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The strength of the trade union movement, the historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote, cannot be fully understood by looking at curves on a graph that show membership. Instead, there are “jumps,” “leaps” and “explosions” in activity. For him, these unpredictable peaks and sudden moments of upsurge are produced by “accumulations of flammable material which only ignite periodically, as it were under compression”. Britain is experiencing a moment of ignition right now. Welcome to what many have already dubbed “hot strike summer”.Clearly, what's happening to our pay packets is a big part of the story. If you take inflation into account, wages are set to shrink by £1,750 over the next two years. The only group of workers whose wages are rising in line with prices are those earning more than...

Chris Kirkland does not hesitate in pinpointing the moment when he knew things had to change. It was in February this year when, struggling with a secret addiction to painkillers that had previously made him consider taking his own life, he found himself lost in Liverpool, the city where he once became English football's most expensive goalkeeper. “I took them and,” he says, puffing his cheeks, “I thought I was going to die. I just didn't know who I was. I couldn't remember where home was. I only got home because I put 'home' into the sat-nav, and it was already preset, otherwise I don't know where I would've ended up. I got home… then I was violently sick. I slept for about 18 hours. I woke up, got the tablets out of the car and flushed them straight down the toilet.”It has bee...

Yo once went to a talk by a psychologist at my daughters' school about how to raise teenagers. There was a fair amount of tosh talked about, mainly by parents seeking advice on how to make sure their babies got exam results good enough to get them to Oxbridge. Not many of them seemed that concerned about, you know, happiness and stuff.There must have been value in the exercise, though, as some of the wisdom dispensed resonates even now my girls are almost out of their teenage years. For example, the psychologist said the single most important factor in raising happy, healthy children was how much sleep they got. Forget about messy bedrooms and all other such irritations, she said. Just make sure they get plenty of sleep, as all good things flowed from that.And that's true for all ...

Nicola Walker, in a still from 'The Split'.Third seasonThere is a day when everything blows up. It can be an angry, deafening explosion that sweeps away glassware, crockery, and twenty years of marriage; it can be a silent, devastating implosion, a breaking inward when, in the middle of the night, one reaches out to touch the other and realizes that he no longer feels anything like that delicious tremor that used to invade him just by getting close. . At that moment he knows that the world he had known is over. And he also knows that he has to call a lawyer to defend his share of the ruins. To one of the Defoes, for example. The Defoe family is dedicated to family law. The matriarch, Ruth, is a living and active legend in the profession; Hannah, the older sister around whom the s...

The Asian Development Bank has cut its growth forecast for China due to concerns about the country's zero-Covid approach and strict lockdowns, which put even more pressure on the real estate sector.Gross domestic product growth for the world's second largest economy is expected to be at 4% in 2022, down from an earlier estimate of 5%, ADB said in a report published Thursday.China's continued "adherence to a zero-covid strategy in response to renewed outbreaks early in 2022 has triggered the reimposition of strict lockdowns," the bank said in its report."With many economies in the region increasingly choosing to live with the virus and reopening, economic activity continued to expand in the first half of 2022 — with the notable exception" of China, the bank added.In addition to lockdown-...

Key events:filters BETAKey events (1)OBR (two)Christine Lagarde (1)nadhim zahawi (1)Bank of Japan (1)European Commission (1)The chancellor of the exchequer, Nadhim Zahawi, said:We recognize that there are risks to the public finances including from inflation, with debt interest costs in June more than double the previous monthly record. That's why the government has taken action to strengthen the public finances, and in their latest forecast the OBR assessed that we are on track to get debt down.Introduction: Russia resumes gas supplies to Europe, ECB set to hike rates Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the world economy and the financial markets.Russia has resumed supplies of gas to Europe today via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline this morning following 10 days...

Minecraft will not allow non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to be used on the popular gaming platform, with the company describing them as antithetical to Minecraft's “values ​​of creative inclusion and playing together”.NFTs confer ownership of a unique digital item, typically an image or a video, with the ownership recorded on a decentralized digital register known as a blockchain.Digital files can usually be copied or deleted for free, but a NFT identifies the owner of the original file for the purposes of buying, selling, or trading the ownership – usually for cryptocurrency.The hype around NFTs led to a boom in sales peaking at US$12bn (AU$17.4bn) worldwide in January. However, coinciding with the downturn in cryptocurrency, sales recently began crashing to a 12-month low of US$1bn (AU$1....

The Nord Stream pipeline linking Russia and Germany, resumed this Thursday your operations after ten days of maintenancetold AFP the management company. "It works," a spokesperson for the Nord Stream company told AFP, without specifying the amount of gas supplied, although Reuters points out that it was 42.2 million cubic meters (mm3). the german government he feared that the gas pipeline would not be reopened by Moscow after the maintenance period, which started on July 11. ...

yesHamony Gibson spent the final months of her life excitedly anticipating the birth of her second child. “Time is flying, four months already,” she says in a home video collage at the beginning of Aftershock, a new documentary about the black maternal health crisis in the US. “Every day is a new process, you wake up like, 'Oh my god, I'm that much closer to being a mom again.'”Gibson, a 30-year-old resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, gave birth to her son, Khari, in September 2019 via c-section. For days afterwards, she complained of shortness of breath. She and her partner, Omari Maynard, repeatedly called doctors, who told her it was fine, just relax.“There wasn't much of a sense of urgency on their part at all,” Maynard says in Aftershock, out on Hulu this week. Two weeks...

The climate and ecological crises are a legacy of systemic racism and people of color suffer disproportionately from their harms, a Greenpeace UK report says. Globally, the report says, it is people of color who, despite having contributed the least to the climate emergency, are now “disproportionately losing their lives and livelihoods” by the millions because of it.“The environmental emergency is the legacy of colonialism,” the report says. This was because colonialism had “established a model through which the air and lands of the global south have been … used as places to dump waste the global north does not want”, the report says.It adds that similar inequalities are visible in the UK, where almost half of all of waste-burning incinerators are in areas with high populations of pe...