New European

Well, now we’re talking. The UK-EU summit in Brussels on November 20, at which Andy Burnham will meet António Costa, president of the European Council, and Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, will kick-start a process that could make his premiership seriously consequential, perhaps even historic. On the agenda are a series of amendments to the Brexit deal, embracing food and drink products, emissions trading, energy policy collaboration, a new youth experience scheme and

Enjoy music but insist on checking the artist’s passport before listening to it? Then you’re in luck with the launch this week of GB News’s spin-off sister radio station. As first reported by Rats in a Sack back in September, bosses at the cash-draining hard right channel have launched GB Music Radio, a channel which promises not to play anything other than UK artists. Its slogan is “all British, all day” (although one jingle proclaims it to be “as British as Morecambe and Wise at Christmas”, s

A children’s slide is the only structure left standing amid the shattered ruins in Kyiv’s Solomianskyi district. The smell of burnt metal, scorched stone and smoke still lingers from the destroyed factory nearby, after the area was hit by Russian drones in August and September this year.  The August 8 attack coincided with US president Donald Trump’s proposed ‘deadline’ for ending Russia’s full-scale invasion in Ukraine. Since then, he has loosened sanctions and signed a deal to buy Russian die

While the rest of the country was entranced by the ending of this year’s The Celebrity Traitors and – spoiler alert! – posh nitwit James Blunt’s self-immolation, Talk presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer had weightier concerns. Referring to the fact that joint winners Romesh Ranganathan and Sebastian Croft had donated their prize money to the Refugee Council and the humanitarian charity Choose Love respectively, Hartley-Brewer fumed on, inevitably, X: “The end of #CelebrityTraitors was the most BBC t

When German media giant Axel Springer finally bought the Telegraph titles this summer, staff were assured that the plan was to pump money into them in a bid to regain their lost glories. Springer, which completed its purchase of the Telegraph in June, announced it would invest in the title to make it the “leading centre-right media outlet in the English-speaking world”. But as Rats in a Sack reported last month, the owners of Bild and Die Welt had barely got their feet under the table before ru

It is hard to overstate just how jittery Washington DC feels this week. Democrats are notoriously neurotic at the best of times. And these are, perhaps, the best of times. The promise of a blue wave in the midterm elections has led many to define the thing they are feeling as “nauseously optimistic”.  The kind of excitement that makes you want to throw up.  We are off to Michigan in the morning to follow one of the most electrifying Senate races of the election. Abdul El-Sayed would beco

Hannibal Lecter, the cultured, sophisticated psychologist and gourmand, continues to capture the public’s imagination 45 years since he first appeared in the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon. He appeared in three subsequent books, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal and Hannibal Rising; on film five times, portrayed by three different actors, and on TV in the series Hannibal. His latest incarnation is in the stage version of The Silence of the Lambs, adapted by Gina Gionfriddo, which is currently o

If you’re an Autistic person like me, these times feel pretty damn hopeless. The Reform Party causes me the most worry, especially owing to their attacks on the welfare system, the only support I can access. The overwhelming sense is of complete and utter despair.  Whether it’s a review into the “over diagnosis” of neurodivergence (which actually concluded that it is not happening at scale), or the continual attacks on how “legitimate” a diagnosis such as Autism is, our 1% of the UK population

Author Gary Indiana described Peter Hujar’s photographs as “serene, elegant, haunting views of dead people and living people who look dead.”  Many of Hujar’s most striking images feature subjects in repose: Candy Darling, surrounded by flowers, dying in her hospital bed, Susan Sontag splayed across sheets like some imposing, mystical human landscape, a close-up of Dutch Anderson’s orgasmic face, posed like a Renaissance statue recently pierced by arrows. The only monograph published in Hujar’s

PICK OF THE WEEK Primetime (general release) NBC’s hit show To Catch a Predator was first launched as a segment within Dateline NBC under the title “Dangerous Web” in 2004 – the same year that the network made Donald Trump an instant television star in The Apprentice. This coincidence was culturally significant. As NBC boss Jeff Zucker (bizarrely playing himself) tells presenter Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson, never better) in Lance Oppenheim’s first dramatised feature, the era of Friends

“Now the monstrous bitch seems to be somehow more organised, or at least more pervasive,” writes Eleanor Johnson in her new book Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women. “It’s not just one demoness or one terrifying monster. In this period, we see the threat of the monstrous bitch crack wide open, engulfing untold tens of thousands of real, historical women, tried and executed as witches, in her gaping maw.” Johnson, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia Universit

Woodward Avenue is the artery that pierces Detroit, Michigan, linking downtown, midtown and uptown, then continuing all the way up to Pontiac. It is 27 miles long and, even in the heart of the 650,000-strong city, at 8am or 6pm, it’s possible to cross it insouciantly, without waiting for the little man to turn white. That’s how empty the place is.  Few American cities are known for their footfall, and Detroit is no exception, but even the cars have too much space on the roads here. If you speak

Every Labour Budget brings a familiar media ritual: the hunt for whoever has been hardest hit, and the attempt to make the rest of us feel terribly sorry for them. Right wing papers in particular love conjuring up images they think will horrify the public. Private school parents forced to skimp on their skiing holidays. Wind turbines blighting the Cotswolds. And now, apparently, the small landlord going under. Little do they know that people like me are reading these headlines while creepily ru

Earlier this week Rats in a Sack reported on Tommy Robinson, the far right thug found guilty of harassing two journalists, and how he lasted 25 minutes from explaining how he couldn’t comment on the case to labelling their employers “fucking wankers”. Now it appears Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, appears absolutely determined to secure himself the longest sentence possible after once again breaking his monastic silence to pontificate publicly on the independence of the jury. The

Some families have their political rows around the family dinner table, some save them up for Christmas Day – and others do it in a far more public manner. Sir Tony Brenton, Britain’s former ambassador to Russia, had a letter published in the Times on Thursday supporting a controversial column earlier in the week in which Matthew Parris, the former Conservative MP turned increasingly erratic writer, suggested Ukraine should be prepared to cede territory to Russia and agree never to join Nato in

When Elon Musk confirmed on October 25 that he had personally ordered the throttling of Ukraine’s Starlink internet service, it felt like a line had been crossed. Here was an individual tech billionaire admitting to intervening in a conflict in which a sovereign nation the other side of the world fights for its existence, in a wider conflict of autocracy against the right of self-determination of democratic states. The world’s richest man says he slowed down Starlink, which allows Ukraine to co

There was a brief, halcyon period in the 2010s when lots of people in white collar jobs were first encountering both high-speed internet and the smartphone boom and at the time, it genuinely felt possible to get a feeling for what was hot. Thanks to shared platforms and access to actual data about what people were watching and sharing, we were able to see what was popular and to discern the shape of the culture. Now? Now it’s so hard to know what people genuinely like that Amol Rajan can convin

In the hundreds of thousands of words written about Andy Burnham’s surprising enthusiasm for not only wanting to take Britain back into Europe but, even more surprisingly, being willing to say so, five of the fundamental questions of journalism have been wrestled with. These, as any good cub reporter worth their salt will tell you, are: who, what, where, when and why? And, in the case of the prime minister’s mission, these answers are: Andy Burnham, fixing Britain’s economy and place in an unce

“I looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before: Nicki Minaj. That’s hard to miss. Stand up.” This presidential quotation probably goes up there with “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” and the Gettysburg Address. Perhaps they should put it on the dollar bill.  This was Donald Trump, at a rally in Port Huron, Michigan, introducing the crowd to Nicki Minaj, the rapper whom readers of The New World will doubtless recognise from her greatest hit, Anaconda, an ode to the benefits of a big

Larks ahoy for the Conservatives, who prepared for John Healey’s inaugural budget as chancellor by releasing their own video game, Super Kemi, allowing people to play as Kemi Badenoch “running, jumping and repealing her way through six worlds of red tape”. The online game, an 8-bit-style platformer, sees Badenoch, trailed by high-profile shadow chancellor Andrew Griffiths and shadow business secretary Claire Coutinho, running through a series of levels and jumping on the heads of baddies before