With much of the world’s oil supplies out of action, Russia could step in to meet demand in China and India
A prolonged energy crisis triggered by the widening war in the Middle East could offer an economic lifeline to Russia’s war machine at a moment when it was beginning to show signs of strain.
The sharp weakening and possible collapse of the regime in Iran would deprive the Kremlin of one of its closest regional partners. But that setback could be outweighed by an economic windfall if disruption pushes buyers toward Russian energy, alongside a possible slowdown in western arms supplies to Ukraine.
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© Photograph: Amr Alfiky/Reuters
© Photograph: Amr Alfiky/Reuters
© Photograph: Amr Alfiky/Reuters
Peppers stuffed with freekeh, lamb and spicy tomato sauce, and a classic Levantine aubergine dip with preserved lemon and dill
I still remember, when I was a kid, the end of spring and early summer when markets in Jerusalem and across Palestine overflowed with freshly harvested freekeh. As you approached, the air carried a smoky, earthy aroma. Freekeh is an ancient grain, a staple across the Middle East and Turkey, made from green wheat roasted over open fires to burn off the husks, which gives it the characteristic nutty flavour. The name comes from the Arabic freek, meaning “to rub”, which describes how the grains are cleaned, dried, cracked and stored for the year.
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© Photograph: Kim Lightbody/The Guardian. Food and prop styling: Florence Blair. Food styling assistant: Phoebe Altman.
© Photograph: Kim Lightbody/The Guardian. Food and prop styling: Florence Blair. Food styling assistant: Phoebe Altman.
© Photograph: Kim Lightbody/The Guardian. Food and prop styling: Florence Blair. Food styling assistant: Phoebe Altman.
The PM’s in-tray is overflowing. But he can’t afford to neglect the real issue that is distorting our politics and the way we live
At home and abroad, Labour and its leader are under siege. Though the Gorton and Denton result is history now, the repercussions roil his party and underpin the fight for its future.
Abroad, the policy rift within the Labour tribe is just as bad, with the fear that the party will be dragged backwards into the wreckage of another illegal war in the Middle East. Yet again Labour and Starmer are damned both ways, with much of the party raging at its leader and a “very disappointed” Donald Trump angry, not appeased.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
On Thursday 30 April, ahead of May elections join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss the threat to Labour from the Greens and Reform and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader.
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© Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images
In my tribe, the Dard Shin, girls’ dreams are often over by 13. It is time we cleared a path towards them all fulfilling their potential
I sit my office in Srinagar surrounded by the steady, safe hum of the secondary school where I work. As academic head, my mind is occupied with curriculums and pupil progress. But my soul is 130km north of the Jammu and Kashmir city, behind the jagged peaks of the Razdan Pass, in the silence of the Tulail valley.
I am a daughter of the Dard Shin. We are a tribe whose history is etched in the Himalayan granite by the glacial water of the Kishanganga River.
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© Photograph: Courtesy of Amreen Qadir
© Photograph: Courtesy of Amreen Qadir
© Photograph: Courtesy of Amreen Qadir
Getting platforms to comply with the restrictions was no small feat. But it’s too early to measure the real-world mental health outcomes
As the UK becomes the latest country to consider following Australia’s lead on a social media ban for teenagers, a question Australians are repeatedly being asked is: how is it going?
“Our data is still minimal,” says Caroline Thain, national clinical adviser with the mental health organisation Headspace. “We’re really waiting for a few more months before we do a deeper dive.”
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© Photograph: Hollie Adams/Reuters
© Photograph: Hollie Adams/Reuters
© Photograph: Hollie Adams/Reuters
Loud, brash and blokey, it’s not nearly as fresh as the director’s last take on the sleuth 15 years ago. There are flashes of fun, even if Moriarty blows the lead off the screen
Guy Ritchie has made a new TV series about Sherlock Holmes and the long and the short of it is … hmm. But first, some questions. Does the eight-part mystery-drama include scenes in which flippant young men in flat caps shout “Oi” while hurtling through the air in slow motion? It does. Are there bare knuckle biff-ups during which bulbous cockneys cheer on other bulbous cockneys and Irish folk music diddles frantically in the background? There are. Might there also be bits where everything suddenly goes really fast for no reason, effortful banter between bruisers in tweed trousers, blundering rozzers and the sense that while female characters are welcome to contribute to the plot, they are very much excluded from being any sort of fun?
Well, duh. Or rather, strike a light an’ cor blimey, guv’nor, you’ve got this Guy Ritchie geezer bang to rights. For here is Young Sherlock, a very large and very loud new series for Prime Video that was “executive produced and directed by the man who made Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, then that one with Brad Pitt, then some other films that weren’t either of those ones apparently” written through it like a stick of bleedin’ rock.
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© Photograph: Daniel Smith/PA
© Photograph: Daniel Smith/PA
© Photograph: Daniel Smith/PA
(Columbia)
The music on Styles’s new album is muted, subtle and pleasant – but from the title downwards, he has a real problem with words
Everything about the launch of Harry Styles’s fourth solo album underlines that its author is a very big deal indeed. Record stores in the UK are opening at midnight or first thing in the morning on the day of release, the better for fans to avail themselves of a copy at once. Styles has been announced as curator of this year’s Meltdown festival at London’s Southbank Centre, an honour previously bestowed on Scott Walker, Patti Smith, Yoko Ono, Ornette Coleman and David Bowie. Last week’s Brit awards featured not merely a beautifully choreographed performance of the album’s lead single, Aperture, but a comedy skit that was, essentially, a two-and-a-half-minute-long advert for Styles’s new album: there was no doubt who the organisers thought the star of the show was. Most striking of all, the accompanying tour largely eschews actual touring in favour of lengthy residencies in one venue per country, or even continent: North America is covered by a staggering 30 dates at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The expectation seemed to be that Styles’s fans are so devoted, they’ll cross the country to see him, rather than vice versa.
This sense, that people will travel wherever Harry Styles wants them to, attends the album itself. It is devoid of unequivocal pop bangers along the lines of As It Was or Watermelon Sugar. Aperture’s hazy, post-club mood wasn’t a soft launch. Whether it’s dealing in mid-tempo house beats topped with plangent piano chords, as on American Girls, or the acoustic singer-songwriter-isms of Paint By Numbers, a lot of what’s here feels like music made in the small hours, with the curtains drawn against the dawn. It somehow manages to sound understated even on Are You Listening Yet? – which variously features a clattering dance rhythm, a bassline not unlike that of Reel 2 Real’s I Like to Move It and a spoken word vocal that inexorably recalls Robbie Williams’s Rock DJ – perhaps because it doesn’t really have a chorus, or rather, the part you assume is going to lead into the chorus turns out to be the chorus itself.
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© Photograph: Johnny Dufort
© Photograph: Johnny Dufort
© Photograph: Johnny Dufort
The visionary photographer captured the ugliness of racism in America, as well as the strength and dignity of those who opposed it – from cleaners in the corridors of power to Martin Luther King Jr proclaiming his dream
In the summer of 1956, the American news magazine Life dispatched its first Black staff photographer, Gordon Parks, to Alabama, with a brief to document racial segregation in the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott. The trip was a perilous one, but Parks, then in his early 40s, was already on a career trajectory that would mark him out as one of the most consequential artists of his generation. The images he returned with were remarkable: intimate and vivid depictions of the daily disgrace of the Jim Crow south. They still feel prescient today.
The photographs form the backbone of a new survey of Parks’ work, opening this week at the Alison Jacques gallery in London and curated by Bryan Stevenson, the famed civil rights attorney. Stevenson is based in Montgomery where he founded a museum and memorial to commemorate Black victims of lynchings and where some of Parks’ work hangs on permanent display. He selected images taken between 1942 and 1967, the artist’s most active time as a photographer and an acute period of unrest in the American experiment.
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© Photograph: Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation, New York and Alison Jacques © The Gordon Parks Foundation
© Photograph: Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation, New York and Alison Jacques © The Gordon Parks Foundation
© Photograph: Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation, New York and Alison Jacques © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Her first album was a huge hit – then she faced the sudden tragedy of her husband’s early death. She describes the rupture of grief, her return to music and the harsh reality of fame as a woman in the 00s
Twenty years ago, Corinne Bailey Rae had her first huge hit single, and her only one. Put Your Records On was one of the great feelgood anthems of 2006. A warm, breezy hymn to authenticity, its key message was keep playing those songs you love, and don’t give a toss about what others tell you is cool. The single was accompanied by her first self-titled album, which topped the charts in the UK and reached number four in the US.
If there was one thing Bailey Rae seemed assured of, it was longevity. She wrote or co-wrote her own songs, had a voice that was compared to that of Billie Holiday and Minnie Riperton, there was a timelessness to her music and she was super smart (four As at A-level, if you must know). Then she was hit by a tragedy that derailed her. In 2008, her husband of seven years and fellow musician Jason Rae died of an accidental drug overdose.
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© Photograph: Ulrike Rindermann
© Photograph: Ulrike Rindermann
© Photograph: Ulrike Rindermann
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