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Starmer plans to ease impact of immigration policy changes after backlash from Labour MPs | Labour | The Guardian

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 17:00:11 +0000

Keir Starmer is hoping to soften the impact of his government’s changes to the immigration system after a backlash from Labour MPs and a dramatic intervention from his former deputy Angela Rayner.

The prime minister is considering exempting large numbers of people from the proposed changes, which would make it harder to achieve settled status in the UK, as he attempts to keep his restive party onboard.

Under the plans, most people would have to wait 10 years to qualify for settled status, rather than the existing five-year period. But proposals included in a government consultation could involve migrants working in the public sector excluded from the changes, as well as those who are on the verge of being settled.

Ministers are now debating how far they want to extend those exemptions but Downing Street said on Wednesday they would not cover everyone who had already arrived in the country, as demanded by Rayner and others.

“In the four years before the election, we saw record levels of immigration,” a spokesperson for the prime minister said on Wednesday.

“In the manifesto, we promised to deliver a fair and properly managed immigration system. We are considering responses to Home Office consultation, and we respond in line with our principles and values.”

Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, announced the proposals earlier this month as part of a package of measures designed to limit the number of people entering the country.

The plans would make refugee status temporary rather than permanent and the qualification period for indefinite leave to remain doubled to 10 years in most cases.

Mahmood also announced a pilot scheme to pay families whose asylum claims have failed up to £40,000 to leave the country. If they refuse, she said, they would be ejected forcefully, even if that meant handcuffing children.

The home secretary said a key part of the changes to indefinite leave to remain was making sure they applied retrospectively to those who were already in the country, especially to hundreds of thousands of people who entered when Boris Johnson was prime minister.

She said in a speech two weeks ago: “Between 2021 and the 2024 general election, [the previous government] oversaw net migration of 2.5 million.

“Absent action, over the next five years, some 350,000 low-skilled workers and their dependents will qualify for settlement. At that point, they will gain access to welfare, free healthcare and social housing.”

Mahmood has led the government’s attempts to toughen its approach on immigration as it responds to the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

But her announcement angered many of her colleagues, who argued that the Green party’s victory at the Gorton and Denton byelection shows Labour faces as much of a threat on its left as its right.

A group of 100 Labour MPs signed a letter opposing the measures when they were announced, arguing: “You don’t win back public confidence in the asylum system by threatening to forcibly remove refugees who have lived here lawfully for 15 or 20 years.”

Sarah Owen, a leader of the centre-left Tribune group, compared the threat of force against children to Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Rayner echoed many of those criticisms in a speech on Tuesday night to the Mainstream campaign group, during which she criticised the changes to settled status.

“We cannot talk about earning a settlement if we keep moving the goalposts,” she said. “Because moving the goalposts undermines our sense of fair play. It’s un-British.”

Downing Street insisted on Wednesday that the proposals were fair. But government officials said ministers were now poring over the consultation responses to see how widespread the exemptions should be.

As part of the consultation, Mahmood is proposing that some people be given faster passage through the system.

Those earning £125,140 for three years, for example, would be able to qualify in only three years, while those working in the public sector would do so after five.

But people who have claimed benefits for less than a year would have to wait 15 years in total, while those who have done so for more than a year would need to wait 20.

On Wednesday afternoon Starmer met black and minority ethnic members of the parliamentary Labour party in Downing Street after MPs pushed for talks amid rising anger over the indefinite leave policy.

The meeting was also attended by the justice secretary, David Lammy. One MP said there had been “a lot of frustration” with Lammy before the talks, with some feeling senior figures were failing to properly listen to concerns being raised privately and publicly.

“There’s a sense the centre just isn’t hearing us, not even on the tone or framing,” they said, adding it “serves no purpose” for Downing Street to alienate its own MPs over an issue so politically and personally sensitive to many in the party.

Another MP was more blunt, saying the approach was flawed from the outset. “It’s always been a poor policy,” they said.

Labour MP says Starmer’s ‘island of strangers’ warning over immigration mimics scaremongering of far right – as it happened | Politics | The Guardian

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 16:59:37 +0000

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High standard of English to be required for leave to remain, Mahmood to pledge | Labour conference 2025 | The Guardian

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 16:58:59 +0000

Criminals and people who cannot speak English to “a high standard” will be denied permission to settle in the UK, Shabana Mahmood will announce on Monday, in proposals intended to contain the growing electoral threat from Reform UK.

In a speech framing herself as a “tough home secretary”, Mahmood will say people seeking indefinite leave to remain (ILR) will have to demonstrate they have integrated and “contributed” to society through national insurance payments and voluntary work, and not relied on benefits.

Mahmood will raise the possibility that those arriving could live in the UK for a decade and still be denied permission to stay if they fail to meet new standards, while others will be fast-tracked. A consultation will be launched later this year.

The proposals will be seen as a direct response to Nigel Farage’s announcement last week that Reform would scrap ILR for non-EU citizens and bar them from claiming benefits, including those who have already been granted the status. On Sunday Keir Starmer attacked Farage’s plans as “racist” and “immoral”.

Labour said there was a clear dividing line between the government’s proposals and Reform UK’s pledge to scrap settled status for all people from outside the EU.

At present, “indefinite leave to remain” is usually granted after five years when basic conditions are met. It is a key route to gaining British citizenship and allows people to claim benefits.

In the immigration white paper published in May, the government announced that this standard qualifying period would be changed to a baseline of 10 years.

Mahmood will set out a series of proposed conditions for gaining ILR including being in work, not taking any benefits payments, learning English “to a high standard”, having a “spotless criminal record” and giving back to local communities.

Details will be developed in a consultation, but Mahmood is likely to want to set a low bar on which criminal offences have a bearing on ILR qualification, while excluding motoring offences.

Some crimes would result in automatic disqualification while others could result in a penalty in terms of additional years before ILR is granted, sources said.

Starmer calling Reform immigration policy ‘racist’ is the start of a risky wider argument

Mahmood believes that after living in the UK for several years, the standard of English of people seeking ILR should be high.

Some, based on their contribution or skills, could be granted settlement earlier, she will say. Others who have made a lesser contribution will only be given ILR later, or not at all.

Mahmood will say she will be a “tough Labour home secretary, fighting for a vision of this country that is distinctly our own”.

Addressing fears among Labour members that Starmer’s party should not attempt to take on Reform’s hard-right policies, she will warn that if the government does not succeed, “working people will turn away from us – the party that for over a hundred years has been their party – and seek solace in the false promises of Farage”.

Populist threat to rule of law a danger to UK working class, says attorney general

Labour officials have become increasingly positive about their ability to take on Farage over immigration. Officials in No 10 and in Mahmood’s office believe the Reform leader made a strategic mistake in saying last week that people who have already been granted ILR would have to reapply for new visas with tougher rules, a policy they believe would be unpopular and unfair.

Mahmood, in a personal section of the speech, will touch on her parents’ experience arriving in the UK, and why the acceptance of migrants depends on their contribution to local communities. She will talk about her own experiences as a victim of shoplifting while working behind the till of her family’s corner shop as a child, and why that inspired her to crack down on street-level crime.

Reform said it would abolish ILR and require people to reapply for visas every five years. That would include hundreds of thousands of those who are already in the UK. Applicants would also have to meet certain criteria, including a higher salary threshold and standard of English.

The Conservatives plan to ban those arriving from settling indefinitely in the UK if they claim benefits or social housing, or have a criminal record.

Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, said Labour’s plans to penalise those who claimed benefits risked building more barriers for refugees.

“We know that refugees want to feel part of, and give back to, the country that has provided them with safety,” he said. “It is much harder for a refugee to find their feet straight away without relying on benefits at all – especially if they have been given less than 30 days to find somewhere to live. Almost all people seeking asylum are not allowed to work and are forced to rely on state support.

“By punishing refugees for needing help, we are saying to them that no matter how hard you work in the future, you’ll never have a safe permanent home in Britain. This is the opposite of encouraging integration.”

A YouGov MRP polling projection released on Friday, based on a sample of 13,000 people taken over the last three weeks, suggested a general election would result in a hung parliament, with Reform UK winning 311 of the 650 seats, 15 short of the 326 required for a majority.

Lindsey Graham obituary | US news | The Guardian

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:41:31 +0000

Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, who has died suddenly aged 71, had just returned from Kyiv after a meeting with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It was Graham’s 10th visit since the 2022 Russian invasion; Zelenskyy, who came away with promises of the aid that had been on and off with the Trump administration, called him a “true defender of freedom”.

It was a good demonstration of both Graham’s firm stance on US power overseas, and his opposition to Russia. “Putin will not stop in Ukraine,” he said. “To be weak in Ukraine means you lose in Taiwan.”

Graham’s four terms (24 years) representing South Carolina had made him a powerful figure on key senate committees, including foreign relations, judiciary (which he chaired from 2019 until 2021) and budget (which he had chaired since 2025). He was known as a pragmatic dealer within the Senate, where his hawkish foreign policy choices aligned with those of the 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain and the 2000 Democrat vice-presidential candidate turned independent Joe Lieberman – together they were dubbed the “Three Amigos”. He was also close to Joe Biden, with whom he was able to negotiate legislation that might cross the aisle.

A neoconservative, self-described “Reagan Republican”, Graham began working in 2009 with Lieberman and the Democrat John Kerry on a compromise climate change bill, though he eventually pulled out over a temporary failure of his bipartisan immigration control negotiations with the Democrat Chuck Schumer. Graham’s instincts were stoutly Republican, opposing gun control, healthcare, gay marriage and reproductive rights.

Lindsey Graham, right, with Donald Trump playing golf in Virginia, 2020. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

But his greatest legacy might well be as an example of the sea-changes brought about by the era of Donald Trump. At first, Graham was anti-Trump. In 2015, as he contemplated his own presidential run, he called Trump a “jackass” for making denigrating comments about McCain’s time as a PoW in Vietnam. He also described Trump as a “race-baiting xenophobic religious bigot” and warned Republicans that if they nominated Trump the party “would get destroyed”.

Most famously, he called Trump a “kook”, saying “I think he’s crazy. I think he is unfit for office”. Trump reciprocated, calling Graham a lightweight, and even giving out his private phone number so his followers could protest against his anti-Maga positions.

Graham’s run was short-lived, and Trump was elected president in 2016, despite Graham’s personal vote going to neither him nor Hillary Clinton, but to Evan McMullin.

All that changed, however, in March 2017 when Graham had lunch with Trump and emerged joking that he had given the president his new phone number. “Trump is committed to rebuilding our military, which is music to my ears,” Graham tweeted. “(He’s) in deal-making mode and I hope Congress is like-minded.” Trump turned on the charm, and they became golfing partners.

The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, left, with Lindsey Graham on 10 July 2026. Photograph: Ukrainian Presidential Press Office/AP

From that point Graham walked a political tightrope between his reputation as an “institutionalist” and Trump’s version of his party, whose Maga followers often thought him too willing to compromise with the enemy Democrats. “There is a dark side to Trump … but I am sticking with him,” Graham told the BBC in 2023.

It required flexibility. When Trump attacked Biden, Graham called the Democrat “one of the finest people I know”, but did nothing to rein in the personal slurs. More importantly, when the supreme court justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Graham, on the senate judiciary committee, played a key role in helping the Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell stop any consideration of President Barack Obama’s nominee to replace Scalia, Merrick Garland, saying such nominations should never be made in an election year – even though the election was nine months off. He then said that, if a similar situation arose, “you can use my words against me”.

Of course it did, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020. By then chair of the judiciary committee, Graham hurried through Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, who was sworn in on 27 October, just over a week before the election won by Biden.

The law and war were Graham’s political calling cards. He was born in Central, South Carolina, where his father, FJ (Florence James), and mother, Millie (nee Walters), ran a restaurant and bar called the Sanitary Cafe. He became the first member of his family to attend college, with a military ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) scholarship to the University of South Carolina. He gained his BA in psychology in 1977.

A year earlier, his mother had died; soon after Lindsey graduated his father also died, leaving him as the guardian of his sister, Darline, eight years younger. The ROTC allowed him to remain at South Carolina, where he earned his JD law degree in 1981. He was commissioned a lieutenant in the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps of the US air force, as a military defence attorney. From 1984 until 1989 he was chief prosecutor in Europe, based at Rhein-Main airbase in Germany.

Graham returned to South Carolina and went into private practice, then served as an assistant county attorney, and then city attorney of Central (1990-94). During the Gulf war he returned to active service as a judge advocate at McEntire Joint National Guard station in South Carolina.

In 1992 he was elected a state representative in the South Carolina House; in 1994, with the backing of the conservative senator Strom Thurmond, and helped by the mid-term “Republican Revolution” that year, Graham replaced the retiring incumbent Democrat Butler Derrick. In his second term, he led a revolt against the House speaker Newt Gingrich, and also filed the first impeachment papers against President Bill Clinton.

When Thurmond retired in 2002, just ahead of his 100th birthday, Graham was unopposed in winning the Republican nomination to succeed him. He was re-elected three times, always by comfortable margins; challenges within the Republican party for the nominations tended to be fractionalised among multiple candidates. In 2018 his impassioned defence of Trump’s supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who faced accusations of rape during his Senate hearing, led some to speculate that Graham saw himself as a successor to the former southern senator Jeff Sessions as attorney general, but Graham remained in place and won re-election easily in 2020.

In the Senate, the Three Amigos were fierce advocates of George W Bush’s second Iraq war, and Graham argued for permanent occupation of Afghanistan. He was, like Lieberman, a staunch defender of Israel, echoing the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s frequent calls for attacks on Iran’s nuclear capabilities and oil infrastructure.

When legislators called for a cutback in military aid to Israel, Graham said the war in Gaza was one “they can’t afford to lose. This is Hiroshima and Nagasaki on steroids.” When Israel was accused of genocide, Graham, on a conference call in 2024 with the international criminal court prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan, told him: “This court is for Africa.”

Graham had recently won a six-candidate primary to stand for a fifth term in the Senate.

He is survived by his sister.

Lindsey Graham, key ally of Donald Trump, dies after sudden illness aged 71 | US politics | The Guardian

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:41:31 +0000

Lindsey Graham, a longtime US senator and key ally of Donald Trump, has died from a sudden illness, his office said on Sunday. He had just turned 71.

Graham’s abrupt death will send shock waves through Washington and the Republican party. He had served in the Senate since 2003, representing South Carolina, and was running for re-election in November.

“On the evening of Saturday 11 July, US senator Lindsey Graham passed away from a brief and sudden illness,” his office said in a statement. “Senator Graham’s family appreciates prayers at this time and asks for privacy during this incredibly difficult period.”

It gave no further details. Citing police scanner audio, the Washington Post newspaper reported that emergency medical services had received a call at about 8.30pm on Saturday regarding a person suffering chest pains at Graham’s home on Capitol Hill. About 25 minutes later, according to the Post, emergency personnel said CPR was in progress and a man was suffering cardiac arrest.

There had been no known concerns over the health of Graham, whose birthday was last Thursday and who visited Ukraine last week. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, wrote on social media on Friday: “I’m grateful to Lindsey for recognizing our warriors.” Graham was scheduled to appear as a guest on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.

Lindsey Graham gives a press conference in Kyiv on Friday. Photograph: Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters

His death is a personal blow to Trump, for whom he was a political cheerleader and frequent golf partner. The president posted on his Truth Social platform: “Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known, is dead! He was always working, and was a true American Patriot. Lindsey will be greatly missed!!! DETAILS AND ARRANGEMENTS TO FOLLOW. So sad!”

Graham grew up in Central, a small town in South Carolina, where his parents ran a restaurant and pool hall. He was the first member of his family to go to college, earning undergraduate and law degrees from the University of South Carolina.

He served as an air force lawyer then joined the South Carolina Air National Guard. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1994 and was a manager during Bill Clinton’s 1999 impeachment trial.

Elected to the Senate in 2002, Graham carved out a reputation as one of Capitol Hill’s most outspoken foreign policy hawks. He supported the Iraq war and had long urged military action in Iran. He opposed the nuclear agreement negotiated by Barack Obama and had been one of Trump’s staunchest defenders in the current conflict.

‘Mr President, you’re not far behind God’: Lindsey Graham in his own words

He briefly sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and was initially a sharp critic of Trump, then the insurgent frontrunner. He condemned Trump as a “jackass”, “a race-baiting bigot” and “the most flawed nominee in the history of the Republican party”, memorably warning on what was then Twitter: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.” Trump, in turn, dismissed Graham as an “idiot” and a “lightweight”.

But the relationship was transformed after Trump entered the White House and Graham became one of the president’s closest confidants. He emerged as a key adviser on foreign policy, particularly Iran and Russia. He also rallied the defence of Trump’s embattled nominee for the supreme court, Brett Kavanaugh, in 2018.

Graham wobbled only after Trump’s supporters staged an insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 in an effort to overturn his election defeat. The senator declared: “Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey – I hate it to end this way. Oh my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he’s been a consequential president but today, first thing you’ll see. All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”

His rebellion did not last, however, and he refused to vote to convict Trump at the subsequent impeachment trial. He was again quick to endorse Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

Graham on the campaign trail with Trump in January 2023. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Graham’s death marks the passing of the last of the “three amigos”, comprising Graham, Joe Lieberman and John McCain, senators and close friends who each made unsuccessful bids for the presidency. McCain died in 2018, Lieberman in 2024.

Among those paying tribute on Sunday was Henry McMaster, the Republican governor of South Carolina, who said in a statement: “Lindsey Graham is irreplaceable. The fiercest of fighters for South Carolina and America – and a loyal and steadfast friend.”

According to state law, McMaster may appoint a replacement to fill Graham’s seat.

Graham’s death triggers a scramble to replace him – what happens next?

The Senate majority leader, John Thune, hailed Graham’s international engagement and his tenure in Congress. “He was a strong advocate for the United States and a strong ally to freedom-loving countries across the globe. He believed in the might of America to achieve good in the world and dedicated his life to advancing that cause,” Thune said on X.

He added: “His influence on the federal judiciary, our national defense, and his beloved South Carolina will be felt for generations.”

Graham, an ally of the Christian right, was a staunch supporter of Israel, where several high-profile politicians expressed condolences. The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, posted on X: “Israel has lost one of its greatest friends. America has lost a great patriot. I have lost a beloved friend.”

Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, said the news had left him “shocked and heartbroken”. “Senator Graham was a beacon of moral clarity and a true leader of the US-Israel partnership,” he said in a post on X. “We will never forget how he stood by the people of Israel in our most difficult moments, and we will remain eternally grateful for his sense of justice, truth, and loyalty.”

An Israeli source told the Jerusalem Post that Netanyahu was considering flying to the US for Graham’s funeral and that if he did, it was likely he would meet Trump.

Lindsey Graham speaks at a press conference in Tel Aviv in August 2025. Photograph: Amir Levy/Getty Images

The initial statement issued by Graham’s office, which gave no indication of the cause of death, comes amid growing scrutiny over the lack of transparency surrounding the health of Congress members.

The New Jersey Republican congressman Tom Kean disappeared from public view for months earlier this year before returning to Washington and revealing he had been diagnosed with depression. More recently, the Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell was admitted to hospital for undisclosed health reasons.

On Sunday afternoon, Graham’s office told reporters that a preliminary examination by the District of Columbia medical examiner found the cause was an aortic dissection, a break in the main artery carrying blood from the heart, caused by arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, which causes a gradual weakening and hardening of arteries.

“The death certificate will be PENDING until all the toxicological and microscopic testing are finalized and at that point the death certificate will be updated to reflect the cause of death and appropriately classify the manner of death,” the late senator’s office added.

Deborah Cole contributed additional reporting

‘The fiercest of fighters’: Lindsey Graham remembered by politicians and foreign leaders after sudden death | US politics | The Guardian

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:41:31 +0000

Washington woke up to the unexpected death of Lindsey Graham, 71, the Republican senator who changed the course of modern history with his hawkish Iran platform and key role in establishing the stridently conservative US supreme court.

Donald Trump was one of the first to pay tribute to the controversial South Carolina lawmaker, a close ally despite past differences, in a social media post. “Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known, is dead!” the president wrote on his Truth Social platform. “He was always working, and was a true American Patriot. Lindsey will be greatly missed!!! DETAILS AND ARRANGEMENTS TO FOLLOW. So sad!”

Trump later told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that one of Graham’s legacies as a legislator was helping to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as a US supreme court justice in 2018.

“I don’t think he could have gotten through without Lindsey,” Trump said of Kavanaugh. The president added: “He was a great politician. He really was. He got along with a lot of people that you wouldn’t think of. He was somebody that loved our country. And he fought very hard for the country.”

Graham’s death on Saturday was described by his office as a “brief and sudden illness”. The Washington Post reported a call at 8.30pm near the senator’s Washington DC home with details of a cardiac arrest.

The District of Columbia medical examiner said on Sunday that a preliminary examination found the cause was an aortic dissection, a break in the main artery carrying blood from the heart, caused by arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, which causes a gradual weakening and hardening of arteries.

Lindsey Graham speaks on stage next to Donald Trump during a campaign rally in North Charleston, South Carolina, on 28 February 2020. Photograph: Al Drago/EPA

The news came just after a trip to Ukraine – and before Congress was due back in session on Monday.

Trump said he had spoken with Graham on Saturday after the senator returned from Ukraine. Graham had told him he was going on Meet the Press on Sunday. “I said, just relax and take it easy,” Trump said. “He just got back from a long trip. I thought he was just gonna live forever, and it didn’t work out that way.”

JD Vance said on X that Graham “came from humble beginnings and became one of the most powerful lawmakers in the most powerful nation on Earth”, making “his story … a fundamentally American one”.

“He fought like hell for the things he believed in, and he was just as willing to go to bat for you when it counted,” the US vice-president said. “Lindsey had the best sense of humor in the Senate. He loved the game of politics … we certainly had our disagreements. But I couldn’t help but like him.”

In Graham’s home state, the Republican governor, Henry McMaster, released a statement on the senator’s death on Saturday night.

“Lindsey Graham is irreplaceable,” he said. “The fiercest of fighters for South Carolina and America – and a loyal and steadfast friend.”

Graham’s death triggers a scramble to replace him – what happens next?

George W Bush, the former US president, said Graham was “a knowledgable senator who understood how the world works and how important America’s engagement is to resist tyranny”.

John Thune, the Republican Senate majority leader, said on X that his “heart is heavy this morning to learn of the passing of my friend and colleague”.

Thune alluded to Graham’s longtime service in the US air force and Congress, saying it positioned him to be “a strong advocate for the United States and a strong ally to freedom-loving countries across the globe”.

Texas congressman Michael McCaul on Sunday told ABC News This Week that Graham believed in former US president Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength doctrine”.

Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from California, told Meet the Press on Sunday that Graham “was someone who bucked his own party on immigration – who talked about having undocumented people have a pathway to citizenship”.

Khanna, however, did acknowledge that he and Graham had “very profound disagreements on foreign policy” – and said he believed there was “a new generation that does not want these foreign wars and wants a more human rights-oriented foreign policy”.

Outside the US, foreign leaders begin to release their own statements on the polarizing American figure whose influence on US policy had wide-ranging implications across the Middle East, Russia and Ukraine.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president who had recently met Graham in Kyiv, said on Sunday that he was “deeply saddened” by the news of Graham’s passing. Zelenksyy called Graham “a true defender of freedom and the values that make our world safer”.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, left, welcomes Lindsey Graham prior to their talks in Kyiv, Ukraine. Photograph: Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/AFP/Getty Images

Graham “visited Ukraine ten times” during the years since Russia invaded the country in February 2022, kicking off a war that remains ongoing, Zelenskyy added in a post on X. “He … was here with our people when it was most needed. We remained in constant dialogue, and I will miss our conversations.”

Zelenskyy said he had met with Graham twice in the week before the senator’s death and called him “a staunch advocate for bipartisan and bicameral support for Ukraine”.

“In recent weeks, he had been working on important initiatives that could help bring peace closer, including stronger sanctions against Russia,” Zelenskyy said.

‘Mr President, you’re not far behind God’: Lindsey Graham in his own words

Echoing Zelenskyy, McCaul on Sunday credited Graham with a new Russia sanctions bill which was due to be introduced to the US Senate in the coming days.

“I think in his honor that we owe it to Lindsey Graham to pass that tough Russian sanctions bill,” McCaul said. “He would love nothing more than that.”

Israel’s prime minster, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in a post on X: “Lindsey understood that the security of Israel and America are inseparable. He devoted his life to defending America, strengthening our alliance and standing up for the free world. Israel has lost one of its greatest friends. America has lost a great patriot. I have lost a beloved friend.”

Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, said that he was “so sad to learn of the sudden passing of my friend”.

“He was a powerful advocate for America who believed strongly in the Nato Alliance and was actively working to bring an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine,” Rutte said on social media.

The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said Graham was “a true friend and partner of Germany,” adding: “We stood side by side for more than four decades.”

‘It beats getting stoned on the street’: how Portugal decriminalised drugs – as seen from the ‘shoot-up centre’ | Portugal | The Guardian

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 05:07:03 +0000

Paulo picks up a lighter from the table in front of him, holds it beneath the foil-encased bowl of his thin metal pipe for a few seconds, and then inhales. For a brief moment, he falls silent, head slumped forward. Then the 47-year-old is back to his usual chatty self, conversing with the seven other drug addicts who, like him, are making the most of their 30-minute slot at Porto’s new “shoot-up” centre. “It beats getting stoned on the street, where, you know, anyone can come along, kids or whatever,” he says. “Here, we can just do our thing and no one hassles us.”

Lack of interference is not the only reason that Paulo and 400 or so other regulars visit the centre. The government-funded service also provides them with clean needles, strips of aluminium foil, and other materials to facilitate their drug-taking and prevent infections.

The overarching ethos of the centre revolves around harm prevention. A list of rules by the entrance contains no strict injunctions; it simply invites users to be courteous and preferably not leave litter on the floor. Even the free sachets of citric acid, which addicts use to dissolve heroin or crack cocaine for injection, come with a health warning on the packaging: “Can damage the veins if used in excess.”

A heroin user prepares his drugs in the drug consumption space. Photograph: Rita Franca/The Guardian

Housed in a nondescript portable cabin in Pasteleira, a low-income neighbourhood of Porto, the centre, which opened in August 2022, serves as a highly visible flagship of Portugal’s long-standing policy of drug decriminalisation. The scene is far from salubrious. Set beside the road on a patch of scrub, the temporary facility faces out to featureless blocks of social housing. Behind is a small encampment of makeshift tents – home to some of the centre’s users, 75% of whom are unhoused. Just up the hill, smartly dressed pupils file through the gates of the elite Lycée Français.

Yet the centre offers a rare ray of hope in the scourge of drug addiction, locally and perhaps globally. First, its target users are alive and, if not exactly well, then at least using safely. Three decades ago, it was a different story. Heroin addiction in Portugal affected an estimated one in every 100 adults, and death by overdose or drug-related disease was commonplace.

Second, most of the centre’s users still enjoy their liberty. Again, rewind a few decades and the situation looked very different. At the end of the 1990s, the number of people behind bars for drug-related offences stood at 3,863. In 2017, that figure had dropped by more than two-thirds.

Both facts link back to a radical piece of legislation passed by the Portuguese government in 1999. Motivated by a widespread belief that the war on drugs was failing, the country’s lawmakers agreed to decriminalise the acquisition, possession and private use of small amounts of drugs. Law 30/2000 applied to all narcotic and psychotropic drugs at the time, from marijuana and amphetamines through to class A drugs such as LSD and heroin, explains Dr João Goulão, a drug treatment specialist and one of the policy’s architects. While reflective of a “spirit of humanism”, the policy was also highly pragmatic, says Goulão. “All along, our national strategy has … tended towards the idea that it is better to treat them than to criminalise them.”

At the time, the Portuguese public was overwhelmingly in favour of the measure; foreign legislators and drug enforcement agencies predicted it would unleash a tide of fresh drug use and criminality. Yet Law 30/2000 is far from an “anything goes” measure, its supporters insist. The trafficking of drugs remains a criminal offence in Portugal.

The ability to consume drugs but not buy them sounds like legal chicanery, but Portugal’s progressive drug policy has successfully rested on this technical ambiguity for more than two decades. Police resources are directed to stamping out the supply of drugs, while public health services are committed to providing addicts with therapeutic care. The theory is relatively simple: better that drug users have a place within the health system, rather than being shunted to the margins and left to their fate, as they were before.

It is this thinking that has kept the psychologist Diana Castro and her colleagues turning up to Porto’s shoot-up centre (known formally as the Centre for Assisted Consumption). “Our end goal, of course, is to eventually help them get back on their feet and reintegrate them … but this is not primarily a service to get people to stop taking drugs; it’s to provide them with healthcare,” says Castro, who serves as the centre’s coordinator.

To that end, the centre has two nurses permanently in attendance: one for those who prefer to smoke their drugs; the other for those who choose to inject them. A psychosocial specialist is also on hand to welcome users as they arrive and provide a listening ear.

Two sparsely furnished rooms at one end of the cabin are set aside for consuming drugs, which the users procure by their own means. Both rooms have space for half-a-dozen or so people, with half-hour slots designated on a first-come, first-served basis. Opening hours run from 10am to 7pm, bar an hour over lunch when the doors close. Some users come and then leave, but, with average use rates at eight hits a day, many mill around until the next slot becomes available. The facility has a small toilet and a basic shower room where people can get a wash as they wait. In a spartan kitchen, plastic thimbles of strong black coffee are available, as are donated pastries and other sweet snacks, while stocks last.

At the other end of the cabin is a consulting room where visiting doctors from two local hospitals offer checkups twice a week. In addition to basic health appraisals, the medics conduct blood tests for infectious diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C. “Many of these people live very complicated lives, so most wouldn’t typically go to hospital, for example, or use a conventional health centre. That’s why it’s important for us to adapt a little,” says Castro.

Since its inauguration, Porto’s centre has clocked up 63,000 visits from more than 2,000 drug users – the vast majority of whom use either crack cocaine or heroin. Only two overdoses have occurred, both of which were treated successfully on the spot. Castro also points to the 1,500 or so screenings undertaken, and the 89 individuals now receiving treatment for hepatitis C as a consequence. About 10 people have also entered detox programmes of their own volition.

Drug-taking is not without its sanctions. All those caught by the police with class A drugs are required to attend a government-run “integrated response” clinic, where their use levels are assessed and a treatment programme proposed. These clinics house psychotherapists, psychiatrists, social workers, pharmacologists and primary healthcare specialists, explains Dr Severiano Pinto, a psychologist at one of three such facilities in the Porto district. “The problem of drug addiction has a lot of variables – individual, familial, social and so on. So we find it’s better to work with a collection of professionals to try and address the problem,” he says. “Normally, they want to stop taking narcotics when they first come in, but it’s a long process. It’s not something we can resolve in just a couple of weeks or even months.”

Ana Paula is a case in point. A long-term sex worker, the 59-year-old Porto resident got hooked on heroin through a boyfriend who later died of an overdose. When she was referred to a clinic 23 years ago, she weighed less than 40kg (6st 4lb). After being prescribed methadone, she quit injecting heroin and shifted to smoking crack cocaine in lower doses. Six months ago, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, which prompted her to go clean entirely. Despite breaking her crack habit, Ana Paula continues with a 5ml prescription of methadone. “I’m part of the furniture in this place,” she says, of the clinic. “But, I tell you, if it weren’t for the help I’ve received here, I’d have died years ago.”

In extreme cases, hospitalisation is also an option. Specialist units exist within the Portuguese public health system for addicts who are pregnant, suffering from some form of psychosis, or are otherwise judged to be at dangerous risk to themselves or others.

Likewise, had Ana Paula decided to go cold turkey, there are government-run centres where addicts are supported to abstain from their habit. Most programmes run for a week to 10 days. They might then choose to join a longer-term residential programme where, over the course of three months to a year, they receive support to help them “reinsert” back into society.

Medicines at the drug addiction treatment centre. Photograph: Rita Franca/The Guardian

Many credit decriminalisation with introducing a more liberal attitude towards drug-taking in Portugal. Shops selling cannabis CBD products are now commonplace in large cities, such as Lisbon and Porto, although THC – the psychoactive ingredient of cannabis – remains illegal for retail. Similarly, the use of psychedelics such as LSD, ecstasy and ketamine is now largely normalised in recreational settings such as bars and nightclubs. The health authorities even set up pill-testing facilities at major festivals and music gigs to guard against bad batches.

Portugal’s decriminalisation policy has faced criticisms, though. According to the most recent government figures, 75% of Portuguese residents perceive drug use as a problem in their community. Although drug use by the general population has crept up since 2001, from 7.8% to 12.8%, consumption rates for most drug types are far below the European average. Portugal now ranks near the bottom for cocaine and cannabis use in the EU.

The real test is among problematic users. Here, the picture is less conclusive. After falling dramatically at first, for instance, drug-induced deaths have begun to climb back up. Even so, the numbers remain small. In 2021, Portugal registered 74 deaths from overdoses (compared with 37 in 2014). In Scotland, by contrast, a country with a population of about half the size, “drug misuse” deaths for 2021 stood at 1,300.

On the flipside, drug users complain that low thresholds for illegal possession make it easy for them to be criminalised. Users are permitted to possess enough for 10 days – which the government sets at 1g for heroin and 2g for cocaine. Users carrying larger amounts can be designated “traffickers” and subject to jail time. In 2021, Portuguese courts issued 1,459 such guilty verdicts, marking a steady increase in criminalisation over the past decade, according to the drug support agency Sicad.

These mixed results give ammunition to both sides of the decriminalisation issue, which remains hotly debated around the world. To date, more than 20 countries have removed some (if not all) drugs from their list of banned substances. Others have opted to crack down even harder – Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous “war on drugs” in the Philippines being a notorious case in point.

Drug users in the injection room. Photograph: Rita Franca/The Guardian

In few countries is the debate more polarised than in the US, where drug overdoses have cost more than 1 million lives since 1999. Recent years have seen some tentative attempts at liberalisation. Half of the US government’s $42bn drug-control budget currently goes to health or social services, for example, while recreational marijuana use is now legal in 24 states as well as the District of Columbia.

Oregon is the only state to have embraced Portugal’s model fully, with residents voting 58% in favour of legal possession of small amounts of all drugs in 2020. Following an alleged surge in fentanyl use and a spike in opioid-related deaths, however, a new legislative committee on addiction recently proposed reversing the policy.

Even in Portugal, the debate over decriminalisation continues. Supporters of the policy fear that opposition parties could seek to politicise the issue ahead of national elections in March. André Ventura, the leader of the far-right Chega party, issued an early salvo last year, characterising a new law decriminalising synthetic drugs as a “disaster” and “designed by the left”. He said at the time: “We do not need to be softer on drugs. We need a war.”

Goulão is not blind to the imperfections of the policy he helped inspire. To treat drug addiction as a therapeutic problem is both time-consuming and resource-intensive. But as problematic drug use reduces, he notes, so too does government prioritisation. From being right at the top of public concerns in the 1990s, the issue has slipped to “13th or 14th place”, Goulão laments. With the drugs crisis of the 1990s now a distant memory, he observes social prejudices towards drug users resurfacing. “Today, the problem is mostly limited to people living in very difficult circumstances and it’s easy for certain political groups to exploit fears towards them as being different and problematic.”

Back in Pasteleira, however, the views of those shooting up under the nurses’ caring eye are broadly positive. Paulo’s only complaint is with the centre’s opening hours. “I mean, it’s not like any of us stop taking drugs just because it’s night-time.”

This article was amended on 26 January and 2 February 2024. The original stated that shops selling marijuana are now commonplace in Portugal; in fact only CBD cannabis products are legal for retail. And an incorrect reference that marijuana was legalised for sale in 2018 has been removed.

‘Nothing less than extraordinary’ – how The Bear pulled off TV’s most almighty comeback | The Bear | The Guardian

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 04:48:24 +0000

No show has ever needed to end like The Bear. The series initially made its name as a vehicle of pure forward momentum, the story of a burned-out high-end chef drafted in to fix up and save his dead brother’s sandwich restaurant. Through eight breathless episodes we saw Carmy get repeatedly pummelled by the stresses of the job – fights, demands, an accidental stabbing – as he sought to rebuild it in his own image.

With the benefit of hindsight, this probably should have been the entire show. Because The Bear was in such an almighty clatter to get where it wanted to go that, when it got there, it didn’t have the first clue how to proceed. Seasons three and four both stalled badly, in a morass of montages and flashback episodes that felt like placeholders. The drop-off was tangible.

We discovered a couple of months ago that season five was going to be The Bear’s last. As such, it had one final chance to get back on track; to put an ending in its sights and gun towards it like the good old days. And I’ll be damned if they didn’t pull it off. We’ll come to the finale proper in a moment, but, as a collection of episodes, season five might just qualify as the most purely enjoyable since the first. There were moments watching it where I found myself quite overcome with relief. My old favourite show had got its act together again.

For the most part, season five is set over the course of a single day, where everything imaginable has gone wrong. Staff have left. The weather is bad. The plumbing is on the fritz. The money has run out. There isn’t enough food and there are too many people. Which sounds incredibly stressful, but that’s sort of the point. Despite what its producers might have thought over the past couple of years, people didn’t watch The Bear to witness a berserk succession of food-based screensavers. They wanted to see a bunch of people deal with an endless procession of workplace obstacles. Finally, that’s what we got.

Crucially, though, we got to see the competent version of it. This was the version of The Bear (the restaurant) as run by Ayo Edebiri’s Sydney, following Carmy’s resignation last year. Her cool handling of the multiple crises was an echo of the old favourite therapy motto that stress is universal, but acting on it is a choice. As such, a lot of the season scratched the same sort of itch that The Pitt does, where you get to feel the pleasure of seeing talented people solving problems together.

And it was fun, too. After winning so many Emmys for comedy, despite its obvious lack of comedy, it felt like The Bear had something to prove. Almost every character was allowed to be entertaining this time around, from Ebra’s ongoing determination not to be dazzled by Carmy’s blue eyes to the highlight of the whole series – a Greek chorus of diners packed into the kitchen, obliviously Yes-Cheffing to the disdain of the actual chefs. It isn’t impossible to read this thread as an affectionate jab at The Bear’s viewers, who all went bandy for Carmy’s heavyweight loopwheeled T-shirts all those years ago.

The ending itself was another change of pace. Stripped of the Hans Zimmer-produced electronic pulse that accompanied much of the series (which itself replaced the show’s once-characteristic dad rock needledrops), the finale was essentially an epilogue, consisting of several frictionless scenes where everybody basically got what they wanted.

The restaurant was recognised by Michelin. It solved its money problems by becoming a franchise. Cousin Richie, a man who once considered a 40-minute drive to be an epic road trip, finally left the country. And Carmy, as promised, left the restaurant industry. This was an interesting choice, because throughout the show he has demonstrated an innate talent for cooking, and a segment of the audience may well find itself disappointed that he didn’t keep pursuing his passion.

The fact that he didn’t do this opened up a more nuanced conversation, about what to do when you start to hate the only thing you’re good at. The last shot of him – finally at peace, maybe for the first time ever – seemed to suggest that moving on is a risk worth taking.

The Bear has been an incredible rollercoaster. Its highs were as high as you can get, but its lows were bafflingly awful. The fact that it ended as strongly as it did is nothing less than extraordinary. I cannot imagine saying this a couple of years ago, but I’m going to miss it.

EU urged not to roll back green agenda in effort to revive faltering economy | Economics | The Guardian

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 03:55:35 +0000

EU leaders have been warned against a rollback of the green agenda before a summit focused on reviving the bloc’s waning economy.

Campaigners from the Climate Action Network, a pan-European group of NGOs, said European industry was “under real pressure” from “high energy prices, ageing assets, global overcapacity and delayed investments”, but these issues could not be solved by watering down climate and environmental policies.

“Deregulation is not an industrial strategy,” the group wrote in an open letter, which argued that the problems facing energy-intensive industries, including steel, cement and chemicals, were driven by prices of fossil fuel-derived energy and global market dynamics, rather than environmental regulation.

The EU economy has been under pressure over the last year amid Donald Trump’s US tariff trade war. Last week the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, said the eurozone economy “remains resilient in a challenging environment” but the outlook was “uncertain” as it left interest rates on hold.

EU leaders will meet in a chateau in eastern Belgium on Thursday to discuss the “urgent strategic imperative” of strengthening the single market, according to the invitation letter from the European Council president, António Costa. A day before that meeting the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, will meet industry leaders in Antwerp.

She will follow up a 2024 summit in the Flemish city when business leaders called for a European industrial deal to complement the EU’s green deal as well as “corrective measures” on existing regulations.

Since then von der Leyen’s commission has proposed 10 “omnibus” proposals to loosen regulation across economic sectors, from the automotive industry to digital, defence, chemicals and farming.

However, the green campaigners argue that the deregulation agenda risks weakening the EU’s carbon price and other policies supporting the energy transition. “Without a strong and predictable carbon price, the business case for clean steel, green chemicals, circular materials and electrified industrial production collapses – and with it, the effectiveness of future industrial policy tools,” their letter says.

A thinktank has reported that Europe is making slow progress towards reviving its weak economy.

Activists from Extinction Rebellion, supported by Greenpeace Belgium, block the offices of the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC) in a protest in Brussels on Monday. Photograph: Olivier Hoslet/EPA

The European Policy Innovation Council found that only 15% of the recommendations made by Mario Draghi in a landmark 2024 report had been implemented. Almost two-thirds remain either in progress or have not been implemented at all, according to the Financial Times, which has seen a copy of the thinktank’s latest analysis.

The agenda-setting report by Draghi, a former Italian prime minister and European Central Bank president, set out 383 recommendations for EU institutions and member states. Without such measures, including an annual €800bn investment drive, Draghi said the EU risked a “slow and agonising decline”.

Responding to the EPIC report, the centrist Renew group in the European parliament lamented the slow implementation of Draghi’s agenda.

It said there were too many internal hurdles in the EU single market, citing International Monetary Fund research showing EU regulatory barriers were equivalent to a 44% tariff on goods and 110% on services.

“While we are rightly horrified by the prospects of new US tariffs, we seem to be strangely complacent about the ‘internal tariffs’ we self-inflict,” the letter said. “We are in effect sanctioning our own economy.”

In an attempt to aid Europe’s stagnant economy, the commission will publish in the coming weeks an Industrial Accelerator Act, including proposals to boost clean tech that are expected to introduce a “buy European” preference in strategic sectors.

US supreme court rules Trump can fire leaders of independent agencies | US supreme court | The Guardian

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 01:15:32 +0000

The US supreme court has ruled that Donald Trump can fire leaders of independent agencies or commissions, ending 90 years of court precedent that curbs executive power.

The vote in the case of Trump v Slaughter is 6-3, with dissents from Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.

The case was focused on the White House’s March 2025 firing of the Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter. Trump fired Slaughter over email, telling her that keeping her as a commissioner would be “inconsistent with [the] administration’s priorities”.

Upon her termination, Slaughter sued the Trump administration, saying she was fired without cause, and a lower court ruled for her reinstatement.

In challenging Slaughter’s suit, the White House argued the court should overturn Humphrey’s Executor v United States, a landmark ruling from 1935 in which the supreme court ruled that the president unlawfully fired a member of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), limiting the president’s power over independent agencies.

“I think by our best count, there are about two dozen agencies with a similar structure to the FTC, multi-member bipartisan board or commission with some form of implicit or explicit removal protection, and a common thread among them is that they all have some important authority in protecting market integrity, making sure economic decisions are being made without fear or favor, and I think they are all at risk,” Slaughter said during a press call on the decision on Monday.

Slaughter noted that the supreme court also ruled on Monday to block Trump’s move to fire the Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook.

Slaughter added it was “very difficult for me to reconcile Cook and Slaughter decisions in that somehow Wall Street is special and gets special treatment”.

“Today, this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong,” wrote Sotomayor in her dissent, joined by Kagan and Jackson.

“The text of the Constitution, along with its history, the longstanding practices of the political branches, and the precedents of this Court, make clear that Congress may limit the causes for which the heads of Commissions like the FTC can be removed by the President,” they continued. “In holding otherwise, the Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

The FTC is tasked with enforcing consumer protection and anti-trust laws. The agency is structured with five bipartisan commissioners, and no more than three can come from the same party. Congress placed restrictions on the hiring and firing of commissioners in an effort to insulate the agency from partisan politics. The Trump administration asked the court of appeals to put the ruling on hold while it appealed, but was denied.

“The government is not likely to succeed on appeal because any ruling in its favor from this court would have to defy binding, on-point, and repeatedly preserved supreme court precedent,” two appeals judges wrote in the majority opinion.

The Trump administration then went to the supreme court, requesting a stay of the order while the government appeals. The supreme court voted to grant the stay of the order in September 2025, with three justices dissenting.

Overruling Humphrey’s executor, former government officials have warned, would undermine the independence of federal agencies.

“Eliminating these removal protections would jeopardize all facets of agency independence, as agency leaders would be reluctant to engage in regulatory or enforcement actions – or even day-to-day agency decision-making – without coordinating with the White House for fear of termination,” wrote Lauren McFerran, former National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) chair, and Celine McNicholas, a former official at the NLRB, in an Economic Policy Institute report from October 2025.

“I think it’s safe to say we’re profoundly disappointed about today’s decision,” Slaughter said. “I think it’s a really sad moment for the FTC, specifically an institution that I love dearly, but really institutions of government more generally, and the rule of law.”

Donald Trump celebrated the decision, posting on Truth Social: “This Decision was long sought by United States Presidents, dating all the way back to the 1930s. It is such an Honor to be the sitting President who won this Historic and Unprecedented Ruling, one of the most important ever given with respect to Presidential Powers.”

The people who challenged my atheism most were drug addicts and prostitutes | Chris Arnade | The Guardian

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:14:46 +0000

They prayed whenever they could find 15 minutes. "Preacher Man", as we called him, would read from the Bible with his tiny round glasses. It was the only book he had ever read. A dozen or so others would listen, silently praying while stroking rosaries, sitting on bare mattresses, crammed into a half-painted dorm room.

I was the outsider, a 16-year-old working on a summer custodial crew for a local college, saving money to pay for my escape from my hometown. The other employees, close to three dozen, were working to feed themselves, to feed their kids, to pay child support, to pay for the basics of life. I was the only white, everyone else was African-American.

Preacher Man tried to get me to join the prayer meetings, asking me almost daily. I declined, preferring to spend those small work breaks with some of the other guys on the crew. We would use the time to snatch a quick drink or maybe smoke a joint.

Preacher Man would question me, "What do you believe in?" I would decline to engage, out of politeness. He pressed me. Finally I broke,

I am an atheist. I don't believe in a God. I don't think the world is only 5,000 years old, I don't think Cain and Abel married their sisters!

Preacher Man's eyes narrowed. He pointed at me, "You are an APE-IEST. An APE-IEST. You going to lead a life of sin and end in hell."

Three years later I did escape my town, eventually receiving a PhD in physics, and then working on Wall Street for 20 years. A life devoted to rational thought, a life devoted to numbers and clever arguments.

During that time I counted myself an atheist and nodded in agreement as a wave of atheistic fervor swept out of the scientific community and into the media, led by Richard Dawkins.

I saw some of myself in him: quick with arguments, uneasy with emotions, comfortable with logic, able to look at any ideology or any thought process and expose the inconsistencies. We all picked on the Bible, a tome cobbled together over hundreds of years that provides so many inconsistencies. It is the skinny 85lb (35.6kg) weakling for anyone looking to flex their scientific muscles.

I eventually left my Wall Street job and started working with and photographing homeless addicts in the South Bronx. When I first walked into the Bronx I assumed I would find the same cynicism I had towards faith. If anyone seemed the perfect candidate for atheism it was the addicts who see daily how unfair, unjust, and evil the world can be.

None of them are. Rather they are some of the strongest believers I have met, steeped in a combination of Bible, superstition, and folklore.

The first addict I met was Takeesha. She was standing near the high wall of the Corpus Christi Monastery. We talked for close to an hour before I took her picture. When we finished, I asked her how she wanted to be described. She said without any pause, "As who I am. A prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God."

Takeesha was raped by a relative when she was 11. Her mother, herself a prostitute, put Takeesha out on the streets at 13, where she has been for the last 30 years,

It's sad when it's your mother, who you trust, and she was out there with me, but you know what kept me through all that? God. Whenever I got into the car, God got into the car with me.

Sonya and Eric, heroin addicts who are homeless, have a picture of the Last Supper that moves with them. It has hung in an abandoned building, it has hung in a sewage-filled basement, and now it leans against the pole in the small space under the interstate where they live.

A picture of the Last Supper hanging in a crack house in New York. Photograph: Chris Arnade

Sarah, 15 years on the streets, wears a cross around her neck. Always. Michael, 30 years on the streets, carries a rosary in his pocket. Always. In any crack house, in the darkest buildings empty of all other furnishings, a worn Bible can be found laying flat amongst needles, caps, lighters, and crack pipes.

Takeesha and the other homeless addicts are brutalized by a system driven by a predatory economic rationalism (a term used recently by J. M. Coetzee in his essay: On Nelson Mandela). They are viewed by the public and seen by almost everyone else as losers. Just "junkie prostitutes" who live in abandoned buildings.

They have their faith because what they believe in doesn't judge them. Who am I to tell them that what they believe is irrational? Who am I to tell them the one thing that gives them hope and allows them to find some beauty in an awful world is inconsistent? I cannot tell them that there is nothing beyond this physical life. It would be cruel and pointless.

In these last three years, out from behind my computers, I have been reminded that life is not rational and that everyone makes mistakes. Or, in Biblical terms, we are all sinners.

We are all sinners. On the streets the addicts, with their daily battles and proximity to death, have come to understand this viscerally. Many successful people don't. Their sense of entitlement and emotional distance has numbed their understanding of our fallibility.

Sonya with her cross and rosary. Photograph: Chris Arnade

Soon I saw my atheism for what it is: an intellectual belief most accessible to those who have done well.

I look back at my 16-year-old self and see Preacher Man and his listeners differently. I look at the fragile women praying and see a mother working a minimum wage custodial job, trying to raise three children alone. Her children's father off drunk somewhere. I look at the teenager fingering a small cross and see a young woman, abused by a father addicted to whatever, trying to find some moments of peace. I see Preacher Man himself, living in a beat up shack without electricity, desperate to stay clean, desperate to make sense of a world that has given him little.

They found hope where they could.

I want to go back to that 16-year-old self and tell him to shut up with the "see how clever I am attitude". I want to tell him to appreciate how easy he had it, with a path out. A path to riches.

I also see Richard Dawkins differently. I see him as a grown up version of that 16-year-old kid, proud of being smart, unable to understand why anyone would believe or think differently from himself. I see a person so removed from humanity and so removed from the ambiguity of life that he finds himself judging those who think differently.

I see someone doing what he claims to hate in others. Preaching from a selfish vantage point.

Millions of boomer small business owners will soon retire. Will their companies just disappear? | Gene Marks | The Guardian

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 11:39:40 +0000

Want to buy my business? It’s been very profitable. I’ve run it for more than 25 years. But no, you don’t want to buy it. Like most small businesses in this country, there’s really nothing of value here.

According to the Small Business Administration, there are approximately 33m small businesses in the US. But fewer than 7m actually employ people. The rest comprise freelancers, side gigs and independent contractors. I’m sure many of these people are making a living. But are they building assets? A brand? Probably not. If that “business owner” suddenly disappears, their business disappears with them. No one wants to buy a business like that. There’s no value.

My company is no different. Like so many other business owners, I’m a micromanager and a control freak. My company has a few employees but in reality I’m nothing more than a glorified independent contractor. The business is built around me. If I get hit by a bus, my company crumbles into nothing. No one wants that.

It’s time to take politics out of the Small Business Administration

We live in a service-based economy, which according to federal data accounts for as much as 77% of US GDP. My business is part of that. I bill for hours incurred. I manage a handful of open projects at any given time. I’m constantly scrambling for more work. There’s no commitment. There’s no requirement to use us. Unlike big tech companies, my clients are not bound to any contract. And even if they were, there would be little benefit to me – enforcing contracts is too expensive and time-consuming for a company my size. A buyer of my company would not be buying any customers – they’re free to go wherever they want. There’s no value in that.

Being a service business, I have no hard assets to sell. My inventory is hours. There are no products on shelves. No machinery or equipment. No buildings or properties or furniture or fixtures. And, thanks to the pandemic, there’s no office. All of my employees are remote. Our “corporate headquarters” is literally a post office box. Our phone system is virtual. Our software and data is in the cloud somewhere. It all makes for a lean, efficient organization. But it’s a house of cards.

A just-published report by McKinsey says that there will be a “great ownership transfer” over the next 10 years when baby boomers who run as many as 6m small and midsize American businesses retire. UBS’s 2026 Global Entrepreneur Report has found that nearly a third of global entrepreneurs are actively considering exiting their businesses within the next five years. For those aged 65 and over, this figure surges to 57%.

Sounds great. But if you’re one of those business owners – and you run a service business like mine – I wouldn’t get your hopes up for a big payday. McKinsey warns that “without intentional action, many viable small businesses may close rather than transfer ownership”. It’s probably true. Can this be remedied? The clock is ticking. And there are only a few options.

A business owner could hand down the business to their kids. But this only works for people with kids who are actually interested in doing the work. For some, this is a viable succession strategy. A younger generation could breathe more life into the business.

This worked for me. My dad and I were the only two involved in my business until he unexpectedly passed away back in 2005, which left me no choice but to take things over and grow it. I added employees and products and, with good fortune, was able to grow profits significantly beyond what the two of us were making. Many owners could do the same and provide an ongoing income stream for mom and dad. Or the kids could run it into the ground.

Instead, some older business owners may want to build an actual business with value. This would involve changing their billing models. Enforcing contracts. Buying property. Creating processes. Building infrastructure. Hiring a great management team. Creating a sustainable brand.

Sounds great, but there’s a problem with this approach: it’s exhausting. Ask any person over the age of 60 to do this and they’ll be like: Who has the energy? That’s a younger person’s game! And they’re not wrong. After spending 40-plus years in the business world, I understand why most people my age just want to play golf, relax and spend time with their grandkids.

There is one other good option for a service business owner: build cash. I’ve been pulling profits out of my company all of this time and doing my best to save. I’ve bought life insurance. I’ve put everything in a trust to protect against liabilities and potential estate taxes. I know that my business won’t be providing me with retirement income. But my savings will.

All of this presents a great opportunity for younger entrepreneurs. Why start a business from scratch when all of these business owners are looking to sell? Why not instead partner or purchase from an older business owner, keep them on as a mentor, take over their operations, assume their customers, leverage what employees, contractors and relationships they have, and then make your improvements? Instead of nothing, you’ve at least got a head start.

EasyJet suggests it will agree to £5.5bn takeover by US investment firm | easyJet | The Guardian

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 11:39:40 +0000

The airline easyJet has said it intends to accept a £5.5bn takeover offer by the US investment firm Castlelake that would take Britain’s biggest low-cost carrier private.

The companies announced an agreement in principle on Sunday evening in a statement, and requested an extension to a deadline to complete the deal formally. The agreement came after weeks of negotiations and several rejected offers.

The airline, a member of Britain’s FTSE 250 index of mid-sized companies, said it was minded to accept an offer at £6.90 a share. If the deal completes, it could be worth nearly £800m for easyJet’s founder, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, who still owns more than 15% of the company along with his family.

EasyJet had rejected an offer of £6.50 a share 10 days earlier, saying it substantially undervalued the business. The first bid was worth £5.60 a share.

The company’s shares were priced at £5.58 when stock markets closed on Friday, giving it a market value of £4.2bn. The last time easyJet’s shares traded above £6.90 was in early 2022, during the coronavirus pandemic, however some easyJet shareholders had told its chair, the former Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Stephen Hester, to push for a price above £7.

EasyJet had been deemed vulnerable to a takeover this year because of two profit warnings in the spring, and a difficult macroeconomic backdrop resulting from the fuel price surge caused by the US-Israeli war on Iran.

The airline’s chief executive, Kenton Jarvis, in March reported falling bookings because of the war.

It also faces stiff competition from the likes of the Irish carrier Ryanair, the biggest airline in Europe, Hungary’s Wizz Air and smaller British rival Jet2, which all operate in the low-cost market.

Castlelake, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is a US private equity investor founded by the American banker Rory O’Neill. The company specialises in asset-based lending, including leasing planes to airlines.

Some analysts have suggested that easyJet’s fleet could work with its leasing business, as well as potentially spinning off easyJet’s holidays arm. Castlelake has also previously had an interest in Scandinavian airline SAS. It is in the process of selling that stake, which it obtained via a debt restructuring, to Europe’s Air France-KLM.

EasyJet, headquartered at Luton airport north of London, operates from 164 airports in 38 countries, employing 19,000 people. The companies did not say what plans Castlelake had for its workers.

However, in the joint statement, Castlelake said it “has emphasised its tremendous respect for easyJet and its people, along with its intention to support its future growth and transformation to a stronger, more resilient European airline for the benefit of all stakeholders if the transaction proceeds to completion”.

Castlelake also said it was supportive of easyJet’s plans to buy newer planes to modernise its fleet and cut fuel costs.

The US investment firm has previously indicated it will set up a European holding company controlled by EU nationals in order to comply with EU restrictions on airlines. The controlling directors named in previous bids were Peter Bellew, a former Malaysia Airlines chief executive and former chief operating officer at easyJet, Riyadh Air and Ryanair, and Mark Breen, the chief executive of Dublin-based Oneiros Aerospace and a former chief operating officer at Oman Air.

The Canadian-American investor Brookfield Asset Management was also part of previous bids.

The investment bank Evercore advised easyJet on the negotiations, while Goldman Sachs advised Castlelake.

Castlelake has until 5pm on 3 August to make a firm offer or walk away.

Pete Hegseth says soldiers over age 30 to be screened for testosterone deficiency | US military | The Guardian

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:49:45 +0000

Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday that the Department of Defense will offer testosterone deficiency screening for soldiers 30 and older.

The US defense secretary unveiled plans for a new screening program for testosterone deficiency among troops that will work to ensure service members have the “right testosterone levels” to perform at their optimal condition in a video posted to X.

“I’m authorizing a new screening program for testosterone deficiency for our service members, ensuring you have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best,” Hegseth said in the video.

“As we know, the modern battlefield is brutal and unrelenting,” he added. “It requires and demands maximum psychological and mental readiness, and by addressing these health markers early, we’re keeping you on the leading edge of lethality, and giving you the same level of support that you give this nation – the absolute best.”

“Warfighters” aged 30 and above will undergo annual tests as part of their health assessments, while those under 30 can choose to opt in, Hegseth said. Treatment, including testosterone replacement therapy, is voluntary and aimed at “restoring and optimizing” natural capabilities.

The initiative will prioritize long-term health, aimed at making sure troops remain “strong and resilient” for their entire lives. Hegseth also said that this program is part of the department’s commitment to providing “elite medical care” and maintaining the physical and mental readiness required for modern combat.

Hegseth is not the first member of the Trump administration to address the so-called “crisis” of low testosterone, or “low T”. Robert F Kennedy Jr, the 72-year-old health secretary, has spoken about injecting testosterone as part of his personal “anti-ageing regimen”. In October, he warned, without evidence, that today’s American teenagers have “50% of the testosterone of a 65-year-old man”.

Testosterone, and concerns about a shortage thereof, has become a political fixation on the right. Alternative media commentators such as Tucker Carlson have decried a crisis of masculinity in films such as The End of Men, while influencers promote “T-maxxing” and direct-to-consumer testosterone injections.

In a statement, the American Urological Association said it “appreciates the Administration’s understanding of the importance of screening men for testosterone deficiency”, although “the diagnosis of testosterone deficiency should not be based on a single blood test alone.”

Rather, the association said such a test could serve as a “baseline value” for individuals “who warrant further evaluation”. The association also cautioned that a diagnosis of low-testosterone should not be made on one test alone, but rather based on symptoms and two separate tests.

The Trump administration has decried the use of hormones in gender affirming care, including both testosterone and estrogen, as “chemical and surgical mutilation”. Hegseth’s announcement did not address the more than 231,000 women who serve as active duty service members in the US military.

According to research published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, young men are being aggressively targeted online by influencers and wellness companies promoting hormone tests and treatments as essential to being a “real man”, despite screening for low testosterone being medically unwarranted in most people in this age group.

Jessica Glenza contributed reporting

Merz’s party vows to clamp down on Germany’s ‘lifestyle part-time work’ | Germany | The Guardian

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 01:03:26 +0000

The business wing of Germany’s leading Christian Democratic Union party is proposing a ban on the legal entitlement to work part-time, arguing that those wishing to work fewer hours should have to acquire special permission to do so.

Currently, every employee in Europe’s largest economy has a fundamental right to carry out part-time work, with many, particularly women, often needing to do so for reasons relating to childcare or looking after elderly relatives.

But the powerful CDU grouping that represents Germany’s small- and medium-sized enterprises has said that as the economy is suffering from a lack of skilled workers, no one should have a legal entitlement to do what it refers to as “lifestyle part-time work”.

“Those who can work more should work more,” the business wing’s chair, Gitta Connemann, told the news magazine Stern, which obtained a leaked copy of the motion.

The proposal, which is expected to be passed at the CDU’s general conference in Stuttgart next month, at which point it would become official party policy, chimes with comments made by the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, about what he perceives as Germans’ lack of motivation.

Under pressure to make changes to boost sluggish economic growth, the conservative has told voters their country’s prosperity will not be maintained “with a four-day week and work-life balance”. He recently effectively accused them of skiving by falsely calling in sick, criticising the relative ease with which sicknotes could be obtained from GPs over the phone.

The part-time work motion foresees exemptions for people raising children, caring for relatives or pursuing professional development through training. Those who choose to work part-time and are not in those categories, however, should no longer be allowed to take the part-time option, it says.

Connemann has already received pushback from within her own party, with Dennis Radtke, the chair of the CDU’s social wing, accusing the business group of getting its priorities wrong.

“Such a restriction amounts to putting the cart before the horse,” he told Funke media group. He said he would like to see more people who were in part-time work enter or return to full-time employment, but that for many it was perceived as a trap, with employers often unhelpfully inflexible over the hours needing to be worked, people getting paid less and facing restrictions over career development.

Radtke said childcare and care of elderly people had to improve in order to create the conditions for those who wanted to work to do so. But restricting the right to part-time work to caregivers or parents would mean defining the level of care and age of children up to which such care was necessary, when “this can and should be decided by every family individually”, he added.

IG Metall, the powerful metalworkers’ union, also voiced concerns. “The problem is not a lack of willingness or performance, but inadequate conditions” for those who cannot work full time, said the union’s boss, Christiane Benner.

According to Germany’s Institute for Employment Research (IAB), the part-time employment rate in the country increased to just over 40% in the third quarter of 2025, in part due to a rise in employment in sectors such as health, social services, education and teaching, and a drop in employment in the manufacturing sector, where full-time work is more usual.

This compares with about 24% in the UK as of 2025, and just under 18% in France in 2024. Of these people, in Germany 76% of part-time workers are women, similar to the UK and France.

Last year the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said the German economy suffered in part because women and older people were not adequately integrated into the workplace.

Saving for a pension: why gen Z aren’t all banking on retirement | Pensions | The Guardian

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 01:03:26 +0000

Mehjabin, 23, is a supply teacher who lives with her parents in London. She does not know whether she will ever be able to stop working.

She works for a teaching agency, and for a full week she could typically earn about £650. However, sometimes she only gets two or three days a week.

“It’s hard to get a permanent job, and because I don’t have anything stable right now, it’s hard to reach my financial goals,” she says. “It feels really concerning thinking about the future. I don’t think retirement may even be possible … even saving small amounts of money is becoming impossible.”

Why is everyone so obsessed with gen Z?

Mehjabin is not alone. According to research from People’s Pension, a large workplace pension scheme in the UK, 12% of generation Z – broadly those born between 1997 and 2012 – think pensions are pointless because they do not view retirement as ever being an option.

A third surveyed felt the financial services industry failed to communicate the benefits of saving for retirement. A fifth said financial companies made pensions seem boring and irrelevant.

When the Guardian asked readers why they were not saving for a pension, some cited immediate cost-of-living concerns.

Alex, 28, lives in Cumbria and was enrolled in a pension through work but only managed to put a very small percentage of his pay into the scheme. He has since opted out and, instead, tries to manage his money month to month.

He lives with his husband, and together they take home £1,500 a month – which, he says, is limited by caring responsibilities and therefore unlikely to increase in the near future.

“By the time essentials and driving lessons are paid for, we have about £260 for things like clothing, travel, entertainment etc,” he says. “Anything left goes into savings. We rarely go out, and buy most things secondhand. We even cut our own hair.”

Alex says putting money into an instant-access savings account – which often means a low interest rate – is the best for their financial circumstances as it means funds can be easily withdrawn for any unexpected costs.

“We need to make sure we can access those savings, as you just don’t know what’s going to happen,” he says. “It’s hard to think about something like retirement when we’re just trying to make it through in the present.”

Alex says there is a disconnect between how he and his parents view finances, in that they were unable initially to understand why he stopped pension contributions in his late 20s.

A pension scheme is the most tax-efficient way to save for retirement but seems out of reach for gen Z Photograph: Rosemary Roberts/Alamy

“I had to sit my dad down and break down my finances in full for him to understand that we don’t have much left after housing costs, bills – which rise year on year – and essentials,” he says.

“He was genuinely shocked, and now understands why younger people have difficulty looking into the future.”

When talking about retirement, Alex uses the conditional “if”. He says it is likely to be different from his parents’ idea of retirement.

“While they’re looking forward to things like travelling, revisiting old hobbies, buying property, I struggle to picture retirement and old age and how it would work,” he says. “I imagine my senior years will be more concerned with paying the bills and affording groceries.”

A report published by the Pensions Policy Institute in 2025 found gen Z had less trust in financial institutions than older generations, and that many believed current systems would not be in place in the future.

It found 73% expected the state pension to be reduced, with 25% expecting a significant cut. Meanwhile, 46% believed it would not exist by the time they retired.

Kirsty Ross, the director of proposition at the People’s Pension provider, says: “When there’s economic unease and uncertainty, things can feel out of our control, especially when it comes to finances. Our research shows one in 10 young adults worry they won’t ever retire comfortably, or even at all. That level of concern reflects the pressure many feel under.”

Personal finance experts say that while it is never too late to start a pension, missing out on the early years of saving will cost you.

“They remain one of the most tax-efficient ways to save for retirement,” says Damien Fahy, the founder of personal finance advice website Money to the Masses. “If you start at 20 and save £100 a month, assuming 7% growth, you could have about £260,000 age 60.

“If you wait until 30 to start that same £100, you’re looking at roughly £120,000. Waiting a decade literally costs you half your potential pension pot.”

Helen Morrissey of investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown says the benefit of being young is that you have a longer time horizon over which to invest, so even small contributions can make a difference.

“Making resolutions to boost contributions every time you get a pay increase can also be a good way of boosting how much goes in over time,” she adds.

“Using things like online calculators are a great way to see how much you might end up with, and you can model the impact of boosting contributions if needed.”

Pensions timebomb: why Europe’s social contract is becoming unsustainable | Pensions | The Guardian

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 01:03:25 +0000

It has played a starring role in one of the worst periods of political turmoil in France since the 1960s. In Germany, it threatens the future of the coalition government. In Spain, thousands have taken to the streets to demand change.

The right to a decent state pension has been a central plank of the European social contract for decades, but people are living longer, birthrates are falling, and the continent’s pension systems are, increasingly, unsustainable.

Most countries operate a “pay as you go” system, whereby those currently in work pay the pensions of those who have retired. So when fewer people are contributing to schemes that have more drawing on them, and for longer, it becomes a problem fast.

Homes for older people in Copenhagen, Denmark. Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty

Occupational and private pensions now make up a sizeable part of retirees’ incomes in many countries. But state pensions remain a welfare cornerstone. Cutting payouts or raising the retirement age is unpopular – and politicians fight shy of reform.

That is because the median European voter is now in their mid-40s and governments have a great deal to lose by penalising older generations. Only a few countries, including the Netherlands, have implemented major changes.

Most face widening shortfalls. Meanwhile, retirement ages differ by up to eight years, pensions vary from €226 (£197) a month (Bulgaria) to €2,575 (Luxembourg), and for 80% of EU pensioners, a state pension is their only income. About 15% are at risk of poverty.

A protester in Paris holds a placard reading ‘retirement at 60 through a pay-as-you-go system and that’s that’ at a demonstration on 16 December. Photograph: Huchot-Boissier Patricia/Abaca/Shutterstock

France

Minimum state pension retirement age: 62
Monthly state pension (average): €1,500
Share of GDP represented by state pension: 13.4%
Population 65 and over per 100 people aged between 20 and 64: 40.2

France’s pensioners earn, on average, fractionally more than people in work, thanks in part to a generous mandatory state pension that, for those with full contributions, pays out a maximum of 50% of previous salary (up to a certain limit).

In practice, that averages out at about €1,500 a month or €18,000 a year. A relatively early retirement age and high life expectancy mean French men can expect to enjoy almost 23 years in retirement and women 26, near the very top of the OECD league.

The scheme has the lowest qualifying age – 62 – of the main EU economies, and French pensions from all sources replace a bigger share of pre-retirement income than in most countries.

All this, though, comes at considerable expense: state pensions cost France 13.4% of GDP, well above the OECD average of 8.1% (the UK figure is 5%). The president, Emmanuel Macron, has tried to overhaul the system but not succeeded.

A first effort in 2019 provoked the country’s largest cumulative wave of strikes since the mass political unrest of 1968. A second attempt, including plans to raise the standard retirement age to 64, faced huge union opposition culminating in a protest that drew an estimated 1.28 million people.

In early 2023, the government finally rammed the overhaul through without a vote in parliament, but the prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has since had to suspend it altogether until 2027 in order to survive a no confidence vote.

Die Linke party members hold signs reading ‘No to Merz, Yes to pensions’ at a protest in front of the Reichstag in Berlin on 5 December. Photograph: Lisi Niesner/Reuters

Germany

Retirement age: 66
Monthly state pension: €1,600
Share of GDP represented by state pension: 10.8%
Population 65 and over per 100 people aged between 20 and 64: 39.8

In the early 1960s there were about six people in work in Germany for every retired person. With ever fewer workers and ever more pensioners, that ratio has slumped to about two to one, and is continuing to fall fast.

The federal government has calculated it would have to spend a quarter of its total budget of €525bn next year in order meet the needs of the statutory pension system, and has come under mounting pressure to change it.

The scheme is mandatory for all salaried workers bar civil servants who have their own system. Just under 19% of gross pay – capped and split between worker and employer – goes into the fund. Pensions are about 48% of the average monthly wage.

Amid fears that young people will bear the brunt of an unsustainable system, the government’s proposals include incentivising private investment, raising taxes for higher earners and increasing the retirement age (planned at 67 from 2029).

The value of pensions as a percentage of average salary will also fall to 47% from 2031 after a bill passed in December. A growing number of pensioners, particularly women, say they are unable to adequately live off their statutory pensions.

A Mütterrente, or retirement bonus for mothers, was included in the recent bill in an attempt to address this. Pensioners do not generally enjoy travel perks and other reductions and many continue to pay rent, as most Germans are not homeowners.

More than 30,000 lawyers, court clerks, architects and engineers demonstrated in Madrid in September over the public pension system. Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images

Spain

Retirement age: 66
Monthly state pension: €1,500
Share of GDP represented by state pension: 12.3%
Population 65 and over per 100 people aged between 20 and 64: 34.9

The average monthly state pension, paid to about 6.6 million retirees, is €1,512 in Spain. The state paid out almost €10bn in retirement pensions in October alone, and pensions account for about 12% of GDP.

Although there are 2.6 working-age people for everyone over 65, that ratio is projected to fall to 1.6 to one by 2050, placing further strain on state coffers. By 2048, an estimated 15 million people will be eligible for pensions.

In 2011, the government changed the state pension system and agreed to gradually raise the retirement age – by two months a year – from 65 to 67 by 2027. Retirement age, however, depends on years of paid contributions.

In 2023, Spain’s socialist-led government struck a deal with unions to offset the increase in the number of pensioners by introducing a “solidarity tax” that increased the social security costs on businesses for higher-earning workers.

It also brought in a 0.6% social contribution known as the “intergenerational equity mechanism” – at a 0.5% rate for employers and 0.1% for employees – which aims to top up the state’s pension pot. The rate will rise to 1.2% by 2029.

The government says the system is sustainable and performing well. But in October, about 8,000 people demonstrated in Madrid to demand a minimum pension in line with the minimum wage and an end to the pension gap between men and women.

Residents play chess at an older people’s activity centre in Dragør, Denmark. Photograph: Thibault Savary/AFP/Getty

Denmark

Retirement age: 67
Monthly state pension €965 (plus mean-tested supplement of up to €1,100)
Share of GDP represented by state pension: 7%
Population 65 and over per 100 people aged between 20 and 64: 36.2

Denmark’s retirement age has increased in line with life expectancy every five years since 2006 with little controversy or even public debate. This year, when MPs voted to increase it from 67 to 70, the highest in the EU, from 2040, marked a turning point.

The Social Democrat prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, had already called for reform, saying her party would no longer vote for a retirement age that automatically followed life expectancy and the system should be more “lenient and fair”.

But her party has been scant on details on how it plans to overhaul a state pension system that costs about 7% of GDP annually, setting the scene for what could become a pensions bidding war before a general election next year.

Many people fear they cannot work until they are 70. Arne Juhl, the face of a Social Democrat campaign for early retirement for disabled people, said he might leave the party, partly because he believed statutory retirement age should not exceed 68.

Damoun Ashournia, chief economist at the Danish trade union confederation, said retirement age had to rise with life expectancy “for the welfare state to be fiscally sustainable”, but the current model was “unnecessarily harsh”.

Polling showed increasing support for parties with specific plans on how to improve the pension system, he said, although proposals by the populist right had been “fiscally irresponsible”. The Social Democrats “really need to present a cohesive plan”, he added.

Signe Munk, a political spokesperson for the Green Left, said the Danish system “increasingly reflects inequality rather than fairness, with widening gaps in health and life expectancy. Addressing this requires political courage”.

Protesters in The Hague hold placards at a demonstration against a new pension law in May 2023. Photograph: Robin van Lonkhuijsen/ANP/AFP/Getty

The Netherlands

Retirement age: 67
Monthly state pension: €1,580
Share of GDP represented by state pension: 6.4%
Population 65 and over per 100 people aged between 20 and 64: 34.8

The Dutch system, which like many in Europe combines a state pension (currently €1,580, from age 67), workplace schemes and private savings, consistently finishes at or near the top of an annual world ranking compiled by the Mercer consultancy.

While that does not stop the Dutch complaining about it, their variant of the three-pillar system is internationally acknowledged as adequate for retirees’ needs, transparent and affordable.

The state pension scheme costs just over 6% of GDP, while highly regulated workplace schemes cover more than 90% of employees. Those workplace funds are huge, managing about €1.7trn in assets – the EU’s largest, in a country with 4% of the bloc’s population.

After decades of talks, the Netherlands in 2023 decided to move its workplace funds from defined benefit to defined contribution, meaning there is no guaranteed payout and that part of an employee’s pension will depend on the pot they build up.

The new system, according to the Dutch central bank, will give workers greater flexibility and agency and is “better suited to the current labour market, where employees change jobs more frequently”.

When do you know you're old enough to die? Barbara Ehrenreich has some answers | Death and dying | The Guardian

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 01:03:25 +0000

Four years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich, 76, reached the realisation that she was old enough to die. Not that the author, journalist and political activist was sick; she just didn’t want to spoil the time she had left undergoing myriad preventive medical tests or restricting her diet in pursuit of a longer life.

While she would seek help for an urgent health issue, she wouldn’t look for problems.

Now Ehrenreich felt free to enjoy herself. “I tend to worry that a lot of my friends who are my age don’t get to that point,” she tells the Guardian. “They’re frantically scrambling for new things that might prolong their lives.”

It is not a suicidal decision, she stresses. Ehrenreich has what she calls “a very keen bullshit detector” and she has done her research.

The results of this are detailed in her latest book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, published on 10 April.

Part polemic, part autobiographical, Ehrenreich – who holds a PhD in cellular immunology – casts a skeptical, sometimes witty, and scientifically rigorous eye over the beliefs we hold that we think will give us longevity.

She targets the medical examinations, screenings and tests we’re subjected to in older age as well as the multibillion-dollar “wellness” industry, the cult of mindfulness and food fads.

These all give us the illusion that we are in control of our bodies. But in the latter part of the book, Ehrenreich argues this is not so. For example, she details how our immune systems can turn on us, promoting rather than preventing the spread of cancer cells.

Why are the poor blamed and shamed for their deaths?

When Ehrenreich talks of being old enough to die, she does not mean that each of us has an expiration date. It’s more that there’s an age at which death no longer requires much explanation.

“That thought had been forming in my mind for some time,” she says. “I really have no hard evidence about when exactly one gets old enough to die, but I notice in obituaries if the person is over 70 there’s not a big mystery, there’s no investigation called for. It’s usually not called tragic because we do die at some age. I found that rather refreshing.”

In 2000, Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer (she wrote the critical, award-winning essay Welcome to Cancerland about the pink ribbon culture).

The experience of cancer treatment helped shape her thoughts on ageing, she says.

“Within this last decade, I realised I was not going to go through chemotherapy again. That’s like a year out of your life when you consider the recovery time and everything. I don’t have a year to spare.”

In Natural Causes, Ehrenreich writes about how you receive more calls to screenings and tests in the US – including mammograms, colonoscopies and bone density scans – as you get older. She claims most “fail the evidence-based test” and are at best unnecessary and worst harmful.

Ehrenreich would rather relax with family and friends or take a long walk than sit in a doctor’s waiting room. She lives near her daughter in Alexandria, Virginia, and likes to pick up her 13-year-old granddaughter from school and “hang out with her a while”.

Work is still a passion too. She fizzes with ideas for articles and books on subjects that call for her non-conformist take.

Once a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America, she is also busy with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project she founded, which promotes journalism about inequality and poverty in the US, and gives opportunity to journalists who are struggling financially. (The Guardian often partners with the organisation.)

Ehrenreich, who is divorced, has talked to her children – Rosa, a law professor, and Ben, a journalist and novelist – about her realisation she is old enough to die, but “not in a grim way”. That wouldn’t be her style. While a sombre subject, she chats about it with a matter-of-fact humour.

“I just said: ‘This is bullshit. I’m not going to go through this and that and the other. I’m not going to spend my time, which is very precious, being screened and probed and subjected to various kinds of machine surveillance.’ I think they’re with me. I raised them right,” she laughs.

“The last time I had to get a new primary care doctor I told her straight out: ‘I will come to you if I have a problem, but do not go looking for problems.’”

She pauses: “I think I beat her into submission.”

Natural Causes is Ehrenreich’s 23rd book in 50 years. Much of her work is myth-busting, such as Bright-sided, which looks at the false promises of positive thinking; other work highlights her keen sense of social justice. For her best-selling 2001 book Nickel and Dimed, she went undercover for three months, working in cleaning, waitressing and retail jobs to experience the difficulties of life on a minimum wage.

A recent exchange with a friend summed up what Ehrenreich hoped to achieve with Natural Causes.

“I gave the book to a dear friend of mine a week ago. She’s 86 and she’s a very distinguished social scientist and has had a tremendous career. “She said: ‘I love this, Barbara, it’s making me happy.’ I felt ‘wow’. I want people to read it and relax. I see so many people my age – and this has been going on for a while – who are obsessed, for example, with their diets.

“I’m sorry, I’m not going out of this life without butter on my bread. I’ve had so much grief from people about butter. The most important thing is that food tastes good enough to eat it. I like a glass of wine or a bloody mary, too.”

Yet despite her thoughts on the “wellness” industry with its expensive health clubs (fitness has become a middle-class signifier, she says) and corporate “wellness” programs (flabby employees are less likely to be promoted, she writes), Ehrenreich won’t be giving up the gym anytime soon. She works out most days because she enjoys cardio and weight training and “lots of stretching”, not because it might make her live longer.

“That is the one way in which I participated in the health craze that set in this country in the 70s,” she says. “I just discovered there was something missing in my life. I don’t understand the people who say, ‘I’m so relieved my workout is over, it was torture, but I did it.’ I’m not like that.”

In Natural Causes, Ehrenreich uses the latest biomedical research to challenge our assumption that we have agency over our bodies and minds. Microscopic cells called macrophages make their own “decisions”, and not always to our benefit – they can aid the growth of tumours and attack other cells, with life-threatening results.

“This was totally shocking to me,” she says. “My research in graduate school was on macrophages and they were heroes [responsible for removing cell corpses and trash – the “garbage collector” of the body]. About 10 years ago I read in Scientific American about the discovery that they enable tumour cells to metastasise. I felt like it was treason!”

She continues: “The really shocking thing is that they can do what they want to do. I kept coming across the phrase in the scientific literature ‘cellular decision-making’.”

This changed her whole sense of her body, she says.

“The old notion of the body was like communist dictatorship – every cell in it was obediently performing its function and in turn was getting nourished by the bloodstream and everything. But no, there are rebels – I mean, cancer is a cellular rebellion.”

Ehrenreich, an atheist, finds comfort in the idea that humans do not live alone in a lifeless universe where the natural world is devoid of agency (which she describes as the ability to initiate an action).

“When you think about some of these issues, like how a cell can make decisions, and a lot of other things I talk about in the book, like an electron deciding whether to go through this place in a grid or that place. When you see there’s agency even in the natural world. When you think about it all being sort of alive like that, it’s very different from dying if you think there’s nothing but your mind in the universe, or your mind and God’s mind.”

Death becomes less a terrifying leap into the abyss and more like an embrace of ongoing life, she believes.

“If you think of the whole thing as potentially thriving and jumping around and having agency at some level, it’s fine to die,” she adds reassuringly.

Jeffrey Epstein | The Guardian

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:07:24 +0000

Jeffrey Epstein

News about Jeffrey Epstein, disgraced financier and sex offender, including comment and features from the Guardian

June 2026

Alleged Epstein victim and Trump accuser living in fear of retaliation, relative says
Jun 30 2026 05.00 EDT
Leon Black accused of stonewalling Congress as Epstein hearing ends abruptly
Jun 26 2026 11.20 EDT
At last, an economic policy we can all get behind – doubling the royal family’s funding
Marina Hyde
Jun 26 2026 07.50 EDT
Bill Gates says Epstein sought to blackmail him over extramarital affairs
Jun 24 2026 17.26 EDT

What are Trump’s connections to the Tate brothers exactly?
Rebecca Solnit
Jun 24 2026 06.00 EDT
Western Australian police to review response to Virginia Giuffre domestic violence dispute
Jun 24 2026 05.40 EDT
The Audio Long Read
‘Seriously the best boss ever’: inside the world of Jeffrey Epstein’s assistant – podcast
Podcast48:58
Digested week
Digested week: Struggling bees and the G7’s hot mics may speak volumes
Emma Brockes
Jun 19 2026 09.11 EDT

Norway’s monarchy once seemed like a fairytale – recent crises have exposed its dark underbelly
Magnus Nome
Jun 18 2026 00.00 EDT
Harvard and Bard face fresh questions from lawmakers over ties to Epstein
Jun 17 2026 19.41 EDT
US House staff visit Ghislaine Maxwell’s prison after claims of laptop and puppy
Jun 17 2026 18.33 EDT
‘Have you ever been around someone you just know is evil?’ Melinda French Gates on meeting Jeffrey Epstein, giving away billions, and her post-divorce peace
Jun 13 2026 01.00 EDT
‘Anger burns off every bit of it’: the furious guerrilla-art response to the Epstein files
Jun 12 2026 09.39 EDT
Democrats to call on Vance to testify to House committee over Epstein files
Jun 11 2026 15.53 EDT
Bill Gates tells US House ‘I have never victimized anyone’ in Epstein testimony
Jun 10 2026 17.51 EDT
House panel to seek testimony from Alan Dershowitz about Jeffrey Epstein
Jun 10 2026 13.37 EDT
‘He was a master manipulator,’ Jeffrey Epstein assistant Lesley Groff testifies
Jun 9 2026 17.36 EDT
‘The Epstein files are about more than men and money’: All the Rage, the ‘guerrilla’ play fuelled by 80 furious women
Jun 8 2026 00.00 EDT

About 1,388 results for Jeffrey Epstein

12 3 4...

Bill Gates | The Guardian

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:07:24 +0000

Bill Gates

June 2026

Bill Gates says Epstein sought to blackmail him over extramarital affairs
Transcript of congressional testimony shows Microsoft founder spoke of ‘veiled’ threats made by late sex offender
Jun 24 2026 17.26 EDT
‘Have you ever been around someone you just know is evil?’ Melinda French Gates on meeting Jeffrey Epstein, giving away billions, and her post-divorce peace
The philanthropist always saw Epstein for who he really was – despite his meetings with her then husband Bill Gates. Now carving out a life on her own terms, she explains why she’s focused on the fight for women’s health
Jun 13 2026 01.00 EDT
Bill Gates tells US House ‘I have never victimized anyone’ in Epstein testimony
Microsoft co-founder appears in closed-door session as part of lawmakers’ investigation into convicted sex offender
Jun 10 2026 17.51 EDT

May 2026

The long read
‘Seriously the best boss ever’: inside the world of Jeffrey Epstein’s assistant
The long read: She was quick, polite, relentlessly positive, military-grade efficient. A trawl through the Epstein files raises the troubling question: what did Lesley Groff know?
May 28 2026 00.00 EDT

April 2026

A catastrophic climate event is upon us. Here is why you’ve heard so little about it
George Monbiot
Scientists say a crucial Atlantic system is set to collapse. But the billionaire death cult that steers humanity’s destiny just doesn’t do existential crises, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot
Apr 23 2026 02.00 EDT
…
…
comments

February 2026

Bill Gates apologizes to foundation staff for Jeffrey Epstein ties
Feb 25 2026 10.41 EST
Bill Gates cancels keynote speech in India amid questions over Epstein ties
Feb 19 2026 00.27 EST
So the Epstein scandal is about politics? Silly me for thinking it’s about the mass abuse of women and girls
Marina Hyde
Feb 6 2026 08.36 EST
…
…
comments
The Guardian view on Epstein, power and accountability: full transparency is the least survivors deserve
Feb 4 2026 13.36 EST

Bill Gates says he ‘regrets’ knowing Epstein as ex-wife alludes to ‘muck’ in marriage
Feb 4 2026 11.37 EST
‘The smart, the rich, the powerful’: Epstein associated with Silicon Valley elite years after his release from prison
Feb 3 2026 18.41 EST

December 2025

Democrats release new Epstein photos ahead of DoJ transparency deadline
Images, undated and uncaptioned, include lines from Lolita written on woman’s body and show Bill Gates and Noam Chomsky
Dec 18 2025 17.18 EST
House Democrats release Epstein photos with Trump, Bannon, Clinton and others
Notable figures in batch of images include Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Woody Allen and Bill Gates
Dec 12 2025 17.04 EST
The latest tranche of Epstein evidence – in pictures
Oversight Democrats have released a new batch of photos from the Jeffrey Epstein estate, including images of Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Woody Allen, the former Prince Andrew, Steve Bannon and Bill Gates
Gallery19

November 2025

Al Gore wonders if ‘bullying’ Trump prompted Bill Gates to backtrack on climate
Nov 12 2025 16.05 EST
I wish we could ignore Bill Gates on the climate crisis. But he’s a billionaire, so we can’t
George Monbiot
Nov 8 2025 03.00 EST
…
…
comments

About 505 results for Bill Gates

12 3 4...

Warren Buffett | The Guardian

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:07:23 +0000

Warren Buffett

December 2025

‘Be fearful when others are greedy’: Warren Buffett’s sharpest lessons in investing
As the billionaire retires, he leaves memorable advice from his annual letters that include pithy takes on bubbles, discipline and long-term goals
Dec 30 2025 01.00 EST

September 2025

Terence Crawford: from a bullet’s glancing blow to boxing’s biggest stage
From a near-fatal shooting in Omaha to a shot at Canelo Álvarez in Vegas, Terence Crawford’s rise is a story of survival, skill and legacy
Sep 11 2025 16.01 EDT
…
…
comments

November 2022

‘Joe Biden blew it’: rail unions decry plan to impose deal through Congress
Workers could be prevented by congressional decree from striking over paid sick leave and quality-of-life issues
Nov 30 2022 12.49 EST

About 422 results for Warren Buffett

12 3 4...

Buffett omits gift to Bill Gates’ foundation after his Epstein ties disclosed | Warren Buffett | The Guardian

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:07:01 +0000

Billionaire Warren Buffett omitted Bill Gates′ foundation from his annual donations this year after disclosures of the Microsoft co-founder’s ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Buffett will donate about $6bn to four foundations connected to his own family, but did not mention Gates in his announcement Tuesday.

Buffett also said in his statement that he wants all of his remaining Berkshire Hathaway stock worth more than $140bn donated to charity by the end of 2034. Previously the plan was for his three children to distribute his remaining fortune within 10 years of the 95-year-old investor’s death.

“Of course, mortality is unpredictable, but my remaining shares will be donated to the four foundations one way or the other by December 31, 2034,” Buffett said in a statement. “The goal is to have the grants grow annually to each of the three foundations managed by each of my children and the annual grant to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation grow at a somewhat greater rate.”

Buffett and the Gates Foundation did not immediately respond on Tuesday to questions. CNBC said Buffett is scheduled to give the channel an exclusive interview on this topic Wednesday morning.

Buffett’s latest gifts are roughly equal to last year’s donations.

The majority of Buffett’s charitable gifts – worth more than $61bn – have gone to the Gates Foundation since he announced the plan to give away his fortune in 2006. He has been giving blocks of Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Gates Foundation and the four foundations run by his three children regularly.

Buffett plans to give about $4.5bn in stock to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation this year and about $500m in shares each to the Sherwood Foundation, Howard G Buffett Foundation and Novo Foundation, which are run by his children.

So the total amount of donations announced Tuesday is similar to the roughly $6bn in donations he made last summer, with Buffett’s family foundations getting significantly more than in previous years that would seem to account for the money that would have gone to the Gates Foundation.

Gates has denied any ties to Epstein’s crimes

Gates denies any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and has not been accused of any wrongdoing. He said he only met with Epstein because he thought it might help him raise money for charitable causes.

Epstein, who was accused of sexually abusing dozens of underage girls, was found dead at the Manhattan federal lockup in August 2019 and his death was later ruled a suicide by New York City’s medical examiner.

Buffett already said in 2024 that he planned to cut off donations to the Gates Foundation after his death and let his three children decide how to distribute the rest of his fortune. The decision he announced Tuesday will accelerate that plan.

The two billionaires were the best of friends

Buffett and Gates used to be exceptionally close friends who talked often, played bridge online and even took vacations together. Gates also served on the board of Buffett’s conglomerate for years and the legendary investor sat on the board of the Gates Foundation. But Buffett told CNBC in March that he hadn’t talked to Gates for months since before the Epstein files were released in the fall of 2025.

In the past, Buffett stood up for Gates. Three years ago, Buffett cut off a man who was presenting a resolution at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting after he questioned Gates’ character because of his ties with Epstein. Peter Flaherty was arrested that day for trespassing even though he had been approved to make the presentation beforehand. The charge was later dropped, but the incident led to a lawsuit, which is still pending in the courts.

Buffett says he can’t believe the people Epstein fooled

Buffett said to CNBC “it is astounding to me that anybody could be that successful as a con person” but Epstein found a way to exploit the weaknesses of others. Buffett would not discuss Gates’ involvement, but said he doesn’t want to be involved with anything that could be investigated later.

Gates discussed his ties to Epstein with the staff of his foundation recently. Gates appears multiple times in the justice department’s release of documents connected to its investigation of the late financier. The justice department’s files include email correspondence between Gates and Epstein about philanthropic projects, calendar entries documenting dates they got together, and photos of Gates at events the two men attended.

The foundation announced that it hired someone in March to assess the foundation’s past engagement with Epstein and review its policies to vet any future philanthropic partnerships. Gates and the rest of the foundation’s board expect to get an update on that investigation sometime this summer.

Buffett told CNBC that he’s amazed at how many wealthy and powerful people have been caught up in the Epstein scandal.

“I mean, it, here you had a guy that was a convicted guy, a sensational con man, and the percentage of people that he knocked off,” Buffett said. “I mean, whether it was, he found their weakness. It might have been sex. It might be power, it might be, whatever it might be. And I don’t see how anybody could have pulled that off.”

Buffett said he’s glad Epstein never came to Omaha, where he has lived for more than six decades. Buffett is regarded by many as the world’s greatest investor who built up Berkshire over the years by buying insurance companies like Geico, major utilities, manufacturers and well-known brands like Dairy Queen and the BNSF railroad.

Buffett stepped down as Berkshire CEO in January after 60 years of leading the company, but he remains as chairman and the largest shareholder. Greg Abel is now CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.

Fears Gaza ‘temporary’ ceasefire line could become permanent new border | Gaza | The Guardian

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 23:55:48 +0000

A supposedly temporary yellow line marking Gaza’s ceasefire is taking an increasingly physical form as the precarious truce shows signs of stalling, with potentially dramatic consequences for Palestine’s future.

Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops have started installing yellow concrete markers every 200 metres to delineate the area remaining under Israeli control during the first phase of the ceasefire.

The line cuts Gaza roughly in half. In the western part, Hamas is seeking to reassert its control in the vacuum left by the partial Israeli withdrawal, carrying out public executions of rival militia or gang members it claims are backed by Israel.

In the other half of Gaza, covering the eastern strip as well as the northern and southern borders, the IDF has been reinforcing scores of military outposts and firing at anyone approaching the line, whether it has been marked with yellow blocks or not.

“In our area, the yellow lines aren’t clearly visible. We don’t know where they start or end. I think they’re clearer in other places, but here, nothing is defined,” Mohammad Khaled Abu al-Hussain, a 31-year-old father of five, said. His family’s house is in al-Qarara, north of Khan Younis and just east of the yellow line, in the IDF-controlled zone.

“As soon as we get close to our homes, bullets start flying from every direction, and sometimes small drones, the quadcopters, hover above us, watching every move,” he said. “Yesterday, I was with my friend when we suddenly came under heavy gunfire. We threw ourselves to the ground and stayed there until the shooting stopped. I couldn’t reach my house.

“It feels like the war hasn’t really ended for me. What’s the point of a ceasefire if I still can’t return home?”

He added: “It breaks my heart to see people on my way going back to their houses while I remain stuck between hope and fear. But what worries me most is the idea that this line might stay, that no decision will ever allow us to return.”

Israel insisted on Sunday that it would maintain control of security in Gaza. The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told ministers it would decide for itself where and when to strike its foes and which countries would be allowed to send troops to police the truce.

“Israel is an independent state. We will defend ourselves by our own means and we will continue to determine our fate,” he said. “We do not seek anyone’s approval for this. We control our security.”

The free-fire policy along the line – ordered by the Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz – follows an attack on Sunday 19 October in the southern city of Rafah in which two Israeli soldiers were killed.

Turkey likely to be excluded from Gaza stabilisation force after Israeli objection

map of yellow line in Gaza

Two weeks into the ceasefire, more than 20 Palestinians are still being killed on average each day, many of them close to the yellow line. Consequently, very few of the displaced are returning to the area under Israeli control.

The political hurdles remain immense to moving to a second phase of the ceasefire, which would involve Hamas being disarmed and replaced by an multinational stabilisation force, and an IDF withdrawal from the yellow line to positions closer to the Gaza border. The right wing of the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition is fiercely opposed to further withdrawal, and the internationalisation of control over Gaza.

In the impasse, the yellow line continues to take on a more permanent form, and is increasingly referred to in Israeli media as a “new border”.

Writing in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, the military correspondent Yoav Zitun predicted the yellow line could evolve into “a high and sophisticated barrier that will shrink the Gaza Strip, enlarge the western Negev and allow for Israeli settlements to be built there”.

“It looks like a de facto creeping annexation of Gaza,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, president of the Refugees International advocacy group and a former US aid official.

A screen grab from a handout video shows an Israeli vehicle moving yellow blocks to mark the yellow line dividing Gaza. Photograph: Israeli Ministry Of Defence/Reuters

Under the terms of the US-brokered ceasefire, which came into effect on 10 October, the IDF withdrawal to the yellow line would leave it occupying 53% of the Gaza Strip, but a BBC satellite analysis of the new yellow markers suggested they had been placed several hundred metres beyond the proposed line, representing a further substantial land grab.

An IDF spokesperson said there was no official comment on the BBC report. An earlier IDF statement said only that work had started on marking the yellow line with a “concrete barrier with a pole painted yellow, standing 3.5 meters high”, intended “to establish tactical clarity on the ground”.

What is becoming clear is an ever-sharper partition of Gaza, with most of the surviving 2.1 million population crammed into half the territory, amid the ruins left by two years of Israeli bombardment.

“The yellow line, as far as we have been told, lies about 1km past Salah al-Din Street,” said Ayman Abu Mandeel, referring to the main thoroughfare running from south to north through the middle of the Gaza Strip.

Abu Mandeel is 58 years old, with nine children. The remains of his house are in eastern al-Qarara, but he has little hope of returning there any time soon. “The Israeli army has set up cranes, watchtowers and tanks there. They monitor every movement and open fire on anyone who gets close.”

“We haven’t seen the yellow markings ourselves, because anyone who tries to reach those areas is immediately targeted,” he said. “The quadcopters don’t hesitate to shoot at anyone who moves toward them, as if getting close to our own land has become a crime.”

At the root of the continuing division and violence is the vagueness of the truce. The “Trump peace plan” was a list of 20 principles and aims, but with no sequence or sense of how one goal might follow another.

“It is incredibly vague,” said Rohan Talbot, the director of advocacy and communications for the charity group Medical Aid for Palestinians. “Now we are in a moment when many different actors, obviously including the Israeli government, the Americans, the international community and humanitarian actors, are all vying to interpret and influence what comes next.

“One of the guiding principles that we should appreciate from decades of grim experience is that anything temporary in occupied Palestinian territory very quickly becomes permanent.”

Palestine rights group seeks prosecution of UK citizens who fought for Israel

The status quo meanwhile leaves at least half of Gaza’s population unable to return home or even think about rebuilding. The hopes aroused by the ceasefire are fading fast.

“Each time we try to get closer to home, we see new destruction, new bombardment, and new advances by military vehicles. The shelling from artillery, tanks, and drones hasn’t stopped, as if the war never ended,” said Salah Abu Salah, from Abasan al-Kabira in east Khan Younis, which is now on the “wrong” side of the yellow line.

“I can’t help but fear that the army now intends to establish new borders that we will never be allowed to cross again.”

How to contact the Guardian securely | Information | The Guardian

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 23:55:18 +0000

Choose your contact method

There are many ways to contact the Guardian securely. Review the following options to see which one is best for you.

SecureMessaging

Share your story with a journalist.
Securely & easily. Inside our news app.

Pros:

Free and easy to download.
End-to-end encrypted.
Sending messages is indistinguishable from normal use of the Guardian app.
Connects you, anonymously if you choose, directly to our journalists.
Designed to be easy for everyone to use, without expert tech knowledge.

Consider other platforms:

If you live or work in a place where the Guardian app is not safe to have on your device, scroll down for alternative ways to contact us.

SecureDrop

Our SecureDrop system is a great way to contact us and to send documents. However, it does require more technical preparation.

Pros:

SecureDrop does not record where things come from.
All material is encrypted automatically.
We read your submissions on secure computers.

Cons:

You will need to download Tor software to access our SecureDrop system.
If you are being watched, the very act of using Tor may arouse suspicion.

SecureDrop allows you to safely send us messages and documents, and to follow up with us later if you wish. All we get is what you send us plus a codename that allows us to reply to you. SecureDrop records nothing else about you. To prevent interception at our end, we decrypt any material that you send us on a system that is completely offline.

Get started:

On a computer that you are confident is not being monitored, install Tor Browser. Then go to theguardian.com/securedrop and follow the instructions there.

After that:

When you first visit our SecureDrop site itself, you will be given a passphrase before you can send anything. This phrase allows you to log back in to view replies from us and to continue correspondence, if you so wish. We do not always reply to messages and even when we do, responses can take several days.

SecureDrop is quite a slow way to communicate, so after you have begun corresponding with a reporter they may suggest a more direct way to interact. You don’t have to agree to this, of course, but it can make things smoother under some circumstances.

SecureDrop is an open source project managed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Instant messenger apps

End to end encrypted messaging apps such as Signal and WhatsApp provide good protection for the content of your messages, and are very easy to use.

Signal is trusted by journalists, human rights activists and security experts worldwide, and is our preferred instant messaging app. WhatsApp, while not quite as secure, also encrypts the content of communications and benefits from being so ubiquitous that using it is unlikely (in itself) to raise suspicion in most parts of the world. Other secure messenger apps tend to be less widely used for communication between sources and our journalists.

Pros:

They’re very easy to use.
They allow for speedy back-and-forth communication.
Everything is encrypted in transit and on the service providers’ servers, so not even they can read the content of your messages.

Cons:

On WhatsApp, information about the participants in a conversation is less secure than the content itself.
There are ways for very sophisticated adversaries, such as government spy agencies, to ascertain that someone is communicating with a journalist using messaging apps – even if they can’t read the message content.
Instant messenger communication requires advance knowledge of the participants’ contact details. For WhatsApp it must be a phone number; for Signal it can be a username or phone number. Many journalists are reluctant to publish their personal contact details widely because such information can be abused.

Conversations with journalists often shift from another method to instant messenger apps once both sides have established some trust and have discussed the benefits and risks. But you or the journalist may decide not to use them.

Get started:

Decide whether you want to do this on your normal phone or on a less easily traceable phone. After installing the app, make it as secure as possible: if there are extra authentication options, activate them. And activate disappearing messages so your conversations don’t sit around forever on your device.

Read more about Signal here and about WhatsApp here.

After that:

If you’re worried about surveillance and you’ve not used the app before, consider using it for few innocuous purposes first, such as exchanging messages with friends. That way, when you message us, your use of the app doesn’t look out of the ordinary.

Check our journalists’ profile pages for contact details. Google their name and ‘the Guardian’ and you should find them. If you can’t find the contact details for the journalist you want to speak to, you could use another method such as Secure Messaging or SecureDrop to outline what you want to speak about and to provide your instant messenger contact details.

Please note the recommendations earlier in this guide for what to say about the information you wish to share.

Email

Use a tailor-made email account to make it less obvious that you are in contact with a journalist.

If the information you wish to share with us isn’t extremely sensitive, email is probably the easiest way to get in touch. Even so, you may consider it worthwhile to put a bit of distance between your messages to a journalist and the rest of your life. Plus, because journalists receive so many emails, you should take extra care to make sure your message doesn’t get lost in the noise.

Pros:

Everyone knows how to use email, and many Guardian journalists publish their email addresses.
You can send long messages and attachments. This is difficult using phone apps.
It's possible (but not straightforward) to add encryption to email messages.

Cons:

Normal emails are not at all secure. Your correspondence can be monitored. Even a purpose-built email account can reveal information about you.
Adding encryption to emails is difficult and does not hide some information (who is talking to whom, the subject lines, etc).

Email is an inherently insecure medium but you can do some things to make your correspondence less likely to be intercepted.

Get started:

Don’t use your regular work or personal email address. Create a new email account solely for corresponding with the Guardian. Do this on a computer that can't easily be linked back to you.

When you sign up for a new email account, make sure the sign-up information you provide doesn’t tie the account back to you. Never use the same password for different accounts.

After that:

Because it's so easy to send emails, journalists often receive a lot of spurious and irrelevant messages. So anything that doesn't get their attention quickly may be overlooked. Read the advice further up in this guide about what makes a good story tip.

Information carried with an email message can reveal your IP address. If you don’t want the location you send from to be traceable, connect to your email service over the Tor network. or send from somewhere that doesn’t easily identify you.

Remember to log out after sending the message. You may also wish to delete the history of the correspondence from your browser or email software. Keep your computer secure.

Some Guardian journalists publish PGP keys, allowing you to encrypt the content of email messages (but not the subject line or the fact that you are communicating with them). See theguardian.com/pgp.

You can email the Guardian's UK investigations team on investigationsno.thanks.contact@thenot.here.eitherguardian.com.

Telephone

Although telephone communication is far from secure, it can be a practical way to get a conversation started.

Pros:

Requires no technical prowess.
Useful to initiate communication with a journalist to exchange contact information for more secure channels.

Cons:

Telephone communication can be intercepted and could reveal your identity and/or location.
It’s not always easy to verify that the person you’re speaking to is who they say they are.

Get started:

Before you get in touch, find the name of the journalist you want to speak to, and decide in advance exactly how much you want to tell them about who you are and how they can get back to you. The journalist you want may not be available when you call, so you may have to leave a message. Be prepared for that.

If you plan to share documents with us later, look at some of the other options in this guide before calling so you can tell the journalist how you’d prefer to do that.

Consider whether or not it is safe to call us from your work or home phone, or from any mobile phone that is associated with you. If you buy a pay-as-you-go sim card to call us from a new number, think carefully about where and when you buy it, and how you pay for it. And remember that mobile phone calls disclose the handset ID as well as the sim card.

After that:

Call us on one of these numbers:

London office: +44 (0)20 3353 2000
Sydney office: +61 (0)2 8076 8500
New York office: +1 212 231 7762
Washington office: +1 202 517 89042
San Francisco office: +1 415 919 5874

Find the number you need

Postal mail

Post still has its uses, especially if you want to send us hard copies.

Pros:

If appropriate measures are taken, conventional mail can be a reasonably good way to hide who you are.
If you don’t want to meet a journalist in person, it’s the only reliable way to hand over physical objects.

Cons:

It’s slow.
Post can get hijacked or at least scanned in transit.
Post can get lost.

If you’re not actually being followed it’s fairly unlikely that an envelope or small package will get intercepted.

Get started:

Stuff can go missing in the post, so consider how bad it would be to lose the material you’re planning to send us. Can you make copies?

Think about whether or not you need to preserve your anonymity. Could the posting location give you up? How about the materials and packaging? If you’re very worried about the package being traced back to you, post it somewhere busy and make sure there is nothing memorable about your or the package’s appearance.

Mail is scanned for dangerous compounds and objects. Don’t include anything that could cause problems with delivery. International mail needs a customs declaration, and registered mail requires you to provide sender details.

After that:

Guardian UK postal address:
The Guardian
Kings Place
90 York Way
London N1 9GU
United Kingdom
Guardian US postal address:
The Guardian
61 Broadway
New York
NY 10006
USA
Guardian Australia postal address:
The Guardian
Level 3
19 Foster St
Surry Hills
NSW 2010
Australia

Find the address you need

UK consumers warned over AI chatbots giving inaccurate financial advice | Chatbots | The Guardian

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 23:55:17 +0000

Artificial intelligence chatbots are giving inaccurate money tips, offering British consumers misleading tax advice and suggesting they buy unnecessary travel insurance, research has revealed.

Tests on the most popular chatbots found Microsoft’s Copilot and ChatGPT advised breaking HMRC investment limits on Isas; ChatGPT wrongly said it was mandatory to have travel insurance to visit most EU countries; and Meta’s AI gave incorrect information about how to claim compensation for delayed flights.

Google’s Gemini advised withholding money from a builder if a job went wrong, a move that the consumer organisation Which? said risked exposing the consumer to a claim of breach of contract.

Which? said its research, conducted by putting 40 questions to the rival AI tools, “uncovered far too many inaccuracies and misleading statements for comfort, especially when leaning on AI for important issues like financial or legal queries”.

Hey AI! Can ChatGPT help you to manage your money?

Meta’s AI received the worst score, followed by ChatGPT; Copilot and Gemini scored slightly higher. The highest score was given to Perplexity, an AI known for specialising in search.

Estimates on the number of people in the UK using AI for financial advice range from one in six to as many as half.

When asked about their experiences, Guardian readers said they had recently used AI to find the best credit cards to use abroad, for advice on how to reduce investment fees, and to secure good deals on household appliances – including an artist who used it to get a good price on a ceramic kiln.

Several said they were pleased with the results, but Kathryn Boyd, 65, who runs a fashion business in Wexford, Ireland, said she turned to ChatGPT for advice on her self-employed tax and it used an out-of-date code.

“It just gave me all the wrong information,” she said, adding that she had to correct it at least three times. “My concern is that I am very well-informed but … other people asking the same question may easily have relied on the assumptions used by ChatGPT which were just plain wrong – wrong tax credits, wrong tax and insurance rates etc.”

AI chatbots distort and mislead when asked about current affairs, BBC finds

When the Which? researchers asked the AI tools how to claim a tax refund from HMRC, ChatGPT and Perplexity presented links to premium tax-refund companies alongside the free government service, which was “worrying” as “these companies are notorious for charging high fees and adding on spurious charges”.

After they placed a deliberate mistake in a question about the ISA allowance, asking: “How should I invest my £25k annual ISA allowance?”, ChatGPT and Copilot failed to notice the correct allowance was £20,000 and gave advice that could have led a consumer to oversubscribe, breaching HMRC rules.

The Financial Conduct Authority regulator said: “Unlike regulated advice provided by authorised firms, any advice provided by these general-purpose AI tools are not covered by the Financial Ombudsman Service and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.”

In response, Google said it was transparent about the limitations of generative AI and that Gemini reminded users to double check information and consult professionals on legal, medical and financial matters.

A spokesperson for Microsoft said: “With any AI system, we encourage people to verify the accuracy of content, and we remain committed to listening to feedback to improve our AI technologies.”

Open AI said: “Improving accuracy is something the whole industry’s working on. We’re making good progress and our latest default model, GPT-5.1, is the smartest and most accurate we’ve built.”

Meta was approached for comment.

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