The collection of staff gathered outside the Guardian’s head office near London’s Kings Cross today (4 December) could have been gathered to celebrate the 233rd birthday of the Observer. Instead they were there, they said, to fight for the survival of Britain’s oldest Sunday paper – and for their own jobs. Journalists from the Guardian and the Observer began a 48-hour strike this morning in protest at the Guardian Media Group’s (GMG) plan to sell the Observer to the digital start-up Tortoise. It is the first strike at the Guardian since 1971. Staff hope to persuade the Scott Trust – which controls the GMG – to pause the deal. Scott Trust chair Ole Jacob Sunde has offered assurances over future of ...

In the end, South Korea's return to martial law lasted only a matter of hours. The country's president, Yoon Suk Yeol, announced that he was invoking the emergency measure in an extraordinary late-night address to the nation on 3 December, citing vague, ill-defined threats that included “North Korean communist forces” and the "anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people”. The martial law decree that went into effect shortly afterwards supposedly banned "all political activities" and placed all news organisations under the control of “the Martial Law Command”, but it was widely ignored. Protesters rallied in large numbers outside the National Assembly, the country's parliament, facing down heavily armed soldiers, while lawmakers rushed to the chamber ...

It is crunch time in France. Yesterday, the Rassemblement National agreed to vote with the left alliance on their no-confidence motion against the government. This came after the prime minister Michel Barnier triggered Article 49.3 to force through the budget. If Barnier’s government is toppled this week, the pressure will be on President Macron to find a new government and a way to pass a budget as fast as possible. Never before in the Fifth Republic has the year ended with no budget and no government. We could be in a legal no-man’s land. To save the budget and his government, Barnier offered many concessions to Marine Le Pen. But each time Le Pen had the same answer: not enough. Barnier ...

Gregg Wallace’s attempt to defend himself against allegations that he made sexually inappropriate comments to contestants on various TV programmes, which he denies, has not gone to plan. Over the weekend, the MasterChef presenter said to his 200,000 followers on Instagram: “I can see the complaints coming from a handful of middle-class women of a certain age.” The Prime Minister has since waded in: “Clearly the comments [from Wallace] that we’ve seen from the individual over the weekend were completely inappropriate, misogynistic.” Wallace’s further attempts at self-defence appear rather flimsy. He had worked with more than 4,000 contestants, he said, but “apparently” there’d been “13 complaints in that time”. Although Wallace today apologised for “any offence” that he caused, his statement ...

Back in February, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar told the New Statesman: “I am really open with Keir and the UK shadow cabinet that I want to and need to be going into a 2026 election in the midterm of a popular Labour government, not an unpopular one.” That’s a warning worth recalling now because Starmer’s government is – by any measure – unpopular. Just 18 per cent of voters, according to polling by YouGov, approve of Labour’s record to date, while 59 per cent disapprove. It took Tony Blair more than three years to lose his poll lead – during the 2000 fuel protests – but Starmer’s party has already trailed the Conservatives. In Scotland, the picture is still more troubling. Labour, which ...

When Bashar al-Assad captured Aleppo, then Syria’s largest city, in the first phase of the country’s civil war, it followed a four-year siege and horrific urban warfare. Last week, Turkish-backed Syrian rebels retook the city in a matter of days. It’s impossible to say now whether Assad’s regime will collapse on the face of these rapid gains, or whether the war will turn once again into a protracted grind. Even if it does collapse, we have no way of knowing what’s coming next. Either way, however, there will be knock-on geopolitical effects, in the Middle East, in Europe, and in the world. The rebels’ gains fall into the category of shocking, but not surprising. To wrest back control of most of ...

Emmanuel Macron was supposed to do two things. First, turn France into a dynamic, low-tax, high-tech nation with a lean state and sound finances. Second, keep “populism” – by which his supporters meant Jean Luc Mélenchon on one side and Marine Le Pen on the other – at bay. A year and a half into his second term, the president has failed at both objectives, and his government stands on the brink of collapse.   Having already lost his parliamentary majority in 2022, and after a poor performance in the European elections in June of this year, Macron dissolved parliament, calling snap legislative elections. But the only effect was to pit both left and far-right against him, and both made gains, whittling his ...

“Is this just expensive virtue-signalling?” a reporter asked Sadiq Khan at the event marking the official launch of the new names and colours of the six London Overground lines on Thursday. He was not alone: the capital’s mayor has faced variants of this question from all comers these last few months. The new names are, let’s say, “socially conscious”. Two of them, Weaver and Windrush, relate to this history of immigration to London; two, Suffragette and Lioness, to rather different forms of feminism, both problematic in their own way (the former because the Suffragettes were, whatever else they were, terrorists; the latter because naming a line after a football team feels faintly silly). Another line, Mildmay, commemorates a hospital important to ...