Guardian spurs media outlets to consider stronger climate language

Use of terms ‘climate crisis’ and ‘global heating’ prompts reviews in other newsrooms

The Guardian’s decision to alter its style guide to better convey the environmental crises unfolding around the world has prompted some other media outlets to reconsider the terms they use in their own coverage.

After the Guardian announced it would now routinely use the words “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown” instead of “climate change”, a memo was sent by the standards editor of CBC, Canada’s national public broadcaster, to staff acknowledging that a “recent shift in style at the British newspaper the Guardian has prompted requests to review the language we use in global warming coverage”.

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I wrote my first book at 75. At the age of 81 and 10 books later, I’m having the time of my life | Susan Moore Jordan

I had a rich, happy life as a musician. But remembering the murder of my friend’s parents in 1954 led to a novel

We all enjoy “milestone” birthdays. At 16, we’re old enough to drive. Then soon after we’re old enough to drink (legally). Then we start marking decades, and 50 is a biggie: a half-century. But for me, the greatest milestone birthday of all was when I hit three-quarters of a century. At the age of 75 I wrote and published my first book, and here I am six years later working on book number 11, and loving this new passion I’ve discovered.

What makes this even more remarkable is that for my entire life I had a rich, happy life as a musician (student/teacher/performer/stage director). Music was my discipline from a very young age. Reading was a hobby, and I probably had a vague thought about “writing something someday”.

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Matthias & Maxime review – Xavier Dolan’s heartfelt tale of male longing

Two friends’ playful kiss rekindles suppressed feelings in a film swept along by rattling dialogue and simmering tensions

Xavier Dolan’s unstoppably garrulous, sweet-natured new movie is a coming-of-age film, or possibly an approaching-thirtysomethinghood film. Or perhaps it’s a portrait of a bunch of friends for whom things would never be the same again after that summer. It is not exactly a sexual awakening tale because the sexuality in question never really went to sleep. But it is a love story.

Related: Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood review - Tarantino's dazzling LA redemption song

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Judith Kerr, beloved author of The Tiger Who Came to Tea, dies aged 95

Writer and illustrator of more than 30 books, including the Mog series based on her pet cats, arrived in England in 1936 as a refugee from the Nazis

Judith Kerr, the author and illustrator whose debut picture book The Tiger Who Came to Tea introduced generations of pre-school children to the joyful chaos of uncontrolled appetites, died at home yesterday at the age of 95 after a short illness, her publisher said on Thursday.

Kerr, who dreamed up the tiger to amuse her two children, only started publishing in her 40s, and lived to see the Tiger reach its millionth sale as she turned 94. To her mild chagrin, it remained her best loved single book: “I’ve got better at drawing, obviously,” she told one interviewer.

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Russian broadcaster hits out at BBC show parodying Putin

Tonight With Vladimir Putin portrays Russian president as a talkshow host

Russia’s government-owned news service RT has denounced a BBC comedy chatshow featuring a 3D animation of Vladimir Putin interviewing the likes of Alastair Campbell.

The BBC described Tonight With Vladimir Putin, which has yet to air, as a “television first” with new technology enabling a “3D digital cartoon of Putin to walk around and sit behind the desk, interviewing real human guests in front of a studio audience, all in real time.”

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‘I even loved his Twankey’: Dench, Hopkins, Mirren and more on Ian McKellen at 80

Wild parties, stunning performances, silhouette erections and marrying Patrick Stewart twice. As the actor turns 80, friends including Derek Jacobi, Janet Suzman, Michael Sheen, Bill Condon and Stephen Fry pay tribute

Ian has been been very important in my life, even before we became good friends. When I was a young teen I remember watching Walter on the TV and being hugely affected by it. Then at Rada in the early 90s, I finally saw him live, in Richard III at the National. I was blown away. I remember him doing the opening speech while lighting a cigarette one-handed. It was brilliant, so understated. It exemplified his mastery – and his work ethic. To do something so difficult and complicated and make it look so easy. Ian has an innate sense of theatrical audacity, something I think he shares with Olivier. They both did things that would make the audience gasp self-consciously.

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Binyavanga Wainaina, Kenyan author and gay rights activist, dies aged 48

One of Africa’s best-known authors and gay rights activists died on Tuesday after an illness

One of Africa’s best-known authors and gay rights activists, Binyavanga Wainaina, has died at the age of 48.

The Kenyan author died on Tuesday night in Nairobi after a short illness, the BBC reported. His death was confirmed by Tom Maliti, the chairman of the Kwani Trust, which Wainaina founded.

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Headless self-portraits from a face everyone knew – Luchita Hurtado review

Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London
Marcel Duchamp massaged her feet and Leonora Carrington built her kids a house. But the work of the 98-year-old Venezuela-born painter is every bit as extraordinary as her life

For a period while living in Chile with her artist-husband Lee Mullican in the late 1960s, Luchita Hurtado painted inside a walk-in closet, standing there and looking down over her breasts and belly to her feet and the floor below. Sometimes a bar of light came in through the slats of the door. She included this in her painting, too. She looks down at the rug, or into a woven basket, that streak of light picking out the weave of the basket, momentarily brightening the pattern on the Navajo rug.

In one painting she drops a strawberry into a bowl on the floor. It hangs in mid-air in the half-lit gloom. Sometimes there seem to be two, three or even four people in there: eight feet on a gorgeous rug, green apples big as bowling balls, inexplicably huge and vivid against the dyed lozenges of the rug, every nub in the rug’s structure picked-out in paint. The painting evokes the feel of the rough texture against naked feet. In another it is all flat zigzags and pattern, interrupted by naked mellow skin.

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Man Booker International prize: Jokha Alharthi wins for Celestial Bodies

First female Omani novelist to be translated into English shares £50,000 prize with translator Marilyn Booth – the first time an Arabic book has won

Jokha Alharthi, the first female Omani novelist to be translated into English, has won the Man Booker International prize for her novel Celestial Bodies.

Alharthi, the £50,000 award’s first winner to write in Arabic, shares the prize equally with her translator, American academic Marilyn Booth. Celestial Bodies is set in the Omani village of al-Awafi and follows the stories of three sisters: Mayya, who marries into a rich family after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries for duty; and Khawla, waiting for a man who has emigrated to Canada.

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Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood review – Tarantino’s dazzling LA redemption song

With Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt playing a TV actor and stuntman who cross paths with the Manson cult, Tarantino has created outrageous, disorientating entertainment

Quentin Tarantino’s exploitation black-comedy thriller Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood finds a pulp-fictionally redemptive take on the Manson nightmare in late-60s California: a B-movie loser’s state of grace.

It’s shocking, gripping, dazzlingly shot in the celluloid-primary colours of sky blue and sunset gold: colours with the warmth that Mama Cass sang about. The Los Angeles of 1969 is recovered with all Tarantino’s habitual intensity and delirious, hysterical connoisseurship of pop culture detail. But there’s something new here: not just erotic cinephilia, but TV-philia, an intense awareness of the small screen background to everyone’s lives. Opinions are going to divide about this film’s startling and spectacularly provocative ending, which Tarantino is concerned to keep secret and which I have no intention of revealing here. But certainly any ostensible error of taste is nothing like, say, those in the much admired Inglourious Basterds. And maybe worrying about taste is to miss the point of this bizarre Jacobean horror fantasy.

Quite simply, I just defy anyone with red blood in their veins not to respond to the crazy bravura of Tarantino’s film-making, not to be bounced around the auditorium at the moment-by-moment enjoyment that this movie delivers – and conversely, of course, to shudder at the horror and cruelty and its hallucinatory aftermath.

Our first non-hero is Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, a failing cowboy actor and alcoholic going to seed in the autumn of his career and in moments of bad temper beginning to resemble Jack Black. His best friend – pathetically, his only friend – is Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt in his Ocean’s-Eleven mode of easygoing competence and imperturbability. Cliff is Rick’s stunt double and has an awful secret in his life: a grisly event for which he may or may not be guilty. Cliff has to drive Rick everywhere because he has lost his licence, and he is Rick’s best pal, assistant, factotum, and the person who has to straighten Rick when he bursts into boozy tears of self-pity.

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Water mistake to make! Rogue bottle spotted in Game of Thrones finale

Two weeks after a coffee cup made an unfortunate appearance in the fantasy drama, eagle-eyed fans have detected another gaffe: a plastic bottle

Game of Thrones review – epic finale corrects some major wrongs
Game of Thrones finale: who ended up on the Iron Throne? As it happened


First it was a rogue coffee cup. Now, Game of Thrones fans have spotted another present-day item lurking onscreen in the fantasy drama: a water bottle.

The erroneous object was detected by particularly perceptive fans during a scene from the show’s final ever episode, tucked behind the boot of character Samwell Tarly during a tense diplomatic scene.

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Game of Thrones review – epic final episode corrects some major wrongs

Warning: contains spoilers
In Westeros, you win or you die. For all this final season’s faults, the last episode won over the doubters – and it did right by those left standing

Spoiler warning: this article is for people who have watched the Game of Thrones finale. Do not read on unless you have watched season eight, episode six: The Iron Throne.

Related: Game of Thrones finale: who ended up on the Iron Throne? As it happened

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Julianna Margulies on her shocking Ebola drama: ‘I panicked in my hazmat suit!’

The star of ER and The Good Wife is back – as a doctor fighting to save humanity. She gives her bodyguard the slip to talk about our imperilled planet – and her love of Sussex A-roads

Before I meet Julianna Margulies, I spend three days staring at her bodyguard. He’s impossible to miss: one of those men whose every attempt to blend in flounders. Margulies and I are in Lille, judges at the Series Mania television festival, although our experiences differ a little. My cloak of anonymity allows me to roam the city unpestered. Margulies, however, has been a TV mainstay for 25 years, with roles in two juggernaut shows, ER and The Good Wife. Everybody knows who she is, hence Muscles.

He’s even there at the start of our interview, looming in the doorway of our room at the Chamber of Commerce. As I ease past and close the door, I ask if it isn’t a pain being constantly tailed. She smiles and says: “Three years ago, I was the guest of honour when they held this festival in Paris. When I get there, they say, ‘We have detail for you.’ I say, ‘Guys, I don’t need a bodyguard.’ But they won’t budge. We get to the hotel and I say to my bodyguard, ‘My husband and I are going out to lunch. You go home, please.’ So we left the hotel and I’ve never seen anything like it. People were everywhere. We backed into the hotel and my husband called the bodyguard and said, ‘We made a mistake!’ He said, ‘I know – I’m just around the corner.’”

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Israeli culture minister criticises Palestinian flags at Eurovision

Madonna and Icelandic band Hatari displayed the flags at competition’s final in Tel Aviv

The Israeli culture minister, Miri Regev, has criticised the display of Palestinian flags during the Eurovision song contest final in Tel Aviv on Saturday night, including by one of Madonna’s dancers.

“It was an error,” Regev, a rightwing minister known for provocative stances, told journalists before a cabinet meeting on Sunday.

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Yemeni poetry thrives despite trauma of civil war

Poets explore how the artform can unite people on different sides of conflict

A story is often told to illustrate how central poetry is to Yemeni culture: that of the visit of a famous lute player from Baghdad.

He was invited to play in Sana’a, where he performed enchanting and technically brilliant music for an hour. But when he stopped, the audience waited for the musician to start talking. Without any poetry, they thought, the entertainment could not possibly be over yet.

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Justin Bieber effect leads to closure of Icelandic canyon

Fjadrárgljúfur closed off to protect it from fans after it starred in pop star’s video

With one music video, Justin Bieber has made a pristine Icelandic canyon famous around the world. And that’s the problem.

Icelandic environmental officials have had to close off Fjadrárgljúfur to protect it from the hordes of Bieber fans who are determined to visit the site, which is featured in the video for I’ll Show You. And these fans are not letting a few fences, signs or park rangers keep them away.

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Eurovision song contest 2019 won by the Netherlands’ Duncan Laurence

Political rancour fails to dampen the Eurovision song contest final in Tel Aviv

Europe’s annual musical jamboree culminated in triumph for the Netherlands on Saturday night.

In one of the closest competitions in recent years, the battle for top spot in the Eurovision song contest was a tight fight between Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy and North Macedonia.

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Madonna makes call for Israel-Palestine unity at Eurovision

Dancers wearing Palestinian and Israeli flags embraced at the climax of her song Future, with Madonna beseeching the crowd to ‘wake up’

In her much-anticipated and politically contentious performance at Eurovision in Israel, Madonna made an apparent call for peace in the region.

As she and guest star Quavo sang the lyrics “Not everyone is coming to the future / Not everyone is learning from the past”, a pair of her dancers – one wearing a costume bearing a Palestinian flag, another with an Israeli flag – embraced as they climbed a set of stairs at the climax of the performance.

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Kim Kardashian West and Kanye West name fourth child Psalm

Reality TV star and musician ‘blessed beyond measure’ with arrival of baby boy

Kim Kardashian West and her husband, the musician Kanye West, have named their new child Psalm after its recent birth via surrogate.

Kardashian West posted a picture of the boy on social media with the caption “Psalm West”.

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