A senior Hamas official on Saturday dismissed US President Joe Biden’s optimism for an imminent ceasefire deal in Gaza, where rescue workers said an Israeli strike killed 18 members of a single Palestinian family. “To say that we are getting close to a deal is an illusion,” Hamas political bureau member Sami Abu Zuhri said in a statement. Read our blog to see how the day’s events unfolded. Source link
There were more than 35 bills in Labour’s first king’s speech. So what does it tell us about the party’s ambitions? And with world events turning darker, can the euphoria around the Labour party last? The Guardian’s John Harris is joined by political editor Pippa Crerar and political correspondent Kiran Stacey How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know Source link
Adela Rubiano Hurtado does not feel there was a point when she made the decision to care for her granddaughter. It was just that when Rubiano’s daughter became pregnant at 15, and could not care for the baby, there was no one else. “I never considered it a job or a career,” the 67-year-old says from an armchair in her house overlooking the urban sprawl creeping up the mountains of Colombia’s capital, Bogotá. “Who else was going to do it?” Her granddaughter, Adriana, now 20, has moderate cognitive impairment and has to be cooked and cleaned for, and needs extra support with the work she brings home from the classes she attends at weekends. It is a round-the-clock job, so Rubiano is rarely able to leave the house. At times she feels trapped by her responsibilities. “I was overwhelmed, frustrated and did not know what path to take,” she says. “There was no one else to talk to about it, either. Sometimes, I just wanted to run away from it all.” In recent months, however, …
“Hopeless and broken”: that is how a top scientist interviewed by the Guardian described feeling as she and hundreds of other climate experts shared harrowing predictions of the future of the planet this week. I resonate with her feelings of despair. Even as the former head of the UN climate change convention that achieved the Paris agreement in 2015, I, like many, can succumb to believing in the worst possible outcome. Just after I assumed the role of UN climate chief in 2010, I said to a room full of reporters that I didn’t believe a global agreement on climate would be possible in my lifetime. Now, scientists say we are on track to shoot through the 1.5C temperature ceiling enshrined in the Paris agreement, leading to a dystopian world plagued with famine, conflict and unbearable heat. Climate impacts have hit so fast that worst-case scenarios predicted by scientists are in some cases already coming true. This isn’t scaremongering: these climate scientists are doing their job. They are telling us where we are, but now …
The Biden administration put an optimistic face Tuesday on prospects for a cease-fire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas, even as Israel began offensive action inside the southern Gaza city of Rafah, closing off all access for humanitarian aid to an area where more than 1 million civilians have crowded to escape Israeli military operations. Source link
Getting trusted friends to share political content, both digitally and face-to-face, could be extremely valuable. It is also difficult. Last fall, the Biden campaign launched pilot relational organizing programs in Arizona and Wisconsin, battleground states that went for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020 and are up for grabs again. The results of a pilot effort in North Milwaukee are one reason for optimism that the campaign can reach middle-class Black voters, whom polls have shown drifting to Trump. A veteran Democratic strategist is more skeptical. “It makes sense in theory,” he says. “The problem is it’s all anecdotal. We don’t know enough yet to say it works. I mean, you have an entire voting population that gets their news from TikTok, right? Which is why most campaigns now, we just push all the buttons. We pay for more door-to-door canvassing, we pay more for texting, we pay more for phone banks, we pay more for digital. But no one—not Republicans, not Democrats—is confident anymore on what messaging works.” There’s no Biden campaign signage …
Dua Lipa’s last album, 2020’s Future Nostalgia, moved the cultural dial. Released into the pandemic, it was ubiquitous, neon-hued and life-affirming, winning two Brits and her third Grammy overall, confirming Lipa as an international superstar. It also kicked off a disco revival boom echoed through numerous other artists, not least dance-pop veteran Kylie Minogue, Róisín Murphy and Jessie Ware. Even Beyoncé went disco for her Renaissance (2022), saluting Black queer culture. But in the video for Lipa’s Barbie soundtrack hit of 2023, Dance the Night, a mirror ball shatters. And the messaging around Lipa’s third album, Radical Optimism, has been keen to fast-forward her into a new era, establish the requisite fresh narrative and, perhaps, move the dial again. There has been some loose talk of Lipa being inspired, this time around, by Primal Scream’s 1991 LP Screamadelica and Massive Attack; of the Britpop 90s and Gorillaz; of the north London Albanian singer turning to low-slung British source material rather than Studio 54. Alongside Lipa’s go-to co-writer, Caroline Ailin, the writing-production team notably features Kevin …
The reviews are out for Dua Lipa’s latest album Radical Optimism – and let’s just say they’re… interesting. It’s now been four years since Dua blessed us with her incredible album Future Nostalgia, and in that time she’s picked up the coveted Album Of The Year and Best Pop Vocal Album titles at the Brit Awards and Grammys, respectively, recorded a chart-topping hit for the biggest film of 2023 and collaborated with everyone from Miley Cyrus and Megan Thee Stallion to Sir Elton John and Kylie Minogue. No wonder, then, that anticipation for album number three has been high – spurred on even more by Dua teasing last year that her new music was “different sonically” to her last offering and “inspired by 1970s-era psychedelia”. So, here’s the thing. It’s not necessarily that reviews for Radical Optimism are bad, but many critics have been left questioning whether it’s a worthy follow-up to Future Nostalgia, particularly given everything that Dua has had to say about her new music in the lead-up. Here’s a selection of what …
Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free You have to admire Dua Lipa’s steely sense of purpose. Back in 2017, when she was working on her self-titled debut album, she told her A&R Joe Kentish that she planned to work with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker on her third album. Kentish laughed and told the emerging star to hold her horses. But seven years later, here she is with her third album, Radical Optimism, and here’s Parker, playing and producing on seven of the 11 tracks. This artistic conviction has been one of the Albanian-British artist’s driving traits from day one. We heard it in the uncompromising regime of her 2017 single “New Rules”, in the brisk edicts of “Don’t Start Now” (2019) and again on “Houdini”, the advance single for this record, on which she throws down the gauntlet to a potential lover with the line: “Prove you’ve got the right to please me.” Urgent, …
Dua Lipa’s “Radical Optimism” has a hilarious album cover, two songs about illusionists and what may end up the year’s most succulent bass playing. What it doesn’t have is the kind of detailed celebrity meta-narrative that’s come to define — and to propel — the superstar pop LP in music’s parasocial age. The 28-year-old London-born singer might disagree: On the cusp of her Saturn return, Lipa has been talking up her third studio album as a meditation on hard-won emotional maturity à la Ariana Grande’s “Eternal Sunshine” or Kacey Musgraves’ “Deeper Well.” “Radical optimism in the way that I see it,” she told Zane Lowe, “is this idea of rolling with the punches.” The LP’s cover shows her bobbing in the sea dangerously close to a shark’s fin, and I guess the shark represents the punches? Yet because Lipa’s lyrics are very bad — “If these walls could talk, they’d tell us to break up,” she sings at one point — this concept doesn’t really come together. And, besides, a quest for emotional maturity really …
