Digital life
fromwww.theguardian.com
15 hours agoIs the UK falling out of love with social media?
UK adults are becoming less active on social media, with only 49% posting, sharing, or commenting.
The 1,640-foot-long National Covid Memorial Wall stretched along the bank of the River Thames, directly opposite the Parliament, as if holding vigil over the nation's corridors of power.
Kanya King stated, 'Black music shapes what we listen to, how we speak, how we dress, how we tell our stories and I guess it's defined as Britain's cultural identity but structurally and institutionally is still often treated as m.'
We're just so f****** divided right now. The working classes, no matter what colour your skin is, are fighting each other and the elites are taking the f****** p***. It's now very apparent they're taking the p***, but instead of everyone coming together and looking up, we're just fighting and blaming each other.
A child born this morning in Britain can expect to be in good health only until they are 61. The last 20 years of their life will be blighted by illness: dodgy hearts, painful joints, an inability to get about. Our healthy life expectancy has been dropping for years; it is now the lowest since 2011, when records began.
A new campaign is aiming to collect 50 objects that sum up Englishness in an effort to move the conversation away from reductive arguments over whether to hang a St George's flag or not. Supported by the Green party politician Caroline Lucas, the musician and campaigner Billy Bragg, and Kojo Koram, a law professor, the A Very English Chat campaign hopes to tackle England's growing social divisions and political polarisation.
Polanski told the crowd: Go back to your communities, to the community centres, to your trade unions, to your friends, to your neighbours. We must organise in our communities. Local elections are coming in just a few weeks' time, he added. We will defeat hate. It's time to make hope normal again.
The data, painstakingly gathered and verified by ELSC, reveals the operation of a system, not something which is centrally directed, of course but something which is organic, multipolar, self-reinforcing and mutually exacerbating. A system which seeks to raise intolerably the personal cost to any individual who speaks or acts in light of their conscience seeks to reduce civil society's capacity to call out genocide and to demand at the same time robust action by our governments.
Not a day passes without some overt expression of it in our national life. A crime committed by one Muslim becomes an indictment of all Muslims. A cultural practice is wrenched from context and weaponised to provoke anxiety. A theological concept is distorted to imply threat. And on the streets, and increasingly online, it can turn into violence, intimidation or exclusion directed at anyone who looks Muslim.
The Facebook ad, part of the campaign that encourages people to intervene safely if they witness sexual harassment or hate crime on the TfL network, showed a black male verbally harassing a young girl accompanied by a white male friend, who sat down close to the victim boxing her in'. A viewer complained that the ad was irresponsible, harmful and offensive for perpetuating negative racial stereotypes about black teenage boys.
It's nearly 200 years since the birth of a British aristocrat who became the first Muslim member of the House of Lords. But few have heard of Lord Henry Stanley, who "defied convention and his family's wishes" when he converted to Islam in 1859, according to historian Jamie Gilham. Little remains of Stanley's letters and diaries "which is really frustrating but adds to the idea that he was a private man," he said.
The stats speak for themselves. In 2015's 'A List', out of 418 executives, 79 (19 per cent) were women and only eight (2 per cent) were BAME. Shockingly, in the second decade of the 21st century, it is still possible to go to a leading marketing or communications industry event and only see a handful of black or Asian faces in the room.
More than 200,000 people living legally in the UK are on the 10-year route to settled status, which requires legal migrants to renew 30-month visas four times at a cost of 3,908.50 including healthcare costs per renewal before they can apply for indefinite leave to remain (ILR). Under proposals by the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, if people have used public funds, even in work, the wait would double to 20 years.
And Prue Leith's leaving Bake Off. Let us focus, then, on the few, brief bright spots we can if we really squint hard into the darkness see. There's microplastics maybe not poisoning our every organ as thoroughly as we thought. There's Gwyneth Paltrow announcing that she loves a 6pm dinner and early beddy-byes. That's not quite how she put it, but that's what she meant.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
Similar perceptions of decline are now the norm across the nation. In postwar Britain, high streets became the thriving hubs of a more affluent society and a source of local identity and pride. But almost 13,000 shops closed in 2024 an attrition rate of around 37 a day, which particularly affected the north of England, the Midlands and deprived coastal areas.