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Wildly popular across China, these addictively fiery street food snacks spiced with cumin and chilli are yours for the making

One of the most welcome developments in the mind-bogglingly, gloriously diverse world of London dining options in recent years has been the proliferation of restaurants serving the food of the vast, automonous north-western Chinese region of Xinjiang, known by many of the predominantly Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghur population as East Turkestan. As this fact suggests, Uyghur cooking has many similarities with other Turkic cuisines, including a love of lamb and mutton, and an aptitude for generously spiced kebabs so good that they’re now an “iconic street snack” in the Chinese capital, albeit some 3,000 miles east, in the time-honoured colonial fashion, and renamed as “old Beijing skewers”, according to that city’s own Maggie Zhu. (In Uyghur, they are, I believe, kawap, though I’d be glad to have that transliteration confirmed.)

Happily, however, you don’t need to go to Beitun or Beijing to enjoy them – or even to Golders Green – because they’re incredibly easy to recreate wherever you are, as long as you have access to a smoking hot grill. I declare this the summer of the skewer!

Editor’s note, July 12, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published in January 2025.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.

I live in an isolated part of a developed country, relatively far from anything else, and am struggling with my relationship to flying in the face of climate change. Most advice on minimizing flying seems tailored to more connected areas in the US or Europe; we have no trains or buses, and it’s a 12+ hour drive to the nearest city. I’ve considered moving to a more connected area where these would be options, but then I’d experience the same angst any time I wanted to visit my family where I currently live. 

I’ve tried to take the approach of flying less frequently and staying for longer periods of time, but I feel resentful toward the carefree way I see friends around me approaching this issue, like flying out every month to watch a game. I feel like I’m torturing myself with guilt over something that no one cares about, and that the good I do by avoiding the one roundtrip I would take on a vacation per year is erased by the behavior of my peers. 

On the other hand, the contribution my annual flight would make, in terms of global emissions and demand in the airline industry, is minuscule. I feel generally opposed to making climate change about individual actions, but flying is also something that is such a privileged action that it feels like a special case. I also feel conflicted because I don’t think I deserve to travel if I can’t do it ethically, but the strategies often proposed as alternatives are not available to me. 

Dear Resentfully Landbound, 

Your question has me thinking about Greta Thunberg. In 2019, the Swedish activist wanted to attend a climate conference in the US, but she refused to fly because of the high carbon emissions associated with air travel. So, instead, she traveled across the Atlantic by boat. On rough seas. For two weeks.

Should we all be doing what Thunberg did?

I think Thunberg is a heroic young activist, and there’s value in activists who take a purist approach, like refusing to ever fly. But the value lies less in their individual action and more in their ability to serve as a powerful jolt to our collective moral imagination — to shift the Overton window, the range of behaviors that seem possible. Thunberg’s well-publicized sailing voyage, for example, helped convince others to fly less. But to say her approach has been a potent rhetorical tool is different from saying it’s a model that every individual should follow to a tee.   

For one thing, not everyone can sail the seas for two weeks — whether because of the time required, a physical health condition, or some other factor. And it’s not clear that all people should forgo all flying. 

That’s because we each have multiple values. Yes, protecting our planet is a crucial value. So is, say, nurturing relationships with beloved family members and friends who live abroad. Or developing a career. Or learning about other cultures. Or making art. So, even though minimizing how much we fly is a virtuous thing to do, some thinkers would caution you against treating that as the only relevant value. 

Take contemporary philosopher Susan Wolf, who wrote an influential essay called “Moral Saints.” She argues that you shouldn’t actually strive to be “a person whose every action is as morally good as possible…who is as morally worthy as can be.” If you try to optimize your morality through extreme altruistic self-sacrifice, she says, you end up living a life bereft of the personal projects, relationships, and experiences that make up a life well lived. You can also end up being a crappy friend or family member.

We often think of “virtues” as being connected to morality, but Wolf’s point is that there are non-moral virtues, too — like artistic, musical, or athletic talent — and we want to cultivate those, too.

“If the moral saint is devoting all his time to feeding the hungry or healing the sick or raising money for Oxfam, then necessarily he is not reading Victorian novels, playing the oboe, or improving his backhand,” she wrote. “A life in which none of these possible aspects of character are developed may seem to be a life strangely barren.” 

In other words, it’s okay — even desirable — to devote yourself to a variety of personal priorities, rather than sacrificing everything in pursuit of moral perfection. The tricky bit is figuring out how to balance between all the priorities, which sometimes conflict with each other.

In fact, I think part of the appeal of the purist approach is that it actually makes life easier on this score. Even though it demands extreme self-sacrifice, the extreme altruist never has to ask herself how much of the luxury (in this case, flying) to allow herself. The right answer is clear: none. 

By contrast, if you’re trying to balance between different values, it’s nigh on impossible to arrive at an objectively “right” answer. That’s very uncomfortable; we like clear formulas! But I tend to agree with philosophers like Bernard Williams, who argue that it’s a fantasy to think we can import scientific objectivity into the realm of ethics. Our ethical life is just too messy and multifaceted to be captured by any single set of universally binding moral principles, any systematic moral theory. 

And, if that’s so, we have to look at how compelling we find the case for each competing value. It’s often obvious to us that we shouldn’t give equal weight to all of them. For example, I’m obsessed with snorkeling, and I’d love to be able to travel to all the top snorkeling destinations this year, from Hawaii, to the Maldives, to Indonesia. But I know I can’t justify taking infinite flights for infinite snorkeling trips during a climate emergency! 

At the same time, that doesn’t mean I won’t ever go on any trip whatsoever. I do sometimes let myself travel by air, especially if it’s for a purpose that is not only pleasurable but also essential to a life well lived, like nurturing relationships with friends and family members who live far away. And when I fly, I try to make those miles really count by staying for a longer time. 

This is basically what you’re already doing: “I’ve tried to take the approach of flying less frequently and staying for longer periods of time,” you wrote, describing “the one roundtrip I would take on a vacation per year.” I think that’s a reasonable approach, especially given the lack of trains and buses in your area.

So, even though you framed your dilemma as a question about whether or how much to fly, I don’t actually think the flying bit is your real problem. The real problem is this bit: “I feel resentful with the carefree way I see friends approaching this issue, like flying out every month to watch a game. I feel like I’m torturing myself with guilt over something that no one cares about.”

To be clear, it’s totally understandable to feel resentful; what your friends are doing does sound excessive. But the issue is that your resentment is making you miserable. And a virtuous but miserable life is not likely to be sustainable.

Some do-gooders can go to altruistic extremes without feeling resentful or judgmental. They may be able to forgo flying entirely and use that choice to create new forms of meaning and connection and to enrich other aspects of their lives so that they don’t become joyless, judgy, or one-dimensional moral optimizers of the sort Wolf described. But most of us are not in that category. And unless you are, I wouldn’t counsel you to go down the purist path, because resentment and judgmentalness can cause their own harm. They harm you. They harm the relationship between you and the targets of your judgment. And they can, ultimately, harm the cause itself because they’re off-putting to others and they make being climate-friendly seem impossibly hard. 

If you’re like most of us, a path of moderation will probably work better. You can decide on a balance that you think is reasonable — for example, one roundtrip flight per year — and stick with that. Once you’ve done that, ditch the guilt that’s torturing you. That’ll help diffuse the resentment, some of which I suspect is actually resentment toward yourself, because of how you’ve been torturing yourself. 

But that on its own might not be enough to get rid of all the resentment, because flying once annually still might feel like a big sacrifice relative to what your peers are doing. So one key intervention here is to expand your aperture, to look at what a broader group of people are doing, so that you don’t feel you’re sacrificing for the sake of “something that no one cares about.” More people care than you might think! 

A study published in Nature Communications found that 80 to 90 percent of Americans are living in a “false social reality.” They dramatically underestimate how much public support there is for climate policies. They think only 37 to 43 percent support these policies, when the real proportion of supporters is roughly double that. (And support is high across the world.) The study authors note that this misperception “poses a challenge to collective action on problems like climate change,” because it’s hard to stay motivated when you think you’re alone in caring.  

Concretely connecting with others who are choosing to fly less will help bring this home for you and make you feel that you’re part of a community that shares your values. Networks you can reach out to include Stay Grounded, We Stay on the Ground, and Flying Less. The sense of belonging and camaraderie you get from being part of such a group can help you form positive emotional associations with your reduced-flying lifestyle. You’ll feel like you’re gaining something, not just losing. 

I think that’s especially important given that resentment can actually feel good in the short term (even if it damages our well-being in the long term). Righteous indignation is a rush; it gives us an energy boost. So we can’t expect the brain to give it up just like that. We need to replace it with something else that feels good. The best candidate may be the pleasant emotion that philosophers and psychologists have identified as resentment’s exact opposite: gratitude. 

Next time you feel resentment bubbling up, go out in nature and do something you enjoy — birding, hiking, swimming — and really savor it. Pay close attention to each sound, each smell. Remind yourself that your reduced-flying lifestyle is helping to preserve this source of pleasure. In other words, it’s enabling you to get more of what you love. As you do that, I hope you’ll feel not only proud that you’re living in line with your values but also very grateful to yourself. 

Bonus: What I’m reading

• This dilemma reminded me not just of Greta Thunberg, but also of Simone Weil, a WWII-era philosopher who died early because she starved herself, refusing to eat more than people in occupied France. She was a “moral saint” if ever there was one. And as this excellent essay in The Point magazine notes, “Weil is a saint, but many couldn’t stand her.” She’s admirable for how much she cared about others’ suffering, but is her extreme self-sacrifice actually exemplary, in the sense that we should all follow her example? I don’t think so.    

• I also finally picked up a book that’s been on my to-read list for ages: Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar. It does a beautiful job telling stories about extreme altruists and getting you thinking about the pros and cons of the purist path. 

• I’m enjoying Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Pursuit of the Ideal” in which the moral pluralist philosopher argues that there’s no one right way to live, whether on the individual or state level. “Utopias have their value,” Berlin writes, since “nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities — but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal.”  

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

Классический мониторинг отвечает на вопрос «открылась ли страница». Магазин со сломанным приёмом заказов отвечает на него уверенное «да»: витрина рендерится, корзина считает, 200 OK, сертификат валиден. Не работает только одно — деньги не проходят. Шлюз остался в тест-режиме после работ, обновление сломало оформление, растёт доля сорвавшихся оплат — снаружи всё зелёное.

Разбираем, как проверять приём заказов изнутри WooCommerce: три сигнала из статистики заказов с порогами, нормированными на собственную норму магазина (чтобы не будить владельца двух заказов в неделю), и суточный smoke-прогон конвейера заказа — создать скрытый виртуальный товар, провести заказ по статусам, удалить всё за собой. Без единого письма, без следов в отчётности, без реальных платежей.

Плюс две грабли, на которых мы посидели: письма WooCommerce не глушатся фильтром woocommerce_email_classes (к моменту cron хуки уже развешаны на init — бить надо в woocommerce_email_enabled_{id}), а finally не спасает от PHP-фатала, из-за чего в чужом магазине остаётся висеть служебный заказ. И почему headless-браузер — это отдельный уровень, а не замена этому.

The White House is working to change electoral rules in its favor. Protectors of democracy must have a counterplan

The second Trump administration is systematically eroding the institutional foundations of competitive elections without formally abolishing them. They have a plan to achieve what scholars of democratic backsliding call “electoral subversion”: changing electoral rules in their favor. Protectors of democracy must have a counter-plan of their own.

The White House’s approach to electoral subversion has multiple fronts. The administration has rewarded those who used violence to disrupt the last transfer of power, disabled the federal agencies charged with protecting election integrity, moved to extend executive control over voter registration, and threatened to withhold terrorism prevention funding from states who do not change their voting rules.

These financiers want to remodel the UK into a form that suits them – one that could threaten to erode the barriers between crime and business

This coming Tuesday, the government’s representation of the people bill comes back to the House of Commons for its third reading. It bundles up a multitude of measures, including an extension of the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds and welcome changes to voter registration. But thanks to the continuing furore around Nigel Farage and his extremely wealthy friends – such as the Thailand-based crypto-investor Christopher Harborne, who gave Farage a £5m “lottery win” personal gift and has donated in excess of £22m to Reform UK – the aspects of the legislation that have suddenly become its headline measures are focused on big-money donations.

The government has already implemented a moratorium – but only a moratorium – on political donations in cryptocurrencies, the encrypted digital assets that, to quote the Electoral Commission, “present particular challenges and risks in meeting electoral law requirements in identifying donors and ensuring they are permissible”. There is a new annual £100,000 limit on donations from British citizens living abroad. Other legislative moves will now take the form of amendments to the bill: they include new checks on whether companies making donations are above board by measuring their profit as well as their revenues, and a requirement for parliamentary candidates to declare any donation above £2,230 (although “personal gifts” will continue to be exempt).

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

We try to pin down definitions and enforce rules – but often what we’re really arguing about is character

In January 2015, two members of al-Qaida gunned down cartoonists at the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo in retaliation for their publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. In the following weeks, my Facebook page split in two. Many of my childhood friends (I grew up in France and went to school near Paris) expressed their sadness at the death of artists they had been familiar with for decades, their anger over religious extremism and their fear about the waning of free speech.

Meanwhile, many of my British and American academic colleagues, who were discovering Charlie Hebdo and its garishly offensive cartoons for the first time, worried about the stigmatisation of French Muslims and cast doubt on the wisdom of publishing the images in the first place; one reposted a link to a blog that described the murdered cartoonists as “racist assholes”.

A comms director and a charity worker disagreed on taxation, but how did they fare on the climate crisis?

• Want to meet someone from across the divide? Click here to find out how

Emma, 34, London

Occupation Thinktank comms director

Her breakup memoir and Vogue column made her the voice of modern dating. As her debut is published, she talks about single life, oversharing and why she still believes she’ll find love

There is a scene in Annie Lord’s novel that will be instantly familiar to any young person who has spent time at a pub or nightclub recently. Daisy and Maya, two best friends in their mid-20s, are lamenting the paltry state of the dating market.

“It’s just shit out there,” Daisy says. “Every time we go out there’s, like, one decent single guy and then about 40 gorgeous women with master’s degrees and shag haircuts and what’s even the point in trying.”

When Mark Lanier and his young client Kaley faced the tech giants in an LA courtroom earlier this year, it seemed a bigger battle than David v Goliath. But they scored a landmark victory, proving that the social media giants had created ‘addiction machines’ that harmed mental health. How did they pull it off?

When Mark Zuckerberg walked into a Los Angeles courtroom on 18 February flanked by an entourage bedecked in Meta Ray-Bans, some people laughed. If this was an attempt at product placement for the company’s newest range of smart glasses, it was jarringly ill-judged: Zuckerberg was about to testify before a jury in a landmark lawsuit that sought to prove that Instagram and YouTube are addictive by design, and he had passed a throng of bereaved parents on his way into the courthouse. But the prosecution team, led by Mark Lanier, were not laughing.

This was a serious trial. For the first time, the most powerful names in social media were being held to account for the inherent design of their platforms, rather than the content hosted on them. They were accused of deliberately and maliciously building products that keep children hooked, with disastrous consequences for the mental wellbeing of young people. It was a landmark case – a big tobacco moment for big tech.

The Nations Championship is a very 21st century sort of sports tournament, which is why the Pacific nation are playing on Merseyside not Suva

Suva’s changed. I mean, I think Suva has changed. I’ve never covered one of Fiji’s home games before. Maybe there are always this many Liverpudlians around the place. The views of the Irish Sea were definitely better than I expected. There were more pictures of Brian Labone and Howard Kendall up around the stadium, too.

The really odd bit was that every time the stadium announcer tried to get the 50,000 fans inside the ground to shout “Go Fiji” everyone just sat there and ignored him. Almost like they were supporting the opposition.

On a day shortened because of extreme heat, it was a chance for opportunists and Mathieu van der Poel took advantage, with Tom Pidcock finishing third

Christian Prudhomme pokes his head out of the sunroof and waves his little yellow flag. Stage nine is underway…

The riders are rolling out of Malemort, racing begins in earnest in 5km.

Officers say they are not looking for anyone else after arrest of man, 28, on suspicion of murdering ex-Tory politician

Police have said there is nothing to suggest the death of Ann Widdecombe was politically motivated.

Speaking at a press conference on Sunday morning, the assistant chief constable of Devon and Cornwall police, Matt Longman, said detectives were open-minded about the motive for the killing, but stressed there was no evidence to suggest it had been politically motivated. He also said it was not being treated as terrorism.

It’s been feeling very 1995 lately. 

Oasis, whose last good song came out back when Macs were still see-through, was the second-biggest tour on the planet last year. Gen Z is snapping up the flip phones and digital cameras their parents had traded in for smartphones, and Y2K-era fashion is flooding the mall, in case you were wondering where all the rhinestones came from. Pop star Olivia Rodrigo just released a hit album heavily influenced by alternative rock recorded a decade before she was born. 

Ask Americans directly and they’ll tell you: the 1990s are the decade we’re most nostalgic for, edging out even the boomer-beloved ’80s. 

Speaking as someone who lived through the 1990s as a teenager and mostly enjoyed it (at least in retrospect), it makes total sense to me. Of course, it would — as a Washington Post analysis found, when Americans name the country’s “best decade,” the answer inevitably boils down to whichever decade they turned 11. 

But personal experience also means that, with a little effort, I can remember what the 1990s were actually like to live through, and the reality was a different story than the myth — especially for teenagers of that era.

Take teen pregnancy. In 1991, the teen birth rate hit a record high of 61.8 births per 1,000 girls aged 15-19. In his 1995 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton called “the epidemic of teen pregnancies and births where there is no marriage” America’s “most serious social problem.” A National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy formed the following year in direct response. 

And the fear ran well beyond pregnancy: juvenile arrests peaked in 1996 at nearly 2.7 million, at the height of the so-called “superpredator” panic over a coming wave of remorseless teenage criminals. In 1995, as the writer Adam Mastroianni points out in an excellent new essay that helped inspire this piece, half of high school students drank alcohol, 35 percent smoked cigarettes, 40 percent had at least tried marijuana, one in 10 had brought a weapon to school at some point, and about 6 percent of teenage girls were pregnant in any given year. The teen suicide rate for boys hit a record high in 1990. Americans were terrified for their teenagers, and terrified of them. 

So, no, the 1990s weren’t all teen boy bands, high school comedies, and endless economic growth. But what’s amazing, at a moment when everyone seems sure that kids today are not all right, is just how much those scary signs of teen dysfunctions from the 1990s have simply vanished.

This spring, the CDC reported that the US teen birth rate fell to 11.7 births per 1,000 girls ages 15 to 19 in 2025 — down 81 percent from its 1991 peak, and the lowest figure ever recorded. That has been the pattern for more than three decades now: the teen birth rate sets a record low, then breaks it, then breaks it again.

It’s not just teen pregnancy: nearly every risky teen behavior of the halcyon 1990s started collapsing almost at once, kept collapsing for 30 years, and is collapsing still. The teen birth rate dropped 7 percent in 2025 alone. And yet it’s hard to find anyone who planned this victory, and nearly impossible to find anyone who celebrated it.

The kids got careful

Let’s start with teen births, which largely comes down to two factors working in concert: fewer teens are having sex, and those who are use much better contraception. 

The share of high schoolers who have ever had sex fell from 54 percent in 1991 to 32 percent in 2023, and Guttmacher Institute researchers found that improved contraceptive use drove essentially all of the pregnancy decline in the late 2000s and early 2010s, including a sevenfold rise in teens using long-acting IUDs and implants. In the decade that followed, delaying sex became the biggest single contributor. 

But contraception can’t explain why violence fell too. The best unified theory comes from psychologists like Jean Twenge and more recently writers like Mastroianni, whose “Decline of Deviance” essays argue that kids stopped taking risks of all kinds in part because their futures became too valuable to gamble. As lives got longer, safer, and richer, the expected cost of any given joint, fight, or pregnancy went up. Twenge called this the “slow life strategy,” and it shows up as much in data about taking good risks as it does in taking bad ones: the share of high school seniors with a driver’s license, for instance, fell from 82 percent in 2005 to 63 percent in 2023.

If you’re waiting for smartphones to enter the picture, you’re going to keep waiting — most of these trends began in the 1990s, long before broadband, let alone Instagram. And policy didn’t seem to do much either. England spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a national teen pregnancy strategy, and a comparative analysis found rates fell about as fast as they did in similar countries that spent nothing. (Researchers have found that one of the few interventions with credible causal evidence behind it, at least in the US, was MTV’s iconic 16 and Pregnant — a reality show that worked by making teen parenthood look as exhausting as it was in reality.) 

Everything everywhere at once

The same collapse in dangerous behavior shows up everywhere you look. Half of high school students drank alcohol in 1991; 22 percent did in 2023. Seventy percent had tried a cigarette in 1991; under 18 percent had by 2021 — and no, they didn’t all just switch to vaping. E-cigarette use has also been falling since 2019. The share of high schoolers who’d been in a physical fight in the past year dropped from 42.5 percent in 1991 to 22 percent by 2019. And this year’s Monitoring the Future survey found that 66 percent of 12th graders — a record — used no alcohol, marijuana, or nicotine at all in the past month.

For me, no number stands out more than marijuana. When I was a teen in the 1990s… well, when I was a teen in the 1990s I was way too uncool to know anyone who had marijuana. (Honest, Mom.) But weed is now legal for adults in half the country, almost certainly easier for a teenager to obtain than at any point in American history, and generally regarded by young people as less dangerous than their parents ever believed. Yet even as marijuana use has spiked among adults, it has fallen among teens from its late-1990s peak. 

All that caution shows up in the most basic stat there is: teenagers stopped dying so frequently. In 1990, 88 of every 100,000 Americans ages 15 to 19 died each year; by 2013 it was 45. The single biggest reason was the car: since 1975, teen road deaths have fallen 67 percent thanks to safer vehicles, the graduated licensing laws every state adopted starting in the mid-1990s, and all those teens who never bothered getting a license in the first place. At the 2013 low, an American teenager was half as likely to die as one in 1990. 

That last stat is worth holding onto. Nostalgia isn’t just misleading; it also suffers from survivorship bias. Adults like myself may look back on their 1990s adolescence as a golden age, but there are tens of thousands of my peers who never lived to look back.

The price of caution

The problem with reducing risk-taking behavior across the board is that not all risks are bad. The same caution that might keep a 16-year-old from smoking or having sex might later keep her from founding a company, moving across the country, or writing a strange novel. In Mastroianni’s “Decline of Deviance” essays he documents falling cultural and scientific risk-taking right alongside fewer fistfights. “For the first time in history,” he writes, “weirdness is a choice. And it’s a hard one, because we have more to lose than ever.””

And if teens are so safe, why are they so sad? Forty percent of high schoolers reported persistent sadness or hopelessness in 2023, and the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued that we’ve overprotected kids in the physical world while underprotecting them in online spaces that didn’t even exist in the dial-up 1990s. The timing backs him up: when the CDC first asked the sadness question in 1999, about 28 percent of students said yes, and the number barely moved for nearly two decades until surging after 2017. Physical safety and psychological well-being may turn out to be more separate than we ever realized.

But our valid worries about the mental state and uncertain future of today’s teens shouldn’t blind us to just how remarkable the shift from the 1990s is as a whole. As Mastroianni writes, “We would have spent billions to solve all of these problems back in the 1990s… and yet when we got the thing we wanted so badly, we didn’t even notice.” 

America wanted its teenagers to stop getting pregnant, stop smoking, and stop fighting — wanted it badly enough to put it at the center of a State of the Union address — and then got nearly all of it, mostly free of charge, from the kids themselves.

“Can we take a win?” Mastroianni asks. We can start by counting this one.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

Farmers in Senegal are welcoming fish into their rice paddies. The hope is they'll fertilize the crop, be a source of food ... and eat the snails that carry parasitic worms.

(Image credit: Ricci Shyrock for NPR)

Officers say they are not looking for anyone else after arrest of man, 28, on suspicion of murdering ex-Tory politician

Police have said there is nothing to suggest the death of Ann Widdecombe was politically motivated.

Speaking at a press conference on Sunday morning, the assistant chief constable of Devon and Cornwall police, Matt Longman, said detectives were open-minded about the motive for the killing, but stressed there was no evidence to suggest it had been politically motivated. He also said it was not being treated as terrorism.

Биологи уже много лет пытаются собрать из отдельных молекул систему, похожую на живую клетку. Главная сложность здесь в том, чтобы объединить отдельные реакции в единый работающий цикл. Репликация ДНК, синтез белков, рост мембраны и деление — все это должно происходить внутри замкнутого пространства и повторяться из поколения в поколение.

Раньше получалось только что-то одно: либо репликация ДНК в липидных пузырьках, либо рост мембраны, либо синтез белка. Полноценный цикл долго оставался недостижимым. Недавняя работа группы Кейт Адамалы из Университета Миннесоты вплотную приблизилась к этой цели. Их искусственные клетки — пока простые, но уже способные делиться несколько раз.

Восемь месяцев назад я думал, что буду писать код по вечерам и получать часть дохода со своего приложения. И в какой-то момент смогу уйти из найма.

И вот спустя восемь месяцев я укладываю детей спать, а потом до ночи монтирую видео в TikTok. А уходом из найма пока даже не пахнет. В общем, реальность оказалась немного другой, чем я себе представлял.

Gallery director says collection of 140 paintings will offer a more balanced view of Manchester painter’s work

A new exhibition of work by LS Lowry will “bust a few myths” about the Mancunian artist, who the show’s co-curator says is still wrongly derided for being “naive and uncultured”.

LS Lowry: the Theatre of Life features 140 paintings by the artist, who captured working-class life in the industrial north-west of England during the early and mid 20th century.

Trump’s immigration architect calls the supreme court’s decision ‘outrageous’ as he pushes for policy rooted in genetics, not law

Neither of the supreme court majority opinions in Trump v Barbara, the 5-4 decision upholding the constitutionality of birthright citizenship, mention the true architect of the case. Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14160, which would deny citizenship to children born on American soil if their parents are undocumented immigrants or on temporary visas, is extensively noted, but not the man responsible for it. The omission of Stephen Miller is like Dracula without Dracula.

The vampire identified is chief justice Roger B Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision of 1857, though his notorious statement at the heart of his ruling went uncited: that the framers believed that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”, that they were excluded from the Declaration of Independence’s principle that “all men are created equal” because of racial inferiority “too clear for dispute,” and that rendered them no different from “an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic.”

Rick and Rachel are non-monogamous – but they both know this arrangement may not work forever

• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

I’ve tried knowing and not knowing, and I find both difficult. In an ideal world, we’d go looking for sex together

Software engineering was one of the best-paying professions in the US in 2022, but the advent of AI has disrupted it, leading to several layoffs and underemployment

Every weekday, Matt, a software engineer, looks forward to his four-hour train commute to Pawling, New York. It’s time he uses to work on his own project: a browser-based video game for which he writes every line of code himself.

“I am actively trying to keep my axe sharp,” said Matt, who did not want to use his actual name, to protect his employment. In the last six months, Matt’s job has increasingly shifted away from coding, problem solving and software architecture towards reviewing code generated by artificial intelligence. Convinced that the shift will weaken his skills, he’s doing what he can to keep them intact. “I am trying not to leverage AI where I can.”

Tensions between progressive and moderate camps of Democratic party on display in key Senate race in Michigan

The Israel-Gaza war created gaping divisions in the Democratic party and contributed to a resounding loss in a critical presidential election year in 2024. Two years later, the issue continues to dominate races across the country, as progressives try to seize on Israel’s falling popularity and a broad anti-war sentiment ahead of November’s midterms.

A recent debate among two Democrats vying for one of the most competitive US Senate seats in the country openly displayed the tension between progressive and moderate camps of the party.

In Alaska, Dan Sullivan is facing Dan Sullivan in one of the country's most competitive contests. Is it a plot to boost the Democratic challenger, Mary Peltola, or mere coincidence? It sure smells fishy.