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The Chinese leader’s visit to Washington appears to have done nothing to shift the stalemate in bilateral relations Within days, two high-profile Chinese visitors will arrive in the US – envoys of friendship, as Xi Jinping described them when he met Donald Trump at the White House this week. The giant pandas, Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, will be hosted at Atlanta zoo. Beijing dispatched the first panda pair to the US in 1972 following President Richard Nixon’s landmark visit to China. It uses the an

All the contenders for this year’s prize are a reflection of the crisis in masculinityJarvis Cocker, one of the judges for this year’s Booker prize, has expressed surprise that the shortlist, announced this week, contains four male authors and only two female writers, because, “generally speaking, the male-written books weren’t as good as the ones written by women”.The Pulp frontman might be on to something. Over the past 10 years, however, seven Booker winners have been men; the number of women

Readers offer solutions to the thorny problem facing the government, in response to an article by Gaby HinsliffGaby Hinsliff (Britain needs cash and everyone knows we should break the pensions triple lock. Where is the courage?, 22 September) is right that public policy should not subsidise wealth without limit, but breaking the triple lock is a poor way to target affluent pensioners. Most pensioners are not affluent. Indeed, a quarter of pensioners require benefits in addition to the state pens

Reader Chris Hodgkins proposes a dual‑pillar system that safeguards national institutions while establishing a dedicated body for grassroots arts and musicThe interview with the new chair of Arts Council England (ACE), who says she wants the organisation to “get its swagger back”, misdiagnoses the crisis facing England’s cultural system (‘I want us to be loud’: Arts Council England’s new chair aims to reconnect young people with culture, 18 September). Swagger is not what is missing. What is req

The transverse Mercator projection was created for European sailors – and it worked for their world, writes Paul HarwoodThe subject of projections is incredibly complicated and you did a good job of navigating the discussion (‘A map is never neutral’: meet the cartographers who took on centuries of western bias, 18 September).However, suggesting that transverse Mercator is inherently biased is not fair (if it is possible to be unfair to an equation) to both the projection and the cartographers.

Bev Littlewood reminds us that mathematics has been the prime driver of the rise in AI, in response to an editorialYou report in your leader that some mathematicians feel discomfiture at the AI solution to a Navier-Stokes problem (The Guardian view on AI v mathematicians: humans are still vital to the field, but tech firms refuse to see that, 20 September). I fear that they have been hoist by their own petard: mathematics, after all, has been the prime mover of the AI revolution.As a somewhat lo

The epic documentary series reveals much about the shifting social attitudes of the last 60 years – and much more about the quiet mystery of human lifeFor an hour or two this week, I’ve been in the company of people whose lives I’ve seen unfold, almost from the beginning, almost to the end. They are people whom, with one exception, I’ve never met. And yet I’ve shared in their triumphs and disappointments for decades.They are the group who, in 1964, when they were seven years old, were the subjec

Focusing on the right to drink at your seat is an odd place to start when discrimination in the game runs much deeperAndy Burnham is right that football fans have historically been treated differently from other sports fans. But if we’re going to talk about discrimination in football, the ban on drinking at your seat feels like a strange place to start.The rule may have its roots in a very different era of football, but for many fans today, being able to take a pint to your seat may not be top o

Ed Davey’s party are the obvious candidates to push for the deeper local democracy the public is crying out forSeptember is the cruellest month for political commentators because it is when something has to be said about the Liberal Democrats. They are a play without a plot, a chorus line of seemingly endless “don’t knows”. Their leader, Ed Davey, recently warned that “we’re in the fight of our lives” to defend the values of liberty and equality. Really? How can this be when Davey is becoming ab

I suspect nearly all of my students use AI, and I worry about its corrosive effects. We must not entrust tech companies with our long-term healthProf Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of EdinburghWhen I was a postgraduate student at the University of Oxford in the early 2000s, I interviewed for a major consulting firm. All my friends were being recruited, and I thought why not give it a shot? Aside from the usual maths-proficiency test (how quickly can you crunch nu

Alan Milburn is preparing to implement his report to bring young people back into work. Let’s hope the government will see it throughAs certainly as the moon pulls on the tides, Labour governments improve the lives of the poorest children. Just as surely, Conservative governments pull back and reverse the good done. Here we go again: despite the social devastation caused by George Osborne’s cuts last time, Kemi Badenoch announces that she wants to impose cuts to universal credit for the poorest

Nationalisation is not the ultimate answer for companies like Thames Water – but they could be run for the public benefitWill Hutton is a journalist and political economist. Andy Haldane is a former chief economist of the Bank of England Continue reading...

Elif Eralp wants lower rents and more public housing. It’s not rocket science but mainstream parties still don’t get why they are failingHope is a fragile thing. You can only hold on to it as long as you find reasons to believe tomorrow can be better. A woman, for instance, who has the resources and opportunity to rent her own flat will be more likely to leave her abusive husband and recover. A pupil who has their own room and desk to do their homework might find more meaning in thriving at scho

Hundreds of thousands are expected to die, millions to go hungry. This is not just about weather patterns, but about injusticeSome warnings are so grave that it is almost impossible to fully comprehend them. The descriptions of a super-sized, “Godzilla-level” El Niño already heating our planet would sound hyperbolic were they not issuing from eminent scientists. They say that the weather pattern, which occurs roughly every two to seven years, may be the strongest in at least a millennium. With i

Ministers’ commitment to cutting youth unemployment is admirable, but how new qualifications will help is unclearThe first question that should be asked about plans to launch a batch of vocational GCSEs is: how will these differ from the roughly 50 similar courses that already exist? Is this primarily a rebadging exercise, aimed at boosting the qualifications’ status and name recognition, while signalling how seriously non-academic education is taken by Andy Burnham and his education secretary,

Endless pursuit of wealth and power by western leaders led us here. What strikes me most is how many saw what was comingThe symptoms of decline are everywhere you look. On Sunday, Germany’s far right won another state election, taking nearly 40% of the vote in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. France is preparing a €54bn fiscal squeeze, which could turn the screw still further on a foundering so-called European social model. At the UN general assembly, Donald Trump once again threatened to “annihil

Changes in guidance and science seem to have little impact on millions of devastated lives. It’s a shocking social crisis playing out behind closed doorsI’ve spent my working life covering neglected issues. But few are neglected like the devastating chronic condition ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome). In severe cases, the illness shuts down people’s lives almost entirely, causing an extreme loss of energy and a wide range of physical and cognitive symptoms that can

Most stars, and especially women, are endlessly expected to explain the past: the lessons learned and all the regrets. But not Tom – it’s Hollywood’s free passThere really is no press tour like a Tom Cruise press tour – which is why there have not really been any Tom Cruise press tours for a very long time indeed. We’re now at the stage of this one where even the interviewers have been forced on to the interview circuit to defend their interviews.Anyway: Cruise. The guy has one child with ex-wif

I want him to start the fightback next week against extremists who peddle hate and those who despise this country. That would be true patriotism“The speech” may have been in the making a long while, maybe for a lifetime, but Andy Burnham has only a week left for revision before his first conference as Labour leader. Expect hope, of course, that the future will be better, though the way is hard. Already his optimism means that fewer people think they will be worse off next year. But his most urge