Forces outside the capital drawn on for Borussia Dortmund v Real Madrid match and a Tommy Robinson march and counter-protest
More than 2,000 officers have been deployed across London, including more than 400 from outside the capital, to police the Champions League final, a protest by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson and a counter-demonstration.
The final between Borussia Dortmund and Real Madrid takes place at Wembley on Saturday evening. And, earlier, a protest organised by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, more commonly known as Tommy Robinson, set off from the Victoria area on Saturday, ending up in Parliament Square where speeches took place.
The party needs to move its campaign on from stories about factionalist infighting over seats – and get on with winning
Whatever your view of Diane Abbott, or your view of Keir Starmer, there has plainly been a serious blunder in Labour’s campaign when her treatment ends up leading the BBC news coverage and splashed across most front pages. Quite apart from the bad look, Labour’s big NHS day was blown away by a story on the fate of one MP.
First, remember this. Starmer has pulled off the near-impossible in a remarkably short time: returning Labour to electability after its worst crash in living memory. This miraculous recovery has required unflinching severity in dealing with antisemitism and a resolute “Labour has changed” message after Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. It was risky to expel the former leader – but he was extraordinarily lucky that Corbyn, with characteristic obstinacy, chose to rule himself out by refusing to accept the overall verdict of the independent Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). Had he accepted its judgment and offered a sufficient apology, he would probably still be a thorn-in-the-side Labour MP. If he wins as an independent, that’s a very minor embarrassment as Labour sweeps to power.
The European parliament’s failure to fully reflect the EU’s diverse population has caused an “identity crisis”, campaigners have said, just days ahead of a vote that is expected to elect even fewer Black, Asian and minority ethnic MEPs.
In an analysis shared exclusively with the Guardian, the European Network Against Racism found that in the parliament’s last mandate, just 4.3% of MEPs were from racial and ethnic minorities – a proportion that falls drastically short of the estimated 10% of the EU population who identify as such.
As a newly minted member of the European parliament in 2019, Alice Kuhnke swiftly learned to keep her ID badge handy. Sometimes the request to see it would come just moments after she had swiped it to enter a building, other times she would be stopped hours later as she made her way to meetings.
Six months into the job, she mentioned the stringent security measures over coffee with a few colleagues. “They said ‘Are you serious? I’ve never been stopped.’”
Britain’s first black female MP faced hostility from the media and political establishment from the start. Nearly 40 years on, she is still not giving up. By Andy Beckett
Readers respond to Labour’s investigation following the Hackney MP’s suspension from the party in April 2023, and the long delay in coming to a resolution
I am not on the left on the Labour party – if anything my political views are more closely aligned with Keir Starmer’s. However, this does not matter. I feel the hurt and pain that Diane must be feeling – along with every black person in this country who has faced treatment which can be comfortably placed in the category headed racism. Her treatment by the Labour party is acting as a trigger for us all.
Shaheen claims party has ‘problem with black and brown people’ after panel stops her standing in London seat
Faiza Shaheen, the candidate blocked by Labour from standing in Chingford and Woodford Green, has announced she will challenge the decision in the courts, claiming she has faced “a systematic campaign of racism, Islamophobia and bullying”.
Citing a series of recent issues, including having a local organiser removed from her team and being blocked from producing videos blaming inflation on “corporate greed,” Shaheen claimed Keir Starmer’s party had “a problem with black and brown people”.
The golden state legalised marijuana production in 2016, but strict curbs have led to a thriving black market. Its hub is in Siskiyou county, where the environmental damage is clear to see
In the shadow of Mount Shasta in northern California, a sea of makeshift greenhouses and plywood huts sprawls between the conifer trees of the high desert. From the air, many of the polytunnels look in bad shape, their plastic covers torn by the wind to reveal what’s inside: hundreds of cannabis plants packet tightly together, their distinctive green leaves easily identifiable against the volcanic soil.
This remote area of Siskiyou county is known for its goldrush history, black bears and returning grey wolves, but in the last few years it has also become a hub for California’s parallel market in cannabis production. More than 6,000 hectares (15,000 acres) of illicit cannabis farms cover the Republic-leaning county, which voted not to legalise commercial farming despite the statewide vote for legalisation in November 2016.
President and vice-president gear up for 2024 election with ‘Black Voters for Biden-Harris’ rally at majority Black Philadelphia school
Gearing up for the 2024 election, the Biden-Harris campaign launched its Black voters initiative on Wednesday at Philadelphia’s Girard College, a majority Black boarding school.
Around 2pm in an auditorium filled with hundreds of Black Philly residents, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris approached the podium to applause and an audience shouting “four more years”.
Sir Keir Starmer should be concentrating on winning power, not becoming distracted by rows over MP selections
Sir Keir Starmer has been having a good campaign. Rishi Sunak’s gamble on an early election has done little to dent Labour’s enormous poll leads. The Labour leader is becoming more fluent in media interviews and more confident meeting voters in his minutely stage-managed appearances over pints and in town halls. So the unnecessary mess surrounding the future of Diane Abbott in the Labour party is an unwelcome reminder of Starmerite intolerance.
Ms Abbott is a significant figure in the Labour party, having become the country’s first black female MP in 1987. Last year she was suspended from her party after she claimed that Jewish people and travellers did not experience racism “all their lives”. This was an offensive mistake, and she rightly apologised immediately. She was suspended from the party, and Labour’s national executive committee launched an investigation into the affair, which was completed by December, resulting in a formal warning to the MP. She subsequently in February took a two-hour online antisemitism awareness training course. That should have been the end of the matter.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Spike Island, Bristol As sickle cell anaemia attacked his body, the artist made political drawings on X-rays and used his own skin for sculpture
Donald Rodney died as an artist in the ascendant. With Keith Piper, a fellow student at Trent Polytechnic in 1981, Rodney was foundational in the politically acute BLK Art Group, committed to pressing social issues within an art world hung up on form and theory. After the success of his 1989 solo show at Chisenhale Gallery, in 1997 he had an exhibition across town at the South London Gallery (in the year Tracey Emin’s show there was considered career-making). He died the following year, aged 36.
Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker, at Bristol’s Spike Island, is a scholarly survey of the few works that survived a brief career punctuated by multiple hospitalisations and invasive surgery. In a vitrine are 10 of the sketchbooks that acted as a portal back to the creative space of the studio when Rodney was bedridden. Through them he developed a compelling personal iconography. By necessity, most work in this show is the result of long reflection and refinement on Rodney’s part before he had the physical liberty to go about the actual making.
Nazi apologists, massacre perpetrators, grave robbers, racists and eugenicists were hugely influential across the entire history of the University of Melbourne, according to its own research.
The university has published a shocking account of the dark side of these erstwhile heroes of Australian academia in a book it hopes will tell a greater truth about the institution and its dealings with Aboriginal people.
EU institutions have already let people of colour down. Now the rise of the far right poses an even greater threat
My inbox is inundated with messages telling me to use my vote in the European elections because if I don’t “others will decide for you”. My head agrees with the messages from EU politicians that I should do my bit for democracy. But for the first time, my heart isn’t in it.
As a European who is also brown and Muslim – and who has long wanted the EU “project” to work – I am terrified at the extent of power and influence wielded, inside and outside government, by politicians who are unashamedly racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic and whose vision of Europe – whatever they may say in public – is also inherently hostile to women, Jews and gay people. And I am worried that it is going to get even worse.
Neville Lawrence writes of continuing fight for justice 31 years after murder of his son in south-east London
The father of Stephen Lawrence has said he has forgiven the racist killers of his son, but has yet to forgive the Metropolitan police for the failings that left them free.
In a comment piece for the Guardian, Neville Lawrence said his “grief has no ending” and told of his enduring pain to “identify the human cost” of the police’s failings.
I cannot forget how badly my family was treated. I live each day with the toll this has taken
It is now 31 years since the death of my son Stephen. Thirty-one years during which I have witnessed countless young people being knifed and shot on Britain’s streets, and seen the devastation that has been wrought on the families of those sons and daughters murdered in their youth.
While my story will resonate with others whose lives have been changed irrevocably, and whose grief has no ending, each story is unique. Mine has been shaped not only by Stephen’s brutal and untimely death, but by the long fight for justice and to expose the failings of the Metropolitan police. It has also been shaped by the institutional racism identified in the Macpherson report (1999) – and by the enduring disbelief that complete strangers could attack and kill my son for no reason other than their hatred of black people.
Neville Lawrence OBE is an anti-racism campaigner
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Lilian Seenoi-Barr, who arrived from Kenya in 2010, will make history when she receives chain of office in Derry
Lilian Seenoi-Barr will make history on 3 June when she receives the chain of office at Derry’s guildhall and becomes Northern Ireland’s first black mayor.
It will be the culmination of a personal and political journey that began in 2010 when she arrived as a refugee from Kenya and became part of the region’s growing multi-ethnic identity.
On the eve of a vital South African election, activists tell how, 30 years ago, London became the centre of the Anti-Apartheid Movement and a base for exiled African National Congress leaders
Speak to those who were fighting it from afar, and they’ll tell you that for a long time, the political situation in apartheid-era South Africa appeared intractable. Even as they wouldn’t allow themselves to feel despondent – the campaign to boycott South African goods had, after all, been successful, and few musicians would tour the country – many activists wondered, deep down, if change would ever come. But in the mid-1980s, things seemed at last to shift. Suddenly, the atmosphere was heady. “There was an energy and excitement that I can’t even begin to describe,” says Chitra Karve, who in 1986 had just taken up a full-time job at the Anti-Apartheid Movement in London. “I worked an inordinate number of hours, but I never thought about that. I never even got tired. You were driven by the pace at which possibility was coming towards you: the possibility of real change.”
Karve had been a student activist, but now she found herself, not long out of university, at the heart of the fight to end apartheid. The team was small – just eight people – which meant that when she developed an interest in working with the press, she was allowed simply to get on with it. Two years later, when the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute took place at Wembley – an event now widely regarded as one of the most important consciousness-raising exercises ever staged – she was so busy dealing with journalists that she missed most of the concert. Up on stage were George Michael, Miriam Makeba, Tracy Chapman, Stevie Wonder and the Bee Gees. But for her, “glamour didn’t come into it”. She spent only 20 minutes in the area where the artists were hanging out: “I went into Harry Belafonte’s trailer where he was sitting with Trevor Huddleston [an Anglican bishop, Huddleston was the president of the AAM] and, wow, that was exciting. But the rest of the time, I was rushing about, trying to get the press organised.”
Sort the Court is a charmingly addictive "kingdombuilder" of sorts that's perfect for a lazy Saturday. Designed and written by Graeme Borland in just 72 hours for Ludum Dare 34, the game casts you as a new monarch who must judiciously grow your realm's wealth, population, and happiness with an eye toward joining the illustrious Council of Crowns... all by giving flat yes-or-no answers to an endless parade of requests from dozens of whimsical subjects. It's possible to lose, and the more common asks can get a bit repetitive, but with hundreds of scenarios and a number of longer-term storylines, the game can be won in an hour or two while remaining funny and fresh.
See the forum or the wiki for help, enjoy the original art of Amy "amymja" Gerardy and the soundtrack by Bogdan Rybak, or check out some other fantasy decisionmaking games in this vein: Borland's spiritual prequel A Crown of My Own - the somewhat darker card-based REIGNS - the more expansive and story-driven pixel drama Yes, Your Grace (reviews), which has a sequel due out this year
Across the world, medical tests are being adjusted according to patients’ skin colour – with shocking consequences. One science writer tells how she helped overturn one of the pernicious assumptions of race-based healthcare
My younger sister is an elite 400-metre sprinter who has competed internationally for Great Britain. In early 2020, she told me about some blood test results she had recently received – her creatinine level was a bit higher than normal – a potential indicator of a kidney problem. That wasn’t particularly surprising; creatinine is a waste product produced by muscles and so athletes, who tend to be more muscular on average, commonly have higher-than-average levels of the compound in their blood without this being associated with kidney problems. She had also shared her blood test results with a sports doctor. He confirmed that creatinine is derived from muscle metabolism and that levels are proportional to muscle mass. He also gave a list of factors that he said could be responsible for raised creatinine levels. One of those listed was “Afro-Caribbean race”. “Could my race be affecting my creatinine level?” my sister asked me.
I was about to stumble on an answer to my sister’s question. I was at the beginning of an investigation into what I now refer to as “race-based medicine” – the practice of adjusting medical tests based on a person’s race or ethnicity. I had first learned about it in a 2015 Ted Talk by US academic and author Dorothy Roberts, but I had assumed it would be a thing of the past by now. I soon discovered that race-based medicine is alive and well.
The state wasn’t the best place to get pregnant in the first place, with some of the highest maternal mortality rates in the US
Louisiana is not a great place to get pregnant. If you need an abortion, a near-total ban means it’s almost impossible to get one, even in cases of rape or incest – anyone who provides an abortion deemed illegal can go to jail for 15 years. And if you plan on having the baby, you have to deal with some of the highest maternal mortality rates in the US. Although, as Senator Bill Cassidy has helpfully noted, “if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear”. In other words, if you ignore Black people (a third of his constituents), things look a little better. So that’s OK then!
Carlos Edmilson da Silva served 12 years in Brazil before being freed, after a widely used police practice led to a false arrest
Carlos Edmilson da Silva had already served three years in prison for a crime he had not committed when he was arrested in the Brazilian city of Barueri and accused of a string of horrific rapes.
His face was plastered across newspapers and TV reports, where he was dubbed the “maniac of Castello Branco”, after the highway where 12 women had been raped over two years.
The Grammy-winning singer suffered an ugly incident with a security guard – but Rowland stood her ground. Good for her
Kelly Rowland is holding her own after she was filmed calling out a security guard who disrespected her as she posed for photos at the Cannes film festival earlier this week.
In the video, you can see the security guard rush the Grammy-winning singer off the steps, blocking photographers’ view of Rowland while speaking to her in a way to which Rowland clearly took objection. The singer initially appears to engage with the security guard calmly, placing a hand on the security guard’s arm after she apologized for stepping on Rowland’s dress. A verbal back-and-forth ensues and then, it appears, Rowland had enough.
Dr Roger Mitchell, former DC chief medical examiner, says ‘we must hold the system accountable’ and properly count officer homicides
The crisis of US police shootings has been increasingly well-documented by advocates and journalists, with data now suggesting officers fatally shoot an average of more than three people every day.
Since George Floyd’s murder four years ago, there has been growing scrutiny of a more hidden epidemic of police violence: deaths at the hands of officers who did not use guns. An Associated Press investigation in March found that more than 1,000 people died in US police custody from 2012 to 2021 after officers used “less lethal” tactics, including pinning victims face down and stunning them with Tasers. In hundreds of those cases, medical officials deemed the deaths “accidents” or “natural” despite officers’ use of force.
Hastily established racial equality schemes are being shuttered. What survives is a movement that’s achieving real change
If 2020 was the year that Black Lives Matter went mainstream, 2024 was the year it died. Quietly, without even the customary whimper, the trappings of diversity so frantically sought and flamboyantly brandished after those protests four years ago are being discarded.
Like so many of the promises and pledges of the pandemic era, those of its accompanying racial equality movement have been swallowed whole by reality. But it’s worth remembering how large, how global, how fashionable it all was at the time. There were big, iconic moments, such as the removal of statues in Europe and the US, that triggered soul-searching about our history, and which opened up productive avenues of reappraisal. And there were others that four years later you cringe to remember: the black squares on social media, Nancy Pelosi taking the knee wearing kente cloth, Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner also taking the knee while looking soberly into the camera.
Ex-air force captain Ed Dwight, passed over by Nasa in 1961, now oldest person to reach edge of space with Jeff Bezo’s space firm
Sixty-one years since he was selected but ultimately passed over to become the first Black astronaut, Ed Dwight finally reached space in a Blue Origin rocket – and set a different record.
At 10.37am on Sunday, Jeff Bezos’s space company launched its NS-25 mission from west Texas, marking Blue Origin’s first crewed spaceflight since 2022 when its New Shepard rocket was grounded due to a mid-flight failure.
Speech warmly received at historically Black college despite backlash from students in weeks leading to address over war
Joe Biden told graduating students of Morehouse College that American democracy has failed the Black community, but vowed to continue fighting “the poison of white supremacy”, in a widely watched speech to a historically Black college during an election year.
Despite a backlash from some students and alumni in the weeks leading up to Biden’s commencement address, including over the Hamas-Israel war and concerns that Biden would use the speech as a campaign event, the president’s address to the all-male school was warmly received. He used his speech to reaffirm his commitment to democracy in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, and to reiterate his call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Historians estimate a quarter of settlers of the US west were Black, moving cattle on horseback, settling towns and keeping the peace
When Larry Callies went to the movies as a boy in Rosenberg, Texas, the heroes riding horses and wearing 10-gallon hats were all white men.
But the real cowboys Callies knew were Black. His great-grandfather Lavel Callies was an enslaved cowboy who worked with horses professionally after emancipation. “We’re cowboys for three generations back,” says Callies, 71, who runs the Black Cowboy Museum.
Republican Glenn Youngkin also vetoed bills related to maintaining access to contraception, saying they were ‘not ready’
Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin has vetoed two bills that would have stripped tax exemptions for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization that has opposed the removal of statues of southern state generals during the US civil war and other markers of the southern states’ attempt to secede from the Union in defense of slavery.
The Republican governor vetoed several measures, including those related to maintaining access to contraception, saying in a statement they were “not ready to become law”.
Login
