Guardian Digest

The news is very good (mostly). The cost of full-time childcare in England for children under the age of two has dropped by a phenomenal 39% since last year, thanks to government funding. This stat, from the 25th annual survey of nurseries by the children’s charity Coram, provides a good opportunity to stop and consider how far the country has come in that quarter-century. In 1995, there were nursery vouchers for a few, but only 4% of children under five in England were in nursery: the right argued young children were the responsibility of families, not the state, and that mothers should stay…

When it comes to waging war on the ABC there are no stronger comrades in arms than the Liberal senator Sarah Henderson and News Corp outlets. The mutually reinforcing views of the journalist turned politician and the Murdoch press are uncanny. Henderson’s call for the ABC’s managing director, Hugh Marks, to “shut down” the Americas editor, John Lyons, over his live analysis on the ABC News channel of the Australian government’s response to the US and Israel launching airstrikes on Iran is a case in point. Last Friday the ABC ombudsman handed down the results of its investigation into Lyons’…

Alarming levels of toxic forever chemicals have been found in the blood of people living in a town previously revealed to be contaminated with the UK’s highest recorded level of Pfas. Pfas, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances and commonly known as forever chemicals because of their persistence in the environment, have been linked to a wide range of serious illnesses, including some cancers. They are used in a variety of consumer products but one of their most prolific uses is in firefighting foam. In May 2024, Ends Report and the Guardian published an investigation revealing that…

For the first time since 1967, al-Aqsa mosque – Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site – will be closed at the end of Ramadan on Friday, with tensions rising among Palestinians as Israeli authorities keep the complex shut, forcing worshippers to hold Eid prayers as close as they can to the sealed site. On Friday morning hundreds of worshippers were forced to pray outside the Old City, as Israeli police barricaded the entrances to the site. Because of security concerns related to the US-Israeli war on Iran, on 28 February Israeli authorities had effectively sealed off the mosque complex in…

EU leaders fumed after Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, refused to drop his opposition to a vital €90bn (£78bn) loan for Ukraine, accusing him of betrayal and acting in bad faith. German chancellor Friedrich Merz described Orbán’s U-turn on the loan Hungary had agreed to in December as “a gross act of disloyalty” adding: “I am firmly convinced that it will leave deep marks.” Speaking after an EU summit in Brussels, Merz said EU leaders had asked the European Commission to find ways to pay out the €90bn loan despite Hungary’s opposition. The commission president, Ursula von der Leyen,…

It was over beers on an autumn evening in Zurich in 2024 that a group of journalists with an independent Swiss research collective began to discuss investigating Palantir, one of the world’s biggest tech companies. Three years earlier, Palantir had advertised that it was setting up a “European hub” in the Swiss municipality of Altendorf, a sleepy town of roughly 7,000 people on the shores of Lake Zurich. Press coverage of the move was positive: a Swiss national newspaper said the canton of Schwyz had “pulled off a coup” by landing a US tech company. But the journalists in the collective, WAV,…