happened. Continue reading...
The Guardian · 15h ago
Motorbikes and mountains: photographing the 2026 Tour de France – photo essay
Pete Goding has been photographing the Tour de France for 20 years – here he gives an insight into what it’s been like to document this year’s raceTwenty Tours de France. It seems faintly ridiculous when I write it down. My first was the year Lance Armstrong’s carefully constructed empire was beginning to wobble. I photographed him circling the Champs-Élysées with a film SLR, blissfully unaware that neither film cameras nor Armstrong’s reputation would age particularly well.Today I’m back where it all began, sitting outside a cafe a stone’s throw from the Place de la Concorde nursing a café crème while Paris carries on entirely oblivious. A couple laugh over breakfast. Someone walks an exceptionally pampered poodle. A waiter in a waistcoat unsuccessfully attempts to persuade two tourists that vodka is an acceptable accompaniment to a croissant. In a few hours the world’s biggest bike race will thunder through these streets. Right now, it’s just another Sunday morning. Continue reading...
The Guardian · 1d ago
The Guardian view on ancient DNA: a female shaman exposes our flawed assumptions about the past | Editorial
Thanks to new technology we are are acquiring insights into earlier times, and realising how little we truly knowArchaeologists believe the Upton Lovell Shaman, who lived in what is now Wiltshire 4,000 years ago, was an important religious leader and metalworker because of the artefacts and tools buried with the body. Until very recently it was also believed, on considerably slimmer evidence, that this shaman was a man: it was simply assumed that someone of such status must be male, and the view was barely questioned over the years. Now ancient DNA analysis performed at the Francis Crick Institute has revealed that the body, held by the Wiltshire Museum, is in fact a woman.That should cause a stir in bronze-age studies. But it is also yet another example of how many of our assumptions about human history have been upended by the rise of ancient DNA analysis over the past two decades. Others include the revelation that there were (frequent) liaisons between humans and Neanderthals just 50,000 years ago, a reconstruction suggesting that the first modern Britons had “dark to black” skin, and the closing of longstanding mysteries such as what really killed two members of Italy’s powerful Medici family in the 16th century (probably malaria, not murder as was often believed). Every time we widen our keyhole view of the past even slightly, we are confronted by how many of our seemingly grounded assumptions are, in fact, wrong. Continue reading...
The Guardian · 1d ago
When it comes to predicting the future, why are TV writers better than politicians? | Zoe Williams
From BBC drama The Rapture on the climate crisis to Apple’s Criminal Record on the rise of the far right, culture often sees what politics fails toIn the BBC’s new apocalypse drama, The Rapture, the UK is engulfed in a terrifying heatwave. I watched a preview of the programme in May, while preparing to interview the lead actor Ruth Madeley. I thought at the time: “This will be much more frightening when it chimes with the real life weather, bad luck for them that it’s not coming out for a couple of months.” But, by the time of meeting Madeley the following month, we were already in the middle of a heatwave that would lead to the highest ever recorded June temperature in the UK. The whole encounter made the show feel even more prophetic. She was in a central London hotel, air-conditioned inside, but all the door handles and surrounding street furniture – benches segmented by metal arm rests, to make life just that little bit harder for homeless people – had got way too hot. It was like playing The Floor is Lava, except instead of “floor”, “everything”. It surely can’t hit the screens at a more apposite time than this, I thought, failing to predict that by late July we’d be in heatwave number three, and France would be on fire.The Daily Mail’s reviewer was upset that Christianity was portrayed “as a bastion of anti-science nutjobs and fundamentalists” in the show, wondering rhetorically whether the BBC would ever create such a drama about a “Muslim imam”. Peculiar thing to get upset about, I thought, since the religion is really more of a symptom of, or even a garnish to, the central atmosphere of engulfing heat. It’s like complaining that cats get a bad rap in the 1974 film The Towering Inferno (yes, there is a cat in it). Continue reading...
