The Guardian

While sitting in an Alabama jail, Martin Luther King Jr began writing a letter about the moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. He invoked the legal maxim originating with St Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all. This week, attorney general Jeff Sessions quoted the bible to justify a cruel policy that is, in fact, not a required law: the forced separation of immigrant families at the border.

David and Goliath are familiar characters in Tuticorin. The south Indian city, home to one of the country’s oldest Christian communities, has been fighting a giant. Days after 13 protesters were fatally gunned down by police, including a teenage girl, activists won a key victory over one of the world’s largest mining companies. For more than two decades, Sterlite, a subsidiary of the London-listed Vedanta Resources, has been operating a copper smelter on the outskirts of the city. Over the same

Thousands of British cattle reared for supermarket beef are being fattened in industrial-scale units where livestock have little or no access to pasture.

Footage and Google Earth images highlight the scale of UK intensive beef farms, uncovered by The Guardian & Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

A British-owned copper smelting plant in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu that has been blamed for unnaturally high cancer rates in surrounding villages has closed, days after 13 people were killed by police during protests against the facility. The Tamil Nadu chief minister, Edappadi K Palaniswami, has ordered environmental authorities to “seal the unit and close the plant permanently”, after a 22-year campaign by environmentalists and residents against the site, owned by London-based V

Want to see the sites that made America? From the Freedom Trail to the oldest hamburger joint in the US, the east coast provides the perfect holiday for history lovers

Journalist Chang Ping remembers his first brush with Chinese press censorship. “In early 1998, I sent a reporter in Beijing to interview rock singer Cui Jian, to talk about the difficulty of revolt. The propaganda department was very unhappy about it and chided me harshly; I was criticised for ‘promoting a capitalist view of the press’.”

Through the window of the small propeller plane leaving the capital Cayenne, the jungle’s canopy stretches out as far as the eye can see. More than 90% covered by luxuriant rainforest, French Guiana has little in common with mainland France bar the name. Yet this corner of the Amazon forest is awaiting a decision by Emmanuel Macron’s government over the development of a controversial open-pit gold mine that would be the country’s largest. Wedged between Brazil and Suriname and about the siz

Earlier this year, the casting director Nina Gold sat at the back of the stalls of the Criterion theatre in the West End and watched a group of students from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland perform their showcase. After three years at drama school, each actor had a couple of three-minute scenes to impress a silent audience of agents and casting directors on their lunch hour. Gold slid down in her seat, as if wanting to remain unseen. Every now and then, she scribbled something next to a name

Samira’s neighbourhood of Govandi-Mankhurd was once on Mumbai’s outskirts – far enough away to plonk fertiliser plants, refineries and a rubbish dump. Today, the area is one of the city’s most populous, poor and underserved suburbs. This is where authorities have resettled, in large housing projects, slum-dwellers from other parts of the city whose shanties were cleared for new roads.

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A leading editor at Hungary’s state television network punched the air in jubilation as he took a phone call on Sunday evening. Shortly afterwards, his subordinates realised what he had been told: Viktor Orbán had secured a resounding victory in the parliamentary election. Orbán and his Fidesz party achieved a third consecutive supermajority in the Hungarian parliament after a campaign primarily fought on an anti-migrant platform. International monitors would later complain about the campaign’s

"We found a boat-lifting machine and asked the actors to jump aboard, then set the mechanism in motion as we started to shoot."

Everything was grey. I could hear my friend Priscilla screaming and voices all around me, but I couldn’t see anything. The paramedics lifted the gurney – “One, two, three” – and that’s when I came to.

Rejecting official information channels, Rio’s citizens are navigating their city using crowdsourced data on shootings and robberies as they happen.

When I was of primary school age, nothing made me so happy as accompanying my mother on her weekly shop. I didn’t get to do it often – during school holidays or the occasional late night shopping expedition on a Thursday. There was magic in those aisles of the Franklins in Sydney’s inner west. By being with Mum, having her ear, I could influence the selection, ensure she didn’t forget the tub of Neapolitan ice cream or jar of fish paste (otherwise known as Peck’s). It was a nervous wait, though,

Images of pigs in filthy pens and barren conditions have sparked a row between animal welfare activists and the makers of Italy’s Parma ham. The campaigners have released footage that they claim exposes barren living conditions with no stimulation, and injured animals with abscesses and hernias being left without adequate treatment. Their expose of follows a series of investigations over the last few years...

Earlier this month Wendell Pierce, who played detective William “Bunk” Moreland in the seminal HBO television series The Wire, tweeted his excitement about a new block of Baltimore apartments in which he is a major investor.

A driver who knocked down a group of children, leaving a girl with a broken neck, was targeting a man walking in front of them, police have said. Five children aged 12-14 were standing on a pavement in Castlemilk, Glasgow, at around 3.30pm on Saturday when they were hit by a silver Vauxhall Astra. Police Scotland said the target was a 21-year-old man who was crossing the road in front of the children. The motorist struck him with the car, then drove into the children and reversed back over an

The US Federal Trade Commission is investigating Facebook’s privacy practices following a week of scandals including whether the company engaged in “unfair acts” which cause “substantial injury” to consumers. Facebook’s stock, which already took a big hit last week, plunged as a result. Facebook’s privacy practices have come under fire after revelations in the Observer that Cambridge Analytica got data on Facebook users, including information on friends of people who had downloaded a psycholog

A number of possible criminal offences may have been committed by members of the official Brexit campaign during the EU referendum, according to the expert view of some of Britain’s leading barristers. Intensifying the pressure on senior figures within Theresa May’s cabinet and No 10 Downing Street, Helen Mountfield QC and Clare Montgomery QC of Matrix Chambers, concluded there is a “prima facie case” that a number of electoral offences were committed by the Vote Leave campaign. An urgent inve

The courier company DPD is to offer all of its drivers sick and holiday pay and will abolish its controversial £150 daily fines for missing work, as part of wholesale reforms to its gig-working model sparked by the death of a driver it charged for attending a medical appointment to treat his diabetes and who later collapsed. The announcement came six weeks after the Guardian exposed the case of Don Lane, who was delivering parcels for the company on behalf or retailers including Marks & Spencer

French investigators are treating the killing of an 85-year-old Jewish woman in Paris as an antisemitic murder, after it emerged that she had survived France’s most notorious second world war round up of Jews in 1942. Mireille Knoll lived alone and was found dead after a fire broke out in her flat in Paris’s 11th arrondissement on Friday night. An autopsy showed she had been stabbed several times before the fire. Two suspects who were arrested are to appear before judges as judicial sources co

French investigators are treating the killing of an 85-year-old Jewish woman in Paris as an antisemitic murder, after it emerged that she had survived France’s most notorious second world war round up of Jews in 1942. Mireille Knoll lived alone and was found dead after a fire broke out in her flat in Paris’s 11th arrondissement on Friday night. An autopsy showed she had been stabbed several times before the fire. Two suspects who were arrested are to appear before judges as judicial sources co

The US Federal Trade Commission is investigating Facebook’s privacy practices following a week of scandals including whether the company engaged in “unfair acts” which cause “substantial injury” to consumers. Facebook’s stock, which already took a big hit last week, plunged as a result. Facebook’s privacy practices have come under fire after revelations in the Observer that Cambridge Analytica got data on Facebook users, including information on friends of people who had downloaded a psycholog

Russia has vowed to expel dozens of western diplomats in the growing diplomatic dispute over the Salisbury nerve gas attack. Officials promised a swift and most likely tit-for-tat response after the expulsion of Russian diplomats across Europe and North America on Monday in a show of solidarity from British allies that represents the biggest concerted blow to Russian intelligence networks since the cold war. In an official communique, the Russian foreign ministry issued a “determined protest

Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who spoke out on US TV on Sunday night about her alleged affair with the future president and threats she said she had received. Cohen’s lawyer, Brent Blakely, wrote to Daniels’ attorney to say she had made false and defamatory comments, “namely that he [Cohen] was responsible for an alleged thug who supposedly visited” and threatened Daniels. “In truth, Mr Cohen had absolutely nothing

If a Muslim man planted bombs in predominately white neighborhoods before blowing himself up, you could bet that the White House and various media outlets would label him a terrorist and draw some connection between his religion and his violent acts. But the case of the Austin bomber reveals an enduring double standard: white Christian terrorists continue to get a free pass.