The local election results highlight how out-of-step London attitudes pose a serious dilemma for Labour and ToriesThe past is a foreign country, we've long known that. Scotland is another country, that's the theme of the dominant political battle of th...

Published by: The Guardian

Hillary Clinton should steer well clear of Nicole Kidman. The latter's performance in a new movie of the life of Princess Grace, formerly Grace Kelly, has come in for some acid criticism. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw declared Grace "so awe-inspiringly wooden that it is basically a fire-risk".

Published by: The Guardian

Halal, is it meat you're looking for? Much as I'd like to, I can't claim credit for that gag, a Lionel Richie parody given a new airing this week alongside the hashtag #halalhysteria, as British Muslims once again found their dietary customs at the centre of a moral panic. Other minorities have learned that same survival strategy when a collective finger is pointed menacingly in their direction: better to laugh, otherwise you'll cry.

Published by: The Guardian

The faces of both Michael McConville and his older sister Helen are haunting because they are haunted. They are in middle age now. He is 53 and she is 57, and yet to see them interviewed about the 1972 abduction and murder of their mother Jean is to glimpse the children they were. Etched on Michael's face is the fear he must have felt as an 11-year-old boy when he witnessed an IRA gang, most wearing masks, barge into their home in the Divis flats in west Belfast and take away their mother. The masked men had to pull the woman from the arms of her 10 children, who were "crying and squealing". As McConville told the BBC, the fear has not left him; it's what prevents him naming his mother's killers now, even though he is convinced he knows who they are.

Published by: The Guardian