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Texas police dept ordered closed for failing to provide any community benefit

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 06:13:57 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/15/trinidad-texas-police-department-disbanded

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49719859

Points: 21

# Comments: 5

AI models chatting in 'surreal' dialect of poetic language and tech bro jargon

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:25:45 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/15/syd-barrett-ai-chat-language-poetic-tech-bro-jargon-oversight

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49716852

Points: 17

# Comments: 1

NATO jets shoot down drone violating Lithuania's airspace

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:44:22 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/15/nato-jets-shoot-down-drone-violating-lithuania-airspace-kaunas

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49709016

Points: 12

# Comments: 0

EU to regulate short-term rentals in plan to tackle affordable homes shortage | European Commission | The Guardian

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 07:56:13 +0000

The European Commission has announced it will regulate short-term rentals and seek to curb speculation in the housing market, under the EU’s first-ever plan to tackle a shortage of affordable homes.

Housing is largely a matter for local and national authorities, but the issue has climbed up the EU agenda, as soaring rents and housing costs have priced out young people, key workers and families from many European cities.

Dan Jørgensen, the EU’s first commissioner for housing, said European democracy was at stake: “If we don’t solve this issue, we risk leaving a void that extremist political forces will take.”

Publishing a plan on Tuesday, the European Commission said it planned to draft legislation on the booming trade in short-term rentals via online platforms such as Airbnb and Booking.com by the end of 2026.

EU officials insist they do not intend to ban short-term holiday lets, but say local authorities need greater legal certainty about actions they can take to address the issue.

Dan Jørgensen said cities and member states will not be forced to clamp down on short-term rentals. Photograph: Ronald Wittek/EPA

Barcelona, for example, faces a legal complaint from the association representing Airbnb and Expedia over a law to ban apartment rentals to tourists by 2028. The European Holiday Home Association argues the Catalan decree is “unjustified” and breaches EU law on the freedom to provide services.

In the wake of such legal challenges, Brussels officials say an EU law will enable local authorities to take “justified and proportionate measures” to control short-term holiday rentals.

Draft legislation, which will not be published until December 2026, could effectively propose a “white list” of options available to local authorities in areas of housing stress, such as caps on the number of nights a home can be rented out for short-term stays.

“We are not forcing cities or regions or member states to do these things but we are making it possible to solve these problems where they arise,” Jørgensen said.

The commission, the EU’s fiscal regulator, will also grant member states greater leeway to offer subsidies or incentives to finance affordable housing.

The plans to curb speculation are more open-ended. EU officials say they will analyse “housing price dynamics, including available evidence of speculation patterns” and seek to shed more light on property ownership.

Demonstrations calling for change have been held in Barcelona for several years. Photograph: Zuma Press Inc/Alamy

The Socialist group in the European parliament welcomed the plan, which had been their key demand for supporting Ursula von der Leyen’s second term as commission president. The Socialists and Democrats (S&D), a diminished force in the more right-leaning parliament, who have recently lost key votes on deregulation, were quick to claim the affordable housing plan as a victory.

S&D leader Iratxe García Pérez described the plan as a “historic milestone” in response to a “social emergency” as she called for quick and ambitious implementation “with massive investments”.

But the plan also faced criticism for being no more than “a framework of intentions and future timelines”. Maria Ohisalo, a Finnish Green MEP, also said the plan lacked “a more decisive approach to real estate speculation, which plays a fundamental role in the housing crisis”.

The centre-right European People’s party housing spokesperson, Nikolina Brnjac, welcomed the emphasis on cutting red tape and accelerating housebuilding.

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The commission – as part of a broader deregulation drive under the banner of “simplification” – has pledged to map EU rules to assess where they may be putting “unnecessary administrative burden” on small and medium-sized housebuilding companies.

As anti-tourism protests grow in Europe, we need a rethink – but that’s no reason to stop travelling | Leah Pattem

Between 2010 and 2024, house prices increased by 53% across the EU, and rents by 25%, while general prices increased by 39%, according to Eurostat.

But the averages mask significant variations. Rents in Estonia surged by 208% over this period – with rises of 177% in Lithuania, 108% in Ireland and 107% in Hungary.

People in cities struggle most with unaffordability. Almost 10% of city dwellers lived in a household where total housing costs were more than 40% of disposable income in 2024, defined by Eurostat as “housing cost overburden rate”.

City dwellers in Greece (29%) and Denmark (23%) were the most likely to be burdened with such high housing costs.

The mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Colboni, told the Guardian this week that housing costs were akin to “a new pandemic” as he and 16 other city leaders urged the EU to help mobilise at least €300bn (£262bn) a year in public and private funds to promote the construction of affordable homes.

The EU is not following that call for an affordable housing fund modelled on the pandemic recovery scheme, which was financed by EU borrowing.

But officials pointed to an announcement from European public and regional banks on Tuesday promising a €375bn investment in social and affordable housing by 2029.

Dorset | The Guardian

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 07:56:13 +0000

Dorset

September 2026

‘We’re not going to back down’: tiny Portland B&B stands up to Airbnb’s legal bid to ‘monopolise’ letters ‘bnb’
Three little letters - bnb-side’s name is a play on the local b-side arts festival, but Silicon Valley colossus sees threat to global brand
01.00 EDT
RNLI steps up security after abuse by far-right agitators over small boat rescues
Volunteers told to consider not wearing charity-branded clothing and to shut lifeboat stations if they feel in danger
Sep 10 2026 09.11 EDT
Abundant common fossils don’t need to be protected
Letters: Museums have countless examples of the common fossils from these Lower Jurassic rocks, says the Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre’s Phil Davidson
Sep 3 2026 12.52 EDT

August 2026

South West Water has worst environmental record in England, analysis shows
Exclusive: Friends of the Earth finds greatest sewage discharge in Devon, Cornwall, Dorset and Somerset
Aug 30 2026 02.00 EDT
Protect fossils from hammer-wielding tourists
Letter: Jill White responds to an editorial calling for fossils to be given legally protected national-treasure status
Aug 28 2026 11.31 EDT
- Block export of ‘national treasure’ UK fossils, says MP
  Aug 16 2026 05.00 EDT
- Other lives
  Dennis Wardleworth obituary
  Aug 12 2026 14.39 EDT
- Britain’s Jurassic gold rush: the fossil hunters chasing fortunes on Dorset’s beaches
  Aug 8 2026 12.00 EDT

May 2026

Guardian Opinion cartoon
Ben Jennings on the Cerne Giant – cartoon
Volunteers have been rechalking the hill figure in Dorset, which is thought to date to the late Saxon period
May 28 2026 12.50 EDT
Rechalking beloved Cerne Giant is a sticky process – and climate crisis is making it worse
Volunteers head to Dorset countryside to restore the figure, but increasing heat means techniques have had to be adapted
May 28 2026 00.00 EDT
Country diary
Country diary: Perilous puffins and a plucky underdog
Swanage, Dorset: While the seabirds here make the headlines, my eye is drawn to the unassuming rock pipit and its accelerating song
May 27 2026 00.30 EDT
…
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April 2026

‘The party was chilled until police sent in the riot squad’: when a Dorset free rave turned violent
The organisers of Eggtek in Lulworth and local police have two very different stories about how trouble started at the Easter event
Apr 11 2026 09.00 EDT

March 2026

Beavers ‘breathe new life’ into Dorset as dams built and biodiversity returns
Mar 27 2026 02.00 EDT
Friendships, fishing and community clean-ups: the unseen kindness of life on the Bibby Stockholm barge
Mar 16 2026 08.21 EDT
Teenagers killed themselves in Dorset after baby taken into care, inquest finds
Mar 6 2026 11.29 EST
Country diary
Country diary: When wild swans need a human hand
Mar 5 2026 00.30 EST
…
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Silicon Valley | The Guardian

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 07:56:13 +0000

Silicon Valley

September 2026

‘We’re not going to back down’: tiny Portland B&B stands up to Airbnb’s legal bid to ‘monopolise’ letters ‘bnb’
Three little letters - bnb-side’s name is a play on the local b-side arts festival, but Silicon Valley colossus sees threat to global brand
01.00 EDT
The Audio Long Read
Democracy v the machine: the birth of the digital age and the warnings that were ignored – podcast
Many hoped that the march of technology would usher in an egalitarian utopia – but some foresaw the threat it would pose to liberal society. Why did nobody listen?

By Jill Lepore. Read by Laurel Lefkow
Podcast46:26
- Burning Man at 40: the once anarchic desert festival faces a midlife crisis
  Sep 13 2026 09.00 EDT
- Who is John Ternus, Apple’s new CEO?
  Sep 1 2026 13.33 EDT
- TechScape newsletter
  Conservatives split from Silicon Valley allies as datacenter backlash grows
  Newsletter

August 2026

TechScape newsletter
Meta goes on trial as Silicon Valley faces a growing backlash
Newsletter
Relax, everyone: Elon Musk has a mantra to make the climate crisis go away
Emma Brockes
Aug 20 2026 03.00 EDT
…
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comments
The long read
Democracy v the machine: the birth of the digital age and the warnings that were ignored
Aug 18 2026 00.00 EDT
A timely warning on the rise of the ‘tech bros’ from the author of The Nerd Reich
Aug 13 2026 12.38 EDT

San Francisco-area estate sells for $70m in sign of AI-fueled wealth explosion
Aug 12 2026 19.22 EDT
The ideas interview
‘If we don’t fight back, we don’t have a future’: the journalist taking on the ‘tech fascists’ of Silicon Valley
Aug 5 2026 05.00 EDT
China’s tech advances are causing chaos from Silicon Valley to the White House
Aug 1 2026 08.00 EDT

June 2026

Silicon Valley donations make Colorado Democratic primary one of state’s most expensive
Jun 30 2026 11.26 EDT
A viral doomsday scenario aims to shake Europe out of its AI complacency
Jun 20 2026 05.59 EDT
California ‘billionaire tax’ makes ballot despite opposition from tech moguls
Jun 18 2026 20.08 EDT
Will it take a ‘Chornobyl-scale disaster’ for us to regulate AI?
Stuart Russell
Jun 17 2026 06.00 EDT
…
…
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Bernie Sanders’ AI sovereign wealth fund plan is good. But we think this is better
Nathan E Sanders and Bruce Schneier
Jun 8 2026 06.00 EDT
…
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The Guardian view on NHS records: patients are not raw material for big tech
Jun 4 2026 13.54 EDT

About 1,370 results for Silicon Valley

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Airbnb | The Guardian

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 07:56:12 +0000

Airbnb

June 2026

‘It’s dangerous and it’s going to erode trust’: redesign of US government websites stokes surveillance fears
The National Design Studio, staffed by Doge veterans, installed visitor-tracking software on vital federal websites
Jun 28 2026 07.00 EDT

May 2026

‘It’s like stealing’: Palestinian family’s seized property listed on Booking.com
West Bank home described as ‘ideal for outdoor gatherings’ is among 41 listed rentals in illegal Israeli settlements
May 14 2026 10.26 EDT
Building power
‘This is not a World Cup for the people’: residents in host cities sound alarm over housing affordability
Organizers fear Fifa event will deepen crisis as short-term listings proliferate and sweeps displace unhoused people
May 13 2026 10.00 EDT
Short-stay Street: in some parts of Sydney, Airbnb guests outnumber residents
Councillors are pushing for a ban on short-term rentals, particularly in inner-city suburbs – where vacancy rates can be as low as 1%
May 9 2026 16.00 EDT

October 2025

Buy now, pay later holiday purchases leaving travellers exposed to losses
BNPL offers are becoming more popular but when it comes to booking a holiday or a flight, consumers need to weigh up the risks
Oct 25 2025 02.00 EDT
EU to propose short-term rental rules to tackle ‘social crisis’ in housing
Bloc’s first affordable housing plan to cover issues such as tenants’ rights, property speculation and tourist lets
Oct 15 2025 00.01 EDT
Consumer champions
Holiday horrors: Airbnb and Booking.com users battle for refunds as stays go wrong
In a Consumer Champions special, Anna Tims tackles online rental disasters, from a tree collapsing on to a cottage to being trapped in a flat
Oct 6 2025 02.00 EDT
…
…
comments

June 2025

Overtourism and housing crisis blight the Lake District
Letter: The harmful effects of world heritage status is not limited to unsustainable farming practices, writes Dr Karen Lloyd
Jun 23 2025 12.03 EDT
Tui says ‘overtourism’ is fault of short-term let companies not hotel industry
Travel operator hits back at Airbnb’s claim that it is being made a ‘scapegoat’ for problems in some holiday hotspots
Jun 13 2025 10.09 EDT
Luxury Airbnbs: tell us what got you into running one, or booking a stay at one
We’re interested to hear from owners of luxury Airbnb-style rentals how business has been, and from guests why they opted to book a stay at a private luxury property
Jun 4 2025 07.27 EDT

Short-stay Street: in some parts of Sydney, Airbnb guests outnumber residents | Housing | The Guardian

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 07:56:12 +0000

At 10am on High Street in Millers Point, it’s checkout time. Departing guests have left laundry bags on their verandas for cleaners, who have laid out fresh towels on beds in neighbouring rooms. Other guests are heading out sightseeing in “I love Sydney” T-shirts.

Although it boasts enviable harbour views, this is not a tourist resort. It’s a street of Federation-era houses – formerly some of the oldest public housing in Australia – overtaken by short-term rentals, many of them managed through Airbnb.

Key safes at the entrance to High Street homes. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

Halfway down, leaves from the plane trees that line the street have piled up outside KU Lance kindergarten, which opened as a supervised playground in 1912. It closed at the end of last year because there aren’t enough local children to fill enrolments. “Now we’re a city without grandchildren,” says Cormac Champion, a Millers Point resident whose youngest child attended the centre before the class size dwindled.

It’s a similar story on neighbouring Kent Street, where Champion lives. Every second Victorian terrace has a key-safe on the front door, the telltale sign of a short-term rental. The area, nestled beside the Harbour Bridge and home to Sydney’s oldest pubs, is understandably popular with visitors.

But while the five-star Langham hotel sits quietly on the corner, the suburb around it has transformed into a giant hotel.

Last week the City of Sydney passed a motion to investigate the feasibility of banning short-term rentals where the host doesn’t live at the property.

The motion included the possibility of a ban linked to the rental vacancy rate or a ban in the worst-affected suburbs, of which Millers Point is “the canary in the coalmine”, according to the Greens councillor Matthew Thompson.

Thompson, who brought the motion, says a ban could return as many as 5,000 properties to the long-term rental market. Last year the council investigated lowering a statewide 180-day annual cap for short-term rentals to 60 days, following a move in Byron shire which covers the tourist hotspots of Byron Bay and Mullumbimby – a region with the second highest rate of homelessness in New South Wales after Sydney.

But Thompson says caps don’t work and are difficult to enforce. He favours a de facto ban like those being implemented in Barcelona, Amsterdam and New York.

“It’s not the silver bullet, this is not going to fix the housing crisis, but it’s something that we could do to return houses that already exist, that could be someone’s home,” he says.

Rental data from the asset analyst SQM, used by the council, indicates that vacancy rates sit between 1% and 1.5% in most postcodes across the local government area.

Murray Cox, the founder of Inside Airbnb, which collects data on short-term rentals in global cities, was a key activist who campaigned for restrictions on non-primary residences being used as short-term rentals in New York, which have been in place since September 2023.

Cox, who grew up in Sydney, says vacancy rates are well below what most cities would consider a housing emergency, at less than 5%.

Tourists head out for day of sightseeing. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

“I don’t think we need to cannibalise our housing markets just to provide cheaper travel options,” he says. “I think we need to prioritise people that are trying to find housing, housing for our children and our students, our elderly.”

The deputy mayor, Jess Miller, says a ban would be difficult to enforce without changes to the state government’s register of short-term rentals.

“We don’t have the ability to match … whether or not it’s a primary or secondary residence,” she says. “We don’t know if it’s a property under management by an agent. We don’t know if it belongs to a consortium.”

Families moving out

Champion began renting his Kent Street house as an office space in 2018 to accommodate staff in his sales and marketing business. He moved his family to the area in 2020.

“We’ve seen so much change in the last six or seven years in this neighbourhood but in the city as well,” he says.

He has seen about 20 families with children leave Millers Point. “There was one family in particular, their rent from one lease to the next, they wanted to raise it by $600 a week,” he says.

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“That’s because the houses on either side of them had become Airbnbs, and that’s what the owners were making.”

Many short-term rental operators are themselves renting the properties then subleasing them as holiday homes – turning up to rental inspections alongside prospective tenants, applying for leases, and running portfolios of dozens of properties, typically with the landlords’ permission.

One Airbnb superhost identified by local residents has listings for at least 66 properties in inner Sydney, including several on High Street.

There are ad-hoc bans in place in NSW: strata corporations can vote to restrict short-term rentals if a property isn’t the host’s principal place of residence. But if the host lives at the property, they can still rent out rooms or the whole home while they are away.

The Minns government came out strongly against short-term rentals after it was elected, launching a review of the sector in 2024.

But more than two years after the initial four-week public consultation, the government is yet to release its report. Meanwhile, Airbnb donated $7,900 to the NSW Labor party in 2025, more than doubling the $3,750 it donated across 2024 and 2023. The company also donated $2,000 to the Liberal party when it was in government in 2022.

In 2024 and 2025, it was a community partner to Vivid Sydney, the annual light festival run by Destination NSW, the state government’s tourism agency. Last year it was both a community partner to Local Government NSW’s annual conference and an “elite partner” for the agency’s Destination and Visitor Economy Conference. A spokesperson for Local Government NSW said “event partners do not have any role in Local Government NSW’s policy positions or advocacy”.

Sydney risks becoming ‘city with no grandchildren’ as housing costs push out families, expert warns

According to diary disclosures, the company or lobbyists representing it have met 12 Minns government ministers across 24 occasions, including at larger industry events, since 2023.

Asked if the government supported a ban, a spokesperson said it was reviewing the planning and regulatory framework surrounding short-term accommodation and would make an announcement in due course, but did not say when the housing minister’s review of the sector would be released.

They added: “The best way to reduce demand for short-term rentals is to build more visitor accommodation. Short-term rental accommodation provides important economic benefits and choice for visitors.”

Airbnb declined to provide a written statement in response to questions from Guardian Australia but shared a statement from Claudia, an Airbnb host with a listing near St Vincent’s hospital in nearby Darlinghurst.

“It gets booked by families in medical crisis who need to be close to the hospital and families who book my place specifically because they have neurodiverse children and they simply cannot stay in a hotel,” she said.

Champion says one short-term rental a few doors down from him advertises itself online as a hotel. One day a lost guest knocked on his door looking for it.

“We want [tourists] here,” Champion stresses. “But it’s not as if they won’t come because they can’t rent a whole house for their visit.”

‘We’re not going to back down’: tiny Portland B&B stands up to Airbnb’s legal bid to ‘monopolise’ letters ‘bnb’ | Airbnb | The Guardian

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 07:55:48 +0000

In one corner is bnb-side, a six-room bed and breakfast on the Isle of Portland – a tiny wedge of limestone tied by a narrow ribbon of shingle to the Dorset coast – that was created to help secure the future of the rock’s much-loved arts festival, b-side.

On the other is Airbnb, the San Francisco-based booking colossus. The battle between them is over the three little letters they share.

bnb-side, a six-room B&B on the Isle of Portland, has received legal letters from booking titan Airbnb. Photograph: Pete Millson

b-side says the “bnb” in bnb-side means what it has always meant: bed and breakfast. But lawyers for the Silicon Valley titan say the name of the guesthouse, perched on an outcrop just 4 miles long by 1.5 miles wide, threatens the global brand of the $100bn heavyweight.

“We thought the name was both really obvious and really cool,” said Rocca Holly-Nambi, director of b-side. “b-side was founded almost 20 years ago, so when we set up our BnB in 2024 to raise money for the festival, we just popped the ‘bn’ in front because it’s a universally recognised description of what we’re offering.”

Airbnb doesn’t agree. In May, it sent the first of three legal letters to the tiny social enterprise to demand it cease its attempt to register the B&B using the name it had used since it opened its doors.

“They won’t let us compromise by using a different case, an ampersand or an ‘and’,” said Holly-Nambi. “According to Airbnb, we can’t describe our BnB as a BnB at all.”

A creative retreat held at bnb-side – the social enterprise was set up in 2024 to raise money for the b-side festival. Photograph: Handout

For bnb-side, losing the argument could mean more than abandoning a clever name. It would mean replacing signage and rewriting websites, social media and all other material referencing and advertising the B&B.

“That’s not just a huge waste of money – of which we don’t have much – and of the equally valuable time of our volunteers, but it would throw b-side’s core income stream into chaos,” said Holly-Nambi. “We’d have to painstakingly build our reputation and brand back up from scratch all over again.”

Raina Summerson, chair of b-side, is fuming and incredulous. “We opened bnb-side because we were completely dependent on public funding and wanted to be more financially secure,” she said. “bnb-side now generates almost half the festival’s annual £250,000 turnover. If it loses its name, we risk having to establish it all over again.”

Short-stay Street: in some parts of Sydney, Airbnb guests outnumber residents

Airbnb has opposed the name on three separate legal grounds: that consumers will confuse the two brands, that bnb-side could benefit from or damage Airbnb’s reputation, and that bnb-side will financially profit by misrepresenting itself as an official Airbnb service.

b-side is asking the Intellectual Property Office to reject Airbnb’s opposition in full, with costs awarded in their favour. The case is still under way, with no ruling having yet been made.

‘It’s pretty bitter,’ said Cat Wightman, pictured at bnb-side, describing the legal battle with Airbnb, a company that has ‘conquered’ Portland. Photograph: Handout: bnb-side, Portland

Airbnb’s claim has hit a nerve on the proud, windswept outcrop. Cat Wightman, manager of bnb-side, said: “It’s pretty bitter. We’ve watched other small, local hospitality businesses go under, and local people unable to afford homes here, who have been negatively affected by the force with which the Airbnb market has conquered Portland. One person owns eight properties on the island, all of which are rented out on Airbnb.”

b-side obtained pro bono advice and is working with the law firm Stevens Hewlett & Perkins to defend them, but the process is still intimidating. “It’s terrifying but we’re not going to back down,” said Holly-Nambi. “We do things differently here in Portland.”

EU to regulate short-term rentals in plan to tackle affordable homes shortage

Craig Beaumont, a trademark attorney and senior associate at Barker Brettell, a law firm that specialises in intellectual property, said that for all Airbnb’s might, this would not be an easy or straightforward win for them.

“This feels like an uphill battle they’re embarking on,” he said. “BnB has long been widely understood as shorthand for a descriptive phrase, and descriptive phrases are available for the public to use.”

bnb-side are not the only company who agree with Beaumont: Companies House records show that in the past decade 14 accommodation companies with “bnb” in their name successfully registered their businesses.

The Airbnb logo on display at its San Francisco HQ – the colossus may be facing an ‘uphill battle’ as it seeks to stake a claim to the letters ‘bnb’. Photograph: Gabrielle Lurie/Reuters

Darren Meale, a partner and trademark litigation specialist at Simmons & Simmons, said it was no surprise the term was used so often. “It’s quite punchy of Airbnb to say they’re so well-known that they can monopolise a term that they only incorporated into their name in the first place because it was a descriptive one that everyone immediately understood, and then say that someone else using the term is going to confuse customers and damage them.”

Lee Curtis, a partner and chartered trademark attorney at IP law firm HGF, agreed that Airbnb “may be testing the limits” of the law. But he pointed to another risk for the lodging colossus.

“There’s a public relations angle to take into account,” he said. “Some companies may welcome getting a reputation for aggressive enforcement but that can backfire when the target is a community organisation, like this one.”

Airbnb has been approached for comment.

The Guardian view on Meta’s smart glasses: regulators must get on the front foot | Editorial | The Guardian

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 04:55:48 +0000

It is not yet clear to what extent Meta’s new smart glasses will live up to the nickname of “pervert glasses” – bestowed in recognition of the obvious appeal of wearable cameras to voyeurs. The past week has seen rising criticism of the devices, which in the UK have been banned by the pub chain Wetherspoons and the theatre group ATG, as well as restaurants, schools and members’ clubs. These organisations deserve praise for standing up for privacy. By contrast, regulators appear once again to be on the back foot.

There have, inevitably, already been reports of women being mistreated. Earlier this year the BBC spoke to several who had been filmed without their consent, with footage subsequently uploaded to social media. In one case, the content creator demanded a fee to remove it. In the year to March 2025, image-based sexual abuse and cyberflashing were responsible for more than half of an 11% increase in reported sexual offences in England and Wales. Normalisation of smart glasses would, clearly, make such offences easier to commit.

Worrying as this is, it is not the only reason to be concerned. Privacy has much wider significance and most people, as the businesses banning smart glasses from their premises have recognised, do not want to be filmed as they go about their lives. While videoing in public is not illegal, this does not give smart glasses wearers the right to place others under involuntary surveillance. An LED light that blinks when the camera is in use, and cannot be disabled, is not an adequate safeguard, whatever Meta might think. Pubs, parks, beaches and workplaces are not film sets.

Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Having invested $80bn in its latest product, Mark Zuckerberg’s company is unlikely to give up easily on its ambition to make the glasses, which have been likened to face-mounted smartphones, as ubiquitous as the handheld kind. More than a decade after the first smart glasses, made by Google, flopped, Meta has bet heavily on making its latest version more stylish, functional and affordable – with UK prices starting at £269. The choice of Kylie Jenner to front this summer’s advertising campaign, and the slogan “Never miss a moment”, aimed at parents of young children, appear calculated to dispel fears about how the glasses will be used by sexually predatory men.

Like most digital devices, these ones can be helpful as well as harmful. As aids for people who are blind or visually impaired, smart glasses that can read text or describe images have been described as life-changing. Any restrictions, in the UK or elsewhere, should be crafted so as to enable such uses to continue – just as guide dogs are exempted from rules about pets. But while the benefits that smart glasses offer to groups of people with specific needs should be recognised, this must not be allowed to distract from their potential to cause harm.

Smart glasses controversy sidelines the benefits for disabled people | Letter

Tech regulation is difficult. But given the UK government’s recent moves towards restricting smartphone use among young people, and the public outcry regarding sexualised AI imagery, it is disappointing that ministers have so far had almost nothing to say about the rollout of wearable hidden cameras. While the tech companies market their products as tools to be used, one of the key lessons of the last two decades is that users are rarely, if ever, as in control as they would like to be. Ministers and regulators should be active, not passive, as Meta intentionally blurs the line between looking and filming.

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

Dolly Parton, country star, actor and philanthropist, dies aged 80 after cancer diagnosis | Dolly Parton | The Guardian

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 01:45:04 +0000

Dolly Parton, one of the greatest singer-songwriters in country music, who was also much cherished for her philanthropy, has died aged 80.

Her death was announced by nephew Brian Seaver on Instagram. “I have imagined the heaviness of this moment but haven’t truly felt it until now,” he said. “It is an honour, an honour that is mixed with absolute pride and great sadness.”

Parton’s team confirmed the singer died Tuesday “after bravely facing a brief battle with cancer.”

“Dolly departed her Earthly life today at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center surrounded by loved ones,” the statement continued.

Dolly Parton – a life in pictures

So gifted that she wrote two of the 20th century’s greatest songs – Jolene and I Will Always Love You – in a single day, Parton’s songwriting was characterised by its vivid storytelling, emotional acuity and melodic strength, all sung with strident clarity. From an eventual catalogue of hundreds of songs, she scored a record 25 US country No 1 singles and 47 albums in the country Top 10. She crossed over into the pop charts with 9 to 5, a US No 1 hit in 1980; balanced her music career with acclaimed acting, twice earning Golden Globe nominations for her roles; and donated more than 300m books to children through her Imagination Library literacy project.

This was all done with considerable panache, rhinestoned glamour and towering hairdos, with her immortal assertion regarding her appearance – “it takes a lot of money to look this cheap” – the most quoted example of Parton’s ready wit.

Dolly Parton in 1976. Photograph: PA

Parton was born in poverty in a one-room cabin in Tennessee, the fourth child to a mother who would have 12 children by the age of 35, and a father who was a farmer and construction worker. One of her best-loved songs, Coat of Many Colours, was about her mother creating patchwork clothes; Parton’s first guitar was cobbled together from a mandolin with bass guitar strings. Her first proper guitar was given to her aged eight by her uncle, and she went from singing in church to appearing on local television aged 10, to cutting her first record aged 13. That year, she appeared at the Grand Ole Opry, the concert hall in Nashville at the center of country music, and her performance was introduced by Johnny Cash. “I’ve always believed things would go well, and I dreamed that they would even before I was in high school,” she later said. “I always wanted to be a star. It just seemed natural to me.”

After graduating high school in 1964, she moved to Nashville and started out as a songwriter rather than performer. The following year, she was signed as an artist and initially moulded as a pop singer, without success; after she was allowed to switch to country, she scored back-to-back hits and released her debut album Hello, I’m Dolly. In 1966, she married Carl Dean – who died in 2025, with the couple renewing their vows in 2016 to mark 50 years together.

Beginning in 1967, a duet partnership with country singer and TV personality Porter Wagoner helped her star continue to ascend, and she had her first country No 1 in 1971 with the song Joshua.

Jolene, her unforgettably raw and desperate plea to a rival lover, was released in 1973 and became her first UK success, reaching No 7. I Will Always Love You, written to Wagoner as a farewell after their creative partnership ended, was a country No 1 in 1974 and again via a re-recorded version in 1982, and would go on to be a huge pop success when revived by Whitney Houston for the soundtrack of The Bodyguard in 1992: it is still the bestselling single of all time by a woman, with an estimated 20m sales.

In the mid 1970s, Parton broadened her sound, embracing pop-rock arrangements on songs such as 1977’s Light of a Clear Blue Morning – its accompanying album New Harvest … First Gathering was her first entry in the pop album chart. Later that year, its follow-up, Here You Come Again, reached the Top 20 and was her first million-selling LP, powered in part by its hit title track, which also won Parton the first of her 10 Grammy awards.

The year 1980 was a peak in her success, with three back-to-back country No 1s, including 9 to 5, taken from the film of the same name, which Parton starred in alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, earning her an Oscar nomination for best original song. Parton would later write songs for a stage musical version of 9 to 5, in 2008.

Another classic single came in 1983 – Islands in the Stream, a duet with Kenny Rogers, which topped the US pop charts – and a Christmas album with Rogers in 1984 went two times platinum. There were more notable film roles in the 1980s, too, opposite Burt Reynolds in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Sylvester Stallone in Rhinestone, and an all-star female ensemble in Steel Magnolias.

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Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris in 1987. Photograph: Paul Harris/Getty Images

A landmark Parton album came in 1987 with Trio, an exquisitely harmonised, springwater-clear collaboration with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, earning Parton her only nomination for album of the year at the Grammys. Another all-star trio recording came in 1993, with Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn on the album Honky-Tonk Angels, followed by a reunion with Harris and Ronstadt for Trio II in 1999, featuring a Grammy-winning cover of Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush.

The turn of the century brought a trilogy of acclaimed bluegrass albums, and Parton would release 10 more LPs, the most recent being Rockstar in 2023. She was courted by a younger generation of stars, appearing with country artists such as Brad Paisley as well as pop singers such as Kesha, and her goddaughter Miley Cyrus. There were fewer acting roles, but she lent her voice to animated film Gnomeo and Juliet in 2011 and the following year appeared alongside Queen Latifah and more in the musical film Joyful Noise.

Alongside her music and acting, Parton was an astute businesswoman and philanthropist. She founded the film and TV production company Sandollar, with former manager Sandy Gallin, which went on to produce hits such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Father of the Bride film series. In 1986, she took a stake in the Silver Dollar City theme park in Tennessee and renamed it Dollywood, doubling its size over the next two decades, and a Dollywood-branded spa, cabin complex, theatre-restaurant concept and waterpark have since been opened.

Dolly Parton in Joyful Noise. Photograph: Van Redin/Publicity image from film company

The Dollywood Foundation, funded through these business ventures and creative projects, was created in 1988, initially awarding college scholarships and running a program to help children complete high school in her native Sevier county, Tennessee. In 1995, Parton began her Imagination Library project, which sent an age-appropriate book to every child in the county every month until they were five. “My father could not read and write, and I saw how crippling that could be,” she explained. It expanded nationwide in 2000, internationally in 2006, and 40m books are now distributed each year across the US, Canada, Australia, the UK and Ireland.

In 2022, Jeff Bezos donated $100m (£83m) to the foundation. That year, Parton explained that as well as improving child literacy, “it’s the fact they get recognised. They get this little book with their little name on it in the mail, and they feel special. They start taking pride in themselves, and they know that somebody out there is thinking of [them].”

Dolly Parton receiving the Moderna vaccine she helped to fund. Photograph: @DollyParton/Reuters

Parton also set up a reserve in 2003 to help preserve the bald eagle; contributed $500,000 to the opening of a Sevier county hospital in 2006; coordinated relief efforts for people affected by the Smoky mountain wildfires of 2016; and contributed to an HIV/Aids charity album. She supported Black Lives Matter and transgender rights, opposing a North Carolina “bathroom bill” that restricted transgender people’s access to toilets (Parton was also nominated for an Oscar for her song in trans drama Transamerica, entitled Travelin’ Thru).

She made a number of donations to Vanderbilt University’s medical center in Nashville, Tennessee, where her niece was treated for leukemia. The most high-profile of these was in 2020, when she donated $1m for research into Covid-19, which formed the basis for the eventual Moderna vaccine.

In May 2026, Parton cancelled her Las Vegas residency over health issues. A Broadway musical is also set to open later this year after a run in Nashville.

NAZA review – Israeli intelligence officers cast chilling light on civilian deaths | Venice film festival | The Guardian

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 06:43:14 +0000

Here is a disquieting documentary about what Israel’s military chiefs in Gaza reputedly call “Naza”, meaning civilian collateral damage – itself a queasy euphemism. The calculated “Naza” number is the amount of projected civilian deaths from each military strike, and perhaps it will come to have the same connotations as the US military term “body count” during Vietnam. The directors are Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the film-makers behind No Other Land, which was about attacks by the Israel Defense Forces on Palestinian West Bank villages. NAZA is executive produced by Jonathan Glazer and James Wilson and appears under the production auspices of the Guardian, in which some of the stories have already appeared.

Secret systems used by Israel in mass killings of Gaza civilians revealed in new film

There are flaws: interviews were conducted on the condition of anonymity, but if no-one can be persuaded to put their name and face to their words (and of course it is terribly dangerous) then the impact of this as testimony is lessened. But even so, the film is casting a chilling light on what is happening now in Gaza.

Their faces in shadow, appearances and voices digitally altered, disillusioned Israeli intelligence officers and personnel speak to the directors about the war in Gaza. They do this semi-furtively on the dark night-time rooftops of Tel Aviv, the home of Israeli intelligence, supposedly for journalistic secrecy purposes – but it also provides a dramatic backdrop, as well as ambient footage of the city in all its eerie heedlessness and heartlessness. Periodically, the camera’s eye will drift across the gleaming apartment buildings, zooming in on glimpses of prosperous lives just 60km from Gaza.

The interviewees reject the whole concept of “human shields”. They allege that it is not a question of Hamas operatives hiding behind civilians; rather, Israel’s intelligence services have subcontracted their attack recon to AI. A computer program reportedly analyses the call pattern on phones belonging to known Hamas terrorists and finds which of the other tens of thousands of phones they have under surveillance exhibit the same tendencies – and then attack the owner, invariably at night, in the apartments whose whereabouts are already minutely documented by the state. A 15% permitted “error” rate for this is mentioned at one stage, and another respondent talks about an expected “Naza” rate of 20 for each action – but clearly this is elastic to say the least. Gaza’s civilians are considered to be all tacitly complicit in the grotesque antisemitic pogrom of 7 October, and whole buildings and vast numbers of people can be wiped out in one computer-generated assault.

‘They know the house they are bombing is full of children’: NAZA’s directors on their devastating film about Israeli intelligence

Elsewhere, the officials talk about the logistics involved in “cleansing” northern Gaza and in sniper attacks on Gazan civilians who, desperate for food, don’t know they have crossed some invisible line into a militarised zone. Another part of the film talks about an intelligence unit unofficially loyal to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally, engaging in dirty tricks undermining international human rights bodies who might be antipathetic to Israel’s political leadership.

The ahistorical comparison to nazism is inevitably and glibly invoked by one speaker. But Gaza, however horrendous, is not the same as the Holocaust. This specious parallel is all too readily available; the bombing of Dresden is the more obvious comparison. At all events, the anguish of Gaza is brought into pin-sharp focus.

‘We must avoid a chilling effect’: the CMA chief on the UK’s pro-growth shift | Competition and Markets Authority | The Guardian

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 06:41:42 +0000

Signs by the lifts in the Canary Wharf headquarters of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) remind staff not to talk about their work in public, given the billions of pounds resting on its decisions.

But a very public debate is taking place about how the competition watchdog works and is run, with the Labour government determined to make an example of it.

In October the prime minister rebuked regulators in front of global business leaders for “needlessly holding back the investment we need to take our country forward”.

In January they were hauled into No 10 to explain how they would support the government’s growth ambitions.

Then days later, the government defenestrated the CMA’s chair, Marcus Bokkerink, replacing him with the former head of Amazon in the UK, Doug Gurr.

Two and a bit years since she became chief executive of the watchdog, Sarah Cardell and her organisation are under the spotlight like never before.

Britain’s chief trustbuster is sitting in a meeting room at the CMA’s head office after a whirlwind morning of broadcast interviews about its latest intervention, this time in the market for baby milk formula.

It demanded changes such as standardised packaging in hospitals and allowing shoppers to use loyalty cards to buy formula milk – changes that it said could help parents save £300 a year by switching to lower-priced brands.

It is an illustration of the breadth of responsibility the watchdog has: from trying to police the tech juggernauts of Silicon Valley, to fining cartels in the asbestos removal industry, to intervening in the price of baby milk.

“This job is for me a particularly unique opportunity to really deliver a tangible impact for people. We can be talking about tech and then we can talk about baby formula,” says Cardell. “It’s a market that really, really matters for parents and where the set of proposals that we have put out can make a real difference.”

But some say that its primary job of ensuring fair competition and keeping powerful vested interests in check, so that households and businesses are not unfairly squeezed by higher prices and reduced choice, has been made significantly harder in recent months.

The government, desperate to prove its pro-growth credentials after a series of mis-steps culminating in a confidence-sapping budget, has demanded the CMA bend to its will. That culminated in the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, last week issuing new guidance for the CMA, demanding it focus more on economic growth and not overreach into global deals.

Critics warn that by politicising the competition watchdog the government risks eroding one of the most sacred pillars of the UK: strong, independent regulation.

A former regulator said: “There’s going to be awful aggro from the business community if the CMA blocks deals now because they are going to think the government has given a signal to allow them.

“It seems like the UK now welcomes monopolies provided they have an investment story. There’s something really topsy-turvy about this.”

Cardell, an Oxbridge-educated former competition lawyer at Slaughter and May, insists there was “no conflict of views at all between myself and Marcus” and the reasons for his departure are between him and the government.

Reports claim that several members of the CMA’s board offered to resign in protest at the government’s tactics. For all that, Cardell appears at peace with the bruising approach from Westminster and Gurr’s arrival.

“I am very comfortable with his appointment and genuinely very much benefiting from working with him,” she says. “Doug actually brings really quite a breadth of experience to the chair role.”

Nor does she feel the CMA’s new growth focus is at odds with its core pro-competition mandate.

“I don’t see there being a fundamental tension between the two and we haven’t got a growth duty that’s coming in over and above. Our statutory functions are to promote competition and protect consumers. Those fundamentals haven’t changed.

“It’s about making sure that the way in which we discharge those statutory duties is done in a way that helps to contribute to driving growth, building that business investor confidence.

“We are looking for more pace, for more predictability, proportionality, and making sure our processes work.”

She insists the CMA has not been a brake on economic growth, but admits “where we do need to go further is to make sure that perceptions of the regime haven’t created a chilling effect, haven’t had a detrimental impact on business and investor confidence.”

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“It is a fair challenge to us to say: ‘Are you doing as much as you can do to build that positive?’ And that doesn’t mean that we are going to suddenly start letting through, obviously, anti-competitive mergers.”

It is a marked change of tone from just a couple of years ago. In a speech in November 2022 Cardell explained how the CMA planned to police Silicon Valley’s tech behemoths with forward-looking regulation, to avoid the risk of “winner takes most” outcomes.

She singled out Amazon, citing its “mind-boggling” breadth – from retail and logistics to music, films, home appliances and cloud services. She warned about the “risks that come from significant and entrenched market power – particularly in markets that have become essential for our way of life and commerce”.

“This unprecedented scale and scope afford these firms a strategic position creating a situation of dependency – and potential exploitation – for the people and businesses who rely on them, as well as the risk that they can act to deter innovative competitors.”

In April 2023 those words were put into practice when an independent panel at the CMA blocked the largest gaming deal in history, Microsoft’s $68.7bn (£55bn) purchase of the Call of Duty developer Activision Blizzard, citing concerns about dominance in the cloud gaming market.

The backlash was furious. Microsoft’s vice-chair and president, Brad Smith, called it a “bad for Britain” and Microsoft’s “darkest day” in its four decades in the UK. The then chancellor Jeremy Hunt admonished the CMA publicly, saying regulators need to “understand their wider responsibilities for economic growth”.

Despite all that, Cardell maintains that “there was no pressure on me from government throughout the entirety of that Microsoft investigation”.

Eventually the Activision deal was allowed to proceed after the CMA extracted concessions including forcing the sale of cloud gaming rights outside Europe to Activision’s French rival Ubisoft.

But the world today looks very different. Donald Trump has criticised European regulatory action against US tech firms as a “form of taxation” and was flanked at his inauguration by Tesla’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

Would the CMA intervene now to stop a company based in Redmond, Washington from buying a Santa Monica, California-headquartered one? Especially when the government has demanded that it focuses on “markets and harms that particularly impact UK-based consumers and businesses”, and avoids international overreach?

Cardell says it will take a “proportionate approach when we’re thinking about global deals or issues that are global in nature”.

“If you think about Microsoft Activision, I think it’s the kind of case that we would want to think very carefully about. I can’t say definitely would we or wouldn’t we.

“It’s about a tailored proportionate approach rather than a default approach which says every single time there’s a global deal, we need to have a seat at the table.”

The CMA’s ambitions will soon be tested: it recently launched an investigation into Google’s dominance in internet search and search advertising, and a separate one into Apple and Google’s mobile phone “ecosystems” and app stores. If it finds they have “strategic market status” that they are abusing, it will propose a series of remedies. If they do not comply it could ultimately end up fining the tech firms, up to a maximum of 10% of turnover.

“I would consider the fines very much the kind of last resort,” Cardell adds. “This is a regime which is built on an aspiration of engagement and constructive resolution.”

Uber concealed massive hack that exposed data of 57m users and drivers | Uber | The Guardian

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 06:24:48 +0000

Uber concealed a massive global breach of the personal information of 57 million customers and drivers in October 2016, failing to notify the individuals and regulators, the company acknowledged on Tuesday.

Uber also confirmed it had paid the hackers responsible $100,000 to delete the data and keep the breach quiet, which was first reported by Bloomberg.

“None of this should have happened, and I will not make excuses for it,” Uber’s chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, said in a statement acknowledging the breach and cover-up. “While I can’t erase the past, I can commit on behalf of every Uber employee that we will learn from our mistakes.”

Timeline

A timeline of Uber's terrible year

Show

January 2017

#DeleteUber goes viral

Uber’s decision to lift surge pricing during a New York taxi drivers’ work stoppage in protest of the Trump travel ban prompts a viral #DeleteUber campaign.

February 2017

Susan Fowler speaks out

Former Uber engineer Susan Fowler publishes a blog post with allegations of widespread sexual harassment and gender discrimination.

March 2017

Greyball deception revealed

The New York Times exposes Uber’s use of Greyball, a tool to systematically deceive authorities in cities where Uber was violating local laws.

May 2017

Drivers underpaid by millions

Uber admits it has for years been underpaying New York City drivers by tens of millions of dollars.

June 2017

Toxic culture reaches breaking point, Kalanick resigns

Uber fires 20 employees following the conclusion of an investigation into sexual harassment and workplace culture.

Uber is sued by an Indian passenger who was raped by an Uber driver after reports reveal that a top executive had obtained the woman’s medical records, allegedly in order to cast doubt upon her account.

CEO Travis Kalanick resigns.

August 2017

Unsafe cars leased in Singapore

The Wall Street Journal reports that Uber had rented fire-prone cars to drivers in Singapore, despite knowing that the vehicles had been recalled over serious safety concerns.

September 2017

Uber loses London license

Uber loses its license to operate in London due to a lack of corporate responsibility. The company is appealing the decision.

November 2017

Massive hack cover-up revealed

Uber admits concealing a 2016 breach that exposed the data of 57 million Uber customers and drivers, failing to disclose the hack to regulators or affected individuals. The company paid a $100,000 ransom to the hackers to destroy the information and keep the breach quiet.

Hackers stole personal data including names, email addresses and phone numbers, as well as the names and driver’s license numbers of about 600,000 drivers in the United States. The company said more sensitive information, such as location data, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, social security numbers, and birth dates, had not been compromised.

In his statement, Khosrowshahi said the company had “obtained assurances that the downloaded data had been destroyed” and improved its security, but that the company’s “failure to notify affected individuals or regulators” had prompted him to take several steps, including the departure of two of the employees responsible for the company’s 2016 response.

Uber’s chief security officer, Joe Sullivan, was one of the two employees who left the company, Bloomberg reported.

The company’s failure to disclose the breach was “amateur hour”, said Chris Hoofnagle of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. “The only way one can have direct liability under security breach notification statutes is to not give notice. Thus, it makes little sense to cover up a breach.”

Under California state law, for example, companies are required to notify state residents of any breach of unencrypted personal information, and must inform the attorney general if more than 500 residents are affected by a single breach.

“The hack and the cover-up is typical Uber only caring about themselves,” said Robert Judge, an Uber driver in Pittsburgh, who said he had yet to receive any communication from the company. “I found out through the media. Uber doesn’t get out in front of things, they hide them.”

Uber said in a statement to drivers that it would offer those affected free credit monitoring and identity theft protection.

According to Bloomberg, the breach occured when two hackers obtained login credentials to access data stored on Uber’s Amazon Web Services account. Paul Lipman, CEO of cybersecurity firm BullGuard, said that the fact that the data was being stored unencrypted was “unforgivable”.

“That’s just a complete misstep from an information security viewpoint,” he added.

The CEO of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The New York state attorney general’s office has opened an investigation into the data breach, a spokeswoman confirmed.

Uber’s potential civil liability from the breach is complicated by the fact that the United States’ various federal appellate courts are divided over how to treat data breach lawsuits. Some courts allow individuals to join class action lawsuits if they are simply at greater risk of having their identities stolen due to a breach, while other courts require plaintiffs to show that their personal information has actually been misused.

In June, health insurer Anthem settled litigation over a 2015 breach affecting 79 million people for a record $115m.

“Non-disclosure creates a practical risk in the hundreds of millions,” said Hoofnagle, who noted that companies can pay third parties to handle the fallout from a security breach – including notifications – for fees in the tens of millions. “Here’s the good news: drivers will finally squeeze money out of Uber.”

The hack and subsequent concealment is just the latest in a string of scandals and crises that Khosrowshahi inherited from his predecessor, Travis Kalanick, who was forced out of the $68bn startup in June.

The year started out with the trend-setting #DeleteUber viral boycott campaign, which arose after the company was accused of exploiting a New York taxi drivers’ work stoppage protesting against Trump’s travel ban.

Uber launches appeal against loss of London licence

Then in February, former employee Susan Fowler published a blogpost alleging a pervasive culture of gender discrimination and sexual harassment at the company.

The next month saw a New York Times report that for years Uber had been running a secret program to systematically deceive law enforcement officials in cities where its service violated regulations. Officials attempting to hail an Uber during a sting operation were “greyballed”; they might see icons of cars within the app navigating nearby, but no one would pick them up.

Fowler’s blogpost prompted Uber to commission an investigation of its workplace culture, and led to a public airing of the startup’s considerable dirty laundry. The company had soared to its position as the highest-value startup and dominant ride-hail app by defying rules and regulations, but the post-Fowler reckoning saw at least 20 employees fired and the company acknowledge that it needed to change. It also led to the eventual ousting of Kalanick himself.

Khosrowshahi displayed the new conciliatory style in September when Transport for London decided not to renew its license to operate in London. “We’ve got things wrong along the way,” the CEO said at the time. “On behalf of everyone at Uber globally, I apologise for the mistakes we’ve made.”

A moment that changed me: I was 16, gay and bullied for it. Then my father wrote to the Guardian … | Parents and parenting | The Guardian

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 05:37:45 +0000

Growing up gay in the 90s was incredibly difficult. In 1998, I was 16 and living in east London, only out to my parents, my sister and a few friends I had made online. I’d already been the target of homophobic bullying and didn’t feel safe coming out to the rest of the world.

I was lucky to live in a loving and supportive home. It was also a political household; my dad, in particular, was always active in expressing his beliefs and principles. Both my parents stood for things, cared about others – and they cared about me.

At school, however, jokes about Aids were a daily occurrence and I felt deeply alone. One so-called friend told me: ‘If you turn out to be gay, I will beat it out of you.’ Like many victims of bullying, I sometimes assumed that I was the problem.

When I came out to my parents, it was at a time when, in Britain, gay men were still discussed as a threat to the concept of family. Politicians and others openly viewed being gay as shameful, wrong or dangerous. While I knew my parents loved and supported me, I still believed I could not have as good a life as other people. I could be turned away from shops, targeted with violence, or legally sacked from my job. And even when I tried to balance this with the idea of finding someone to love, I knew that any relationship I had would not be seen as worthy of legal equality by the state or much of society. Amid all the love and support my mum showed me when I came out, she also said, sadly: “Your life will be hard.”

It was in this context that a feature was published in the Guardian about parents who expressed their sadness, regret, disappointment or shame about having gay kids. It wasn’t malicious – it was just real people sharing their stories – but it felt like yet another example of the shame associated with people like me. And it clearly hit a nerve with my dad.

About a week later, on 13 July 1998, my dad placed a copy of the paper in front of me and asked me to turn to the letters page. I saw an anonymous letter headed “Our gay son” and, with a lump in my throat, I read: “The reaction of the parents in your article in no way reflects that of my wife and I when our son came out to us earlier this year. Our reaction was one of pride and respect. He came out to us in an intelligent, mature and sensitive way and demonstrated an understanding of his sexuality way beyond that of many heterosexual men and women of his age … his parents have no expectations of him other than he is the person he is, and that happens to be a gay young man.”

Alec Dick’s letter to the Guardian, July 1998. Photograph: Courtesy of Sam Dick

I knew it was my dad who had written it and, while I already knew my parents loved and supported me, it showed that they cared deeply about other people’s children too. I felt immense pride – and also a sense of possibility. It was the first time I had seen someone close to me take action on behalf of lesbian, gay and bisexual people, and it was inspiring.

Until that point, my number one subject at school had been geography. I took great reassurance in seeing the world as rocks and rivers, devoid of morality, social pressures and people. But, after reading the letter, my perspective quickly began to shift. I started thinking about politics, which I went on to study at university, and how I could make a difference in society.

My dad taught me to present a the case for a better, different world. It became the driving force behind my career, kicking off two decades of campaigning for social change. In that time, I’ve tackled important and controversial social issues, from equal marriage and assisted dying to loneliness and wealth inequality.

Today, I work as the codirector of campaigns for the NGO Global Witness, helping to uncover the systems of power and exploitation that drive the climate catastrophe. My job is to push for the real and lasting change our planet urgently needs.

The fight to protect LGBTQ+ rights from Trump – podcast

My career has not always been easy. Fighting for justice takes its toll, and success isn’t guaranteed. In my more hopeless moments, I still call my dad for advice. More than 25 years after he wrote that letter, his principled, pragmatic and compassionate approach continues to encourage me.

My personal life has not been easy either, but it is nowhere near as hard as we all feared, not least because of my wonderful parents. Recently, my dad told me that the letter was written to me, and it just happened to be published in a newspaper. I don’t think he imagined it would change the course of my life – but he still keeps it safely in his desk drawer.

Quarter of branded baby foods in UK still have too much sugar, analysis finds | Children's health | The Guardian

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 02:07:07 +0000

Almost a quarter of popular branded baby foods sold in UK supermarkets still contain excessive amounts of sugar, analysis suggests, a year after the government introduced voluntary industry guidelines.

In August 2025 the government gave baby food manufacturers 18 months to reduce the sugar and salt content of their products, stop marketing snacks to infants under 12 months, and address misleading and inaccurate labelling that makes some infant foods appear healthier than they actually are.

An analysis of 224 branded infant foods and snacks has found that, a year on, more than half (58%) breached at least one of the nine guidelines and that a quarter of all products breached two or more.

Nora Cavani, the chief executive and co-founder of Alba Health, a gut health company that conducted the analysis, said: “Parents are not failing their children – they are being misled. Products that contain more sugar than a child should consume in a day are sold under the banner of health and nature. A year on from the guidelines’ introduction, the data shows voluntary standards haven’t worked.”

The foods studied included purees, breakfast, main meals, desserts, snacks and finger foods made by nine of the UK’s leading brands: Ella’s Kitchen, Heinz, Organix, HiPP, Kiddylicious, Little Freddie, Piccolo, Aptamil and Cow & Gate.

Of these, 51 (23%) contained too much sugar, including 52% of Kiddylicious’s products, 28% of Piccolo’s, 27% of Heinz’s, and 24% of Little Freddie products. In the case of five products, more than 80% of the total calories were from sugar, including Organix raisins, which contained 66g of sugar per 100g (86.6% kcal from sugars) and Kiddylicious apple fruit wriggles, which contained 70g of sugar per 100g (85.6% sugars).

The NHS recommends that babies under one consume less than 1g of salt a day, but the analysis found about 6% of foods – 14 products – breached those limits, with Heinz spaghetti bolognese pouches containing 0.27g of salt, more than a quarter of an infant’s entire daily allowance in one meal. In all, 19% of Kiddylicious’s products, 13% of Heinz’s and 6% of Cow & Gate’s breached the Office for Health Improvement and Disparity (OHID) salt and sodium guidelines.

Labelling and marketing breaches were found in 28% of products, including 31 snacks marketed at children as young as six months old, while labels on others made misleading health claims.

Experts said the data showed that the voluntary approach had failed. Prof Steve Turner, the president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said: “Paediatricians have long raised concerns about the high levels of salt and sugar in some infant and baby foods, and the impact this can have on children’s long-term health, including obesity and poor oral health.

“Ensuring baby food is nutritious, and does not encourage children to develop a preference for sugary foods later in life, is essential. We are clear that only mandatory nutritional standards and regulation of these products will provide the protection babies and children need.”

Sonia Pombo, the head of research and impact at Action on Salt and Sugar, said it was striking that there were problems among brands that positioned themselves as organic or healthy. “Parents should be able to trust that the name and imagery on the front of a pack accurately reflect what is inside, yet when a product is promoted using an appealing fruit or vegetable despite not being the main ingredient, it risks misleading parents,” she said.

“With only six months until the February 2027 compliance deadline, voluntary action is clearly not delivering quickly enough. If the government is serious about protecting babies and young children, these guidelines should be made mandatory and properly enforced.”

A spokesperson for the British Specialist Nutrition Association, which represents the infant food industry, said: “BSNA members welcomed the government’s guidance and have been fully engaged with OHID throughout its development. Significant progress has already been made, including reducing sugar and increasing vegetable content. Ultimately reformulation takes time, and the government recognised this when setting a deadline of February 2027 for compliance.

“Parents can feel confident that members are on track to meet the guidance, offering convenient, nutritious choices that support the realities of modern family life.”

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “We want every child to have the best possible start in life, and that includes making sure the food available to babies and young children is as healthy as possible. We have already taken action, publishing targets to reduce sugar and salt and introducing guidelines to improve labelling in baby food and drink, with industry given until February 2027 to make these changes.

“We will continue to work with industry to make sure parents can make healthy choices for their children.”

Revealed: top carbon offset projects may not cut planet-heating emissions | Carbon offsetting | The Guardian

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:04:50 +0000

The vast majority of the environmental projects most frequently used to offset greenhouse gas emissions appear to have fundamental failings suggesting they cannot be relied upon to cut planet-heating emissions, according to a new analysis.

The global, multibillion-dollar voluntary carbon trading industry has been embraced by governments, organisations and corporations including oil and gas companies, airlines, fast-food brands, fashion houses, tech firms, art galleries and universities as a way of claiming to reduce their greenhouse gas footprint.

It works by carbon offset credits being tradable “allowances” or certificates that allows the purchaser to compensate for 1 ton of carbon dioxide or the equivalent in greenhouse gases by investing in environmental projects that claim to reduce carbon emissions.

But there is mounting evidence suggesting that many of these offset schemes exaggerate climate benefits and underestimate potential harms.

In a new investigation, the Guardian and researchers from Corporate Accountability, a non-profit, transnational corporate watchdog, analysed the top 50 emission offset projects, those that have sold the most carbon credits in the global market.

According to our criteria and classification system:

A total of 39 of the top 50 emission offset projects, or 78% of them, were categorised as likely junk or worthless due to one or more fundamental failing that undermines its promised emission cuts.
Eight others (16%) look problematic, with evidence suggesting they may have at least one fundamental failing and are potentially junk, according to the classification system applied.
The efficacy of the remaining three projects (6%) could not be determined definitively as there was insufficient public, independent information to adequately assess the quality of the credits and/or accuracy of their claimed climate benefits.
Overall, $1.16bn (£937m) of carbon credits have been traded so far from the projects classified by the investigation as likely junk or worthless; a further $400m of credits bought and sold were potentially junk.

The 50 most popular global projects include forestry schemes, hydroelectric dams, solar and wind farms, waste disposal and greener household appliances schemes across 20 (mostly) developing countries, according to data from AlliedOffsets, the most comprehensive emissions trading database, which tracks projects from inception. They account for almost a third of the entire global voluntary carbon market (VCM), suggesting that junk or overvalued carbon credits that exaggerate emission reduction benefits could be the norm.

In our analysis, a project was classified as likely junk if there was compelling evidence, claims or high risk that it cannot guarantee additional, permanent greenhouse gas cuts among other criteria. In some cases, there was evidence suggesting the project could leak greenhouse gas emissions or shift emissions elsewhere. In other cases, the climate benefits appeared to be exaggerated or the project would have happened independently – with or without the voluntary carbon market.

Quick Guide

Methodology

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1. The raw data on the 50 top offsets projects was obtained from the AlliedOffsets database which aggregates carbon trades from the world’s leading offset registries, carbon resellers and brokers, and includes around 25,000 offset projects across 150 countries. The 50 top projects were ranked based on the number of credits they have retired (sold) since inception.

2. The analysis draws on information from public and private sources including academic studies, civil society research, offset project certifiers/registries, private sector databases and ratings, and media investigations. In addition, we assessed the strength and rigourness of the available evidence and took this into account for our grading of each project.

3. The classification system assessed whether each offset project could be counted upon to lead to the promised additional emission cuts – or not. The integrity and effectiveness of each emission-cutting project was assessed against the following set of criteria:

Leakage – shifting emissions from one place to another, even if unintentionally. This has been a common issue in forestry projects.
Exaggerated claims, intentional or unintentional, about the project’s emission cuts.
Inflated baseline figures often - though not always - can lead to exaggerated claims of a project’s benefits.
Overestimation of avoided deforestation.
Non-permanence – permanence ensures that the carbon stored or captured doesn't escape back into the atmosphere. Scientifically, it can’t be stored forever, but anything less than 100 years is too little in the context of the climate crisis.
Non-additional – the project would have happened anyway, with or without the VCM – and doesn’t lead to additional emission cuts. Common in large renewable projects.

4. Strong evidence of at least one failing means the promised emission reductions can not be guaranteed and should be presumed junk. Some evidence of at least one failing means the project is problematic and is potentially junk as it cannot guarantee the advertised emission cuts.

5. Each environmental project with one or more fundamental failing was classified as likely or potentially junk, depending on the number and gravity of the failings.

The findings come on the eve of the UN climate ambition summit in New York amid mounting concerns that world leaders will make further climate pledges that rely on what non-industry experts increasingly refer to as flawed market-driven solutions rather than justly and rapidly transitioning off fossil fuels.

“The ramifications of this analysis are huge, as it points to systemic failings of the voluntary market, providing additional evidence that junk carbon credits pervade the market,” said Anuradha Mittal, director of the Oakland Institute thinktank. “We cannot afford to waste any more time on false solutions. The issues are far-reaching and pervasive, extending well beyond specific verifiers. The VCM is actively exacerbating the climate emergency.”

The certifiers/registries with most projects in the top 50 said the VCM was an important tool in fighting the climate crisis and that their methodologies and safeguards were continually improving.

Independent experts say that to have any chance of being effective, carbon credits must be tied to new and permanent emissions-reducing activities which lead to additional cuts that would not have happened otherwise – and should not lead to collateral damage to the environment or communities. Evidence of overestimation on how much carbon pollution a project is really saving, either intentionally or unintentionally, is also key to determining whether a project is able to guarantee promised benefits.

Bar chart of reasons why the projects were classified as junk

Our analysis builds on previous independent investigations and academic research into the efficacy and weaknesses of the VCM in mitigating global heating, as the climate breakdown intensifies. It draws on information from public and private sources including academic studies, civil society research, offset project certifiers/registries, private sector databases and ratings, and media investigations. In addition, we assessed the strength and rigorousness of the available evidence and took this into account for our grading of each project.

The Guardian/Corporate Accountability classification system assessed whether each offset project could be counted upon to lead to the promised additional, permanent emission cuts – or not. Assessing the health, social, economic or other local benefits – or harms – were beyond the scope of this investigation and did not influence the classification.

Strong evidence of at least one fundamental failing recorded means the promised emission reductions – which is the presumed primary objective of the VCM and every offsets project – cannot be guaranteed and was therefore classified as likely junk or worthless.

According to our research, more than a third of the top 50 projects had some evidence of three or more fundamental failings. In one case, a giant forest conservation project in Zimbabwe was reported to have had so many exaggerated and inflated claims – and probably shifted emissions elsewhere – that it was described as “having more financial holes than Swiss cheese”. Bloomberg reported rating experts who said the project’s emissions cuts were overestimated by five to 30-fold.

In the US, the most problematic project is the world’s largest carbon capture and storage plant in Wyoming, which has benefited from generous taxpayer subsidies, but where the vast majority of the captured CO₂ has been released into the atmosphere or sold to other fossil fuel companies to help extract hard-to-reach oil, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. It is certified by the American Carbon Registry (ACR), which said that new carbon credits have not been issued for 15 years – although corporations are still retiring or purchasing old ones to offset emissions.

Four carbon markets experts said the findings were based on solid methodology and shine a light on the pitfalls of market-driven climate solutions which can enable polluters to keep polluting instead of transitioning off fossil fuels.

Treemap chart of the the top 50 carbon offset projects classified by their status

“At the heart of carbon markets is what is seen by many as the flawed notion that avoiding or reducing emissions in one place can make up for ongoing emissions elsewhere. Delaying the transition [away from fossil fuels] by purchasing pollution credits only serves to maintain business as usual and increase the likelihood of climate catastrophe,” said Erika Lennon, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law (Ciel)’s climate and energy program.

Recent investigations have found fundamental failings in forest offset projects but the problems, according to our research, appear to be more widespread in the industry.

All 10 hydroelectric dams in the top 50 carbon offsets – including the Teles Pires dam in the Brazilian Amazon and the Karcham Wangtoo plant in the Himalayas, India, which have both faced opposition from tribal communities – were classified as likely junk in our analysis as the climate benefits would have happened anyway, regardless of carbon credits. A number of previous studies have shown that although large dams cut national emissions, they do not lead to new or additional reductions needed for effective carbon credits. In some cases large dams have been associated with land disputes, displacement, increased poverty and environmental damage – including some greenhouse gas emissions emitted from water reservoirs.

In another example, a program in western Kenya provides water filters so households no longer need to boil water with firewood for filters. Though the potential health and sanitation benefits are not questioned, from an emissions perspective it was classified as likely junk in our analysis due to what appeared to be inflated baseline figures on how many households used firewood to heat water, and exaggerated claims in part due to evidence of low uptake of the filters.

Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, which recently published a study that concluded that Verra’s Redd+ forest schemes – like other major offset projects – exaggerate climate benefits, said: “The overall [new] findings align with the research on carbon credit quality which finds widespread over-crediting across many registries and offset project types including those with the most credits on the market – avoided deforestation and renewable energy.”

In response, Verra said many of the issues highlighted in the report would be addressed in its forthcoming new methodology for generating carbon credits.

Back in 2021, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned that there could be no further expansion of oil, gas and coal production if the world wanted to have any chance of avoiding catastrophic climate breakdown. The world failed to heed the warning, and emission cuts are wildly off track, according to the recent UN global stocktake, the most comprehensive analysis of global climate action produced to date.

“The climate breakdown has begun,” said the UN secretary general, António Guterres, after the hottest atmosphere and ocean temperatures were recorded this summer. “Our climate is imploding faster than we can cope with extreme weather events hitting every corner of the planet.”

Scientists have for decades been warning about the risks, yet instead of phasing out fossil fuels, vast amounts of time and resources have been invested into market-based carbon offset schemes and technologies that trade, cap and capture – rather than cut – greenhouse gas emissions.

Estimated to be worth about $2bn, the voluntary carbon market (VCM) is vast, fragmented and opaque, involving a complex network of developers, registries, traders, brokers and investors that makes it difficult to track and evaluate the effectiveness – and potential harms – linked to offset projects.

Despite the complexity, there is a strong public interest in calculating the benefits of offset projects given the deepening climate emergency and lack of meaningful progress in reducing fossil fuel production and global emissions.

Researchers from Corporate Accountability created a classification system to analyse the effectiveness of the top 50 offset projects, using raw data from AlliedOffsets.

Most of the top 50 were primarily promoted as emission avoidance or reduction projects but also included a handful of carbon removals schemes. Carbon credits for each project were certified and issued by one of seven registries; each project had been verified by a third party.

The top 50 included three projects in the US, including a tree-planting project in the Mississippi Delta which a 2020 Bloomberg investigation found took “credit for trees that were already planted, or would have been planted anyway”, and the oil company project in Wyoming which stores only a fraction of the carbon captured. Both were classified as likely junk due to evidence of multiple fundamental failings. American Carbon Registry (ACR), which certified both projects, rejected the findings and sources relied upon for our analysis. ACR said the tree planting project had enabled hundreds of private landowners to reforest over 130,000 acres of marginal and degraded sites in the Mississippi Delta.
Forty-seven of the top 50 projects are in Latin America, Africa and Asia, predominantly in countries that have contributed the least to the climate crisis but are being battered by its effects. Five of the seven located in Brazil were classified by this investigation as fundamentally flawed and likely junk, while another is problematic and potentially junk. In neighbouring Peru, all four forestry projects in our top 50 have evidence of multiple failings making the carbon credits likely worthless, according to our analysis.
The nine offset projects in India – five large hydroelectric dams, two solar plants and two wind farms – were all classified as likely or potentially junk, in part because none would lead to additional emission reductions.
One or more fundamental flaws were found in 96% (22 out of 23) of the forest offset projects which are located in Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay, Indonesia, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe among other countries.
Fifteen of the 16 renewable energy projects, which include dams, solar and wind, are likely junk – mostly because the project would have almost certainly happened anyway. While renewable energy is essential for the energy transition, these carbon credit projects do not appear to be leading to the claimed additional climate benefits and should not be used by polluters to offset emissions.

“These findings show that the VCM is flawed and basically a fraud, allowing the west to offset their emissions and continue business as usual at the expense of the global south,” said Souparna Lahiri, the New Delhi-based climate adviser for the Global Forest Coalition.

“The carbon market and the rich west, for the last 25 years has actually done nothing to mitigate the climate crisis, rather, protected their high-emitting industry, production, consumption and lifestyle. It’s a story of continuing and widening inequity and climate injustice,” said Lahiri.

Map of the top 50 projects, and below a chart of the projects broken down by sector.

Almost two-thirds (32/50) of the most traded projects were certified by the US-based non-profit Verra, which operates the world’s most prominent carbon standard or registry, and included 18 forest offsetting projects known as Redd+ schemes.

Twenty-eight of the 32 Verra projects the Guardian/Corporate Accountability analysed were classified as likely junk; the other four were problematic and potentially worthless. Verra has faced mounting criticism for its methodology and lax safeguards including a Guardian investigation that found that its forest carbon offsets are mostly junk and could make global heating worse.

Verra disputes the criticism of its forest projects. “There is compelling evidence proving the effectiveness of Redd+ projects,” said a Verra spokesperson who pointed to recent research papers including a 2022 study of 40 Redd+ projects that found deforestation and degradation declined in the first five years of implementation.

Verra did not comment on the specific findings of this investigation, but in a statement said: “Verra’s role is to ensure that projects satisfy its program rules, such that they can be registered and receive issuance of credits. Project proponents are free to hold, sell or retire those credits thereafter at their discretion … Verra is happy to engage with data, reconsider assumptions and consider future improvements based on sound feedback and expert input.”

Our analysis found similar issues with offset projects from other certifiers.

From the clean development mechanism (CDM), a UN-led program and first international carbon trading scheme, five of the eight offset projects were classified as likely junk – including the Teles Pires hydropower dam in Brazil which has reportedly damaged Indigenous and traditional communities, harmed biodiversity and fisheries, and is also probably emitting significant carbon emissions.

The CDM was established as part of the Kyoto protocol that allows countries to support emissions-reductions projects in other nations while counting them toward their own international climate commitments, and follows a “comprehensive set of criteria for selecting its projects”, a UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) spokesperson said. Despite its goals, the CDM has faced numerous criticisms for exaggerated claims, and lack of community safeguards. One study found that most of its certified renewable energy projects did not provide real, measurable and additional emission reductions.

The spokesperson added: “The supervisory body is currently working on the creation of a new mechanism [certifier], striving to make it being highest possible integrity to overcome any weaknesses pointed out in the past.”

The UNFCCC did not respond to growing concerns that the sustainable development mechanism (SDM), which is replacing the CDM, has already come under fire by civil society groups across the world for promoting activities that do not lead to emissions reductions and risking harm to local communities and ecosystems, among other things.

In another case, two out of four of the projects on the Swiss-based Gold Standard Registry (GSR) – a water filter program in Kenya, and a cooking stove initiative in Ghana that promises to cut emissions and deforestation – were also classified as likely junk or worthless from a carbon credits perspective. The additional emission cuts claimed are unlikely due to exaggerated claims and inflated baselines, the analysis found.

GSR vehemently rejected the methodology of the research and disputed the basis for its findings, saying the company therefore could not comment on the conclusions about its projects. “We pay close attention to new academic research and best practices and update our methodologies to ensure they take account of the leading science,” said Jamie Ballantyne from GSR. “Despite this, it is inevitable that mistakes will be made – which is why we have a market-leading grievance process that allows anyone to submit a grievance against any project. What we can’t do is demand changes to individual projects based upon inconsistent evidence every time any allegation is made.”

‘Nowhere else to go’: forest communities of Alto Mayo, Peru, at centre of offsetting row

Mary Grady, executive director of ACR, said: “Findings of an ‘inflated baseline’, ‘exaggerated claims’, and ‘not additional’ should be reconsidered.” She said natural tree regeneration was accounted for and would not skew the baseline or benefit calculations; and that the project proponent was legally required to monitor the projects for at least 40 years.

In the past year, amid mounting critical evidence and bad publicity some corporations have said they are looking to create their own emission offset schemes – which experts warn could be even harder to track.

Carbon offsets continue to be promoted as a source of climate financing for the global south, and at the recent Africa Climate Summit, hundreds of millions of dollars were pledged to boost the continent’s carbon credit production.

Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, said: “It is clear that the most important climate mitigation approach is direct emissions reductions. Beyond that, the offset market has not been a reliable way to support climate mitigation.”

Corporate Accountability researchers: Rachel Rose Jackson and Adrien Tofighi-Niaki
Guardian graphics: Andrew Witherspoon

'It was like a movie': the high school students who uncovered a toxic waste scandal | Environment | The Guardian

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:24:34 +0000

In the summer of 1991, Middletown high school, roughly 70 miles north of Manhattan in New York’s verdant Orange County, acquired a handful of video cameras. The goal was to train the school’s teenage students in film-making and media production, using local subjects as a starting point – perhaps a documentary about the city’s sports teams or an amateur talkshow. Instead, under the tutelage of Middletown high’s popular English teacher, Fred Isseks, a rowdy and diverse group of teenagers organised themselves into an investigative journalism unit.

Officially, Isseks’ class was open only to the school’s oldest students, aged 16 to 18 – but, unofficially, it welcomed everyone. Kids not even enrolled in the course joined Isseks’ students in shooting short films. The teenagers alternated between grungy early-90s flannel and choker necklaces and awkward attempts at business attire as they honed their reporting skills. They invited local representatives into the school’s new media studio for a political debate, and covered topics such as the city’s curfew for teens. One former student joked to me that the class became a surreal mix of “rap videos and corrupt politicians”.

Over the next six years, culminating in 1997, students passing through Isseks’ high school class would film, edit, and release a feature-length documentary that exposed a generation’s worth of illegal, mob-connected dumping of toxic materials in their part of New York state. Industrial solvents, liquid refrigerants, crushed battery casings, petroleum additives, printing inks and untreated medical waste, including radioactive isotopes: it all flooded the landfills around Middletown, constructed without ground liners, atop freshwater aquifers that fed the region’s drinking wells. As a retired compactor operator explains to Isseks’ students in the film, sometimes there was so much bloody hospital waste on the ground, it looked as if he had run someone over. Another interviewee, a former driver for a mafia-owned waste-hauling firm, described tipping fuming truckloads of paint sludge from a nearby automobile factory straight into the dump. Middletown residents were told it was all just certified municipal waste.

Isseks’ course, known as Electronic English, would propel many of its students into careers in media production and environmental law, but at the time their work did not receive universal approval. There were warnings of arrest from the county sheriff; near-total disinterest from the city’s local newspaper; public frustration from regional politicians; and at least one death threat.

David Birmingham, now 42, is a former student of Isseks’ who graduated from Middletown high in 1995. He lives in town with his wife and four children; their eldest daughter graduated from the school in 2019. “In the beginning, I just thought it was too fantastical to be true,” Birmingham says. “To me, it was like: there’s no way there’s a toxic waste dump basically in my backyard. There’s no way all these politicians I see on TV are actually covering something up. It seemed like a movie – like this couldn’t happen here. People would tell me, ‘You know, this isn’t what you think it is.’ But, as it turned out, it was exactly what we thought it was.”

While Isseks’ class suggests an early affinity with today’s youth climate activists, it also relied upon slightly different tactics, based not in protest or spectacle, but documentation. As Birmingham describes it to me, it was about showing up, over and over again, at local meetings, relentlessly filing freedom of information requests, and, importantly, getting things on film. Nevertheless, the question seems to haunt both Isseks and Birmingham: what did the documentary achieve? Is Middletown, as a community, safer today because of the students’ work?

Middletown sits amid rich, rolling agricultural lands and mountains with biblical names, such as Mount Adam and Mount Eve. The financial magazine Kiplinger routinely rates it as an idyllic place to raise a family, and an equally inviting place to retire. Humans have long been seduced by the region: 12,500-year-old indigenous archaeological sites have been discovered here, some of the oldest known in North America.

Just outside the city are synthetic landforms that swelled into being in the 1960s. These unearthly blisters, together occupying an area more than three times the size of Disneyland, California, loom over the surrounding fields and forests. They are the county’s landfills, built to contain only municipal household waste. However, as the students’ documentary discovered, and sworn legal testimony taken in the 1990s made explicit, this was by no means the case. The landfills accepted anything and everything, from customers hundreds of miles away in Pennsylvania and Ohio, sometimes in the middle of the night, when the landfill gates were left unlocked. Although some of the dumps investigated by the students were as far as 15 miles outside Middletown – on land within the boundaries of neighbouring municipalities –others were right down the hill, along the banks of the Wallkill River. It was the residents of Middletown, a city of more than 25,000, who found themselves directly in the centre of them all.

Isseks, 71, still lives in Middletown with his wife, Denise. Their daughter graduated from Middletown high in 2010; Isseks retired from teaching the following year. Isseks is himself a 1966 graduate of the school; his senior yearbook describes him as “intelligent and sincere, with a streak of devil in him”. While teaching at Middletown in 2003, Isseks earned a PhD in communications from the European graduate school in Switzerland, whose celebrity faculty has included Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler. Isseks’s thesis, Media Courage, includes a chapter on the philosophical potential of the American high school system. His belief that teenagers need to be given work with genuine meaning and consequence in the world would shape his entire teaching career and, in the process, change his students’ lives.

Reflecting on the project today, Isseks places the county’s three major landfills – the Town of Wallkill, Orange County, and Al Turi landfills – in the context of geology, not cultural theory. During the last ice age, he explains, massive glaciers sculpted the land into the gentle bowls and valleys that would later be so appealing to Middletown’s 20th-century landfill entrepreneurs. Landscape, for Isseks, is drama solidified. When we meet, he is wearing a T-shirt with the geological ages of the Earth depicted in a colourful graphic on its front. (Later, after a boozy dinner, Isseks is able to recite the eras of the Earth backwards, from memory, making only one minor error.)

The students’ documentary originated from a passing comment. In 1991, Isseks tells me, he heard from an environmentalist friend that former employees at the Town of Wallkill dump had unsettling stories to tell – and that a few were willing to speak on the record. Isseks asked his students if they might be interested in interviewing the men. To his delight, several said yes.

The resulting hour-long film, titled Garbage, Gangsters And Greed, opens with an interview with former bulldozer operator Donald “Dutch” Smith. At the time, Smith lived in a trailer just outside the Wallkill landfill gates. “I tell you,” he says, speaking to the camera as birdsong trills in the background, “there’s thousands and thousands of tonnes of toxic waste in there, of anything you can name, from radioactive to hospital waste”. Smith’s words are followed by shots of rust-coloured leachate pooling on the soil: unidentified chemicals oozing from the waste mass. “You name it, it’s in that landfill – and I know it’s in there, because I buried lots of it.” The town’s supervisor at the time, Howard Mills, described by the local newspaper as a “Republican icon”, admits later in the film that this was not an exaggeration. “It’s absolutely correct that there is a tremendous amount of toxic waste remaining in that landfill… We make no attempt to deny that,” Mills says, flanked by county officials. “This is a dangerous landfill.”

The documentary is a mix of handheld footage, produced during various acts of trespass at the county’s landfills, and formal, on-camera interviews with politicians and retired landfill workers, often staged in the high school’s recording studio. One of the students’ most shocking discoveries comes during an interview with Dieter Bohnwagner, a stocky, mullet-haired former worker at the Orange County landfill. In the film, Bohnwagner admits there is a “hidden landfill” on Orange County land, somewhere in the woods beyond the sixth fairway of a local publicly owned golf course. Trespassing across the course – and filming themselves every step of the way, as golfers play in the background – the students locate this illegal dump, finding a dozen crushed, 55-gallon chemical drums half-buried in the earth.

Isseks shows me a letter he received from Orange County representatives after he informed them of his students’ discovery: rather than offer thanks for locating a site of potential risk to the Middletown community, it threatened Isseks and his students with arrest should they ever attempt to return. (One of Isseks’ former students suggests to me that perhaps this response was not unfair: Isseks, at the very least, was not discouraging minors under his supervision from trespassing and publicly antagonising figures allegedly connected to the New York mafia.) For his part, Isseks insists that he went out of his way to ensure his students’ safety, often bringing other adults along on excursions. He also made sure the students’ parents knew exactly what the class was up to and when, becoming long-term friends with many in the process.

In one interview that did not make it into the film, Isseks tells me, Bohnwagner also claimed that a fairway at the same golf course had been built over a dumping ground for household appliances. Hundreds of refrigerators, leaking toxic CFCs, allegedly lie underground there. Facing what he interpreted as professional retaliation for complaining about conditions at the landfill, Bohnwagner also threatened to reveal the location of something called “the tomb”. The tomb, he claimed, was an unlined pit into which chemical waste had been dumped, inside a local, publicly owned park. Whether or not Bohnwagner’s tomb, or those hundreds of discarded refrigerators, even exist is unclear; when I ask the parks commissioner for Orange County about these allegations, he responds that this is the first time he has ever heard such rumours.

Perhaps the group’s most significant feat of reporting came in June 1996, when a Middletown sheriff’s lieutenant escorted Isseks and two female students into the county’s sheriff station. They were attempting to discover the truth about a logbook from the Wallkill landfill. In the late 1980s, a burglar had broken in late at night, it was claimed, and, improbably, stolen this notebook: the only record of what had been dumped and buried there – and by whom. According to Isseks, he and his teenage students had made multiple, formal requests for information about the book for two years; the sheriff’s office consistently replied that no such notebook existed.

The lieutenant led the group into the station’s storage facility. He opened a document box, reached inside, and said, “This is what you’re looking for, right?” Out came the missing logbook. He encouraged the students to take it home – and to copy it.

The book contained meticulous handwritten notes by Orange County sheriffs’ deputies, stationed at the nearby Town of Wallkill dump. Over hundreds of entries, they had documented the illegal burial of toxic waste in a landfill meant only to receive municipal rubbish. What’s more, the log confirmed that much of this dumping had been done by haulage firms connected to the East Coast mob, including one owned by the Mongelli organised crime family. (Louis Mongelli Sr, former owner of Orange County Sanitation, had allegedly disappeared into the federal witness protection program in 1994.) The deputies had also noted every single ticket they’d written to drivers hauling prohibited loads – though, to the deputies’ frustration, most of these tickets simply disappeared, unpaid, never to be submitted to local courts.

For Isseks and his students, the logbook was undeniable proof of illegality – not just evidence of toxic dumping, but of collusion between town officials and corrupt waste-hauling firms. More importantly, Isseks tells me, the book’s mysterious reappearance in the sheriff’s archive was a sign that the students’ efforts were succeeding. Even the deputies now seemed to be on their side, accelerating a sense that the city wanted its toxic secrets unearthed.

By the mid-90s, the students’ documentary had picked up political steam. Birmingham tells me that he grew accustomed to seeing local politicians annoyed at the students, irritated by Birmingham’s own habit of showing up to film town hall meetings, filing endless freedom of information requests. One evening in spring 1994, though, a politician pulled Birmingham aside and asked for an update. What was going on at the landfills? What had the students found out? An unruly group of trespassing teenagers had quietly become the best news source in town.

Their most powerful ally would prove to be New York state representative Maurice Hinchey. As Hinchey and others had shown, mob connections to illegal dumping were by no means limited to the landfills around Middletown. In Poisoning For Profit: The Mafia And Toxic Waste In America, published in 1985, authors Alan A Block and Frank R Scarpitti documented similar scenarios across the US. Some haulage firms, they wrote, deliberately stockpiled trucks filled with liquid toxins, waiting for rainy days; their drivers would then circle around on local freeways with their valves open, draining hazardous chemicals directly on to the roadbed. One driver boasted that “the only way I can get caught is if the windshield wipers or the tires of the car behind me start melting”.

Other mob-owned companies would mix liquid waste with home heating oil, meaning that unwitting customers could stay warm in the winter, while burning toxic waste at the same time. Some businesses would “cocktail” their wastes with construction debris, allowing crushed drywall, lumber and other porous building materials to absorb dangerous chemicals. (In 1995, the Town of Wallkill landfill was capped using just such construction debris.)

These mafia associations began to worry some of Isseks’ students. One member of the class, speaking to me on condition of anonymity, describes receiving a death threat. The student was pulled aside at a late-night “field party” – an outdoor get-together – by the adult son of a local politician. Drunk, the man warned Isseks’ student to “leave the landfill alone”. The man went on to falsely claim that he was suffering from terminal cancer, adding that he “wasn’t afraid to take someone with him”. Sufficiently spooked, the student dropped Isseks’ class. Another student vividly recalls being followed home after an afternoon filming at the dump, by a car they had seen parked outside the landfill gates. These experiences contributed to a sense among the students that they might be getting in over their heads.

For Hinchey, who died in November 2017, the Middletown high school students’ dedication was a shot in the arm; in the documentary, he seems energised. He even launched a new round of public hearings in the town of Wallkill, questioning former landfill employees, among other witnesses, about what had really been buried near Middletown – testimonies that further fuelled the students’ reporting.

It was in 1993, however, that the class had perhaps its ultimate brush with power. The students were invited to attend an event at Stewart Air National Guard Base where they would meet President Bill Clinton. Birmingham took advantage of the opportunity to hand the president a VHS tape with an early cut of their documentary. Despite Clinton’s thumbs-up, the narrator of this scene drily remarks that the students received no official response. Four years later, in 1997, when the final cut of their documentary was released, the question of the landfills’ long-term effects – and the Middletown community’s safety – remained unanswered.

Hoping to better understand the students’ legacy, I visited New York state wildlife pathologist Ward Stone at an assisted-living facility in upstate New York, where he has retired. Stone, who participated in the documentary, is a broad-shouldered former football player unafraid of corporate power. Knocked down by a series of strokes, he remains, in his words, “a fighter”. In the film, we see Stone standing in the road, hands on his hips, loudly arguing with a landfill official; his attempts to run chemical tests had been consistently thwarted, his samples physically confiscated by police.

“Pursue the chemicals,” Stone urges me, insisting that the story of these landfills is far from over, their legacy now hidden in the bodies of local animals, from birds to fish. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), Stone’s former employer, confims that since Stone’s time the DEC “has not conducted any investigations of contaminant levels in wildlife associated with closed landfills in the Wallkill River watershed”.

Isseks is still in close contact with many of the students who passed through his classroom. Even those he has not kept in touch with remember him fondly: when we go out for dinner at a local pizza restaurant, a man sitting several tables away recognises him, offers an effusive hello, and explains that he took Isseks’ English class in the late 80s.

Rachel Raimist was one of the first students to get involved in the landfill documentary. At the time, Raimist tells me, she was just another bored teenager, with dyed hair, a pair of battered Doc Martens, and an interest in photography. One day, she and a friend decided to skip class and go to Burger King. On their way across the parking lot, they ran into Isseks. His response was disappointed, rather than disciplinary, and she credits his intervention with changing her life. “You shouldn’t be cutting class,” she remembers Isseks saying, “you should be taking Electronic English.” Curious, Raimist signed up, and within days was helping to uncover her town’s buried secrets. “I loved the power of telling stories and getting adults upset,” she says with a laugh. Raimist now works in television, and even has a media lab named after her at the University of Minnesota, the Rachel Raimist Feminist Media Center. “I would not be directing television now if it wasn’t for Fred,” she says. “Fred had a huge influence on who I am, and how I see the world.”

Another former student, Jeff Dutemple (class of 1994), works as a camera operator on shows including Apple TV’s Dickinson. “I think there are more people I worked with on those documentaries in high school who still work in film and television than the people I went to film school with,” he says. Jon Gunther, who graduated in 2000, and took Isseks’ course early in his high school years, now practises environmental law.

Although all three major landfills explored in the documentary are now closed and no longer receive waste of any kind, concern about their impact on the region persists. Today, Isseks has new allies. Susan Cleaver is a photographer and environmental activist based in Goshen, 10 miles from Middletown. Concerned that the DEC has not done enough to monitor for pollutants, and alarmed by rumours of local health issues potentially connected to the landfills, Cleaver has funded a series of water-quality tests along the Wallkill River. She shows me three-ring binders stuffed with test results and photographs, including long lists of chemical elements and their concentrations in the water. High levels of ammonia, arsenic and magnesium, among dozens of chemicals, have been detected.

One of the worst of these is toluene, a petrol additive and potent nerve toxin, according to former Orange County legislator Tom Pahucki. Pahucki served in local government from 1994-2013, and still lives in the area, where he now works as a real estate broker. When he stood for the first time, Pahucki says, it was a “single-issue election”: you either agreed with his opponent, who sought to reopen and even expand the county’s landfills, or you wanted to close those facilities entirely. Although the landfills had been a dependable source of local employment, Pahucki won, signalling a clear shift in opinion, fuelled in no small part by Isseks’ students, who had been broadcasting their in-progress documentary on a local television channel.

Just a few months after being elected, in 1994, Pahucki was alerted to something strange happening along the edge of the landfill, on the banks of the Wallkill River. The trees were falling over – in the wrong direction. Rather than leaning toward the water, as the ground around them eroded, they were instead falling back toward the landfill, evidence that their roots were being pushed out from beneath. The landfill was slumping. Alarmed, Pahucki pointed this out to Orange County engineers. When he came back a few weeks later to see if anything had changed, someone had simply cut down the trees. “That’s how we do things,” Pahucki says, disappointed. “You got a problem with the trees? Well, we’ll just cut them down.”

In October 2019, Isseks, Cleaver, Birmingham and I go for a long hike along the Wallkill River, scrambling through thick growth across from the Orange County landfill. At one point, a DEC employee arrives and begins taking photographs of us from the opposite river bank.

Throughout the afternoon, Birmingham seems nostalgic. Now a family man, running his own tutoring business, Birmingham tells me that Isseks’ class awakened in him a passion for environmental conservation. “I remember coming home just generally muddy and dirty, and sometimes smelling a little like a dump,” Birmingham says. For him and his fellow students, the mud, ticks and ruined shoes were a source of pride, an essential part of fact-checking what the adults in town had been telling them. “Still, after all these years,” Birmingham says, referring specifically to the Wallkill landfill, “it boggles my mind what they were going to do with that place. They were literally going to plant grass on top of a known toxic waste dump and build a park and an adjacent school.” That this never came to pass is at least one strike in the documentary’s favour.

Although there are no leachate streams visible on our hike, Cleaver notes that previously prominent mounds of rip-rap – dry stone rubble that had been dropped along the edge of the landfill to prevent it from slumping – have disappeared below the waterline. She and Isseks both interpret this as a sign of potential structural failure.

For Isseks, the nightmare scenario is that a hurricane or tropical storm – such as Sandy, which dramatically flooded New York City in 2012 – could hit the region, saturating the landfills from below and leading to their collapse. One or both of the Orange County and Al Turi landfills could then slide into and block the Wallkill River. Contaminated waters would back up, flooding tens of thousands of acres of productive farmland with toxins. (Asked about this scenario, Robert Gray, deputy commissioner of the Orange County Department of Public Works, disputes that it is a risk or even a physical possibility, noting that the landfill is capped with a waterproof membrane and sloped to prevent precisely such a collapse.)

Just one week after our visit, however, the US General Accounting Office releases a report echoing Isseks’ warning. Climate crisis-enhanced storms of the near-future pose a very real risk of catastrophic flooding at sites of toxic waste storage, the paper concludes, including several sites in New York State, along the Hudson River. The report also clearly states that it only addresses sites recognised by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA “does not have quality information on the boundaries of non-federal” waste-disposal sites, such as those near Middletown; it does not know how many such sites there are, or whether they will be impacted by extreme weather events. They exist in a kind of environmental blind spot.

“As I’ve started digitising some of this stuff,” Isseks says, referring to his voluminous personal archives, including hundreds of pages of documents formally requested from Middletown administrators, “there’s a sense that we’re forgetting where the landfills are. We’re forgetting where the poison is located. If nothing else, we’ve got to provide maps for the future, so that people know where not to build their houses or to dig their wells. This stuff is not going away. The problem will be relevant as long as it’s here.”

Meanwhile, Middletown high school is rebuilding its media lab, although it is not clear what the focus of the students’ work will be, or if they are even aware of their school’s investigative pedigree. Isseks tells me that among city officials his students’ watchdog role has been missed. With a mischievous grin, he relays a final anecdote. More than a year after the documentary was finished, Middletown politicians found themselves confronting yet another controversial project, this time a waste-to-ethanol plant. Orange County legislator Roberta Murphy wrote an exasperated letter to the local newspaper asking: where are those Middletown students, now that we really need them?

If you would like your comment on this piece to be considered for Weekend magazine’s letters page, please email weekend@theguardian.com, including your name and address (not for publication).

Why the California vote count is slow – and Trump’s fraud claims are bogus | California | The Guardian

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 07:57:08 +0000

As California continues to slowly count ballots, Donald Trump and other Republicans are spreading claims of election fraud that have become common after California elections.

On Monday, Trump-backed Republican Steve Hilton was inching closer to securing the second runoff spot in the California governor’s race, after Democrat Xavier Becerra secured the first spot on Friday. But the race has yet to be called for Hilton, with more than 2.5m ballots still left to be counted across the state.

In the Los Angeles mayoral race, the progressive city councillor Nithya Raman advanced to the runoff on Monday. She and reality TV star Spencer Pratt, a registered Republican, were in a close race to challenge Karen Bass, the incumbent mayor, who advanced to the runoff on election night. On Sunday, Raman began to lead in the election count as more mail-in ballots were tallied.

When Decision Desk HQ posted that it predicted Raman would win the second seat in LA’s mayoral runoff, Trump posted on Truth Social: “No way this could have happened. Rigged Election!” In a separate post, he added: “Two great Republican Candidates are being cheated.”

Who’s spreading election fraud conspiracy theories?

Just days after the California primary, Trump began claiming without evidence that Democrats were cheating in the state’s election, and urging Americans to support the Save Act.

On Thursday, Trump wrote in a social media post: “The Dumocrats are at it again! They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS.” He repeated such claims before walking out of an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Friday, and over the weekend.

Trump has a history of undermining election results that don’t go in his favor, most notably alleging that Democrats “stole” the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Joe Biden. He has repeatedly opposed mail-in ballots, a voting method favored by Democrats in recent elections.

Voters stand in line at the Biltmore hotel in Los Angeles last Tuesday. Photograph: Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Over the weekend, Trump’s preferred LA mayoral candidate, Pratt, hinted at similar election conspiracy theories in a social media post, writing, “They’re not the only ones who know where to find votes” and suggesting that Raman’s lead in the race came from votes from the entirety of LA’s unhoused population.

On Monday, Elon Musk joined the fray, the tech billionaire reposting several tweets questioning the integrity of California’s elections, supporting the Save Act and alleging that recently counted votes in support of Raman were fraudulent. In a post, he wrote: “Once voting is this fraudulent, they can get whatever outcome they want, making a sham of democracy.”

Meanwhile, offline, Trump’s justice department sent a federal prosecutor to observe ballot counting in LA and the first assistant US attorney for the central district of California, Bill Essayli, announced his office had “multiple election fraud investigations under way” in coordination with the FBI’s Los Angeles office.

Is there evidence of voter fraud?

No credible evidence of voter fraud has emerged in California. Essayli has even debunked some of the claims currently circulating about ballot manipulation, writing in a social media post: “There was a claim circulating on social media about an election night ballot update at the Los Angeles Registrar of Voters where one candidate received zero votes. We reviewed official county records. The claim is false.”

Voter fraud is incredibly rare in the United States. To create a database of 1,000 instances of voter fraud, the conservative Heritage Foundation, the organization behind Project 2025, “had to go back decades in time where there have been hundreds of millions of votes cast and a very small number of cases of election fraud have been found, none of which affected election outcomes,” according to the Brookings Institution.

Analyzing Heritage’s data, to give concrete examples, Brookings found that the percentage of fraudulent votes cast in Arizona was 0.0000845% and no election outcome there was altered by ballot fraud.

Why does California take so long to count its ballots?

California has long been among the slowest states when it comes to counting ballots. That’s because California has “the most accessible, secure and verifiable election system in the country”, said Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation, a non-partisan voting rights group.

Every voter in California receives a mail-in ballot, which most voters use to vote by mail. The signatures on those ballots are verified electronically and by human observers – and voters are given the opportunity to fix any errors within 22 days of the election. The system prevents the state from having to discard ballots with minor errors, but means it can easily take more than 22 days for California to count all votes.

“There’s not a lot of people I know who would say: ‘Nah, I would rather have known who won the race faster than have my vote count,’” Paul Mitchell, vice-president of the voter data firm Political Data Inc, told the Guardian. “The only people who complain about it are the people who lose.”

But Californians understand that the state’s slow pace can create space for misinformation to spread.

“Time is of the essence in preventing election lies from taking hold,” Governor Gavin Newsom warned in a letter that he sent to county election offices last month, urging them to speed up their counts. “We face an assault on our democratic values unlike anything we have seen in our lifetimes, and it’s our job to safeguard those values.”

Why do Californians wait so long to vote?

Another reason why California takes so long to call the results of its elections is because voters often wait until the last minute to cast their ballots. Many of these last-minute ballots are not counted until after election day.

The state also accepts mail-in ballots that were postmarked on and before election day and received no later than a week after the election.

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Mail-in ballots in San Francisco. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

This year, with the California governor’s race hotly contested, many voters made the decision to mail in their ballots at the last minute – allowing them to make a strategic decision about who to vote for based on the most recent polling.

Are there ways to speed up the process?

Yes. Experts and lawmakers have called for investments in California’s elections and legislation that would shorten the window voters have to “cure” their ballots.

If California invested more in statewide elections, to pay for the staff, equipment and office space to count ballots, it could see some of the same results that wealthier counties like Los Angeles and Orange have witnessed in recent years. In November 2022, Los Angeles had only counted 77% of its ballots one week after election day. But after funding a $10m ballot processing facility, the county counted 96.9% of votes within the same time frame in 2024.

California has taken some steps to speed up the process, reducing the number of days voters have to “cure”, or correct errors on their ballots from 26 days to 22 last year. Some advocates are calling for the state legislature to reduce the window even more.

And with many voters walking their mail-in ballots to polling sites, dozens of counties have started allowing voters to open their ballots and cast them directly at the polls - meaning their vote is counted that same day.

“It’s a great benefit for voters because they know their ballot has been counted,” said Alexander of the California Voter Foundation. “They can walk away with confidence.”

Did Nithya Raman concede?

When Raman addressed supporters on election night, incumbent mayor Karen Bass was leading in the results. Early results showed Raman behind Pratt, and she gave a cautious and teary-eyed speech thanking her supporters. At no point in her address did she concede.

“Tonight may not give us a final answer on this race. Many thousands of votes will be counted in the days ahead, and we may not get an answer we like. But regardless of what happens next, nobody, nobody can take away what all of us have built together,” Raman said.

Even if Raman had conceded during her remarks, it would not have been legally binding.

Why is Raman gaining in results now?

Democratic candidates typically surge in the results later than their Republican competitors because Democratic voters usually favor ways of voting (like mailing in their ballots) that see their votes counted later. Since 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic, Democrats have increasingly voted by mail. That year, 58% of Democrats voted by mail, compared with 29% of Republicans.

Voters cast their ballots at the El Camino park community center in Orange, California, on Tuesday, 2 June 2026. Photograph: MediaNews Group/Orange County Register/Getty Images

Will Newsom block Pratt from winning the LA mayor’s race?

Rumors that California governor Newsom will block Pratt from advancing in the LA mayor’s race have begun circulating on social media, citing Newsom saying he had a “break the glass” option for Pratt winning.

In reality, Newsom told lawmakers he had a “break-the-glass” contingency plan to support at least one of the Democratic candidates in the state’s governor’s race if it looked likely that two Republicans were headed to the general election.

Although he did not share details of the plan, it included rallying Democratic voters to go to the polls ahead of the primary rather than blocking a candidate from winning after the election.

Roman shipwreck with 500 amphorae found off coast of Sicily | Archaeology | The Guardian

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 04:42:16 +0000

A 2,100-year-old Roman shipwreck carrying about 500 amphorae has been discovered 3 miles off the coast of Mazara del Vallo in Sicily.

Italy’s Carabinieri cultural heritage protection squad investigated the wreck with the help of divers and underwater cameras after receiving a tip-off from fishers. The vessel was found at a depth of about 46 metres (151ft) and was carrying hundreds of amphorae – ancient two-handled ceramic jars with a narrow neck – thought to have been used mainly to transport wine.

The wreck, measuring about 21 metres long and 6 metres wide, was described by Italy’s culture minister, Alessandro Giuli, as “one of the most important underwater archaeological discoveries of recent years”.

Giuli said the wreck offered “precious fragments of our history” and provided further evidence of the trade routes and exchanges that made the Mediterranean “a crossroads of civilisations”.

The divers Giacomo De Mola and Igor Bisulli described how they came across the wreck.

“Visibility wasn’t the best … I got closer. And my heart stopped. Below me was a vast expanse of amphorae,” De Mola said in an Instagram post accompanying video footage of the discovery.

“This is, without a doubt, the most incredible discovery of my life,” he said. “It’s hard to describe what it feels like to be among the first humans, in nearly 20 centuries, to see that place again.”

Most of the ship’s cargo consisted of Dressel 1A amphorae, widely used to transport wine and particularly valuable to archaeologists because they can help reconstruct the commercial networks that linked Italy with other parts of the Mediterranean between the second and first centuries BC.

Over the coming months, Sicily’s superintendency of the sea is expected to carry out a new phase of scientific documentation and research at the site. Archaeologists will seek to establish more precisely the date of the wreck, the origin and intended destination of its cargo, and the condition of the surviving material, while also drawing up measures to protect what officials have described as a site of exceptional archaeological significance.

The discovery is the latest in a series of important Roman wrecks found in Italian waters.

In 2021, another Roman vessel dating from the second century BC was discovered off the coast of Palermo. The wreck lay 92 metres beneath the sea near Isola delle Femmine and images taken by an underwater robot showed it carrying a large cargo of wine amphorae.

Before that, an almost intact Roman vessel dating from the second century BC was discovered in 2013 off the coast of Liguria. The ship, carrying about 50 valuable amphorae, was located by police divers about a mile off Alassio at a depth of about 50 metres.

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In that case, police were alerted to the wreck during a year-long investigation into archaeological artefacts believed to have been looted and sold on the black market in northern Italy.

Italian police recover hundreds of illegally removed ancient Roman amphorae each year, many of them found in the homes or warehouses of collectors and art dealers.

The waters surrounding Sicily are regarded as one of the Mediterranean’s richest areas for underwater archaeology. The island’s strategic position along the ancient maritime routes linking Greece, the Middle East, north Africa and Europe means its seabed is believed to contain some of the most significant surviving wrecks from the ancient world.

Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

Is This OK? by Harriet Gibsone review – second life | Autobiography and memoir | The Guardian

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:18:58 +0000

Harriet the Spy is a 1964 childrens’ book about a little girl who snoops relentlessly on her neighbours. Harriet Gibsone did the same thing when she was young. Now in her late 30s, she still shares with the fictional Harriet a powerful imagination and endless fascination with others. Harriet the Spy was banned in a number of American schools; apparently morally upright people didn’t approve of watchful girls trying to figure out the world on their own terms. I love these characters, nurturing as they do some feeling of control in a world where they do not have any.

Is This OK? is a memoir, full of finely told stories that were once secrets existing only in the writer’s mind; addictions, obsessions, weirdnesses. Gibsone came of age at the same time as the internet, her own development shaped by its strange currents. She chooses episodes from her life and makes some of them funny – laugh-out-loud-on-the-train funny; some of them are frightening and sad. Many illuminate a bigger truth about living at this peculiar time and in the grey area between the online and offline worlds. That is, of course, where many of us spend hours each day, without fully realising it, even as researchers warn us of the negative impact on self-esteem and mental health.

We didn’t know all of that when we first went online, back when the internet seemed to offer a thrilling sort of social freedom. In 2001, when Gibsone was 14, she discovered MSN messenger, which rapidly became, as she puts it, “an urgent state of being”. She devoted herself to chatting online, pretending to be older, more sexual, and simply different from the awkward young woman she really was. This pattern continued as the platforms multiplied with each passing year; “As a woman prone to slow reaction times and meekness in real life, I could now partake in meaningful conversations and have an instant connection to someone without the threat of tending to them physically.”

The word “threat” is well chosen. Gibsone’s early romantic and sexual relationships are troubled. Some verge on abusive, and she turns the pain they inflict inwards. She torments herself with hunger, alcohol, and generally abnegates herself to meet others’ needs. Though drawn to music and art, she is not yet able to claim the power to create for herself. It’s comforting to know that this book is proof of her ultimate success in that respect. But it comes slowly. At first, instead of nurturing her own creativity, she makes a career out of tending to that flame in others. She becomes a music and culture editor at the Guardian, where she remains a contributor.

She was in her early 30s when she experienced a host of alarming and mysterious symptoms: sweating, bloating, emotional instability and brain fog, leading to a diagnosis of premature ovarian insufficiency, one cause of early menopause. She struggles hard to get pregnant via a donor, and to give birth, and her account of both is quite stunning. The misogynistic resistance to women writing frankly about birth and motherhood means that such work is still too rare. The power and horror of bearing children have been covered with skill and clarity by writers such as Rachel Cusk in A Life’s Work and Anne Enright in Making Babies. Gibsone owns her place among them with a bloodied confidence after the fight it took to get there.

Is This OK? swings between silliness and profundity; Gibsone is a writer taking herself seriously but having fun while doing it. This is a book to hold on to and one to share, a warning and a map created by a watchful girl, telling others what may lie ahead.

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Third person dies at New Jersey immigration detention center | US immigration | The Guardian

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 21:11:15 +0000

A Guatemalan immigrant detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at a Newark, New Jersey, facility suffered a medical emergency and later died after being hospitalized, according to the Trump administration.

José Chajón-Raxón is the third immigrant to die after being held at Delaney Hall, an ICE detention center that reopened in May 2025 amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

A nurse responded when Chajón-Raxón experienced a medical emergency and “witnessed Chajón-Raxón experiencing seizure-like activity”, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Medical personnel were called, and he was transported to a hospital, the DHS said in a statement shared with the Guardian.

ICE agents had arrested Chajón-Raxón before bringing him to Delaney Hall on 18 July, the agency said. Four days later, Chajón-Raxón was “released from ICE custody on July 22”, according to the agency, which did not provide further details about the circumstances of his release.

Key questions about what happened next remain unanswered in the DHS account. The department did not say what occurred after Chajón-Raxón arrived at the hospital, whether he left the hospital before his death or exactly when he died.

“Per ICE policy, when an individual is no longer in ICE custody then ICE will no longer be responsible for monitoring or reviewing deaths that may occur. This is common sense,” the DHS statement said.

The case comes after a policy shift announced earlier this year under which the agency stopped reporting deaths occurring within 30 days after a person is released from custody. That change reversed a policy put in place by the Biden administration in 2021.

US representative Rob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat who has regularly visited Delaney Hall, has sharply criticized the change. Menendez told the Associated Press that it creates a “loophole” allowing the agency to release someone from custody and then “claim it has no responsibility to investigate their death or inform Congress and the public”.

Chajón-Raxón’s death did not become publicly known until Menendez disclosed it last week in the aftermath of another death connected to the facility.

Delaney Hall has already faced scrutiny from human rights advocates and Democrats over two other deaths involving immigrants detained there.

Edwin López-Cornejo, a man from El Salvador, died earlier this month after experiencing a medical emergency while in ICE detention. Jean Wilson Brutus, a Haitian man who had also been detained at Delaney Hall, died in December.

The latest disclosure adds to broader concerns surrounding deaths in immigration detention. More than 50 people have died in ICE custody nationwide since Donald Trump took office, while rights groups have repeatedly raised alarms about medical care and conditions inside detention facilities.

Delaney Hall itself has increasingly drawn national attention. In recent months, protests have followed allegations of problems including physical abuse by guards and spoiled food. Those concerns escalated in late May, when at least 300 detainees organized a hunger and labor strike.

Weeks after that action began, women housed in a separate unit at Delaney Hall launched a hunger strike of their own. Their demands include improvements at the facility as well as calls for ICE to release women younger than 21, women with medical conditions and mothers.

ICE maintains that detainees receive appropriate medical care.

The Best Painting of ... hunters at night | Art | The Guardian

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 14:04:04 +0000

Today I launch the first of several serials on my blog. The Best Painting of ... takes one painting that I argue is the best of all time of some specific subject or theme (eg the best sunrise, the best painting of a British man o' war being tugged to its last resting place ... ) and, of course, I welcome debate on my selection.

So to kick off:

The Best Painting of ... hunters at night: The Hunt in the Forest (c1465-70) by Paolo Uccello in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

A crowd of hunters, mounted on horseback and costumed in red and black, seem to hesitate before following their hounds any further into the depths of a dark wood. The night sky above the canopy of treetops is deep blue and cloudy. This is Renaissance Italy and, in an echo of the nets and massacres of ancient Roman hunting, these wealthy Florentines are served by men with spears who have helped to round up and isolate the wood's wildlife. But, as the dogs rush into the darkness after their quarry, the men appear to hold back. One hunter in bright red leans over backwards to rein in his horse, another in black raises his hand to restrain the pursuit.

Uccello was one of the first 15th-century artists to systematically use perspective, that is, to replicate in his paintings the way objects appear to the eye to diminish in size with distance. He was so fascinated by this new way of designing pictures that it was said when his wife begged him to come to bed, he'd say no and carry on studying perspective. In this painting he demonstrates not just the optical but also the poetic and emotional effects of perspective, for it is this that gives his woodland nocturne such eerie beauty. As the hunters restrain their horses, their dogs chase deer among the trees in a receding triangular vista towards a vanishing point deep in the darkness. This effect is heightened by the grey-blue line of a river zipping away from us at the right of the picture, almost like a floodlight beam in the dark.

There is an emptiness and mystery in the depths of the forest that gives the hunters pause. In The Inferno by Uccello's Florentine compatriot Dante, the selva oscura, the dark wood, is an image of the sinful, anguished world we wander through. It is as if Uccello's hunters have suddenly glimpsed that in the forest's vanishing point.

Starmer gives tech firms ultimatum to block explicit images on children’s phones | Internet safety | The Guardian

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 23:26:43 +0000

Apple and Google have been given until September to install software that blocks explicit images on children’s mobile phones or face legislation to force them to do so, Keir Starmer said on Monday.

The prime minister said tech companies must activate nudity-detection algorithms or other technical solutions on smartphones and tablets to prevent users taking photos or sharing images of genitalia unless they are verified as adults.

If businesses do not comply within three months, legislation will be brought forward requiring the protection to be added to all phones and tablets sold in the UK. Tech firms that fail to do so could face fines, and their senior managers could be made criminally liable.

Last month Jess Phillips quit her post as safeguarding minister, claiming that Starmer had failed to introduce changes to halt the ability of children in the UK to take naked images of themselves.

However, some Labour MPs told the prime minister to “stop asking” the tech firms to make changes and legislate instead.

Speaking at London Tech Week on Monday, Starmer said the plan meant the UK would become the first country in the world to make it impossible for children to take, share or view nude images.

“Today, I am calling on tech companies operating in this country to introduce vice controls that prevent children from sending and receiving sexually explicit images. Because this is not an impossible challenge,” he said.

“If they choose not, then we will act and we will change the law.”

The announcement has been driven by an explosion in child sexual abuse referrals. The UK’s National Crime Agency receives 1,700 referrals every week. Last year nine in 10 child abuse images were generated by children, many of whom had been tricked or blackmailed by abusers they had met on the internet.

Online grooming cases have risen to 7,000 a year in the UK, with organised criminal gangs and social media sites profiting from the sale and exchange of images and footage of abuse.

Under the changes, sexual predators will be prevented from being able to exploit and abuse victims through their devices, and children stopped from being able to access pornography, the Home Office said. Adults will still be able to take, share or view nude content once they have verified their age.

In the Commons, Melanie Ward, the Labour MP for Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy, said: “It’s time to stop asking social media companies to make their products safe, and instead time to start requiring them to do so through regulation.”

Clive Efford, the Labour MP for Eltham and Chislehurst, said the “sociopaths” running social media platforms had no concern for the welfare of children. “The only message that they’re going to listen to is if there’s legislation put before this house that is going to act and send a clear message to them.”

The proposal is designed to sit alongside the Online Safety Act, which requires companies to have processes for removing material that is illegal or harmful to children.

Neither Apple nor Google offers a nudity-blocking system that works across the entire operating system.

Apple is introducing age checks for iPhone and iPad users in the UK which ask them to verify if they are adults to access certain services such as 18-plus apps. Users who do not confirm their age or are underage will have web content filters turned on automatically.

Last year, Google introduced measures to detect and blur nude images and issue warnings when a child attempts to open, send or forward them.

Whitehall sources said that while the Home Office was “100%” behind the proposal, there were concerns that the Treasury could be susceptible to lobbying from tech companies with the promise of extra investment.

One insider questioned whether the “tech bros in No 10” – a reference to advisers to Starmer – would also try to curb the plans.

Phillips welcomed the proposed legislation, but added: “The government needs to be incredibly clear about its red lines when drawing up new rules to stop children from from taking, sharing or viewing nude images. It cannot be squeamish and end up taking its red lines from tech companies. And they need to now begin preparing robust legislation in case of failure in three months’ time.”

Civil liberties groups have expressed concerns that tech companies will introduce changes that threaten anonymity and privacy. Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch, said the plans could “invoke the death of anonymity and internet privacy”.

Google said: “Google is deeply committed to protecting children online. We are working constructively with UK partners to find effective, privacy-preserving solutions that deter the spread of harmful content while ensuring a safe digital environment for young people.”

North Sea oil fuelled the 80s boom, but it was, and remains, strangely invisible | Ian Jack | The Guardian

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 23:23:52 +0000

More than a quarter of a century ago, when it looked as though the sun would never set on Mrs Thatcher, I published a book called Before the Oil Ran Out. My children, who arrived later, would sometimes pick the book from a shelf and puzzle at the title and the dust jacket, which showed a white garden bench under a dark sky. What did it all mean? I couldn't help at all with the cover image – it was striking but mysterious – but the title, too, defied an easy explanation. First, because the book contained few mentions of oil; second, because the past tense implied something historical while the subtitle, Britain 1977-86, suggested the present.

I had the idea for the title when I was walking through a London square around the time of the City's deregulatory "Big Bang" and Peregrine Worsthorne coining the phrase "bourgeois triumphalism" to describe the brash behaviour of the newly enriched: the boys who wore red braces and swore long and loud in restaurants. Champagne was becoming an unexceptional drink. The miners had been beaten. A little terraced house in an ordinary bit of London would buy 7.5 similar houses in Bradford. In the seven years since 1979, jobs in manufacturing had declined from about seven million to around five million, and more than nine in every 10 of all jobs lost were located north of the diagonal between the Bristol channel and the Wash. And yet it was also true that more people owned more things – tumble dryers and deep freezers – than ever before, and that the average household's disposable income in 1985 was more than 10% higher than it had been in the last days of Jim Callaghan's government.

Social peace had been bought by tax cuts and welfare benefits, and these had been largely enabled by government income from North Sea oil that by the mid-1980s was delivering the Treasury 10% of its revenues. The question was, how long would this bounty last? My estimate that by about 2010 Britain would "probably cease to be a significant producer of oil" was hopelessly wrong; present forecasts suggest reserves could last for another 30 to 40 years, depending on rates of exploitation and the success of new fields. On the other hand, revenues to the UK government are much less than they were – adjusted for inflation, receipts averaged more than £18bn a year in the 80s, compared to the £6.7bn estimated for the current year – and could of course, shrink much further if an independent Scotland won what the Scottish government considers its rightful share of the oilfields. It seemed at the time that the peace and plenty of late-period Thatcherism was a temporary phenomenon owing more to oil than to ideology – the book's title implied an era that would soon be historic.

The idea wasn't original. Economic journalists such as the Observer's Bill Keegan keenly promoted the argument, and in 1987 even Tony Blair felt able to say that North Sea oil was "utterly essential to Mrs Thatcher's electoral success". And yet the benefits of North Sea oil were never popularly acclaimed, or indeed much noticed. We didn't look at our disability allowances or wage slips and attribute any increase to men in hard hats far out to sea. Ditto with any moderation of deficits in the balance of trade. To adapt George Orwell's famous passage on coalminers, we didn't understand that all of us ("you and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the Nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury … ") really owed the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges blackened to their eyes in mud, fitting drill bits on storm-lashed metal platforms 200 miles from the Scottish coast. They never came into it.

There were reasons for this. No politician has ever been keen to publicise luck as the source of national wellbeing – it takes away so much of their raison d'etre – and luck plays an especially big part in dictating how near a tribe, a village or a country lies to a workable carbon deposit. The emirs of the Persian Gulf were lucky, as in an earlier age were the large number of British landowners (Lord Elgin, the Dukes of Hamilton, etc) who discovered that they lived above coal seams. Still, whatever the happenstance of their location, we knew about coalminers because they lived together in communities and because pyramids of colliery waste marked the skyline in many parts of Britain, including unexpected places such as Somerset and Kent. Oil-platform workers, in contrast, have homes scattered across the UK and come together only on the helicopters flying them out to workplaces that civilians will never see with the naked eye, unless they sail in fishing boats. Also, with wages averaging £64,000 a year, they are too well paid to be pitiable.

But the chief cause of the industry's invisibility at its 1980s height was surely that Britain had become increasingly London-focused, and regarded any kind of manufacturing or extractive industry as "northern" and old-fashioned. According to the historian Christopher Harvie, the country had seen no greater civilian project since navvies built 5,000 miles of railway in the late 1840s; the North Sea's story of underwater exploration and daring engineering would have thrilled earlier generations. Instead, Harvey writes, "the impact of oil on the British metropolitan intelligentsia and its imagination was practically zero". In Scotland, where oil had immediate political, environmental and social repercussions, journalists took a greater interest, but even there the emblematic figure of that decade was the aforementioned shouty boy from a bank rather than a roustabout on the train home from Aberdeen, taking advantage of the buffet car after his teetotal stay at sea.

Oil's failure to intrude into the public debate, particularly in southern Britain, had an important consequence. "Not fixing the roof while the sun shone", the favourite Tory accusation against the Blair/Brown regime, held true in spades for the way oil receipts were spent in the Thatcher years. Other countries – Norway is the leading example – used their tax on oil to modernise infrastructure and industry, or hoarded some of it in a sovereign wealth fund for the proverbial rainy day. Instead the Treasury used every last pound of it to set against current expenditure, leaving nothing for capital projects or the post-Thatcher future. No roofs were fixed: in this respect, Mrs Thatcher as the prudent housewife is a piece of make-believe.

Oil inflated sterling's value in the 80s, destroying exports and industries, and some analysts believed that only when it ran out and sterling declined could Britain flourish again as a trading nation; the running-out would be a cloud with silver lining. "But," as I wrote in my strangely named book, "given the lack of industrial investment during Britain's peak oil years, it is difficult to see what will provide our living." There are many sentences in the book I never want to read again – rereading can be a painful experience. But that one at least has the comfort of rightness. Neither Big Oil nor the Big Bang has saved us – what will, O Lord, what will?

Roastidio.us in webspace https://www.theguardian.com/

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