As you hunker down for the last few days of the Camp for Climate Action, discussing how to force your way into Kingsnorth power station in an attempt to prevent the construction of a new coal facility, cast your eyes around your fellow protesters. Do they look entirely bona fide to you? And don't look for the old-school special branch officers - Kent Police are a tiny force. It's the [...]

Two different lives - same looming crisis. Damien Core, 20, is a student from Kent, studying biology. Lisa Rice, 22, works for a technology company in Yorkshire and has done since leaving school. Damien plays in an indie band, drinks at the student union and has a steady girlfriend. Lisa is single, likes to go clubbing and spends her Saturdays in Leeds, shopping with mates. Last month both faced the [...]

Many Hollywood actors like to sound off about politics. But few have been at the sharp end of it quite like Donald Sutherland. "I was in Yugoslavia when I found out," he says, with a fond smile. He is telling me about the day in 1969 when he found out his then wife, the actress Shirley Douglas, had been arrested for procuring arms for the Black Panthers. "Clint Eastwood came [...]

Michael Chopra is having a bad season. The Sun derland striker has scored only three goals in the Premier League since August. It's a bad run of form for any player, but for Chopra the pressure is unusually intense. He's not just playing for himself or his team: as the first and only British-born Asian among the more than 400 Premiership players, he is, in effect, playing to break down [...]

"The first thing is, I don't feel like I'm old," says Martin Skelton, 59, a former teacher from Brigh ton who now runs his own business.

"I exercise, I eat well, I go rollerblading with my granddaughters and I'm still working. I'm from a generation that thinks nothing is impossible. But suddenly I'm aware that in ten years' time, I may fight some serious health problems. And I guess I've [...]

The strongest scene in Nick Broomfield's latest film, Battle for Haditha, shows a US marine breaking down as the nightmares of Iraq crowd in on him. Corporal Ramirez has just led Kilo Company on a rampage through the Iraqi town, seeking to avenge the death of a comrade. In the process, 24 innocent people have been slaughtered and he is consumed with guilt. He destroys the barracks shower room in [...]

Judy Arnold is a retired teacher. She went on the third Aldermaston march in 1960 and just about every subsequent CND demo in the 1960s. In the 1970s she was active in the Anti-Apartheid Movement and in the 1980s she sent money to families of imprisoned ANC activists through Canon John Collins's Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa. In 2002, after her husband's mother died, she realised that the [...]

Riz Ahmed is being very careful at the moment. He is young, good-looking and a fast-rising actor, appearing in scorching dramas about the problems British Muslims face in this fractured century. He stars in the award-winning writer-director Peter Kosminsky's drama Britz, which goes out on Channel 4 this month, and last year played one of the Tipton Three in Michael Winterbottom's Road to Guantanamo. Not only is he British, Muslim [...]

Your starter for ten: which US TV show most outraged the Republican right over immigration last year, with bloggers such as Redrover and Stonecold Harbours calling it "a sleezy [sic] way to make illegals appear sympathetic" and complaining that the whole show "disgusts me"? Was it: a) Comedy Central's avowedly pro-Democrat Daily Show? b) Hard-hitting, investigative 60 Minutes? Or c) The frothy prime-time fashion-world comedy Ugly Betty? Yup. It was [...]

The current thinking has it that Spike Lee has mellowed. This, after all, is the man who once argued so much with an interviewer from US Esquire that the magazine ran its piece under the headline "Spike Lee hates your cracker ass". He approached conversations as combat and Hollywood as the shyster promoter, overseeing the big-money bout for its tidy 10 per cent. At the age of 50, however, he [...]