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The Guardian view on the killing of Gaza’s journalists: Israel wants to stop the world from seeing what it’s doing | Editorial

The Guardian view on the killing of Gaza’s journalists: Israel wants to stop the world from seeing what it’s doing | Editorial

This is the most lethal war for the media in recent times. A generation of journalists is being wiped out Day by day, the death toll rises, the war crimes mount, and the outrage grows. Last Wednesday, the pope demanded that Israel stop its “collective punishment” of Gaza’s population. A day later, António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, warned that “the levels of death and destruction … are without parallel in recent times”. More than 500 UN staff have pressed the human rights chief, Volker Türk, to call it genocide. Half of registered voters in the US have already concluded that that is what Israel is doing in Gaza. The agony is deepening. On Friday, the Israeli military declared famine-hit Gaza City to be a combat zone, intensifying its assault and ending “tactical pauses” that allowed limited – if utterly inadequate – food delivery. Many inhabitants are physically incapable of fleeing again, and fear that they would be no safer elsewhere. Israel has attacked parts of areas that it has labelled as “humanitarian zones”. Continue reading...

The Wizard of the Kremlin review – no magic from Paul Dano as cynical Putin spin doctor

The Wizard of the Kremlin review – no magic from Paul Dano as cynical Putin spin doctor

Venice film festival The rise of Vladimir Putin, chillingly played by Jude Law, is portrayed through the eyes of a cynical insider in Olivier Assayas’s adaptation of a hit satirical novel. But its hero cuts a one-note figure Giuliano da Empoli’s smash-hit satirical novel The Wizard of the Kremlin , about a Putin spin doctor called Vadim Baranov and based on shadowy Russian politician Vladislav Surkov , has now been converted into an exasperatingly laborious and literal-minded movie, burdened with endless dull voiceover. It has been written for the screen by its estimable director Olivier Assayas, working with the formidable author and reportage journalist Emmanuel Carrère; Carrère in fact has a cameo here, playing a supercilious French figure at a raucous Moscow student party in the early 90s, patronisingly informing the young people present that it was the communism they’ve just rejected that really believed in the arts. The action takes us through the 1990s decline of ailing president Boris Yeltsin and the promotion of FSB chief Vladimir Putin as prime minister by entrenched oligarchic interests who assume he will be their apparatchik puppet. Through the eyes of our strangely cynical media-manipulator hero, we see Putin’s presidential election triumph in 2000 , the sinking of the Kursk submarine , which tested the president’s neo-Stalinist ruthlessness in ignoring public-opinion pressure orchestrated by unreliable courtier and media magnate Boris Berezovsky (who was destined for a lonely death in UK exile), the Chechen wars, the annexation of Crimea, the development of internet black ops and bot farms, and Putin’s growing hatred of Ukraine. Will Keen plays the bullish and hubristic Berezovsky, Tom Sturridge is private banker Dimitri Sidorov (based on Mikhail Khodorkovsky ), and Alicia Vikander does her best with the uninteresting role of “Ksenia”, a fictionalised girlfriend who leaves Baranov for Sidorov. Continue reading...

The Guardian view on GCSE resits: admitting the problem is just the first step | Editorial

The Guardian view on GCSE resits: admitting the problem is just the first step | Editorial

The low pass rate in compulsory retakes is one of many challenges in 16-19 education For years, rigid rules and a shocking failure rate in compulsory GCSE retakes have been one of the exam system’s dirty secrets. At last this dire situation is getting some of the attention it deserves. This year, nearly a quarter of all maths and English language entries in England, Wales and Northern Ireland were for students aged 17 or older on a repeat attempt – with just one in six of those retaking maths managing to pass. By calling this a crisis, Jill Duffy, who heads the OCR exam board, has thrown a spotlight on the problem. But admitting that there is an issue with resits, as officials are now doing, is only the first step. There are differing views about what ought to happen next. Continue reading...