President, 80, vows to keep far-right from power as Flávio Bolsonaro tells supporters he will ‘fight this system’Brazil’s leftwing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has launched his campaign for a historic fourth term and vowed that as long as he lived he would not allow the “shameless” right to return to power.Addressing a sea of supporters in São Bernardo do Campo, the industrial city where his political career began nearly half a century ago, the 80-year-old politician reminded voters of the chaos and violence that unfolded during the 2018-22 presidency of his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, whose son Flávio Bolsonaro will face Lula in October’s presidential election. Continue reading...

16 Aug 2026 18:44 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Ahead of Fat Bear Week, avid fans are glued to the spectacle of brown bears devouring salmon at Brooks Falls in AlaskaOne of this summer’s biggest onscreen hits has had big beasts, great escapes and choppy waters, but it’s not Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey – it’s a livestream of Alaskan brown bears catching salmon.The Brooks Falls bearcam at Katmai national park in the US was watched 7.3m times between 22 June and 4 August – up 70% from the same period last year and more than double the views it attracted in 2024. Continue reading...

16 Aug 2026 06:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Student unrest sweeps India, Portugal and Mexico as grievances and pressure for good grades in tough job market collideFamilies with teenagers in education know the private, hidden pain of exam season. But this year, what might have been a summer of quiet family anxiety has erupted in several countries into public unrest.Exam-related turmoil has led to mass student protests in Mexico after nearly 60,000 university applicants were forced to resit tests amid suspected cheating, while Portugal’s disastrous attempt to digitise school exam marking sparked the country’s worst education crisis in decades. Continue reading...

16 Aug 2026 07:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Historians argue box office enthusiasm shows desire for unifying figure as country faces political divisionOn 18 June 1940, Charles de Gaulle, then a little-known army officer, sat in a BBC studio in London and made his famous rallying call for the French to resist the Nazi occupation and its puppet Vichy government.In the eyes of the British prime minister Winston Churchill, De Gaulle was an arrogant, stubborn and defiant thorn in his and the allies’ side, but the Frenchman never stopped believing in the greatness of France and the need for resistance. Continue reading...

16 Aug 2026 06:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Mir Hussain has been followed by TV cameras since he was a child, and managed to deliver love and laughter alongside his struggle. Now his previous Bafta-winning documentary gets an updateMir Hussain remembers the first time he saw a video camera: “I looked at it and it looked straight back at me.” His relationship with this all-seeing eye has broadened and deepened in the years that followed. Since 2002, when Phil Grabsky and Shoaib Sharifi first started documenting his story, Mir has lived an extraordinary life: grinding poverty and impossibly hard work, eking out a living in the mountainous Bamiyan province and then in urban Afghanistan, but combined with a remarkable level of exposure to the world, via modern media.Mir and his family first appeared on our screens in 2021, in the Bafta-winning film My Childhood, My Country – 20 Years in Afghanistan. This updated reversioning of that film contains plenty of the same footage but also, in a telling update, hits very differently in the light of what happened that year. In April 2021, US president Joe Biden announced the withdrawal of American soldiers from Afghanistan. Essentially, the US (and their allies, including Britain) abandoned the country to the Taliban extremists. The knowledge of this incipient horror looms unavoidably large; the whole film now feels like foreshadowing. Continue reading...

17 Aug 2026 00:05 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

As wildfires rage across Europe and Britain swelters through its hottest summer on record, literary fiction has a vital role to play in capturing the severe consequences of climate crisisEarlier this summer, I travelled through Europe on a book tour. Everywhere I went, the heat broke records. In Italy, Germany and Spain, I sought refuge from the afternoon sun in air-conditioned hotels. In normally temperate Zurich, it averaged 37 degrees. I jumped into the Limmat for relief. On my final day in Warsaw, Poland had never been hotter – one of 14 countries to hit a historic high. In June, when I left to return to the US, Europe was scorching. At the end of July, as I write this, it is burning.Since the heatwaves began, there have been more than 10,000 excess deaths. Yet for many, myself included, the high temperatures brought nothing more than inconvenience – uncomfortable commutes, heat rash, less time outdoors. This seems to be a defining feature of today’s climate crisis; deadly for some, banal for others. Even when the world is on fire, it somehow doesn’t feel like an emergency for everyone. Continue reading...

16 Aug 2026 11:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Pokémon outlived the moral panic of its early days in Australia and its staying power has proved that simple joy can cross bordersThere’s a generation of Australians for whom Cheez TV was a religion. Every morning before school, I’d sit in my little white plastic chair about three feet from our big wooden television and watch 90 minutes of cartoons “curated” by the show’s teenage hosts, Jade and Ryan.Premiering in 1995, Cheez TV dominated the children’s breakfast market by 1998, stealing the crown from Channel Seven’s bogan-muppet icon Agro. A daily dose of Cheez TV was such an important ritual to me that I remember feeling active resentment towards Princess Diana’s death because the news coverage bumped Earthworm Jim. Continue reading...

16 Aug 2026 15:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN