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Received today — 15 December 2025

Around the world, anti-Jewish hate is growing. In Bondi, we see the tragic results | Dave Rich

15 December 2025 at 06:30

After the latest in a series of deadly attacks on the global Jewish community, Jews are angry. And we have good reason to be

  • Dave Rich is director of policy at the Community Security Trust

Heaton Park, Boulder, Washington DC – and now Bondi beach. Add the murders of Rabbi Zvi Kogan in the UAE and Ziv Kipper, an Israeli-Canadian businessman, in Egypt, and Jews have been killed on five continents since the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas upended the Middle East and unleashed a wave of antisemitism around the world. Anti-Jewish terrorism is now a global problem, as is the hateful extremism that drives it.

The death toll from the appalling atrocity in Sydney is shocking enough: at the time of writing, 15 people killed, including a child, and many more injured. Awful images circulate, as they always do. The mobile phone footage of two gunmen calmly taking aim at families enjoying a Hanukah party is utterly chilling. It takes a special kind of dehumanisation, an ideology of pure hatred and self-righteous conviction, to do that.

Dave Rich is director of policy at the Community Security Trust and the author of Everyday Hate: How Antisemitism is Built into Our World – and How You Can Change it

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© Photograph: Hollie Adams/Reuters

© Photograph: Hollie Adams/Reuters

© Photograph: Hollie Adams/Reuters

Welcome to the twilight zone where Nigel Farage can be accused of racism yet still lead the polls | Nesrine Malik

15 December 2025 at 01:00

After weeks of allegations of schoolboy racism, the Reform leader is doubling down. And our political establishment is allowing it

Just as I was starting to write this column, an email alert popped up on my screen. “Punters back Nigel for prime minister after Keir Starmer,” it read, placing the Reform leader second in the odds market after Wes Streeting. What a weird, dissonant duality this is. Nigel Farage is in his fourth week of revelations about alleged racist behaviour at school, and yet, here we are. This is one of those twilight-zone moments in British politics, where it seems something is going to “cut through” any minute now. For a moment it seems as if it absolutely will. And then, there’s a loss of momentum and a return to the status quo. In my mind it manifests like a battle of physical forces, acting on one another. Journalistic investigations, testimonies, whistleblowers, all as a sort of storm that blows on a political actor who may be knocked off his feet, but still manages to cling on by his fingernails, until the gale blows over.

Up scrambles Farage, a few pieces and more than a few polling points knocked off him, but still in place. This is, so far, what he is managing to survive – the testimonies of some 28 of Farage’s contemporaries at Dulwich college who have told the Guardian that they experienced or witnessed racist or antisemitic behaviour when he was a teenager. Jewish students were taunted; “gas them,” Farage said, “Hitler was right”. A black student, much younger than the then 17-year-old Farage, was told: “That’s the way back to Africa.” The allegations amount, in my reading, to a sort of obsessive campaign against minority students, pursued with the kind of bewildering commitment that anyone who has ever been bullied will feel in their bones.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

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© Photograph: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

Received yesterday — 14 December 2025

‘It’s not a coincidence’: journalists of color on being laid off amid Trump’s anti-DEI push

14 December 2025 at 08:00

Black and brown former employees from CBS, NBC and Teen Vogue talk about the effects of being let go

Trey Sherman was traveling to work on the New York subway when he received an email from David Reiter, a CBS News executive, about an imminent meeting on 29 October. Sherman, an associate producer of CBS Evening News Plus at the time, suspected that he would be laid off. CBS News’s parent company, Paramount, had closed a merger with the Hollywood studio Skydance in August, and planned to slash more than 2,000 jobs as part of corporate restructuring.

Sherman, who is Black, and Reiter, who is white, had an amicable conversation, according to Sherman. Reiter told Sherman that he was being laid off because his show was being eliminated, Sherman said, and that Reiter was unable to assign the team to other positions. Sherman accepted the news and the two men wished each other good luck.

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© Composite: Rita Liu/The Guardian/Getty Images/Wikimedia Commons

© Composite: Rita Liu/The Guardian/Getty Images/Wikimedia Commons

© Composite: Rita Liu/The Guardian/Getty Images/Wikimedia Commons

Received before yesterday

‘People will listen’: turning anger into community pride in North Shields

13 December 2025 at 03:00

A tour of local ‘wins’ shows how the charity Citizens UK is working with residents to build a better, fairer society

Dashing through the snow with Father Chris … It does not get any more seasonal, even if it feels like there might be a final syllable missing. To be honest we are not really dashing, it’s more a leisurely walk-and-talk, around North Shields. And the snow, the remnants of an early Tyneside flurry, is patchy and dirty rather than deep and crisp and even.

Father Chris is real though – Father Chris Hughes, Catholic priest; the diocese is a strategic partner for the local chapter of Citizens UK, one of five charities supported by this year’s Guardian charity appeal, under the theme of “hope”. The appeal supports grassroots voluntary groups that nurture community pride and positive change, providing an antidote to division and hate.

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© Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

© Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

© Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Edward Enninful: ‘Britain feels less tolerant now than we were in the 90s’

The former British Vogue editor reflects on his early years in London, the importance of celebrating diversity and why he takes comfort in the younger generation

When Edward Enninful was scouted on the tube travelling through London in 1988, it changed his life. The Ghanaian teenager, newly arrived in Britain, was drawn into the capital’s creative scene of the 90s – as a model, then stylist and, by 18, the fashion director of i-D magazine.

“It was the height of the YBA [Young British Artists] movement – Jay Jopling, Tracey Emin. I met Kate [Moss] at a casting,” he recalls. “Then Naomi [Campbell] for a cover, and I knew we’d be great friends. We all hung out across disciplines. Friday rolled into Saturday into Sunday. I miss that rawness.”

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© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Dulwich college head responds to claims of teenage racism by Nigel Farage

11 December 2025 at 14:07

Robert Milne says he fully recognises the ‘seriousness of the behaviours described in the media’

Dulwich college’s headteacher has responded to allegations of teenage racism by Nigel Farage by saying he recognised the “seriousness of the behaviours described in the media”.

Robert Milne, who joined the school as its “master” this summer, said the alleged behaviour was “at odds” with the modern-day school in a letter in which he said he understood why 28 former pupils had felt compelled to speak out.

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© Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

© Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

© Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Trump’s anti-Somali tirade is a shocking new low | Moira Donegan

11 December 2025 at 08:00

The president called immigrants such as Ilhan Omar ‘garbage’ – but this latest racist outburst may be another sign of weakness

Last week, as ICE agents descended on Minneapolis and St Paul, Minnesota’s Twin Cities, and members of migrant communities there retreated into hiding, Donald Trump unleashed a wave of bigotry against the area’s Somali population in a moment of vitriol that was shockingly racist even by his own very low standards. Rousing himself to animation at the tail end of a televised 2 December cabinet meeting during which he sometimes appeared to be struggling to stay awake, the president disparaged Somali immigrants, many of whom are refugees from the country’s long-running civil conflict, as ungrateful and unfit for residence in the United States.

“I don’t want ’em in our country,” Trump said of ethnic Somalis, about 80,000 of whom live in the Minneapolis area. “Their country’s no good for a reason.” The comments echoed recent posts from the president’s powerful adviser Stephen Miller, who has largely taken over immigration policy. Referring to what he called “the lie of mass migration” in a November 27 post on X, Miller cast doubt on the possibility of assimilation, and suggested that immigrants from troubled countries would contaminate America with a kind of genetic or ontological incapacity for democratic governance. “At scale, migrants and their descendants represent the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands,” Miller wrote.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

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© Photograph: Christian Zander/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Christian Zander/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Christian Zander/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

Badenoch criticises Farage over refusal to apologise for alleged racist remarks

Tory leader says head of Reform should ‘put on his big boy pants’ and apologise over allegations from ex-schoolmates

Kemi Badenoch has questioned why Nigel Farage has not apologised for alleged racist and antisemitic comments while at school, saying the weight of the evidence of more than 20 former schoolmates is significant.

In her strongest comments yet on the issue, the Conservative leader said she was struck that Farage had not admitted any fault or apologised, saying it would have been her first instinct as a politician.

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© Photograph: Andrew MacColl/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Andrew MacColl/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Andrew MacColl/Shutterstock

UK police forces lobbied to use biased facial recognition technology

10 December 2025 at 01:00

Exclusive: System more likely to suggest incorrect matches for images of women and Black people

Police forces successfully lobbied to use a facial recognition system known to be biased against women, young people, and members of ethnic minority groups, after complaining that another version produced fewer potential suspects.

UK forces use the police national database (PND) to conduct retrospective facial recognition searches, whereby a “probe image” of a suspect is compared to a database of more than 19 million custody photos for potential matches.

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© Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

© Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

© Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

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