Add source Login
Justice for Jeyasre: how a brutal murder led to a better deal for garment workers in India

Justice for Jeyasre: how a brutal murder led to a better deal for garment workers in India

After a 21-year-old employee was raped and killed by her supervisor in 2021, campaigners ensured conditions at the factory were overhauled. But its order book never recovered Ask the women working at Natchi Apparels in the historic city of Dindigul in Tamil Nadu and many will describe the turnaround in their working conditions in the garment factory over the past five years as extraordinary. On 5 January 2021 the decomposing body of Jeyasre Kathiravel , a 21-year-old Dalit woman who was an employee of Natchi, then an H&M Group supplier, was found on a strip of farmland a few miles from her village after she failed to return home following a shift on New Year’s Day. Continue reading...

Europe must now tell Trump that enough is enough – and cut all ties with the US | Alexander Hurst

Europe must now tell Trump that enough is enough – and cut all ties with the US | Alexander Hurst

How do you retain a space of democracy in a world that is reverting to violent conquest? By building a protective moat of federalism around it ‘He keeps encouraging me … to choose between Europe and the US. That would be a strategic mistake for our country,” Keir Starmer said in response to Ed Davey’s question in the House of Commons last week, about whether a US move against Greenland would mean the end of Nato. What about Europe, though? As Danish and Greenlandic ministers prepared to face JD Vance in the White House , the question was would Europe finally choose between Europe and the US? Will its leaders have the courage to tell the full truth – that the US isn’t simply abandoning its allies and destroying the international order but is now in the position of active and hostile predation by force – and more importantly, to act on it? To offer Denmark moral and material backing, and Greenland a future of self-determination and membership, rather than subservience to US resource plunder? Donald Trump has already set the tone by saying the US will seize Greenland “one way or the other”, and no part of the triumvirate around him is trying to hide their imperial intentions any more. Not the nepotists and grifters amassing ever greater private fortunes. Not the white supremacist ideologues drawing inspiration from Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer! to post “ One Homeland. One People. One Heritage ”, via official US government social media accounts. Not the techno-nihilists salivating to mine every bit of Greenland’s mineral resources and rule their own neofeudal city states on its coast. When Trump says that the only constraint on his exercise of power is “my own morality”, that means there is no constraint . Like Vladimir Putin, he will keep grabbing until someone imposes a limit on him. Alexander Hurst writes for Guardian Europe from Paris. His memoir, Generation Desperation , is published this month Continue reading...

Royal Society president reignites Elon Musk row by defending lack of action

Royal Society president reignites Elon Musk row by defending lack of action

Society should only eject fellows for fraud or other defects in their research, says Paul Nurse The president of the Royal Society has reignited a row over Elon Musk’s association with the body by arguing that fellows should only be ejected for fraud or other defects in their research. In an interview with the Guardian , Paul Nurse defended the academy’s decision not to take action against Musk – who was elected a fellow in 2008 – despite claims the tech billionaire had violated its code of conduct, including by his role in slashing US research funding as part of the US “department of government efficiency”. Continue reading...

Hijack season two review – Idris Elba is back with the most effortlessly bingeable show of them all

Hijack season two review – Idris Elba is back with the most effortlessly bingeable show of them all

Sam Nelson is ready to beat some more bad guys – and this time he’s on the Berlin metro. Shenanigans will ensue! Do you remember the lazy, hazy days of summer 2023, when Idris Elba got on a plane and it was hijacked? It was in a programme called Hijack . For seven effortlessly bingeable hours supposedly showing the adventure in real time, our man on the pressurised inside deduced complex situations from misplaced washbags, sent coded messages via fruit cartons and dying men’s phones, saved lives, averted disasters, and got Kingdom Flight 29 landed safely by Holly Aird so that he could return to his family, even though viewers agreed the scenes with them in between the plane bits were very boring indeed. And he wasn’t even a policeman like Bruce Willis in Die Hard or a counter-terrorist federal agent like Kiefer Sutherland in 24 ! Or a pilot, which might also have been useful. He was Sam Nelson, a business negotiator. He had extreme business negotiating skills and he beat the bad guys. Who turned out not to be terrorists but a crime syndicate that wanted to short shares in the airline. Which was a bit weird, but never mind. And one of the bad guys escaped, but the point is Sam was a hero and Elba was the only man who could have played him and made it work. He was a mighty, implacable force. The rock on which this fragile, teetering edifice of nonsense was built. Continue reading...