“We’ve got over 800 people trying to get tickets tonight,” says Abdus Khan, the founder of ‘Karrom’, “but we whittle that down to 44 lucky players.” Khan runs a London-based community evening, bringing people together with a traditional Indian game, carrom. Widely played across South Asia, he describes it as playing pool “but with your fingers”.

This tabletop game has evolved and is increasingly played around the world, including the US and the UK. “We now use this game as an exercise to promote diversity in a fragmented world,” Khan says.

And it seems to be working.
According to Khan, the game has grown into a grassroots movement of more than 12,000 players. His goal is to launch a super league, inspired by franchise models like cricket’s IPL, with ambitions to expand globally.

Politicians and pundits in the UK are fuelling a moral panic around “the Muslim vote." Once seen as a reliable base for the Labour Party, the Muslim community’s growing support for independent candidates and the Green Party is now being framed as a threat to democracy. As the country heads towards the local elections, Taj Ali investigates whether a singular “Muslim vote” exists, and examines how these divisive narratives around sectarian politics are shaping public debate and impacting communiti...

If not taking the knee, then what? How do you think football can tackle racism in the sport?

In 2016, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt alongside his teammate Eric Reid during the national anthem before San Francisco 49ers games as a protest against racial injustice, police brutality and oppression, and in support of Black Lives Matter.

In 2020, taking the knee was then adopted by UK football teams an anti-racist gesture following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

After the England defender Jess Carter revealed the racist social media abuse she has experienced during Euro 2025, the Lionesses said they would not take the knee before their semi-final fixture against Italy, saying football needed “to find another way to tackle racism”, as colleagues and matchgoing fans rallied around her.

The decision has split opinion, with some activists questioning the decision to stop the anti-racist gesture in the face of racist abuse, while others argue taking the knee had already lost its effectiveness.

Watch as Guardian journalist Xaymaca Awoyungbo explains the significance of the Lionesses’ decision – and to read in depth about the debate, tap the link in bio

“We’re seeing this taken to a new extreme … turbocharged by AI”.

The rape culture behind the creation of non-consensual deepfake porn is nothing new, says Soma Sara, founder of @everyonesinvited

Ten years ago, Sara’s generation had to face the problem of nudes being sent non-consensually on Snapchat – something she says “was totally normalised because of the ease in which this was happening”.

But now she says we’re seeing deepfakes “trivialising and normalising these experiences” anyone can become victim to.

Sara, whose charity works to expose and eradicate rape culture by advocating for survivors and running workshops in schools, says this is a global problem – and there’s more that needs to be done to tackle it.

A poll of 4,300 secondary school teachers in England, carried out by Teacher Tapp on behalf of the Guardian, found that about one in 10 were aware of students at their school creating “deepfake, sexually explicit videos” in the last academic year.

Three-quarters of these incidents involved children aged 14 or younger, while one in 10 incidents involved 11-year-olds.

There has been some movement in the right direction. The UK has just brought into force a law which will make it illegal to create non-consensual intimate images, following the UK privacy watchdog opening an inquiry into X after its Grok AI tool was used to mass-produce and publish partially nudified images of girls and women.

Watch to learn more, and read about the rise of deepfake porn in schools – and the people it impacts – by heading to the link in bio.