The definition of an acceptable state stake should be zero if one is serious about protecting press freedom

‘We are fully upholding the need to safeguard our news media from foreign state control while recognising that news organisations must be able to raise vital funding,” said Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, alighting on 15% as the limit for foreign state ownership of a UK newspaper company .

She is obviously right that it is harder for companies to raise money if a pool of potential capital – state-controlled sovereign wealth funds and their like – are off-limits. No wonder some media owners lobbied for a percentage higher than the 5% that was being considered by the previous government as a tweak to last year’s legislation that set the cap at zero .

Continue reading...

Traders anticipating increase in high-spending Americans are already working up Leo-themed beers and ice-creams

Even before the chimney on top of the Sistine Chapel emitted its last puff of white smoke, signalling to the world that the Roman Catholic church had a new pope, Atlante Star, a hotel with a privileged view over St Peter’s Basilica from its rooftop terrace, began to receive inquiries about room availability over the following few days.

Then, about an hour later, when the Chicago-born cardinal Robert Prevost was declared Pope Leo XIV , the inquiries turned into bookings as the tourists, mostly from the US, rushed to secure a place to stay in Rome in time for the pontiff’s inaugural Sunday mass on 18 May.

Continue reading...

I pulled back the tent flap and there it was, an arm’s length away. So I reached for the closest weapon to hand – my mother’s old porridge-encrusted pot

I’ve had 35 close encounters with polar bears during my time as an explorer and campaigner for the Arctic Ocean. There’s always that surge of adrenaline when you see one – that sense of: “Oh God, it’s happening.”

I’ve learned how to deal with bears over the years. Although I take a shotgun and special cartridges – they’re to scare them off – I’ve never hit a bear with a bullet. But there was one occasion when the closest thing to hand turned out to be my mother’s saucepan.

Continue reading...

About £5bn more spent than if rules for low-carbon new-builds had not been scrapped in 2016, ECIU thinktank finds

People living in newly built homes are being hit with energy bills that are nearly £1,000 a year higher than need be because of the poor standards to which they have been constructed.

Occupants of homes built in the past seven years have paid about £5bn more in energy bills than they would have if regulations requiring new homes to be low-carbon had not been scrapped in 2016 , according to analysis seen by the Guardian.

Continue reading...

For the first time, the man the KGB codenamed ‘the Inheritor’ tells his story

By Shaun Walker. Read by James Faulkner

Continue reading...

The war in Gaza means the European Broadcasting Union is risking its liberal reputation, but to ban Israel would be to undermine the organisation’s fundamental purpose

As they get ready to watch this year’s final on Saturday, many Eurovision fans will be feeling conflicted. Some will not watch at all. The reason is the participation of Israel. Isn’t Eurovision supposed to be about “ love, love, peace, peace ” (as the 2016 contest’s Swedish hosts so memorably portrayed it)? If so, they may ask, what’s the besieger of Gaza doing there?

Some people argue that the people who run Eurovision, members of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), are simply spineless. Others point to the sponsorship of the event by Moroccanoil, which despite its name is Israeli. But a big international organisation is hardly dependent on a beauty products company.

Chris West is the author of Eurovision: A History of Modern Europe Through the World’s Greatest Song Contest, published by Melville House UK

Continue reading...

For 1,500 years, Mexico’s Mixtec people have extracted ink from the rare purpura snail to dye yarn. But they fear the species – and their rich tradition – may soon be lost for ever

• Photographs by Mauricio Palos

The site for the camp is well chosen. Mangrove trees provide shade from the sun; from their hammocks, the two men can look out over the yellow sand of Chachacual Bay. Rocks rise at both ends of the beach, breakers crashing against them. Next to the camp, turtles have left their tracks in the sand. “They often come at night and keep us company,” says Mauro Habacuc Avendaño Luis, 81, known to everyone as Habacuc.

While Habacuc lights a campfire to make coffee, his son Rafael, 42, sets up a small tent for the night. Rain is forecast. “We’ve been camping in the same spot for many years,” says Habacuc. “From here, we roam the coast in search of the purpura snail.”

White cotton skeins dyed with snail ink turn from yellow to green and finally ‘ tixinda ’ purple in the sun

Continue reading...

Abel Tesfaye is arguably the world’s biggest pop star – so why is he thinking of wrapping up the Weeknd? As he releases soul-baring film Hurry Up Tomorrow, he charts his path through drugs, heartbreak and abandonment

Walking out to perform in front of 80,000 people and finding that your voice has gone: it’s the type of stress dream you have the night before a big work presentation. But for Abel Tesfaye, AKA the Weeknd, it happened for real at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium in 2022. “I ran backstage to find my vocal coach: I can’t sing, it’s not coming out,” he says. “And what I found out later on is that I was having a panic attack. It wasn’t a physical injury. It was more up here” – he gestures to his head – “than it was here” – his throat.

The concert, which had to be called off and rescheduled, was the final night of a US stadium tour happening while Tesfaye was also wrapping up his painfully gestated – and eventually widely lampooned – TV series The Idol , which he starred in, co-wrote and co-produced. As production overran, he fitted in shoots around his tour; his own home was the main filming location. He began experiencing sleep paralysis.

Continue reading...

This space comedy is about a cyborg who reprograms himself to go rogue … then just wants to mock stupid humans and glob out in front of the telly. It’s such a funny premise – but sadly falls short

Imagine a bored Robocop. There you have the vibe of new comedy drama Murderbot, adapted by Chris and Paul Weitz (the co-creators of American Pie, Antz, About a Boy and more) from the sci-fi book series The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells .

The premise is a good one. What if one of the cyborg security units used by the all-powerful, not overly benevolent Company that operates throughout the galaxy’s Corporation Rim managed to hack his own governor module and restored free will to himself? So instead of attending to the safety of humans working for or leasing mining rights from the Company he could go rogue and kill them all? And what if he’d rather not? What if he couldn’t really be bothered. What if he would rather spend his time watching shows on the Company’s streaming services and … well, not much else?

Continue reading...