Martin Rowson on fracking/Brexit backstop controversies – cartoon
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‘Being Melania’ interview proves her the queen of barely coded messages | Meghan O'Rourke
From fashion choices to her marriage, ABC special reveals first lady is far from clueless – and willing to bait those around her
“Media can be very tricky sometimes,” Melania Trump said back in 1999, in an interview with ABC News. “You need to be very careful.”
That wariness has, not surprisingly, stuck with her, which is why much of the new ABC special, Being Melania, consisted of her offering up vague bromides and an innocuous set of talking points: her independence, her own priorities, the Be Best initiative she launched earlier this year and the work of “staying true to myself”.
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The Guardian view on rising infant mortality: a warning from data | Editorial
Baby deaths cause untold sadness, and preventing them is a marker of civilisation. That’s why these statistics from England and Wales are devastating
Since the 19th century, infant mortality has been viewed as a marker of civilisation. In Victorian Britain between a quarter and a third of all babies died. Following a century and a half of progress in health, education and sanitation, the figure today is nearly 100 times better, 3.8 per 1,000. But infant mortality has risen for two years in a row. In 2016, 2,651 babies under one died in England and Wales, an increase of 134 in just two years. In 2016 cot deaths– which account for around a twelfth of the total – also went up. Now a new report from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health is warning that England is likely to fall further behind other wealthy nations over the next decade. It believes a new national strategy for children’s health is needed to halt the slide.
Babies die for a variety of reasons, about two-thirds of them in the first 28 days of life (stillbirths are counted separately). But both the Royal College and the Lullaby Trust, the cot death charity, point to widening inequality as a factor in increased mortality, since infant deaths are far more common in deprived populations. Risk factors associated with poverty include prematurity, smoking, maternal obesity, young maternal age, poor nutrition and lack of antenatal care.
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The Guardian view on populism: belonging not believing | Editorial
When religious and nationalist longings combine, progressives need a powerful counter-narrative
The regional elections in Bavaria resulted in a crushing defeat for the CSU party, which has ruled the province since 1950. It fell from almost half the votes to slightly over a third; at the same time its traditional rival (and partner in the national coalition government), the Social Democrats, did even worse and slumped to fifth place. The huge gainers were the Greens, now almost twice as large as the Social Democrats, and after them the anti-immigrant AfD in fourth place.
The CSU lost votes to both right and centre; more votes to the centre, in fact, than to the populists. But across Europe is it the populist parties that seem to be having their moment now. The word “populist” is a useful label, but it does not entirely explain the power of these movements. This cannot derive only from their most obvious feature, which is hostility to outsiders. There is also the sense of belonging that they produce by combining religion and nationalism to imagine, and so create, communities.
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What’s the point of growth if it creates so much misery? | Lynsey Hanley
Forget the ‘high-skill, hi-tech’ obsession: we should invest in everyday services to create a society run for collective good
The late Prof Mick Moran, who taught politics and government at Manchester University for most of his professional life, had, according to his colleagues, once had “a certain residual respect for our governing elites”. That all changed during the 2008 financial crisis, after which he experienced an epiphany “because it convinced him that the officer class in business and in politics did not know what it was doing”.
After his epiphany, Moran formed a collective of academics dedicated to exposing the complacency of finance-worship and to replacing it with an idea of running modern economies focused on maximising social good. They called themselves the Foundational Economy Collective, based on the idea that it’s in the everyday economy where there is most potential for true social regeneration: not top-down cash-splashing, but renewal and replenishment from the ground upwards.
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Does Kanye West deserve to be called an Uncle Tom? | Nadifa Mohamed
He says slavery was ‘a choice’. Yet he’s just the latest in a long line of minorities who have stood against their community
Last week rapper Kanye West met President Trump at the White House in what must be one of the most bizarre meetings in Oval Office history. Wearing his infamous, Chinese-made, Make America Great Again baseball cap, West regaled an unusually silent Donald Trump with his thoughts on masculinity, hydrogen-powered planes and the Democratic party.
In May, in another logorrhoeic display, West opined that “slavery was a choice” – a result of “mental imprisonment” – and more recently expressed a desire to see the repeal of the 13th amendment to the US constitution, which abolished slavery. West’s continued praise for Trump, a man who once referred to white supremacists as “very fine people”, has led to widespread condemnation and the accusation (from fellow rapper Snoop Dogg, among others), that West is nothing but an Uncle Tom.
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Two images that show we need to be sensitive about our photos | Paul Chadwick
Pictures can be upsetting, so a lot of time is spent considering, and reconsidering, their usage
Khalid Masood was lawfully shot dead by police after he killed five people at Westminster in March 2017, a coroner’s inquest in London concluded on Friday. Over several days of covering the hearing, Guardian editors had access to a limited range of images of Masood. For one report they used a photo of him taken in the Great Mosque of Mecca, Islam’s holiest site.
Some Muslim readers expressed to me concern that the image linked a particularly important aspect of their religion to the awful crimes of this individual. One of the five pillars of Islam is for Muslims, if physically and financially capable, to make the hajj, a pilgrimage to the site, at least once in their lifetime.
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Would you eat insects to save the planet from global warming? | Jessica Brown
More people would give up meat for edible bugs if they believed they were tasty and trendy
The thought of rising sea levels and more intense heatwaves are enough to keep you up at night. But while we all know the situation is getting more serious, most of us are preoccupied with work, doctor’s appointments and paying bills – and these immediate, visceral worries win every time.
There isn’t much time left to figure out how to bring global warming closer to the forefront of people’s minds and persuade us to reduce our carbon footprints. In fact, we have just 12 years left to keep global warming to 1.5C, according to last week’s landmark UN report. Anything beyond this will massively worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.
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Don’t let Johnson and Rees-Mogg hold the UK to ransom | Simon Jenkins
Post-Brexit Britain will be better off if it continues to trade with the EU. To claim otherwise puts tens of thousands of jobs at risk
Brinkmanship needs a brink. Britain’s EU brink comes as border gates slam shut at Dover, the M20 jams and the French visa office is besieged. That prospect may delight Boris Johnson, David Davis and Jacob Rees-Mogg, but even the deepest cynic must assume those elected to lead the country will not let it happen.
Related: Theresa May’s reward for a Brexit deal? Political annihilation | Matthew d’Ancona
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Don't despair: the climate fight is only over if you think it is | Rebecca Solnit
After the panicky IPCC report on climate change, it’s easy for pessimism to set in – but that would be conceding defeat
In response to Monday’s release of the IPCC report on the climate crisis– which warned that “unprecedented” changes were needed if global warming increases 1.5C beyond the pre-industrial period – a standup comic I know posted this plaintive request on her Facebook: “Damn this latest report about climate change is just terrifying. People that know a lot about this stuff, is there anything to be potentially optimistic about? I think this week I feel even worse than Nov 2016 and I’m really trying to find some hope here.”
Related: Mary Robinson on climate change: ‘Feeling “This is too big for me” is no use to anybody’
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Harry and Meghan’s baby news is lovely – but it’s a distraction from what the nation really needs | Suzanne Moore
The nation increasingly feels little connection to the old elites. Another royal isn’t the rebirth this country is crying out for
Womb watch actually started a few weeks ago. I was pretty revolted when people started talking about how “chunky” Meghan looked in a leather pencil skirt on a visit to Sussex. For the royals, any woman with any kind of tummy either signals an appetite beyond all control (Fergie) or, more usually, that they are doing their duty and breeding in captivity.
Don’t get me wrong: babies, happy couples, people being in love – I am not untouched by these events. Or I am touched for all of 10 seconds. I mean, well done, Harry, for having sex with your lovely wife! His virility is being praised as though he has special super-speed sperm. Is this discussion of pregnancy tasteful? Of course not, but don’t come to me, a republican – or, indeed, most so-called monarchists – for good taste.
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We need the Scotsman more than ever, but who will safeguard its future? | Lindsay Mackie
For 200 years, it has been the liberal voice of Scottish culture and aspiration. Long may that continue
Around 1840, a distinguished editor of the Scotsman called Charles Maclaren proved, with the help of an equally distinguished Swiss geologist called Louis Agassiz, that there had been an ice age in Scotland 10,000 years before, and that the country had been shaped and marked by something that, until then, people had not been aware of. It was a worldwide scoop, and its central piece of evidence was a vast, scarred rock on Blackford Hill in Edinburgh.
With the news that Scotland’s national newspaper, 200 years old last year, is up for sale in a job lot with hundreds of other Johnston Press titles, the metaphors lurking in that piece of Scotsman history are numerous. That vast, scarred rock redolent of meaning, fact, truth, analysis and history could be the Scotsman itself. The paper has punched above its weight internationally (it was a fervent supporter of African nationalism at a time when most other papers followed the government line on “mutiny and disobedience”) and has always been the voice of the Scottish centre, of Scottish culture and aspiration.
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The world can no longer ignore Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses | Rodney Dixon
After Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance, it’s time to stop pretending that locking up dissidents is normal
For the dozens of women and other activists arrested in Saudi Arabia this past year alone, Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance last week at the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul will not have come as a surprise. For those who have been able to leave the kingdom after speaking out, meanwhile, it has now become overwhelmingly clear that even on the outside they need to be extremely careful. The regime has a knack for using threats against family members as leverage in return for silence; these threats have taken on a new, alarming meaning.
Related: Saudi isolation grows over Khashoggi disappearance
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Jeremy Hunt poses in a maze. Behind him lurks the Brexit Minotaur | Jonathan Jones
The image of the foreign secretary with his EU counterparts looks comical at first, but there are dark echoes to it
The moment over the weekend when the foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and his fellow European foreign ministers posed grinning and waving for a picture in the middle of a maze must have been one of those brief pauses of optimism in the Brexit process when a happy outcome seemed just a few laughing circuits of the greenery away – only for Arlene Foster or Jacob Rees-Mogg to appear at the next turn of the labyrinth with axe in hand and a determination to stay entrenched for ever and ever and ever.
A softly melancholic autumnal scatter of brown leaves across the emerald hedge-tops hints at winter closing in and the possibility – probability? – that the government’s cursed meanderings will leave Britain by the end of it completely and utterly lost. It was taken at Chevening, a country house in Kent at the prime minister’s disposal, which has a special association with the Foreign Office and whose maze is suggestive of a different age of elite diplomacy, when John le Carré’s George Smiley might have given his latest unsmiling account of the labyrinthine games of cold war espionage to a senior minister among these discreet walks.
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Why ‘no surrender’ on Brexit is a bad strategy for the DUP | Bobby McDonagh
I understand many unionists are not happy. But the alternative to compromise would not be stalemate, but a Brexit that does them no favours
Respect for unionist aspirations is a requirement of the Good Friday agreement. If we are to deepen friendship on our small island that respect should be written in our hearts. Parity of esteem, which requires equal respect for nationalist aspirations, must work in both directions.
As a former Irish diplomat, I come from a different tradition from unionism, but it is with that awareness that I offer the following thoughts.
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Feel no pity for Theresa May – this Brexit bind is of her own making | Polly Toynbee
The prime minister will have to tell the Brexiteer bullies to put up with a Norway solution or shut up, and let the people vote
Theresa May’s week began with an early-morning visit to a loneliness charity. She needed its help in parliament today, stymied still by intransigence on the Brexit backstop. She will need it tomorrow, with half of her cabinet toying with self-serving resignations. David Davis’s rebel cry at the weekend urged them to rise up against her and “exert their collective responsibility”, but around that table it’s every man and woman for themselves, each eyeballing the others for fear someone else might make some grandstanding demarche. This improbable crew commands our fate. Never in living memory was Britain worse governed.
Related: Brexit: EU insistence on Northern Ireland backstop unacceptable, May tells MPs
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All the president's men: what to make of Trump's bizarre new painting | Hannah Jane Parkinson
The artwork hanging in the White House depicts the US president drinking with his Republican predecessors
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, unless it’s a shredded Banksy, obviously, which is worth around £1m. But how to put a value on the majestic artwork Donald Trump was revealed to have gracing the wall outside the Oval Office, as eagle-eyed viewers of 60 Minutes spotted?
So far, we know of two other “artworks” that Trump has: that Photoshopped picture of his inauguration crowd (dude, let it go), and the electoral college map. It is no wonder Trump wanted to spruce the place up in his own way, given that he referred to the White House as “a dump”. I still cackle at this, given its sheer, disparaging rudeness – like how when Location, Location, Location’s Phil shows a couple around a three-bedroom semi with a north-facing garden, Kirstie mugs to the camera and draws an imaginary knife across her throat.
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The Tories will regret ignoring the pain inflicted by universal credit | Dawn Foster
Millions will be hurt by the new benefits system – and they will make the government pay at the ballot box
Making up excuses on the hoof is difficult. No one truly believes the friend who replies with effusive apologies three days after a text message suggesting a drink: if you care, you reply quickly. Things are a little different if you’re a cabinet minister: ignoring your constituents is generally considered an abdication of professional responsibility, rather than simple bad manners. So Matt Hancock has given himself a headache by claiming to have received absolutely no correspondence from his West Suffolk constituents on universal credit.
The issue of universal credit has rumbled on for months, bobbing beneath the endless Brexit story headlines. It took the Mirror journalist Dan Bloom mere hours to prove that Hancock’s claim, made on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, was false: a single mother, 36-year-old Joanne Samson, had emailed her MP on Thursday to explain her desperation at losing £40 per week on universal credit while caring for her autistic son. Given the wealth of problems created by the new single benefit – with the transition period leaving people with nothing to live on for weeks, and when payments do begin, hundreds of thousands finding they are worse off – it remains extremely unlikely that more correspondence hasn’t reached the health secretary.
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Britain’s magical thinking won’t make the EU accept the impossible | Rafael Behr
Brussels’ Brexit policy has always been clear. We’re in this mess because British politicians never took it seriously
At every step of the Brexit process, there has been a reliable way to predict what the European Union will do. This technique yields top intelligence on the motives of the key continental players. It is devilishly simple, too. The trick is to listen to what they actually say.
The inevitable dynamic of the negotiations was spelled out even before the referendum result was known. Angela Merkel described it, three weeks before polling day. The German chancellor was reluctant to intervene in domestic British debate, understanding that anything she said would be seized upon by the leave campaign as proof of meddling by beastly foreigners. (And in paranoid Eurosceptic folklore, none are beastlier than the Germans.)
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How to make a four-day week reality | Sonia Sodha
It starts with parents – if fathers are made to take up paternity leave, part-time work will become acceptable for all
Imagine a Friday morning with no rude awakening by shrill alarm, no dastardly commute: just the joyful prospect of a three-day weekend and the delicious knowledge that it’s yours to enjoy week in, week out.
That might sound like wishful thinking. But a full-pay four-day working week is an idea fast gathering pace. Last month, the TUC backed it. And the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, has hinted it could feature in Labour’s next manifesto.
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