Who decides what’s news these days? For all the diversity talk, it certainly isn’t Black journalists | Omega Douglas

9 mars 2026 à 09:00

As a new report reveals career ‘apartheid’ in newsrooms, I and many others wonder if the fine promises will ever bring genuine change

There’s a generally accepted ethical requirement for news organisations to reflect society, both in terms of the content they produce and the people who produce it. Unfortunately, this is just not happening. Look, for example, at the new study released this week by the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity revealing a DEI backlash in British journalism, with one respondent describing their office as an “apartheid newsroom”. Look, too, at the Press Awards, said to showcase “the best of national journalism in the UK”, and notably the individual awards shortlists. Search for the Black journalists in them. You’ll struggle. Diversity was clearly not a priority: several categories, including news reporter of the year, feature only men.

As the head of journalism and strategic communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, this all makes my heart sink.

Dr Omega Douglas is an academic and writer. Her latest book The Racial Dynamics of Reporting Africa: Colonial and Decolonial Practices is Mainstream Western News Media is published by Routledge.

Why Train Dreams should win the best picture Oscar

The Guardian

Par : Rebecca Liu

9 mars 2026 à 09:00

With its meditative pace and sincere interest in moral questions, Clint Bentley’s film of a rudderless man cutting down trees in Idaho’s verdant vistas has the air of a Hollywood classic from another era

Train Dreams is arguably the lowest-profile of all the Oscar best film nominees, and could have easily passed me by, destined instead to be lost in the sprawling Netflix library, if it weren’t for a phone call with a friend last year. She had just watched one of last year’s big films – which carried famous names, plenty of hype, and promised to generate lots of debate – and emerged feeling despondent about it as well as the state of cinema. It was a film that, like so many she had recently encountered, contained only empty provocations that amounted to nothing. “I don’t want to sound like a cliche,” she said, “but I believe this was all better in the 1970s!” Train Dreams was one of the few films of the year she had enjoyed.

So I came into Train Dreams, Clint Bentley’s adaptation of the Denis Johnson novella, with that idea in mind: that it was a thing out of step with our time and possibly better for it, too. Immediately, its use of a kindly voiced omniscient narrator recalled Hollywood classics of the late 20th century. Our voice of God drops us into Bonners Ferry, Idaho, in the early 1900s, to the life of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), a man who drifts through his first two decades without much purpose before he falls in love with the free-spirited Gladys (Felicity Jones).

‘Even when the world is collapsing, life continues’: the return of indietronica legends The Notwist

The Guardian

Par : Aida Baghernejad

9 mars 2026 à 09:00

The Bavarian band known for a love of tinkering embraced a fresh ethos, ditching remote collaboration for a collective recording done in a week

‘It all went so fast,” Markus Acher says. “We’ve never been this fast at making a record.” He is sitting at the far end of a sofa in the Notwist’s Munich studio. On the other end is his brother Micha Acher; next to them, Cico Beck, who joined the band in 2014, balances on a stool. For a group known for meticulous studio craft, speed is an unfamiliar sensation. For most of their career, the Notwist have worked slowly, layering, revising, rethinking, as if wary of committing too soon to anything at all.

Formed in 1989 in the Bavarian town of Weilheim, the Notwist began as a heavy metal trio before evolving, over the next decade, into one of Germany’s most distinctive bands. Their breakthrough album, Neon Golden (2002), married indie songwriting to electronic textures, shaped largely by then-member Martin Gretschmann, also known as Console or Acid Pauli, in a way that felt inward-looking and strangely expansive. Its influence travelled far beyond Germany, securing the band a place in the canon of early-2000s indie experimentalism. Pitchfork named Neon Golden one of the best albums of the 2000s.

American Airlines traveler freaks out as she’s allegedly kicked off plane for playing videos on loudspeaker

New York Post

Par : Chris Bradford

9 mars 2026 à 08:55

She was literally sounding off. An American Airlines passenger unleashed an expletive-ridden tirade as she was allegedly kicked off a flight for playing a cell phone video on her loudspeaker. In the video, the woman swore at cabin crew before being led off the plane with cops — even though she claimed she stopped playing...

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An American Airlines passenger shouts on a plane.

A passenger being removed from a plane by a sheriff.

G7 to discuss release of emergency oil reserves as price tops $100

The Guardian

Par : Lauren Almeida

9 mars 2026 à 08:52

US among three countries so far backing measure triggered by Middle East war, according to reports

G7 finance ministers are preparing to discuss the release of emergency oil reserves, according to reports, after the US-Israel war with Iran sent the price of crude above $100 (£75) for the first time since 2022.

The ministers will discuss the release of the reserves in a call coordinated by the International Energy Agency (IEA), according to a report from the Financial Times.

Hair apparent: inside the transplant capital of the world – photo essay

The Guardian

Par : Alessandro Gandolfi

9 mars 2026 à 08:00

It is estimated that every year more than one million bald people fly to Istanbul. They go for two reasons – hair transplant quality and competitive costs

“I used to look at my father and understand that I was destined to go bald,” says James McElroy. He smiles when he thinks back to his trip to Istanbul a year ago. “I had a few doubts at the beginning, but today I’m happy and satisfied. Yes, I had a hair transplant, I don’t hide it and I’m not ashamed of it. It was a somewhat intense experience, but I’d do it again – especially now that I’m single. I’m happy to talk about it and I’m happy to receive compliments. That wasn’t the goal, but I appreciate them.”

A patient is reading the terms and conditions of his contract before the transplant begins at Sule Hair Clinic.

Look What You Made Me Do by John Lanchester review – a battle between millennials and boomers

The Guardian

Par : Clare Clark

9 mars 2026 à 08:00

There are sharply observed pleasures to be found in this black comedy of infidelity, revenge and intergenerational tension – but the plot is both implausible and predictable

John Lanchester has distinguished between his nonfiction and his novels as the line between “things happening in the world” and “the things that won’t leave you alone”. Over the last decade and a half that gap appears to have narrowed. His 2012 bestseller, Capital, used the global economic crisis (explained with characteristic verve and lucidity in the nonfiction Whoops!) to lend a sharply moral edge to a sprawling Dickensian story about the London property bubble, told through the class cross-section of a newly affluent south London street. His 2019 follow-up, The Wall, was a dystopian near-future tale in which rising sea levels have exacted a catastrophic toll: a heavily guarded sea wall encircles a Britain determined to fortify its vanishing coastline and keep out the refugees desperately seeking asylum. In 2019, global sea levels reached a record high.

Lanchester’s satirical chops are on full display in his latest, Look What You Made Me Do, but this time his focus is more personal than political. Set in a recognisably professional – for which read excruciatingly smug – north London peopled by architects and agents, Lanchester’s sixth novel is billed by its publishers as a black comedy.

How the ‘Galápagos of west Africa’ is plundered by floating fish factories

The Guardian

Par : Davide Mancini in Bissau

9 mars 2026 à 08:00

A Guardian investigation with DeSmog reveals thousands of tonnes of fish are illegally turned into fishmeal and oil off the coast of Guinea-Bissau

The only ice factory on Bubaque, an island in west Africa’s Guinea-Bissau, is out of service. Local fishers, such as Pedro Luis Pereira, are forced to source ice from factories on the mainland, about 70km away – a six-hour round trip by boat.

“The machines have been broken for months,” Pereira says, as he pulls in his nets on the shore of the island inside the protected Bijagós archipelago. “We’ve alerted the ministry of fisheries, but so far, no one has come to fix them.”

Foreign industrial vessels anchored near the port of Bissau. Photograph: Davide Mancini

A loving homage to pop culture’s also-rans: best podcasts of the week

The Guardian

Par : Hannah J Davies and Hollie Richardson

9 mars 2026 à 08:00

Maisie Adam and Scott Bryan talk comically and sensitively to people who found sudden tabloid and early internet fame in the 00s. Plus, Norse myths and history with Iain Glen from Game of Thrones

It’s all too easy to sneer at pop culture’s also-rans. This series from comic Maisie Adam and journalist Scott Bryan does the opposite, embracing people who found sudden fame – mostly in the 90s and 00s – and telling their stories with humour and care. Guests include Liberty X’s Kelli Young, who thinks she and her bandmates were seen as “too R&B” to win ITV’s Popstars – and is surprisingly grateful to the funk band who sued them. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly

Terraforma review – unhurried portrait of Ascension Island’s human-made nature

The Guardian

Par : Phuong Le

9 mars 2026 à 08:00

Documentary reflects on how Victorian botanists began to remodel a barren ocean outpost, but omits some crucial environmental and social questions

From the dark belly of the ocean rises Ascension Island, a rocky outpost in the Atlantic Ocean born from volcanic eruptions and sediments accumulated over millions of years. While its formation feels like an act of cosmic creation, much of its landscape is human-made. During the Victorian era, British botanists brought plants to be cultivated locally, transforming a once barren land into a green oasis. Using this example as a starting point, Kevin Brennan and Laurence Durkin’s unhurried documentary contemplates the evolution of “terraforming,” a much-theorised ecological process in which humans alter a hostile environment to their needs.

Visually, this film unfolds in a series of static vignettes, which largely capture the natural topography of Ascension. Cracked lava fields and golden sands give way to lush forests, conjuring a striking colour palette of black, yellow, and green. The images are poetic, showcasing a stunning variety of flora and fauna; people are rarely seen on screen, their absence adding a touch of eeriness to the atmosphere.

10 of the best affordable family adventures in Europe

The Guardian

Par : Rhiannon Batten

9 mars 2026 à 08:00

From packrafting in Luxembourg to cycling in Slovenia and eclipse-spotting in Spain, here are some great ways to get the kids into the wild

Several companies offer affordable multi-activity trips for families in Greece, but if you’re looking for something less frenetic, and a bit more challenging for teenagers, how about Greek island-hopping by sea kayak? Running on regular dates through the summer months, Trekking Hellas’s three-day, two‑night odysseys in the Ionian Sea start in Nidri, on Lefkada, and paddle on past Skorpios to Meganisi, camping out at Lakka before continuing the next day to Mikros Gialos for a second night under the stars before turning for home. There are stops for swimming, resting and barbecues along the way, and some thrilling cave detours, but with about six hours of paddling a day, the minimum age is 14.
From €352pp including kayaking and camping equipment, guiding and meals (trekking.gr)

Dear Abby: My mom won’t use her walker even after falling

New York Post

Par : Dear Abby

9 mars 2026 à 08:00

Dear Abby advises a woman who's mother won't use her walker even though she has fallen.

A new start after 60: I’d had several careers but no degree – then I became a palaeontologist at 62

The Guardian

Par : Paula Cocozza

9 mars 2026 à 07:45

In search of a new adventure, Craig Munns went back to school. Now, at 65, he spends his days examining long-vanished life forms

Craig Munns has a large model of a T rex on his desk. He got it with a magazine subscription two decades ago. One day, a few years ago, he was sitting in his study, which was dense with books and yellow sticky notes and posters charting evolution from single cells upward, and he thought, “What am I going to do next in my life?” And his eyes lit upon the T rex.

Munns had recently taken on a job at the public library in Canberra, but it had always rankled with him that he had not studied for a degree, starting instead as an electronics trainee after he left school in Sydney, Australia. So he decided to enrol as a part-time student. He graduated at 62, with honours in palaeontology from the University of New England in Armidale, NSW.

FBI raids homes of self-radicalized ISIS protesters accused of hurling bombs at Gracie Mansion protest

New York Post

Par : Anna Young

9 mars 2026 à 07:22

Photos showed agents hauling evidence, including what looked like computer parts, from Balat's home.

FBI Evidence Response Team agents collected evidence and executed a search warrant at a home associated with 18-year-old terror suspect, Emir Balat in Langhorne, Pennsylvania

Ibraham Kayumi, 19, and Emir Balat, 18, trained with ISIS overseas and packed their bomb with “Mother of Satan,” an explosive long favored by international terrorists, sources said.

Beetroot and goats’ cheese salad and hake with blood oranges: Rosie Healey’s recipes for early spring

The Guardian

Par : Rosie Healey

9 mars 2026 à 07:00

A simple beetroot salad much like one you might be served in a Paris bistro, and a succulent fish fillet with a knockout, tangy dressing

The trio of fennel, blood orange and potato is one of my all-time favourites. It’s clean and fresh, with all the ingredients working in harmony. I often serve it with a piece of fish, which is a beautiful combination. But, first, a simple beetroot salad that reminds me of the ones served in Paris bistros – it’s no fuss and very satisfying.

‘End of an era’: death of Khamenei seen as Iran’s Berlin Wall moment

The Guardian

Par : Robert Tait

8 mars 2026 à 13:00

Iran experts believe the symbolism of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death is overwhelming and that the regime will struggle to fill the power vacuum

Even before US and Israeli missiles began raining down, those sensing the winds of change were forecasting a Berlin Wall moment for Iran.

Mass nationwide demonstrations in January – although savagely repressed, causing the deaths of an estimated tens of thousands – were seen as portents of a reckoning for the country’s ruling theocrats, just as the popular breaching of Berlin’s fearful symbol of Europe’s cold war division spelled the downfall of East Germany’s communist regime in 1989.