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1 week ago | 
theguardian.com | Helen Pidd |Zoe Williams |Ivor Manley |Sami Kent
On Friday it was announced that David Beckham was to receive his knighthood – the fruits of a campaign for the honour that started more than a decade ago. So why now? And what does it say about the UK’s honours system – and its class system – that it took so long?
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1 week ago | 
theguardian.com | Helen Pidd |Zoe Williams |Ivor Manley |Sami Kent
“England trail by two goals to one. Beckham could raise the roof here with a goal,” goes the commentary, as David Beckham lines up a free-kick against Greece, shortly before whipping it into the top corner. “I don’t believe it! David Beckham scores the goal to take England all the way to the World Cup finals! Give that man a knighthood!”The year was 2001, and the ultimate honour seemed close for England’s biggest football player – and perhaps the most famous living Briton, full stop.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Helen Pidd |Heather Stewart |Lucy Hough |Ivor Manley |Joel Cox |Sami Kent
The last few weeks have proved difficult for Rachel Reeves. In public, the news has been dominated by Labour’s U-turn on the winter fuel allowance. In private, the Treasury has been caught up in wrangle after wrangle with ministers, all negotiating what their departments would receive in the spending review. Reeves’ speech to parliament on Wednesday announcing the review was a chance to tell a more positive story – particularly for a government accused of lacking direction and ambition.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Michael Safi |Andrew Roth |Eli Block |Rudi Zygadlo |Sami Kent
It started with a tweet. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” wrote Elon Musk. Donald Trump’s tax and spending bill was a “disgusting abomination”. What followed was a remarkable – and remarkably public – feud between the world’s richest man and the US president: insults were traded, threats were made, shares in Musk’s publicly traded companies plummeted. It was quite the turnaround for the pair. Last year, Musk had given Trump’s re-election campaign more than $280m in donations.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Michael Safi |Nino Bucci |Eli Block |Hattie Moir |Elizabeth Cassin |Sami Kent
Last week, in a trial followed all over Australia and across the world, Erin Patterson took the stand. She is accused of three counts of murder, and one of attempted murder, allegedly by poisoning her relatives with deadly mushrooms inside four separate dishes of beef wellington. As the Guardian Australia justice and courts reporter Nino Bucci explains, Patterson has always denied the charges.
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3 weeks 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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3 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Helen Pidd |Richard Norton-Taylor |Alex Atack |Rudi Zygadlo |Sami Kent |Elizabeth Cassin
On Monday, the prime minister, Keir Starmer, told Britain it was facing threats that were “more serious, more immediate and more unpredictable than at any time since the cold war”. It was time, he said, to make Britain a “battle-ready, armour-clad nation”. As the government publishes its strategic defence review, the former Guardian security editor Richard Norton-Taylor tells Helen Pidd there are still serious questions over whether Britain is ready for this new era.
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3 weeks 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 month 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 month 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.
