Some businesses still waiting for final EHRC guidance while firms that moved early to exclude trans people show no sign of backtracking
On Monday, a Dundee employment tribunal ruled a narrow win for Sandie Peggie, the nurse who complained about sharing a changing room with a transgender doctor. But the lengthy judgment also takes on the pivotal question that has been challenging employers, lawyers and campaign groups since April – does a supreme court judgment mean that transgender people must now be excluded from same-sex facilities that align with their chosen gender? Does it amount to a bathroom ban or not?
The supreme court ruled earlier this year that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex. Interim advice released by the Equality and Human Rights Commission soon after the judgment in effect banned trans people from using facilities according to their lived gender, and its official guidance is expected to closely reflect that advice.
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© Photograph: Jane Barlow/PA
© Photograph: Jane Barlow/PA
© Photograph: Jane Barlow/PA
Former chancellor also says Johnson was ‘least well briefed’ of the PMs he had served
Sajid Javid told Boris Johnson he was a “puppet” of Dominic Cummings before he resigned as chancellor rather than accept a Cummings-led takeover of his Treasury, he has said in an interview about his experiences as a minister.
Speaking to the Institute for Government (IfG), Javid also said that his other departure from Johnson’s government, shortly before it collapsed in 2022, was because he had lost confidence in the prime minister after being assured that allegations about lockdown-breaking parties in No 10 were “bullshit”.
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© Photograph: Belinda Jiao/Reuters
© Photograph: Belinda Jiao/Reuters
© Photograph: Belinda Jiao/Reuters
Unfettered love for late photographer in France and elsewhere stands in contrast to occasional reservations in UK
The death of Martin Parr, the photographer whose work chronicled the rituals and customs of British life, was front-page news in France and his life and work were celebrated as far afield as the US and Japan.
If his native England had to shake off concerns about the role of class in Parr’s satirical gaze before it could fully embrace him, countries like France have long revered the Epsom-born artist “like a rock or a movie star”, said the curator Quentin Bajac.
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© Photograph: Dpa Picture Alliance/Alamy
© Photograph: Dpa Picture Alliance/Alamy
© Photograph: Dpa Picture Alliance/Alamy
More than £3bn that could have been used for UK patients will go to big pharma for its branded products – money for care siphoned off for profit
Of Arthur Scargill it was said that he began each day with two newspapers. The miners’ leader read the Morning Star of course, but only after consulting the Financial Times. Why did a class warrior from Yorkshire accord such importance to the house journal of pinstriped Londoners? Before imbibing views, he told a journalist, he wanted “to get the facts”.
In that spirit, let us parse a deal just struck by the governments of Donald Trump and Keir Starmer. You may not have heard much about this agreement on medicine, but it is huge in both financial and political significance – and Downing Street could not be more proud.
A “world-beating deal,” boasts the science minister, Patrick Vallance. It “paves the way for the UK to become a global hub for life sciences,” claims the business secretary, Peter Kyle, with the government press release adding: “Tens of thousands of NHS patients will benefit.”
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
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© Illustration: Sébastien Thibault/The Guardian
© Illustration: Sébastien Thibault/The Guardian
© Illustration: Sébastien Thibault/The Guardian
Every day he broadcasts a marathon Twitch stream, airing his views to his three million subscribers. It has led to fame – and some fear – in a country ever more politically divided
Hasan Piker calls it the bus driver test: “You get on a bus and you have 30 seconds to explain whatever online phenomena took place to the bus driver without them looking at you and going, ‘Get off the fucking bus.’” Most online discourse, no matter how heated, fails the test, he says – not least an incident last weekend, when someone on a Dublin street asked to take a picture with Piker, then held up a picture of his dog and shouted “Free Kaya!” Never mind the bus driver; trying to explain the significance of this particular event might well take the rest of this article, but the wider point is that there is a jarring overlap, or more often disconnect, between the online and offline worlds.
Piker finds himself in this in-between space more and more these days. Until fairly recently, the 34-year-old was familiar only to the very online, especially Americans in their 20s and 30s, largely thanks to his presence on the streaming channel Twitch, where he has three million subscribers. But since Donald Trump’s election, Piker has become an in-demand voice in “the real world” for his views on the beleaguered political left, and especially that inordinately fretted-over demographic, young men.
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© Photograph: Philip Cheung/The Guardian
© Photograph: Philip Cheung/The Guardian
© Photograph: Philip Cheung/The Guardian
Crowborough on edge as unconfirmed plan to house asylum seekers in training camp spurs street patrols and pre-emptive protests
Among the crowded shelves of Sacred Heart hardware store in Crowborough, there is a gap on the wall where the kitchen knives used to be displayed.
As the local rumour of recent days goes, that space is linked to the news story of the moment in the East Sussex town: the imminent arrival of hundreds of asylum seekers at a nearby military training camp.
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© Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian
© Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian
© Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian
Director of After the Rain, set in animal therapy retreat, says she aimed to portray ‘children as children, not as a statistic’
Sasha Mezhevoy was five years old when she, her older brother and sister were sent to an orphanage in Moscow. They were told they were going to be adopted by a Russian family. But they were not orphans. They were Ukrainian children who had been forcibly removed from their father.
Sasha grew up in Mariupol, the port city that endured more than 80 days of bombardment in one of the bloodiest and most destructive chapters of the early months of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
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© Photograph: Denis Sinyakov
© Photograph: Denis Sinyakov
© Photograph: Denis Sinyakov
Among the many people I met, there was a pervasive feeling of hopelessness and a sense that resistance is slowly becoming a memory
In November, Israeli flags suddenly appeared beside a highway in the Palestinian West Bank. More than 1,000, placed about 30 yards apart on both sides of the road, stretching for roughly 10 miles. They were planted south of Nablus, close to Palestinian villages regularly targeted by extremist Israeli settlers. I saw the flags on my way to visit those villages, the morning after they were put up. Their message echoed the ubiquitous graffiti painted by settlers across the West Bank: “You have no future in Palestine.”
Compared with the 70,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza and more than 1,000 in the West Bank since October 2023, the flags amount to no more than a minor provocation. But they reflect how dominant Israel has become in the West Bank, land recognised under international law as belonging to the Palestinians. During the second intifada, the Palestinian uprising from 2000 to 2005, Israeli settlers would not have risked planting such flags, for fear of coming under fire from Palestinians. Not now.
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© Photograph: Zain Jaafar/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Zain Jaafar/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Zain Jaafar/AFP/Getty Images
Ecologically important Diadema africanum almost eliminated by unknown disease in Canary Islands
A marine pandemic is bringing some species of sea urchin to the brink of extinction, and some populations have disappeared altogether, a study has found.
Since 2021, Diadema africanum urchins in the Canary Island archipelago have almost entirely been killed by an unknown disease. There has been a 99.7% population decrease in Tenerife, and a 90% decrease off the islands of the Madeira archipelago.
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© Photograph: Biosphoto/Alamy
© Photograph: Biosphoto/Alamy
© Photograph: Biosphoto/Alamy
Exclusive: Letters with deepfake images of Carmen Lau in UK and targeting of Ted Hui in Australia part of growing harassment
Sexually explicit letters and “lonely housewife” posters about high-profile pro-democracy Hong Kong exiles have been sent to people in the UK and Australia, marking a ratcheting up in the transnational harassment faced by critics of the Chinese Communist party’s rule in the former British colony.
Letters purporting to be from Carmen Lau, an exiled pro-democracy activist and former district councillor, showing digitally faked images of her as a sex worker were sent to her former neighbours in Maidenhead in the UK in recent weeks.
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© Photograph: Eleventh Hour Photography/Alamy
© Photograph: Eleventh Hour Photography/Alamy
© Photograph: Eleventh Hour Photography/Alamy
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