The prince was right to fight – and also right about the need to stop good journalism being sullied by the bad. Trust has been severely damaged
The apology is “full and unequivocal”. The damages to be paid are huge. Appearing before the Leveson inquiry in 2011, Rupert Murdoch pronounced that to be “the most humble day of my life”
.News Group’s settlement today
of Prince Harry’s monumental case citing phone hacking, surveillance and misuse of private information by journalists and private investigatorsmay make this another such day.It appears to vindicate Harry, not just in complaints about his treatment by the Murdoch press, but also the intrusions into the life of his late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales. One can only speculate about the sting of that within the Murdoch empire.
But if the best courtroom drama ends with a sense of justice being done and a triumphant winner, the long-awaited denouement is unlikely to win awards and the satisfaction for the victor, having settled the case must be – to some degree – limited. In this tale of celebrity, scandal and corruption there has been no obvious winner.
Any funding disparities can be addressed, but another pandemic is coming – and we’ll need the WHO to help fight it
This week, in East Sussex, a case of mpox was announced
, the sixth UK case since October. New cases have also been detected recently in France, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Canada and the US as mpox spreads out of Africa. Also this week, Tanzania’s president confirmed an outbreak of Marburg
, an Ebola-like virus, which the country’s health minister had previously denied, only after the World Health Organization (WHO) independently reported an outbreak of nine suspected cases and eight deaths.
These two new reports of infectious diseases, thousands of miles apart, emphasise why, if a World Health Organization did not exist, it would have to be created to identify and prevent the spread of infectious diseases worldwide.
Gordon Brown was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010
Our job is to imagine scenarios from the impact of the climate crisis to the rise of AI – and decision-makers need our help
Emma Newman’s Planetfall science-fiction series was shortlisted for the best series Hugo award
I am an imaginative person, but I never once imagined I would find myself in a room with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) talking about what the world could be like many decades into the future. But that is what I have been doing recently, as one of several science-fiction authors on the Creative Futures
project, a partnership between Coventry University and the MoD’s defence science and technology laboratory.
As it seems the world is hellbent on making some of the dystopian futures we have imagined become reality, I raised my concerns about how our work would be used. But we weren’t there to suggest ideas for weapons of mass destruction. We were there to talk about things such as the impact of the climate crisis and potential future technologies, and how both could impact society. What kind of crises could arise and what sort of disaster relief may be required. The sci-fi writers of the past
did a pretty decent job of predicting our present – from the moon landings (Jules Verne, 1865) to the use of geostationary satellites for global communications (Arthur C Clarke, 1945
) – so I can see why the MoD wanted our contributions.
Emma Newman is an author, podcaster and audiobook narrator. Her Planetfall science-fiction series was shortlisted for the best series Hugo award
Germany’s capital was known for its affordable rents. Now ‘furnished temporary’ flats risk destroying the heart of the city
From London and other overpriced cities, we often look to Berlin as a beacon of progressive housing politics. Renting in the capital, as some 84% of households do
, is associated with secure, unlimited, rent-controlled tenancies. Berliners have rallied behind moves to freeze rents
and expropriate hundreds of thousands of apartments from corporate landlords
. But in the last few years, Berlin’s housing crisis has escalated to unprecedented proportions, with median asking rents across the city rising by 21.2%
in 2023 alone. Far from “poor but sexy
”, as it was once dubbed by its own mayor, Berlin now has one of the most overheated property markets in the world.
The reasons for Berlin’s housing crisis are complex, yet there is one simple and resolvable mechanism driving the stratospheric rent increases of recent years: the large-scale exploitation by landlords of a strange loophole in German federal law. If apartments are rented out as “temporary” and “furnished”, owners can evade tenancy regulations and charge considerably higher rents.
Tim White is a researcher and writer studying housing, cities and inequality. He is Alexander von Humboldt research fellow at the Free University of Berlin and visiting fellow at the London School of Economics
Difficult choices between alignment with Europe and the US are coming at the prime minister fast. He risks losing control of the debate
When all eyes at Westminster are fixed on Washington
, it is easy to forget how little attention is paid back in return.
Unlike Mexico and Canada, Britain doesn’t have a long border with the US. It doesn’t rival America’s superpower primacy on the planet, unlike China. And it doesn’t export more goods across the Atlantic than it imports – a trait Donald Trump despises about the European Union.
