Beauty & Personal Care is one website shows the all News Channel report Like New York Time, Times, BCC, CNN, and also Google top stories
These mainly listed buildings sit at the heart of almost every community – we are squandering a precious legacy
For the first time, possibly in a millennium, fewer than half of all Britons call themselves Christian. This month’s updating of the 2011 census suggests the latest figure is down from 60% to 51%, with predictions that next year it will be in the 40s. No one yet knows what the pandemic has done to religious faith, but the trend across the western world is the same. At least in wealthier countries, religion of any sort is becoming a minority practice.
The archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is an ardent evangelical. His Anglican church has spent a phenomenal £240m since 2017 on a mission to “plant” new churches, apparently to no avail. Vicars are some of the most dedicated and public service-minded people I know. They are underpaid and overworked. They will be further demoralised by predictions of another 20% of worshippers poised to desert their congregations after Covid. Yet the public will regard all this as Christianity’s problem, not theirs. As the retreat continues, some will shed a tear but few will worry.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...In failing to repair relations and right land dispossession as Ubuntu demands, there is yet to be meaningful reconciliation with Black people
Under a 1986 newsletter headline, “Ubuntu, Abantu, Abelungu”, Black Sash, the anti-apartheid organisation founded as the vanguard of white liberal women’s opposition in South Africa, reported surprising findings from a white fieldworker in their programme against forced land removals – Black people of the land do not consider white people to be people. That is, we do not consider them to be Abantu. Instead, they are abelungu.
“Ubuntu, Abantu, Abelungu” appeared a few years before the late archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu thrust Ubuntu – the African philosophy best understood through the proverb found in Bantu languages across the continent, “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu ngabanye bantu” (a person is a person through other people) – into the global imagination as he presided over post-apartheid South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commission (TRC).
Panashe Chigumadzi is the author of These Bones Will Rise Again and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University
Continue reading...The WHO’s vaccination goal is achievable – but it will take proper funding, better vaccine distribution and jabs with longer shelf lives
While western countries scramble with their booster rollout to deal with the Omicron wave, only 8.4% of people in low-income countries have had at least one Covid vaccination dose.
The gap in the vaccination rates between high- and low-income countries is wider than ever. We cannot keep turning a blind eye to it.
Continue reading...After visits to Israel and Palestine, Tutu used his moral authority to speak out and, despite abuse, refused to back down. He wanted liberation for everyone
Even amid the torrent of praise for the revered former archbishop Desmond Tutu in the days since his death, the anti-apartheid champion is not being universally mourned. Alan Dershowitz, the renowned US constitutional lawyer and ardent defender of Israel, took a moment to brand Tutu as “evil” and “the most influential antisemite of our time”.
“The world is mourning Bishop Tutu, who just died the other day. Can I remind the world that although he did some good things, a lot of good things on apartheid, the man was a rampant antisemite and bigot?” he told Fox News.
Chris McGreal is the former Guardian correspondent in Jerusalem and Johannesburg
Continue reading...It took my six-year-olds to shame me out of my pandemic rut, and now I’m back in love with the printed word
Since the beginning of the pandemic, a low-key but persistent source of irritation has been how impossible it is to focus. “I can’t do anything,” is a line I’ve exchanged with friends countless times, by which we mean anything more energetic than scrolling. For the past 12 months, at the end of most days, the scene has been exactly the same; I’m out cold on the sofa, dazed from hours of binge-watching, as a prelude to dragging myself to bed. It’s a dull, depressing and nutrient-free way to pass the time. It’s also a hard habit to break.
For many of us, the biggest casualty has been reading. Books – in particular, in my case, fiction – have seemed to require unearthly levels of engagement. For months at a time, no book has appealed, and every title picked up has been put down. Across my apartment, along with the unwashed cups and stray socks, is an archipelago of books started and abandoned. As the pandemic wore on, the New York public library system stopped charging fines for late returns, removing the single incentive I had to finish anything.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...How book-loving communities on social media are helping authors break barriers to become bestsellers
Talia Hibbert was rewatching a Spider-Man film and eating a meal in her living room when she received life-changing news. Her romance novel Act Your Age, Eve Brown, which she wrote at the beginning of the pandemic, had entered the New York Times bestseller list.
The lighthearted romantic comedy, published this year, follows the escapades of a young black British woman who crashes into the life of an uptight B&B owner.
Continue reading...December in Lagos should have been the highlight of my year. But when plans were cancelled I turned to a new trait: resilience
I planned to be in Lagos this Christmas. The season is called Detty December (as in “dirty”), and it’s a whirlwind of weddings, parties and concerts that go on till the early hours of the morning. The dress code is “slay queen” – dress to slay – and there’s only one rule: enjoyment. I booked my flight months in advance to avoid the price hikes that happen close to Christmas. I readied my outfits. I packed my sunscreen. And then, as of 7 December, the UK government put Nigeria on the red list. I was scheduled to fly the day before.
I sought counsel. My bolder friends encouraged me to travel because the rules might change before my return flight. My more cautious friends advised that I should only risk it if, in the event that the travel ban was not lifted, I was ready to pay £2,120 for hotel quarantine. I was not ready to pay £2,120. I postponed my trip.
Chibundu Onuzo is a Nigerian novelist living in London.
Continue reading...Report from aviation analytics firm Cirium shows domestic flights were down by almost 60%
Air travel in and out of the UK slumped by 71% in 2021 as the second year of the Covid-19 crisis took its toll on international flying, according to a report.
Just over 406,000 international flights operated from the UK this year compared with almost 1.4m in 2019 before the pandemic struck and travel restrictions were imposed, said the aviation analytics firm Cirium in research reported by the BBC. UK domestic flights were found to have declined by almost 60%.
Continue reading...Analysis reveals widespread violations of international democratic freedoms in response to pandemic
Europe’s political approach to the coronavirus pandemic has divided down stark east-west lines, a Guardian analysis has found.
Five of 18 eastern European countries have registered major violations of international democratic freedoms since March 2020, according to research conducted by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, compared with none of 12 western European countries.
Continue reading...The pandemic finally brought into being a European public, as we discovered that our health is a common concern
March 2020: an insidious virus seeds itself across the globe pitching tens of thousands in the European continent into a life-and-death battle. Most European countries secure their borders; millions of households lock their front doors. Hellish scenes flash by, feeding fears of infection. In Europe a disaster is unfolding, but there is no joint response.
The loudest cry comes from Italy, hit by the virus early on. Appeals for help go unanswered and bitter reproaches ensue. The EU is slow to react: the fact that Brussels’ institutions lack the “competences”, or formal powers, to act in the field of public health impresses no one. When, soon thereafter, an economic depression looms, prophets of doom start predicting the end of the EU.
Continue reading...Punctuation has always been controversial, but right now, amid fierce political debate, matters seem especially polarised
Punctuation is so 1990s. The comma is disappearing, the full stop has come to a full stop, and the semicolon has been repurposed as a pair of winking eyes. While the exclamation mark remains in rude health, the fate of the apostrophe seems especially bleak. Even the Apostrophe Protection Society has given up the fight, calling an end to its activities in 2019 and declaring a victory for “ignorance and laziness”. Debates over the correct use of punctuation have raged since English printers began to adopt the fancy new marks to supplement the simple virgule of medieval scribes (the ancestor of today’s forward slash), used singularly to serve a range of functions.
The recent release of a large electronic corpus of written English from the past 30 years by Lancaster University allows us to track this rapid shift to a plainer prose. Short messages typed in haste dispense with old-fashioned commas and stuffy semicolons in favour of more informal dashes. Text messages now often sent as individual sentences mean the full stop has become surplus to requirement; including one is seen to signal a deliberate desire to be blunt or convey hostility, similar to adding the word “period” in speech: “That’s enough – period.”
Simon Horobin is a professor in the Department of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford
Continue reading...Net Zero Diaries focus group finds people sceptical about whether Cop26 commitments will stick
Britons are concerned that hypocrisy by politicians will affect the public’s willingness to change their own behaviour to tackle the climate crisis – and doubt that Cop26 commitments can be met unless they are legally binding.
The opinions come from the latest in the Net Zero Diaries, a project run by the consultancy Britain Thinks to examine evolving attitudes to the pursuit of a net zero emissions target, the first collation of public views from the cohort since the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow.
Continue reading...Government struggling to persuade councils to find permanent homes for those who have arrived since August
About 12,000 Afghan refugees will begin 2022 in UK hotels as the government struggles to persuade enough councils to find permanent homes for the new arrivals, the Guardian has learned.
Of the 16,500 people airlifted from Afghanistan to the UK since August, “over 4,000 individuals have either moved into a settled home or are in the process of being moved or matched to a suitable home”, according to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
Continue reading...After one too many rainy nights waiting for the bus, I decide to face my ultimate fear. Can I learn to drive, despite a disastrous attempt in my teens?
It has been 10 years since I last stalled a car. I was 18 and drifting across several lanes of an A-road roundabout while my driving test examiner gripped his seat. It was my second attempt at taking the test and my brain had turned into sweaty spaghetti. As I casually cut in front of an HGV, the examiner gasped and demanded I take the next exit. I mirrored, signalled and manoeuvred, found a safe space to pull up, and promptly stalled metres from the curb.
I failed – of course I did – and didn’t get back in the driver’s seat in a hurry. I finished school and went to university, always deferring the prospect of booking another test. Years passed, priorities shifted, and even though I kept telling myself that driving is a scourge on the environment, a decade of scrounging lifts from my friends and family has taken its toll.
Continue reading...Analysis: Rishi Sunak most popular successor but could face tricky spring with tax hikes
Conservative MPs in marginal seats will enter 2022 with an agonising dilemma. Do they stay loyal to Boris Johnson, who helped them win two years ago, or depose him in order to keep their seats next time?
Opinium’s figures show that Johnson has lost his personal appeal, at least for the moment. Opinium’s normal voting intention question, reported in the Observer on Sunday, showed Labour on 39%, seven points ahead of the Conservatives on 32%.
Continue reading...The climate emergency has clear themes with heroes and villains. Describing it this way is how to build a movement
The biggest success of the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long campaign to push doubt about climate science is that it forced the conversation about the climate crisis to centre on science.
It’s not that we didn’t need scientific research into climate change, or that we don’t need plenty more of it. Or even that we don’t need to do a better job of explaining basic science to people, across the board (hello, Covid). But at this moment, “believe science” is too high a bar for something that demands urgent action. Believing science requires understanding it in the first place. In the US, the world’s second biggest carbon polluter, fewer than 40% of the population are college educated and in many states, schools in the public system don’t have climate science on the curriculum. So where should this belief – strong enough to push for large-scale social and behavioural change – be rooted exactly?
Amy Westervelt is a climate journalist and the founder and executive producer of the Critical Frequency podcast network
Continue reading...I owe my career to Twitter, but two years reporting on the pandemic has made me realise disinformation costs lives
I have a fantasy and it goes like this: a political party is formed, running on an anti-social-media platform. It campaigns on a pledge to ban social media. (“SWITCH IT OFF” is its straightforward, and elegant, slogan.)
The party wins a general election and at midnight, on what comes to be known as Social Media Freedom Day, the prime minister pushes a giant button that blocks all access to social media. Crowds cheer. On the anniversary of Social Media Freedom Day – which becomes a bank holiday, of course – children burn effigies of Mark Zuckerberg and dress up as the Twitter bird.
Sirin Kale is a Guardian journalist
Continue reading...Omicron threat stokes fears coast to coast but leading public health expert says ‘We know how to keep schools open and safe’
As US regional health authorities reacted with alarm to a jump in child Covid infections that caused some school districts to announce returns to remote learning, a leading public health official questioned the need for schools to close, saying: “We know how to keep schools open, we know how to keep them safe.”
Over the past three weeks, as Omicron-related cases soared in New York City and elsewhere, the number of children hospitalised in New York with Covid-19 quadrupled, the state health department said.
Continue reading...Many people are facing Omicron feeling broken, our resilience worn down by unrelenting demands
“When all this is over …” These words started so many wistful sentences during Britain’s lockdowns of 2020. They carried the weight of our hopes and fears and grief and loss. When all this is over, we should have a national day of mourning for everyone and everything we’ve lost. When all this is over, we should honour our collective sacrifice by “building back better”. When all this is over, we should have a huge party and celebrate being able to dance and hug and feel free again.
But for anyone who still doubted it, the rapid spread of the Omicron variant brings home the difficult truth: the moment isn’t going to come “when all this is over”. The pandemic isn’t like a war, to be survived until the day when peace is made, and we can all exhale and begin picking up the pieces. It’s a new reality that will, at best, gradually fade into the background as the threat recedes and our coping strategies improve.
Christine Berry is a freelance writer and researcher based in Manchester
Continue reading...Whether it was Nigel Farage attacking the RNLI or official cover-ups of racism, the attempts in 2021 to stoke division have fallen flat at every turn
In January, when England’s third national lockdown was just beginning and most of us were blissfully ignorant of the middle letters of the Greek alphabet, I used these pages to make a prediction. Not about the pandemic but about another equally tedious and long-running nightmare that most people hoped would be over by now: the culture wars.
I predicted that during 2021 what are called “contested histories” – those relating to empire, slavery and race – would be increasingly “weaponised for political gain” and that the historians who study them, along with the minority communities for whom contested histories are family histories, would be among the “new enemies” paraded before the culture war gallows.
Continue reading...The space between Christmas and New Year is normally treated as pretty sacred in political circles. There are a few modest pre-prepared government and opposition announcements to keep journalists in business while everyone else switches off and remembers what their families look like. Not so this year. In the next few days, there will most likely be a cabinet meeting, albeit one on Zoom, to discuss whether England needs more restrictions to stop the spread of Omicron.
After nearly two years of Zoom meetings, everyone is well aware of how hard it is to read the mood of a group of people through a computer screen. Some of Boris Johnson’s problems with his party have stemmed from the lack of real contact between the prime minister and MPs. It hasn’t helped that the internet in Downing Street is about as reliable as Johnson’s commitment to being straight with people. But even when the wifi signal is strong, the prime minister has failed to read the virtual room and has often ploughed ahead with jokes and upbeat speeches while his colleagues stare disconsolately at their screens.
Continue reading...I am writing from the past, so many things remain uncertain for me about Christmas 2021. Will my husband’s parents have managed to adjust their tablet screen to show us something other than the ceiling, or my mother-in-law’s ear? Did we have our usual fight about my husband eating foods at a time other than that which I have arbitrarily decreed to be the correct time? (No crystal ball required for this: yes.) Where have we landed on the farce-to-fury British politics rollercoaster and how deftly has the Queen’s speech skirted it?
Specifically, I find myself wondering what’s on television: not the programmes, the adverts. Usually, the evening of the 25th marks an abrupt shift from lingering shots of whatever salted caramel prawn crown Frankenfood Heston has dreamed up this year and baffling perfume ads in which Johnny Depp stamps on a guitar in cowboy boots then uses the shards to carve his name into a buffalo or something, to soft white sandy beaches lapped by Tiffany blue seas set to calypso tunes. Traditionally this is the travel industry’s peak period, as we collectively realise there is nothing to look forward to other than endless night and scrabble to book a fortnight in Crete, our deposit a down payment on optimism.
Continue reading...The Six Feet Under actor on challenging roles, working with Guillermo del Toro and being recognised at funerals
American actor Richard Jenkins, 74, has been a screen regular since the 70s, but his big breakthrough came in 2001 playing deceased funeral director Nathaniel Fisher in the TV series Six Feet Under. He went on to receive an Oscar nomination for best actor in The Visitor (2007) and won an Emmy in 2015 for his role in the drama series Olive Kitteridge. Jenkins has worked with directors including Woody Allen, Kathryn Bigelow, the Coens and Mike Nichols, and next month can be seen in Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley. His latest project is playwright Stephen Karam’s film of his own one-act play The Humans – set in a newly rented, unfurnished apartment in New York’s Chinatown – in which Jenkins plays a man contemplating the state of his life at a family Thanksgiving.
You live in Providence, Rhode Island, where you’ve worked a lot in theatre, right?
I’m from Illinois, but I’ve been out here for 50-some years. I was a member of the acting company here for 14 seasons, and later I ran it for four seasons. My wife [Sharon R Friedrick] is a choreographer, and we still direct and choreograph some stuff there. We rethink musicals, like Oliver! and Oklahoma!. We love working together. When I directed alone, it was in your own head, but when you’re doing it with someone else, you talk about it for months before you even start rehearsals. It’s really wonderful.
If someone asks me why, I reach for the word velleity – desiring things you cannot hope to get
I keep a list of words that are strange to me. Any time I find one I half-know or do not recognise, it goes in the list. I find its existence reassuring, as if having more words at my disposal will make it easier to decode whatever confusing things happen to me each day.
The best word on my list is velleity. I found it in Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), in a section where a Jesuit priest is explaining to the main character, Nick Shay, the value of knowing the names for those things in danger of being lost to eternity. The priest teaches the word “velleity” to Nick. “Volition at its lowest ebb,” he calls it. “A small thing, a wish, a tendency.” He uses it in relation to his own life, to express regret at how it has passed. He has prayed a lot, sure, but what tangible things has he done in this world?
Lamorna Ash is the author of Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town
Continue reading...The American author was not only brilliant but also generous and kind to younger writers, writes Emma Brockes
There is that famous photo of Joan Didion, taken in Malibu in 1976, in which she leans on a deck overlooking the beach, cigarette in hand, scotch glass at her elbow, and regards her family – John Dunne, her husband, and their then 10-year-old daughter, Quintana – through lowered, side-long eyes. Like other iconic photos of Didion from the period, she is at one remove from the group, off to the side and in this case, looking not at the camera but at her family as they look at the camera. It’s the pose Didion perfected, in life as in art, and when news of her death at the age of 87 broke on Thursday, it was a shock to see another frame from that sequence surface online. In it, Didion, eyes fixed forward, smiles broadly at the camera in the conventional style – a rare glimpse behind the persona.
The paradox of Didion was not unusual among writers, whose confidence is often born of a million anxieties. But her ability to operate outside herself – to measure the gap between inside and out and slyly mock any effort to conceal it – was unparalleled. She was, famously and by her own account, diffident, brittle, runtish, prone to migraines, afraid of the telephone, and as she wrote in the preface to her 1968 collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “bad at interviewing people”, apparent deficits that, in Didion’s hands, were of course precisely what permitted her entry to places her rivals – particularly the blow-hard men of 1960s journalism – couldn’t reach.
Continue reading...I was conditioned to think of going out as morally superior to hibernating. Now I regard the decisive opt-out as a dynamic choice too
As of Wednesday this week, a quarter of all kids at state school in New York were absent, for virus or other reasons. In the UK, a week before Christmas, they wouldn’t have been at school in the first place, but across much of the US, winter break doesn’t start until Christmas Eve. Every year this seems ungenerous, but this year it’s unbearable. We struggle in on Wednesday in -3C weather, and that night I have a conniption. That’s it, we’re out. I tell my kids, we’ll stay home tomorrow; the vacation starts now.
It costs me something to say this. Through a combination of kneejerk rule-following and a desire to have the house to myself, we rarely skip school, even when people are sick (not with Covid). Until recently, we didn’t skip anything much. I’ve long subscribed to the theory that it’s better to do things than not do things. I also have to be vigilante against constant lobbying from my kids to take the line of least resistance. “No, we’re going, so stop asking me,” is a phrase played on repeat in my house with varying levels of crossness. “Giving up” is bad. Effortful endeavour is good. “You’ll enjoy it once you get there” – a line used every Thursday night by my mother when I didn’t want to go to Brownies – has surfaced three decades later to be rolled out prior to violin, taekwondo and playdates in the park. Silently, I say it to myself as I shrug on my jacket prior to dinners.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Figure could rise to 750,000 as Omicron variant drives daily number of new cases to record 119,789
More than 600,000 people will be forced to isolate with Covid across the UK on Christmas Day after a record 119,789 tested positive, the highest daily figure since the pandemic began.
The surge triggered by the Omicron variant means that 608,000 people who have had Covid confirmed since 18 December in England and 15 December in the rest of the UK will still be in their isolation period on 25 December, Guardian analysis shows.
Continue reading...My eclectic musical tastes encompassed indie, hip-hop, and modern classical. But it took a pandemic to make me love pop
This was the year I started listening to non-stop pop music. It could be something to do with everything seeming hard and sharp at the moment, like those morphing spikes on the coronavirus. Those jaggedy little ridges tearing through our day-to-day lives.
Growing up, pop was a dirty word and instead indie music was the soundtrack of my youth. I’ll probably never be as happy as I was stumbling around the Pavilion Tavern in Brighton drenched in lager, as the the Futureheads’ Hounds of Love blared from the speakers. Hip-hop figured heavily too. The crunchiness of Wu Tang Clan, like gravel underfoot. The ego of Kanye. The erudition of Kendrick. The melancholy of Frank. The swagger of Jay-Z. And latterly, the sheer hot-diggety of Skepta and the seductive hallucinatory quality of A$AP.
Oscar Quine is a writer and journalist based in Glasgow
Continue reading...