It was nearly a decade ago now, when social media – and indeed my children – were in their infancy. My eldest son, then six, had a favourite toy, a remote-control car that could navigate water as well as land. He filmed it in the park, as it ploughed through muddy puddles, and wanted to post the video on YouTube. To add to what was then a novel experience, he added a soundtrack. To reinforce the watery theme, he chose Neil Young’s Down by the River.

Published by: The Guardian

If you want to see Israelis and Palestinians attempt to make peace, you should head for the National Theatre in London – because you certainly won’t see them doing it anywhere else, least of all in the land they both call home. On stage, it’s all there. The sweat, the tears, the angst are laid bare in Oslo, the Tony-award winning play whose London transfer is just beginning. It tells the improbable story of the secret back-channel opened up by two Norwegian diplomats in the early 1990s, which ultimately led to the White House lawn, where Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands, watched by a smiling Bill Clinton, 24 years ago.

Published by: The Guardian

From colonialists to Confederates, the debate over who should be honoured is raging around the world. We asked Guardian readers to nominate deserving figures yet to be carved in stone. Here, we make the case for people ranging from David Attenborough and JK Rowling to Peter Tatchell and Britain’s first Asian MP

Published by: The Guardian

To the remainer, and even to the neutral, our current politics contains a big mystery. Put simply, where is the sentiment we hoped to call regrexit? Where is the collective outbreak of buyer’s remorse? After all, the evidence that Brexit will be the greatest error in our national history since Munich is piling up. It’s not just that a process the leavers used to say would be quick and easy is proving to be long and torturously difficult, or that the European economies are growing while ours is sluggish. It’s more fundamental than that.

Published by: The Guardian

Whoever leaked this document has done us all a great service. True, we don’t know what motive led the UK government blueprint for post-Brexit immigration to be handed to the Guardian. It could have been done by an enthusiast for the plan, keen to ensure that there’s no backsliding and that ministers stand firm. Or, more likely, the leaker was appalled by a document that sees migrants as a menace to be repelled – and hoped public disclosure might generate enough opposition to kill the plan off.

Published by: The Guardian

A quick quiz. No Googling, no conferring, but off the top of your head: what is currently the world’s worst humanitarian disaster? If you nominated storm Harvey and the flooding of Houston, in Texas, then don’t be too hard on yourself. Media coverage of that disaster has been intense, and the pictures dramatic. You’d be forgiven for thinking that this supposedly once-in-a-thousand-years calamity – now happening with alarming frequency, thanks to climate change – was the most devastating event on the planet.

Published by: The Guardian