This is how we must proceed, Gordon Brown.

What’s clear after recent events is that the fourth global order cannot be restored. 

We are not only in a more protectionist era but are moving from a unipolar world where the US was the sole hegemonic power to one that has many more centres of decision-making power.

 But because we are also a more interconnected world, we are more vulnerable to crises – from pandemics and climate emergencies to financial contagion. 

All the more so because countries can, as we saw this week, weaponise that interdependence and the choke points it creates for their own advantage. 

So if we are to have anything approaching a values-based order we will have at some point to agree an updated global charter for our common future, something that builds on the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and the UN Charter of 1945, but is geared to a completely different century. 

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For many of us, the United States means music, progress, hope.

Illustration: Nathalie Lees/The Guardian 

 My first sense of the US’s allure came when I was a four-year-old, watching the glorious educational TV show Sesame Street, and being spellbound by its multiracial cast, and the way it offered a much more thrilling take on letters and numbers – and life – than the staid fare we got from the BBC and ITV. 

A little later on, I can recall a few lucky childhood friends returning from American holidays – in Florida, usually – coming home with comics and sweets that increased my sense of the States as a beguiling land of dreams. And then came the clincher: a great mountain of music, which still sits at the heart of my understanding of what the US is, and how it may survive its current crisis.

 By John Harris, continue reading.

 

How Hungary’s PM became the spoiler of the Nato summit.

If there has been a spoiler at this week’s carefully curated Nato summit, then it is Viktor Orbán, the conservative Hungarian prime minister who has enraged his Nato allies by meeting with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping en route to Washington in what he has called his “peace mission”. 

 Now on Thursday the Hungarian PM is planning to fly to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Donald Trump, a source close to Orbán told he Guardian.

 

Who’s the elephant in the room at the Nato summit?

Fiona Katauskas

 

Temperatures are rising and the clock is ticking.

What if the solution to these problems lies, in part, in our gardens and other green spaces?

 Not that gardening can stop climate change, but what if gardens could connect us with the natural world, make us more aware of the destruction all around us?

 What if we rise up, garden by garden, park by park, balcony by balcony and do something – anything – to help a bee or a butterfly or a bird or a hedgehog?

 What would our world look like if more of us were tuned into the life systems that support us?

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Who is next?

A Russia that so casually destroys its finest is not a country you can live in.

 In a land you can live in there is no space for this kind of criminal regime. The state that goes under the name of the Russian Federation, which visits death and malignancy on those who live in it and on the world at large, simply should not exist. It had to murder Navalny.

 Dictatorship calls for a sullen population and nationwide jubilation at the least word from its leader. 

The regime recognised the threat this man posed. It tried to silence him by sentencing him to more than 20 years in jail. It tried to poison him, but failed. So now it has finished the job. 

By Mikhail Shishkin, continue reading.

 

Why couples fall out of love

Popular culture tends to focus on the image of the middle-aged man seeking the ego gratification of a younger woman as a fundamental cause of marital breakdown. 

And while there’s no denying that particular phenomenon, it might be that the less conspicuous issue of gradual female disappointment with men is a more common cause of marriages coming to an end. 

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Hear me out ..

Lefki Savvidou

 

Move over Napoleon, Ferrari and Oppenheimer … here come the wives, Anne Billson

Penélope Cruz as Laura Ferrari in a scene from Ferrari. Photograph: Lorenzo Sisti/Leon via AP

 
From Ridley Scott’s Napoleon to Michael Mann’s Ferrari, this has been a year of biopics about men, by men. But it’s the female powerhouses who deserve equal billing.

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German Muslims frustrated by Israel backing

Since the Hamas attacks, Germany has been in a state of heightened tension. While pro-Palestinian marches have been banned in many towns and cities, others have been allowed to go ahead, with strict guidelines. 

In the meantime there has been a steep increase in reports of antisemitic attacks targeting the country’s estimated 200,000-strong Jewish population. The Rias group, which tracks antisemitism, said it recorded 994 incidents between 7 October and 9 November, an increase of 320% compared with the same period in 2022. 

 Last month, before a two-day annual conference bringing together politicians, Muslim groups and representatives of the Christian and Jewish communities, the interior minister, Nancy Faeser, called on Muslim groups to clearly condemn the Hamas attacks and distance themselves from antisemitism.

 But many Muslims, part of the second biggest religious group in Germany with 5.5 million people, say they are being unfairly targeted. A large increase in Islamophobic attacks has also been registered, and it is suspected that many more have gone unreported.

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Donald Tusk’s second coming

Tusk’s return after eight years of rule by the Law & Justice party (PiS) will be a moment of satisfaction for those raising a glass of vodka in Gdańsk; many of those playing have supported him since his time as a student organiser working with the anti-communist Solidarity movement that emerged from strikes at the local shipyards. 

But they will also recognise that Tusk’s second coming is far from guaranteed to succeed; communism did fall in Poland, but the performance of Lechia Gdańsk never did match the passion of its fans.

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Napoleon: Directed by Ridley Scott.

Napoleon is a complex subject whose aura, monstrosity and genius is a perfect fit for great cinema and who is therefore an irresistible challenge for any serious film-maker.

 Little wonder then that Ridley Scott, who is now 85 years old, and whose long and prolific career includes many big, sweeping movies, has finally succumbed to the lure of the “little corporal” from Corsica.

 Napoleon is due in cinemas at the end of the month with Joaquin Phoenix in the leading role and a soundtrack which includes Black Sabbath (their classic dirge War Pigs) and a slowed-down Radiohead cover (The National Anthem – another dirge). According to the publicity, it promises to tell the life of Napoleon through his tortured love affair with his wife, Joséphine, his own jealousies and obsessions, as well as his master-plan to conquer Europe. From the trailers, it looks like another epic in the mould of Scott’s Gladiator, with at least some of the gripping battle scenes that are his trademark. 

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Is Shrinkflation Bad?

The concept of 'shrinkflation' has been floated around since the 1950s, although it has received quite a lot of attention in recent years especially as consumers have noticed how the products that they used to buy had decreased in size, number, or weight. 

The practice is done by manufacturers to assuage the effects of inflation and other factors like rising wages, increasing prices on raw materials, and the like on their profits. And as retail psychology goes, consumers will more readily notice an increase in prices over a decrease in the quantity or quality of the products, so from a retail perspective, it's much easier to simply shrink the products than to increase the price. 

 So, the question of whether or not it's advantageous depends on from whose perspective we're looking. Read more

 

The truth about drinking straws

The backlash against single-use plastics has seen a growing market for paper, metal, glass and plant-based straws. But is the choice between them really a simple one? 

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Why are we so intent on destroying the dark ?

Darkness is being stripped at a rate unprecedented in human history – the spectacle of the Milky Way in the night sky is now invisible to 80% of the world’s population (and 99% of the population of the US). There have been some efforts to reduce light pollution: in December 2021, for example, New York City passed landmark lights-out laws, while Germany, France and Spain have reduced illumination on municipal buildings. But this goes nowhere near to repairing the damage artificial light is causing. 

This matters because the dark matters. Not only does darkness offer unique physical and mental benefits to humans, it is vital to plants, mammals, birds, reptiles and insects – and not just the ones that are active at night. The trouble is, the dark scares us.  

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The laws of war, it seems, are for the little people.

So why bother?

 Why even mention war crimes, knowing that the charge is unlikely to be enforced against powerful perpetrators? Why not accept that war and atrocity are inextricable? 

 Because it is upon these laws that aspects of our humanity hang. If we succumb to cynicism, if we are dissuaded by the hypocrisy of the dominant powers, if we cannot demand and hope for a better world, we accept the premise that might is right, and the powerful may treat the powerless however they wish. 

We accept that atrocities by one side will be used to justify atrocities by another, in a never-ending cycle of revenge and carnage. In doing so, we create a world in which none of us would choose to live.

 George Monbiot , read more.

 

Gazans are on their knees.

People in Israel and Palestine want peace. If we keep fighting hatred with hatred, it takes us to a really dangerous situation, not just for that region but globally. And ultimately, it is the people who will suffer. I believe Israeli and Palestinian families want their children to grow up in a peaceful, safe country with a two-state solution. Three things are needed immediately: facilitating a ceasefire, the opening of humanitarian corridors, and to let out foreign nationals who, like my parents, can seek safety elsewhere. Gazans are on their knees, with no medical supplies left, and they are running out of food. My own family have only salty water left to drink.

 By Nadia El-Nakla, read more.

 

Incompetent and discredited leaders, in thrall to worn-out ideologies, have brought Israel and Gaza to this catastrophe.

From Israel, Lebanon and Palestine to Egypt, Syria, Libya and back to Turkey, such men, in thrall to worn-out ideologies and prejudices, hold leadership positions by reason of longevity and guile, not wisdom or sense. They rule by fear and division, abuse the tenets of their faith and poison the minds of children. The young pay the price. Take for instance Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s expensively suited 61-year-old chief. He ordered last weekend’s atrocious onslaught on southern Israel from the security of his Qatar office. Martyrdom, it seems, is not for him – unlike the psychopathically deluded, criminally misled young men he sent to murder, maim, rape and die in the Negev. Now, a week later, Haniyeh looks on again in safety as the youth of Gaza and their families face Israel’s crushing fury.

Simon Tisdall 

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Word on the Street

Economic and political inequality have grown so extreme that many are rejecting democracy. 

This is fertile ground for authoritarianism, especially for the kind of rightwing populism that Trump, Bolsonaro and the rest represent. But such leaders have shown that they have none of the answers that discontented voters are seeking. On the contrary, the policies they enact when given power only make matters worse.

 Rather than looking elsewhere for alternatives, we need to look inward, at our own system. With the right reforms, democracies can become more inclusive, more responsive to citizens, and less responsive to the corporations and rich individuals who currently hold the purse strings. But salvaging our politics also will require equally dramatic economic reforms. We can begin to enhance the wellbeing of all citizens fairly – and take the wind out of populists’ sails – only when we leave neoliberal capitalism behind and do a much better job at creating the shared prosperity that we acclaim. 

Joseph E Stiglitz

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It’s time for a new climate populism, to show how the super rich got us – and the planet – into this mess by Andy Beckett

Alliances between the rich and financially stretched or anxious parts of the working class and middle class have often sustained the right, ever since the arrival of democracy made a more popular conservatism essential. These coalitions have used the same basic argument against necessary reforms as the anti-green movement is using now. This says that the cost, practical difficulties and general disruptiveness of change are too large. Meanwhile, the status quo is either rosily presented as stable and sustainable, or as the least bad option. Yet behind such reassurances something important and potentially explosive lurks unmentioned: that the rich will be able to avoid the climate crisis for longer than the rest of us. 

When the weather becomes intolerable in one country, they can more easily move to another. Or they can retreat into climate-controlled private spaces. In his 2016 book Vertical, Stephen Graham shows how the growing segregation of cities is creating “apartheid atmospheres”: air-purified towers and below-ground complexes for elite residents. Like latter-day castles, these enclaves shut out an increasingly harsh outside world. Meanwhile, through the heat expelled by their air conditioning systems, they make that world worse for everyone else. 

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