Giles Whittell

4 days ago | observer.co.uk | Giles Whittell

It’s now proven that you can race up Everest and back inside a week by acclimatising with xenon gas, but most people still have to do it the old-fashioned way. That means bottled oxygen, long queues up the Hillary Step – deep in the death zone – and costs that can exceed £100,000 a climber on high-end commercial expeditions. Fees don’t normally include the removal of spent gas canisters or the bodies of the roughly 1% of climbers who die on the way up or down.

6 days ago | observer.co.uk | Giles Whittell

Elon Musk thought he could shrink America’s mighty federal bureaucracy. The signs are that he simply wasn’t thinking straight Ten years ago Elon Musk’s first biographer described in riveting detail how Musk took on the most successful agency in the history of the US federal government – Nasa – and made it look bloated and feckless. Nasa had been used to paying $10 million and waiting years for a new set of computer systems for a rocket, Ashlee Vance wrote.

2 weeks ago | observer.co.uk | Giles Whittell |Catherine Neilan

The prime minister and Ursula von der Leyen are poised to sign a deal in London that marks a turning point for Labour’s hopes of reset on closer cooperation Five years after Brexit, Britain and the European Union are poised to sign a security and defence pact that could lead to the broadest, deepest set of repairs to the EU-UK relationship since the 2016 referendum. Progress towards a new deal on trade could take months.

1 month ago | observer.co.uk | Giles Whittell

The EU is changing. Member states are reasserting themselves and power is shifting from the Commission to the Council. That boosts the influence of Council president Antonio Costa and especially of Donald Tusk, prime minister of Poland, which holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union. If there is to be an EU-UK defence pact, Tusk will have sign-off.

1 month ago | tortoisemedia.com | Giles Whittell

When Elon Musk sided with Trump and bet a large part of his farm on the gargantuan Tesla Cybertruck, the best gloss analysts could put on it was that he would gain more customers in red-state America than he lost in blue. This hasn’t happened. Revenues were down 9 per cent and profits an astonishing 71 per cent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2025 as Chinese rivals outsold Tesla with cheaper electric cars and Teslas became lightning rods for anti-Musk protest.