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If the monarch thought his sniffy letter would put Harry and Meghan at a disadvantage, he doesn’t understand how the celebrity world works
Once again, it has been a lively week for the Real Housewives of Windsor franchise, with Harry and Meghan back in the UK for precisely 12 days before the king fired out a letter via the lord chamberlain on Monday, reminding viewers that the Sussexes are “private citizens” and not to treat them as working royals. You have to say the producers on this unscripted reality show are truly at the top of their game with these targeted provocations. Harry and Meghan duly took the bait and issued an intemperately hurt rejoinder – but we’ll get to that in a bit.
First, let’s deal with King Charles’s missive to “relevant senior stakeholders across government, the military and Lord Lieutenancies”. Ugh. Not to be too aesthetically sensitive, but I think we can all live without the sovereign being reduced to the ghastly language of “relevant senior stakeholders”. What next? Seeking “buy-in” for ribbon-cutting events and referring to posies as “high levels of audience engagement”? It does all rather reinforce the idea that the Windsors’ cringe-makingly self-styled “the firm” really is some dreary mid-range company with a wan Meet Our Team page on its website, in which Prince William – carefully photographed without a tie – explains that he “enjoys long walks with the dog and is a passionate Aston Villa supporter”.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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Continue reading...Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:31:49 GMT
Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham collected the testimony of 24 insiders who helped remotely target Gazans’ homes. They explain how they got these self-professed ‘small cogs’ to talk about the killing
On a darkened rooftop in Tel Aviv, Israeli intelligence officers outline the details of their work. These men tell us how they helped develop an AI mapping tool that trawled for phone signals and recommended apartment buildings in Gaza to bomb. Indirectly, they admit, they are responsible for thousands of deaths, but they never spoke up because that wasn’t their place. “My role is technical,” says one. “I’m just a small cog,” says another.
NAZA – directed by the Israeli film-makers Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham and produced by the Guardian – is a chilling documentary about a mass slaughter that was authorised at the highest levels of government. But it is also, primarily, about the process, the system, the little links in the killing chain. Szor and Abraham build their film around the accounts of 24 anonymised military and intelligence insiders. NAZA, we learn, is an acronym used by the intelligence service to indicate how many civilians it expects to die in an airstrike on Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces prefer to target Hamas terrorists in their homes at night – and if they live with their family, or in heavily populated neighbourhoods, too bad. At one point, a source claims, approval was given to kill 500 NAZA for one Hamas member.
Continue reading...Fri, 11 Sep 2026 15:18:52 GMT
Matthew Klimow recalls the day a hijacked airliner crashed into the headquarters of the US defence department in Arlington, Virginia
“All day I had been a good soldier: stolid, resolute, unemotional, rational, and dispassionate,” writes Matthew Klimow, recalling the wave of emotion that overwhelmed him as he arrived home from the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. There was sadness for the lives lost. But there was another emotion, too: humiliation.
“We, as a nation, had been humbled,” writes the retired army colonel, who remained at the Pentagon even after it was struck by a hijacked airliner, killing all 64 people onboard and 125 inside the building. “The fighting force of which I was part had been impotent, unable to protect our fellow citizens. The darkness I felt matched the darkness inside my house as I opened the door.”
Continue reading...Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:16:52 GMT
The US president is ever more wayward – and has little interest in defending Europe. The constitution may hold him to account, but we can’t wait
If Americans vote for a Republican majority in both houses of Congress in November, “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.” But they must not spend it in Canada or China or anywhere else outside the US. So said Donald Trump in Texas on Wednesday in advance of the forthcoming midterm elections. He further told voters to “Pretend that I’m on the ballot”. It was a climactic moment in an almost two-hour rant.
Trump does not have the required trillion dollars in his pocket, and it would be illegal to disperse such a sum without congressional approval. In any case, JD Vance now appears to have rowed back on the promise.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:00:04 GMT
Do you gain weight once you stop using them? Do they make your face saggy? Can they improve your mental health? Experts explain whether 13 common beliefs about GLP-1s are true or false
FALSE “GLP-1 medications mimic Glucagon-like peptide-1 – one of the hormones involved in appetite regulation. It doesn’t completely suppress hunger, but it is powerful,” says Dr Federica Amati, nutrition lead at Imperial College School of Medicine and author of The Appetite Reset. “The medicine is about 1,000 times stronger than what we naturally produce from our gut,” she explains. As food passes through the gut, cells called L-cells sense the nutrients, which sparks the production of the GLP-1 hormone. Without the drugs, these bursts of GLP-1 production last a few minutes. “It’s a bit like a sparkler. In comparison, the drugs are like a bonfire that roars for a week,” says Amati. Because the GLP-1 hormone stays in your body for longer if you are on the drugs, you feel fuller faster and your appetite gets suppressed, but you will eventually get hungry.
Continue reading...Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:00:07 GMT
The Centre of Chinese Contemporary Art closed in 2021 after a series of controversies. Now it’s been relaunched under a new name – and with a new mission
In March 2020, the visual artist JJ Chan was assembling video footage for a group exhibition scheduled at the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester. Centred on family VHS tapes, and titled A New Constellation: Chinese Diaspora Now, the artwork was an exploration of Chan’s emotionally complex relationship to Hong Kong, their parents’ birthplace. When Chan asked for guidance after the sudden departure of the initial curator, the artist discovered that the gallery did not employ anyone who was Chinese: 12 out of the 13 staff members were white, while most of the front-facing (unpaid) volunteers were of Chinese descent.
Fearing their art would be shaped through a white lens, Chan withdrew and published an open letter to the centre, writing: “My experience, and my trauma, are being used as a leg-up into an industry for an already overrepresented demographic.” Later that year, the organisation recruited seven artists of Chinese heritage to address the lack of diversity before that initiative was cancelled when the artists raised issues surrounding institutional racism with the gallery. The artist-led working group subsequently petitioned for an international boycott of the institution resulting in the resignation of six board members and several employees. After closing due to Covid in 2020, the arts space never reopened.
Continue reading...Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:00:04 GMT
Bill’s failure in Commons sparks anger among its supporters after Lords blocked earlier legislation
A renewed attempt to legalise assisted dying has been voted down by MPs in a decision that is likely to scupper the idea for a political generation, sparking anger among supporters after an earlier bill was blocked by the Lords.
A private member’s bill put forward by Labour’s Lauren Edwards, which would have permitted assisted dying in England and Wales in certain limited circumstances, was defeated by 286 to 270 at second reading, the first chance MPs have to vote on a measure.
Continue reading...Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:53:19 GMT
President appears to tie Iran war to ‘sacred oath’ to victims killed in September 11 attacks as memorials are held across the US
On 11 September, 25 years ago, Osama bin Laden drove with a small number of al-Qaida retainers and aides to a remote location in eastern Afghanistan. His convoy of SUVs was accompanied by a minivan converted into a makeshift communications centre.
The van’s rudimentary equipment did not allow Bin Laden to watch the 19 men he had started sending to the US more than a year before fly planes into the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon near Washington DC, killing about 3,000 people. But he listened as shocked radio announcers broke the news.
Continue reading...Fri, 11 Sep 2026 18:00:37 GMT
Rampant Yemeni fighters take control of island in narrow point of Bab al-Mandab strait, which Saudi is relying on for oil exports
Yemen’s rampant Houthi forces have captured the strategic island of Perim in the Bab al-Mandab strait, expanding their control of the narrow waterway, one of the world’s vital shipping routes.
The Iran-aligned Houthis took control of the volcanic island after forces allied to the UN-backed, Aden-based government left in the latest of a dramatic series of reverses along Yemen’s west coast in recent days, including the loss of the port city of Mocha on Thursday.
Continue reading...Fri, 11 Sep 2026 15:55:32 GMT
Letter from 70 MPs and peers follows Anthropic employee’s claim new technology could wipe out humans
More than 70 MPs and peers have urged Andy Burnham to back a ban on the creation of artificial superintelligence (ASI) and lead an international movement to stop the technology after a week of warnings from experts of a 10% chance it could kill all humans.
Fifteen former government ministers, along with the former head of the civil service Robin Butler, senior Labour MPs including John McDonnell and leading Conservatives, Liberal Democrat and Scottish National party MPs have written to the prime minister. They urged him to throw the government’s weight behind a bill, tabled in the Commons on Tuesday, that would prohibit ASI – an as-yet-nonexistent AI that would outcompete human capabilities in most domains.
Continue reading...Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:54:35 GMT