Month: May 2021

While the rest of the world decluttered and reimagined ways of doing things, fashion design due Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales of Romance Was Born were doing exactly the same. Over the past 18 months, the pair have been working through boxes of remanent fabric and vintage finds from their studio. On 31 May, they debuted the result at Australian fashion week: two collections constructed almost entirely from dead stock, vintage pieces and other treasures that have piled up over their 16 years in business.

‘I joke that Anna is a bit of a hoarder,’ says Sales. ‘It’s … a sentimental way of holding on to something. So if we’ve ever used something in the past and there’s been a scrap of something beaded, Anna has always put it away … kept it stashed for the right time.

‘During Covid we had the time. That was the right time.’

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Civil society groups say UK agreements should tackle long-term unemployment and gender and racial equality

The UK government should broaden its ambition for the G7 next week to include agreements that tackle long term unemployment, eradicate insecure jobs and close the gaps in gender and racial equality, according to civil society groups given official status at the summit in Cornwall.

In a letter to Boris Johnson, groups representing unions, women, ethnic minorities, developing world nations and young people said he should focus on avoiding repeating the mistakes that followed the 2008 financial crash.

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Ofgem aims to stop microbusinesses being locked into bad-value gas and electricity contracts

The UK energy regulator will force “unscrupulous” energy brokers to come clean about the true cost of their deals by revealing their hidden commission fees to help protect more than a million microbusinesses from being ripped off.

All energy brokers will need to disclose how much commission they stand to earn from their services after some rogue brokers conned charities, church groups and care homes by locking them into long-term bad-value gas and electricity contracts.

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The Crescent Stars have often struggled defensively but Senol Gunes’ rock-solid side have the potential to go far this time

This article is part of the Guardian’s Euro 2020 Experts’ Network, a cooperation between some of the best media organisations from the 24 countries who qualified. theguardian.com is running previews from two countries each day in the run-up to the tournament kicking off on 11 June.

Turkey cruised through the Euro 2020 qualifiers, finishing second in their group behind France. Indeed, Senol Gunes’ side took four points off the world champions and only narrowly missed out on the top spot. It was the defence that stood out in qualifying, conceding only three times and keeping eight clean sheets.

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Proposal for 21% minimum corporate rate would generate additional £14.7bn for Britain, says IPPR

The UK would reap an extra £14.7bn annually by adopting Joe Biden’s proposal for a new global minimum corporation tax rate of 21%, according to a major thinktank.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) Centre for Economic Justice has urged the government to embrace and push for the US president’s proposals at the forthcoming G7 summit, arguing that the global system would both be fairer and allow the UK to raise billions in vital revenue.

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AuthorSHARE, a royalty fund set up by two used booksellers with support from industry bodies, is calling for more retailers to participate

Unlike regular book sales or library borrowing, authors do not receive a penny from the sale of secondhand editions of their works – but a new scheme dreamed up by used booksellers is set to change this for the first time.

William Pryor, founder of Somerset-based used bookseller Bookbarn International, came up with the idea to pay authors royalties on used book sales in 2015, but needed a wider partnership to make it work. World of Books Group, which describes itself as the UK’s largest retailer of used books, then got involved to help Pryor create AuthorSHARE, a royalty fund worth £200,000 for the scheme’s first year.

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WHO unveils new names for variants of concern to replace ones linked to where they were discovered

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Coronavirus variants are to be named after letters of the Greek alphabet instead of their place of first discovery, the World Health Organization has announced, in a move to avoid stigma.

The WHO has named four variants of concern, known to the public as the UK/Kent (B.1.1.7), South Africa (B.1.351), Brazil (P.1) and India (B.1.617.2) variants. They will now be given the letters Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta respectively, to reflect their order of detection, with any new variants following the pattern down the Greek alphabet.

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• Manager must trim Euro 2020 squad to 26 players
• Alexander-Arnold now expected to be picked

Gareth Southgate will tell seven players on Tuesday that their hopes of representing England at Euro 2020 are over, after deciding to wait until the last possible training session to finalise his 26-man squad.

The England manager has until 11pm BST to submit his list to Uefa and will oversee a final session for the friendly against Austria on Wednesday before confirming his selection. A press conference with Southgate to explain his decisions was scheduled for 3pm on Tuesday. That will be put back several hours, before which he will inform seven members of his provisional 33-man squad in person that they will not be involved in the finals tournament this summer.

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Emergency services are seeking a teenager who was seen getting into difficulty in the water

Emergency services were searching the Thames on Monday for a teenage boy who was seen getting into difficulty in the water, hours after the body of a woman was recovered from the river two miles away.

Thames Valley police said on Twitter that officers were at the river between Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, and Cookham, Berkshire on Monday, following a report of a fear-for-welfare incident.

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The actor’s turn as a complex, fallible detective has been a privilege to witness, in a murder mystery that kept us guessing right to the profoundly moving end

In interviews, Kate Winslet always said it wasn’t a thriller. And she was right. Yes, Mare of Easttown (Sky Atlantic) began with a murder in a small, bleak Pennsylvania town and Winslet’s police detective Mare Sheehan being called upon to investigate. But it was almost immediately clear that the seven-part drama was setting up to be so much more – and even clearer soon after that it was likely to succeed in all its endeavours.

It was a character study, of how a woman ground down by life after the loss of a son to drugs and suicide, the consequent divorce from her husband and raising of her grandson in the face of a custody battle with his mother (her son’s former girlfriend, rehabbed but fragile) endures.

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