Day: September 2, 2024

It was, Sahra Wagenknecht declared on the social media platform X on Sunday, “a historic result” achieved from almost a standing start. Within eight months, her leftwing-conservative Sahra Wagenknecht Allianz (BSW) has gone from an upstart party of breakaway populists to a decisive player with the potential to upend the German political scene. The BSW … Read more

The acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has called for euthanasia to be legalised worldwide. Almodóvar was speaking ahead of the world premiere of his first English language feature, The Room Next Door, which stars Tilda Swinton as a journalist with cancer who decides to end her own life and asks an old friend, played by … Read more

‘And Ticketmaster crashed!” Stuart Maconie kicks off the in-demand Supersonic pub quiz on Sunday with a riff on the festival’s entirely unintentional namesake, who a day prior broke the internet with demand for their upcoming reunion shows and spurred talks of government action on the ticketing market. At the risk of stating the extremely obvious, … Read more

On my way to Hard Graft, a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London, I sat beside an employee with a lanyard round her neck like a chain whose exhortatory instruction read, “straightforward, purposeful, collaborative behaviours” – but to what end I had no idea. Jobs come with added sententiousness these days, as employers … Read more

My mum’s not who you think of when you think of suicide When you think of suicide you may not picture someone like my mum – a middle-aged woman with four children and a loving husband. Yet, at the age of 18, my world changed forever when she took her own life at just 53. … Read more

There were two tragic deaths last weekend that were connected with this year’s Notting Hill carnival. One victim was a 32-year-old woman, Cher Maximen. She was at carnival with family and friends, including her three-year-old daughter, on 25 August and was stabbed on Golborne Road, squarely within the carnival route. It seems that she had … Read more

Iain Softley, director I was working at Granada in the 1980s when I came across a photograph of Astrid Kirchherr and Stuart Sutcliffe while going through the station’s Beatles archive. They looked confident and interesting and I wanted to know more about them. I’d heard about the Beatles becoming a great live band while playing … Read more

Leaders of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland have demanded that their party be included in coalition negotiations in two states where it won nearly a third of the vote in elections on Sunday, in results that have scrambled the political landscape a year before a general election. Although the political earthquake from the elections in … Read more