RSS Feeds

With Lazy Thinking in Sydney the latest venue to shut its doors, the once-vibrant grassroots music scene is becoming increasingly vulnerable

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Jim Flanagan has four days to hand his keys back to his landlord.

Panels engulfed in grungy band posters, handmade plates that have served countless customers, a shelving unit housing a library of iconic vinyls: all of it will be sold for next to nothing in the rush to vacate.

Hearings began amid the grief of the Bondi attack. The community hopes the inquiry will ‘help us to go back to the Australia that we love’

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

As the university student Liat was excused from the witness stand of the royal commission into antisemitism and social cohesion, she felt a weight lifted off her chest.

“It was certainly very cathartic for me … having gone through the majority of my university life in a state of fear,” she says.

Many of us are overwhelmed by the sheer number of our belongings, but can we change our consumption habits? And is there a more sustainable way to declutter?

• Change by degrees offers life hacks and sustainable living tips each Saturday to help reduce your household’s carbon footprint

• Got a question or tip for reducing household emissions? Email us at changebydegrees@theguardian.com

Whether you call it decluttering, death cleaning or a clear out, many of us face the onerous task of paring back our possessions, or those of a loved one.

There can be many reasons: from managing the mountains of stuff that comes with small children, to downsizing or moving house, or dealing with a deceased estate.

Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads

Reading Festival

There’s not much time to dig into her deep catalogue of future-facing pop, but she satisfies the hardcore

“Time itself is a circle,” as the rock’n’roll philosopher Nietzsche once said, accurately foreshadowing Charli xcx’s only UK festival appearance this summer. Like her performance on Glastonbury’s Other Stage last year – a pyrotechnic farewell to the puke-green reign of Brat – Charli’s Reading and Leeds appearance is a not-quite-headline slot that also follows a rowdy set from grime don Skepta.

Yet in the past 14 months, everything else in Charli’s pop factory has undergone a hard reset. She’s released two albums – a grandiose, gothic soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and last month’s high-concept Music, Fashion, Film, an album of raw, glitching micro-rock, with guitars shredded into Tetris-like pieces, and fitted with lacerating lyrics about shopping, egotism and mortality. She’s also launched an acting career, thrown a big fat celebrity wedding and, somewhere along the way, found time to rehearse her biggest, most vertiginous show to date.

Penalties for travel to blacklisted countries have recently risen, while aid workers and activists say they have also been caught up in the law

Shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, freelance photographer Jang Jinyoung crossed from Poland into Lviv and travelled on to Kyiv, where he spent a fortnight documenting the war.

South Korea’s foreign ministry had designated Ukraine off-limits days earlier, making unauthorised visits a criminal offence. He knew he was breaking the law but went anyway, as no Korean journalist had yet reported from inside the country.

His removal order was triggered by two convictions from over 15 years ago, when he struggled with untreated PTSD. New York's governor said Park earned a "second chance through rehabilitation."