A simmering row in Australia over plans to charge social media companies for sharing news erupted last week when Facebook blocked news sites across the country. The row was resolved on Tuesday with an 11th-hour deal that will see the web giant excluded from the new code in exchange for signing deals with content providers to showcase their news.
In this week’s big story, the team from Guardian Australia look at how a compromise was reached before Emily Bell analyses Facebook’s gambit – which she calls a PR disaster even for a company that specialises in them.
On Monday, UK prime minister Boris Johnson once more addressed the nation to plot a course from the strict lockdown in England. Though children will soon be back in schools and some outdoor gathering will be permitted, the country – and the rest of the UK nations – remain a long way from any kind of normality. But, as our Westminster team report, there is now a path back towards ordinary life. Though if we’ve learned anything about Covid-19 it’s that it retains an ability to put paid to Johnson’s best-laid plans.
Elsewhere, in a fascinating piece on page 34, John Vidal revisits the somewhat unwise decision to let hundreds of thousands of people attend the Cheltenham horse racing festival last March as the scale of the spread of Covid-19 was beginning to dawn in the UK.
Away from the UK, Michael Safi and Milivoje Pantovic look at how China and Russia are using the scale of their vaccine supplies to assist other countries – and the importance that will have for their soft power in the post-pandemic age. Whenever we get there …
Elsewhere in the magazine, Simon Hattenstone interviews Hollywood legend Kim Novak about working with Hitchcock and why she stepped away from stardom and we look at the transformative effect the pandemic may, or may not, have on the stories told on film and television.
