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3 days ago | 
theguardian.com | Michael Safi |Oliver Laughland |Natalie Ktena |Joel Cox |Sami Kent
“This is the future, man,” a SpaceX fan tells Oliver Laughland as they look over at a giant rocket. “It’s a weird combination of the wild wild west and the brand new future!”The rocket stands in Starbase, Texas, and the Guardian US southern bureau chief was visiting at a very particular time: as the area home to Elon Musk’s pioneering space company was poised to vote in an election to officially transform the place into its own city.
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6 days ago | 
theguardian.com | Michael Safi |Hattie Moir |Ivor Manley |Sami Kent
In 2019, before most of the world had heard of the company, the technology journalist Karen Hao spent three days embedded in the offices of OpenAI. What she saw, she tells Michael Safi, was a company vastly at odds with its public image: that of a transparent non-profit developing artificial intelligence technology purely for the benefit of humanity. ‘They said that they were transparent. They said that they were collaborative. They were actually very secretive,’ she says.
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1 week ago | 
theguardian.com | Michael Safi |Hattie Moir |Ivor Manley |Sami Kent
In 2019, before most of the world had heard of the company, the technology journalist Karen Hao spent three days embedded in the offices of OpenAI. What she saw, she tells Michael Safi, was a company vastly at odds with its public image: that of a transparent non-profit developing artificial intelligence technology purely for the benefit of humanity. “They said that they were transparent. They said that they were collaborative.
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1 week ago | 
theguardian.com | Helen Pidd |Hannah Al-Othman |Hattie Moir |Ivor Manley |Sami Kent
In November 2020, in the middle of a national lockdown, Nicola Packer found out she was pregnant. It was a shock, she tells the Guardian’s north of England correspondent, Hannah Al-Othman. Nicola hadn’t really thought she was pregnant, didn’t even believe she could conceive and had never wanted children anyway. After a call to the UK’s largest abortion provider, she was sent pills to terminate her pregnancy. They believed, she was told, she was about six weeks pregnant.
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1 week ago | 
theguardian.com | Michael Safi |Patrick Wintour |Eli Block |Eleanor Biggs |Rudi Zygadlo |Elizabeth Cassin | +1 more
“We must call this what it is. It is extremism. It is dangerous. It is repellent. It is monstrous.”Last week, the words of British foreign secretary, David Lammy, in the House of Commons on Israeli cabinet ministers’ calls to “purify Gaza” marked a shift in the UK’s position on Israel’s offensive. Lammy announced that Britain would be suspending negotiations with Israel over a new free trade deal.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Helen Pidd |Gary Younge |Courtney Yusuf |Rudi Zygadlo |Sami Kent
“We have people who can write about this,” the journalist Gary Younge remembers an editor once telling him about a column he had written on Bosnia. “Can you add an ethnic sensibility to this?”For Younge, being one of the few black columnists in the British press has not been easy; rather, it has been a constant struggle, he explains, to avoid being pigeonholed as a journalist only ever interested in race.
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3 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Helen Pidd |Nesrine Malik |Eleanor Biggs |Rudi Zygadlo |Sami Kent
On Monday, Keir Starmer announced the government’s latest proposals to reduce immigration. The plans included restricting visas for students and skilled workers, tightening up English language requirements and – perhaps most drastically – aiming to end all overseas recruitment of social care workers by 2028. Yet maybe more notable than the policies was the language Starmer used to introduce them.
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3 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Michael Safi |Hannah Ellis-Petersen |Hattie Moir |Tony Onuchukwu |Sami Kent
On Saturday, Pakistan and India agreed a fragile ceasefire. The announcement, reports the south Asia correspondent Hannah Ellis-Petersen, was made after days of escalation between the two neighbours: drone and missile attacks; cross-border skirmishes; and a world watching on, hoping that these two nuclear states would not go any further. Yet while the US-brokered peace may have reduced the tension, the long-running dispute over Kashmir remains unresolved.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Michael Safi |Harriet Sherwood |Eleanor Biggs |Sami Kent
On Wednesday, 133 cardinals will gather in the Sistine Chapel to select the next pope. It is called the conclave and it is one of the oldest election processes in the world. For days – perhaps even weeks – the cardinals in Rome will vote again and again until one candidate wins a two-thirds majority. Then, and only then, will they be named as the successor to Pope Francis. It is, as Guardian journalist Harriet Sherwood explains, an election rich in ceremony and ritual.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Michael Safi |Kaamil Ahmed |Eli Block |Tom Glasser |Sami Kent
Zamzam, in Darfur, has been a place of refuge for decades. A sprawling camp in western Sudan, some have estimated that it houses up to 700,000 people – a place of relative safety from the violence that has engulfed the region over the last 20 years. It was also one of the last holdouts in Darfur, one of the few places in the region not yet under the control of the Rapid Support Forces. The paramilitary group has fought a devastating civil war with the Sudanese army since April 2023.
