Society

It was International Women’s Day on Wednesday of this last week. The Guardian had enjoined its readers to send in reports of what they had done to advance the struggle, or how they had been in some way oppressed by men — perhaps raped, or talked to as if they were stupid, or looked at a little coldly when they squirted breast milk over fellow diners at The Ivy. I tried to think of something I had done for the cause but came up short, sad to say. So instead I tried to show solidarity by spending a substantial amount of International Women’s Day looking at a photograph of Emma

Luis Dominguez was born in the UK to the family of an Argentine diplomat and spent most of his childhood in the US, having relocated there during World War II.  I first met him at Portsmouth Priory, a small boarding school in Rhode Island, not far from Newport. My memory is of him dressed in whites for the tennis team. My next crossing of Luis’s trail was at Rollins, a small college in Winter Park, Florida. Here he was once again dressed in whites as leader of the triumphant tennis team. After graduation, we met in New York for lunch at the Racquet and Tennis Club. Luis worked for House

On the eve of the Budget, the row about whether ministers struck a ‘sweetheart deal’ with Surrey Council on social care funding to stop the local authority from having to hold a referendum on raising council tax has blown up again. BBC Surrey has recorded extracts of a meeting between council leader David Hodge and colleagues in which he talks of a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ that was struck with Sajid Javid. The councillor claims that such agreements often take place in the Conservative party. This is particularly unhelpful for ministers if they are planning to tell councils to buck their ideas up about social care, as they seem to be preparing

It’s an increasingly familiar scenario: grown-up children moving out of rented accommodation and back into the family home as they save for their first property. For some, the idea of coming together under one roof again conjures the return of family movie nights and getting to know your loved ones afresh. For others, it will be a case of making the best of living in a familial and financial pressure cooker.   So, what are the ground rules for parents and grown-up children thrown together again, and what are the best ways parents can accelerate the moving out date?  To live harmoniously, charity Family Lives suggests agreeing upfront that the ‘child’

‘They will hate you because of who I am,’ Jesus says in the Gospels. He forgot to add: ‘And the ones who don’t have a clue will point and laugh.’ It’s a lesson Carol Monaghan has learned abruptly. Monaghan is MP for Glasgow North West and a member of the Scottish National Party. A former science teacher, it’s fair to say she hasn’t grabbed the media spotlight in the way some of her colleagues have since entering Parliament in 2015. Still, she’s gone about her duties as an MP, seeing to the needs of her constituents, and serving on the Commons science and technology committee. This week, the TV cameras

The notion of artificial life created in a lab – heralded today with the news that scientists at Cambridge have managed to combine two sets of mouse stem cells to start the process of embryo creation is mildly alarming, no? Shades of Aldous Huxley, Brave New World? These aren’t exactly embryos; a scientist friend prefers to call them embryoids, or proto-embryos, a bit like those brain-like organoids that can now be created to mimic the behaviour of actual brains. But it would seem that the Cambridge team may have come close to actual embryo creation; if it had added a third set of stem cells, the yolk, to sustain development,