The Guardian Articles

The director of the Edinburgh international festival has warned it could lose its status as one of the world’s greatest arts events without significant increases in public and philanthropic support.

Nicola Benedetti, a Grammy-winning classical violinist who

became the festival’s director in 2022

On Golba Hill on the Caribbean island of St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), just below a cluster of colourfully decorated homes, there are rows and rows of premium marijuana plants. Gleaming like green gold in the Caribbean sun, they lead up to a crudely constructed hut where cannabis farmer …

Whether they’re on skis or a sunlounger, there is no beach, mountain or fireside that can spare lawyers from the urgent calls of zealous, dealmaking executives and private equity bosses. After a breathless 2024, the City’s army of corporate lawyers are set for another year of masking their poolside backgrounds …

Walter Scott knew a thing or two: “Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practise to deceive.”

In many ways, however, Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and their colleagues were deceiving themselves when apparently deceiving the electorate on the subject of taxation.

Just as the great mistake made by …

Victoria’s tourism agency has removed a social media post that described an unpatrolled ocean beach on the Mornington Peninsula as a “pristine swimming spot” amid almost 150 rescues on the state’s beaches on Saturday.

Number 16 beach, on the Bass Strait side of Rye, is described on the Visit Victoria …

As the popularity of his government has nosedived in recent weeks, Keir Starmer has turned up the heat on his cabinet ministers. Since early last month, individual secretaries of state have been summoned by the prime minister to attend 90-minute, one-to-one interrogations to check on their work, department by department.

The Danish drug company Novo Nordisk provided hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of sponsorship to pharmacies including Boots and Lloyds as it sought to boost sales of its slimming drugs in Britain, the

Observer

The maker of Wegovy and Saxenda weight-loss injections gave money for Google …

Six months after

Labour’s biggest landslide in a generation

Film

American auteurs return

A new film from one of the heavy hitters of US cinema is always cause for celebration, and with projects from Kathryn Bigelow, Noah Baumbach and Paul Thomas Anderson on the horizon, there’s plenty to whet cineaste appetites in the coming year. Details on …

As a business proposition, Elon Musk’s ownership of X, formerly known as Twitter, has so far been a disaster: since he acquired X in late 2022, the social media company, according to one estimate, has

lost

As a political proposition, however, Musk’s …