Japanese consumers who used to treat foreign-grown rice with scepticism have been forced to develop a taste for it amid domestic shortage
Japan has imported rice from South Korea for the first time in a quarter of a century in an attempt to address soaring prices and growing consumer anger.
South Korean rice arrived in Japan last month for the first time since 1999, according to media reports, as the price of domestically produced grain continued to rise, despite government attempts to relieve the pressure on shoppers.
Disney+ series revisits killing of Brazilian man wrongly identified as a terrorist by Met police officers in 2005
The mother of a man shot dead by police in a London Underground station after being mistaken for a terrorist has said “everyone should watch” a new dramatisation of her son’s killing.
Jean Charles de Menezes was shot seven times by two police marksmen in Stockwell tube station on 22 July 2005. De Menezes was wrongly identified as one of the fugitives involved in a failed bombing two weeks after the 7/7 attack in London, which killed 52 people.
The Guardian is joining forces with dozens of newsrooms around the world to launch the 89 Percent Project—and highlight the fact that the vast majority of the world’s population wants climate action. Read more
How much of a $450 (£339) pot would you give to a charity that cuts carbon emissions by investing in renewable energy, and how much would you keep for yourself? That was the question posed in a recent academic experiment. The answers mattered: real money was handed out as a result to some randomly chosen participants.
The average person gave away about half the money and kept the rest. But what if you had been told beforehand that the vast majority of other people think climate action is really important? Might you have given more to the charity?
He declared destroying the environment a sin, warned that humanity was turning the glorious creation of God into a “polluted wasteland full of debris, desolation and filth”, and located the cause of the climate crisis in people’s “selfish and boundless thirst for power”.
Angela Rayner’s renters’ rights bill is admirable, but it won’t help those living in substandard accommodation
Steve Bundred is a former Audit Commission chief executive
On the tree-lined north London street where I live, scaffolders arrived seven years ago. Metal poles were erected around a housing association property next door to me, owned by the social housing provider Peabody, to allow for external refurbishment work to be carried out. But today, that scaffolding still stands – and those repair works have never been carried out.
“This is yet another example of Peabody’s casual neglect of their residents. They do not respond to emails from me or senior council officers and have also ignored an enforcement notice served on them by planning officers,” the chair of Islington council’s planning committee, Martin Klute, recently told the Islington Tribune.
Peabody owns more than 5% of Islington’s nearly112,000 properties. And it has well below average performance on every key indicator of landlord services. Inaction on dealing with hazardous cladding, damp, rodent infestation or broken-down lifts, and failure to tackle neighbour nuisance or other forms of antisocial behaviour, are typical of the concerns that Peabody tenants raise regularly.
Funeral should be held between the fourth and sixth days after the pope’s death, with heads of state and royalty expected to attend
Cardinals will meet on Tuesday to decide the date for Pope Francis’s funeral, starting a process that will culminate in the election of a new Catholic leader.
The pope, the head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, died at his home in the Vatican on Monday aged 88 after suffering a stroke. He had been recovering from double pneumonia that saw him hospitalised for five weeks.
In a Danish palliative care unit, the alternative to assisted dying is not striving to cure, offering relief and comfort to patients and their families
• This article is nominated for the 2025 edition of the European Press Prize in the Distinguished Reporting category. Originally published in Danish by Politiken
René Damgaard, 67, lies in a hospital bed in the palliative care unit at Hvidovre hospital outside Copenhagen. It’s the first evening of May, and the window is open, letting mild air and the sound of a blackbird singing into the room.
“This is the kind of weather you love the most. When you usually stand and fish at the sandbank,” says his niece, 53-year-old Mette Damgaard. She is leaning over the bed, her face very close to his. She has been sitting like this for a long time.
Decades-long use of chalice at Worcester College highlights violent colonial history of looted human remains, says Prof Dan Hicks
Oxford academics drank from a chalice made from a human skull for decades, a book that explores the violent colonial history of looted human remains has revealed.
The skull-cup, fashioned from a sawn-off and polished braincase adorned with a silver rim and stand, was used regularly at formal dinners at Worcester College, Oxford, until 2015, according to Prof Dan Hicks, the curator of world archaeology at the university’s Pitt Rivers Museum.
When the late Pope Francis stepped on to the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica to give his first speech as leader of the Catholic church in March 2013, he cast away formality by dressing in simple white robes instead of the regal ermine-trimmed cape usually worn by newly elected pontiffs.
The next day, Francis – a name chosen in honour of Francis of Assisi, the Italian saint who renounced a life of luxury to help the poor – returned to the Rome hotel in which he had stayed before the conclave to pick up his luggage and pay his bill. He substituted a plush apostolic apartment for a simple room within the Vatican walls and, unlike his predecessors, did not spend his summers in Castel Gandolfo, an opulent 12th-century fortress close to Rome.
When Pedro Niada awoke to find his house tilting and filling with water, he was confused. He soon realised he was in a race against time to save everyone
Jolted awake at 4.30am, Pedro “Peter” Niada was certain a meteorite had fallen near his seaside home, lifting it from its foundations and sending it flying through the air. He took two steps down the stairs, felt water splash his feet and realised the house was sinking.
Nothing made sense. Why was the house tilting? Why could he hear what sounded like a waterfall outside? The sound of breaking timber led him to pull back the curtain at The Flying Fish (El Pez Volador), the 12-bed tourist lodge he had built by hand.
People with albinism are often attacked and even killed for body parts. As elections approach, activist Tonney Mkwapatira fears the situation may get worse
Tonney Mkwapatira was making a rare visit back to his home village from the Malawian city of Blantyre when he saw his childhood friend for the last time. Just a week after Mkwapatira returned to Blantyre he heard that his friend, a security guard for a church, had been murdered.
“His name was Chikumbutso Masina and we used to chat almost every day. We looked alike and it was painful when people missed him because they used to ask me questions like, “Oh we heard that you had died?” It really touched me and I will never forget,” he says.
The American biotech company Colossal Biosciences recently made headlines around the world with claims it had resurrected the dire wolf, an animal that went extinct at the end of the last ice age. But does what the company has done amount to ‘de-extinction’ or should we instead think of these pups as genetically modified versions of the grey wolves that exist today? Science correspondent Nicola Davis tells Madeleine Finlay about the process that created these wolves, how other companies are joining the effort to use genetic modification in conservation, and why some experts have serious ethical questions about bringing back species whose habitats no longer exist
GPs working in the most deprived areas in England are paid an average salary £5,525 less a year than their counterparts working in wealthier areas, according to a study.
The report, by researchers at the University of Manchester and published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, analysed data from more than 8,500 GPs between 2015 and 2021 in the GP work life survey.
By the time a team of police officers and engineers stormed a disused office block in Wigan, Greater Manchester, on a November morning last year, the building had been abandoned.
Left behind were rooms filled with thousands of cannabis plants: a nursery on the first floor, the growing crop on the second, and leaves drying out on the third. The criminal gang behind the marijuana farm is thought to have fled after the grid operator cut off the stolen electricity used to power scores of LED lamps.
Having missed out in my youth, I thought that was that – until I took a revelatory trip with my sons. We’re going again this year
Youth might not be wasted on the young, but for the longest time I thought Interrailing was. When I was a student, as the 1980s became the 1990s, many of my friends took the opportunity to discover Europe by train and they all returned with amazing stories of discovery. But for long-forgotten reasons, it was something I was always going to do but never actually got round to. And then suddenly I was in my late 20s and reluctantly resigned myself to never doing it, having been reliably informed by so many people that it was an opportunity only open to those under the age of 26.
Fast forward a few decades to spring 2023 and I’m trying to decide where to take my teenage children for our first holiday in five years – a gap caused largely, but not wholly, by the pandemic. My most memorable childhood holiday had come in 1981 when, over the course of a few days, my dad drove my family and our caravan from Nottingham to Pisa. I still remember the incredible feeling of my horizons broadening overnight. I’d love to give my children a similar experience, except I don’t drive.
Phil Mongredien is a production editor on Guardian Opinion and Long Reads
Emma Raducanu has revealed she intends to continue her coaching partnership with Mark Petchey on an ad hoc basis following her quarter-final run at the Miami Open last month.
“We’re keeping things informal for now and it’s been working,” she said in a joint interview with the Guardian and the BBC before the Madrid Open. “He’s someone I’ve known for a long time and I do feel like I can trust him.
Just hours after wishing the world a happy Easter, the 267th head of the Roman Catholic church passed away. What was his legacy and who will take his place? Catherine Pepinster reports
Pope Francis was working until the end. On Easter Sunday, the 88-year-old head of the Catholic church offered an Easter greeting to the crowds in St Peter’s Square who had gathered for mass. By the next morning, after months battling pneumonia and bronchitis, he had passed away.
From the beginning, the first Latin American pope wanted his papacy to be different. Catherine Pepinster, the former editor of the Tablet, says one of his first notable actions was to go to a prison, rather than a church, to wash people’s feet in the traditional Maundy Thursday rite. It was typical of a pontiff who refused many of the luxuries of his predecessors – from giving up an apartment in the papal palace to only wearing simple leather shoes.
From Timor-Leste to PNG and the Philippines, millions of Catholics are marking the death of Pope Francis
The death of Pope Francis has left millions of people in south-east Asia and the Pacific in deep mourning, as they remember a Catholic leader known for his humility, interfaith commitment and dedication to their region.
In tiny Timor-Leste, where more than 95% of people are Catholic, Francis was the first pope to visit since its independence.
Palestinian activist, held in Louisiana detention facility, only allowed to call in as wife delivered their first child
Noor Abdalla, the wife of detained Columbia university graduate and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, has announced the birth of their son.
In a statement released on Monday evening, Abdalla wrote: “I welcomed our son into the world earlier today without Mahmoud by my side. Despite our request for ICE to allow Mahmoud to attend the birth, they denied his temporary release to meet our son. This was a purposeful decision by ICE to make me, Mahmoud, and our son suffer.”
For years, we’ve looked at democracies like the US, Germany and South Korea, disturbed by what a nation divided along gender and generation lines could look like. Australia, by comparison, seemed less polarised, but new research hints that something’s starting to shift – slowly, unevenly and with plenty of caveats – among young Australians too.
But let’s not jump the gun – because the story is more complicated than it first appears, and framing “young men” as a purely reactionary force isn’t going to get us anywhere helpful.
On a stinking hot November day, seven years ago, Grace Vegesana and a handful of other young climate activists set up a small stage in a large square in Sydney’s CBD – and waited. Inspired by the first school striker for climate, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, the high school students decided to organise their own rally.
Vegesana expected a hundred people to show up. Five thousand came. “It was like, oh my God, we’ve unleashed some kind of beast, people want more,” she recalls. In the months afterwards crowds doubled and then tripled.
Russian president has previously spurned direct negotiations unless Ukraine holds elections; Ukrainian delegation headed to London. What we know on day 1,154
I love music. I think there’s nothing better than immersing myself in a really powerful song. But I don’t expect the rest of the general public wants to listen to whatever my earworm of the day is. That is why God invented headphones.
For some reason, though, I assume a subset of the population weren’t informed of this miracle invention. These are the people who insist on playing music aloud through their phones – or worse, through a handheld speaker – in public places.
Passport, driver’s license and keys also reportedly taken but not clear if theft was random or if Trump ally was targeted
A purse belonging to Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, that contained $3,000 in cash, her passport, driver’s license and her apartment keys was stolen while she ate dinner at a restaurant in downtown Washington on Sunday night.
The secretary revealed the theft to reporters at the White House Easter egg roll on Monday. Noem said the incident remained unresolved.
Early in his papacy Pope Francis said the name for God is mercy. He understood the church had become too doctrinaire, divisive and judgmental for too many people. The drift of Catholics from conventional practice in the west said as much. He knew the church had alienated the LGBTQ community, discriminated against women and resisted full participation for divorced and remarried Catholics. He acknowledged that previous popes had not confronted the clerical sex abuse scandal. He wanted to do better and the Catholic world was with him, the institution was not.
The Catholic church by its nature is a conservative institution. It uses inertia as a management tool. Change is a slow and drawn-out affair. Francis regularly railed against clericalism because of its sense of entitlement and misuse of power. He saw it as one of the reasons why the church became obsessed with protecting its image instead of believing and caring for the victims of clerical sex abuse. He also realised the clerical instinct to protect their own and conceal their crimes was underpinned by their exclusive hold on the workings of the church.
Veteran breaks down after beating Joe O’Connor 10-7
Mark Allen looks to past after seeing off Fan Zhengyi
The tearful four-time world champion John Higgins overcame overwhelming emotions to beat Joe O’Connor 10-7 at the Crucible.
The 49-year-old was out of sorts in losing the morning session 5-4 but returned later in the day to turn things around and admitted afterwards he was battling strong feelings.
María Isabel Salvador tells security council the country could face ‘total chaos’ without necessary international aid
Haiti, where rampant gang violence has surged in recent weeks, is approaching a “point of no return” leading to “total chaos”, the UN special representative to the troubled Caribbean nation has warned.
“As gang violence continues to spread to new areas of the country, Haitians experience growing levels of vulnerability and increasing skepticism about the ability of the state to respond to their needs,” María Isabel Salvador told the UN securitycouncil.
The university is fighting back against the administration’s threat to review about $9bn in federal funding after Harvard officials refused to comply with a list of demands that included appointing an outside overseer to ensure that the viewpoints being taught at the university were “diverse”. Harvard is specifically looking to halt a freeze on $2.2bn in grants.
‘Collectively, as players and as a club, we failed’
Jamie Vardy has apologised to Leicester’s fans for the club’s relegation and labelled his own season as a “total embarrassment”.
Leicester were relegated on Sunday with five games of the Premier League campaign to play after defeat at home to Liverpool. That loss saw Leicester slump to a record ninth successive top-flight home defeat without scoring a goal.
WTC format ‘as if designed on the back of a fag packet’
New 2025 edition includes tributes to Graham Thorpe
Wisden hits the shelves this week and, as well as unveiling its latest batch of award winners, it has trained its sights on the International Cricket Council. The World Test Championship, the book argues, is a “shambles masquerading as a showpiece”.
The publication of the sport’s annual bible is timely, with the future of the WTC discussed recently at ICC meetings in Zimbabwe. In typically opaque fashion, the sport’s governing body is yet to announce the outcome of the debate.
Ekaterina Barabash, 63, facing up to 10 years in jail due to outspoken criticism of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine
A Russian journalist who faced up to 10 years in prison for criticising the army has escaped house arrest and is now wanted by police, Russian state media has reported.
Ekaterina Barabash, 63, had been arrested in February on suspicion of spreading false information about the Russian armed forces in several posts she made on social media.
There is no need to attempt to rewrite history by arguing that Tottenham failed to see what they had in Nuno Espírito Santo. All that matters now is that this meticulous, softly spoken manager is the perfect fit for Nottingham Forest.
They have provided Nuno with the perfect platform for his counterpunching tactics and, in what would surely be the story of the Premier League season, are closing in on Champions League football after beating Ange Postecoglou’s half-hearted Spurs.
Daniel Farke lauds his side for delivering ‘in great style’
The Burnley head coach, Scott Parker, described his third Premier League promotion as his best yet after taking Burnley up, while Daniel Farke said Leeds are “back where we belong” after securing a top-flight return.
Parker has taken Fulham and Bournemouth to the Premier League in previous jobs and will have a third chance to challenge the elite next season after two goals from Josh Brownhill edged Burnley past third-placed Sheffield United to ensure their opponents can no longer catch them or Leeds.
Nayib Bukele offered to exchange 252 Venezuelan migrants deported to El Salvador for 252 prisoners in Venezuela
Venezuela’s chief prosecutor has accused El Salvador’s president of being a “tyrannical” human trafficker after Nayib Bukele offered to exchange the 252 Venezuelan migrants deported to his country’s prisons by Donald Trump for the same number of political prisoners in Venezuela.
Bukele made the offer on Sunday night in a message addressed directly to his authoritarian counterpart Nicolás Maduro. “I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that includes the repatriation of 100% of the 252 Venezuelans who were deported, in exchange for the release and delivery of an identical number … of the thousands of political prisoners that you hold,” El Salvador’s leader posted.
Potential danger to humans and wildlife from harmful pesticide discovered in fish at 10 times safety limit
Residues of the insecticide DDT have been found to persist at “alarming rates” in trout even after 70 years, potentially posing a significant danger to humans and wildlife that eat the fish, research has found.
Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, known as DDT, was used on forested land in New Brunswick, Canada, from 1952 to 1968. The researchers found traces of it remained in brook trout in some lakes, often at levels 10 times higher than the recommended safety threshold for wildlife.
The Argentine pontiff was a vital progressive influence on issues such as migration, and fought for a more merciful, less rigid Catholic church
Defying doctors’ orders to rest following his battle with double pneumonia, a weak Pope Francis last week visited Rome’s Regina Coeli prison, where he blew kisses towards inmates and spent half an hour in discussion with some of those incarcerated. Sadly, this Maundy Thursday encounter turned out to be one of the last acts of a supremely hardworking papacy. In retrospect, its location was entirely appropriate.
Throughout his 12 years in Saint Peter’s chair, Francis sought admirably to refocus the Catholic church’s energies on the marginalised, while challenging the power of entrenched interests. Coming, as he put it, “from the ends of the earth”, the first non-European pontiff of modern times was an outsider pope and a radical one. Within the church, the Argentine was a sometimes spikily direct reformer; outside it, he was a significant, high-profile ally of progressive causes.
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The world champion went from one masterclass on the track to another off it with his discontent at recent FIA rule changes
In the aftermath of a superb drive at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, Max Verstappen went on to give something of another masterclass, in putting across an opinion while ostensibly declining to say anything at all.
It was an arch display of discontent and dissatisfaction, delivered with a disarming smile, and aimed at the FIA; the latest expression of a cumulative wave of disquiet with the governing body.
Numerous celebrities, many among the nearly 1.3 billion Catholics worldwide, expressed condolences for the late Pope Francis, who died early on Monday – the morning after Easter Sunday – at the age of 88.
Martin Scorsese, who has grappled with Catholic faith in several of his films, called Pope Francis, “in every way, a remarkable human being” in a statement to Variety. “He acknowledged his own failings. He radiated wisdom. He radiated goodness. He had an ironclad commitment to the good. He knew in his soul that ignorance was a terrible plague on humanity. So he never stopped learning. And he never stopped enlightening. And, he embraced, preached and practiced forgiveness. Universal and constant forgiveness.”
Out of the Woods, the fourth novel of Gretchen Shirm, is a sobering reflection on the necessity of bearing witness. It is also inseparable from real events: the massacre in 1995 of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by the Serbian Army of Republika Srpska in Srebrenica, and the later conviction of a senior military commander, Radislav Krstić, for genocide. The novel, though imperfect, elevates the lived experience of survivors with care and verisimilitude, while asking probing questions about how to comprehend their trauma.
Jess, an introverted Australian woman in her 50s, has moved to the Netherlands to work as a legal secretary at The Hague. It’s the year 2000, and a United Nations tribunal is prosecuting war crimes committed in former Yugoslavia, with Jess’s days filled with transcribing the testimony of survivors of the Bosnian war. As the trial unfolds, two divergent feelings increasingly disorient her: the yawning gulf between the atrocities and her written account; and her sympathy for one of the defendants, a military commander named K.
… she was writing these words down but none of them seemed to make sense and she wondered whether something was wrong, whether the translation was off. She waited for someone to tell the witness to stop, to say that an error had been made.
Leader of the Catholic church who pushed for social and economic justice, and an urgent response to the climate crisis
The election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as pope in March 2013 was unexpected, even to the then cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires himself. He may have come a distant second in the previous papal conclave in 2005, but at 76 and, following the resignation on the grounds of old age of the candidate who had come first back then, the 85-year-old Benedict XVI – Bergoglio was convinced that a younger man was needed.
However, the majority of cardinals who gathered in the Sistine Chapel to vote were looking for something more than (relative) youth. Top of their agenda as they assembled was openness to fresh thinking after 35 years of no change under the almost seamless reigns of Pope John Paul II and Benedict, his erstwhile right-hand man. And so they surprised everyone by opting for Catholicism’s first Jesuit pope, the first Latin American successor to Saint Peter, and first leader from outside Europe in over a millennium.
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