The president is used to bullying his media targets. The quagmire that is his libel actions shows the broadcaster is working to a different scriptFor the greatest account of the BBC’s finest hour, one must turn to Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, Human Voices, written in 1980 and set 40 years earlier, at the corporation’s Portland Place wartime HQ. Flanked by sandbags and infused with a smell of cooking “from the deep hold that suggested more strongly than ever a cruise on the Queen Mary”, the organisation that Fitzgerald describes is at once noble and deeply eccentric. “Broadcasting House stood headed on a fixed course south,” she writes. “With the best engineers in the world, and a crew varying between the intensely respectable and barely sane, it looked ready to scorn any disaster.”In other words, a formidable foe, one that in the spring of 1940, in the face of anticipated Nazi invasion, decided “without prompting, that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective”. I bring this up in respect to the gathering storm of Donald Trump versus the BBC, a fight triggered by the US president’s $10bn defamation lawsuit – $10bn! It’s a wonder he didn’t go for $10 gazillion – brought against the corporation at the end of last year in response to a poorly edited episode of Panorama. The BBC was at fault, editing together comments made by the US president at a rally on 6 January 2021 to give, as the corporation’s apology put it, “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action”. But it is fighting the lawsuit.Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

15 Oct 2026 10:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Thinking about writing a book and doing it are two very different things – so how to get started and follow through? At some point in their lives, many people are confronted with a big question: what if I wrote a book?Writing a memoir, murder mystery or steamy romance is an accomplishment. Like running a marathon or successfully filing your taxes, it speaks to grit, determination and hours of research and effort.How to start meditatingHow to start weightliftingHow to start budgetingHow to start running Continue reading...

15 Oct 2026 16:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

There are brief, simple pleasures in the inevitable new big screen take on the classic game but like the recent Mortal Kombat movies, it’s a largely incoherent messWe just had Resident Evil, Zach Cregger’s giddy, nasty, devilishly fun spin on Capcom’s popular zombie franchise. It gave us renewed hope (after Sonic the Hedgehog, The Last of Us and Fallout) that video game adaptations could be good, actually.But now here comes Street Fighter, a garish and incoherent mess that amuses in fits and starts but barely improves on the Mortal Kombat movies before it, crushing those hopes in its atomic suplex. Continue reading...

15 Oct 2026 16:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

As Americans use apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats more habitually, they confront the guilt of paying extra fees for convenienceTell us: what is your personal ‘recession indicator’?When it comes to food, Caroline Bauldree does not like to “deprive” herself of anything. She does not like to cook either, so that means a lot of food deliveries. “If I want sushi, I’m getting sushi,” said the 24-year-old nanny, who lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. “I’m definitely lazy in that regard.”Bauldree got into the habit of near-daily DoorDashing back in college. “I could order whatever food from whatever restaurant and it showed up at my door – that’s the dream,” she said. “But then I just feel like crap about myself because I’m like, ‘wow, I’m a lazy piece of shit.’ Nine times out of 10, I feel bad about myself.” Continue reading...

15 Oct 2026 11:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

As his new movie The Debut closes the London film festival, we count down the best of the actor’s shy, sly and sometimes hairy outingsA doppelganger role can be a trap for an actor: either the two roles are not sufficiently distinct, or they are too hammily different, and either way the result can look like a film school graduation project. But Jesse Eisenberg gives a stylish split-personality turn in Richard Ayoade’s adaptation of the Dostoevsky novella. He plays Simon, a nerdily shy and self-effacing computer programmer in a grim futureworld, ignored by his employers and by co-worker Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), with whom he is hopelessly in love. But then his carbon copy, James, arrives, also of course played by Eisenberg. James is a confident alpha-achiever who impresses his bosses and entrances Hannah – to Simon’s gibbering despair. Continue reading...

15 Oct 2026 11:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

As climate breakdown pushes families to starvation, many feel forced to ‘sacrifice’ daughters to save siblings. Photographer Elise Blanchard travelled the country speaking to girls as young as eight, 10 and 14 who have been engaged or married to repay debts or pay for food‘I’m not happy about this,” says 11-year-old Khatira, who was sold into marriage to repay debts, sitting in her home in Qala-e-Naw, capital of Badghis province in north-west Afghanistan. “She was healthy before her engagement, now she is worried and cries a lot,” says her 40-year-old mother, Noor Bibi.When her 20-year-old husband-to-be comes to her home, Khatira runs away. Since her engagement, she has stopped going outside because she “is ashamed of having a husband in front of the other girls”, says her mother.Shepherds watch over their sheep in the hills of Bala-Murghab, Badghis province, north-west Afghanistan. By March, the pasture was already too dry for the season Continue reading...

15 Oct 2026 04:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Soldier who killed 13 people in 2009 will still be executed, but president said ‘people would rather not watch him die’Donald Trump has shelved a widely condemned plan to livestream the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, who was convicted of killing 13 people at a military base at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009.In a social media post on Thursday, Trump argued that broadcasting such an execution “might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan” but said that “many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device”. Continue reading...

15 Oct 2026 17:03 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN