Innovation prizes aren’t hard to come by. Last year Elon Musk announced $100 million to come up with ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The year before, Prince William and David Attenborough announced an annual £1 million Earthshot Prize for solutions to environmental problems. This year, no doubt, will herald another headline-grabbing announcement.

In 1989, just as leaders around the world were starting to think seriously about tackling global warming, the National Association of Manufacturers assembled a group of corporations — utilities, oil companies, automakers, and more — united by one thing: They wanted to stop climate action. It was called, in Orwellian fashion, the Global Climate Coalition.

That winter of 2003—you remember it, and so do I—the world assembled, arms linked, to protest the prospect of war in Iraq. What times those were, and how the passions swelled. The fervor of the public reached a peak on February 15th, when millions of people in more than sixty countries claimed the streets, voicing their opposition. “listen to us,” a sign in London read. In New York, demonstrators stormed the avenues with a huge inflatable globe. Young and old turned out, and citizens and foreigners. A few weeks later, the United States was at war.

Fear of professional exile has kept Sarah Hepola from taking on certain topics. What gets lost when a writer mutes herself?

In the information era, a lie can make its way around the world and, in short order, make millions of people sympathetic to an unjustifiable war of aggression. False claims that Russia has been targeting sinister U.S.-backed “biolabs” in Ukraine were popularized among conspiratorial American audiences by QAnon believers shortly after Russia launched its invasion in late February. Mainstream Republican voices have since dragged the old Russian propaganda at its roots across the forefront of the U.S. political stage.

However repressive his regime, Vladimir Putin was tolerated by the US, Britain and the EU – until he became intolerable, says Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty

Earlier this week, President Biden banned all oil and energy imports from Russia, punishing Vladimir Putin for his brutal war against Ukraine and building upon an earlier package of historic economic sanctions. Biden’s actions are a steely acknowledgment that our reliance on Russian fossil fuels threatens both national and global security. They are also tangible evidence that Biden can act quickly and boldly to confront national emergencies when he chooses to.

Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city - or should I say, "our city." I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes. It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.

First it was Matt Damon and Spike Lee, and now the blockchain has come for Larry David and Lebron James. David and James became the latest celebrities to endorse cryptocurrency, in Super Bowl commercials aired this Sunday — David as a character mocking great ideas throughout history in an ad for the Bahamian crypto exchange FTX, and present-day Lebron James traveling back in time to Biff Tannen his digitally de-aged teenage self into buying crypto in an ad for Crypto.com, a Singapore-based exchange app.

Big Tech companies whose online platforms carry advertisements for scams should be made to reimburse victims as part of wider efforts to combat a growing epidemic of online fraud, British lawmakers said.

Once upon a time, a very long time ago – until Thursday 28 October 2021, to be precise – the term “metaverse” was known only to lexicographers and science fiction enthusiasts. And then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How come? Simply this: Mark Zuckerberg, the supreme leader of Facebook, pissed off by seeing nothing but bad news about his company in the media...

It’s told like this: Amanda Gorman performed at the inauguration and the rest is history. The truth is I almost declined to be the inaugural poet. Why? I was terrified. I was scared of failing my people, my poetry. But I was also terrified on a physical level. Covid was still raging, and my age group couldn’t get vaccinated yet. Just a few weeks before, domestic terrorists assaulted the U.S. Capitol, the very steps where I would recite.

Veganism has gone mainstream, so it’s easy to forget what life used to be like for us plant-munchers. In restaurants we had to endure awkward conversations with bewildered waiters, who would disappear to the kitchen and return saying they could do us the salad with the cheese picked out and the dressing left off. We’d go home hungry.

Billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya triggered a backlash on social media after saying during a recent episode of his podcast that “nobody cares” about the ongoing human rights abuses against the Uyghurs in China.

FACEBOOK IS A lot like a landfill, not only because it’s full of other people’s shit but because, while everyone agrees something needs to be done about it, nobody seems to quite know what. What most (American) commentators have in common, though, is where they look for the answer: the late 19th and early 20th century trust-busting and progressive movements, when activists and politicians broke harmful concentrations of economic power in everything from oil to railways.

On December 14, while addressing the Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate, the ambassador-designate to Pakistan, Donald Armin Blome, pledged that he would champion the press in his new post. “Pakistani journalists and members of civil society face kidnappings, assaults, intimidation and disappearances,” he said, promising to advocate for expanded protections and to hold the perpetrators of these actions to account.

As we approach the one-year anniversary of the violent assault on the Capitol, the prevailing argument on the left and much of the center is that the Republican Party poses a novel threat to American democracy. This is a flawed assessment, which oversells and understates the danger we face.

Of late, we’ve been getting used to shortages of things we’ve previously taken for granted, like petrol, gas, toilet rolls, HGV drivers and seasonal labour. Could it be that we’re about to add a new item to that list: antibiotics?

The characters in HBO’s prestige hit let us set aside judgment and just marvel at how ardently, how comically, people will chase after the worst thing for them. Two years ago, as HBO’s “Succession” finished its second season, we saw Logan Roy, the head of a right-wing media empire, looking for someone in his inner circle to serve as the scapegoat for a corporate scandal. One candidate was his hapless son-in-law, Tom Wambsgans.