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https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/jun/27/podcast-positive-news-we-need-to-talk-about-supporters | Membership | 2018-06-27T15:11:58.000Z | Sophie Zeldin-O'Neill | Contribute to a podcast on the importance of positive news coverage | Supporters’ voices are essential to our monthly podcast, We Need to Talk About…, whether our subject matter is Brexit, nationalism or the environment. In our next podcast, we’ll consider the impact of the modern news cycle on our health and wellbeing, and whether a greater focus on positive, hopeful and light-hearted stories would help to mitigate this.
Our editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, promised in a speech on the future of the Guardian recently, “we will develop ideas that help improve the world, not just critique it. Despair is just another form of denial. People long to feel hopeful again – and young people, especially, yearn to feel the hope that previous generations once had.”
Rapid developments in technology in recent decades mean that news now reaches us on our phones, TVs, and social media profiles every hour of the day, every day of the week – some of it very distressing. Even when we try to switch off from it, news seems to find a way to reach us. With the dawn of the internet and improved mobility for journalists across the world, we can access vivid, uninterrupted images and footage of events moments after they happen, in the palm of our hands.
This onslaught of negative news has a cumulative effect on our collective mental health and our perception of our own worries. It can create a sense of disempowerment and apathy, and exacerbate our feelings of isolation and fear. Conversely, positive news often carries a message of hope and activism: those who have made a difference – for example, by saving a pub, library or park, working closely with a local community, inventing a tool to solve a problem, fundraising for an underreported cause – and whose work has captured the public imagination on a small or wide-reaching scale.
Two years ago, the Guardian launched a pilot project, Half Full, to see how readers would respond if we deliberately sought out the good things happening in the world. Several hundred articles later, we had proven out our theory that there’s a huge appetite for positive news stories among our readership. Off the back of this success, we were able to launch our series The Upside, supported by the Skoll Foundation, which has so far examined everything from urban gardening to maternal health in India, prosthetic arms and the four-day working week. We’ve invited the series’ editor Mark Rice-Oxley into the studio to join our next podcast and we’d love you, the Guardian’s supporters, to pose questions for the discussion.
The Guardian isn’t alone in experimenting with the publication of good news – the New York Times, the BBC and other major global news outlets are providing their readers with content to which readers can retreat when the atrocity and conflict starts to become overwhelming. That’s not to mention dozens of blogs dedicated to marking the unsung heroes, pioneers and everyday acts of selflessness that could restore faith in even the most jaded consumer of news.
Perhaps you feel it’s flippant or unnecessary to mark these more trivial or jovial moments? Are they simply a distraction from what really matters? Or do you feel they are more important now than ever? How can we prevent so-called ‘news fatigue’? Have you found yourself switching off from the news cycle? Do you crave more light news?
We are also really interested to know what your favourite positive story of the past year has been. Has there been good news on a particular issue that has given you hope? Do you worry about the effect of news coverage on children or more vulnerable groups in society? Has a positive news story inspired you in some way?
Please do get in touch, wherever you are in the world: we would like to hear your questions, views and experiences. To get involved, send an email to [email protected], including your question or comment, your name, and a phone number so we can call you to make a recording.
If you’d like to catch up with the podcast and previous discussions, you can do so at gu.com/talk-about. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/11/this-england-team-arent-playing-for-the-tories-version-of-the-country | Opinion | 2021-07-11T07:30:39.000Z | Andrew Rawnsley | This England team aren’t playing for the Tories’ version of the country | Andrew Rawnsley | When the men of England last won a significant international football tournament (you may know that this was 55 years ago), the official mascot was called World Cup Willie, a cartoon lion sporting a union jack football shirt and mop-top mane.
In the build-up to tonight’s final of the Euros, another mop-top, this one lamentably lacking in leonine qualities, has been doing his utmost to make a willy of himself. Before the match with Ukraine, a giant St George’s Cross was laid out in Downing Street for posing purposes by Boris Johnson, despite his passion for the game having gone hitherto undetected. He was seen at the semi-final against Denmark wearing a Three Lions top over his business shirt and tie, but under his suit jacket, an ensemble as clumsy as it was cynical, and one that suggests he is not fully conversant with stadium dress codes. The prime minister’s under-strappers are now spinning the idea of a celebratory additional bank holiday as a reward for an England victory. Genuine fans will want their team to win the trophy for the achievement itself, not a day off.
Many other Tories who have previously been furious opponents of “bringing politics into football” have been photobombing social media with snaps of themselves in hastily purchased England kit. In her desperation to scramble aboard the bandwagon, Priti Patel neglected to have the package creasing ironed out before she stuck on the shirt, while Rishi Sunak forgot to snip off the sales tags. This competition to drink from the euphoria around the team is an all-party sport. Sir Keir Starmer released a photo of himself celebrating the victory over the Danes while declaring that the team have “shown the best of England”. The Labour leader at least has a true claim to be an avid football fan. The ball sports previously associated with the prime minister are ping-pong, the Eton wall game and the notorious occasion when he flattened a 10-year-old during what was supposed to be a casual game of street rugby.
If England lift the trophy tonight, it will be thanks to a group of talented players under a great manager. If they don’t, it will be because they were not quite good enough to prevail over Italy. It will have nothing to do with politicians playing for advantage from the touchline.
This tournament has nevertheless been freighted with much more politics than we are used to. The relationship between the beautiful game and the uglier one played in the Westminster stadium has changed over the years. Politicians have become more anxious to associate themselves with footballing success, and footballers have become more politically engaged in the decades that have passed since England lifted the Jules Rimet trophy in 1966. Bobby Moore and his teammates generally avoided the political world and it was so indifferent to their achievements that the captain was never knighted before his death in 1993. Star players of the 1980s usually resisted being drawn on their politics. On the occasions when one did voice an opinion, they were quite likely to talk about their admiration for Margaret Thatcher.
I would not presume to guess which way members of the England squad vote, but they do not present as natural Tories
I would not presume to guess which way individual members of the England squad vote, but they do not present as natural Tories and their matches were not won on the playing fields of Eton. They have foregrounded life stories involving modest or challenging family circumstances when they were growing up. Several of the squad are effective social activists for progressive causes. Marcus Rashford is a powerful campaigner for an end to child hunger and has twice forced a retreat on the government over free school meals. Raheem Sterling has displayed moral leadership in the fight against racism. Harry Kane wore a rainbow-coloured armband to mark Pride month during the match against Germany.
Their manager, Gareth Southgate, published a superbly crafted “Dear England” letter just before the tournament began. He gave eloquent expression to his belief in an England united not in an angry and ugly nativism, but a positive patriotism at ease with and enriched by the country’s diversity.
“Our players are role models,” he wrote. “It’s their duty to continue to interact with the public on matters such as equality, inclusivity and racial injustice, while using the power of their voices to help put debates on the table, raise awareness and educate.” He celebrated the idea that “we are heading for a much more tolerant and understanding society”.
Tony Blair would have no problems putting his arms around that credo. Were he still prime minister, David Cameron would have tried to. Keir Starmer retweeted the Southgate letter, perhaps a little enviously. A likable squad and manager expressing values he’d call his own ought to help the Labour leader, but it also throws into relief his struggles to find a persuasive way to articulate a progressive patriotism on behalf of his party.
Much as the prime minister yearns to steal himself a slice of their glory, embracing this team authentically is impossible for a Johnsonified and Brexified Tory party. They would like to interpret the squad’s successful run as a Brexit dividend: England’s potential unleashed by the great escape from Europe. Yet the composition of the team makes a nonsense of that self-serving script. Rather than demonstrate a triumph for English exceptionalism, the side displays the virtues of fusing homegrown qualities and traditions with talents and lessons absorbed from elsewhere. This squad honed their skills playing in Europe or with English clubs under the mentoring of elite foreign managers such as Marcelo Bielsa, Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp. The team has a diverse ancestry. Captain Harry Kane has an Irish father. Raheem Sterling was born in Jamaica. The parents of Bukayo Saka, a breakout star of the tournament, are Nigerian. As the sports writer Jonathan Liew has pointed out, 13 of the 26-man squad could have chosen to play for another nation.
What this group says about modern England doesn’t fit with the conception of the country that grips a large part of the Conservative mind. This England team isn’t their version of England. The starkest illustration of that has been the way in which Tories have attacked the side for taking the knee as a collective declaration of solidarity against racism. The Conservative MP for Ashfield, Lee Anderson, issued an absurdly self-aggrandising proclamation that he would not watch “his beloved England team” for so long as the players knelt at the beginning of games. The latest from his camp is that he will not look at the final, but will be checking the score on his phone, which is kind of cheating on his own boycott.
This runs deeper in the Conservative party than just one asinine backbencher. Priti Patel, the same Priti Patel who is now a replica fan, scoffed that taking the knee was “gesture politics” and defended the minority of fans who booed at the players. The prime minister didn’t rebuke the home secretary and only said that he did not want fans to boo when he grasped he was on the unpopular side of that argument.
Tories have surely noticed that the public find the England manager more appealing than the mismanager at Number 10
In response to the “Dear England” letter, some Tory MPs could be heard grunting that the England manager “shouldn’t be getting political”, by which they meant he should shut up if he didn’t share their worldview. One Tory strategist sniffed to the Financial Times that the letter was “suspiciously well-written”, using the insulting old trope that people in football are too dim to be allowed to express views of their own.
Yet even these Tories have surely noticed that the public find the thoughtful and self-deprecating England manager and a team that doesn’t behave like prima donnas a great deal more appealing than the narcissistic mismanager at Number 10 and his inept cabinet squad.
A report by the thinktank British Future found that two-thirds of white and non-white citizens agree that the team is a positive symbol of an England that “belongs to people of every race and ethnic background”. The inclusive England showcased by a diverse and harmonious squad that places its emphasis on collective endeavour is the antithesis of the exclusive and reactionary England represented by snarly Tories waging dismally divisive culture wars.
If England win tonight, Gareth Southgate and his players will be national heroes. If they lose, they will still have given the country much to admire and think about. That can’t be hijacked from them, even by a thief as shameless as Boris Johnson.
Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/01/red-caesar-authoritarianism-republicans-extreme-right | World news | 2023-10-01T14:00:47.000Z | Jason Wilson | ‘Red Caesarism’ is rightwing code – and some Republicans are listening | In June, the rightwing academic Kevin Slack published a book-length polemic claiming that ideas that had emerged from what he called the radical left were now so dominant that the US republic its founders envisioned was effectively at an end.
Slack, a politics professor at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, made conspiratorial and extreme arguments now common on the antidemocratic right, that “transgenderism, anti-white racism, censorship, cronyism … are now the policies of an entire cosmopolitan class that includes much of the entrenched bureaucracy, the military, the media, and government-sponsored corporations”.
In a discussion of possible responses to this conspiracy theory, he wrote that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people”.
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For the last three years, parts of the American right have advocated a theory called Caesarism as an authoritarian solution to the claimed collapse of the US republic in conference rooms, podcasts and the house organs of the extreme right, especially those associated with the Claremont Institute thinktank.
Though on the surface this discussion might seem esoteric, experts who track extremism in the US say that due to their influence on the Republican party, the rightwing intellectuals who espouse these ideas about the attractions of autocracy present a profound threat to American democracy.
Their calls for a “red Caesar” are now only growing louder as Donald Trump, whose supporters attempted to violently halt the election of Joe Biden in 2020, has assumed dominant frontrunner status in the 2024 Republican nomination race. Trump, who also faces multiple criminal indictments, has spoken openly of attacking the free press in the US and having little regard for American constitutional norms should he win the White House again.
The idea that the US might be redeemed by a Caesar – an authoritarian, rightwing leader – was first broached explicitly by Michael Anton, a Claremont senior fellow and Trump presidential adviser.
Anton has been an influential rightwing intellectual since in 2016 penning The Flight 93 Election, a rightwing essay in which he told conservatives who were squeamish about Trump “charge the cockpit or you die”, referencing one of the hijacked flights of 9/11.
He gave Caesarism a passing mention in that essay, but developed it further in his 2020 book, The Stakes, defining it as a “form of one-man rule: halfway … between monarchy and tyranny”.
The Guardian contacted Anton at his Claremont Institute email address, but received no response.
Anton and others in the Claremont milieu are not simply hypothesizing about the future: their dreams of Caesar arise from their dark view of the US.
Anton wrote the scene-setting essay in Up From Conservatism, an anthology of essays published this year and edited by the executive director of Claremont’s Center for the American Way of Life, Arthur Milikh.
Michael Anton, a former adviser to President Trump, described Caesarism as a ‘form of one-man rule: halfway … between monarchy and tyranny’. Photograph: Pablo Martínez Monsiváis/AP
In that essay Anton writes baldly that “the United States peaked around 1965”, and that Americans are ruled by “a network of unelected bureaucrats … corporate-tech-finance senior management, ‘experts’ who set the boundaries of acceptable opinion, and media figures who police those boundaries”.
His diagnosis of US social and cultural life unfolds under a series of subheadings that are almost comical in their disillusionment: “The universities have become evil”, “Our economy is fake”, “The people are corrupt”, “Our civilization has lost the will to live”.
Damon Linker, a senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of several books on the American right, was early in noticing the extreme right’s drift towards Caesarism.
Linker told the Guardian that Anton and others in the Claremont milieu “have convinced themselves thoroughly that the current order is decadent, corrupt and far removed from the proper, admirable origins of American government”.
Linker said their current view is related to a long-held position among Claremont scholars that “democracy as they understand has been supplanted by bureaucrats and entrenched executive branch departments”.
“The fact that Trump lost in 2020 has just radicalized a lot of these people – it occurred to them that they might not win a proper election again,” he said.
“That would mean that – excuse the language – they’re shit out of luck unless there’s some other path to power. That’s where Caesarism comes in.”
If Trump wins in 2024, does he listen to people like Michael Anton about the need to perhaps cancel the next election?
Damon Linker
Linker said that the danger in such ideas is not that the American people will actively choose a dictatorship, but more in how they might shape the rightwing response to a future emergency.
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“If Trump wins in 2024, what does the opposition do, and how does he respond?” Linker speculated. “Does he send in the troops? Does that lead to bigger protests?
“If he then declares martial law, do these ideas prepare people in the Republican party to say, ‘Well, we need law and order’?” Linker asked.
“Does Trump then listen to people like Michael Anton and his friends about the need to perhaps cancel the next election?”
Underlining this danger is the fact that Caesarism has won converts beyond Claremont as a solution to perceived decadence and the declining electoral appeal of far-right ideas.
Charles Haywood, a former industrialist the Guardian exposed last month as the founder of a secretive fraternal lodge and a would-be warlord, wrote in 2021 that “I like, if not love, the idea of Red Caesar” since “Caesarism, and its time-legitimated successor, monarchy, is a natural, realism-based system, under which a civilization can flourish”.
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The idea has been lodged in the broader sphere of conservative debate in the rightwing writer Stephen Wolfe’s book The Case for Christian Nationalism, in which he proposes a “Christian prince” whose rule would be “a measured and theocratic Caesarism”, and might perhaps be installed by “a just revolution” against secular rule.
Caesarism and other antidemocratic ideas bemuse many observers, including some with whom they might otherwise share common ground.
Thomas Merrill is a political theorist and an associate professor at American University in Washington DC, who has written critically on the Claremont Institute, but from a broadly conservative perspective.
“We’re cousins,” he said of Claremont intellectuals in a telephone conversation, “and sometimes you have to ask your cousin, what the hell are you doing?”
He said that the authoritarian drift exhibited in work like Anton’s was an example of “the Claremont guys shooting themselves in the foot”. For Merrill, while he agrees that the ideas are dangerous, he thinks they have an air of compensatory fantasy.
“They’re selling a very dark picture of the world to conservative donors without going out and doing the hard work of democratic politics.”
For Linker, the author and lecturer, a far-right dictatorship remains “a tail-end, worst-case scenario”, but one that is more realistic in the US now than it has been for many decades.
“Thirty years ago, if I told you that a bunch of billionaires and intellectuals on the right are waiting in the wings to impose a dictatorship on the United States, you would have said that I was insane,” he said.
“But it’s no longer insane. It’s now real. There are those people out there,” Linker added. “The question is: will they get their chance.”
This article was amended on 2 October 2023. Michael Anton was an adviser to President Trump, but not “national security adviser” as a previous picture caption said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/feb/15/echoes-of-the-past-review-contrived-coda-to-a-nazi-atrocity | Film | 2022-02-15T10:00:10.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | Echoes of the Past review – Max von Sydow’s final film is coda to a Nazi atrocity | Max von Sydow, in his final film role, does what he can to lend gravitas to this odd, stilted and contrived movie, a fictional drama based on a horrendous Nazi atrocity in occupied Greece in 1943, for which the question of reparations still grumbles on. In Kalavryta in the northern Peloponnese, nearly 700 civilians were shot by the Nazi forces, in chilling reprisal for Greek resistance fighters executing 78 German soldiers taken prisoner. Von Sydow plays Nikolas, an ageing Greek writer who as a young boy miraculously escaped the massacre, but has been haunted by it ever since. In the present day, Astrid Roos plays Caroline Martin, an ambitious Berlin lawyer who is tasked by a heartless and cynical German government to go to Greece and to find details that might undermine their case for reparations.
The tense occupation and slaughter of 1943 themselves are recounted in flashback, and director Nicholas Dimitropoulos makes a reasonably workmanlike job of this drama. But the film strangely insists on imagining a balancing “good German” who supposedly helps the Greek women and children. It is his existence that Caroline refuses to use against the Greek government, due to that predictable crisis of conscience to which the action had been unsubtly leading from the outset. She, in effect, becomes the film’s second imaginary “good German”, whose behaviour is at odds with the cynical German government.
Oddly, Caroline finally goes on a trip to Austria to interview the sad and saintly widow of this fictional good soldier, and she is played by Alice Krige, looking if anything younger than Von Sydow, who was supposed to be a small boy at the time. The film’s one moment of real power comes when Caroline visits the real-life Museum of the Kalavrytan Holocaust and stands in front of the memorial gallery of photographs: the victims’ faces. That has real substance. This film doesn’t.
Echoes of the Past is available on 21 February on digital platforms. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/13/why-im-against-aberdeen-city-gardens | Opinion | 2012-06-13T15:37:27.000Z | Annie Lennox | Annie Lennox: why I'm against Aberdeen's City Gardens project | The City Gardens project is something I took up arms against a couple of years ago, but in the end I put them down again, because I felt – and stated – that it is ultimately down to the citizens of Aberdeen to take the final decision.
But when I went back up to Aberdeen a few weeks ago and saw the state of the streets, I had never seen the city look so dejected. I felt very saddened by that. I had never thought I would see Aberdeen look like this.
Experience shows that city councillors, planners and developers, come together and offer a bright vision of the future, as they did in Aberdeen in the 1960s when they razed huge swaths of the historic city. They thought that would be their modernity. What we got was a ruination of history, and something put in its place which was cheap, crap and concrete. I knew at the time, when I was a teenager, that this was going to be pretty disastrous.
I have nothing whatsoever against modern architecture, but when it is cheap and crappy you usually look back at it in a few years time and say: "What a monstrosity." I think they are applying the same sort of deluded vision with Union Terrace Gardens. Instead we should look at what really needs to be done there: it needs a collective civic response.
What I see in Aberdeen is that there has been a lot of money made, but that money has not trickled through. You see strata of wealth in Aberdeen; there are expensive cars and glitzy restaurants but I don't see that reflected in the general civic state of the city. I feel the oil industry lives separately to the town.
My father and grandfather worked in the shipyards and shipbuilding industries; people built up wealth and then people who made their money put it back into Aberdeen, building the art gallery, the music hall etc and it served the community very well. It was beautiful. But walking around Union Street today you get a sense of a broken place. It is kind of degraded. It seems to me Aberdeen thinks in terms of a consumerist society, where the solution is: "Well, put more shops in and get more business." I think it's a mistake; the same mistake they made back in the 60s.
I think this phenomenon can be found through the whole of the country. It has wrecked the towns of Great Britain. I think it is a symptom; we used to have different types of flourishing industry, people had skills and crafts, they had a work ethic and were proud of their cities. But now it is very different. In some places generations have lived with unemployment for decades. We have a recession and we have imported American corporate chains on our high streets, creating a consumerist society in which we've lost a lot of our culture and a lot of our skills.
It's endemic and downgrading, and I don't think Aberdeen is much different to many other places that have lost their heart and soul. I don't think that oil money has brought a tremendous civic pride back to the citizens of the city. It's the fast buck: there's money being made but it's just floating on the top, separated from the rest of Aberdeen's citizens.
If Sir Ian Wood wants to invest £50m into the centre of Aberdeen, that is fundamentally good, but I disagree with the way he's going about it. It is not because I'm a reactionary, it is not because I'm against modernity or change. It is the way that this was done; it is short-termism, it is short-sighted.
From what I am gathering, he is not saying: "I have £50m, I want to talk to you, I want to hear what you guys want." He's telling the city this is what he will do with it. I think it's very imperious. I think it is very, very important to listen to more people, the people who are living there, the citizens of the town.
I don't have a great respect for the aesthetic values or vision of city planners or city councillors; I don't think that they've often got it right. Building a concrete piazza across Union Terrace Gardens, in a city that knows rain very well, I don't quite get that. It's not Italy. They don't get tourists coming to Aberdeen, and if they did, wouldn't they want to see something more real and authentic? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/mar/29/michael-jordans-big-score-why-his-nba-ownership-tenure-is-far-from-a-failure | Sport | 2023-03-29T07:15:28.000Z | Andrew Lawrence | Michael Jordan’s big score: why his NBA ownership tenure is far from a failure | It used to be that only the truly exceptional were called “the Michael Jordan of” their particular arena: of acting (Viola Davis), of fibbing (George Santos), of the Democratic party (Barack Obama). “They know what you’re talking about,” Obama said before bestowing the Chicago Bulls legend with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, “because Michael Jordan is the Michael Jordan of greatness.” And now he’s poised to win another title: the Michael Jordan of dealmakers.
Last week came news that the six-time NBA champion was in serious talks about selling a portion of his majority stake in the Charlotte Hornets. This comes four years after he sold a slice of the franchise to a group led by the venture capitalist Gabe Plotkin – the Michael Jordan of short-selling, according to some. It’s unclear whether Jordan is trying to bring in investment, or whether he wants to cash out of the league entirely. In the latter case, his take would be an 80% slice of a pie valued at more than $1bn. As investments go, it’s nothing but net.
But it isn’t just the money that makes this a big deal. For the better part of two decades the Chicago Bulls great has been the Michael Jordan of front office executives, exceptional by virtue of being the only Black majority team owner in America’s big four sports leagues. A divestment may leave him better off, but a larger movement toward diversity, inclusion and fair play will be poorer in the end.
All of which is to say: this isn’t a case of one bored rich guy selling to another who’s never known the thrill of victory. This is for higher stakes. There’s so much to consider – from what it means for North Carolina’s most prominent professional franchise to lose its favorite son as a steward, to whether the Hornets even have much more room to grow while stuck in the NBA’s eighth-smallest media market.
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Fox Sports’ Colin Cowherd, however, could only reach the lowest hanging fruit – the team’s record under the greatest player to ever lace ‘em up. (Note: born and raised Chicagoan here.)
“He tried baseball, he failed,” Cowherd fumed last week. “He tried ownership, he was awful. He tried the Wizards, it bombed. Everybody understands that, take Scottie Pippen and Phil Jackson, this whole Michael Jordan mythology is just that.” And this is coming from someone who professes respect for Jordan’s singular air. Imagine what MJ’s real haters must think.
In their defense, there’s certainly no arguing with the scoreboard. Since Jordan bought a stake in the Hornets in 2006, Charlotte have posted a winning record just four times in 17 tries. That’s including this season, which finds Charlotte racing to the bottom in hopes of winning the Victor Wembanyama sweepstakes.
Worse, the best player of his generation has demonstrated a weak eye for talent – reaching to draft shaggy Gonzaga star Adam Morrison, splurging on a new deal for underachieving center Emeka Okafor, blowing up one rebuild after another, never hitting on a coach or general manager anywhere near as good as the odd couple he had in Chicago.
The close friendship between Jordan and Charles Barkley was destroyed when the TNT analyst castigated Jordan for insulating himself with yes-men. “He called me and the last thing I heard was, ‘Motherfucker, fuck you. You’re supposed to be my boy,’” Barkley recalled in a recent guest appearance on the podcast All the Smoke. “I said, ‘Man, I gotta do my job.’ We haven’t spoken since that night.”
Given Jordan’s reputation as a serial competitor with a knack for refining slights real and imagined into fuel for conquest, you’d think the criticism – which was hardly exclusive to Barkley – would have launched the Hornets into rarefied air. Instead, they barely got off the ground.
But what about Jordan’s other achievements in Charlotte? Recall: when he bought into the team in 2006, they were called the Charlotte Bobcats – a vanity play by previous owner Bob Johnson, the BET co-founder who relaunched basketball in the Queen City after the original Hornets relocated to New Orleans in 2002. It was Jordan who restored the team’s brand and clawed back its heritage from the New Orleans Pelicans, effectively undoing what had been a messy divorce from the city.
Jordan called the un-branding “an historic day” – and he wasn’t kidding. Ask any Carolina hoops nut: That smirking Hornets logo – and the visions it conjures of Larry Johnson streaking through the air, of Alonzo Mourning bulling his way through the paint, and of Muggsy Bogues confounding defenses off the dribble – belongs nowhere else.
Those yes-men? A fair few were people of color and women, far more than could be found in other front offices when Jordan took over. Those misses on court? No doubt, Jordan’s touch was dulled by his distance from the game. But it’s hard to crush the guy for not trying when he hired Larry Brown, brought back all-time wins leader Paul Silas and made San Antonio assistant James Borrego the NBA’s first Latino head coach. What’s more, there’s no question Jordan’s Hornets have turned a corner since bringing on former Lakers GM Mitch Kupchak, who has built a promising young roster around Miles Bridges and LaMelo Ball.
This sale? Isn’t the point of investing was to make money? When Jordan consolidated his purchase of the Charlotte franchise for $275m in 2010, it seemed as if he had more money than sense – but only just. Back then Forbes estimated Jordan was worth $550m, a pile that included all the money he made from Nike – a company, a forthcoming feature film reminds us, that was going nowhere before he set foot in that first pair of Airs. That failed comeback with the Wizards that Cowherd referred to began with Jordan being invited aboard as part-owner of that team and the NHL’s Capitals, which bolstered his portfolio.
More to the point: Jordan got in early. He parlayed the wealth he accumulated on the court into a proper ownership share at a time when player salaries were relatively modest and most owners had made their ransoms in real estate. He bridged the gap between the owners and players, helping the former appreciate the latter’s reasons for walking off the job during the 2020 playoffs after the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
In the age of billionaire venture capitalists and tech moguls, it’s tough to see LeBron James or another high-earning NBA star pulling off as spectacular an upward move. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer changed NBA math forever with his $2bn acquisition of the LA Clippers.
And while it’s true that bought a halfway decent team in a top media market, it was also almost a decade ago. Since then, the Houston Rockets sold for $2.2bn, the Brooklyn Nets for $3.2bn and the Phoenix Suns just went for a record $4bn. Given those prices and the NBA’s global expansion, the Hornets’ true value could be a lot higher than the $1.6bn figure that has been thrown about
There are some who will always see Jordan as a failure for anything he does outside the Bulls, whether he’s playing baseball or working as a Nascar owner. (And with Jordan seemingly looking to get out of NBA so soon after getting into stock car racing, it’s hard not to be reminded of that famous Junior Johnson quote about how to make a small fortune in motor sports: “Start with a big one.”)
But the fact is that even Jordan’s disappointing tenure as Hornets owner is a staggering success. By standing apart for so long, he gave other athletes turned executives another reason to be like Mike. It’s just a shame it’s him who wants to sell and not, say, New York’s James Dolan. It’s hard to imagine the NBA without Jordan as a final boss. Whoever follows him will have big shoes to fill. The Michael Jordan of shoe-filling, no doubt. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/26/the-guardian-view-on-alcohol-drinking-less-is-good-for-you | Opinion | 2018-08-26T17:32:30.000Z | Editorial | The Guardian view on alcohol: drinking less is good for you | Editorial | Alcohol is physically bad for you in any quantity; and the more you drink, the worse its health effects. The gigantic report on the subject published last week is unequivocal and authoritative. It makes depressing reading – “sobering” would be the wrong word here, not least because few people are likely to change their behaviour as a result. But it is difficult to argue with the conclusions. The report was based on enormous amounts of data: 28 million people around the world were examined in 592 studies to estimate the health risks, while the prevalence of drinking was estimated using a further 694 studies. Some of the effects of large-scale drinking are really shocking. In Russia, after the failure of Gorbachev’s attempt to curtail the country’s vodka habit, alcohol caused 75% of the deaths of men under 55, at a time when life expectancy was actually falling. Around the world today, alcohol is responsible for 20% of the deaths in the 15 to 49 age group (the researchers include in this an estimate for the proportion of road traffic fatalities cause by drunk driving, though this is extrapolated from US data).
The variety of ways in which alcohol can kill or damage people comes as a shock. In the poorest countries, its primary means of damage is through TB; as countries grow more developed (and drink, on average, more) the damage shifts to cancer and heart disease. It is the trade-off between cancer and heart disease which leads the researchers to reject the notion that moderate drinking has health benefits compared with abstinence: they find that the increased risk of cancers outweighs the diminished risk of heart disease among middle-aged moderate drinkers.
Perhaps the most startling single finding is that two-thirds of the world’s population don’t drink at all. They manage without a drug apparently essential to civilised life in the west. The question is whether those of us in the other third should try to emulate them. The researchers are unequivocal. They want concerted government action to deliver lower alcohol consumption, using many of the same mechanisms that have been successfully deployed against tobacco: price rises, restrictions on advertising; limiting the availability of the drug. Some of these look like common sense: the Blair government’s relaxation of the licensing laws has not had the good effects hoped for at the time.
But the report’s concentration on the physical ill effects of alcohol consumption leaves two important questions unanswered. The direct physical effects of the drug are not the reasons for its popularity or use. It is the effect on mood and even intellect that many people take it for. This isn’t an entirely benevolent one. Drunken drivers, and drunken physical violence, cause immense suffering. The emotional damage that even high-functioning alcoholics do to their families is profound and lasting. Alcohol is bad for judgment and can promote a destructive solipsism. But it can also stimulate imagination, courage and friendship in a way that is hard to achieve otherwise. These are gifts that make life worth living. There is a reason why wine is tightly linked to paradise in religious poetry. Almost all human societies have used drugs for social purposes as well as individual pleasure. A world without drink might find itself poorer as well as richer.
The report is right that many people should drink less than they do. Almost everyone should drink less than they want to. Perhaps the real benefit of moderate drinking is not that it protects the heart, but that it requires a little self-discipline. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/may/24/energy-bills-likely-to-rise-by-800-in-october-says-ofgem-chief | Business | 2022-05-24T13:33:56.000Z | Phillip Inman | Energy bills likely to rise by £800 in October, says Ofgem chief | Calls for the chancellor to act immediately on the cost of living crisis grew louder after the head of the energy regulator told MPs it is on course to raise the cap on household energy bills to about £2,800 in October.
The increase in the cap would push up the average annual bill by more than £800, after the regulator Ofgem increased it by £693 in April to £1,971.
Ofgem’s chief executive, Jonathan Brearley, told parliament’s business, energy and industrial strategy committee (BEIS) the figure was provisional but was based on the most accurate current estimate.
Sunak faces calls for help with living costs as budget deficit lower than forecast
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He said he would be writing to the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, on Tuesday afternoon to confirm the soaring cost of wholesale gas, which has risen by as much as 10 times the normal price in recent months, and a rise in electricity costs, were to blame for a 40% increase in the average bill.
Brearley said: “The price changes we have seen in the gas market are genuinely a once-in-a-generation event not seen since the oil crisis of the 1970s.”
Energy prices pushed the consumer prices index (CPI) to 9% in April, fuelling criticism that the government has failed to protect millions of low-income families from making the choice of feeding themselves or heating their homes.
The Resolution Foundation thinktank said raising the energy price cap to about £2,800 in October could mean 9.6 million families across England fall into fuel stress this winter, defined as spending at least a 10th of their total budgets on energy bills alone.
Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the TUC, said the chancellor must act now with a package of measures in an emergency budget.
“Millions of families are already at breaking point. But now they face even more bill hikes, while ministers do nothing to make sure wages and universal credit keep pace,” she said.
O’Grady called for an increase to universal credit and a “major programme of energy grants to cut bills” funded by a windfall tax.
Adam Scorer, chief executive of National Energy Action, said Brearley’s warning “will strike terror into the hearts of millions of people, already unable to heat and power their homes. It will plunge households into deep, deep crisis. The financial, social and health impacts are unthinkable.”
Kwasi Kwarteng, the business and energy secretary, said he expected households would receive further help.
Kwarteng told the BEIS committee: “These interventions may not be able to solve all the problems consumers face but they will go some way to dealing with this cost of living issue.”
There is speculation in Westminster that a package of measures will be announced this week to coincide with the publication of the Sue Gray report on parties in Downing Street.
Officials in No 10 expect measures to include further support for low-income households, in part paid for by a tax on oil and gas producers and possibly electricity generators.
Kwarteng said he disapproved of a windfall tax on energy companies. “I don’t think [a windfall tax] supports investment and is necessarily the right thing to do. But the chancellor makes the decisions. His instinct is against a windfall tax, but if he thinks these extraordinary times require extraordinary measures, that will be up to him … I think his judgment has been very good during the pandemic.”
Research from the energy consultants Cornwall Insight shows consumers wanting to fix their energy costs have already suffered an “unprecedented increase in their bills” to £3,685 a year, £1,714 more than the current default tariff cap.
It found that deals for new direct debit customers showed that despite April’s £693 cap increase, suppliers’ standard variable tariffs continued to be the cheapest tariffs available to customers.
Just a year ago, in April 2021, the cheapest 10 fixed tariffs averaged £937 a year, it added.
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Kwarteng defended the government’s role in the development of a gas market that one MP described as unstable and which has seen about 40 retail suppliers go bust. Bulb was the largest to go into administration, at a cost to the taxpayer of £2.2bn, he confirmed at the meeting.
He also defended keeping Bulb’s chief executive, Hayden Wood, in place and maintaining his £250,000 salary while the government seeks a buyer. He said the government would have had to find another chief executive who would have asked to be paid more.
A consultation on Ofgem proposals to update the price cap every quarter rather than every six months closes on 14 June, with planned changes implemented from October. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/nov/12/national-newspapers-daily-mirror | Media | 2014-11-12T09:24:00.000Z | Roy Greenslade | Harry Arnold, the reporter who deserves to be called a Fleet Street legend | Harry Arnold, one of the very best journalists to have graced the newsrooms of both the Daily Mirror and the Sun, has died aged 73.
He was a reporter's reporter. If a story was there to be got, he got it. If it wasn't, he refused to bend it. Harry had standards. And what skills - on the road, he phoned in copy to deadline without writing it out first; in the office, he was a wonder on the phone.
His contacts book was replete with excellent sources. Although he will be remembered for his prolific story-getting as a - arguably the - leading member of the royal rat pack, he was relieved to give it up.
Three months ago, before we appeared on Radio 4's The Reunion to talk about the 1980s era at the Sun, he told me just how much he relished his years at the Mirror.
I had recruited him from the Sun in 1990 and appointed him as chief reporter. In the following 12 years until his retirement he covered a whole range of stories, including wars in the Gulf and Kosovo, and the floods in Mozambique.
Within weeks of arriving at the Mirror, in April 1990, he proved his ability by beating the rest of Fleet Street to discover the address of a British lorry driver, Paul Ashwell, who had been arrested in Greece for supposedly transporting the parts of an Iraqi "supergun".
It enabled the paper to befriend Ashwell's family, post bail for him and lead the campaign on his behalf. Charges were dropped two months later.
Harry, a dapper dresser who acquired his range of pin-stripe suits from Savile Row, was known for his deadpan sense of humour and his refusal to panic.
In the Mirror's handsome tribute to him, photographer Roger Allen recalled working with him in Kosovo when they were forced to hide in a ditch to escape Serb soldiers who they feared were about to shoot them.
Harry's mobile phone rang and Roger heard him politely tell the caller: "I'm sorry, I'm a bit busy at the moment. Could I call you back?"
He whispered to Roger that it was a garden centre calling to inform him his rose arbor was ready for collection.
Throughout his long stint as the Sun's royal correspondent, in which he broke countless stories, he refused to succumb to "red carpet fever", the condition that afflicted many people, including several journalists, who came to see themselves as part of the royal family.
Harry kept his distance as he competed with his fierce rival, the late James Whitaker, to report on the troubled relationship between Prince Charles and Princess Diana.
They both laid claim to having broken the story about the beginning of the couple's romance. But they remained close friends and helped each other. Harry told me: "When one of us broke an exclusive in the first edition, we would tip off the other in time for the second edition... our editors could never work out what what going on."
Harry's first royal scoop for the Sun occurred in the 1970s when - for the price of a cup of coffee at Barbados airport, plus his charm - he secured an interview with Roddy Llewellyn in which he confirmed he was having a romance with Princess Margaret.
Despite his relief at giving up the royal beat, Harry enjoyed the foreign travel that went with the job. He stayed in the best hotels, travelled first class and lived off expenses.
Yet he was something of a union militant. In my earliest days at the Sun, I recall Harry as one of the opinion-forming speakers at chapel meetings. Like many journalists who had arrived in 1969 from what became known as "the old Sun" and its predecessor, the Daily Herald, he was imbued with an anti-management ethos.
It was one of the reasons that the Sun's editor, Kelvin Mackenzie, was not one of Harry's greatest fans, despite his appreciation for his string of royal exclusives.
This tension between the two came to a head in 1989 when Harry wrote the story about claims by the police that Liverpool football fans had been the authors of their own misfortunes at the Hillsborough tragedy.
Harry, who had been given the news agency report, wrote it carefully to show that the claims by the police were just that - allegations (which were also published by most other newspapers). So he was appalled when he saw that MacKenzie was about to put the story on the front page below a headline saying: "The Truth."
He protested, as he revealed when breaking his silence about the incident in a BBC documentary in September 2012. It is a version of the truth, he told MacKenzie, not the truth. He was ignored.
Months later Harry left the Sun to join me at the Mirror. He emailed me recently to say: "I don't think I ever thanked you for removing me from the misery of Kelvin's clutches and giving me what I still regard as the top reporters' job in Fleet Street. If I did not thank you, then I do so now."
He added: "I regard him [MacKenzie] as the nastiest man I ever met in my 40-year career."
Among the many tributes to Harry was a fine one from Mirror editor-in-chief Lloyd Embley. He said: "Harry was a tremendous journalist and one of the best reporters of his generation... he was an inspiration to many younger journalists over that period."
I also like this heartfelt comment by his former Sun colleague, Vic Chapple, who said: "Harry was a Fleet Street legend who was professional to his fingertips. He was extraordinarily well-loved and respected by those he worked with."
Legend may be an overworked description, but I think all those who worked with Harry, and in competition with him, would say that he deserves the hyperbole.
He is survived by his wife, Mary, four children and six grandchildren. There is sure to be a memorial service. His funeral will take place at midday on Monday 24 November at St Mary's church, Chilham, Kent. A reception follows at the Woolpack Inn, Chilham.
Sources: Daily Mirror/The Sun/PBS/BBC/GentlemenRanters/Personal knowledge | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/apr/15/west-midlands-metro-mayor-elections-joseph-chamberlain | UK news | 2017-04-15T23:05:15.000Z | Ewen MacAskill | Labour heartland under attack in metro mayor elections | The great mayor of Birmingham Joseph Chamberlain, one of the most famous Victorian reformers, presided over slum clearance, the introduction of clean water and public works that included swimming pools, libraries and schools. He is commemorated in the city with a fountain and a clock tower – though, surprisingly, no statue.
Those achievements belong to a very different age. The candidates in the election on 4 May for a new “metro” mayor for the West Midlands are under no illusions that they will ever be honoured in the same way as Chamberlain. Even if their ambitions matched his, the powers being granted by Theresa May’s government in this experiment in English devolution would make it near impossible to emulate him. But that will not stop the Conservative candidate, Andy Street, from trying.
Interviewed in a car between Birmingham and a campaign stop at a Sikh temple in West Bromwich last week, Street drew parallels between the Victorian precedent and the new mayor, acknowledging Chamberlain as a role model and expressing admiration for his philosophy and drive.
But this campaign is about more than just the metro mayor. Street, former managing director of Britain’s favourite store, John Lewis, carries the prime minister’s hopes of fulfilling a long-held Conservative ambition. The party’s aim is to get beyond the shires and suburbs and make a breakthrough into urban England.
“Yes, if we won this election in an area that has been a Labour heartland for 30 years, I think it would be seen as a very dramatic point for the Conservative party,” Street said.
He recalled Margaret Thatcher, after a third general election victory in 1987, saying that while she was satisfied with the result, the Conservatives had to get back into urban areas. “If one was honest, with the exception of London, the party has found that difficult over the last 30 years,” he said.
Evidence of just how important this election is to the Conservatives and Street can be seen in the estimated £1m or more spent in campaigning over the past six months, a lot of money for a race that has barely registered nationally. The budget dwarfs spending by other candidates.
The outcome in a region that has the highest concentration of marginal seats in England will be a pointer to the next general election. The West Midlands mayor, elected initially until 2020 and after that in contests held every four years, will preside over a combined authority that might for simplicity have been called Greater Birmingham, though that would not have pleased surrounding conurbations. He or she will represent not just Birmingham but Coventry, Solihull, Wolverhampton, Dudley, Walsall and Sandwell.
Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914). Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Other mayoral elections being held on 4 May are Greater Manchester, Liverpool City Region, Tees Valley (which includes Middlesbrough, Darlington and Hartlepool), Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, and West of England (which includes Bristol and Bath). An election in Sheffield will be held next year.
Liverpool, Manchester and the Tees Valley are almost certain to go Labour. Until a few years ago, the West Midlands might have been bracketed alongside them. Not now.
According to one of the leading poll analysts in the UK, Professor John Curtice of Strathclyde University, Labour emerged from the 2015 general election in the West Midlands constituencies with a nine-point lead over the Conservatives. But that appears to have been eroded by recent polls putting the Conservatives on 42% against Labour on 27%.
Curtice said: “If Labour wins the West Midlands, it will help hide poor results elsewhere. It would give them a degree of cover. If they were to lose, they would attempt to claim Liverpool, Manchester and the Tees Valley as great achievements. And we would say, ‘Come off it’.”
His verdict on the West Midlands: “It is too close to call. We do not know who is going to win.”
The new mayors are England’s tentative response to devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, imposed on a population that for the most part did not ask for them. It might yet turn out to be a case of too little too late. The metro mayors have their origins in Thatcher’s dismantling of the Greater London Authority in 1986 along with six huge Labour-controlled metropolitan councils that included the West Midlands.
The decision by David Cameron and May to introduce metro mayors beyond London is a tacit admission that Thatcher made a mistake in destroying regional authorities.
The West Midlands, reflecting English apathy towards devolution and regarding the mayor as just another layer of bureaucracy, voted against the idea in a referendum in 2012, with Birmingham 58% against and Coventry 64%. In spite of that, the government is in effect imposing one anyway, using a small budget as an incentive.
The mayor’s responsibilities include transport, regeneration and economic growth, though with just £36m a year to spend on them. Some of the candidates argue that a strong personality can make the post dynamic.
Among them is Street, who was earning £800,000 a year at John Lewis when he stood down in October to fight the election. At the time he did not know how much the mayor would earn: it has since been set at £79,000. He offers that up as evidence of his commitment to the job: a £721,000 drop in salary.
Brought up in Birmingham, Street failed after university to become either a social worker or get on to a Marks & Spencer training scheme. He instead joined John Lewis, where he spent 35 years, the last 10 as managing director.
One of his main pitches for the mayor’s job is that he is from a business background rather than being a career politician. Chamberlain, a Liberal who became a Conservative, had a simple message, Street said: that the skills he learned in business were relevant to public office. “He strongly believed that a vibrant economy was the best way of improving the prosperity of every resident, and also got the idea of the role of the public sector in support.”
It was a little-known fact, he said, that Chamberlain was in office for only three years. “He had incredible energy and delivery and set about achieving a lot very quickly. I do think there is an opportunity for whoever is successful in this election because the conditions are right for that same emphasis on delivery.”
Rivals claim Street is fighting a campaign based on personality, what they refer to as “Project Andy”, and say that his campaign literature minimises the fact he is the Conservative. One said this was a strategic mistake, given May and the Conservatives are high in the polls at present, and that the £1m had been wasted, only succeeding in raising his name recognition from zero to about 8%. That financial advantage has gone now. From 27 March, an election spending cap of £120,000 applies to all the candidates.
Labour is battling to stay competitive, with Labour activists on phone banks reporting Jeremy Corbyn as a negative. “We are not miracle workers,” one said.
Given that Labour is braced to lose swaths of seats in council elections across the country on the same day as the mayoral vote, it is almost inevitable that Jeremy Corbyn will face renewed calls to stand down as Labour leader. Loss of the West Midlands mayoral election would magnify that pressure.
Ironically, Corbyn’s hopes for holding the West Midlands rest on Siôn Simon, a Labour member of the European parliament, who is portrayed as part of a rightwing cabal out to get him. The general secretary of Unite, Len McCluskey, one of Corbyn’s biggest supporters, blocked a recommendation of the union at regional level to give £10,000 to Simon’s campaign. Simon insists he has been at pains to be “completely neutral” with regard to Corbyn and McCluskey.
Andy Street, Conservative candidate in the West Midlands mayoral race. Photograph: Graham Turner/The Guardian
In spite of Labour’s internecine disputes, the party holds an advantage over Street: it has lots of councillors who can mobilise volunteers to canvass, organise events and run phone banks. The party is also pioneering new techniques, such as targeting specific voters through Facebook.
Simon, a former MP for Birmingham Erdington and minister in Gordon Brown’s government, said he was confident he would win but acknowledged “it is much closer than it is usually”. He added: “All our evidence is that our vote is holding well, whatever difficulties Labour has had nationally.”
As well as its own private polling, Labour bases its analysis, unlike Curtice, on last year’s local elections. Across the councils that make up the West Midlands, the party won 47.2% of the votes to the Conservatives’ 28.5%. Corbyn was leader at the time.
The outcome could depend on turnout. Simon predicted: “It will be more than 10%, and I think less than 30%. Probably around 20%.” The party best able to get its core vote out would benefit from a low turnout and, based on recent past experience, that would be Labour.
If no candidate wins 50% of the votes cast, the two candidates with the most votes go through to the next round, and the second preferences of those voting for the other candidates are added the mix.
Simon, who has said he will stand down immediately as an MEP if he wins, has a potent election message, another sign of English nationalism awaking. While the Labour mayoral candidate in Manchester, Andy Burnham, is fighting on a northern Labour ticket, Simon has opted for an English one, arguing that it is time to bring to an end the Treasury’s Barnett formula, which gives a higher share of spending to Scotland.
“It has been taboo for English politicians to challenge the Barnett formula, but I am doing that now. Public spending in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland – as well as in London – is at least £10,000 per head, whereas in the rest of England it is much lower. In the West Midlands, it is only £8,750,” Simon said.
“This is not some arcane financial malarkey. If you go to Scotland, they have better schools and hospitals, and in London better parks – all being funded by the English taxpayer, and cumulatively so for 40 years. [At the same time] four out of the five constituencies in the entire UK with the highest rates of unemployment are in the city of Birmingham.”
A debate in Birmingham City University last week attended by Simon, Street and the four other candidates attracted an audience of about 100, a respectable enough figure for a political meeting mid-week. They are scheduled to receive national visibility before 4 May when, according to the candidates, the BBC is planning to televise a debate.
Questions at Birmingham City University focused on what a mayor could actually achieve, given the limited resources, asking what he or she could do about issues such as homelessness, pensions, jobs, pollution and abolition of the M6 toll.
Liberal Democrat hopes of a party revival on the back of its strong Remain position will be tested in the West Midlands, which voted 60% Leave in last year’s EU referendum. The Lib Dem candidate, Beverley Nielsen – who works at Birmingham City University, which has set up a Centre for Brexit Studies – rejected the narrative that the West Midlands is a two-horse race. She said: “There are many people out there who feel that Labour has not delivered, has not provided a strong opposition to the government, did not stand up for EU access to the single market, for example, and just basically caved in to a hard Brexit.”
The West Midlands has strong pockets of Ukip supporters, especially in the Black Country, but the party’s candidate, Pete Durnell, whose background is in computing, is hampered by Ukip’s many setbacks at national level and its search for a new identity after the EU referendum.
The Green candidate and social worker, James Burn, said in his manifesto launch he would not make “any wild promises” but he did pledge that he would take only the average salary for the West Midlands, £28,000, using the rest of help small businesses in less well-off areas.
In a recent candidates’ debate, it fell to the Communist party candidate, Graham Stevenson, a former senior official with the Transport and General Workers’ Union, to deliver one of the punchiest lines, describing the mayoral post as “crap devolution” and bemoaning the lack of powers.
Street and Simon would not agree. Commemorating important figures with such things as statues, fountains and clock towers is unfashionable these days. But if the idea of metro mayors were to take off, there might one day be – improbable as it might seem at present – a Burnham Street in Manchester or a Simon Road or Street Square in Birmingham.
Greater Manchester
Manchester. Photograph: Alamy
Labour’s Andy Burnham should be a shoo-in. At one point, he was among the favourites to win the 2015 Labour leadership contest but he proved indecisive, making a huge tactical blunder in refusing union support. He is interesting in that he seemingly decided there was no future for him - or Labour - at Westminster, and saw the mayoral job as a better option. As well as Manchester, the region includes Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford and Wigan. It is already more integrated than the other regions where metro mayors are to be elected, such as the West Midlands.
Liverpool City Region
Liverpool. Photograph: Alamy
Labour’s Steve Rotheram, MP for Liverpool Walton, is expected to win easily. What will be interesting to watch is his relationship with the mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson. Rotheram defeated Anderson in the race to become the Labour candidate for the combined-authority mayoral elections but Anderson, an old-style political operator, will still wield a lot of power as head of the biggest city council in the region. Rotheram, who began work as a bricklayer before starting his own construction company, worked closely with the Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn in parliament. Apart from Liverpool, the region includes Knowsley, Wirral, Sefton, St Helens and Halton.
West of England
Bristol City Hall and College Green. Photograph: Alamy
Theoretically, this will be a three-way split between the Conservatives, the Lib Dems and Labour. However, based on the 2015 general election results and high poll figures nationally, the Conservative, Tim Bowles, an events manager and South Gloucestershire councillor, starts as favourite. Labour’s Lesley Mansell is a councillor and NHS worker in Bath. The Liberal Democrats are putting up Stephen Williams, an accountant and former MP for Bristol West. Bristol’s current mayor is Labour but there are several Tory MPs in the region.
Tees Valley
Hartlepool Historic Quay. Photograph: Alamy
Labour’s Sue Jeffrey is almost certain to win. She will ensure that at least one of the mayoral leaders will be female, no mean feat given the extent of male dominance in local government across the country. Jeffrey said: “It’s really important that we have many more women a) in senior positions in the Labour party overall, and b) concerned and involved with generating economic growth.” The Tees Valley region includes Darlington, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland, and Stockton-on-Tees.
Cambridgeshire and Peterborough
Peterborough. Photograph: Alamy
The Conservatives should take this election. James Palmer, leader of East Cambridgeshire district council, was selected in a nomination battle that included Heidi Allen, MP for South Cambridgeshire. Allen had declared she intended to do both jobs, which might have worked against her. The region includes: Cambridge city council, East Cambridgeshire district council, Fenland district council, Huntingdonshire district council, Peterborough city council and South Cambridgeshire district council. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/feb/11/albanese-calls-on-coalition-to-explain-barnaby-joyce-footpath-incident | Australia news | 2024-02-11T07:58:51.000Z | Natasha May | Albanese calls on Coalition to explain Barnaby Joyce footpath incident | The prime minister has called for the Coalition leadership to explain the actions of former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce, who was last week filmed lying on a Canberra footpath having a phone conversation.
Guardian Australia understands Joyce won’t attend the Nationals party room meeting scheduled for Monday.
On Friday, Daily Mail Australia published night-time footage of Joyce lying face up on the pavement with his feet on a planter box having a phone conversation and uttering profanities.
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Questioned about Joyce’s behaviour at a press conference, Anthony Albanese said on Sunday that people deserved an explanation for what had occurred.
“Well, I think people will certainly make their own judgments on that. People will see that footage, they will look for an explanation that … has some credibility, and they’ll look for leadership from the leader of the Liberal party and the leader of the National party about this,” Albanese said.
“I think people will also think to themselves, what would the response be if that was a minister in my government being seen to be behaving in that way?
“I think that there just needs to be an explanation of what occurred.”
On Friday Joyce told Guardian Australia he was walking from parliament to his accommodation late on Wednesday, when he fell over next to a planter box on Lonsdale Street in Braddon.
He said he was on the phone with his partner, Vikki Campion.
“If I knew someone was filming me I probably would have got up quicker before I walked home. I was swearing at myself,” Joyce said.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton told Sky News on Sunday he would talk with Joyce later in the week, as would Nationals leader David Littleproud.
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“It’s pretty rough when people are walking past somebody who might need support,” Dutton said.
“I understand a chalk mark has been drawn on the footpath. It could only happen in Canberra where all those Greens and Labor staffers are.
“I will have a chat with Barnaby later this week and as you said David Littleproud spoke with Barnaby and is going to speak to him again this week and that is where the situation is at the moment.”
The Barnaby Joyce chalk outline in Lonsdale Street, Braddon, Canberra. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian
The shadow treasurer, Angus Taylor, warned against “jumping to conclusions” when he was questioned about the incident while appearing on ABC Insiders.
“Look, people love to jump to conclusions on these things. And I’m certainly not doing that. And I don’t think anyone should. I think the primary issue for us is Barnaby’s welfare. And we will remain focused on that. I certainly will remain focused on that,” Taylor said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/20/millions-of-vapes-could-be-dumped-before-uk-ban-as-retailers-fail-to-recycle | Society | 2024-03-21T18:30:00.000Z | Sarah Marsh | Millions of vapes could be dumped before UK ban as retailers ‘fail to recycle’ | A quarter of a billion disposable vapes could be dumped before a ban comes in next year as most retailers are not fulfilling their legal duty to help consumers recycle them, according to new research.
The not-for-profit organisation Material Focus, which conducted the research, found that more than nine out of 10 vape producers and retailers seemed not to provide or pay for the return and recycling of single-use e-cigarettes.
High street brands and convenience stores were among the worst offenders, providing few or no recycling drop-off points, according to Material Focus.
The not-for-profit went into more than 700 retail stores looking for drop-off-points or asking if they could get their vape recycled, after seeing the products advertised for sale. Even though some say that they run takeback schemes shoppers were told that they could not take the products when they asked.
The disposable vape ban
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Material Focus said single-use e-cigarettes were one of the “most environmentally wasteful, damaging and dangerous consumer products ever made”. They estimate that more than 250m vapes will be thrown away before the forthcoming ban on single-use vapes, due to be implemented in 2025.
Scott Butler, executive director of Material Focus, said: “The environmental responsibilities of vape producers and retailers are very clear. Any company producing significant quantities of electrical items is required to register, report their sales and finance the cost of their product being recycled. Retailers are also responsible for ensuring that it’s easy for their customers to recycle these products by providing recycling drop-off points in their stores.
“It is shocking that there has been so little progress since last year. As sales and profits have boomed, the environmental impacts and costs of collecting and recycling waste vapes have been disregarded.”
Sales of disposable single-use vapes in the UK are now at least 360m per year – the equivalent of providing lithium for the batteries of more than 6,700 electric vehicles. The cost of recycling all the single-use vapes bought in the UK could be up to £200m per annum.
0:46
'Children shouldn't be vaping': Rishi Sunak explains UK disposable vapes ban – video
Disposable single-use vapes have a wide range of environmental impacts. They also contain some of the most precious materials on our planet, such as lithium and copper, which are lost for ever when thrown away.
Each single-use device contains on average 0.15g of lithium and according to GAP Group, an electricals recycling company, on average 50cm or 1.9g of copper cable. Vapes, as they contain lithium, also present a fire risk if not disposed of correctly – more than 700 fires are caused by the incorrect disposal of electricals containing hidden batteries, including vapes.
Material Focus conducted research among 764 retailers in 13 cities across the UK who sell vapes. They say that, despite legal obligations being in place since 2021, only 86 stores (11%) provided recycling points.
The analysis, which examined the company records of more than 165 of the most significant vape and vape juice producers in the UK, identified that only 15 had registered to comply with environmental regulations for producer responsibility for waste electricals, portable batteries and packaging.
However, all of the companies identified in Material Focus’s analysis had become members of a vape industry trade association such as the UKVIA or IBVTA and also registered their products with the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency.
The companies identified have not registered with UK environment agencies for various regulations that mandate they contribute to the costs of recycling of the products and packaging they sell when they reach their end of life.
Companies must register as a producer each year depending on how many electricals they sell. If they sell less than 5 tonnes a year, they must sign up with their environmental regulator as a small producer; more than that and they must pay to join a producer compliance scheme.
At the end of 2022, Material Focus produced a briefing paper that set out the environmental responsibilities of vape producers and retailers, which has been widely shared across the industry. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2023/may/19/brokeback-mountain-review-sohoplace-london | Stage | 2023-05-19T12:34:03.000Z | Arifa Akbar | Brokeback Mountain review – perfectly pitched staging of the heartbreaking love story | Where Ang Lee transformed Annie Proulx’s 35-page short story about two gay cowboys into a feature film in 2005, Ashley Robinson’s stage adaptation, all of 90 minutes long, returns it to a distilled purity.
The dialogue, especially at the start, is minimal, and skates on the surface of deeper felt emotions between Ennis (Lucas Hedges) and Jack (Mike Faist), the Wyoming sheepherders who meet, aged 19, and become furtive lovers for the next 20 years.
Nica Burns’s new theatre is proving itself as a space in which acoustics are central to the action and Dan Gillespie Sells’ country and western songs, led by Eddi Reader’s beautiful vocals, build the atmosphere and charge.
In Jonathan Butterell’s production, the music becomes its own language, even between the lovers who connect through song. Although there is a conspicuous yee-haa twang to it all, with Tom Pye’s set made of scrubland, tent and glowing campfire and his costumes featuring suede, spurs and Stetsons, it manages not to sink into cliche.
Building atmosphere and charge … Eddi Reader as the Balladeer. Photograph: Manuel Harlan
The story begins in 1963 in a state so homophobic it was life-threatening to be openly gay. Hedges and Faist take some time to warm up: they have the look of Abercrombie & Fitch models, topless in denims and suede boots, and the sexual interest is initially delivered in coy, cursory glances. The passion never really burns up the stage but their chemistry comes alive as boyish romance, with play fighting and suddenly grabbing ardour. It retains an innocence and tenderness all the way through, even in spite of the unspoken dissatisfaction they come to feel, and both actors are compelling, Faist especially so as the ebullient Jack, while Hedges is more melancholic as Ennis, too scared to risk a fuller life with Jack, and full of regret for it.
Staged as a memory play, it features an older Ennis (Paul Hickey), as grizzled as he is at the start of Proulx’s story. This is the play’s only dud note, the older figure is too evidently a device and spare part.
Then there is Ennis’s wife, Alma (Emily Fairn), who captures the impact of closeted male homosexuality on the women caught within its doubleness. “I’m not no queer,” says Ennis, Jack quickly echoing him, and we see how the denials are necessary for survival, in their time.
Yet still we cannot consign their story to the past at a moment in America in which the “don’t say gay” bill is gaining traction. The play’s ending is stark, leaving our sobs stuck, dry, in our throats. The men’s unlived lives, their unspent passions, are desolately evoked.
At @sohoplace, London, until 12 August | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/my-hero-flann-o-brien-by-john-banville | Books | 2016-04-01T09:00:09.000Z | John Banville | My hero: Flann O’Brien by John Banville | Ireland loves, or pretends to love, its literary heroes, so much so that we put quotations from Ulysses on little brass plaques and nail them to the pavements for tourists and Dubliners alike to tread on, give to a gunboat the name of that most peace-loving Irishman, Samuel Beckett, while Oscar Wilde is represented by a hideous statue indecently asprawl on a rock behind railings opposite his birthplace. What the reaction would be of Flann O’Brien, Myles na Gopaleen, Cruiskeen Lawn (Irish for “the full glass”) or Brian O’Nolan – his real name, more or less – to the gushing lip-service we pay these days to our dead writers (he died 50 years ago on 1 April) can be easily guessed: a sardonic shrug, and a turning back to the bar to order another ball of malt.
He was a slightly late arrival among the generation that included James Joyce, Beckett, Frank O’Connor, Seán O’Faoláin, Patrick Kavanagh and, later again, Brendan Behan. Born into a somewhat peculiar nationalist family, his first language was Irish, although it was as a prose stylist in English that he wrought his finest achievements. Chief of these is the novel At Swim-Two-Birds, a comic masterpiece that he unluckily published on the eve of the second world war, and which only attained its true status after its author’s death.
O’Brien yearned for Europe, into which Joyce and Beckett had triumphantly flung themselves, but in his lifetime he made only one trip abroad, to Germany. He disdained the self-heroicising of the likes of Joyce, with his wish to “forge the uncreated conscience of my race”, and rejected the myth of the selfless artist wedded to his art. “But it could be argued,” his biographer Anthony Cronin writes, “that in [O’Brien’s] case, he was, in time, destroyed by its opposite, by a too ready acceptance of the necessity of emulating the life pattern of the majority who do not have a special vocation and are not burdened by the claims of art.”
O’Brien was a philistine as well as a consummate prose stylist, an artist who threw away his talent, a Catholic who allowed himself to drift into the sin of despair, and a great comic sensibility thwarted and shrivelled by emotional self-denial. He would have laughed at the notion of being anybody’s hero. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/mar/21/then-barbara-met-alan-review-a-rollicking-fact-based-drama-with-a-rock-biographys-swagger | Television & radio | 2022-03-21T22:10:36.000Z | Jack Seale | Then Barbara Met Alan review –a true 1990s love story of people power in action | The word “then” in the title of Then Barbara Met Alan (BBC2) is important. When standup comic Barbara Lisicki meets protest singer Alan Holdsworth in 1990, the lives of disabled people in Britain are continually blighted by blatant discrimination. Then, these two souls find each other. Five years later, protests organised by Lisicki and Holdsworth result in the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. By then Barbara and Alan have also had a child.
Jack Thorne and Genevieve Barr’s rollicking fact-based drama about the couple is a social history document and a love story in equal parts, showing how politics and relationships are both about the power of people allowing their qualities to complement each other. Compromises are argued over. Imperfect but glorious outcomes are shared.
The unstable chemistry that will one day change millions of lives is nailed in the first scene shared by Ruth Madeley as Barbara and Arthur Hughes as Alan. They emerge from a cabaret club, his callipered leg trying to keep up with her speeding wheelchair. When he asks her out for a drink, she rattles cynically through the evening’s likely sequence of events, culminating in a warning that he will need £40 for a cheap hotel, plus £20 for cheap booze to fuel the sex. Undaunted, he asks if she can lend him £60. Barbara’s hard realism and Alan’s freewheeling idealism, forged as their individual responses to physical trauma and social disenfranchisement, are a perfect match – at least at first.
Having quickly moved in together, the two hit upon a grand plan when they have friends over one evening to “hate-watch” the ITV Telethon. This cheesy biennial fundraiser is meant to be television using its clout for good by boosting disability charities, but Lisicki observes that the depiction of people with disabilities as pitiable wretches is harmful: “28 hours of well-intentioned do-gooders dangling us poor crips in front of the nation’s bleeding hearts”. She urges her pals to stop grousing in their living room, step outside to protest against the format and take the show off the air.
Many campaigners might think criticising a charity drive that assists the cause for which they advocate would be ungrateful, but Lisicki knows handouts are not a solution, and that being thankful for the odd sackful of crumbs means accepting the underlying injustice. In a scene utilising Madeley’s gift for confrontational, unblinking erudition, Lisicki shatters the polite protocols of an anodyne TV debate show by mercilessly cutting through an ITV executive’s self-congratulatory waffle. Lisicki and Holdsworth’s campaign group, Block Telethon, soon claims victory – ITV bins the concept after the protests against the 1992 show – and then morphs into the more ambitious Disabled People’s Direct Action Network (DAN).
Now Lisicki and Holdsworth are in their imperial phase and Then Barbara Met Alan takes on the swagger of a rock bio, as the couple swap their comedy/music gigs for public performances of a different kind. Touring the country in a van with the band they have put together, they draw crowds and press coverage by handcuffing themselves to buses and arranging noisy pickets. In lieu of hit singles, they roll out a series of brilliant slogans: “Rights, not charity”; “To boldly go where all others have gone before”; “Piss on pity”; “Nothing about us, without us”. The momentum takes them all the way to Westminster, at which point hard choices have to be made about exactly what legislative change is achievable. Meanwhile, the intensity of their success, and the stress of parenthood, recasts Barbara and Alan’s personality clash as more painful than fruitful.
Then Barbara Met Alan puts us right behind them at every moment, nimbly mixing archive footage – Michael Aspel’s stricken mugging to camera as the Telethon studio is invaded is a highlight – with staged scenes, and using animation, trippy filters and breaking the fourth wall to mirror the chaotic improvisation of a grassroots movement.
The programme isn’t obliged to have a wider significance beyond the struggle of the disabled community: attacks on disabled people by an uncaring state are ongoing, and it is notable that the show has cast a much larger number of performers with disabilities than usual. The sex scene where Hughes and Madeley’s bodies are uncovered and beautiful is a further small but pointed statement.
But at a time when protest, solidarity and collective action are needed more than ever and under unprecedented threat, the lessons about effective activism feel universal. For as long as Barbara and Alan were spurring each other on, they showed everyone how to get things done. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/apr/09/bridget-mckenzies-office-wanted-sports-rorts-funding-tripled-after-consultation-with-mps-and-senators-documents-confirm | Australia news | 2024-04-08T15:00:44.000Z | Paul Karp | Bridget McKenzie’s office wanted ‘sports rorts’ funding tripled to pay for target and marginal seat priorities | Bridget McKenzie’s office proposed tripling funding for the “sports rorts” program to deliver “priorities for target and marginal” seats after consultation with MPs and senators, new documents confirm.
After a three-year freedom-of-information battle, the Greens have secured the release of colour-coded spreadsheets related to the community sport infrastructure grant program and the “talking points” document prepared for McKenzie to pitch to the then prime minister, Scott Morrison, to expand the program from $30m to $100m.
That document reveals McKenzie’s office spoke “to other members and duty-senators and some cross-bench on key priorities – with a priority on marginal and target seats” before discussing the proposed expansion with Morrison.
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“With $29.7m, we cannot fulfil key priorities; with $100m, we can achieve at least two priorities for all our targets and marginals,” the talking points said.
In January 2020 the audit office delivered a scathing report that the program was targeted at marginal or Coalition target electorates, after McKenzie departed from Sport Australia’s recommendations by effectively conducting a parallel assessment process.
McKenzie denied wrongdoing in her administration of the scheme but resigned over an inadvertent undisclosed membership of one of the recipient clubs.
'Sports rorts' grants explained: how we got here and why it all matters
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In 2020 the Australian National Audit Office told a Senate inquiry that McKenzie’s office had drawn up talking points to pitch a $70m expansion of the sports grants program on the basis it would help fund 109 more projects in marginal and target seats.
McKenzie has consistently denied that she saw the talking points before her meeting with Morrison on 28 November 2018.
Download original document
The talking points document notes that expanding the program from $30m to $100m would increase the number of projects in target seats from 32 to 67; and the number in marginal seats from 82 to 156.
Total projects in target and marginal seats would rise from 114 projects worth $21m to 223 projects worth $46.5m.
The talking points suggested the program could be expanded further to $130m, with “$30m for new and emerging priorities for target and marginals”.
Even with $100m there would be “205 total projects” in marginal and target seats unfunded despite receiving a score above 60% from Sport Australia, it said.
The talking points document is written in the first-person, for example, suggesting McKenzie tell the prime minister: “A number of members and senators have made representations to my office and I have taken these into consideration.”
The talking points contain a “communications plan” including to “aim to sign off during final sitting fortnight for year” to “provide time for MPs/duty-senators to fight for projects”.
Successful projects could be announced in the lead-up to Christmas and into the new year, in time for “cutting ribbons from February 2019 onwards”.
“Small projects will be completed very quickly providing opportunities for continual announcements during the early part of 2019.”
Download original document
McKenzie said she stood by her evidence to the Senate inquiry, which was that applications in marginal and target seats hadn’t been given “any precedence or special treatment”.
“This former adviser’s memo was not used as a basis for my decisions at any stage in the process,” her April 2020 submission said. “The memo was never provided to me or seen by me.”
McKenzie rejected claims project selection had been “negatively politicised” and argued that, although not her intention, Labor seats had done better from the program as a result of ministerial decisions.
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She told Guardian Australia: “I resigned for a perceived conflict interest; I did not see these documents and my ministerial decisions were made to broaden the spread of sports and communities who benefited.”
“Some Labor MPs were among MPs advocating their preferred local projects.
“I stand by my decisions as over 680 clubs benefited across the country.”
The freedom-of-information documents include a spreadsheet breaking down the proposed $100m of funding by state and territory; and by the party that held the seat in which the projects were located.
Sports rorts: Queensland club with no adult women's team given grant for female change-room
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A further colour-coded spreadsheet notes the party that holds every federal seat, with a column for “electorate status” including whether they are “target” or “marginal”.
This document notes the number of applications and number of projects funded, with a column for the “% successful” by both number of projects and value of funding.
The talking points suggest that this spreadsheet “reflects an ask for $100m+ in line with the letter I [Bridget McKenzie] wrote to PM in October”.
The document reflects indicative benefits of expanding the program, rather than the final result of grant rounds.
In her submission McKenzie claimed that the audit office appeared to have based its assertion “there was a marginal seat strategy conducted within my office that influenced the success of grant applications” on this “singular email”.
The Greens senator Janet Rice said the documents confirmed that “the ANAO found there was more funding for projects that didn’t score as well on the assessment in targeted and marginal seats”.
“Any assessment saying this much went to Labor or Liberal seats wasn’t the appropriate metric – the metric was whether they were the seats [the government] were targeting.”
Rice, who will retire from the Senate on 19 April, said it was an “absolute indictment” it had taken three years to release the documents, quipping that FoI had become “freedom from information”.
The health department resisted the release of the documents, and has appealed against the information commissioner Elizabeth Tydd’s decision ordering their release to the administrative appeals tribunal.
In her 1 March decision Tydd said that “disclosure would promote effective oversight of public expenditure by providing documents created by staff in the then minister’s office”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/aug/09/helping-sydneys-homeless-once-they-have-a-warm-bed-they-can-focus-on-the-future | Society | 2017-08-08T18:00:45.000Z | Susan Chenery | Helping the homeless: 'once they have a warm bed they can focus on the future' | Susan Chenery | The house sits among large brick homes in a quiet residential street in Sydney’s west. With their landscaped shrubberies, meticulously mown lawns, the boats in the driveways, the sheer sprawl of these dwellings, this is a neighbourhood of middle-class comfort and material reward.
There are children playing in the backyard of the white brick house, eucalyptus against a cobalt winter sky; a portrait of sunny Australian suburban normality.
Except that the mother drinking tea and trying to talk while dealing with a demanding four-year-old has been camping and living in her car for three months.
'The big stigma is it’s the homeless person’s fault'
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This is a safe house and shelter, crisis accommodation for the homeless.
On the run from a partner who threatened to kill her, Cherry is here with her son and his 16-month-old sister because “I don’t want to put my kids under the stress of being in the car any more”. A well-spoken and educated Indigenous woman, Cherry has applied for more than 40 rental properties. Even though she has a good rental history, “there are just knock backs”.
Cherry is one of the hidden homeless who make up the vast majority, the 93% who are not visibly sleeping rough. These are the ones, says Suzanne Hopman, who cofounded the charity Dignity two years ago with the proceeds of the sale of her house, who “could be anybody, you just don’t hear about it”.
It could be the woman with her children on the trains to Newcastle or Goulburn, going up and down all night because she is frightened her kids will be taken away if she approaches agencies for help. It could be one of the thousands of people sleeping in their car, still going to work and participating in the community, but too embarrassed to tell anyone they have lost their home – until they get pneumonia from exposure or the car gets towed away because they can’t pay the registration to keep driving it. It could be the woman snoozing in the shadowy corner of the shopping mall who has been up all night keeping her children safe and the only time she can sleep is when they are at school, too exhausted to go looking for a job.
“It is not an unusual situation for mothers to be hiding children who are still going to school and the school doesn’t know. They don’t understand the help that can be out there,” says Hopman.
“We have had CEOs of major corporations through here, it is just a combination of things that have gone wrong. They have had to file for bankruptcy, have no access to money and are ashamed of telling people. It could be people with very high mortgages and all it takes is for someone to lose their job.”
Spending time with Hopman in her “office” – her car – as she goes on her rounds taking calls from the agencies sending people her way is a journey through a litany of heartbreak.
It is such a fine line between living on Centrelink and homelessness
Suzanne Hopman, charity director
Judy only discovered her husband had refinanced the house after he died. He had looked after the money and left her with debt she could not hope to repay. The house was foreclosed and she ended up living in her car, occasionally getting a motel room until the money ran out altogether.
Shirley had worked hard all her life. When she was 60 she had a stroke. While she was in hospital she was evicted because she was unable to pay her rent. She had recently changed jobs so no sick leave was available. When she was finally able to return to work she was fired the same day because she was still on probation. Medical bills had eaten up all her savings, her children lived overseas and interstate and she didn’t want to tell them about her situation. She had never been on Centrelink and wasn’t entitled to benefits immediately because she had been earning money. She couchsurfed with friends but felt she was putting pressure on them, and so she spiralled down to homelessness.
‘Every story is different’: Suzanne Hopman, cofounder of the homelessness charity Dignity. Photograph: Suzi Ford
“Every story is different,” says Hopman. “We know that approximately 50% of the homeless population are women, often escaping domestic violence. And we are seeing an increase in the number of older people who become homeless and don’t fall into the aged care category of 65.” If you lose your job in your late 50s or early 60s it can be dauntingly difficult if not impossible to get another one. “Early 60s is the hardest,” says Hopman.
For older women, superannuation inequality can be the crucial trigger for homelesness. A Newstart allowance is $250 a week. The cheapest rent in Sydney is between $160 and $200 a week in shared houses. That leaves $50 a week for food, phone, transport.
“All it takes is one extra expense you are not expecting and it all falls over,” says Hopman. “It is such a fine line between between living on Centrelink and homelessness. You need to get a job but you can’t get a job until you have got somewhere safe to live.”
By the time they come into one of Dignity’s houses people are traumatised, disoriented, devastated by trying to hold themselves and what is left of their belongings together. “People will try and manage on their own for a long time,” Hopman says. “They feel like a failure, that somehow they could have done things differently. There is the regret and sadness that follows whatever crisis has occurred.”
Once you don’t have an address you have fully fallen through the cracks and are lost to the system. You can’t enrol your children in school, or renew your drivers license. You can’t get a community nurse to visit you if you need after care from hospital. “You can’t do much without a 100-point check these days” says Hopman. “You can’t open a bank account or access money in an account, or apply for rental properties.”
Women who leave violent partners are often unable to take the paperwork they need to get government support. “Many have had to leave in such a hurry they have no identification.”
I broke down. I couldn’t accept the fact that I was [accepting] charity from anybody
Richard, 62, homeless
While we are driving the calls are coming in from Link2home, a telephone service for people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless, run by the NSW government’s Department of Family and Community Services. A single mother who was working on a casual basis fell behind in rent because she had a medical complication. She has been evicted. The mother of a two-week-old baby is fleeing a violent partner. He has cut off any access to money. A woman is planning to leave a violent relationship and is trying to make an exit plan.
The Dignity charity, which has 110 beds in 15 Sydney houses paid for by philanthropists and a nightly rate paid by the NSW government, has recently partnered with the RSPCA to allow people to bring pets with them. The thought of abandoning a pet can keep people in dangerous situations or lead them to live on the streets.
“One mum had kids and the perpetrator of the violence told her he would kill the dog and take pictures of it and send it to the kids if she left. It is also comfort for people whose pet is their only solace,” says Hopman.
The closest feeling to homelessness is having a broken heart
David West
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In a Dignity house people are treated like family. The rental properties are often million-dollar houses, with good food in the fridge, hotel-grade sheets, slippers, bags of toiletries and clothes. While there, Hopman helps them attend to the practical details of their lives, the personal administration made so difficult by their homeless status.
The idea is to give people back their dignity. Domestic violence victims are given clean smart phones so they can’t be located. “A lot people who come here haven’t eaten for days. The children are crying because they are hungry. A lot of it is things that have just gone wrong. Once they have got somewhere safe to sleep, a warm bed and a shower they can focus on the future. Once you get your hair done and some cream on your face you feel so much better.”
Richard Teasdell, 62, still gets tearful when he recalls his time in a Dignity house. A lifelong workaholic, first in the army then as a courier for TNT, it all come crashing down when he had a bad accident at work. His insurance company didn’t want to pay out and he found himself being bounced between Veterans Affairs and fighting his claim. First he lived in a caravan, then when his marriage broke up, a tent in his daughter’s garden. When they fell out he was out of options with nowhere to go. He had never claimed any veterans’ payments or Centrelink. He had been too proud to take “charity”. When he came in his glasses were broken, he hadn’t eaten for days and was dizzy. He hadn’t known how to get help. “I was anxious, stressed and knackered,” he recalls.
“My health was suffering big time. Next thing I knew I was at Dignity. I broke down. I couldn’t accept the fact that I was [accepting] charity from anybody.”
The safe houses are full every night with stories like Richard’s. “Unless we walk in their shoes,” says Hopman, “how can we possibly judge?” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/14/utrecht-restores-historic-canal-made-into-motorway-in-1970s | World news | 2020-09-14T12:44:50.000Z | Daniel Boffey | Utrecht restores historic canal made into motorway in 1970s | It is being viewed as the correction of a historic mistake. More than 40 years after parts of the canal that encircled Utrecht’s old town were concreted over to accommodate a 12-lane motorway, the Dutch city is celebrating the restoration of its 900-year-old moat.
In an attempt to recast its residents’ relationship with the car, Utrecht’s inner city is again surrounded by water and greenery rather than asphalt and exhaust fumes.
The reopening of the Catharijnesingel attracted pleasure boats and even a few swimmers into the water, with the alderman for the central Hoog Catharijne district, Eelco Eerenberg, lauding the “grand conclusion” of decades of work.
The first plans for restoring the canal, or Stadsbuitengracht, which dates from the city’s birth in 1122, had been made in the 1990s.
Residents then voted in a 2002 referendum for a city-centre “master plan”, in which water would replace roads. But efforts have been boosted in more recent years by a broader attempt by the municipality to sideline the car and promote healthier living.
In 2017, the city opened the world’s biggest bicycle park, accommodating 12,500 bikes next to Utrecht railway station. There is a drive to lay flora and fauna on the roofs of city centre buildings in the name of biodiversity and clean air. And as part of the canal’s reopening, the central Zocherpark has been restored to its original 1830 design.
The restored section of the canal had been filled in to allow cars better access to Utrecht’s shopping district in the 1970s. The waterway now runs under an indoor shopping centre, allowing boats to travel the full 6km route around the city centre.
Construction work on the emptied canal in 1972. Photograph: Utrecht Archives
“Traffic had increased enormously,” said René de Kam, a curator of urban history at the Centraal museum in Utrecht, of the decision to concrete over the canal. “There was a kind of ring around the city, namely the canal. It was very tempting to think: what if we just asphalt it? Then the traffic problem will be solved. The shopping heart of the Netherlands should be easily accessible by car, they thought. That’s where it went wrong.”
Eerenberg said the municipality had chosen “water and greenery over a highway for cars”. “It is quite unique for a motorway, with space for 12 lanes, to be converted back”, he said. “Now that the canal is back, it provides a beautiful connection to a plethora of important urban functions. Among other things, the station, a pop stage, theatre and greenery have found their place at the water.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/jan/06/jeremy-hunt-issues-tax-warning-as-cut-in-national-insurance-takes-effect | Politics | 2024-01-06T12:30:58.000Z | Tom Ambrose | Hunt issues tax warning as cut in national insurance takes effect | Jeremy Hunt has said he does not know if he can afford to cut taxes for British households, on the day a national insurance reduction came into force.
The main rate of national insurance contributions (NICs) paid by employees is now 10%, down from 12% as announced by the chancellor in his autumn statement in November.
About 27 million UK employees were expected to benefit, the government said, despite warnings that millions of people would still end up being worse off in 2024.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Hunt said it had been right to help families during the Covid pandemic and cost of living crisis, which was why, along with the US, Germany and Japan, taxes in the UK went up. He added that the country wouldn’t be able to get back to pre-pandemic levels of tax “in one fell swoop” but said the government had made a start.
Hunt said: “Nearly £1,000 off the tax bill for a typical two-earner family is a significant change and will bring significant relief to many families. What I would say in an election year is there is a very big choice because Keir Starmer made it very clear this week that it is Labour’s confident ambition that they will be able to spend £28bn a year more.
“You can’t continue to reduce the tax burden and get it back to those pre-pandemic levels if your priority is to spend £28bn a year.”
The chancellor said that, under the Conservatives since 2010, 3 million fewer people were paying NICs and that he believed in a “lighter” taxation regime.
The class 1 contributions are made on earnings received by anyone between the age of 16 and state pension age who is getting more than £242 a week from one job. Employees will now pay 10% on earnings between £242 and £967 a week. They pay 2% on all earnings above £967 a week, which equates to an income of £50,284 a year.
The Treasury has said the two percentage point reduction was “the largest ever cut to national insurance”.
However, the Resolution Foundation said the net effect would result in all employees earning below £26,000 a year being worse off or unaffected, while those on more than that would gain. “If you earn £50,000, you’re in the sweet spot and will benefit most,” it said.
Hunt said: “Chancellors have very little control over what’s going to happen to the GDP figures in one month compared to the previous month.”
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“I think there is no doubt at all – like America, Germany, France, all the other economies – we’ve been through a very difficult patch … and we can now look forward to things getting better.”
Hunt also said he “profoundly” disagreed with the former net tsar, Chris Skidmore, who announced on Friday he was quitting the Conservatives over the government’s decision to increase domestic oil and gas drilling.
Hunt said: “The independent panel for climate change that we have in this country are very clear that even when we reach net zero in 2050, we will still get a significant proportion of our energy from fossil fuels.
“And domestic oil and gas is four times cleaner than imported oil and gas.”
Skidmore, who carried out a net zero review for the government in 2022, announced on Friday he would stand down, citing Rishi Sunak’s environmental stance as wrong and triggering another byelection.
His decision comes before a vote in the Commons on Monday on the offshore petroleum licensing bill.
If passed by parliament, the legislation will mandate that licences for oil and gas projects in the North Sea are awarded annually. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/dec/19/the-box-of-delights-review-hereford | Stage | 2019-12-19T12:52:13.000Z | Sanjoy Roy | The Box of Delights review – an exquisite Christmas cabaret | ‘C
ome along, chop-chop!” say our minders, rather briskly. It’s a foggy winter evening in Hereford, we’re on the trail of a dastardly couple who have just made off in a vintage car, and there’s no time for laggards. Thus begins The Box of Delights, a mix of promenade performance and dining experience, based on John Masefield’s 1935 children’s story, and marking the 20th anniversary of Hereford-based company 2Faced Dance.
We pass a whining man dressed as a rat, offering old boots to eat; a stoutly old-fashioned copper and a cathedral choir; an antlered fortune-teller in a wooden booth. Meanwhile, normal life continues: taxis purr past, residents sometimes glance at us through windows, the few passersby carry on as normal. The concurrence of make-believe and matter-of-factness is utterly beguiling, nowhere more than when our young hero Kay (fresh-faced Alex Tucker) imagines a phoenix rising from a brazier and we turn to see a flame-feathered trapeze artist swinging high above us, while in the distance masked wheelchair users spin by – “the wolves are running!” comes a cry – their eyes like green torchlights through the dark. In the middle of Hereford.
Imaginations transported, we are led to the Green Dragon hotel for an exquisite sit-down meal, and the performers continue their story on a platform at eye-level with the diners, gleefully mixing parkour, circus, street dance, slapstick and cabaret.
No need to have read the book: choreographer Tamsin Fitzgerald and writer Tim Evans have done a canny job of condensing Masefield’s profuse story to a set of sprightly essentials. Cannier still: doesn’t the arc of their evening – wide-eyed wonder and witching tales giving way to communal feasting, accompanied by feats, tricks and entertainment – nicely mirror the idea of Christmas itself?
Various venues, Hereford, until 23 December. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/16/donald-trump-rupert-murdoch-friendship-fox-news | US news | 2017-06-16T10:00:06.000Z | Lucia Graves | Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch: inside the billionaire bromance | The alliance between Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch has never been stronger. In April, the Australian-born media mogul topped the New York Times’ list of Trump’s key advisers outside the White House, identified as someone the president speaks to “on the phone every week”. Last month the paper revised that upward to “almost every day”, although the White House denies this.
At a recent speech in New York to mark a second world war battle in which the US fought alongside Australia, Trump was welcomed on stage by the News Corp chief.
“The man I’m about to introduce believes, as I do, in challenging conventional wisdom, because conventional wisdom is often not wise at all,” Murdoch said, concluding with a hug for “my friend, Donald J Trump”.
“Thank you to my very good friend Rupert Murdoch – there’s only one Rupert that we know,” said Trump in turn as he took the podium.
Now, with a reported criminal investigation in connection with sexual harassment allegations into Fox News, the stakes are higher than ever for the two friends.
During the 2016 election, Fox News played a crucial role for Trump. In the lead-up to the Republican primary, Murdoch openly favored Jeb Bush, and early reports highlighted tensions between Murdoch and Trump. Trump’s closest ties were to Fox News’s then-boss Roger Ailes and its then-star host Bill O’Reilly rather than to Murdoch, and the mogul’s main conduit to the Trump campaign was said to be Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Trump had a well-publicized tiff with Fox News after one of the network’s top hosts, Megyn Kelly, challenged him during the first Republican debate.
But as far back as the summer of 2015, Trump was already getting significantly more Fox News airtime than any other presidential candidate, and by spring of last year he and Murdoch were having private meetings. In March 2016, Murdoch tweeted that Republicans would “be mad not to unify” behind Trump “if he becomes inevitable”. Murdoch’s New York Post endorsed him for the primary in April 2016 (although the paper did not endorse in the general election).
As Trump’s “inevitability” grew and it became clear he was going to win the Republican nomination, the two men grew closer still, uniting around what is perhaps the biggest thing they have in common: both men love to win, and suddenly they were in a position to use one another to do just that. Fox was a crucial platform for Trump – and Trump was great for Murdoch’s ratings.
By the time Trump had been elected, relations were close enough that the president-elect gave his first foreign newspaper interview to Murdoch’s UK paper the Times – with Murdoch himself in the room.
For many, Murdoch’s embrace of Trump was itself inevitable.
“His entire empire’s at stake – that’s why Murdoch is talking to him every day,” said Sid Blumenthal, a former aide to Bill Clinton and longtime observer of New York politics. “It’s not because he enjoys the sparkling conversation of Donald Trump.”
Trump and Murdoch: the early years
Rupert Murdoch was born in Melbourne in 1931 and enjoyed a seemingly idyllic childhood, riding horses through the countryside and reading the great literature his mother insisted her children be surrounded by. The son of a distinguished journalist and an Australian publishing executive, he was educated at Oxford but returned home following his father’s death to take over the family business, News Limited. His early editorial emphasis on crime and scandal coverage drew criticism, but it was entertaining – and entertainment, he found, was good business. Soon his publications had proliferated in number, circulation and reach.
After expanding into London with the acquisition of the News of the World and the Sun, in the early 1970s he moved to New York City to pursue media properties in the US. Perhaps more than anything it was his 1976 acquisition of the New York Post, a highly esteemed liberal paper at the time, that brought him into the orbit of Trump. The 30-year-old son of a wealthy real estate developer had recently graduated from Wharton business school and was trying to establish himself in Manhattan – and like Murdoch, he found in the Post the ideal vehicle to do just that.
It was the Post’s gossip section, Page Six, which Murdoch launched shortly after taking over the paper, that helped transform Trump from New York realtor to celebrity. For Murdoch, too, it was transformational: a chance to reach the city’s most influential people.
Writing about Trump was inescapable, said Susan Mulcahy, one of Page Six’s earliest reporters and editors, and it was also difficult.
“You had to double- and triple-check everything,” she told the Guardian. “When it was a good story it was worth doing the extra work, but much of the time it would turn out to be a lie.”
The woes of fact-checking Trump are now well known, but they weren’t then, or even when Mulcahy first wrote about them publicly: her 1988 book about her time at Page Six devotes an entire half a chapter to Trump’s fondness for falsehoods. “He’s a pathological liar,” she said. “I’ve said that repeatedly and I’ve been saying it since the 80s.”
Trump's a pathological liar. I’ve said that repeatedly and I’ve been saying it since the 80s
Susan Mulcahy, former Page Six editor
That never seemed to concern Murdoch too much. Then as now, he and Trump had a symbiotic relationship: Trump provided entertaining coverage for Murdoch, and Murdoch provided good visibility for Trump. “Both of these guys are extremely transactional,” said Lloyd Grove, who wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News, the Post’s rival publication, in the early to mid-aughts. “They have no permanent bonds, they just have permanent interests.”
At times over the years, those interests put them at odds. In 1982, when the Daily News went up for sale, both moguls put in rival bids for the paper (neither was accepted). Six years later, Trump would try to buy the Post out from under Murdoch after regulatory rules forced him to put it up for sale. Murdoch rebuffed Trump’s offer, sold it elsewhere and was able to buy it back again in 1993.
Trump was glad to see Murdoch return. Though the future president’s affair with Marla Maples would, largely by his own design, be chronicled exhaustively under the Post’s new owner, Peter Kalikow, Trump apparently still preferred Murdoch’s rule. “He’s killing me,” Trump said of Kalikow in 1988. “Rupert, come back.”
Five years later, Rupert did. But only after expanding his newspaper business and building the foundations of the cable television empire he enjoys today, the empire which would one day make Trump’s path to the presidency possible.
The Cohn connection
Trump and Murdoch had something else in common: a deep and abiding connection to Roy Cohn, one of America’s most reviled but most successful defense attorneys, who rose to political prominence in the 1950s as a legal adviser to Senator Joseph McCarthy. As the writer Ken Auletta put it in a 1978 Esquire profile: “Prospective clients who want to kill their husband, torture a business partner, break the government’s legs, hire Roy Cohn. He is a legal executioner – the toughest, meanest, loyalest, vilest, and one of the most brilliant lawyers in America.”
Both Murdoch and Trump were clients of Cohn, as Trump biographer Harry Hurt III noted in a 1993 book, but over the years the lawyer also became something of a mentor to them. After Murdoch’s arrival from Australia in 1976, Cohn offered entree into the world of America’s powered elite. And for Trump, a political neophyte from Queens looking to get on Manhattan’s “fast track” (in the words of Trump ally Roger Stone), the relationship was transformational. For a while, Cohn once told Vanity Fair, he and Trump spoke “15 or 20 times a day”.
“Murdoch came in from the outside,” said Blumenthal. “Cohn was his Virgil who guided him through the netherworlds of New York influence,” he added, “which led to Trump, among others, who was not much of a power broker at the time.”
Stone, in an interview with the Washington Post, put it in even starker terms: “I think, to a certain extent, Donald learned how the world worked from Roy, who was not only a brilliant lawyer, but a brilliant strategist who understood the political system and how to play it like a violin.”
Murdoch and Trump were still coming up in the world, but Cohn was approaching the height of his power. He would host lavish parties with politicians, journalists and celebrities, and it was through such salons and attendant parties at exclusive clubs such as Studio 54 (the owners were also clients of Cohn’s) that Murdoch and Trump came to know one another socially. “They were taking their tips from Roy,” Hurt said in an interview. “I’m not saying they were swallowing the whole glass of Kool-Aid but they definitely took a few good gulps, and you can see that reflected, especially in the subsequent behaviour of Donald Trump,” he said. “Rupert maybe only took one gulp of the Kool-Aid and then spat it out.”
Chief among those tips was how to play the media. At the Post, where their mutual apprenticeship in the dark arts of media manipulation started, Cohn was, at least in the early years, the go-between for Trump and the paper’s editorial side. Cohn was an important source for Page Six’s Mulcahy, and he certainly knew how to make himself valuable to a reporter. When Mulcahy had to cover Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural on 24 hours’ notice, Cohn got her security clearance and into all the evening’s exclusive parties at the drop of the hat. But Cohn also had some unsavory qualities as a source. “Roy seemed to think because he gave me stories, I would do his bidding,” Mulcahy recalled.
Donald Trump with Anna and Rupert Murdoch. Photograph: Sonia Moskowitz/Zuma Press
Such presumptions seem to have rubbed off on Trump in later years. Linda Stasi, who covered Trump’s tumultuous relationship with Maples in the 1990s, recently told the New York Times that Trump wouldn’t just plant stories – he actively sought to direct them. “It never occurred to him that he couldn’t control everything,” she said, adding that even now, “he is shocked that he is not in control of the press.”
In what is perhaps the most striking example of such habits, 1991 audio obtained by the Washington Post seemed to reveal Trump masquerading as his own publicist to brag about his sexual conquests. Though Trump has denied or evaded questions about posing as his own spokesman, the recording corroborates the accounts of numerous reporters and editors who covered him throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Such misogynistic boasting by Trump’s alter ego was very much the pattern, as when he boasted that in addition to living with Maples, he had “three other girlfriends”.
Trump and Murdoch have scratched each other’s backs over the years, starting at the New York Post, but more recently their connections have taken on an almost familial air. When Jared Kushner took over the New York Observer in mid-2006 (around the time he met Ivanka Trump, whom he would marry in 2009) he turned to Murdoch for counsel. Murdoch is thought to have influenced Kushner’s rightward shift politically, passing on books by Charles Murray and Niall Ferguson.
Jared and Ivanka were known to double-date with Murdoch and his ex-wife Wendi Deng, and even after Murdoch’s split with Deng, the two women and the two men remained close. Until December, Ivanka was a trustee for a $300m fortune set aside for Murdoch’s daughters with Deng. That means that throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, while Trump frequently appeared on Fox News, his daughter was directly implicated in the financial wellbeing of the network’s owner’s daughter.
Such developments show the continuity of the Trump-Murdoch bond beyond political convenience. “They’re mutual users who’ve become one family,” Blumenthal said. “She [was] a trustee of their money. That’s as intimate as you can get.”
Trump biographer Gwenda Blair agrees the bonds between the Trumps and Murdoch are deep. “They both speak the language of cable news – cabalese,” she said.
Political back-scratching
Now, for the first time in their decades-long relationship, Murdoch really needs Trump: a reported federal probe into Fox News stemming from serial sexual harassment allegations threatens the model of his flagship network, which has already paid $45m in sexual harassment claims and continued making settlements into this year.
In April, Trump proved he was quite willing to publicly downplay such allegations, asserting: “I don’t think Bill [O’Reilly] did anything wrong” after it emerged that the high-profile Fox host had settled claims of sexual harassment.
Trump also, of course, presides over the Department of Justice tasked with overseeing such investigations.
Murdoch may well have welcomed his firings of Preet Bharara, the US attorney reportedly tasked with overseeing Murdoch’s investigation, as well as that of James Comey, the director of the FBI. He certainly welcomed the relaxing of regulations for TV station owners earlier this year under the Federal Communication Commission’s new Republican chairman Ajit Pai – something 21st Century Fox has previously fought for in court.
Murdoch has not been coy about his attitude toward such FCC protections. In 2014, he hit out at being barred from making a bid for several media properties he wished to acquire, tweeting: “Sorry can’t buy Trib group or LA Times – cross-ownership laws from another age still in place.”
But under President Trump such concerns are a thing of the past for Murdoch.
The new relaxed rules allow for a level of media consolidation many believe will prove harmful to consumers and hinder the free and democratic flow of information.
But the crucial aspect of the Fox News controversy for Murdoch is how it might affect his proposed takeover of Sky, the British satellite broadcasting company, which he has been fixated on since at least 2010, when the deal was scrapped following the phone-hacking scandal plaguing his UK newspapers.
Wendy Walsh, a former radio host who recently went public with her sexual harassment allegations against O’Reilly, wants to make sure Murdoch’s bid fails this time, too.
Walsh was among the accusers to travel to the UK in May to urge regulators to reject the Murdoch takeover in light of Fox’s toxic culture regarding women. “Everyone’s focusing on Russia, Russia, Russia,” she told the Guardian. “Fox News played a large role in Donald Trump’s election too, and they’re both under investigation right now.”
Everyone’s focused on Russia. Fox News played a large role in Trump’s election too, and they’re both under investigation
Wendy Walsh, former radio host
UK media regulator Ofcom will make a determination by 20 June whether Murdoch can be considered a “fit and proper” owner given Fox’s culture of sexual harassment and whether his expansion through Sky – of which he already owns 39% – would give him too much control of the UK media market, something the outgoing head of Ofcom warned about back in 2014 when he accused British government officials of unduly favoring Murdoch’s companies and called their relationship “too cozy”.
“I contend that a company that has harassed, discriminated against and retaliated against dozens of women and people of color since 2004 is not fit and proper,” said Walsh’s lawyer, Lisa Bloom. “The UK has long stood as a world leader for women’s equality. We appeal to that moral standing now.”
Trump “will be loyal to Murdoch”, Bloom predicted, “and Murdoch will be loyal to Trump. These men value only power.”
In his deep dive for the Atlantic, James Fallows found “many examples of Murdoch’s using political connections to advance his business ends”, and that his actions, generally, “are consistent with the use of political influence for corporate advantage”. Specifics reported by the New York Times more than a decade ago further support the observation and will sound familiar to any recent observers of Trump’s FCC. After Murdoch’s papers, comprising roughly 35% of Britain’s media market, endorsed New Labor’s Tony Blair in 2001, for instance, Blair backed “a communications bill in the British Parliament that would loosen restrictions on foreign media ownership and allow a major newspaper publisher to own a broadcast television station as well as a provision its critics call the ‘Murdoch clause’ because it seems to apply mainly to News Corp”, as the New York Times put it.
Such backscratching happened in America too.
Leveraging the presidency
To understand Murdoch’s relationship with Trump, it helps to understand his relationship with one of the president’s predecessors in the White House, Ronald Reagan, with whom Murdoch enjoyed surprisingly close ties, facilitated and fostered by the same man who links him to Trump: Roy Cohn.
Joe Conason, who covered Murdoch at the Village Voice throughout much of the 70s and 80s, called Cohn “the lynchpin” of Murdoch’s cozy relationship with Reagan. Cohn was very close to Reagan going back to the “red scare” in Hollywood, said Conason, adding: “Reagan did lots of favors for Murdoch when he was president at the behest of Cohn.”
Reagan presidential library documents obtained by investigative journalist Robert Parry show Cohn was instrumental in facilitating Murdoch’s face-to-face meetings with Reagan, the first of which took place in January 1983, two years into the president’s first term. Parry, the founder of Consortium News and author of America’s Stolen Narrative, told the Guardian that he came across a photo of Cohn in the Oval office alongside Murdoch and Reagan by chance, while investigating another story. His subsequent request for documents mentioning Cohn revealed a series of letters in which Cohn demanded better treatment of Murdoch and his media properties by the president.
Ronald Reagan meeting with Rupert Murdoch in the Oval Office on 18 January 1983. Photograph: Ronald Reagan presidential library
In one such missive to the White House dated 27 January 1983, Cohn appears to suggest Murdoch’s papers had granted Reagan favorable coverage in hopes of receiving political favors. He writes: “I had one interest when … I first brought Rupert Murdoch and Governor Reagan together and that was that at least one major publisher in this country would become and remain pro-Reagan. Mr Murdoch has performed to the limit up through and including today.”
In another letter, Cohn complained that though “the Post and other Murdoch’s papers gave their blood on a daily basis”, the president had, in a recent media appearance, failed to grant a Post reporter a question and even encouraged his audience to read the Post’s competition, the New York Daily News. “Without the Post, Reagan could not have carried New York,” Cohn complained.
When the president failed to make time for one of Murdoch’s papers while on a trip through Boston, the threats were all but explicit: “To say that all the good you tried to do, and I tried to do, and the President did in his meeting with Rupert has been severely damaged by this second insult, is an understatement,” Cohn wrote in a note shortly after Murdoch’s first face-to-face at the White House. “As of now, tempers are so hot that I would wait for things to cool off.”
Among the gifts to Murdoch from Reagan was the elimination of the 'fairness doctrine', requiring balance in broadcasting
In the years that followed, with the help of the Reagan administration’s relaxed policies, Murdoch’s media empire in the US burgeoned: within two years he had become a naturalized citizen of the US, allowing him to meet a regulatory requirement that television stations be owned by Americans; and by 1986 he had founded the Fox Broadcasting Company. Among the biggest gifts to Murdoch from the Reagan administration was the elimination of the “fairness doctrine”, which required political balance in broadcasting, allowing Murdoch a free pass in driving home his network’s brand of fierce conservatism. But other smaller relaxations of regulations were helpful, too.
Practically every utterance of Reagan’s initial FCC chairman, Mark Fowler, was music to Murdoch’s ears. Fowler famously said a TV was nothing more than a “toaster with pictures” (read: a frivolous commodity requiring only the bare minimum in safety regulations), removed controls on what radio stations could air and indicated the same logic should apply to television. The rule change allowed stations to follow market incentives in programming, a move that allowed for the transformation of dutiful public affairs programs into just the sort of entertainment Murdoch made a fortune promoting.
It was Fowler’s FCC that in approving his acquisition of local TV stations allowed Murdoch to form his fourth major network: Fox. Though Murdoch wouldn’t enter the cable news market with the Fox News Channel until the following decade –1996, to be precise – through Reagan, Fowler and Cohn the groundwork had been laid.
N
ow Murdoch’s White House meetings are reportedly happening again, and if Murdoch needs Trump, Trump needs Murdoch, too. The president’s disastrous performance his first months in office has been accompanied by a historic slump in ratings, and with so many Americans relying on cable and Fox in particular for their national news, Murdoch is uniquely valuable to Trump right now.
So far Fox’s fawning coverage of Trump, and in some cases total avoidance of certain topics unflattering to the president, hasn’t been enough to lift him out of his presidential doldrums. Being skeptical about the significance of the regular government leaks regarding Trump’s presidency has not necessarily played well with Fox’s viewers.
The proof is in the place that hurts Murdoch and Trump the most: the ratings. Recently, MSNBC won all five weekdays in primetime over Fox News, according to Nielsen data, with NBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show topping the week’s list of most watched programs. And MSNBC finished last month as the No 1 cable news network on weeknights that month, beating out Fox and CNN for the first time since 2000.
We can’t know what that will mean for the Trump-Murdoch axis, just as we can’t know what these men are discussing on the phone, or what, precisely, the Trump presidential library will reveal some 30 years from now. We do, however, know that the last time this happened with the same media mogul and a president he had far fewer connections to, the media mogul got a hell of a lot out of it. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/oct/15/northern-ireland-loyalist-shootings-loughinisland | UK news | 2012-10-15T17:08:32.000Z | Ian Cobain | Northern Ireland loyalist shootings: one night of carnage, 18 years of silence | Shortly after 10pm on 18 June 1994, Ireland were 1-0 up against Italy in the opening match of the 1994 World Cup. at the Giants Stadium in New Jersey. The second half had just kicked off, and inside the Heights Bar at Loughinisland, 21 miles south of Belfast, all eyes were on the television. The bar is tiny: there were 15 men inside, and it was packed.
Aidan O'Toole, the owner's 23-year-old son, was serving. "I heard the door open and then I just heard crack, crack, crack and felt a stabbing pain inside me," he recalls. "I just ran. It was instinctive. I didn't know what was happening but I knew I had to get away."
Others inside the bar turned when the door opened and saw two men in boiler suits, their faces hidden by balaclavas. One of the intruders dropped to one knee and fired three bursts from an automatic rifle. Barney Green was sitting with his back to the door, close enough for the gunmen to reach out and tap his shoulder had they wished. He took the first blast, with around nine rounds passing through him before striking other men. Green, a retired farmer, was 87.
Green's nephew, Dan McCreanor, 59, another farmer, died alongside him. A second burst killed Malcolm Jenkinson, 53, who was at the bar, and Adrian Rogan, 34, who was trying to escape to the lavatory. A third burst aimed at a table to the right of the door missed Willie O'Hare but killed his son-in-law, Eamon Byrne, 39. O'Hare's son Patsy, 35, was also shot and died en route to hospital. Five men were injured: one, who lost part of a foot, would spend nine months in hospital.
O'Toole returned to the bar from a back room after hearing the killers' car screech away. A bullet was lodged in his left kidney and a haze of gun smoke filled the room. But he could see clearly enough. "There were bodies piled on top of each other. It was like a dream; a nightmare."
Most of the victims had been hit several times. Thirty rounds were fired, and some had passed through one man, ricocheted around the tiny room, then struck a second. Adrian Rogan's father pushed his way into the bar and whispered a short prayer in his son's ear, knowing he was not going to survive.
Loughinisland had been scarcely touched by the Troubles. A village of 600 or so people, where Catholics and Protestants had lived side by side for generations, none of its sons or daughters had been killed or hurt before, and none had been accused of terrorist offences. It is not a republican area – many of its Catholic inhabitants were so uninterested in politics that they did not vote even for the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP) – and Protestants often drank at the Heights. Only by chance were no Protestants killed or wounded that night.
Ninety minutes after the attack, a loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), telephoned a radio station to claim responsibility.
Police promises
Despite years of death and destruction in Northern Ireland, people around the world were shocked by the slaughter at the Heights. The Queen, Pope John Paul II and Bill Clinton sent messages of sympathy. Local Protestant families visited their injured and traumatised neighbours in hospital, expressing shock and disgust.
The police told the victims' families they would leave no stone unturned in their efforts to catch the killers and bring them to justice.
The morning after the killings, the gunmen's getaway car, a red Triumph Acclaim, was found abandoned in a field seven miles from Loughinisland. The farmer who spotted it called the police at 10.04am. The recovery of such a vehicle was quite rare during the Troubles – paramilitaries often torched them to destroy forensic evidence – and police were soon at the scene to take possession. There was no forensic examination of the area around the car, however.
A few weeks later, workmen found a holdall under a bridge a couple of miles from where the car had been found. Inside were three boiler suits, three balaclavas, three pairs of surgical gloves, three handguns, ammunition and a magazine. Not far from the bridge, police found a Czech-made VZ-58 assault rifle, which scientists confirmed was the weapon used to kill the men at the Heights.
The same weapon had been used the previous October in a UVF attack on a van carrying Catholic painters to work at Shorts aircraft and missile factory in Belfast, in which one man died and five others were wounded.
In the months that followed the Loughinisland shootings, nine people were arrested and questioned. All nine were released without charge. A 10th was arrested and released the following year, and two more suspects were arrested for questioning a year after that, all released without charge. The police repeatedly assured the families that no stone would be left unturned.
Emma Rogan was eight years old when her father, Adrian, was killed at the Heights. "I was told that these bad men came into the bar, and that my daddy was dead. I didn't really know what they meant."
As she grew up, she had no reason to doubt the police when they said they were doing everything in their power to catch the killers. "We didn't question the police: that's what this area is like. If they said they would leave no stone unturned, you took that at face value."
By the time the 10th anniversary of the killings came around, Rogan was anxious to learn more about her father's death, and hear of any progress the police had made. A series of meetings was organised between senior investigators of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the victims' relatives, and later more information emerged when the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland published a report in 2011 on the investigation. Relatives of the dead men came to the conclusion, as Rogan puts it, that "they had treated us like mushrooms, keeping us in the dark for years and feeding us whatnot".
A memorial plaque in the room where six men were murdered in a 1994 Loyalist attack on the Heights Bar in Loughinisland, County Down, Northern Ireland. Photograph: Paul McErlane for the Guardian
The getaway car had passed through four owners in the eight weeks before it was used in the shooting, changing hands so quickly that the first person in the chain remained the registered owner. The morning after the killings, a Belfast police officer was asked to call at this person's home. The officer did so, but found the man was out. The officer then recorded the time of his visit as 9.30am - 34 minutes before the farmer had rung police to tell them he had discovered the car.
Some time between 11am and noon, a second police officer – a detective with no connection to the murder inquiry – telephoned the second person in the ownership chain, and asked him to come to the local police station to give a statement. How this detective came to know that the car had passed through this man's hands is unclear. What is known, however, is that a statement was given, and that a note was attached to it, saying that the individual who gave it could be contacted only through the detective who took it.
The Loughinisland families argue this amounts to evidence that the person who gave this statement – one of the people involved in supplying the car used by the killers – was a police informer.
The Guardian has interviewed this man. He is Terry Fairfield, and today he runs a pub in the south of England. Fairfield confirms that he was a member of the UVF at the time, but denies he was a police informer. He says he did subsequently receive several thousand pounds from the detective, for helping him take a firearm and some explosives out of circulation. He accepts that being invited to attend a police station, rather than being arrested, was highly unorthodox. The detective says he had known Fairfield for years and contacted him after hearing of the Loughinisland shooting, but that only members of the murder inquiry could decide whether to arrest him.
A second man, who is widely suspected locally of having been in the getaway car, and who is also alleged to have been an informer, has also told the Guardian that he has never been arrested.
The families also question the failure to take samples from some of the people arrested for questioning. The Guardian understands that at least five of the men arrested in the months after the shootings were not fingerprinted before being released without charge. No DNA swabs were taken from either of the two people arrested in 1996.
One man, Gorman McMullan, who has been named as a suspect in a Northern Ireland newspaper, was arrested the month after the shootings and released without charge. He was one of the people who were released without being fingerprinted and no DNA swab was taken. McMullan firmly denies that he has ever been to Loughinisland or that he was ever in the getaway car, and no further action was taken against him in connection with the shootings. He acknowledges however that he was "involved in the conflict".
The police admitted to the families at one of their meetings that they had handed the getaway car to a scrap metal firm to be crushed and baled. They said this had been done because the vehicle was taking up too much space in a police station yard. That decision means it can never again be tested for comparison with samples taken from any new suspects.
Families' disbelief
Emma Rogan and Aidan O'Toole cannot believe that the destruction of the car or other failings in the investigation were an accident. They believe that this is evidence of police collusion. "They knew exactly what they were doing," Rogan says.
The families lodged a complaint with the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland. When the ombudsman, Al Hutchinson, published his report, it contained mild criticism of an investigation that displayed "a lack of cohesive and focused effort". To the anger of the families, it refused to state whether or not police informants were suspected of involvement and appeared to gloss over the forensic failures. It concluded that the destruction of the car was "inappropriate", rather than evidence of corruption or collusion.
The report was widely condemned in Northern Ireland. Hutchinson agreed to leave his post, and his successor is now reviewing the report. There will be no examination of the arms shipment, however, as the ombudsman's remit extends only to the police, not the army.
Much of the suspicion about British involvement in the 1987 arms shipment revolves around Brian Nelson, a former soldier who joined the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) in the early 70s. In 1985, Nelson offered himself as an informant to the Force Research Unit (FRU), a covert unit within the army's intelligence corps that recruited and ran agents in Northern Ireland. He quit the UDA the following year and moved to Germany with his wife and children. The FRU, operating with the approval of MI5, approached Nelson in Germany and persuaded him to return to Belfast to rejoin the UDA as an army agent.
For the next three years, Nelson was paid £200 a week by the government while operating as the UDA's intelligence officer, helping to select targets for assassination. He informed his army handlers in advance of attacks: only two were halted, while at least three people were killed and attempts were made on the lives of at least eight more.
A detailed account of this extraordinary operation appears in a report on the loyalist killing of the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane that Peter Cory, a retired Canadian supreme court judge, prepared at the request of the government in 2004. An FRU report from July 1985 discloses that the army paid Nelson's travel expenses when he travelled to Durban in South Africa that year to make initial contact with an arms dealer. "The [British] army appears to have at least encouraged Nelson in his attempt to purchase arms in South Africa for the UDA," Cory concludes. "Nelson certainly went to South Africa in 1985 to meet an arms dealer. His expenses were paid by FRU. The army appears to have been committed to facilitating Nelson's acquisition of weapons, with the intention that they would be intercepted at some point en route to Northern Ireland."
Nelson is said to have told the FRU that the UDA possessed insufficient funds at that time to purchase any arms. "The evidence with regard to the completion of the arms transaction is frail and contradictory," Cory says. As a result, "whether the transaction was consummated remains an open question".
In July 1987, the funds to purchase a large consignment of weapons were secured with the robbery of more than £325,000 from a branch of Northern Bank in Portadown, 30 miles south-west of Belfast. The proceeds of the robbery were to be used to purchase weapons that were to be split three ways between the UDA, the UVF and Ulster Resistance (UR), a paramilitary organisation set up by unionists in response to the 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement.
What happened next is described by a former senior employee with South Africa's Armscor, a man who was intimately involved in the plot to smuggle the weapons into Northern Ireland. According to this source, officials in South Africa introduced a senior figure within UR to one of the corporation's representatives in Europe, an American arms dealer called Douglas Bernhardt.
In October 1987, Bernhardt is said to have flown to Gatwick airport for a face-to-face meeting with a senior UDA commander, John McMichael, after which couriers carried money from the bank raid, in cash, to Bernhardt's office in Geneva.
Bernhardt was not told where the money had come from, according to the Armscor source. "When you get that sort of dirty banknote, you don't ask," the source says. Bernhardt obtained a bank draft which was then sent to an arms dealer in Beirut, who had obtained the weapons from a Lebanese militia.
As the operation progressed, according to the Armscor source, Bernhardt would regularly call his UR contact at his place of work. This man would then call back from a payphone, and they would talk in a simple code, referring to the weapons as "the parcel of fruit". At each stage, Bernhardt is said to have been told that the arrangements needed to be agreed by McMichael and by his intelligence officer – Brian Nelson. "Everything had to be run by the head of intelligence."
Bernhardt is said then to have travelled by ship to Beirut, where arrangements were made to pack the weapons into a shipping container labelled as a consignment of ceramic floor tiles. Bills of lading and a certificate of origin were organised, and the weapons were shipped to Belfast docks via Liverpool.
"There were at least a couple of hundred Czech-made AKs – the VZ-58," the Armscor source recalls. "And 90-plus Browning-type handguns: Hungarian-made P9Ms. About 30,000 rounds of 7.62 x 39mm ammunition, not the 51mm Nato rounds. Plus a dozen or so RPGs, and a few hundred fragmentation grenades."
Sources within both the police and the UVF have confirmed that one of the VZ-58s was used at Loughinisland.
According to the Armscor source, the UR member who dealt with Bernhardt was Noel Little, a civil servant and former British soldier. Now in his mid-60s and living quietly in an affluent Belfast suburb, Little denies this. "My position is that I wasn't involved," Little says. But he adds: "I would deny it even if I was."
Little confirms, however, that he was a founder member of UR, and a central figure within the organisation at the time that the weapons arrived in Belfast. He also appears to possess detailed knowledge of the way in which the arms were smuggled and distributed.
The weapons arrived in Belfast in December 1987, a few days before McMichael was killed by an IRA car bomb. Early in the new year, they were split three ways at a farmhouse in County Armagh. The UDA lost its entire slice of the pie within minutes: its share of about 100 weapons was loaded into the boot of two hire cars that were stopped a few minutes later at a police roadblock near Portadown. The three occupants were later jailed, with their leader, Davy Payne, receiving a 19-year sentence.
The following month, police recovered around half the UVF's weapons after a tip-off led them to an outhouse on the outskirts of north Belfast. Fairfield says he recalls being shown what remained of the UVF's new arsenal, in storage at a house in the city that was being renovated. "I made the mistake of touching one," he says, adding that this could result in him being linked to the October 1993 killing outside the Shorts factory.
Little was also arrested, after his telephone number was found written on the back of Payne's hand. "John McMichael had given it to him, in case he got into any trouble in Armagh," Little says. "I lost three-quarters of a stone [4.75kg] during the seven days I was questioned. The police put me under extreme psychological pressure." Eventually, he was released without charge.
Little says that while UR redistributed a few of its weapons – "there were some deals around the edges" – most of its consignment was kept intact.
"They were never used. They were for the eventuality of the British just walking away – doing an Algeria – after the Anglo-Irish agreement was signed." As far as he is aware, the consignment has never been decommissioned.
Dramatic arrest
The following year saw Little arrested again, this time in France, in dramatic fashion. He had travelled to Paris with two fellow loyalists, James King and Samuel Quinn, to meet Bernhardt and a South African intelligence officer operating under the name Daniel Storm. Officers of the French security agency, Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), seized the three Ulstermen and the South African in a raid on a room at the Hilton International, at the same moment that Bernhardt was being grabbed in the foyer of the Hôtel George-V, and lifted bodily, according to one witness, out of the building and into a waiting car.
The five had been caught red-handed attempting to trade stolen parts from the sighting system of a ground-to-air missile that was under development at the Shorts factory. The apartheid regime wanted to use the parts in the development of its own missile for use in Angola, where its ground forces were vulnerable to attack by Cuban-piloted MiGs. "This deal was about speed," says the Armscor source. "If you've got Cuban-piloted jets whacking your troops in border wars, you don't have the luxury of saying: 'We'll have a research programme over time.' You've got to speed up the R&D."
Storm was set free after claiming diplomatic immunity, while the others were interrogated in the basement of the DST's headquarters in the 15th arrondissement. "I was slapped about a little," says Little. "But not too much." The DST told Bernhardt it had listened in on a meeting the previous night, through a bug in the chandelier of the room at the George-V where the men had gathered. "They knew all about the fruit code used in 1987," the Armscor source says. "They thought the talk about pineapples was a huge joke. They must have been monitoring the phone calls. And they knew all about Lebanon.
"My guess is that the British were intercepting those phone calls. But the British didn't get all the weapons. How much did they know in advance? Why didn't they move more quickly? Maybe they were perfectly happy to have that material … sort of 'arrive', and put into the hands of the loyalists. Christ knows, the IRA had had enough of their own shipments, everywhere from Boston to Tripoli."
Noel Little also suspects the British turned a blind eye to the 1987 arms shipment. "It is a theory I can't discount," he says. "Brian Nelson was inserted into the UDA as an agent, he wasn't a recruited member. Ho w could he know about it and not tell his handler?"
Little believes that his attempt to hand over stolen missile technology to Armscor in Paris – straying into "secrets and commerce", as he puts it – would have been a step too far for the British authorities, obliging them to tip off the French.
After eight months on remand, the four men were brought to court charged with arms trafficking, handling stolen goods and terrorism-related conspiracy. Bernhardt told the court that he had helped arrange the Lebanese arms deal for loyalist paramilitaries in 1987. The four were sentenced to time served and fined between 20,000 and 100,000 francs (£2,000-£10,000 then).
Brian Nelson was finally arrested in January 1990 after John Stevens, then deputy chief constable of Cambridgeshire, had been brought in to investigate collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. While awaiting trial, Nelson wrote a journal in which he recounted his time as an army agent inside the UDA. "I was bitten by a bug ... hooked is probably a more appropriate word. One becomes enmeshed in a web of intrigue, conspiracies, confidences, dangers ..."
After flying to Durban in 1985, he wrote, his South African contacts had asked whether he would be able to obtain a missile from Shorts. Two years later, while talking about the South African connection with "Ronnie", his FRU handler, he had been told that "because of the deep suspicion a seizure would have aroused, to protect me it had been decided to let the first shipment into the country untouched". Nelson added that "Ronnie" assured him that the arms consignment would be under surveillance.
In 1993, an intelligence source told the BBC that this had happened: the consignment had indeed been under surveillance by a number of agencies, but the wrong port was watched, with the result that the weapons slipped through.At Nelson's eventual court appearance, a plea deal resulted in Nelson being jailed for 10 years after he admitted 20 offences, including conspiracy to murder. Murder charges were dropped. More than 40 other people were also convicted of terrorism offences as a result of the Stevens investigation. They did not include any of the intelligence officers for whom Nelson worked.
Stevens' investigation team was well aware of concerns surrounding the importation of the weapons. Members of the team talked to former Armscor officials in South Africa, but concluded that an investigation into the matter was so unlikely to produce any results as to be fruitless. However, a senior member of the inquiry team says he believes it feasible that the UK authorities could have been involved in bringing the weapons into Belfast – or at least turned a blind eye. "It's not at all far-fetched," he says.
By the time of the Loughinisland massacre, loyalist gunmen with access to the Armscor arsenal were killing at least as many people as the IRA. Czech-made VZ-58 assault rifles were used in many of the killings. A few weeks after the shootings at the Heights Bar, the IRA announced a ceasefire.
Many in Northern Ireland are convinced that the importation of the Armscor weapons, and the large numbers of killings that followed, contributed greatly to the IRA's decision. Among them is Noel Little, who says: "There's no doubt that that shipment did change things."
Increasingly, the IRA was forced to defend itself against attacks by loyalists, it was diverted into targeting loyalist paramilitaries rather than police officers or soldiers, and it came under pressure from nationalists as more and more Catholic people were slaughtered. To Little's way of thinking, the Armscor weapons "tipped the balance against the IRA and eventually forced them to sue for peace". And while he accepts – and says he deplores – the slaughter of innocent people at Loughinisland and elsewhere, he adds: "Innocent bystanders are killed in every war."
Six weeks after the IRA's announcement, loyalist paramilitaries announced their own ceasefire.
With the Loughinisland families no nearer to discovering the truth about the deaths of their loved ones following publication of the ombudsman's report, they embarked on their civil actions against the Ministry of Defence and the police in January this year. A letter of claim sent to the MoD says the claim is based in part on "the army's knowledge of and facilitation of the shipment", while one sent to the Police Service of Northern Ireland says the claim arises from a series of failings, including "closing off investigative opportunities" and "the destruction of vital evidence".
Their lawyer, Niall Murphy, says: "The experience of these six families demonstrates that the current mechanisms for truth recovery do not work."
Rogan and O'Toole remain tormented by the events of June 1994. "The people who died in this room didn't know anything about the Troubles, and yet they were slaughtered," says Rogan. O'Toole, who still has a bullet lodged in his kidney, becomes emotional when he walks into the Heights Bar. "It's guilt," he whispers. "They died in here, while I was keeping the bar."
Both say they are angered even more by the evidence of inaction and failure that they have discovered in recent years, and by the signs of collusion that have slipped slowly to the surface, than they are about the killings themselves.
And after 18 years, both use the same phrase to describe the way they believe their friends and relatives were regarded, both by the gunmen and by those institutions they looked to for protection: "They were expendable." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/27/sir-gerald-kaufman-obituary | Politics | 2017-02-27T16:01:32.000Z | Stephen Bates | Sir Gerald Kaufman obituary | In Sir Gerald Kaufman, who has died aged 86, the Labour party had not only one of its longest-serving MPs, but also one of its loyalest, if most waspish, members. He supported a succession of leaders from Harold Wilson onwards through all vicissitudes, regularly coming high in MPs’ polls for the shadow cabinet through his earlier years in the Commons, and was a committed and outspoken frontbencher. He was described by an ally as “a politician’s politician, a sublime operator, brilliant in committee and at persuasion”.
But he never achieved full cabinet rank when the party was in government. This was mainly due to bad timing, which saw Labour out of power during his political prime, but partly also because of a certain unclubability. “He does not inspire warmth and trust,” wrote the political commentator Alan Watkins. “He puts people’s backs up … in fact, he is a perfectly nice chap, but there it is.”
Kaufman, small, bald and often dressed in pastel-coloured suits, set off by patterned ties, was a distinctive figure in the Commons. “Gee, here comes the mayor for Miami Beach,” exclaimed one startled American reporter. He had a sharp tongue, as often deployed against leftwingers such as Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone on his own side as against the Tories, or regular bêtes-noires such as the BBC, modern journalists and the Israeli government. This was despite the fact that he was both Jewish and a former journalist – his satirical skills honed on the Daily Mirror and writing sketches for the BBC’s That Was The Week That Was in the early 1960s – and that he also classed himself as a leftwinger. It was he who coined the memorable line about the Labour party’s lengthy and disastrous 1983 general election manifesto that it was “the longest suicide note in history”.
Gerald Kaufman walking past the entrance of the Abraham Mosque or the Cave of the Patriarchs, a holy site to both Muslims and Jews, in the West Bank town of Hebron in 2010. Photograph: Hazem Bader/Getty Images
Kaufman was born in Leeds, the seventh and youngest child of Louis, a tailor, and his wife, Jane, Jewish refugees who had escaped the pogroms in Poland to settle in Yorkshire. Gerald won a scholarship from his primary school to the fee-paying Leeds grammar school. He often rubbed people up the wrong way, not least when, on winning a school prize, he asked for a copy of Das Kapital. He won a scholarship to Queen’s College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) and chaired the University Labour Club.
On leaving Oxford, he initially failed to get a job in journalism, becoming instead an assistant secretary at the Fabian Society. In 1955 he joined the Daily Mirror, under the editorship of Hugh Cudlipp, as a researcher to the MP and journalist Richard Crossman.
Then he was a political columnist for the New Statesman (1964-65), and soon entered the so-called kitchen cabinet of Wilson, the new Labour leader, notionally as a political press officer, but also as a speech writer and phrase-maker, alongside Joe Haines and Marcia Falkender.
Kaufman had fought his first parliamentary election in 1955, in the hopeless cause of Bromley, against Harold Macmillan, then the foreign secretary – who he accused of “political peacemaking” because he was absent on international business for much of the campaign. He was also defeated in 1959 at Gillingham, before finally achieving election in 1970 to the safe inner-city Manchester seat of Ardwick, and subsequently Gorton from 1983. He held the seat until his death, winning a 24,000 majority in the 2015 general election, after which he became Father of the House, the MP with the longest unbroken service.
Under Wilson, Kaufman began an ascent up the ministerial ladder as a junior minister at the Department of the Environment, then industry and, following his friend Eric Varley, to minister of state in the same department. That he was not made a cabinet minister was attributed to the fact that James Callaghan, succeeding Wilson in 1976, mistakenly – and bizarrely – assumed he had supported Michael Foot instead of himself for the leadership.
This was the extent of Kaufman’s ministerial career, ending in his late 40s with Labour’s defeat in 1979, though he did claim successes in office, including the securing of US landing rights for Concorde and the repeal of the Tories’ Housing Finance Act, which had reduced subsidies for council house tenants and allowed local authorities to charge “fair”, not controlled, rents. Perhaps more substantially, out of Kaufman’s brief time in office came his book How to Be a Minister (1980, reissued 1997), a witty and acute dissection that has been read by government incomers on both sides ever since.
In opposition, under Callaghan, Foot and then Neil Kinnock, Kaufman served as the party’s spokesman on the environment, then shadowed the Home Office and latterly foreign affairs for five years from 1987 until he stood down from frontbench positions after the election defeat in 1992. Despite the popularity of his spirited attacks on the Tories with his fellow MPs – Thatcher was a “female Mussolini” and her cabinet “dim second-raters” – he failed repeatedly to win election to the left-leaning national executive. He succeeded only belatedly in 1991, at the 11th attempt.
Instead, as the party tore itself apart, he became a vehement critic of the left for wrecking Labour’s chances of election. He tried unsuccessfully to persuade Foot to stand down just before the disastrous 1983 campaign and was a vituperative opponent of Benn in Labour’s internecine struggle.
Kaufman told the Guardian’s Simon Hoggart: “I once got a letter from a constituent saying that whenever he saw my face on television he could reach the set and switch me off in two seconds. Well, whenever I see Benn’s face, I can switch it off in half a second, because I have a remote control.”
It was the sense that his appearance and manner alienated voters that led to accusations in 1992 that the over-cautious party managers were keeping its foreign affairs spokesman away from the cameras. Whether true or not and whether he would have maintained the portfolio if Labour had won were never tested. His outspoken and long-standing opposition to the policies of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians would have made him an awkward choice for the Foreign Office.
“The sufferings of the Jewish people cannot be used as some sort of justification for what Israel does to the Palestinians,” he said in 2012. “I find it degrading that the sufferings of Jews in the Holocaust should be used as a kind of justification for persecuting Palestinians.” Such comments caused trouble in the British Jewish community – confrontations at the St John’s Wood synagogue and a promise by a rabbi that he would refuse to conduct his funeral – , which perturbed Kaufman not at all and certainly did not deter him.
He was a loyal supporter of Tony Blair – claiming credit for persuading him to go for the leadership in 1994. However, when Labour returned to power in 1997 Kaufman was nearly 67 and considered too old to join the cabinet. He supported the war in Iraq, though he was privately opposed to it, and rallied to Gordon Brown when he became leader. He was knighted in 2004.
From 1992 until 2005 he chaired the select committee on culture, media and sport (formerly national heritage, 1992-97). It was something of a dream job as it allowed him to pronounce on high profile issues. He repeatedly criticised the “shoddy” BBC and its unnecessary board of governors and, at one stage, claimed that digital broadcasting was a blind alley and a waste of resources: “It will not be the way of the future.”
However, it did not stop him receiving bad publicity during the MPs’ expenses scandal for trying to claim an £8,000 television set sometime after he stood down from the committee.
Kaufman dated his love for the cinema from being taken to see Disney’s Three Little Pigs cartoon at the Rialto, Briggate, as a child in Leeds and he became a notable film buff, with a particular enthusiasm for musicals. For the British Film Institute, he wrote Meet Me in St Louis (1994), a study of the making of the 1944 classic, for which he interviewed many of its stars; he also published a memoir entitled My Life in the Silver Screen (1985).
He is survived by two nieces and four nephews.
Gerald Bernard Kaufman, politician, born 21 June 1930; died 26 February 2017
This article was amended on 28 February 2017. Gerald Kaufman was assistant secretary of the Fabian Society (1954-55) rather than the Labour party. He then worked as a political journalist on the Daily Mirror (1955-64) and the New Statesman (1964-65). Mention of Richard Crossman editing the New Statesman in the early 1960s has been deleted, since he did so from 1970 to 1972. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jul/20/icac-finds-nsw-mp-john-sidoti-engaged-in-serious-corrupt-conduct-over-family-owned-properties | Australia news | 2022-07-20T09:37:30.000Z | Tamsin Rose | Icac finds NSW MP John Sidoti engaged in ‘serious corrupt conduct’ over family-owned properties | Former New South Wales Liberal minister John Sidoti has said he will fight to clear his name after being found to have engaged in “serious corrupt conduct” to benefit his family’s property interests by the Independent Commission Against Corruption.
The anti-corruption watchdog recommended that the Director of Public Prosecutions consider whether the independent Drummoyne MP should be charged with misconduct in public office.
The NSW premier, Dominic Perrottet, called on Sidoti to resign from parliament over the findings saying there was “no place for corruption in the NSW parliament”.
The commission found Sidoti had used his official role as a member of parliament to try to “improperly influence” Liberal City of Canada Bay councillors in relation to properties in Five Dock between late 2013 and early 2017.
NSW MP John Sidoti reprimanded during fiery Icac inquiry hearing
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He has denied the allegations against him, and the rezoning he had allegedly sought did not go ahead.
On Wednesday evening Sidoti made plain his intent to fight the findings.
“Icac did not interview the people at crucial meetings to support what I had stated,” he said.
“They failed to chase down exculpatory evidence. This report has a number of unfounded inferences, errors and assumptions, and its findings are completely rejected.
“I will continue to fight to clear my name and have instructed my lawyers to lodge an application in the supreme court.”
Sidoti said Icac had interviewed “disgruntled” Liberal members and taken complaints from a nongovernment majority upper house inquiry to conclude that he had engaged in corrupt conduct.
Earlier in the day, Perrottet said he had contacted Sidoti and asked him to resign.
“I have contacted Mr Sidoti to inform him that I believe he should resign from the parliament,” Perrottet said in a statement.
“Should Mr Sidoti not resign, the NSW government will move a motion to have him suspended. The NSW government has also sought legal advice in relation to this matter.”
The opposition leader, Chris Minns, supported the call and confirmed Labor would support a motion to suspend him if he did not resign.
Sidoti said he would not resign, telling Nine News: “I’m going to fight this all the way. I’m not going anywhere.”
The findings were made public on Wednesday after public hearings in April 2021 that investigated whether Sidoti had misused his position as a member of parliament, as well as any possible breaches of public trust by failing to disclose pecuniary interests.
“The commission found that Mr Sidoti engaged in serious corrupt conduct by, between approximately late 2013 and February 2017, engaging in a protracted course of conduct, involving the use of his official position as a member of parliament,” the report said.
“Despite his representations that he was acting at all times in the interests of his constituents … the outcomes that he wanted those councillors to deliver were entirely directed to his private interest in increasing the development potential of his family’s growing number of properties in and around the Five Dock town centre.”
The Icac found Sidoti tried to influence councillors Helen McCaffrey, Mirjana Cestar and Tanveer Ahmed to adopt and advance certain positions in Five Dock that would benefit his family’s property interests.
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Sidoti was dumped from the frontbench more than a year ago, while the Icac made initial inquiries. He moved to the crossbench before last year’s hearings.
Despite Sidoti’s evidence during the Icac’s public hearings being unable to be used against him in criminal proceedings, the commission believed there would be other admissible evidence that could be used if charges were laid.
“The commission is of the opinion that consideration should be given to obtaining the advice of the DPP with respect to the prosecution of Mr Sidoti for the offence of misconduct in public office,” the report said.
The Icac also made 15 recommendations in the report, including changes to the way members of parliament are trained about the improper exercise of power and undue influence, in line with findings made in the investigation. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/26/copeland-sprint-theresa-may-muddy-marathon-brexit | Opinion | 2017-02-26T17:00:06.000Z | Anne McElvoy | Copeland was an easy sprint. Theresa May now faces a muddy marathon | Anne McElvoy | Politics offers so few outright triumphs that they deserve celebration when they occur. Seizing the Big Mo, Theresa May threw on her ceremonial visit-to-the-north Barbour and headed to Copeland. It was the nearest we have seen to this restrained prime minister basking in success, thanking voters for the best byelection trounce of an opposition challenger in decades. Special affection went to Jeremy Corbyn, for a performance that emboldens the Conservative central office strategists to talk of a push for 70 more Tory seats at the next election. Ukip’s insurgency foundering in Stoke is a bonus to those planning for a second May term.
But the tests of the prime minister’s strengths are yet to come. For one thing, her party, while it will never be united on Europe, needs to reach a more settled view on why what she is proposing on the detail of Brexit is a good idea – one that will also look credible if the economic impact in the coming year or two looks less sunny than it does now, before its true impact is felt.
Copeland shows Corbyn must go. But only Labour’s left can remove him
Jonathan Freedland
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Amber Rudd’s tergiversations on Peston on Sunday over whether the future of free movement lies in limited-term work visas for EU nationals or work permits is an indicator of ongoing cabinet disagreement. Remain supporters, such as May and her nearest avatar Rudd, favour an outcome that is really as near to free movement as possible – an overall cap on numbers and an emergency brake that can be triggered without the EU getting in the way. Sundry dotted lines and question marks linger. They range from how rigorously UK entry should be linked with a particular job to how far student numbers should count towards a target, and on what terms.
Plans for trade arrangements after Brexit are even more fissiparous. So far, May’s negotiating strategy has been a double bluff to Europe. Give us the deal you know you need with us, she says, or we quit the EU with only the very basic provisions of the World Trade Organisation treaty, storing up negotiations as long as the never-done Doha trade round. It reminds us of the cartoon robber who tells his target that in the event of not handing over the goods, the robber is not afraid to shoot himself. But it might nonetheless come to pass.
May’s defence for this position is that the Brexit that must be delivered cannot be transformed into something that looks more like staying in the EU than leaving it. Such ruthlessness is the source of her power, but also poses the internal contradiction of how far she is prepared to go to keep Eurosceptics happy.
The view of Philip Hammond, her stolid chancellor, is that after a shortish period of lambasting foolish Brits, Berlin will come round to the need to lead a better deal arrangement to benefit major economic powers (notably Germany) and the UK. Even that is a dicey prospect in electorally turbulent 2017.
Angela Merkel, for all the chill she has exuded since last June, remains the best outlook for Britain as de facto leader of the EU’s response to Brexit. No one really believed the EU negotiator, Michel Barnier’s claim that a £50bn “divorce settlement” fee could be slapped on unfaithful Blighty. But the best person to inform him of this fact is the German chancellor, not May.
So it would be an ill wind for Downing Street, were she to be defeated by a leftish coalition headed by Martin Schulz (a narrowcast Social Democrat and no natural friend of UK Tory governments), with Emmanuel Macron as the leading French presidential candidate doubling down on the rhetoric of “no caveats or waivers” for the UK.
In fact, our future dealings with the EU will be a vast stockpile of caveats and waivers. A large and important trading country close to the continent cannot simply be spun out of EU considerations to buddy up with the Azores. But May could do with more bankable practical allies than she currently has to make that look workable.
Who will the Brexiteers blame when the milk and honey fails to flow?
Rafael Behr
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The timelines are already out of joint: article 50 will be triggered, in all likelihood, by the end of next month, while the EU will not address Brexit with seriousness until after the German election in September. That leaves a gap for trouble to brew in parliament. Let me take an early guess as to how this goes. Peers will agitate for extra protections for EU citizens here. May will hold out to strengthen her position on British workers’ access to continental Europe, but there will be a deal and the only question is how long she can spin it out for maximum leverage. She will not mind looking callous, or even being accused of dithering, if she prevails.
More significant is the shape of “final veto” argument, forcing ministers to get the approval of MPs and peers on the final Brexit deal. The most likely result is lengthy parliamentary “ping pong” in which the government makes clear that it thinks the Lords are on constitutional thin ice. At the same time, the PM will be tending a small Commons majority – and hoping that her own rebel camp of the likes of Anna Soubry, Claire Perry and Nicky Morgan can be balanced by Labour Brexiteers of the Frank Field/Gisela Stuart ilk.
As this unfolds, soft leavers across the benches will get more alarmed as the prospect of a hard exit nears, figures such as George Osborne will be tempted to break their omerta and the temperature will rise, as post-Brexit generals leap back into the party fray.
The lesson bequeathed by Maastricht Treaty rows, though, is that it does not take many rebels to stir up unquiet ghosts. That is why May, fresh from a sprint victory last week, is up against a muddy Brexit marathon.
This article was amended on 27 February 2017. An earlier version mentioned Nadine Dorries rather than Anna Soubry. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/jun/21/ivan-turgenev-brief-survey-short-story | Books | 2013-06-21T13:42:13.000Z | Chris Power | A brief survey of the short story part 50: Ivan Turgenev | When Gogol died in 1852, Ivan Turgenev, the man whom many in Russia were calling his successor, was arrested for writing an obituary in praise of the great writer. In fact, the official reason was a pretext. Turgenev had already displeased the tsarist authorities with his series of sketches of rural Russian life, published in the journal the Contemporary between 1847 and 1851, and collected in 1852 as Sketches from a Hunter's Album.
This book, which it is claimed influenced Tsar Alexander II's decision to emancipate the serfs in 1861, comprises vignettes of peasant life as observed by a landowning hunter much like Turgenev. Not even Gogol had presented such rounded portrayals of serfs before. As the translator Richard Freeborn notes, while Turgenev would go on to greater things in both the short story and the novel, he was quite aware of the book's merits. At the time of publication he wrote:
"Much has come out pale and scrappy, much is only just hinted at, some of it's not right, oversalted or undercooked – but there are other notes pitched exactly right and not out of tune, and it is these notes that will save the whole book."
Of these, perhaps the one pitched most perfectly of all is Bezhin Lea. This masterful story begins with a description of a July day, and close rendering of the natural world represent one of the deep pleasures of Turgenev's writing. As Edmund Wilson writes, in Turgenev "the weather is never the same; the descriptions of the countryside are quite concrete, and full, like Tennyson's, of exact observation of how cloud and sunlight and snow and rain, trees, flowers, insects, birds and wild animals, dogs, horses and cats behave, yet they are also stained by the mood of the person who is made to perceive them".
Returning home at the end of this glorious day the hunter becomes lost, and as night falls he passes through a landscape of endless fields, standing stones and terrifying gulfs. The mood is that of fairytale, but rather than supernatural beings, the hunter eventually finds only a group of boys guarding a drove of horses. They are gathered around a fire telling ghost stories. Throughout his story Turgenev, the committed realist, repeatedly balances the unreal, the ghostly, with the simply human, fantastical terror with everyday pathos and empathy. The little ring of storytellers, gathered in a small patch of flickering light on a vast plain, effortlessly coexists as concrete setting and existential symbol. At the story's end, when the narrator reports that one of the boys died the following year, he moves quickly to defuse any supernatural tension. As Frank O'Connor notes, Turgenev did not want "the shudder of children sitting over the fire on a winter night, thinking of ghosts and banshees while the wind cries about the little cottage – but that of the grown man before the mystery of human life".
Although Turgenev did occasionally explore supernatural themes, particularly towards the end of his life, his greatest achievements in the short story have love and youth as their main themes. He was at his best when writing autobiographically, and two of his finest stories, the novella First Love (1860) and Punin and Baburin (1874), draw deeply on his own memories. Near the end of his life, Turgenev said of First Love: "It is the only thing that still gives me pleasure, because it is life itself, it was not made up … First Love is part of my experience." This long and beautiful story powerfully evokes both a teenage boy's experience of love, and the complex sorrow of an older man looking back on his youth. The story unfolds over a summer when the narrator, Vladimir Petrovich, becomes one of a number of suitors clustered around Zinaida, whose mother is an impoverished princess using her daughter as bait to lure a wealthy husband. This story sees the first full flowering of Turgenev's ability to create and move between distinct, remarkably vivid characters and points of view, displaying what VS Pritchett calls the "curious liquid gift which became eventually supreme in Proust".
If this liquid sense infuses Turgenev's work as a whole, its point of origin is the individual phrase. Wilson writes: "Turgenev is a master of language, he is interested in words in a way that the other great 19th-century Russian novelists – with the exception of Gogol – are not." Constance Garnett, whose translations introduced most of the great 19th-century Russians to English readers, considered Turgenev to be the most difficult of them to translate "because his style is the most beautiful". "What an amazing language!" Chekhov wrote when rereading Turgenev's 1866 story The Dog. Whether writing of ponies groomed until they are "sleek as cucumbers" or the "steam and glitter of an April thaw", the large edifices of his stories are always built brick by brick, with immense and detailed care. In Death, from the Sketches, he describes the scene of a terrible accident:
"We found the wretched Maxim on the ground. Ten or so peasants were gathered round him. We alighted from our horses. He was hardly groaning at all, though occasionally he opened wide his eyes, as if looking around him with surprise, and bit his blue lips. His chin quivered, his hair was stuck to his temples and his chest rose irregularly: he was clearly dying. The faint shadow of a young lime tree ran calmly aslant his face."
That last detail is a master's touch, all at once visually anchoring the scene, conveying nature's indifference to Maxim's plight, suggesting the border between existence and oblivion, and underlining the solitariness of the moment of death as the observer notes a detail that Maxim never would. Turgenev may not have written quite as often as Tolstoy about the actual moment of dying, but was perhaps equally skilled at summoning the twin currents of dread and banality it so often encompasses.
Turgenev is a poet of disappointment, whose rapturous descriptions of youth are always filtered through an older consciousness aware that it "melts away like wax in the sun". The stunning evocation of childhood in Punin and Baburin begins with the words "I am old and ill now". In an essay of 1860, Turgenev divides heroes into prevaricating Hamlets and mad Don Quixotes, who get things done. As that distinction suggests, action in his work is often troublingly problematic – Baburin's costly outspokenness before his masters, Harlov's fatal destruction of his home in Turgenev's version of King Lear, A Lear of the Steppes – while inaction proves no more profitable (witness the pathetic figure described in The Diary of a Superfluous Man). Yet for all this sorrow and anguish, which led Henry James to speak of Turgenev's collections as "agglomerations of gloom", his stories pulse with a life as vivid as any in literature. In Fathers and Sons, one of the great novels of the 19th century, Turgenev writes of a character's "quiet attentiveness to the broad wave of life constantly flowing in and around us". It's this that his work channels, a wave that carries us ineluctably to our end, but that also contains all the powerful, fleeting beauty of existence. As Vladimir Petrovich says of love, so Turgenev seems to think of life: "I wouldn't want it ever to be repeated, but I would have considered myself unfortunate if I'd never experienced it."
Translations from the work are by Isaiah Berlin, Richard Freeborn, Constance Garnett and Michael R Katz.
Next: Sherwood Anderson | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/aug/30/livefirstwritelater | Books | 2007-08-30T13:28:42.000Z | Joseph Ridgwell | Live first, write later | Hemingway: the bigger the beard, the better the writer? Photograph: Corbis
Should all novelists under 30 be banned from publication? That might sound a bit extreme or even absurd, but let's dig a little deeper. How do you begin to validate such an outrageous proposition? For starters, consider these authors: James Joyce, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Richard Brautigan, Knut Hamsun, Sherwood Anderson and Mark SaFranko. The later work of all these writers is undeniably superior as it is more rounded and contains greater emotional depth.
Most writers take years to get to grips with their chosen craft. And to produce anything of literary worth, they need to have lived a little, taken jobs, travelled, had a series of love affairs, shot a man in Reno. How can you write about life if you haven't even lived it?
Most masterpieces are composed by writers in their 30s. Authors produce some of their best work as they stumble towards mid-life and beyond. Of course there will always be stunning exceptions like The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, whose work arguably deteriorated as she matured (because of illness?). Then there's Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, Digging the Vein by Tony O'Neill or The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll. There will always be a few ebullient individuals who cram several decades of living into a few years, and still have the ability to transmute their experiences into art, but generally these prodigies are few and far between.
So why is it that our bookshelves and book columns are filled with work by young and talented but underdeveloped writers? One quote from an unnamed publisher will probably suffice: "When I saw the new writer was under 30 and very photogenic, I breathed a sigh of relief." The majority of publishers do not want to publish great books by older, maybe less attractive authors. Sex sells, beauty sells, and - wouldn't you know it - youth sells. Look around at the current crop of much-vaunted young writers, male and female: there's not an ugly duckling among them. Coincidence? Perhaps, but go to their work and it just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The writing is as flat as the paper it is printed on.
Ultimately, publishers and marketing folk have to take some responsibility for this systematic denigration of our precious culture. Brilliant writers will be lost forever, and publishing young, not-yet-ready authors and hyping them into oblivion does the writers themselves few favours. Where do they go from there? If they are told they are good when they've yet to develop, how can they judge the validity of everything they do afterwards?
Maybe banning all novelists under 30 is a fanciful idea, but if publishers used this awkward notion as some sort of yardstick, our bookshelves might contain a good deal more than just pretty covers, pretty pictures and problematic prose. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/dec/26/labour-warned-against-dancing-to-tory-tune-by-offshoring-asylum-claims | UK news | 2023-12-26T17:18:22.000Z | Rowena Mason | Labour warned against ‘dancing to Tory tune’ by offshoring asylum claims | Labour has been warned that processing asylum claims offshore could harm refugees and amount to “dancing to the Tory tune” on immigration, as it declined to rule out adopting such a policy.
The party has been looking at “offshoring” to deal with migration via illegal routes but charities, the SNP and the leftwing pressure group Momentum have said it would be a dangerous path to go down.
Keir Starmer said this month that he would look at offshore schemes where migrants are processed in a third country “usually en route to their country of destination”, saying that other European countries are also considering this.
The Times reported on Monday that Labour was also looking at all options for offshore processing of asylum claims as long as British officials did the assessment and migrants were not barred from claiming asylum if they had arrived by illegal means – unlike the government’s Rwanda scheme.
One senior Labour source expressed great enthusiasm for the idea of offshore processing of migrants claiming asylum, saying it was being considered.
However, other Labour sources downplayed the idea that it was anything more than just one option. One suggested it could be more about processing applications from refugees fleeing war when they have arrived in neighbouring countries, rather than sending migrants already arrived in the UK to completely unrelated nations.
Labour’s decision to consider a range of options for offshoring caused alarm among charities and drew criticism from some of its political rivals.
Alison Thewliss, SNP home affairs spokesperson, said Labour was yet again “dancing to the Tory tune”, this time on Rwanda and asylum.
“Sir Keir is so weak he has been forced to back Brexit, Tory spending cuts, NHS privatisation – and he is now caught in a trap over the absurd Rwanda plan, which has cost Scottish taxpayers millions of pounds,” she said.
“The SNP is clear offshoring our fellow human beings is inhumane and immoral. The Labour party should be ruling out Rwanda-style plans, not helping to enable them.”
A Momentum spokesperson said it was “disturbing” that Labour was reportedly considering such a plan. “Labour should not be the party of more deportations and more effective offshoring, and it doesn’t need to be,” they said.
“As migration experts have said, the way to minimise perilous small boat crossings is to expand safe routes for refugees. Instead of aping inhumane Tory policies like offshoring asylum seekers, Keir Starmer should be standing up for progressive values and migrants’ rights. In doing so, he can offer a practical alternative to the Tories’ cruel and divisive war on migrants.”
Charities supporting refugees caught up in the government’s efforts to deport migrants who arrived via illegal means to Rwanda expressed dismay.
Steve Smith, the chief executive of Care4Calais, said: “The colour of their party rosettes may be different but it seems their morals aren’t. Outsourcing our international obligations to other countries is a shameful policy where everyone loses.
“It does nothing to protect people who are fleeing war, torture and persecution. Just like the outsourcing racket in public services, UK taxpayers’ money will be sent to other countries for no return, with hundreds of millions already paid to Rwanda under the Tories’ failing plan.
“And the UK’s reputation on the international stage will remain more Little Britain than Great Britain. All these expensive anti-refugee rhetoric and gimmicks when the only workable solution to Channel crossings is so simple and inexpensive – open safe routes for refugees to claim asylum in the UK. That’s what any serious, and progressive, incoming government would introduce.”
Natasha Tsangarides, the associate director of advocacy at Freedom from Torture, also criticised Labour for reportedly considering plans to process refugees overseas. She said: “We know that these schemes will always be harmful to survivors of torture. Survivors run the risk of not being identified in time and of being detained, further compounding the horrific trauma they’ve already experienced.
“Now is a real opportunity to finally move away from the divisive scaremongering and politics of hate. If Labour is serious about fulfilling the positive commitment it has already made to consider the asylum claims of all those arriving on our shores, then they must focus instead on rebuilding a fair and compassionate asylum system here in the UK.”
The government’s Rwanda plans have repeatedly failed in the courts and it has recently passed legislation aimed at bypassing elements of human rights laws to get the scheme to go ahead.
Of Labour’s plans, Jo Maugham, director of the Good Law Project, said: “Whether these plans meet the UK’s moral obligations is a matter for voters. But Good Law Project will absolutely want to make sure that government – of whatever political colour – meets its international and domestic legal obligations.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/29/hilary-mantel-bring-bodies-costa-prize | Books | 2013-01-29T23:22:00.000Z | Mark Brown | Hilary Mantel's Bring up the Bodies wins Costa prize after unanimous vote | The unstoppable Hilary Mantel has added another award to her astonishing haul of major literary prizes when judges at a ceremony in London unanimously named Bring up the Bodies the 2012 Costa book of the year.
Mantel became the first novelist to win both the Man Booker and the Costa prize when a nine-strong judging panel took less than an hour to decide that her thrilling, gripping and bloody second instalment of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy was a clear winner.
It was perhaps the least surprising result in the prize's history. The chair of judges, Dame Jenni Murray, said: "One book simply stood head and shoulders, more than head and shoulders … on stilts, above the rest. We had a really good discussion, like being at a high-powered book club, and I said, 'OK, let's have a vote on Bring up the Bodies' and every hand went up."
Murray admitted it was a tricky prize to judge, as one is choosing between different genres. There are five category winners bidding to win the £30,000 main prize – that means pitting poetry against biography, first novel, children's book and novel. That did not make it difficult, though. "I'd like to tell you there was blood on the carpet, there wasn't. There was absolute unanimity," Murray said.
Some commentators have suggested that the one book that did not need any help in terms of sales was Bring up the Bodies, having sold 240,000 hardback copies already – miles ahead of the other four, which have not sold more than 30,000 together.
But Murray said that was not what the prize was about – it was completely irrelevant. "These prizes are about 'What is the best book, what is the most enjoyable book? If I were to go away from here tonight and choose a book I wanted to read again, what would it be?'
"Everybody knew there was just one book we know has had lots of prizes but we couldn't allow the number of times it has been lauded to affect our decision."
Mantel conceded that some believed she had won enough plaudits, even to the detriment of other talent, but last night she was defiant, congratulating judges on not being told how to do their jobs. "I understand the feeling but, you know, books prizes aren't Buggins's turn, are they? I was writing for many, many years and I was not among the prizes at all or I was a perpetual runnerup, and things have changed in a big way.
"I feel my luck has changed – of course that's not true, what's changed is that I'm working on possibly the project that's played to my strengths and a project that came along just when I was ready for it."
The books, with their foreign translations and TV and stage versions, have become a phenomenon. Mantel added: "I should have known that Thomas Cromwell was bigger than I was. It is as if he has been revivified with a driving will to conquer all media and all languages!"
Mantel is now working on the third novel, with renewed confidence, she said, taking readers on the further rise and rise of Cromwell until his downfall in 1540.
When Mantel won her first Booker prize she vowed to spend the money on sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. The second time she joked rehab. For the Costa she was more pragmatic – "my pension fund".
The prize, which rewards enjoyability, is now in its 41st year, although for 34 of those it was called the Whitbread prize. The name Costa has just about stuck now and the company optimistically placed a coffee stall at the side of the ceremony at Quaglino's restaurant in Mayfair. The champagne waiters were busier.
Murray said everything they read was "immensely pleasurable". Many observers had hoped a graphic work might become the first overall Costa winner, with Mary and Bryan Talbot's graphic memoir, Dotter of her Father's Eyes, flying the biography flag. The other contenders were Francesca Segal's first novel, The Innocents; Kathleen Jamie's poetry collection The Overhaul, and Sally Gardner's children's book Maggot Moon.
Since Mantel brought out Wolf Hall, which won the 2009 Booker prize, she has been like a literary steamroller. We can expect to see a dramatisation of the two novels on the BBC this year and next year the RSC is to put on stage versions adapted by Mike Poulton.
Bring Up the Bodies is a much more condensed read than Wolf Hall, tackling in enveloping detail the sensational downfall of Anne Boleyn beginning in September 1535, just after Thomas More's execution, to May 1536, when she was publicly executed.
Murray said Mantel's prose was poetic and beautiful: "It is so set in its time, you know exactly where you are and who you are with but it is also incredibly modern. Her analysis of the politics is so modern.
"Everybody found there were things that just stuck in their minds that they would think about for a very long time. I have no doubt I want to go back to it."
Murray said she had read it twice now, on her Kindle and in book form, and that publishers should not worry – the book experience was much more pleasurable.
Mantel, 60, was the winner from a shortlist notable for being almost all female (Bryan Talbot illustrated while his wife, Mary, wrote). Murray said she had nothing to do with that, but added: "It was a real joy for me to see five women's names there."
Bring up the Bodies has been lavishly praised by most critics although the Sunday Times' Andrew Holgate was a voice of dissent, writing that there were too many characters and it was too mired in the historical detail: "The result is a book that is curiously flat and leaden, and one whose central ambition, to explain its chief subject, is frustratingly unfulfilled."
Although some might have been daunted by the four-and-a-half-page dramatis personae at the beginning of the novel, most readers delighted in it.
The Costa prize is a curious one in some ways. When Antony Hegarty won the Mercury prize for music in 2005, he memorably remarked: "It's like a contest between an orange and a spaceship and a potted plant and a spoon." The same goes for the Costa. Last year the judging chair, Geordie Greig, said it was like comparing "bananas with chicken curry".
The judging panel for this year's prize was appropriately diverse. It consisted of actors Jenny Agutter and Sophie Ward, the broadcaster Katie Derham, poet Daljit Nagra, novelist DJ Taylor, comedian Mark Watson, writer Marcus Sedgwick and the author Wendy Holden. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2001/may/05/restaurants.restaurants | Life and style | 2001-05-05T10:39:52.000Z | Matthew Fort | Eating out: Hakkasan | HakkasanRating: 17/20
Is Hakkasan the sexiest restaurant in London, or what? Even finding it provides a frisson of excitement. Go up Tottenham Court Road from the Oxford Street end. Take the first left, Hanway Street. Turn right almost immediately into Hanway Place, a Raymond Chandler mean street if ever there was one, with an air of invincibly seedy dilapidation about it. Don't mind that. Press on. At the top of the street, you will see a large man looking like a smartly dressed brick wall standing by a substantial but curiously self-effacing doorway. Go through it and descend the stairs inside. You pass from day into night, or from real night into more dramatic night. The walls are lined with charcoal-grey slate. At each step there is a square red light set into the wall. It is like something out of a James Bond movie. At the bottom of the stairs is Hakkasan, the latest creation of Alan Yau, the man behind Wagamama.
Hakkasan is about as far removed from Wagamama as it is possible to be. It is as suave as the other is sophomoric, as classy as the other is classless. A large dining room is divided up into discrete areas by oriental screens of geometric design. The lighting is what you might call nightclub subdued, with a kind of prevailing lambent, midnight blue. Waiters and waitresses pass and repass in silhouette, suddenly emerging into the third dimension when they bring your food. A metre or so above each table, a light throws reflected rays up off the dark wood, illuminating the lower halves of people's faces, leaving the rest in shadow. Anyone can look sexy when lit like that, even me - or so I was assured. There is even muzak, but for once its self-absorbed, repetitive, insistent rhythms seemed calibrated to reinforce the sense of sleek chic.
I have eaten at Hakkasan twice so far, once a solitary lunch of dim sum, Mr Yau's trademark noodles and some oddities such as congee, that invalid food of the gods; and once in the evening, when there's a menu of more substantial and elaborate dishes, many involving seafood in one form or another - steamed crab in Shao Hsing wine, soft-shell crab with hot and sour sauce, stir-fried lobster tail in XO sauce, roast duck with mango and lemon sauce, stir-fried jellyfish, squid and Chinese chives, pan-fried rib-eye beef with sweet soya and almond, roast pork with red rice, ginger and Shao Hsing, stir-fried asparagus with lotus roots and lily bulb with black pepper - that little lot rather overdid for three of us at dinner .
Of course, the food is Chinese, but it has been burnished with astute intelligence to sit comfortably with western tastes, with variations on rib-eye steak, poussin, ostrich, lobster and sardines among them. There are even a couple of dishes made with the very Chinese Windyridge merlot and Nicolas Feuillatte champagne. There's no point in going to Hakkasan in search of authenticity - but does it really matter?
Not very much, in my view. I am probably more in favour of the nooks and crannies of the deep-fried pig's oesophagus and steamed eel with preserved plum sort than most, but here much of the food was so delicious in its own right that I felt perfectly happy to eat more. And more. The lobster, steamed crab, roast duck and roast pork were outstanding at dinner; ditto the scallop shumai, tienging bun, cod congee and plum wine jelly, and lychee sorbet at lunch. If I have a criticism, it's that too many dishes on the dinner menu had sweetish overtones, which made for a certain monotony. But considering that this was within a few days of the place opening, it was a pretty alpha-plus showing; no doubt such minor flaws will get sorted out along the line. Yau and his team have even managed to solve the problem of how to make Chinese food look terrific, partly by borrowing from the Japanese.
Needless to say, just as Hakkasan isn't your average slam-bang, quick, quick, in-and-out Chinese restaurant, so the cost isn't quite your cheap, cheap, dirt-cheap giveaway, either. Dinner was £142.10, including two bottles of nicely judged Pinot Blanc, three beers and a water, which accounted for £51.80 of it. My solitary lunch came to £31 (but I did eat enough for two), plus £11 on the booze. But for the sheer class of the place, it seems a fair price to pay - particularly if it makes you look sexy. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/apr/25/glaxosmithkline-shares-slide-first-quarter | Business | 2012-04-25T15:24:21.000Z | Julia Kollewe | GlaxoSmithKline shares slide after disappointing first quarter | Sales and profits at GlaxoSmithKline, Europe's largest drug maker, have been hit by austerity measures in Europe and price cuts in some emerging markets, along with unrest in the Middle East.
The group's first-quarter results missed analysts' expectations, and sent its shares down 3.1%. The chief executive, Andrew Witty, said price reductions imposed by cash-strapped European governments as part of cutbacks in healthcare spending were bigger than expected and would probably average between 4% and 5% for the rest of the year.
Russia and Turkey have also cut spending. Political upheaval in the Middle East, where GSK is the market leader, have also dented sales, as has a mild flu season this winter. "We all understand the pressures they [governments] are under," said Witty, but warned politicians not to chase cost at the expense of patients' health.
He has been reducing the group's reliance on what he calls "white pills in western markets", which are particularly vulnerable to price cuts and competition from generic drug makers. Sales in Europe, and the Middle East and Africa, dropped by 6%, but Witty was confident sales from emerging markets would soon return to the more normal growth rate of 11% or more.
Turnover and core operating profits grew by 1% between January and March, with core earnings per share up 5% at 27.3p. Quarterly sales of £6.6bn fell short of City expectations of £6.8bn, as did EPS, for which analysts had pencilled in 29.1p. Net profits were down 13% to £1.3bn.
Despite the weaker results for the first quarter, GSK stuck to its estimates for sales growth and improved margins for 2012.
The company is largely over the "patent cliff" – a trough caused by patent expiration on big-selling drugs – though there is uncertainty over when the lung drug Advair, one of GSK's bestsellers, will face generic competition. It it also unclear whether the follow-on medicine, Relovair, which showed mixed results in clinical trials, can plug the gap. Witty said the drug maker had received positive data for five products in late-stage development to treat HIV, cancer, diabetes and asthma.
"GSK's late-stage pipeline has been slowly improving," said Bernstein analyst Tim Anderson. "Overall, a mixed quarter, yet the long-term growth with GSK continues to look comparatively good."
The pharmaceutical company is also trying to replenish its drug portfolio by buying in medicines. Last week GSK pounced on its long-term partner Human Genome Sciences with a $2.6bn (£1.6bn) offer, which was swiftly rebuffed by the Maryland-based biotech firm.
Witty dismissed suggestions that GSK could sweeten its bid, describing it as "very fair and full". "We absolutely believe we are the compelling owner for this business," he said. "We have the rights and the operational control for the three main assets and believe this is the right time to maximise value for both sets of shareholders."
The acquisition would give the UK company full ownership of Benlysta, the first new treatment for lupus in half a century and Human Genome's only product on the market, as well as experimental diabetes and heart medicines.
GSK has offloaded nearly all its over-the-counter brands it wanted to sell for nearly £700m, including Gaviscon and Beano. Its weight-loss pill Alli remains on the block, but its sale has been put on hold after an interruption in supplies of the pill's active ingredient from Roche.
To please investors, GSK announced a 6% dividend rise to 17p and the return of £2bn to 2.5bn to shareholders through share buybacks this year. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2006/mar/21/horseracing.comment | Sport | 2006-03-21T02:19:40.000Z | Greg Wood | Horse racing: Cheltenham the victim of its own success after a Festival that lacked fizz | Nine dead horses, a violent robbery, a series of beaten champions and favourites, and an arctic wind that even the thickest country jacket could not repel. These are some of the more enduring memories a week on from the opening of the 2006 Cheltenham Festival, and though the racecourse executives might argue otherwise, it is probably no bad thing.
Not if those memories persist until September, at any rate, when trainers and owners will once again be tempted to suggest, in the aftermath of a maiden hurdle at Fontwell, that "we're hoping he might just be a Cheltenham horse". Because for all the excellent and impressive efforts of horses like Brave Inca, War Of Attrition, Black Jack Ketchum and My Way De Solzen, this was a Festival that never caught fire.
Part of the reason for that must surely be the extended build-up to the meeting, which is now at least seven months long, and means that the Festival has assumed such significance that it can rarely deliver on the pre-publicity. Any eight-year-old will tell you that birthdays can often fail to live up to months of anticipation, and Cheltenham may now be suffering for its success in much the same way.
The part that a four-day Festival has played in this is hardly worth discussing, since the economics dictate that no matter how stretched the programme now seems, particularly on Thursday, there is no going back. It is interesting to note, though, that when an urgent need for new races was advanced as one of the arguments for a four-day Festival, the idea that the four-mile National Hunt Chase could make way for a fresh contest was sacrilege. Now that it has been responsible for three deaths in a single running, it seems that the course cannot consign it to history quickly enough.
A meeting like the Festival needs some head-to-heads sprinkled through the programme too, and the fact that Black Jack Ketchum ducked a race against Denman in the SunAlliance Hurdle was - along with a 17-runner Triumph Hurdle - probably the most significant effect of the extra day. Give people easy options and they will rarely, if ever, turn them down. It is another point to bear in mind when the build-up to the next Festival begins, because hankering after eyeball-to-eyeball showdowns is only likely to lead to disappointment.
One final point which needs to be addressed in the aftermath of the 2006 Festival is the farcical way in which the trophy for the top trainer at the meeting was handed first to Nicky Henderson and then, two days later, snatched away and presented to Paul Nicholls instead.
As a result Betfair's customers fared worse than punters - most bookmakers paid out twice - as the exchange simply reversed its previous payout on Henderson, leaving his backers and those who laid Nicholls with an unexpected hole in their accounts.
Since the Racing Post - which sponsors both the trainers' and jockeys' prizes at Cheltenham - had clearly stated before the meeting that win prizemoney would settle a tie, it seems incredible that such a mistake could be made in the first place. The delay in reversing it, though, is simply unforgiveable, since Cheltenham was well aware on Friday evening that it might have got things horribly wrong.
Chris Cook, my colleague on this paper, rang me just a few minutes after Henderson had left the podium clutching his trophy, to point out that Nicholls had accumulated approximately £2,000 more win prize-money. He then phoned a senior executive at Cheltenham to do the same. Yet nothing became public until Sunday morning, increasing the disappointment and annoyance for all concerned.
There have been many glorious moments at Cheltenham over the years. This was not one of them. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/mar/14/john-gau-obituary | Television & radio | 2024-03-14T16:34:12.000Z | Anthony Hayward | John Gau obituary | John Gau, who has died aged 83, had a 40-year career in television current affairs and documentaries that was notable for his time as a producer on Panorama, a tumultuous period as the BBC’s head of current affairs and then as a leading light in the new age of independent production heralded by the launch of Channel 4.
On Panorama from 1969 to 1973 he formed a fruitful producer-reporter partnership with Julian Pettifer. Their early programmes raised moral questions about the huge cost of the moon landings, assessed the British army’s role in Northern Ireland and, in 1973, revealed what life was really like for citizens of Ukraine, in advance of a first visit to the Soviet Union by British royals since the 1917 revolution.
The pair had previously worked together on another BBC current affairs series, 24 Hours, which Gau produced from 1965 to 1969, and Pettifer was a presenter during Gau’s tenures as deputy editor of Midweek (1973-75) and editor of Nationwide (1975-78).
Gau was at the centre of one of the BBC’s biggest political storms, when the Troubles in Northern Ireland were at their height
Later, as head of BBC television’s current affairs group (1978-81), Gau was embroiled in battles with his own bosses and various politicians. Jitters over a 1980 Panorama programme asking whether all potential transplant donors were correctly pronounced dead led Ian Trethowan, the BBC’s director-general – lobbied by transplant surgeons – to say to Gau: “I think you should pull the programme.” Gau replied: “You pull it if you want to. I think it’s a perfectly good show,” and it went ahead.
A year earlier, more seriously, Gau was at the centre of one of the BBC’s biggest political storms, when the Troubles in Northern Ireland were at their height. While making a Panorama episode examining the IRA’s history, the reporter Jeremy Paxman and producer David Darlow received a tip-off to drive to the County Tyrone village of Carrickmore, where they were able to film IRA members carrying out “road checks” on motorists – staged as a display of power.
The footage was never screened, but some newspapers accused the BBC of colluding with “the enemy” and the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, told the corporation to “put their house in order”.
Gau knew that the proposed programme had, in accordance with BBC rules on the coverage of Northern Ireland, been “referred up” the management structure to Richard Francis, the director of news and current affairs, although it emerged that the Northern Ireland controller, James Hawthorne, had not been told.
Roger Bolton, Panorama’s editor, was sacked – but reinstated after solid backing from the National Union of Journalists and Gau.
Writing to the BBC’s deputy director of television, Robin Scott, Gau had argued that the BBC he had joined in the 1960s had been “fiercely independent, journalistically courageous and steadfastly loyal to its staff” – and that “the handling of the Carrickmore incident seems to me to call these virtues into question”. Like Bolton, Gau was officially reprimanded, but held on to his job.
Setting up his own company, John Gau Productions, in 1981, Gau later enjoyed more than 20 years as an independent producer. The opportunity arose with the 1982 launch of Channel 4, which revolutionised British broadcasting by commissioning programmes rather than making its own.
His output as an executive producer or hands-on producer for the television newbie was prolific, from The Front Line (1983), on war-torn El Salvador, to The Living Body (1984-85), a 26-part examination of how humans work, to celebrations of human endurance such as On Angel’s Wings (1985), about a hang-glider flight over Venezuela’s spectacular Angel Falls, and 90 Degrees South (1987), following Monica Kristensen in the footsteps of Roald Amundsen.
The new era of commissioning independence also allowed Gau to make documentaries for his former employer, the BBC. They included Deep Into the Blue Holes (1983), a World About Us episode about an underwater expedition beneath the Bahamas, and histories of the military (Soldiers, 1985), aviation (Reaching for the Skies, 1988) and motor racing (The Power and the Glory, 1991).
The silver screen was in the spotlight for Lights, Camera, Action: A Century of Cinema (1996) on ITV, while Electric Money (2001), made for PBS in the US, charted the digital revolution’s effect on financial activities.
Gau was born in London to South African parents, Nan Munro, an actor, and her husband, William Gau, a civil engineer who died in action during the second world war. His mother then married the author Rayne Kruger, who eventually left her for the cookery writer Prue Leith.
After attending Haileybury in Hertfordshire, he studied classics and modern languages at Trinity Hall Cambridge before moving on to the University of Wisconsin, where he became involved in campus television. He joined the BBC as an assistant film editor in 1963 and within two years was a producer.
He was approached by the Labour party to produce its political broadcasts after Neil Kinnock became leader in 1983
After setting up John Gau Productions with his wife, the actor Susan Tebbs, whom he had married in 1966, he was approached by the Labour party to produce its political broadcasts after Neil Kinnock became leader in 1983.
Four years later, with the Chariots of Fire director Hugh Hudson, Gau – left-leaning privately, but impartial in his documentaries and current affairs programmes– concentrated its election broadcasts on Kinnock’s passion and affable personality, and featured the music of Brahms.
The first was dubbed Kinnock: the Movie, and boosted his approval rating, although Labour ultimately failed to beat the Tories.
From 1988 to 1990 Gau was director of programmes at British Satellite Broadcasting, before it merged with Sky. Appointed a CBE in 1989, he chaired the Independent Programme Producers Association (1983-86) and the Royal Television Society (1987-91) and was a director of Channel 4 (1984-88).
He is survived by his wife and their children, William and Chris.
John Glen Mackay Gau, television producer, born 25 March 1940; died 3 March 2024 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/sep/25/we-could-all-be-better-parents-if-only-there-was-a-rehearsal | Life and style | 2022-09-25T07:00:28.000Z | Eva Wiseman | We could all be better parents, if only there was a rehearsal | Eva Wiseman | When I was growing up, teenagers were given a bag of flour to raise as their baby. It looks odd written down. But these were the days of Tamagotchis and dolls that pissed fake urine advertised on Sunday morning telly, and sex education was largely banana-focused. The flour project was an attempt to teach kids the amount of care it takes to look after a baby, thereby potentially reducing rates of teen pregnancies. Today, American schools provide uncanny dolls instead which cry until held, and wake their pubescent parents up in the night, but back then flour would do. Sometimes it was a bag of sugar. Sometimes it was an egg. Typically the egg baby would crack within a day, sometimes an hour. The flour babies would spring a leak by lunchtime, trailing powder through the gym. The sugar would caramelise in the rain.
Even then I could see the project was flawed. Even then, when I was a closer thing to a baby myself than the bag of flour could ever hope to be, it was clear there was something lacking in the experiment, the idea that this could be a simulation of parenthood. Was it love? Was it vomit? Was it the great unknowable crisis where identities slip overnight into the sea and suddenly you will die for a literal baby? This week I was gripped by a TV show – semi-reality, semi-comedy, verging by the end on semi-horror – called The Rehearsal. The premise is this: comedian Nathan Fielder hires actors and builds elaborate sets in order to anticipate and prepare for real people’s complicated interactions. What if we had infinite chances to get it right? What if we could control our own futures?
What if we had infinite chances to get it right? What if we could control our own futures?
One of the real people is Angela, a woman who is trying to work out whether she wants to have kids. To simulate the experience of raising a child, Nathan moves her into a house in the countryside and hires dozens of child actors to take it in turns to play her son, Adam, who ages across the hours and weeks. A robot baby cries through the night. Nathan moves in, too, as co-parent, while also playing and replaying his own interactions using actors in the roles; he digs so deep into the premise that beneath it we see whole civilisations. “Every now and then, there are these glimmers,” Fielder says over footage of him playing with one of the Adams. “These moments where you forget and you just feel like a family. That’s when you know the rehearsal is working.”
It’s upsetting and strange with moments of absurdity, and at least two jokes about bums; it’s the parenting experience in six episodes. When a teenage Adam overdoses, Nathan rewinds him to six years old, to try to raise him right. This scene wasn’t the first time I felt like crying watching the show, nor the last. It offered a glimpse of two awful despairs: the first, the fact that, off-camera, nobody has the chance to play it again, and the second, the dread-filled reality of parenting.
We all try to plan for the future – we research the prams, we baby-proof the corners, we practise with eggs, and still, still, parenthood outfoxes us, in increasingly shocking and disgusting ways. I speak as a person whose parent friends are dealing with, in no particular order, their children’s sleep regression, depression, loneliness and university anxiety. In The Rehearsal’s finale, one child actor, Remy, doesn’t want to go home – he’s come to believe Nathan is his father. So Nathan starts to replay the scenes with actors, to work out what he did wrong. By the end, Nathan is playing Remy’s mum, comforting an actor playing Remy, and deconstructing the whole comic-hellish illusion piece by piece. “Maybe we shouldn’t have done that show, huh,” Nathan says, to him, as her. “It’s a weird thing for a little kid to be a part of.” It’s the first time he appears to be feeling something, connecting, breaking through, and he concludes (a mother suddenly, and a father, and an actor, and the director in control of it all), “Life’s better with surprises.” Despite watching the finale through my fingers, its combination of exploitation, therapy and detached reality destined to give me nightmares, I found myself horribly moved.
Today I baked a cake. It’s something I find myself doing now, a quiet attempt to win at parenting (cooking will not make me a good mother), along with laundry (cleanliness will not make me a good mother) and reading articles about, for example, the effect of the pandemic on child development (keeping eight parenting pieces open on my laptop will not make me a good mother, especially as I feel their eyes judging me). Pouring the sugar and the flour from their paper bags, I mourned the lack of a better system of simulating the parenting experience. A place where people really could work through the question of whether or not to have children, and then practise the day-to-day intimacy, monotony, agony, fear, before deciding to leap into a life that’s both bigger and smaller, and no longer their own. And then, no lie, I dropped the eggs.
Email Eva at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2017/oct/08/france-family-boating-holiday-le-boat-strasbourg-canals | Travel | 2017-10-08T06:00:42.000Z | Emma Cook | Smoke on the water: a boating holiday adventure in France | It’s a beast of a boat, more Puerto Banús than Canal du Rhône, satin white curves and chrome handrails gleaming in the sun.
And it’s ours for the week. This is Horizon, the shiniest and newest addition to the range by Le Boat, the canal boat specialist which offers self-drive craft along the waterways of mainland Europe, UK and Ireland.
At a little over 4m wide and 13m long, its footprint is around the same size as a small Victorian terrace, our terrace in fact, but with more en suites, a bigger outdoor area and a much newer, sparklier kitchen. So why does my husband look uneasy?
“It’s kind of … big isn’t it?” he says.
“I know, the kitchen is amazing – two fridges!”
“But how are we going to park it?”
“Just don’t reverse, we’ll be fine,” I tell him, pointing out a large rubber rim encircling the boat. “See, we’re basically a bumper car on water.”
All aboard … the good ship Horizon. Photograph: Nicolas Plessis
As a rule, we don’t do boats. There was an Isles of Scilly ferry crossing when the only upside, as waves crashed across the deck and my youngest threw up in my lap, was spotting dolphins following us through the wake. Then the fishing trip off a Greek island – more vomiting but no dolphins. Even a speedboat around a Cornish harbour left us reeling. But I want to overcome our dread of water and figure a gentle canal trip may convert us. We have six days ahead of us to wend 104km along one of France’s most picturesque canals, from Boofzheim in Alsace to Hesse, following the Canal du Rhône au Rhin and changing over in Strasbourg to the Canal de la Marne.
The water is serene, the route straight and the pace glacial. What could possibly go wrong? The next morning is an introductory lesson in how to steer and negotiate locks. The other families around us look relaxed and jolly about the journey ahead. We look like a family who have come on a boating holiday by mistake.
“We’re way out of our comfort zone,” my husband hisses, out of earshot of the boat manager. She tells us we have to grab a green pole that will dangle over the boat as we approach each lock, pull it firmly then have our ropes ready to lasso the bollards once we’re stationary. If the ropes miss we will need to leap on to the bank to tie it up and avoid drifting towards the torrent of water flowing in behind. How many times do we have to do that? “Only 33,” says the boat manager cheerfully. “You’ll have to get your eldest to help.”
‘An unexpected gem’ … Strasbourg old town. Photograph: Alamy
Our 15-year-old has yet to surface, after discovering USB sockets in his cabin and free wifi. All three of our children are still in bed when we pull out of the harbour and strike out into the unknown. The steering is tricky at first and the boat zigzags from one bank to the other. But we get the hang of it and feel absurdly pleased with ourselves – even more so now I have an authentic rope burn on my hand from the last lock change.
My six-year-old is entranced by two otters following the boat. There are moor hens, newts and dragonflies, too
The eldest has appeared, lying on deck, and my husband is an expert now – a beer in one hand, the other resting casually on the wheel.
We enjoy a baguette, brie and beer from the last village, watching the absurdly pretty scenery pass by. “Wouldn’t it be lovely living on the water like this?” we say. It’s so peaceful and quiet, and you get a sense of freedom and adventure, knowing you can moor up wherever you want along the canal bank.
I’m still seduced by the design detail below deck: seamless storage, sleek lighting, dinky bathrooms and a curvaceous master bed. It’s a floating penthouse below and a nature reserve above. My six-year-old is entranced by two otters following the boat. There are moor hens, newts and dragonflies, too. Rows of poplars fringe the water framed by golden cornfields: empty, endless and utterly silent.
Smart design … the Horizon’s well-equipped galley. Photograph: Nicolas Plessis
Then it happens. An alarm that pierces that silence like a knife. Red lights flash from every dial. “Turn the engine off!” I scream up the stairs to my husband but it cuts out anyway. I phone an emergency number and an engineer arrives. The engine is new, he explains, with no filters and it sucks up weeds until it overheats. Teething problems, he says, which shouldn’t happen again. Just a blip then. We open a bottle of Alsace, laughing already about the dramatic highlights: white smoke billowing from the engine, my husband dragging it through the mud and reeds African Queen style.
Joy comes in the form of Strasbourg marina: we eat picnic lunches on deck and enjoy day trips into town by tram
We sit on deck, miles from the nearest village, playing cards as the light fades, and looking forward to an early start behind the wheel. But the next day the same thing happens and much of our time is spent waiting for an engineer to appear. “But it’s a new boat,” says a woman at reception when I call the second time. “So was the Titanic,” I want to say, ground down by the inevitability of it all.
The third breakdown is on a drab stretch on the outskirts of Strasbourg where I watch schoolboys throw stones at floating cans as it starts to rain. Heavily. My children are restless and bored below deck, what happened to the otters? No amount of Gerwürztraminer will lighten this moment, I think.
Dining out … Place de la Cathédrale in Strasbourg. Photograph: Alamy
But eventually joy does come in the form of Strasbourg marina; when the boat is fixed, we moor up there for the final three days. It is close to town and it serves as a handy floating hotel. We eat picnic lunches on deck and enjoy day trips into town by tram. Strasbourg is an unexpected gem, compact and easy to navigate, with plenty to see. There is a striking Gothic cathedral and La Petite France, the old heart of the city, is a Germanic-looking Venice with wood-timbered houses and medieval waterways which we are only too happy to admire from a distance.
Then there are the winstubs (wine bars) and restaurants serving frothy beer and specialities like delicious handmade Alsatian pasta in a cream and mushroom sauce.
The second half of the holiday isn’t exactly what we’d planned but it is lovely; so when Le Boat offers us a brand new model to complete our canal journey, we decline. There were some idyllic moments but it’s a sign, I decide. No more leaving our comfort zone; we’re happiest on dry land and that’s where we are going to stay.
Way to go
The trip was provided by Le Boat. Sail from Boofzheim to Hesse via Strasbourg on the Arzviller Experience. A seven-night self-catered stay for five costs from £725 a boat or £1,436 on the Horizon. British Airways flies from Heathrow to Stuttgart (closest to Boofzheim) from £47 each way | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/marketforceslive/2014/nov/07/rentokil-initial-drops-4-on-european-slowdown | Business | 2014-11-07T10:57:03.000Z | Nick Fletcher | Rentokil Initial drops 4% on European slowdown | Rentokil Initial has dropped nearly 4% after it warned a slowdown in Europe was affecting its performance.
The pest control and workwear group has reported a 15.4% rise in underlying third quarter profits to £53.5m. It saw growth in north America, the Pacific region and Germany, but lower profits in Benelux and slower growth in France. The continuing strength of sterling also had an impact, and it expected to cost £17m in the full year. Chief executive Andy Ransom said:
Challenging conditions persist in our European businesses, impacting our hygiene and workwear categories.
He added that the fourth quarter was likely to be in line with the previous three months. It bought five businesses in the quarter, making a total of 22 so far this year.
The company’s share are down 4.5p or nearly 4% at 117.6p, and Peel Hunt analyst Christopher Bamberry said:
The third quarter was in line, with pretax profit up 6% (up 15% at constant exchange rates). However, 2014 pre-tax forecasts have been cut by 4% to reflect the deteriorating European economic environment and a slower than anticipated turnaround in Benelux. Overall the group is on the path to becoming a better business. However, in our opinion this is reflected in the valuation (15.7 times 2014 estimated earnings per share), and for the shares to progress it will require Rentokil to demonstrate that the new strategy can successfully deliver accelerated organic growth (and this will be a challenge given the deteriorating economic backdrop in Europe) ... and that it can successfully execute its M&A plans . | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/30/britons-brexit-bad-uk-poll-eu-finances-nhs | Politics | 2023-12-30T16:18:35.000Z | Toby Helm | Brexit has completely failed for UK, say clear majority of Britons – poll | A clear majority of the British public now believes Brexit has been bad for the UK economy, has driven up prices in shops, and has hampered government attempts to control immigration, according to a poll by Opinium to mark the third anniversary of the UK leaving the EU single market and customs union.
The survey of more than 2,000 UK voters also finds strikingly low numbers of people who believe that Brexit has benefited them or the country.
Just one in 10 believe leaving the EU has helped their personal financial situation, against 35% who say it has been bad for their finances, while just 9% say it has been good for the NHS, against 47% who say it has had a negative effect.
Ominously for prime minister Rishi Sunak, who backed Brexit and claimed it would be economically beneficial, only 7% of people think it has helped keep down prices in UK shops, against 63% who think Brexit has been a factor in fuelling inflation and the cost of living crisis.
The poll suggests that seven and a half years on from the referendum the British public now regards Brexit as a failure. Just 22% of voters believe it has been good for the UK in general.
The Vote Leave campaign led by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove had promised that Brexit would boost the economy and trade, as well as bring back £350m a week into the NHS and allow the government to take back control of the UK’s borders.
James Crouch, head of policy and public affairs at Opinium, said the perception of Brexit being handled badly and having had negative effects on various aspect of UK life appeared to be spreading: “Public discontent at how Brexit has been handled by the government continues, with perceived failings even in areas previously seen as a potential benefit from leaving the EU.
“More than half (53%) of leave voters now think that Brexit has been bad for the UK’s ability to control immigration, piling even more pressure on an issue the government is vulnerable on. Despite this, Brexit is likely to be a secondary issue at the next election compared to the state of the economy and the NHS, which are the clear priority for voters.”
Boris Johnson, the then prime minister, speaking at a press conference in 2019 about his party’s plans to solve the impasse on Brexit. Photograph: Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images
Robert Ford, professor of political science at Manchester University, said that while there was now evidence that negative perceptions of Brexit, particularly on the economy, could have an effect on votes at a general election, Brexit was very unlikely to play such a direct role as it did at the last two general elections.
Ford said: “Voters’ attention has shifted decisively elsewhere, with leave and remain voters alike focused on the domestic agenda of rising bills, struggling public services and weak economic growth.
“The appeal of ‘Get Brexit Done’ was not just about completing the long Brexit process but also about unblocking the political system and delivering on other long-neglected issues. Brexit got done, but this has not unblocked the political system, and troubles elsewhere have only deepened. Many of the voters who backed the Conservatives to deliver change now look convinced that achieving change requires ejecting the Conservatives.
“This shift in sentiment may be particularly stark among the ‘red wall’ voters who rallied most eagerly to Johnson’s banner four years ago, but have been most exposed to rising bills and collapsing public services since. The final act of Brexit may yet be the collapse of the Brexit electoral coalition.”
One of the key claims of the Brexiters was that leaving the EU’s single market and customs union would usher in a new era of global trade for the UK based on trade deals with other parts of the world. Many voters now seem to have concluded that Brexit has in fact been bad for trade. Some 49% think it has been bad for the ability of UK firms to import goods from outside the EU, while 15% think it has helped. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/oct/25/free-schools-revolt | Education | 2010-10-25T21:10:51.000Z | Jeevan Vasagar | Councils revolt against free schools | ‑A flagship government policy has provoked a grassroots revolt against the coalition, with senior Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillors lining up to attack the introduction of free schools, one of education secretary Michael Gove's most cherished projects.
Gove believes that a new generation of "independent state schools" with small classes and firm discipline will reduce inequality in England's education system. The schools are led by parents or teachers, and 16 have been given initial approval to open next September.
Coalition councillors are fighting the education secretary's plans, claiming that they threaten to wreck social harmony by creating ethnic or religious enclaves and will disrupt efforts to improve the lives of all children.
Cllr Les Lawrence, the Conservative cabinet member for children's services in Birmingham, said the proposed schools were "deeply worrying" because they threatened a consensus "whereby all faiths are taught in schools [in religious education lessons], irrespective of the primary faith".
A Sikh faith-based school was keen to co-operate with the council, but other free school campaigners had caused concern, he said. "Some of the individuals that are involved have set out to denigrate other schools. The city council has raised concerns about community cohesion. It is an exclusive, not an inclusive type of education that they would provide, not the kind of comprehensive ethos we have developed in this city."
Tory-led Bromley council says a local free school proposal will waste money and harm other schools by creating needless extra places.
The schools provider behind the Bromley proposal, the Harris Federation, which operates a chain of academies in south London, was invited to speak ahead of Gove at this year's Tory party conference, where their chief executive highlighted the planned new school and attacked the "bureaucracy and interference" of councils. This year, schools in the Harris Federation saw striking improvements in their GCSE results.
Gillian Pearson, director of children and young people's services for Bromley, said: "We're not saying there shouldn't be one on our patch, but where's the business case for building a free school that really isn't needed?"
But Fiona Murphy, a mother of three who has led a campaign to bring Harris to Beckenham, said the plan was a response to a poorly performing local comprehensive, Kelsey Park. She said: "The council can stop it in terms of Harris taking over Kelsey Park. They can't stop the free school application at all. All Harris want to do is improve chances, free the teachers there, free the kids there, get the school oversubscribed rather than undersubscribed." You just need to look at the results – it's a fantastic opportunity for Beckenham.
"It's a key Conservative manifesto policy, and we've got a Conservative council blocking it," she added. "All this is about is politics from start to finish. No one's thinking about what's best for children."
Other free schools have come under fire from Liberal Democrats, who are campaigning against a parent-led school planned in Birkenshaw, West Yorkshire, claiming that the school's catchment area will be set to exclude a neighbouring town with a substantial Asian population. During the election, Gove and David Cameron attended a rally in support of the Yorkshire campaigners.
Kath Pinnock, leader of the Lib Dem group on Kirklees council, said: "[Free schools] can draw their own catchment areas. This is quite a diverse area, but it is diverse in pockets. This new school is in a more or less 100% white area. Less than half a mile down the road is the town of Batley, where 50% of the population are of British Asian [origin]."
She says small free schools are not sustainable in urban areas because they struggle to attract specialist teachers, who prefer bigger schools where there is greater opportunity for promotion. "We might be in a coalition with Conservatives in central government, but our party does not support free schools, and we are therefore able to campaign against it," she said.
The Harris Federation insisted it had good relationships with all the local authorities where their academies are based. Chief executive Dan Moynihan said: "As educators, the schooling we provide is our number-one priority, and this is what counts for parents too. Bromley council may call us an island, but parents in their borough see us as a safe shore."
A government source said: "Where local schools are failing pupils, where there is parental demand for change and where there is a clear need for new school places, we will do everything we can to support high-quality free school proposals." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jul/08/carney-should-heed-employment-experts-before-rate-decision | Business | 2018-07-08T10:09:37.000Z | Larry Elliott | Carney should heed employment experts before rate decision | Larry Elliott | The message from the Bank of England has been clear: get ready for an August increase in interest rates. Modestly higher official borrowing costs are needed to prevent the economy from overheating.
This, of course, is exactly what Threadneedle Street was saying three months ago. Back then it had convinced the City that a May rate increase was pretty much a done deal but then got cold feet as weak economic data from the first three months of 2018 poured in.
Bank of England expert: World Cup feelgood factor backs case for rate rise
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The U-turn damaged the Bank’s credibility, which explains why the recent hawkish noises emerging from Mark Carney and some of the other eight members of the monetary policy committee have been largely ignored by the markets.
The argument for a rate rise goes like this. For almost a decade the Bank has been providing colossal stimulus to the economy. Interest rates have never been lower and the boost from cheap borrowing has been supplemented by quantitative easing (increasing the money supply by any other name).
This was needed because the deep recession of a decade meant there was oodles of unused capacity in the economy that would not have been put to work without the monetary stimulus. But that spare capacity has pretty much been used up and, as a result, there is a risk that inflation will start to rise unless policy is tightened.
When it shelved plans for a rate rise in May, the Bank judged that the weakness of the economy in the first quarter was exaggerated by weather-related disruption and predicted that growth would rebound. This does appear to be the case. Growth in the first quarter has been revised up slightly (from 0.1% to 0.2%) and, on the basis of survey evidence, appears to be on course for 0.4% in the second quarter.
However, the Bank also said it expected inflationary pressures to build in the labour market because the lowest unemployment rate for more than four decades would force employers to pay more in order to recruit and retain workers. Here the Bank is on shakier ground.
Without question, the current unemployment rate – 4.2% – suggests that wage pressures should be rising but the hard data doesn’t show they are. Total pay – regular pay and bonuses combined – was 2.5% higher in the three months to April than in the same period a year earlier. That was down from 2.6% in March and 2.8% in February.
Central banks, including the Bank of England, base their judgment that inflationary pressure is building in the labour market on the relationship between earnings and unemployment first developed in the 1950s by Bill Phillips. The traditional Phillips curve showed that as unemployment came down, workers found it easier to negotiate higher pay deals. When joblessness went up, workers reined in their demands. Unemployment is at its lowest since 1975, so earnings growth should be picking up. If it isn’t there can only be two realistic explanations: the inflationary surge will eventually happen and has simply been delayed; or there is more slack in the labour market than the headline unemployment rate would suggest.
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The Bank goes for the former explanation: two of the world’s leading labour market experts – David Blanchflower and David Bell – believe the latter. In two forthcoming papers, the pair say that traditional Phillips curve models need recalibrating to take account of underemployment (people who would work longer hours if they could) as well as employment. It is significant, they say, that when the labour market was strong before the Great Recession, the underemployment rate was lower than the unemployment rate. Today, it is higher, which has had both social and economic consequences. Underemployment has led to a marked increase in depression among those desperate to work longer. It has also kept the lid on wage inflation because if employers need more labour all they need to do is ask employees who want extra hours to work longer at existing pay rates. An unemployment rate taking underemployment rate into account would be 7.7% rather than 4.2%.
In addition, the pair say that workers are frightened in a way they weren’t before the Great Recession and have less bargaining power than they once did. The Bank is gearing up to raise interest rates because it thinks unemployment is poised to fall below the level at which it will start to generate inflationary pressure (usually called the natural rate or the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment). However, Blanchflower and Bell assert that the natural rate or the NAIRU is actually a lot lower than the Bank believes.
They say:
“It is our contention that the natural rate of unemployment in most advanced countries is well below 4% and perhaps even below 3%.
Employment rates and participation rates can rise, and unemployment rates can fall and by a lot. Globalisation has weakened workers’ bargaining power. Migrant flows may have put downward pressure on wages and greased the wheels of the labour market as their presence increased mobility. The decline in the home ownership, which slows job creation and increases unemployment, has helped mobility and lowered the natural rate.”
Of course, it is possible that the hawks on the MPC are right and that Blanchflower and Bell are wrong. Sooner or later, wage inflation will inevitably pick up if unemployment continues to fall. But it is worth saying that the Bank has been consistently wrong about the labour market while Blanchflower and Bell have been consistently right. Carney needs to be careful not to go down in history as central banking’s version of the boy who cried wolf. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/jun/10/nick-offerman-standup-tour-interview | Culture | 2023-06-10T10:55:20.000Z | Fiona Sturges | Nick Offerman: ‘I was told I’d never not be Ron Swanson’ | At the weekends, Nick Offerman likes nothing more than to sit at home with his wife, Will and Grace’s Megan Mullally, doing puzzles while listening to an audiobook – “Which, by the way, is a huge life hack,” he says enthusiastically. “Those two activities use different parts of your brain and allow you to really lock into each of them.”
One day, Mullally had a brainwave: the pair should dress up and recreate the picture on the puzzle they had just finished, complete with cameos from their dogs. “So we would finish doing a Sunday of this activity and then Megan would say: ‘OK, great, now come up with me to my closet so I can dress us up,’” Offerman continues. “And of course, like a whiny kid, I was like: ‘Can we please get this over with?’ In hindsight, those pictures may end up being the greatest work we’ve ever done.”
A selection of these photos – which see them variously decked out as the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, fairytale maidens, cherubim and assorted big cats – can be viewed in their joint 2018 book, The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, in which they winningly share the details of their domestic life. Over the years, Offerman and Mullally have delighted in subverting the notion of the showbiz couple via means of copious oversharing. It started when Mullally – who, after 20 years of marriage, Offerman still refers to as “my bride” – turned up in an episode of Parks and Recreation, the beloved comedy in which Offerman played the moustachioed public servant, staunch libertarian and all-round fan favourite Ron Swanson (the show’s co-creator Michael Schur called Swanson “our cast MVP”).
‘Like winning the lottery’ … Offerman with Amy Poehler in Parks and Recreation. Photograph: NBC/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images
Mullally was cast as Swanson’s ex-wife, Tammy, with whom Ron has a lust/hate relationship. An early scene saw them breaking the furniture while kissing in a diner before hightailing it to a nearby motel, shedding clothes as they went. As Offerman tells it, “the fanbase began to absolutely shit themselves … It was all very over the top given we are just a couple of expectorating human beings who happen to have gotten some lucky acting jobs. We are maintaining a relationship, like anybody.”
Offerman – whose recent roles have included the real-life porn producer Milton Ingley in Pam and Tommy; the American football quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s adoptive dad in fictionalised drama series Colin in Black and White; and a lonely prepper in HBO’s zombie series The Last Of Us – is talking to me from the guest room of his and Mullally’s home in Los Angeles. Wearing black-rimmed specs and sporting Lemmy-style mutton chops, he has the rugged, outdoorsy look of a man who, given an axe, would make light work of a pile of logs. Which is fitting, since, when he’s not acting or writing books (he has published five, with a sixth in the works), or at home doing jigsaws, Offerman can be found – also like Ron Swanson – at his wood shop, a business in LA that he launched in 2001 when he was still a struggling actor, and where he now has four employees producing everything from dining tables and shelving units to handcrafted canoes.
He tries to visit a few times a month “to do problem-solving and offer my two cents on the designs that are going out the door. I do miss it terribly; it’s like getting home to a family you hardly see. Everywhere you look, there’s somebody you want to hug or there’s a project calling out your name. But, after a couple of days, Dad’s got to head back out on the road.”
I was afforded an easy step up into standup because of Parks and Rec. I’m a spoilt baby
On the road is where he’s headed next: having just wrapped filming on the fourth series of superhero drama The Umbrella Academy, in which he and Mullally play married college professors, he is putting the finishing touches to his one-man show, which comes to the UK this month. Offerman came late to standup. After the success of Parks and Recreation, universities would ask him to perform and he kept turning them down: “I told them I was a theatre actor, that I perform works of literature on stage.”
But the invitations kept coming, including one from Ohio State University. When Offerman asked how many students would attend, he was told 2,000. “And so I thought: ‘OK, there are some things I would love to tell 2,000 young people.’ My agent was also telling me: ‘Look, they pay great and they don’t care if you’re a comedian or not.’ That was around 12 years ago. I mean, I was afforded an easy step up because of Parks and Rec. I am a spoilt baby who was able to leap past the ‘paying of dues’ stage. Now when I walk on stage and say ‘Good evening’, everyone laughs like they’re somehow already on board.”
Cheer up, petal … Nick Offerman Photograph: Joe Carrotta
Audiences at his touring show can expect a mixture of songs and wry commentary: “I do my best to take whatever is annoying me in the news, or in general with people’s lack of comportment. One of my first songs, for instance, was suggesting that we all carry a handkerchief.” Offerman’s description makes it sound sweet and innocent; in fact, like a lot of his songs, it gets very dirty very quickly.
While he is in the UK, Offerman also hopes to head north to Cumbria to visit his beloved Belted Galloways, or “belties” as he calls them. These are black cattle identifiable by the fat white stripes around their middles that he, rather improbably, co-owns with the English farmer and A Shepherd’s Life author James Rebanks.
Offerman and Rebanks met on Twitter, where they bonded over their love of all things agrarian. A friendship was struck and Rebanks invited Offerman to visit him next time he was here. By chance, Offerman had just been cast in sci-fi series Devs, part of which was filmed in Manchester. And so he became a weekend guest at Rebanks’ farm (his escapes there, and to assorted rural locations in the US, are detailed in his 2021 book, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play). On arriving, Offerman rolled up his sleeves and asked Rebanks to put him to work. “James told me: ‘You’re like the fool that Tom Sawyer tricks into painting his fence.’ [But] when he said: ‘You want to go help me repair a stack stone wall? I was like: ‘Yes, this is my Disneyland.’”
The actor’s enthusiasm for the outdoor life goes back to his childhood in Minooka, Illinois, as a member of “a salt-of-the-earth midwestern family”. His mother was a nurse, and his father a high school teacher, and his grandparents on his mother’s side were farmers. They, along with the books of Kentucky author and environmentalist Wendell Berry, helped instil in Offerman a deep reverence for nature and a sustainable way of living.
All my family are teachers and librarians. My dad is mayor of our town. I’m the dancing jackass
“We as a society don’t pay attention,” Offerman tells me. “We have been completely blinded by consumerism and modern capitalism to not care about where our goods come from. Once I read Berry, and also Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma [about the impact of our food choices], the toothpaste was out of the tube. I have never been able to let go of it.” The Offermans still live in Minooka; he reckons around 40 members of his family live within an eight-mile radius. “Megan and I are the only ones who don’t live right in the nucleus. They’re all teachers and librarians. My dad is the mayor of our little town. Meanwhile, I am the dancing jackass.”
His parents were initially nonplussed by his desire to act: “It was bizarre to them. I grew up in the 70s and 80s in a cultural vacuum. Nobody in our town had ever gone into the arts. So when I said: ‘I think I want to be an actor’, everybody kind of shook their head and said, ‘I don’t think you can get there from here.’” With no funds to go to New York or Los Angeles, he instead went to Chicago, an hour away from home, where he joined a drama programme at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and found a flourishing theatre scene.
Thanks to his father, who had raised his son to be an able carpenter, Offerman was able to stay afloat financially by building scenery in between whatever acting roles came his way. At 25 “something clicked” and the stage roles started to get bigger: he won a theatre award for Robert Schenkkan’s seven-hour play called The Kentucky Cycle. In 1997, he moved to Los Angeles on the assumption he would be able to continue his ascent, but instead spent a couple of years “flailing, realising my theatre résumé was worthless to the people I was meeting in film studios and television networks”. But Offerman was stubborn and, he says, “willing to live in poverty until things kicked in”. Eventually, he got an agent and the work – including small parts in ER, The West Wing and Gilmore Girls – started to trickle in.
Then came Parks and Recreation, which ran from 2009 to 2015 and changed everything. I imagined Offerman would be heartily sick of discussing it, but he shakes his head. “It was like winning the lottery, except there was creativity involved,” he smiles. The series was not the instant runaway hit many assume it was. “We were on the cusp of being cancelled every year and we were very grateful to be able to survive for 125 episodes,” Offerman says. “Then when streaming came on the scene, it became one of these comfort shows, and the popularity grew exponentially.”
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“Like making a Sundance movie’ … Offerman opposite Murray Bartlett in a standalone story for The Last of Us. Photograph: Warner Media/2023 Home Box Office, Inc
He remains fiercely proud of Parks and Recreation, although being in a hugely successful sitcom has its drawbacks. For his comedy tour American Ham (recorded for a 2014 Netflix comedy special), he wrote the song “I Am Not Ron Swanson” in which he bemoaned being mistaken for his most famous character (sample lyric: “He can eat a big-ass steak for every single meal / Because his colon is fictitious while mine is all too real”).
In some ways, you can understand the confusion: both men play saxophone, enjoy woodwork and have a manly gruffness about them. Offerman sighs. “I’ve argued with fans over whether or not I am actually Ron Swanson and, pretty quickly, I was like: ‘OK, I’ve been a part of this narrative that is a medicinal part of their escapism, and I don’t want to diminish that.’”
But some comments stick in the craw. He recalls a young woman tweeting: “I saw Nick Offerman without his moustache. I vomited and died.” “And that’s sort of the root of it,” he says. “People don’t want to allow [you] to play Atticus Finch, or Polonius. They’re like: ‘No, no, you’re Ron Swanson.’ So even when I got some attention, earlier this year, for an episode of The Last of Us, there was a portion of people obstinately saying: ‘No, that’s still Ron. It’s prepper Ron. It’s gay Ron. You’ll never not be Ron.’”
I just keep listening to my gut. The worst-case scenario? I’ll have some time off and get to build another canoe
Ah, yes, The Last of Us. When Offerman says he got “some attention”, he is being modest. The series, about a middle-aged man and a 14-year-old girl travelling across America during a zombie apocalypse, was already a hit before he pitched up in the third episode. But this was different, a standalone story about Bill (Offerman), a Massachusetts survivalist with a well-stocked armoury who catches Frank (Murray Bartlett) in a trap in his property. Bill grudgingly allows him to stay for dinner, and what is meant to be a passing visit turns into a wonderfully poignant 20-year romance. The New York Times called the episode “frankly remarkable … It’s as though the opening montage from the movie Up were extended to about 45 minutes and then dropped in the middle of World War Z.”
When Offerman read the script, he “knew it was going to be trouble”, by which he means he knew he had to do it. “There was nothing to do but to ask Megan to read it. Because my options were either to say: ‘Honey, I just read a very good script that’s going to screw up the calendar for a month’, or say, ‘Will you please read this and let me know what you think?’ She read it and said: ‘Sorry buddy, you’re going to Calgary to shoot this show.’”
How we made Parks and Recreation, by Amy Poehler, Nick Offerman and Mike Schur
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Making it was, he says, “like making a Sundance movie. It was treated by the entire production [crew] like the exquisite hit that it became.” Though Offerman isn’t one to worry about ratings, or what critics make of his shows, he was nonetheless “quite taken aback at the Game of Thrones-level tsunami of approbation. Megan said she was going to start calling me ‘Episode Three Offerman’.”
Presumably, he must now have casting directors beating his door down. Not exactly, says Offerman. “I’m not choosing from a raft of scripts and saying: ‘Should I play this Marvel hero? Should I be the next Bond?’ Or should I do this character role?’”
When considering their next roles, he and Mullally try to go where the good writing is and “go with our gut. We also have a No-Assholes policy, wherever we can manage it.” In rare moments of professional discontent, Offerman makes a point to “stop and think and look at the bigger picture. I mean, I thought my life had peaked when I became Mr Megan Mullally, I had a wood shop and I was getting guest-star jobs on ER and The West Wing. So I just keep listening to my gut. The worst-case scenario? I’ll have some time off and get to build another canoe.”
Nick Offerman tours the UK and Ireland from 26 June to 4 July, starting at Vicar Street, Dublin. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/14/mental-illness-breakdown-david-harewood | Opinion | 2019-05-14T05:00:24.000Z | David Harewood | I thought I knew about my mental illness. But the truth shocked me | David Harewood | It’s been nearly two years since I tweeted that when I was in my early 20s, I had a breakdown and was sectioned. I didn’t know it at the time, but that early morning post would have a profound effect on me, and challenge me to re-evaluate just about every area and aspect of my life. I expanded on the tweet in a piece I wrote for the Guardian about my experiences, and was actually pleased that I’d finally told the story publicly, as I’d wanted to do for a long time.
Psychosis affects roughly one in 100 people every year, and each case is different
But shortly after the article was printed I heard through the grapevine that a good friend, who had spent time with me at the time of my breakdown, had read the article and remarked: “That’s not how I remember it.” Hmm … I thought. Was it possible that I had somehow been mistaken? Had my recollection of events faded over the years? I needed to find out.
I made a call to a producer friend and pitched him an idea: “Why don’t I do a documentary in which I find out what happened to me 30 years ago when I lost my mind?” “Great idea!” came the reply. “Let me make some calls.” By complete coincidence, at the same time the BBC was thinking about a season of mental health programmes, and after some wrangling a deal was done.
However, the filming did not go as I’d planned. This was without doubt the most difficult thing I’d ever done, and at times during the shoot I actually thought history might be repeating itself. I found myself under intense pressure as the reality of what had “actually” happened to me came flooding back, while at the same time I was doing my jaunty professional best to present a television programme.
Some people say it’s never a good idea to rake up difficult or emotional moments from the past, yet here I was with a camera pointed at me, face to face with the facts of my own breakdown. After 30 years I was finally confronted with the truth. Gazing down at my medical records, stored on microfilm by the Whittington psychiatric hospital in north London, I got my first glimpse of the truly disturbed mind of my young psychotic self.
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Everything I’d said while sectioned in hospital had been written down; every drug I’d been administered had been recorded; it was my breakdown in black and white, and it wasn’t pretty to look at. Psychosis affects roughly one in 100 people every year, and each case is different. You will believe things that aren’t real, and possibly hear or see things that aren’t there, all the while getting further and further from reality. Thoughts become disordered and the excessive dopamine racing around your brain can give you a euphoric sense of your own capabilities, keeping you awake for hours and making sleep and rest seem boring and unnecessary.
As I slowly settled into this new realisation I began to ask questions, and the amazing professionals I met during filming began to give me answers. Suddenly things unexplained for three decades were laid bare, and I realised it wasn’t that I’d been mistaken in my recollection of the past; it was that I’d buried the painful memories of the distress and trauma my younger self was experiencing so deep that I would never find them … and now I had.
It was an uncomfortable couple of days. But my head cleared, and at a drop-in centre in Birmingham, I took inspiration from the youngsters I met, all of whom were recovering from psychosis and were on the long, slow path towards putting themselves back together again. They were at first wary of me: “You can’t understand unless you’ve experienced it,” came a voice to my right. “Well … I know because it happened to me,” I answered. Suddenly I was no longer the bloke off the telly; I was one of them, and we began to open up to each other.
I’d never met anybody who’d gone through what I had: 30 years ago support groups like this didn’t exist. Sitting in on the class that day was a turning point for me and, as I gazed at the slides and diagrams being projected on to the classroom walls, I realised I’d never once been given this information. Three decades ago I was handed a bottle of pills and told to “keep taking the tablets”, but here I was being educated on the chemical and biological reasons why psychosis occurs – and it was a revelation, as I hope all the films in this mental health season will be for people unfamiliar with the realities of mental illness.
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I began to investigate why I’d had my breakdown, and my understanding was further expanded when I found out that black men in Britain are 10 times more likely than white men to be diagnosed with a psychotic illness, and four times more likely to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Young black men are one of the most overrepresented ethnic minority groups in inpatient mental health services. The reasons are complex, but discrimination and cultural differences do play a role. Personally speaking, I simply wasn’t prepared for a world full of sharp objects: as an actor not black enough for some and a novelty elsewhere I found myself lost, unable to set my own course, spiralling out of control and hitting the rocks only two years out of the safe harbour of drama school. Perhaps not the best way to start a career, but in a sense I’m glad I got all the shit out of the way early!
I’m extremely lucky to have got through my psychotic breakdown, and the term “post-traumatic growth” seems apt when I think of where I am today. It has deepened my understanding of myself, and certainly made me far more robust than I was as a younger man.
I’m proud to have made this film alongside the other contributors, each in our own way shining a light on a subject that has for far too long remained in the shadows and been shunned for fear of shame. Mental illness attacks indiscriminately, no matter your age, race or creed. The more we talk about it, the better – dragging it into the light can only deepen our understanding, and maybe even save a life or two.
David Harewood is an actor. Psychosis and Me will be broadcast on BBC2 at 9pm on 16 May
Mental Health Awareness Week 2019, hosted by Mental Health Foundation, takes place from Monday 13 to Sunday 19 May
Contacts
Mind, 0300 123 3393
Rethink Mental Illness, 0300 5000 927
SANE, 0300 304 7000 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/dec/16/brexit-institute-for-free-trade-dispute-name-companies-house | Politics | 2017-12-16T21:30:12.000Z | Michael Savage | Brexit thinktank in dispute over use of ‘institute’ in title | A hard Brexit-supporting thinktank faces being forced to change its name or pay a fine after describing itself as an “institute” without permission.
Use of the title is protected by law and reserved for established organisations “that typically undertake research at the highest level, or are professional bodies of the highest standing”. It can be used only after permission has been granted by Companies House and Greg Clark, the business secretary.
However, it has emerged that the Institute for Free Trade (IFT), which has already become the thinktank of choice for some leading Brexiters, is facing an inquiry by Companies House after adopting the term without permission. The development is an embarrassment for Daniel Hannan, the Tory Eurosceptic MEP who set up the organisation. Hannan has advocated a Singapore-style Brexit, with the UK becoming a low-tax, low-regulation country to attract more business.
The IFT had already attracted controversy after Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, allowed its launch event to take place in the Foreign Office. Besides Johnson, the public meeting took place in the FCO’s Map Room. Guests included leading cabinet Brexiters Michael Gove and Liam Fox.
The registered name for the IFT avoids the word “institute”; instead the organisation calls itself the Initiative for International Trade Ltd. Companies House said any company that was trading under the title needed permission. It said it was aware of the IFT’s use of the term and would be contacting the company.
“It is an offence to use a sensitive word set out in regulations in a business name without the prior approval of the secretary of state,” a spokeswoman said. “The offence is committed by the company and every officer of the company. The person(s) guilty of an offence is liable to a fine.”
Hannan was contacted for comment on Friday, but had not responded at the time of publication.
Chris Bryant, a Labour MP and supporter of the pro-Remain Open Britain group, said: “Hannan, Johnson and all those involved in the IFT have some very serious questions to answer. The word ‘institute’ is rightly reserved for the use of serious organisations of long standing – not some tinpot hard Brexit thinktank that has only been active for a few months. Using the word in breach of the rules shows utter disrespect for the many institutes in our country that conduct thoughtful public policy research.”
A spokeswoman for the IFT said: “Established as a not-for-profit earlier in the year, the IFT now has a registered office and permanent staff, and is taking advice from Companies House regarding the trading name of IFT.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/jul/28/barack-obama-documentary-series-hbo-black-camelot | Television & radio | 2021-07-28T14:48:30.000Z | David Smith | ‘This was Black Camelot’: looking back on Obama’s journey to the top | The date was 10 February 2007 and the air was cold. Barack Obama, a US senator without deep political experience, stood before the old state capitol in Springfield, Illinois, where Abraham Lincoln began his career, and announced his daring candidacy for president of the United States.
But on that same day, a State of the Black Union conference was taking place in Virginia. Al Sharpton, a civil rights leader and former presidential candidate, told the gathering: “I wish Obama had announced here ’cos Lincoln did not free us. The abolitionist movement freed us. We’ve got to quit giving the wrong people credit for our history.”
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The audience erupted. It was an early glimpse of the endlessly complicated path between identity politics and respectability politics that Obama would navigate as a Black politician in America. That journey is charted in Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union, a compelling three-part documentary directed by Peter Kunhardt and showing on HBO from Tuesday.
Obama’s presidency feels both like yesterday and like a lifetime ago. With hindsight, he appears even more of a one-off than he did back then, and not just because of his unusual name. Turning 60 on 4 August, he is 15 years younger than predecessors Bill Clinton and George W Bush and 18 years younger than successor Joe Biden.
He is always called the first Black president rather than the first biracial or mixed race president. His father was from Kenya and absent from his upbringing; his mother was from Kansas. He was born and raised in Hawaii and but also spent formative years in Indonesia. He studied in Los Angeles, New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, before settling in Chicago.
Part one of the documentary explores how these experiences shaped Obama’s character and worldview, giving him the sensibility of an outsider and ability to make connections, bridge misunderstandings and walk in someone else’s shoes. He also credits his mother for the gift of empathy (a trait notably present in Biden and absent in Trump).
This background made him a different political proposition, able to make the claim that he could hold together the different strands of American life. He said in an interview early in his candidacy: “I am rooted in the African American community but I’m not defined by it. I am comfortable in my racial identity but that’s not all I am.”
Jelani Cobb, an author and academic and contributor to the film, says in a phone interview: “Obama had this kind of kaleidoscope effect where people could look at him and see all sorts of different things. A person from the south side of Chicago could look at him and see another Black person like themselves.
“A person from an Ivy League school could look at him and see someone like themselves. A person who considers themselves intellectual and above the fray of typical partisan politics and see someone who did not want to be mired in what we thought was the old type of politics. So he had that incredible surface area to his benefit.”
But there was always a tightrope to walk. Obama exploded on to the national political stage at the 2004 Democratic convention with a speech that now seems to have an inverted prescience about the nation’s divisions. “Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes,” he said.
“Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a Black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”
Cobb, who like many others first came across Obama that night, recalls: “This idealism that didn’t really square with reality, most notably when he said there’s not a Black America or white America or Latino America, there’s the United States of America, which is patently untrue. Obviously, that was untrue but the way in which it was untrue was more interesting than the veracity of it.
“What he was doing was speaking aspirationally, even though everyone in that auditorium knew that there was a Black America and a white America and a Latino America and all these various people whose relationship to the country is mediated by their identity. They very much aspire to a day when those things would not be the case. He was articulating a vision which I thought made him a really intriguing figure.”
President Barack Obama in the Oval Office on his first day in office. Photograph: Pete Souza / HBO
Then came the 2008 Democratic primary campaign against Hillary Clinton. The film features a rare interview with Obama’s firebrand pastor, the Rev Jeremiah Wright, who recalls his bewilderment at being sidelined from the announcement in Springfield because he could be “over the top sometimes” and might upset white voters in Iowa.
Obama’s embrace of Lincoln fit a mainstream narrative of American history. Some Black commentators understood the political calculation to avoid alienating white voters. Others were wary of what they saw as an example of white saviour complex.
Academic Michael Eric Dyson tells the film-makers: “Black leaders were kind of resentful because he kind of did an end run around Black leadership. Most Black people who rise in Black communities have to come through and kiss the ring of the Black political dignitaries and potentates. Obama leapfrogged over them.”
But as Obama’s candidacy gathered momentum, Black leaders could see the people were moving towards him. Dyson adds: “Black people are practical. We’re no longer interested in symbolic politics, run as a reaction to white supremacy, run as a candidate who will protest. No, we want real people who are able to really win.”
The film is haunted by the words “not Black enough”, as some had asked whether the mixed-race Obama, not a descendant of enslaved people, was an “authentic” member of the African American community. Obama deftly noted at the time that, when walking on the south side of Chicago, it was not a question he got asked much.
The film highlights an illustrative moment on the campaign trail in South Carolina. Cobb explains by phone: “He makes fun of a guy’s shoes at a barbershop, which is a Black male cultural stronghold. He knew he was fluent in the language of the barbershop, You’re going to joshingly talk about this guy’s shoes, you’re easy in your own skin. For people who had questions about who he was that was an identifier. ‘OK, he’s this guy, he knows us, he speaks our language and so on.’
“But then there is the fact that he is married to Michelle Obama who did a lot to familiarise him. If people thought his identity was exotic and cosmopolitan and global and these other things that they didn’t typically associate with black identity, then they understood exactly who his wife was. She was a very familiar entity.”
But the biggest crisis of the campaign erupted when the media compiled past comments from Wright about American imperialism in language too incendiary for many Americans to stomach. The pastor was on a cruise ship at the time, beyond the reach of the baying media pack, but fellow passengers saw it all on the TV news. Wright says in the documentary that a white family asked to be moved so they would not have to sit next to him at dinner. “That became for us the cruise from hell.”
Obama memorably confronted the issue head on with a speech in Philadelphia about race that did not concede defeat nor throw Wright under the bus. Instead his professorial instinct kicked in. For Cobb, it was a case of stepping into the middle of the issue, looking at it panoramically and trying to understand it lucidly. And this masterclass worked. Obama rode out the storm and beat Clinton to the nomination.
President Barack Obama, Vice-President Joe Biden, and senior staff applaud in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, as the House passes the healthcare reform bill. Photograph: Pete Souza/Pete Souza / HBO
When it came to his coronation at the Democratic national convention in Denver, there was another twist on identity. Former nominee John Kerry introduced Obama’s great-uncle, Charles Payne, a second world war veteran … and white man. He rose and waved with Michelle Obama at his side. The crowd went wild.
Cobb recalls: “It was brilliant. John Kerry gave an acknowledgment of Barack Obama’s uncle and this wizened, elderly white man stands up. All the Black people I was with howled with laughter because they knew exactly what he was doing which was kind of cynically deploying the idea of race – race is a cynical concept – and so he was riffing on the idea of it.
“Here is this guy and people are going, ‘Oh, he’s a Black guy running for president,’ but then you see his uncle and they’re going, ‘Oh, I have an uncle just like that, I have an uncle who’s a veteran.’ It was this way of communicating without speaking overtly about race that was almost metaphorical.”
Obama went on to defeat the Republican John McCain in the general election and tell tens of thousands of supporters in Chicago’s Grant Park: “Change has come to America.” The White House, built by enslaved Black people, would now be home to a Black president.
The author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates tells the film-makers: “Rappers and basketball players: that was the range in which Black men existed in the pop culture for the most part. That was it. It was really something beautiful about seeing something else. This was Black Camelot. How much more American could we get than this?”
Others were eager to make hopelessly idealistic claims of a “post-racial society” – which Obama’s presidency would spend the next years disproving. The third episode tells how he was constantly trying to thread the needle of being a black president but not a Black president, finding that when, for example, an unarmed African American was shot by police, some would criticise him for speaking out too forcefully, others for not speaking forcefully enough.
Cobb comments: “It was a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation for him. The most idealist possibilities governed the campaign and, in some ways, the most sceptical ones governed the presidency. And so everything that he did was wrong or, to some portion of people, it’s going to be wrong. Navigating that, I don’t think that anyone could have come through it unscathed.”
In Washington Obama staved off economic depression and passed the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, but ran into a red wall of Republican opposition and obstruction beyond a typical presidency. His very existence, shattering the myth of white men’s exclusive right to the nation’s highest office, also regenerated some of the darkest impulses in American society.
Barack Obama on 20 October 2009. Photograph: Pete Souza / HBO
Celebrity businessman Trump seized on and amplified the big lie of “birtherism”, falsely suggesting that Obama had not been born in America and might be a Muslim. Looking back, this film reminds us, all the seeds of polarisation, disinformation and raw racial backlash were there during Obama’s presidency. Trump channeled those forces with reptilian intelligence and transmogrified into the anti-Obama. It won him the 2016 election.
Cobb reflects: “Without Obama, there is no Donald Trump. It didn’t say anything about America that we didn’t already know. We knew that there would be a pushback but still, seeing it was incredibly disheartening.
“Even though Hillary Clinton lost the election, after Obama came out and gave the statement about Trump being the next president, I wrote a piece that was titled ‘Barack Obama in defeat’ because the resurrection of the kind of racialist politics that Trump represented was a defeat of the idealism and racial progress that Obama had been hoping to promote.”
But there was a resistance to the resistance. A diverse caucus of Democrats won back the House of Representatives and, last year, Biden took the White House with Kamala Harris becoming the first Black female vice-president. Does Cobb expect to see another Black president any time soon? “I would not hold my breath,” he replies.
Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union does not feature new interviews with Barack or Michelle Obama. But there are rich pickings in archival clips offering snapshots in time. In one old interview, Obama is asked if he thinks there is a difference between Black patriotism and white patriotism.
No, he does not, but he elaborates: “What I think is that the African American community is much more familiar with some of the darker aspects of American life and American history. I think that they understand America much less as a marching band playing John Philip Sousa. They understand America much more as a jazz composition with blue notes and I think those are different things and so the African American community can express great rage and and anger about this country and love it all the same.”
Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union starts on HBO on 3 August with a UK date to be announced | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jul/18/gary-oldman-five-best-moments | Film | 2014-07-18T08:20:35.000Z | Adam Boult | Gary Oldman: five best moments | To mark Gary Oldman's appearance in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, here's our selection of some of the actor's finest screen roles to date – but what are we missing?
Let us know your favourite Oldman performances in the thread below.
Sid and Nancy
Director Alex Cox gave Oldman his first major film role in this 1986 biopic of Sex Pistol bassist Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, the girlfriend he was accused of murdering. Oldman initially turned down the role in favour of theatre work, but was convinced to change his mind and put in an intense, memorable performance.
Bram Stoker's Dracula
Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film aimed for a respectful adaptation of the source novel, with Oldman playing a more complex and sympathetic Count Dracula than audiences were used to. Critics weren't unanimously won over, but most agreed that Oldman was excellent.
Léon: The Professional
Throughout the 90s Oldman was cast in a number of villanous roles – as the pimp Drexl in True Romance, as Russian terrorist Egor Korshunov in Air Force One – and as Norman Stansfield in Léon, a pill-popping, drug-dealing, murderous cop, and an all-round nasty piece of work.
The Fifth Element
Director Luc Besson followed up Léon with this very different sci-fi extravaganza, but kept Oldman on as his preferred antagonist. He plays Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg, a gleefully OTT villain with a broad Texan accent and one of the worst hair-dos ever committed to film.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
And finally, this 2011 adaptation of John Le Carré's novel, for which Oldman picked up best actor nominations in the the Oscars and Baftas. Peter Bradshaw, reviewing the film, said: "I found it more gripping and involving than any crash-bang action picture, and it is anchored by Gary Oldman's tragic mandarin, a variation on Alec Guinness which transfers the emphasis away from George Smiley's wounded feelings to his cool capacity for unconcern in the face of violence, a hint of a daredevil past, and a schoolmasterly scorn for his victim's weakness and disloyalty. What a treat this film is." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/feb/21/liverpool-real-madrid-champions-league-last-16-match-report | Football | 2023-02-21T22:00:01.000Z | David Hytner | Vinícius Júnior and Benzema lead Real Madrid to 5-2 comeback win at Liverpool | What had struck Jürgen Klopp most vividly on Sunday when he finally watched a re-run of last season’s Champions League final defeat to Real Madrid was the streetwise conviction that the Spanish team showed; how they did not panic during the low moments, how they knew they would find a way.
Madrid dug a hole for themselves here, shipping two early goals – the second after a terrible goalkeeping blunder by Thibaut Courtois. It felt as though this last 16, first-leg tie could be about to slip away from them. And yet they barely blinked.
‘We gave all five goals away’: Klopp furious with defending in Real Madrid rout
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Instead, it was Liverpool who fell apart at the first sign of turbulence, which came after a first goal of the evening for their nemesis, Vinícius Júnior. It was the 21st minute and the extent of the home team’s collapse thereafter laid bare the fault lines that have framed a difficult season.
Liverpool had entered with their tails up after the Premier League wins over Everton and Newcastle. As they wrestle with a transitional period, with problems in midfield and beyond, the hope was that they could locate an ignition point. “Life is about timing and maybe we have found our feet again,” Klopp said beforehand.
The reality was that their supporters were left to watch through their fingers, Klopp’s players taking leave of their defensive senses, seemingly forgetting the basics. The collective confidence is brittle and, in the face of a litany of individual errors, it cracked.
Alisson was at fault for Vinícius’s equaliser on 36 minutes, trying to be a bit too cute with a clearance and sending it straight at the Madrid forward. The ball ricocheted off Vinícius and looped into the net. He did not know much about that but he was across everything else during a virtuoso performance.
It was Vinícius who got the only goal in last season’s final; it was him that scored twice in Madrid’s 3-1 aggregate win over Liverpool in the quarter-final of 2020-21. Now this.
The second half would turn into a procession for Madrid, their superiority – and Liverpool’s travails – emphasised when Luka Modric sprinted through a nonexistent midfield, having won the ball off Fabinho and left Stefan Bajcetic in his wake. Modric did not look his 37 years. He found Vinícius, who squared for Karim Benzema and, at that point, it felt as though the centre-forward wanted to toy with Liverpool.
Benzema checked, putting Alisson on the floor, and he took his time, revelling in the moment, wanting to string it out. He knew that he was about to score, despite there being a few red shirts close by. Eventually he swept home.
Karim Benzema runs to the fans after scoring Real Madrid’s fifth goal in superb style. Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters
That made it 5-2 and it was Benzema’s second. Éder Militão had made it 3-2 after Liverpool froze inside the six-yard box on a Modric free-kick, caught out by a simple run, but it was a gruesome job to rake over all of the concessions. Benzema’s first was a scuffed shot that Alisson looked to have covered before it deflected off Joe Gomez, who had an evening when nothing went right.
Carlo Ancelotti, the Madrid manager, once of Milan, knows that a three-goal lead over Liverpool is no guarantee of victory. And yet it felt ridiculous to invoke the famous Istanbul final of 2005. This tie is surely over. The same could be said of Liverpool’s season.
Real are the reigning Spanish and European champions; the World Club champions, too, having beaten Al-Hilal in Morocco ten days previously. Klopp probably has a few extra ways to describe them and the history that his Liverpool team have with them was an unavoidable subplot – not just the two most recent defeats but the one in the 2018 final, too.
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Ancelotti was bold with his lineup, including Rodrygo on the right wing which meant Federico Valverde in midfield. But it was Klopp’s team who found a way at the outset, the opening goal marked by a clutch of eye-catching contributions. Bajcetic controlled a breaking ball and volleyed wide for Jordan Henderson, who fed Mohamed Salah up the right, and his low cross was a beauty. Darwin Núñez finished with a spectacular trailing leg flick.
Courtois was a helpless bystander. Soon afterwards, he was hapless and beside himself. The goalkeeper knew what he wanted to do when he addressed a Dani Carvajal back pass with Salah in attendance. His brain told him to play it out with his left foot. But somewhere there was a crossed wire. Courtois’s right knee intervened and the ball just squirted away from him, straight to Salah, for whom the finish was easy.
Real Madrid’s imperial troopers glide through a Liverpool side out of time
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Salah had been rampant in the early going. At 1-0, moments after Virgil van Dijk had made an important block to deny Rodrygo, Salah ran at David Alaba and seemed to ghost through him. Ignoring Núñez in the middle, he dragged wide of the near post. Alaba would soon be forced off. Salah had twisted him in every direction.
Madrid stayed cool, Modric stabilising them in possession. And when Vinícius struck out of nothing, Fabinho and Gomez giving him the room to shape a curler into the far corner, the script was about to be turned upside down.
Real just about kept out Salah then Núñez in a scramble before, at the other end, Alisson pushed away another Vinícius curler. It was a fine save. The goalkeeper’s descent to zero was shuddering and Liverpool would need an Andy Robertson intervention in front of Rodrygo to enter half-time at 2-2. The less said about the second half from a Liverpool point of the view, the better. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/apr/11/culture-of-australian-special-forces-to-be-regularly-reviewed-in-wake-of-brereton-inquiry-report-reveals | Australia news | 2023-04-10T15:00:23.000Z | Daniel Hurst | Culture of Australian special forces to be regularly reviewed in wake of Brereton inquiry, report reveals | The culture within the Australian army’s special forces will be reviewed regularly in the wake of the Brereton inquiry into alleged war crimes, a new document reveals.
The Australian defence force is also updating its respite policy to ease pressure on individuals after the inquiry found an overreliance on special forces in Afghanistan provided too little time between deployments.
The moves are mentioned in a new oversight report obtained by Guardian Australia under freedom of information laws. The document also says ADF members “will have to be assisted to disentangle their experiences of trauma and moral injury”.
ADF taking too long to enact reforms after Afghanistan war crimes inquiry, watchdog warns
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An oversight panel led by the former intelligence inspector general Vivienne Thom carried out confidential interviews last year with 17 people who have regular working relationships with Special Operations Command. The goal was to check whether cultural change was actually filtering through.
While the specific findings of the interviews were redacted, the panel called for “this type of independent stakeholder review [to] continue to be done on a regular basis”.
The new report revealed that the chief of the ADF, Gen Angus Campbell, and the chief of the army, Lt Gen Simon Stuart, had “agreed with that recommendation and issued appropriate directives for that work to continue”.
A four-year-long inquiry by Maj Gen Paul Brereton found “credible” information to implicate 25 current or former special forces personnel in the alleged unlawful killing of 39 individuals and the cruel treatment of two others in Afghanistan.
Brereton’s report said some within the Special Air Service regiment had embraced or fostered a “warrior culture”, and his findings were “indicative of a culture that has departed from acceptable norms”.
Australian defence force members warned they face prosecution if they plant weapons on people killed in combat
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Thom’s panel has previously pointed to efforts to reform the culture of “exceptionalism” within the SAS with a renewed focus on “humility”.
Thom and two other panellists were appointed by the former defence minister Linda Reynolds in late 2020 to give the government and the public confidence that the Afghanistan inquiry led to lasting change.
Their latest oversight report was handed over to the deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, in February and covers the period November to January.
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The report backed a new “enduring respite policy” for ADF members. Guardian Australia understands the new policy ensures members have adequate respite between redeployments to recuperate and spend time with family and friends.
The panel said the policy brought “an improved form and structure to the purpose of respite and the situations in which it will apply, its duration and the processes for reducing or extending respite periods in individual cases”.
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“The policy takes a realistic approach to balancing the competing pressures of members’ individual respite needs and the strategic situations and governmental demands confronting Defence,” the report said.
The panel warned, however, that “one outstanding issue is whether the revised policy will operate as designed and effectively evaluate and approve or reject respite waiver applications”.
Members of the panel held discussions about ongoing mental health impacts with the ADF’s joint health command staff on 11 and 28 November 2022.
“The panel considers Defence members will have to be assisted to disentangle their experiences of trauma and moral injury, and that the significant majority of individuals who would benefit from post-traumatic stress interventions understand the psychological and physiological benefits of pursuing those treatment options.”
The panel said it had previously warned that “generally ethics training within Special Operations Command was not yet consistent with the Defence ethics doctrine, may be unnecessarily complicated, and may still not lead to ethical decisions”.
But Campbell had “addressed the panel’s immediate concerns” by issuing a specific direction on 16 January that required training to be updated, the report said.
Thom’s panel updates the defence minister on progress in implementing cultural and organisations reforms four times a year.
It does not investigate criminal allegations against individuals, which are considered by the Office of the Special Investigator and the Australian federal police. Last month a former Australian soldier, Oliver Jordan Schulz, 41, was arrested and charged with the war crime of murder.
It was the first such charge laid against a serving or former ADF member under Australian law. Schulz was granted bail under strict conditions. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/25/caracas-venezuela-joggers-crime-runners | World news | 2013-06-25T12:59:03.000Z | Juan Forero | Venezuelan joggers find safety in numbers on the streets of Caracas | Andrea Pereira just shakes her head at how carefree she used to be, when she'd strap on her running shoes and jog alone at night in the streets of Caracas.
Then came the "express kidnapping" plague – ordinary people snatched off the street, sometimes in broad daylight. Homicides skyrocketed, with Caracas recording nearly 4,000 slayings last year, more than any other city in the world. Stories of robberies – and worse, robberies gone horribly, fatally wrong – became standard workplace chatter.
Pereira still jogs at night. But she goes with friends, plenty of friends – as many as 300 of them, a huffing, heaving mass of people who chug in unison along darkened streets three nights a week. Their club, Runners Venezuela, underscores a central reality: despite the mayhem, the people of Caracas are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to have as normal a life as possible.
"My family, they were really worried because I was, you know, going alone running in the street," said Pereira, 23. "So I said, 'Mum, I am going with a big group.' She said, 'A big group running at night, here in Caracas? You have to be kidding me.'"
There are many other violent metropolises in Latin America: Rio de Janeiro, with its heavily armed drug gangs, and Cali in Colombia, where the heirs to the old cocaine cartels battle it out. But Caracas is worse, with homicides rising nearly threefold from 1998 to 3,973 homicides last year, for a murder rate of 122 per 100,000, said Active Peace, a group that studies crime trends here. That is 32 times the homicide rate in New York, a far larger city.
The problem partly explains why late President Hugo Chávez's handpicked successor, Nicolas Maduro, almost lost an April presidential vote that he had been polled to easily win, analysts say. Facing an outcry over crime, among many other deep-seated problems, Maduro has responded by sending troops into the streets to bring order to a city populated with heavily armed pro-government militias, drug gangs, common thugs and a corrupt police force.
Crime experts say the tactics will have little lasting impact. And nationwide, most Venezuelans fear for their lives. A Gallup poll released in May showed that residents are the least likely to feel safe among the inhabitants of 134 nations. Forty per cent said there was drug trafficking in their neighbourhoods, and 10% told Gallup that a relative or close friend had been slain in the previous 12 months.
Jorge Urbina, who runs a small store, and his wife, Eslovania Ramos, a lawyer, compared going out into the streets to playing "Russian roulette".
"We limit ourselves a lot because we want to keep on living," Urbina said.
Gilberto Aldana, crime victim and president of the Venezuelan Society of Psychological Health, said his countrymen may be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
"People have trouble sleeping, people have difficulty concentrating – all of this a product of anxiety," said Aldana, who treats people affected by the rampant crime. "The anxiety generates psychophysiological changes, stress, hormonal swings, neurological shifts, even changes to our immunological system."
Aldana, who has been robbed four times on the street, said it's enough to make Venezuelans want to shut themselves indoors.
Still, people here face the dangers and adapt.
"We Venezuelans have always been very creative," said Claudia Sucre, who was once kidnapped but managed to fool her abductors into thinking she wasn't affluent. "We've reinvented things so we can live our lives feeling like we're in a safe place, so as to not lose our enthusiasm."
So young people invited to parties take their pyjamas, staying over to sleep once festivities end and avoid the drive home at night, when they could be kidnapped.
Maria Blasini, 47, spoke of how when she leaves the bank she waves around her deposit slip to ensure that lurking robbers see that her money is in the vault. Many take to the streets with decoy phones – say, the cheap state-made Vergatario – to avoid losing a $400 smartphone.
Some drive low-key cars because they fear kidnappers target those in fancier vehicles. Soccer moms now install bulletproof plating in their SUVs.
Lately, those who want to attend a wedding or to enjoy a leisurely dinner hire bodyguards – for just a few hours.
"Yeah, they contract for a night, even for a trip from one place to another," said Chamel Akl, who runs Akl Elite Corp, which offers the service. "They know that after 10 o'clock, they have to go home. They call us, they want an armoured car or a close-protection vehicle outside or a bodyguard that goes with them, from the restaurant to the house."
Akl noted that such services aren't just for the rich – in fact, those who hire for a night tend to be middle class, people who will readily pay $25 an hour for a bodyguard to have peace of mind.
Arturo Hidalgo, 41, an avid runner who lived for years in the United States, knew he had to take precautions when he went running.
So he and a small group of friends began to run together, as darkness fell and a cool breeze blew off the Caribbean. Soon, more joined in. And then the organisers began using Twitter and other social media to advertise their group.
On a recent night, 270 showed up, gathering in a public square in the affluent eastern end of the city, where they got into long lines. Some would do longer runs, others go just a short distance.
"Those running seven kilometres, come here!" an organiser shouted. "Five kilometres, over there!"
And then they were off, heading straight up a steep incline towards the towering Avila mountain, before turning west past a big hospital, on towards the San Ignacio shopping mall, and then looping back to the square where they began.
"We take care of each other," Hidalgo said. "We go back and forth. We look for the last one. We don't leave until the last one is accounted for."
This story appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from The Washington Post | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/aug/11/lord-lester-of-herne-hill-obituary | Politics | 2020-08-11T17:35:28.000Z | Julia Langdon | Lord Lester of Herne Hill obituary | The lawyer Anthony Lester, who has died aged 84, was the author of the groundbreaking legislation on racial and gender equality introduced in Britain by Harold Wilson’s Labour government in the 1970s. He was also the single most influential voice in establishing the recognition of the concept of human rights in the courts and its enshrinement in domestic law in 1998 by the succeeding Labour administration under Tony Blair.
The reforming home secretary Roy Jenkins, who has been credited by history with responsibility for the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and the Race Relations Act 1976, happily conceded in his memoirs that his commitment to the principle of human rights was thanks to the encouragement and direction of Lester, to whom he also gave credit for writing much of the legislation almost single-handed.
Lester’s lasting impact on civil and human rights also included work on civil partnerships, which led to the Civil Partnership Act 2004, and on the rights of free speech which resulted in the Defamation Act 2013. In the course of a lifetime campaigning in the law he also acted in a number of historic British court cases including the Sunday Times’s case against the Distillers’ company over the use of thalidomide in 1972 and the attempt by Margaret Thatcher’s government to ban the publication of the former MI5 officer Peter Wright’s memoir Spycatcher in 1987. Ten years later he acted for Diane Blood, the widow who won the right to conceive a child of her late husband, using his previously stored sperm.
Most pertinently, given recent developments in Hong Kong, it was Lester who was prominent in first warning, in 1990 after governing authority for Hong Kong had been restored to China, that the newly enacted Hong Kong Bill of Rights could possibly be used by the government in Beijing as an “instrument of oppression” against the people of the island.
Anthony Lester, left, with Helena Kennedy, Claire Rayner and Greg Dyke at a meeting of Citizens’ Enquiry for Charter 88. Photograph: Kalpesh Lathigra/The Independent/Rex/Shutterstock
In a sad coda to his career, in November 2018 the House of Lords’ committee for privileges and conduct recommended the suspension of Lester, who had joined the Lords as a peer in 1993. The case arose from a complaint by the author and charity worker Jasvinder Sanghera, who waived her right to anonymity to assert that in 2006 she had been subjected to sexual harassment by Lester and additionally offered a peerage in exchange for sexual favours.
Sanghera was influenced by the emergence of the Me Too campaign to raise the historic incident, which Lester rejected as “completely untrue”. A procedural wrangle in the Lords led to a vote against Lester’s suspension, although he nevertheless resigned his membership of the upper house. The vote to suspend him was later agreed by the Lords. He himself said that he had neither the strength nor the health to continue to counter the allegation and friends suggested that the case hastened his death from heart disease.
Born in London, Anthony was the grandchild of Jewish refugees and the elder son of a barrister, Harry Lester, and his wife, Kate (nee Cooper-Smith), who was a milliner. From the City of London school he went on to national service in the Royal Artillery (1955-57). Although a non-observing Jew, he refused to put his religion as Church of England, rather than Jewish, when advised to do so by his commanding officer before the ill-fated Suez invasion in 1956, on the grounds that he would be less likely to be tortured if he were captured during the exercise.
He went on to study history and law at Trinity College, Cambridge, then spent two years at Harvard Law School and secured a master’s. He also demonstrated his early concern for race relations by writing a report for Amnesty International which was published in 1964 as Justice in the American South.
By that time, Lester had already been called to the bar, in 1963, as a member of Lincoln’s Inn and begun his lifetime pursuit of an improvement in the equality laws in the UK. During the 60s he was a founder member of the Institute of Race Relations, of which he became a council member, the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (1964), and the Runnymede Trust (1968, and its chair 1991-93).
He was also a member of the Society of Labour Lawyers, the Fabian Society (chair 1972-73) and the Family Planning Association. His work for Jenkins during the 60s Labour government extended to editing a book of Jenkins’ essays and speeches (1967).
His first sortie into public political life came as Labour candidate in the safe Conservative seat of Worthing in the 1966 general election. He had been a committed Gaitskellite and his close friendship with Jenkins led to him joining the breakaway Social Democratic Party in 1981. After the collapse of the SDP, he joined the Liberal Democrats and was nominated for the Lords by Paddy Ashdown. He had worked for Ashdown, notably in resolving an internal party problem in Tower Hamlets, and was trusted as a fair and sagacious adviser.
He was also seen as a brave lawyer. Those who worked with him said that he could be pernickety and sometimes grumpy, but he was always prepared to stick his neck out in the interests of furthering the pursuit of equality. After appearing in a human rights case in the Singapore courts in 1989, he was thereafter banned from any subsequent case in their judiciary, a decision that took on diplomatic implications when the Foreign and Commonwealth Office objected.
He spent more than 30 years seeking to secure the inclusion of the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law and regarded his eventual success with astonishment because of the length of time that it had taken. At a bar conference in 1987, he found himself arguing with Blair, then a newly elected young Labour MP, about the merits of such legislation and it was another 11 years before he won the argument.
By that time he had, however, won the intellectual argument for which he had earlier found himself being derided in the courts. One favourite example was his practice of applying for advertised vacancies by submitting two identical applications with the pseudonyms “Smith” and “Singh” and noting the predictable relative successes notched up by “Smith”.
When Gordon Brown took office as prime minister in 2007, he appointed Lester as an adviser to the justice secretary, Jack Straw, with responsibility for constitutional reform. Brown chose him as one of the men and women of goodwill whom he wanted in his “Goat” – government of all talents – described as “a new spirit of public service”.
The arrangement was not a success and there were difficulties because of Lester’s lack of readiness to collaborate with others. He had never been a team player and resigned the following year. He subsequently complained that human rights legislation needed to be constantly defended against erosion by its critics and this was the prevailing theme of his last book, Five Ideas to Fight For (2016).
Lester was made a QC in 1975 and appointed as a recorder in 1987, a post he held until joining the Lords. At Westminster he was a member of the Lords procedure and privileges committee (1994-96), the joint parliamentary human rights committee (2001-15) and the Lords constitution committee (2013-16). He was the Liberal Democrat spokesman on human rights until the 2018 complaint against him.
Among many other appointments he was made adjunct professor at the University of Cork law faculty in 2005. In 2007 he was given a lifetime achievement award in the human rights awards sponsored by the pressure groups Liberty and Justice.
In 1971 he married a fellow barrister, Katya (Catherine) Wassey. She later became an asylum judge and survives him together with their son, Gideon, an artistic director in New York, and their daughter, Maya, who followed them into the law and became a QC in 2016.
Anthony Paul Lester, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, lawyer, born 3 July 1936; died 8 August 2020 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/feb/05/albanese-declares-indigenous-voice-wont-impact-first-nations-sovereignty | Australia news | 2023-02-05T02:49:03.000Z | Katharine Murphy | Albanese declares Indigenous voice won’t impact First Nations sovereignty | Anthony Albanese has declared the voice to parliament will have no impact on First Nations sovereignty, and has rubbished the idea of having a constitutional convention before the referendum later this year.
With parliament set to resume for the year this week, the prime minister’s position was echoed on Sunday morning by Megan Davis, law professor, member of the expert working group and one of the leaders of the Uluru dialogues. She told the ABC deliberations around constitutional recognition had now entered a second decade.
“This is the second decade, the 12th year of constitutional recognition. So [the proposal] hasn’t just come out of nowhere,” Davis said. “That work has been done and the Uluru statement from the heart is the offer on the table.”
Anthony Albanese on navigating an insecure world
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The prime minister was asked after a speech he delivered at the Chifley Research Centre conference on Sunday to respond to concerns that have been expressed about the impact of the voice on First Nations sovereignty.
Greens senator Lidia Thorpe has asked the Albanese government to supply a guarantee that constitutional recognition won’t impact sovereignty. Albanese said on Sunday the view of the eminent legal advisers doing the preparatory work ahead of the referendum was clear.
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“The vote and the referendum will have no impact on the issue of sovereignty,” Albanese said in Sunday. The Greens are expected to resolve their stance on the voice over the coming parliamentary week.
The prime minister said it was time to finish the mechanics required before putting the question of constitutional recognition to the Australian people. “A new argument came up a couple of days ago of a constitutional convention, why aren’t we doing that?”
Albanese said there was no constitutional convention before the 1967 referendum, and he said the issue of constitutional recognition had had more precursor processes than the referendum to determine whether Australia should become a republic.
“This has been going on for years,” the prime minister said. “There’ve been multiple inquiries [and] it is time to have recognition in our constitution.
“We are going to put it to the Australian people.”
Davis told the ABC more information about the advisory body would be released by the expert panel in the coming weeks, ensuring there would be “sufficient information for Australians to make an informed decision”.
The Liberal leader, Peter Dutton, has been demanding more detail be supplied before he determines the party’s position on the voice, and wrote to Albanese over the summer break asking 15 questions about the proposal.
Dutton dialled in to a meeting of the expert working group on the referendum last week, and said afterwards his questions remained unanswered.
Davis was asked whether he put his 15 questions to the meeting last week. “No, he didn’t ask those questions,” she said.
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“There’s only so far we can go in terms of those questions,” Davis said. “We can’t tell you the address or location of the building of what the voice will be, or what the business cards will look like.”
Davis said the national parliament would ultimately determine the architecture of the body. “We can tell only so much in terms of those questions because, of course, if the voice is successful, what happens in Australian democracy is there is a process that follows.”
PM, state and territory leaders formally back Indigenous voice to parliament with statement of intent
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Albanese was asked on Sunday whether the campaign to secure the voice to parliament would divert the government from other elements of its agenda.
“This campaign won’t be delivered by parliamentarians, it will be driven by the community,” Albanese said.
The prime minister said he led a government with a “very broad agenda of economic, social and environmental reform” and that remained his focus “but at the same time, how about we get this done as well?”
Sunday’s speech was a scene setter ahead of the opening of the parliamentary year on Monday. The prime minister pitched the voice to parliament referendum as a gesture of trust in the Australian people at a time when increasing polarisation and misinformation means democracy needs to be “nourished, protected, cared for, treated with respect”.
He said the referendum campaign would be a civic exercise in finding “common ground amid differences” and seeking meaningful change while “bringing people with you, empowering and including Australians in the work of progress.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/feb/25/disease-of-disadvantage-melbournes-lower-socioeconomic-areas-suffer-most-covid-deaths-amid-omicron | Australia news | 2022-02-24T16:30:49.000Z | Stephanie Convery | ‘Disease of disadvantage’: Melbourne’s lower socioeconomic areas suffer most Covid deaths amid Omicron | The most disadvantaged areas of Melbourne have been hit hardest by Covid-19 deaths during Victoria’s Omicron wave, further underscoring the pandemic’s disproportionate effect on communities with lower employment and income levels, and poorer access to services.
Data obtained exclusively by Guardian Australia shows that in Melbourne’s most disadvantaged local government areas (LGAs), Covid deaths occurred at a rate of 26 deaths per 100,000 residents. This substantially outweighs deaths in areas of greater socio-economic advantage.
The local government areas of Brimbank, Greater Dandenong and Kingston accounted for 134 of the 943 Covid deaths in the state between 8 December 2021 and 21 February 2022.
Brimbank is Melbourne’s second-most disadvantaged LGA and third-most disadvantaged in the state, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ index of relative socio-economic disadvantage (IRSD), which takes into account factors such as employment, income levels, access to education, services and more.
It was also the hardest hit LGA overall in this period, with 65 deaths in total, that, when weighted for population, equates to 33.45 deaths for every 100,000 people.
Covid death rate three times higher among migrants than those born in Australia
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In Greater Dandenong, which ranks the lowest in terms of socio-economic indicators, 37 people died, which equates to 24.33 deaths per 100,000 people.
George Disney, a social epidemiologist and research fellow from the University of Melbourne, told Guardian Australia the findings were “depressingly predictable”.
“If you’re disadvantaged, you’re more likely to be exposed to the disease and you’re more likely to have worse health outcomes,” Disney said.
Covid in Australia could be characterised as “a disease of disadvantage”, Disney said.
Migrant communities disproportionately hit
Data released by the ABS last week showed that Covid deaths since the onset of the pandemic until the end of January this year have disproportionately affected migrant communities, with 6.8 deaths per 100,000 people born overseas, compared with 2.3 for those born in Australia.
Delta deaths expose Australia’s great disadvantage divide
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The 2016 census shows both Brimbank and Greater Dandenong have large numbers of migrants. Just 45% of the residents in Brimbank were born in Australia, and in Greater Dandenong the percentage is even lower, at 36%. Nationally, more than 66% of Australian residents were born here. A non-English language is spoken at home in more than 60% of households in both LGAs. The same is true for about 22% of households across Australia.
Just over a third of the people in Victoria who died from Covid in the past three months – 327 people – lived in the 10 most disadvantaged areas of Melbourne, accounting for 34.67% of the overall deaths during the most recent wave of the pandemic.
Five of those most disadvantaged LGAs – Brimbank, Casey, Whittlesea, Greater Dandenong and Hume – accounted for 240 deaths from Covid in this period.
Disney said the results were unsurprising. He said the issue of workplace entitlements such as sick leave had still not been adequately addressed.
“How are we two years into this and we don’t have universal sick pay? The isolation period will disappear – it’s happening overseas. The Covid-specific protections will go, and we’ll just be left with what we had previously. And there are so many people who don’t have protections from sickness,” he said.
“We shouldn’t have been surprised that this happened with Covid because it happens with almost every other disease. It’s depressingly predictable. The government could have averted so many deaths if they’d focused on this.”
Data echoes Delta wave
Many of these areas have repeatedly suffered during the pandemic. Hume and Whittlesea were also among the Victorian LGA’s with the five highest death rates during the Delta wave. Hume, Casey, Brimbank and Whittlesea all have had some of the highest case numbers throughout the pandemic.
In the middle of the Delta wave, Hume had already recorded more than 1,500 cases per 100,000 residents while more affluent areas of Melbourne had just 17.
The Victorian Department of Health shared data on Covid deaths in 63 local government areas. Of these, 25 had fewer than five deaths during the Omicron wave. Almost 900 deaths were recorded in 39 LGAs – most of them in metropolitan Melbourne. Most of the LGAs with few deaths were in rural areas.
Darebin in Melbourne’s north, where 51 people died from Covid, had the highest death rate during Omicron, at just over 34 deaths per 100,000 people. Darebin is ranked 13th lowest on the IRSD scale for Melbourne.
The Darebin, Brimbank, Moreland, Monash and Macedon Ranges LGAs all recorded more than 25 deaths per 100,000 people.
A report released last year by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare found that in the first year of the pandemic there were nearly four times as many deaths in population groups of lower socio-economic status compared to those in the highest.
Guardian Australia understands 37% of the people who died with Covid in Victoria during the Omicron wave had not received two doses of the vaccine, and about 33% were unvaccinated.
A spokesperson for the Victorian Department of Health expressed sympathy for those who had lost loved ones and said: “The data is clear that getting your third dose will significantly reduce your chances of going to hospital, going to ICU or dying from Covid-19. The best thing Victorians can do to protect themselves from Covid-19 is to get their third dose as soon as they’re eligible.”
The Guardian sought similar data from New South Wales but NSW Health did not provide it, nor could their representatives describe the methodology used for the publicly available breakdowns of areas in which deaths occurred. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/13/eliud-kipchoge-marathon-sheer-audacity | Opinion | 2019-10-13T09:30:06.000Z | Kenan Malik | Eliud Kipchoge and a marathon whose audacity will live long in our memory | Kenan Malik | Some sporting moments achieve mythical status because of their sheer audacity. Muhammad Ali’s “rumble in the jungle” defeat of George Foreman in Kinshasa in 1974 to regain his world heavyweight title comes to mind.
Eliud Kipchoge shatters two-hour barrier to crash into the mainstream
Sean Ingle
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Others astound with a seemingly impossible perfection such as Nadia Comăneci’s perfect 10 in gymnastics at the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games.
And then there are those that astonish by redefining one’s perception of what it’s possible for a human being to achieve.
Eliud Kipchoge’s completion of a marathon in under two hours was one of those moments. Not so long ago, just the possibility of breaking the two-hour mark seemed beyond imagination. On Saturday, we were witness to that something beyond imagination.
Kipchoge’s time is not an official record as it was not performed under competition conditions. That does not matter. All that matters is that he did it.
It was the equivalent of running 422 100m sprints one after the other, every one of them in 17.08 seconds. One can barely comprehend the willpower required. Or the self-belief. Or the imagination. And yet one can, because it is a human achievement.
1:01
'Anything is possible': Eliud Kipchoge on his sub-two hour marathon record – video
When Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in 1954, it seemed just as miraculous. Forty-six days later, the Australian runner John Landy did it again. And since then, at least 1,400 people have run the mile in under four minutes.
Someone – probably Kipchoge himself – will break the two-hour marathon mark officially in competition. Someone will run faster than 1:59:40. But nothing will make his feat any less special. It is for such moments that we treasure sport. And it is in such moments that we marvel at human possibilities. As Kipchoge tweeted before his run: “I don’t know what the limits are, but I would like to go there.”
Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/mar/26/titanic-floating-door-prop-sells-at-auction | Film | 2024-03-26T11:59:50.000Z | Catherine Shoard | Infamous Titanic floating door prop sells for $718,750 | Ever since the release of Titanic in 1997, debate has raged over whether the piece of wood which keeps Kate Winslet’s Rose out of the icy waters could in fact have also accommodated her lover, Jack, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.
One lucky theorist can now test their hypothesis, as the piece of prop balsa wood has sold at auction for $718,750 (£567,561).
The door – which the auction notes reveal was in fact part of the door frame above the ship’s first-class lounge entrance – is clung on to by the central couple as the ship sinks. But in their attempts to clamber to relative safety, they realise there is only space for one person, so Jack sacrifices his life for Rose.
In 2022, director James Cameron attempted to quash speculation over whether Jack’s death was unnecessary by conducting what he told Postmedia was a “scientific study to put this whole thing to rest and drive a stake through its heart once and for all.
“We have since done a thorough forensic analysis with a hypothermia expert who reproduced the raft from the movie … We took two stunt people who were the same body mass of Kate and Leo and we put sensors all over them and inside them and we put them in ice water and we tested to see whether they could have survived through a variety of methods and the answer was: there was no way they both could have survived. Only one could survive.”
Cameron concluded by invoking less scientific rationale: “[Jack] needed to die. It’s like Romeo and Juliet. It’s a movie about love and sacrifice and mortality. The love is measured by the sacrifice.”
Other key lots at the Heritage Auctions’ Treasures from Planet Hollywood event included Winslet’s chiffon dress from Titanic’s finale, which sold for $125,000 (£98,743), Indiana Jones’s bullwhip from The Temple of Doom ($525,000/£414,717) and Jack Nicholson’s axe from The Shining ($125,000/£98,743).
Meanwhile, Bill Murray’s red rose bowling ball from Kingpin fetched $350,000 (£276,454) and Tobey Maguire’s black symbiote suit from Spider-Man 3 sold for $125,000 (£98,743).
The can of shaving cream used by Wayne Knight to smuggle out dinosaur embryos in Jurassic Park made $250,000 (£197,451) and a blaster carried by Carrie Fisher in Return of the Jedi took $150,000 (£118,463).
A number of items which didn’t sell in Monday’s auction are still available, including Mark Addy’s red thong from The Full Monty (buy it now price: $625/£494). | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/aug/27/va-dundee-exposes-scottish-design-icons-slavery-links | Art and design | 2020-08-27T13:04:09.000Z | Severin Carrell | V&A Dundee exposes Scottish design icons' slavery links | Scotland’s newest museum, the V&A Dundee, has started challenging the cherished status of some of the country’s design icons, exposing their links to slavery, colonial wars and cultural appropriation.
In a reassessment of its collection before its reopening this week, V&A Dundee has updated its Scottish design gallery to show how many of the country’s most famous industries profited from British colonisation of much of the globe.
It includes the Paisley pattern that uses mango and teardrop-shaped motifs. V&A Dundee now tells visitors these were Kashmiri and Persian designs appropriated by Scottish firms and sold back to south Asian consumers at prices that undercut local producers.
Factories in the Vale of Leven near Glasgow profited from the production of bright and long-lasting Turkey Red fabrics for sale in India, without telling Hindu consumers they used bullocks’ blood during the dyeing process, which was against their religious beliefs.
Alongside a display of an elegant linen damask napkin bearing the arms of Scotland from 1762, the museum points out that 90% of Scotland’s coarse linen was exported to clothe slaves on plantations in the Americas.
Rewritten labels and gallery panels also link a Scottish architect’s design for the Cathedral Church of All Saints in Khartoum with Sudan’s “violent conquest” by British-led forces, and an elaborately embroidered glengarry military bonnet from India with colonial Indian regiments. Another explains how Scottish tea planters, jute mill owners and shipping magnates profited through the East India Company.
The V&A Dundee disclosed its decolonisation programme in time for its reopening on Thursday, five months after it was closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. It is running the V&A’s blockbuster exhibition on the 1960s fashion designer Mary Quant.
The reassessment was carried out in consultation with the V&A Museum in Kensington, which owns about 60% of the Dundee museum’s exhibits, after its curator Meredith More, who was previously the Scotland curator in Kensington, began reappraising the collection 18 months ago.
Glengarry style cap; embroidered wool; Indian (Ludhiana, Kashmir); Mid 19th century. Photograph: Victoria and Albert Museum
Sophie McKinlay, the V&A Dundee’s programmes director, said the work involved consulting experts from the universities of St Andrews and Dundee, and developing new programmes to bring in artists, curators and specialists to expand its work on decolonisation, class and local communities.
“This is the only step for us if we’re going to be relevant as a 21st-century museum,” she said. “Museums, if we are to be relevant, need to be open, we need to be transparent [and] we need to share.
“If we can view these historic objects through a contemporary lens, that is the key to understanding design. You can only unlock those stories by really understanding the history but also understanding their relevance today.”
McKinlay said the museum was “acutely conscious” of its need to bring in minority ethnic experts, curators and artists. “There’s a longer-term commitment that this absolutely cannot be a hollow gesture; that this needs to be backed up by systemic change.”
Under its director, Tristram Hunt, the V&A Museum has also re-evaluated its work and collections in parallel with the Black Lives Matter movement and a sector-wide reappraisal of how European museums built their collections after colonising, exploiting or subjugating other countries during the colonial era.
The V&A Museum, whose collection is significantly larger than that of its Dundee outpost, is not relabelling its exhibits but has set up an anti-racism taskforce to ensure its next five-year work programme is underpinned by “diversity, equality and inclusion”.
The museum has put on new displays to identify its set of Asante goldweights – copper alloy weights seized by British troops in a raid on Kumase, in what is now Ghana, in 1874 – as the product of imperial conquest. Another uses gold and silver pieces to explore Nazi looting through the stories of eight Jewish collectors and their families.
V&A Dundee’s initiative follows a recent re-evaluation of Scotland’s integral role in the British empire and its enrichment from the Atlantic slave trade and plantations in the Americas.
‘Longitudinal section and south elevation.’, measured drawing by Robert W. Schultz Weir, Cathedral Church of All Saints, Khartoum, Sudan, 1888-1934. Photograph: Victoria and Albert Museum
Duncan Dornan, the head of museums with Glasgow Life, which runs the city’s major museums, said it had hired a new curator, who starts work in September, to lead its work on decolonisation and to expand its programmes with the city’s minority ethnic residents.
Other initiatives include a new display at its Riverside transport museum on the role of Glaswegian shipbuilders who sold dozens of steamships to the Confederate rebel army to break blockades during the US civil war.
Last year Glasgow University pledged £20m for a research project with the University of the West Indies after a study estimated it had benefited financially by up to £198m from slave trade receipts in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Plans are being drafted for a museum of slavery that will explore Scotland’s ties to the trade and plantations economy.
Five V&A Dundee exhibits – before and after
Jute bags
Before: Dundee became famous as Juteopolis because it made so many jute sacks and goods, and “Dundee’s shipyards built the ships that imported raw jute fibre from south Asia”.
Now: “Dundee-built ships brought the raw fibre to the city from Bengal, where it was grown by peasants, or ryots, in the Ganges river delta.”
The Paisley pattern
Before: The designs “proved so successful that their characteristic teardrop or pine cone pattern became known around the world as ‘Paisley’.”
Now: “Paisley shawls became so successful that their characteristic mango, teardrop or pinecone shaped motif, known in Kashmir and Persia as buta, became known in the west as the ‘Paisley pattern’.”
Fine linen napkin, 1762
Before: Linen weaving became one of Scotland’s main industries after 1707, and Edinburgh and Dunfermline “became two major centres for the weaving of fine linen damask goods”.
Now: “Scotland mostly produced coarse linen for export, 90% of which was sold to plantations in the Americas for clothing enslaved people.”
Turkey Red fabrics
Before: Factories in the Vale of Leven used long-lasting bright red dyes which “often incorporated Asian motifs and were particularly popular with Indian markets.”
Now: “Hindu consumers were not aware that during the dyeing process madder root extract was combined with bullocks’ blood, which was against their religious beliefs.”
Sample of printed cotton, made by United Turkey Red Co. 1860-1880. Photograph: Victoria and Albert Museum
Glengarry bonnet
Before: This finely embroidered cap emerged after “Scottish regiments were deployed across India, and in 1848 the Ludhiana Sikh Regiment adopted the Glengarry as its uniform cap”.
Now: “Following the first Anglo-Sikh war, the newly formed Regiment of Ludhiana, which included colonised Indian soldiers, adopted the Glengarry as its uniform cap. Is this a sign of cultural exchange or subjugation?” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/10/anti-monarchy-arrests-coronation-scrutinised-mps-public-order-act | World news | 2023-05-10T09:38:48.000Z | Matthew Weaver | Anti-monarchy arrests at coronation to be scrutinised by MPs | The arrest of anti-monarchy protesters at King Charles’s coronation and intimidatory Home Office warnings to campaigners before the event are to be scrutinised by a committee of MPs.
In a statement, the home affairs select committee said it would examine the Metropolitan police’s handling of republican protests at an evidence session next Wednesday.
It will investigate the force’s approach to public demonstrations, the practical implementation of the public order bill and the arrest of republican protesters. A full list of witnesses will be announced in the coming days.
Dame Diana Johnson, the chair of the home affairs select committee, said there were “real questions” about how the new Public Order Act was used to hold leading members of Republic for up to 16 hours during the coronation.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Johnson said she would be interested in reviewing how broad the law was and “what guidance was given to frontline police officers and whether there is an issue about training”.
She added: “There had been in this case, months of negotiation and liaison with Republic about their protest.”
Labour urged to say whether it would scrap new anti-protest laws
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Days before the coronation, the Guardian revealed that the Home Office sent official warning letters to anti-monarchists to point out the new criminal offences under the act.
Johnson suggested this tactic would also be scrutinised. She said: “I want to know why the Home Office are writing to organisations, as they did with Republic, setting out changes in the law. That’s been seen to be perhaps intimidatory and I don’t know whether that’s a new tactic that the Home Office are using.
“That issue of how protests were policed is something that has raised concerns, particularly about the implementation of this very new act of parliament, the Public Order Act 2023, and particular section 2, which is about going equipped to lock on, which seems to have been at the core of why members of Republic were arrested around the use of luggage tags.”
Johnson added: “So there are real questions about that and we think this morning we’ll need to look at that and decide whether we want to have that short inquiry to learn some lessons and see what the implementation of that act actually means in practice to frontline police officers.”
On Tuesday, the head of the Met police, Mark Rowley, said it was “unfortunate” that six members of Republic were unable to take part in a protest that had been pre-arranged with the force. But in an article for the Evening Standard he supported the officers involved and said the arrests were cheered and applauded by crowds in the Mall.
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The force also released without charge three women’s safety volunteers who were arrested on suspicion of committing a public nuisance for carrying rape alarms at the coronation.
Johnson also wants answers about the treatment of these women. She said: “There’s also an issue about the women who were giving out the rape alarms as well and the how they ended up arrested. I don’t think it was under the Public Order Act 2023, but they were arrested as well.
“There’s an issue there about liaison with the Metropolitan police and partner organisations like Westminster council … I think it’s absolutely right that the committee looks at whether the operational policing in London through the Met is working.”
Johnson also cited concerns of the former Greater Manchester police chief Sir Peter Fahy, who said “poor police officers” were left to interpret the law “passed only a few days” before the coronation. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/apr/08/toto-wolff-rues-lewis-hamilton-nico-rosberg-rivalry-says-never-again-mercedes | Sport | 2021-04-08T16:25:37.000Z | Giles Richards | Toto Wolff rues Hamilton-Rosberg rivalry and says ‘never again’ | The Mercedes team principal, Toto Wolff, has insisted he would have dropped Lewis Hamilton or the British driver’s then teammate Nico Rosberg from races had their rivalry continued to prove detrimental to the team.
Wolff revealed he had to use an “iron fist” to manage his two drivers. The turbulent period at Mercedes has informed Wolff’s decision-making process in choosing teammates for Hamilton and will play a part in the makeup of the team in future.
Nico Rosberg: 'To do good you need to get out there, you can’t sit in a cave'
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Hamilton and Rosberg were teammates at Mercedes between 2013 and 2016. When Mercedes delivered a completely dominant car in 2014, the world championship became a two‑horse race and the friendship the pair had shared since karting deteriorated into a bitter rivalry. They clashed at the Belgian GP in 2014, in Austria in 2016 and also notoriously took each other out of the race in Spain the same year.
Wolff said the team could not tolerate the situation. “It was very difficult, because I came into the team as a newcomer in F1 and Nico and Lewis had been in the sport for much longer,” he told the High Performance podcast. “But still I was able to create an environment where they had to respect the team, sometimes with an iron fist, and they understood that they couldn’t let us down, they couldn’t let Mercedes down.”
The team principal, who joined Mercedes in 2013, issued an unequivocal warning to his drivers. “I always made clear that if this was going to happen regularly and I would see a pattern, I have no fear in making somebody miss races,” Wolff said.
Hamilton won the title in 2014 and 2015, with Rosberg taking it in 2016 and then immediately retiring. He was replaced at Mercedes by Valtteri Bottas, with whom Hamilton has a friendly relationship and over whom he has enjoyed a clear advantage on track. The British driver has won every title since 2017.
However, both he and Bottas are on one-year contracts and Hamilton’s future in the sport remains uncertain. The hugely promising George Russell, a Mercedes junior driver competing for Williams, is a favourite to replace Bottas. Wolff was clear, though, that any decision would be informed by the likely dynamic between prospective teammates.
“If the debriefing room is full of negativity because the two drivers are hostile with each other then that will spill over into the energy in the room and that is not something I will ever allow again,” he said.
The Mercedes sporting director, Ron Meadows, who has been with the team since they were BAR in 1997, has praised the crucial role Michael Schumacher played in the team’s success since 2014. Schumacher came out of retirement to drive for Mercedes in 2010 and was with them until 2012.
“Given how he helped us improve, I think certainly my biggest regret was not seeing Michael win a race for us,” he said. “ He was a different level of driver [than] we’d ever worked with at that point. We all wanted him to win. It didn’t happen. A couple of years later we couldn’t stop winning and he deserves some of that because the reason we’re winning today, a lot was down to him because he made us better.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/mar/15/garlic-alexanders-foraged-greens-recipes | Life and style | 2013-03-15T20:59:01.000Z | Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall | Free for all: foraged wild greens recipes | Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall | I've done a lot of travelling in the past year or so. I've found myself on a boat, pitching through the wild waters of Antarctica, and I've sweltered in the steamy heat of Thailand and the Philippines. I've relaxed with my family in France, and spent some inspiring days with groundbreaking young chefs in Denmark. Sojourns such as these, whether for work or pleasure, are always a privilege and I don't think I've passed through any place that hasn't left some mark on my cooking.
But one of the trips I love best is the journey home. Being in a familiar place and settling back into routines is more than comforting; it's the essence of life. We all draw strength from our home and hearth, and from the environment and landscape we know best. Seeing the seasons change in a place you know and understand, and repeating the little rituals that mark those turning days, make us feel rooted and safe. It's very hard to go adventuring if you don't have a secure base to start with.
One thing I make time for every year, no matter how busy I am, is a little springtime foraging. Even if it's only a few exploratory rambles, this is a non-negotiable part of my annual schedule. It's long been my belief that wild food you've gathered yourself is mind-broadening, confidence-boosting and soul-enriching, and the great thing about spring foraging is that it's so easy – everything is shooting, budding and generally advertising itself. Plus, early season growth is often sweet and tender, the cream of the crop.
I often find myself writing about nettles at this time of year – a very easy and enjoyable task, since they remain one of my all-time favourite wild foods. Like so many of our plants, they seem to appear earlier and earlier each spring, so I'm already a few weeks into my nettle season. I've been blitzing them into soups and chopping them into risottos, and maybe next I'll use them like spinach in dishes such as spanakopitta. However, abundant, delicious and health-giving as they may be, nettles are by no means the only wild plant that is easy to find, simple to cook and good to eat. So this spring, whether you're a foraging rookie or a seasoned pro, I urge you to get out there and expand your wild greens repertoire.
The three wild plants I've focused on this week are among the most widespread and accessible edible spring greens you're likely to find in the British Isles. There are many more, of course, everything from young chickweed shoots (great in salads) to tiny, butter-yellow broom buds (ace in a stir-fry) and deliciously bitter young dandelion leaves. There are several books that will guide you on a sortie to seek out these and other wild treats – among my favourites are Richard Mabey's classic Food For Free, and my friend and colleague John Wright's River Cottage Hedgerow Handbook and Edible Seashore Handbook.
Alexanders (that's the singular as well as the plural) is one of the best wild vegetables of spring, and unusual in that it's the fleshy young stem, not the leaf, that's of interest. This statuesque, easy-to-spot plant is widespread, but thrives especially in coastal regions in the south. Look for it at roadsides (though pick as far from the road as you can). Cut the stems close to the ground, then at home strip them of their tougher outer layer and celery-like stringy fibres. Steam or boil until tender, which takes only a few minutes, and serve simply buttered and seasoned. The flavour is aromatic, fragrant – a little musky, a touch juniper-ish.
Sea beet, or sea spinach, is the genetic ancestor of beetroot, chard and perpetual spinach, and shares similar thick, pointed leaves and firm stems. As the name suggests, it's usually found by the coast, and at pretty much any point around our shores. Its glossy, fleshy leaves – sometimes red-tinged – and, in summer, waving flower-spikes will probably be a familiar sight if you've ever spent any time walking near the sea. The leaves are an excellent vegetable and can be served in just about any recipe that calls for cooked spinach. Picked young, juicy and glossy, you may well decide it's the best spinach you've ever tasted.
Wild garlic, meanwhile, is one of my favourite foraging finds. Also known as ramsons, bear garlic and stinking jenny, its pungent allium scent will lead you to it before you see it. Damp, shady, wooded places are the best hunting grounds, and it grows all over the UK. It's a pretty plant, with long, tulip-like leaves and tiny, white, starry flowers. Where it's really abundant, you can dig it up and eat the little bulbs, too, but I prefer to harvest handfuls of the leaves, which have a delicately garlicky flavour. Use raw in salads or cook them lightly – try shredding and adding to soups, risottos or omelettes, always towards the end of cooking, to preserve their flavour. Alternatively, use them raw in a pesto (see my recipe below).
Whether it's just one of these plants that takes your fancy, or all of them, I hope you'll embark on a little adventure close to home, and have a few wild green feasts this spring.
Creamed sea beet gratin
You can also make this with spinach. It's especially good alongside sausages or black pudding. Serves four as a side dish.
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
500g sea beet, stalks removed (unless they are very tender, in which case leave them on), washed
About 50g coarse breadcrumbs
About 50g grated cheddar (or other flavoursome cheese)
For the béchamel
500ml whole milk
1 bay leaf
A wedge of onion
35g butter
35g plain flour
Bring a pan of water to a boil and salt it lightly. Drop the sea beet into the boiling water, cook for two to three minutes and drain. When cool enough to handle, squeeze out all the water, then chop coarsely.
Put the milk in a pan with the bay leaf and onion. Bring to just below boiling, then turn off the heat and leave to infuse for at least 30 minutes.
Heat the butter in a medium saucepan over a medium heat. When melted and bubbling, stir in the flour to make a smooth roux. Let this bubble over a gentle heat for about three minutes, then remove from the heat, add a quarter of the warm milk (if it's cooled right down, reheat it gently before you add it) and beat vigorously to form a smooth paste. Add another quarter of the milk and beat again until smooth. Repeat with the remaining milk. When you have a smooth sauce, return the pan to the heat and simmer gently, stirring often, for four to five minutes.
Heat the grill to medium. Remove the sauce from the heat, stir in the sea beet and season to taste. Spread the mixture in a shallow ovenproof dish, scatter with the breadcrumbs and cheese, and grill until golden and bubbling. Serve straight away.
Wild garlic and walnut pesto
Fresh pesto is always so much more delicious than a shop-bought one. Toss this into hot pasta, swirl it into a vegetable soup, use on bruschetta or crostini, or serve with roast veg. These quantities make enough for pasta sauce for four.
50g shelled walnuts
About 75g wild garlic leaves and stems, washed and roughly chopped
35g parmesan (or other hard, mature cheese), finely grated
Finely grated zest of ½ lemon, plus a good squeeze of lemon juice
100-150ml extra-virgin olive oil
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Heat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4. Put the nuts in an ovenproof dish and toast for five to eight minutes, checking from time to time because they burn easily. Leave to cool.
Put the toasted nuts in a food processor, along with the wild garlic, parmesan and lemon zest. Blitz to a paste, then, with the motor running, slowly add the oil until you have a thick, sloppy purée. Scrape this into a bowl, add a squeeze of lemon and season to taste. This pesto will keep in a jar in the fridge for a few days.
Steamed Alexanders
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's steamed alexanders: One of the best wild vegetables of spring. Photograph: Colin Campbell for the Guardian
These are a real delight. Serves two as a starter.
200g prepared alexanders stems or shoots (ie, from around 8-10 stems)
Knob of butter
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
With a small, sharp knife, peel away the outer membrane and stringy fibres from the alexanders stems. Trim the ends, then cut the stems into 10-12cm lengths. Put in a steaming basket or sieve suspended over a pan of boiling water, cover and cook for five to 10 minutes, until they are tender and can be pierced with the tip of a sharp knife.
Once cooked, toss gently with a large knob of butter, a little salt and lots of pepper, and serve. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/careers/charity-careers1 | Guardian Careers | 2011-09-23T11:10:00.000Z | Alison White | Live Q&A: Quiz the charity workers | This week it emerged there's a rather high-profile 29-year-old in the market for some charity work. Kate Middleton is exploring the charitable sector as she mulls over what to make of her position at the top of British society, Associated Press reported.
OK, we know the Duchess of Cambridge isn't currently holed up in the palace drafting a CV and covering letter for the good causes she's considering. But what do you need to know if you want to work for a charity? Should you happen to lack a royal family connection, that is.
Joking aside, if you're serious about a career within a charity, your CV should have voluntary experience on it. That's according to Rachel Smith, head of NGO partnerships and campaigns for Global Giving, who said in a live Q&A that any level of experience is a good start, whether it's volunteering in your own community or taking on a voluntary position within a charity.
Getting your foot in the door is a good idea, agrees Leisa Ashton from Oxfam. She explained in the same Q&A how once you're working for an organisation you can then network and work towards landing a job in your area of interest, once your knowledge of the organisation and sector improve.
Keen to know what else will improve your chances of carving out a career in a charity? We've lined up a panel of experts who will be sharing their experiences and knowledge in a live Q&A. They'll be taking your questions and explaining what it takes to succeed in their chosen specialism. So, whatever area you are interested in within the sector, join us on Thursday 29 September between 1pm and 4pm.
Advance questions are welcome below.
To keep up-to-date with our regular Q&A sessions, you can now sign-up for our newsletter here.
Our panel:
Kam Thandi is a team manager at the NSPCC Helpline, which provides 24-hour advice and support to adults who are concerned about the safety or welfare of a child. Kam will be online from 2pm until 3pm.
Karen England is director of fundraising at Make-A-Wish Foundation UK. Karen heads up the charity's fundraising and marketing team of 14. Karen has also recently sat on the Institute of Fundraising's Policy Advisory Board, was involved with the set-up of the PFRA (the body that regulates street and door donor recruitment) and was shortlisted for Fundraiser of the Year in 2004.
Lynne Mackintosh is director of finance at Make-A-Wish Foundation UK. She joined Make-A-Wish early in 2010. She has experience in both the commercial and charity sectors.
Georgina Anstey is assistant consultant at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. She looks after the Working For A Charity programme, which offers training to help people to transfer their skills from the public or private sector into the charity sector.
Lucy Caslon is founder and director of Msizi Africa, a charity which feeds and provides shelter to 1,000 AIDS orphans in Southern Africa.
Linda Craig is interim director of Suzy Lamplugh Trust. She has 17 years experience in the charity sector, following an early career in information management in the private sector.
Pam Zigomo is the programme manager at Brightside, a national charity that develops online mentoring projects, and other online tools and resources, to support disadvantaged young people into education and employment.
Claire Methven is PR officer for muscle-wasting disease charity, the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign. Claire specialises in campaigns and advocacy media relations.
Cat Powell is arts for health coordinator for The Children's Hospital Charity. Her role is to promote recovery by providing a creative and child-friendly environment at Sheffield Children's NHS Foundation Trust.
Ben Carter is marketing and communications manager for international development charity Emerge Poverty Free. Ben promotes individual giving, raises funds through appeals and raises public awareness of the charity and its cause.
Steven Franks is manager of Action for Blind People's north London team. Steven held various fundraising posts before joining Action for Blind People. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/oct/24/brexit-means-brexit-independence-sovereignty-freedom-recession | Politics | 2016-10-24T15:49:53.000Z | Jonathan Lynn | Brexit means Brexit: independence! Sovereignty! Freedom! Recession! | European Union exit and trade (European affairs) sub-committee
PM I went to Brussels. Met the EU leaders. They wanted to know our plan. I had nothing to tell them.
Foreign secretary Rome wasn’t built in a day.
PM We need a plan. The EU wants to know the plan. Parliament wants to know the plan. It has been four frigging months! No plan! I’m beginning to wonder if this will be over in my lifetime.
Foreign secretary Probably not. How old are you, actually?
PM You three ran the leave campaign. I assumed you had some idea what to do.
Foreign secretary Nope.
Trade minister The Great Repeal bill will solve the problem.
PM No. EU-related law constitutes more than one-sixth of our statutes. I’m told there are 12,295 EU regulations concerning consumer and banking rules and food-safety standards. The bill will simply transfer all those EU rules into UK law. Then we still have to get rid of them, one by one.
Brexit minister Independence! Sovereignty! Freedom!
Chancellor Recession!
Foreign secretary It took 40 years to get into this mess; it could take as long to get out.
Trade minister We’ll start with blanket legislation that chucks out all their stupid food-safety standards.
PM We can’t. We export food to the single market. They take 44% of our exports.
Brexit minister That’s why they have to do a deal with us.
PM No! That’s why we have to do a deal with them!
Foreign secretary Same difference.
Trade minister So we sell our food somewhere else. Indonesia? The Philippines?
Foreign secretary Food safety won’t matter to them.
PM You’re delusional!
Brexit minister Prime Minister, we look to you for guidance. And support.
PM You can’t pass the buck. That won’t work.
Foreign secretary With respect, Prime Minister, you’re panicking.
PM What if parliament doesn’t pass the Great Repeal bill, then the government falls? Won’t that panic you?
Foreign secretary No.
PM Because I’d be history and you want my job?
Foreign secretary Oh, ye of little faith! | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2023/nov/10/goodbye-cakey-finish-meet-the-next-generation-of-face-powders | Fashion | 2023-11-10T08:00:17.000Z | Sali Hughes | Goodbye, cakey finish! Meet the next generation of face powders | Sali hughes on beauty | Interview any glamorous female celebrity over 40 and she will almost invariably give the same beauty tip – avoid powder in later life. It ages you, she’ll say. Looks dull, settles into wrinkles. I’m 48 and admittedly less glamorous, but I still call hogwash.
For me, powder is an essential, and shine in the wrong place can be particularly ageing. It’s all about proper placement (use a medium brush and stay away from the cheeks – some light here looks healthful) and choosing the right product.
The new generation of moisturising powders makes the second part easy. Brand founder and makeup artist Terry de Gunzberg is impossibly well groomed and approaching her eighth decade, so can be trusted on this. Her new Hyaluronic Hydra Pressed Powder (£42) which has been on my face for the past month, rubbishes accepted wisdom in the sweep of a fluffy brush.
Almost transparent (it looks deceptively white in the compact) and finer than icing sugar, this elegant powder mattifies the nose, chin and forehead, locking down foundation comfortably. It sits obediently in place all day and imparts a smoothness with no hint of dryness or chalk.
Here’s the best thing for those who want the moon on a stick: a powder that behaves like one without looking like one
If you’d like the same fine, matte finish but with a little coverage to even out tone, allow me to uncover the hidden gem that is Clinique’s Almost Powder Makeup SPF15 (£34). This deserves all the love from those who want to swoosh on their makeup in seconds and feel exactly the right level of “done” for daily life. The inclusion of squalane will see even dry skins through to bedtime without any flaking, caking or discomfort.
Finally, it would be remiss of me to not to mention MAC Mineralize Skinfinish Natural (£32), because although I haven’t brought it up before, I would never want anyone to assume it had fallen from favour. It is still, in my view, the best powder available for those effectively looking for the moon on a stick: a powder that behaves like a powder without looking like one.
The key to its success is natural mica and jojoba oil, and its slow-baked formula. This results in a very thin, non-drying coating on a brush or puff, which gives the lightest possible finish. And there’s no monochrome here: as ever, MAC has an unusually large and inclusive line up of 14 natural-looking shades to suit everyone. The soft, light-reflecting finish is also absolutely spot on – subtly pearlescent but not at all glittery. It is candlelight in a compact. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/29/democratic-republic-congo-citizen-tribunal-milo-rau | World news | 2015-05-29T13:35:24.000Z | David Smith | Part war crimes trial, part performance art: tribunal investigates Congo conflict | No one knows exactly how many people have died in the past two decades in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but Milo Rau, a Swiss theatre director and journalist, puts the figure at six million.
No one is quite sure why conflict has raged either, thanks to the labyrinthine complexity of the region: the alphabet soup of armed groups, the seeming lack of ideology and the shadowy involvement of neighbouring countries and multinational corporations. But Rau is determined to unravel at least some of these tangled threads. Today he will begin staging an unprecedented event – part political inquiry, part verbatim theatre – in eastern Congo itself, hearing evidence from players on all sides of the ongoing tragedy.
The roots of war in eastern Congo
Read more
“There are no huge battles, there is no Stalingrad,” he says, explaining why Congo defies the single story that headline writers crave.
“Instead you have massacres – like the one in Mutarule in which 35 people died last year – but they happen every day and, after 20 years, you have six million people dead and you don’t even have a trial. Through the tribunal we hope to simplify it and give it a human face.”
Costing 900,000 euros (£643,969), The Congo Tribunal will take place across six days starting today, first in Bukavu, then later in June in Berlin, where in the 19th century the colonialist empires infamously gathered in a “scramble” to carve up Africa.
‘Nothing has changed’
It took a year to put together a “cast”, including Congolese government and opposition politicians, military officers and rebels, UN and World Bank mandarins and major mining companies, as well as ordinary Congolese citizens, philosophers, economists and lawyers who will all appear before an international jury.
Rau, 38, is determined that it will not merely be an exercise in western corporation-bashing, and should differ from the Russell Tribunals on Vietnam and Palestine – organised by Nobel-prize winning philosopher Bertrand Russell, and hosted by Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1960s.
The tribunal – backed by sponsors including the German and Swiss culture ministries – moves to Berlin onfrom 26 to 28 June. Photograph: IIPM/The Congo Tribunal
“It’s not only leftwing people,” he continues, speaking from Bukavu via Skype. “We have an advocate of a huge mining company and an advocate of the government. We also try to see it from the neoliberal side. It’s necessary to have these minerals to produce the computers we’re talking on. But the most important people are the miners and the citizens to tell what has happened.”
Among these is Théophile Gakinz, a pastor from Bukavu. “The resources are badly divided,” he told Rau’s researchers. “A small group of people takes it all. The rest struggles in misery.”
The tribunal will grapple with the region’s ethnic, political and economic dividing lines. It will look at the implications of assimilating former rebels into the Congolese government army, whether the UN and NGOs in the region have become a “peacekeeping industry”, and what impact, if any, American legislation against conflict minerals has had on the ground.
Prince Kihangi, a civil society activist who will be on the jury in Bukavu, said: “The US wants to appear righteous to the rest of the world. Officially they say, hey, we need a law that shows the world that we impose a ban. That we are not involved in this mafia. But because at the same time we need those minerals we must find other ways.
“For us, all these initiatives are fit for nothing. Absolutely worthless. Nothing has changed.”
In part, the tribunal will look at the impact of American legislation against conflict minerals has had on the ground. Photograph: Schalk van Zuydam/AP
The investigations
This weekend the tribunal will first hear evidence about three local cases. One concerns the discovery of cassiterite [tin ore] on a hill in Bisie in 2002 that attracted numerous armed groups as well as the Congolese army, who walked away with most of the profits. Four years later a company acquired an exploration licence for the mine from the government, which led to an open conflict with the miners on the site.
A key question for the tribunal will be: “Does the industrial mining of the raw materials in Bisie contribute to the security and economical development of the region, or are the foreign mining companies the only ones who profit?”
The second case examines what happened when a Canadian company bought a gold mining licence and wanted the local population to be relocated, causing conflict.
People say to themselves: the state doesn’t protect us. It’s up to us to protect ourselves
Sylvestre Bisimwa, chief investigator
“Has Banro profited from the political instability during the war in order to plunder the natural resources of eastern Congo, or are they pioneers of the industrialisation of the region?”
Peter Mugisho, a local activist, says in a promotional video for the tribunal: “After the re-localisation they find themselves in a situation with no access to running water, no access to health services and no access to food. This is a method to exterminate the population.”
The final case concerns a massacre in the village of Mutarule in June last year, resulting in 35 deaths. Although local authorities had repeatedly warned about increasing insecurity in the region, neither the nearby UN peacekeeping mission nor the Congolese army prevented the atrocity.
DRC military personnel patrol against rebel groups near Beni in North Kivu province. Photograph: Stringer/Reuters
“Key question: Is there no end to the insecurity in eastern Congo because too many local and international players are involved in the numerous conflicts and profit from them, or do they in fact prevent something even worse?”
‘It’s up to us to protect ourselves’
The tribunal – backed by sponsors including the German and Swiss culture ministries – moves to Berlin from 26 to 28 June, where it will examine the involvement of the European Union, the World Bank, the international community and multinational corporations.
It will be filmed and turned into a documentary that will go on general release next year after a premiere at the Tata Raphael Stadium in Kinshasa – where heavyweight boxers Muhammad Ali and George Foreman fought the Rumble in the Jungle in 1974.
The project is a natural successor to Rau’s masterpiece Hate Radio, which reconstructs the broadcasting of a Rwandan radio station that combined pop music with propaganda that fuelled the 1994 genocide.
Sylvestre Bisimwa, chief investigator at the Bukavu hearings, says on the video: “People say to themselves: the state doesn’t protect us. It’s up to us to protect ourselves.
“The victims are left with their pain. They carry their burden alone,” he said.
“This tribunal will lead to a totally neutral and independent prosecution, and will form a base to fight exemption from punishment in Congo.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/16/i-look-forward-to-hearing-from-you-by-nick-bhasin-review-madcap-hollywood-satire | Books | 2023-06-15T15:00:21.000Z | Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen | I Look Forward to Hearing from You by Nick Bhasin review – madcap Hollywood satire | The year is 2002 and Hector Singh, an aspiring screenwriter in his late 20s, has moved to Los Angeles to pursue his dreams. He is mixed Indian and Puerto Rican, though he considers himself post-race – after all, it’s a meritocracy, isn’t it? Hector has written his own scripts but gets put to work as a writers’ assistant on a bland TV drama, Coming Holm, about a white woman trying to get her life back together by running for mayor in her washed-up home town. He is also dealing with his mother’s sudden death but he pushes the grief aside to not only survive but thrive in Hollywood.
Sydney-based US expat Nick Bhasin’s ambitious debut novel, I Look Forward to Hearing from You, is a madcap satire of the screen industry and the very act of writing, from inflated egos to the messy politics of the workplace. It’s a distinctive and daring piece of work but, while it has moments of pathos and brilliance, the novel more often is swallowed by its own snark.
‘Sinister’, ‘bonkers’, ‘meta’: the best Australian books out in June
Read more
Each chapter begins with a fake quote from a celebrity or notable writer: “The life of a writer is pure torture,” from the pen of Judy Blume. Or “What is success? Is it fame? Is it wealth? Yes.” from Clint Eastwood. These pithy snippets recall the #TheySaidWHAT series on Clickhole – in fact it all feels very now, including conversations about diversity, body positivity and appropriation, which makes the fact it is set in the early-aughts seem unconvincing.
Celebrity and pop culture are mercilessly skewered, sometimes in wickedly funny ways: Eminem sings a song for a film called Hip Hop Hobo; Angelina Jolie stars in I, Refugee. Bhasin – who has worked in film and TV production in the US – has concocted perhaps hundreds of fake films, TV shows and loglines, often taking aim at the shallowness of the industry. (Speaking about a show called My One Black Friend, a character muses, “Black people really don’t like My One Black Friend. White people? They love it.”) He clearly has a deep knowledge and begrudging love for pop culture, but the effect of this unyielding avalanche of satirical references is that their impact gradually dulls, and it eventually becomes more grating than humorous.
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Bhasin’s brand of satire recalls another Australian debut, Siang Lu’s excellent 2022 novel The Whitewash, which took the form of an oral history about the rise and fall of a fictional Asian-led film in Hollywood. Both novels blend fact and fiction to create hyperreal parallel universes that reveal the industry’s complicity in perpetuating white supremacy.
But Bhasin takes that surrealism to another level. Hector’s reliance on antidepressants blurs the lines between reality and his increasingly manic imagination, exacerbated by an absurd coyote infestation in the city and his imaginary primate friend – a literal monkey on his back. The protagonist’s professional and interpersonal relationships become more unhinged as the narrative unfolds and he unravels.
When Bhasin does bring in actual reality, it is to illustrate what is probably already obvious to the reader. Reflections about real-life actors such as Raquel Welch and Rita Hayworth, who anglicised their names to make it in Hollywood, drive Hector to slowly accept that being post-race isn’t possible in a world where race very much still dictates people’s lives and opportunities. His experiences in the workplace, where he is subject to constant racism, eventually wear him down.
One of Hector’s maladaptive coping mechanisms is binge eating, which couples with intrusive thoughts. He is faced by two opposing groups – Fat Acceptance and Fat Panic – rallying for body liberation and espousing fatphobic beliefs, respectively. These two sides represent the character’s battle with internalised fatphobia (Bhasin has written in the past about his own struggles with body image) but it’s the latter that win out most often in this novel, as Hector expresses constant revulsion at what he perceives to be the grotesqueness of his body – which is really just described as being large.
While it provides an honest window into the character’s self-loathing, and his perception of weight gain as a personal moral failing, Bhasin’s relentless negative physical descriptions do begin to feel gratuitous. Hector refers to himself as a “hippo”; looking in the mirror at his fat moving, he reflects that it’s “one of the most hideous things I had ever seen in my life”. At another point, he thinks, “I’d rather have had fucking hands for feet and feet for hands than jiggly titties.” Similar to the onslaught of jokey references, more restraint would have communicated the character’s struggle just as effectively, without veering into potentially harmful or triggering territory.
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Scenes detailing Hector’s grief are the novel’s strongest points – a moment in which he discovers his mother’s secret ambitions and love for film is profoundly moving, revealing a side of her he had never known or had access to, due to the expectations of immigrant mothers to put their dreams aside. Hector dials his dead mother’s number just to hear her voicemail.
In these moments, the character’s deep sorrow is fully rendered and he becomes much more real and sympathetic; Bhasin’s narrative voice softens enough to let the reader into the true heart of the story, which stands in contrast to the acidic tone of the rest of the book. While the latter illustrates the self-defensive mechanisms necessary to survive as a minority in the cut-throat film world, a greater balance in tone would have made for a more satisfying arc.
Hector is a strange and unreliable narrator but, when Bhasin lets the character’s emotional walls down, there’s a fragile, beautiful sense of humanity underneath. More often, though, the satire and self-defence is laid on so thick that it’s almost suffocating. Welcome to Hollywood.
I Look Forward to Hearing from You by Nick Bhasin is out now through Penguin | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/aug/20/closure-of-craig-solly-russell-kane-review | Stage | 2014-08-20T12:06:23.000Z | Lyn Gardner | Edinburgh 2014 review: The Closure of Craig Solly – Russell Kane in unnerving form | Putting the audience face to face with a "monster" is a favourite on the Edinburgh fringe. While it might be a slightly tired trick for those of us who have sat through any number of shows about Myra Hindley and other serial killers, and still have no greater understanding of what makes them tick, comic turned writer and performer Russell Kane does it with some flair in this solo debut. Kane finds a reason for us being there with his anti-hero, Craig Solly, a clearly psychopathic villain with a taste for delivering rough justice. We first meet him standing over his wife's naked lover with a pair of nutcrackers. Kane has a neat turn of phrase as he describes the man pleading for mercy "like a Victorian street-child begging for bread".
Inevitably there is no mercy forthcoming, and that's why we are here in a confined space with the unlovely Solly. We are the parents, lovers, sons and daughters of all of those Solly has killed and maimed, and coming here is supposed to bring us some kind of closure. Except of course it doesn't, because the blindingly articulate Solly is a self-justification machine, a man who tells the truth as he sees it with more than a touch of dirty poetry thrown in for good measure. Even villains can be artists.
Kane is good enough in the dead-behind-the-eyes role to almost certainly ensure a string of offers playing villains in low-budget British crime movies, but it's the writing that makes you sit up and listen. Unlike many of his fellow comics turned playwrights on the fringe, Kane mostly keeps the joke under control and understands that chucking in lots of one-liners is a hindrance rather than a help. It's a particularly nasty and unnerving hour, but one that is delivered with real confidence and style.
Until 24 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000. Underbelly. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/jul/03/tennis-tough-sport-to-break-into-says-rising-uk-hopeful-jay-clarke | Sport | 2018-07-03T18:18:55.000Z | Haroon Siddique | Tennis 'tough sport' to break into, says rising UK hopeful Jay Clarke | Jay Clarke has said he hopes to inspire other people from working class and minority backgrounds to follow in his footsteps after an impressive Wimbledon singles debut in which he came close to a memorable victory.
The 19-year-old, mixed race British wild card card pushed former top 10 player Ernests Gulbis, from Latvia, all the way before losing the deciding fifth set.
Clarke was born in Derby and a couple of years ago still had to walk three miles to practise because his parents did not own a car. He only received funding from the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) when he turned 18 as part of its player pathway programme. When one of his sponsors stopped funding him before that he had to stop playing because he could not afford to go to tournaments.
He cut a disconsolate figure after his 6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 6-3, 4-6 loss but said: “I hope I inspire people. I don’t think I’m in the position, that high-ranked or well-known to do that at the minute, [but] if anybody was watching today, wanted to pick up a racquet, yeah, that’s a bonus.”
Andy Murray is a perfectionist but his Wimbledon decision may be flawed
Kevin Mitchell
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Clarke cut a striking contrast to Gulbis, the son of an investment banker. The 29-year-old, who received a warning for verbal abuse during the match, is now married and a father but had a reputation as a playboy when younger, borrowing his father’s private jet to travel to tournaments as well as parties. He once said: “I do not play tennis for the money, but I do need to work. I don’t want to live off others.”
Clarke warned before the tournament that the lack of official funding for junior players was hampering the search for British talent. After his defeat, he said more facilities would help grow the game. “It’s a tough sport to get into ... If there’s more opportunity, maybe there would be more players,” he said. “I’m not sure if there would be more elite players making it to this level, but for sure there would probably be in the UK.”
He was tearful, having come so close to victory, but his parents, who shouted encouragement to “JJ” during the match, were more upbeat.
His father Earol said: “We are both very proud, he’s worked hard. It’s always been his dream. He watched it [Wimbledon] on TV [when he was a child] and asked me many a time, ‘Are Agassi and those guys going to be there when I play there’?”
He expressed his hope that it was the “start of something special” for his son.
“We are showing we can succeed at tennis, [even though] we are not from a wealthy background” said Earol, who coached his son when he was younger.
Gabriella Taylor, another British wild card making her debut in the singles against a big name player, also gave a good account herself on Tuesday. Taylor came back from a 6-0 drubbing in the first set to win the second against the 2014 finalist, Eugenie Bouchard. However, Taylor succumbed to the Canadian 6-3 in the final set.
Another British wild card, Gabriella Taylor, succumbed to the Canadian Eugenie Bouchard in the third set. Philip Toscano/PA Wire. Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA
Unfussy straight sets wins for Kyle Edmund and Johanna Konta, both carrying extra expectations in Andy Murray’s absence, ensured that the number of victories for British players exceeded that on the first day, when Katie Swan was the sole home winner.
No, Serena Williams isn’t being punished for having a baby
Andrew Jerell Jones
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At her press conference, Konta, a semi-finalist last year, gave her backing to making the rules fairer for women returning to action after maternity leave. While Serena Williams was seeded 25th for Wimbledon, this was only at the discretion of Wimbledon. The former world number one, Victoria Azarenka, pointed out after her match on Monday that she was not afforded the same treatment when she returned last year.
The odds were always against Naomi Broady, another wild card, who was drawn against defending champion Garbiñe Muguruza first up on centre court. Nevertheless, she put up a creditable performance, particularly in the second set, losing 6-2, 7-5.
Broady said that, far from being overwhelmed by the biggest crowd she had ever played, it gave her a boost. “I’m a player that definitely plays better in front of a crowd. The more they were cheering, my level was going up, so they needed to cheer louder and maybe it would have gone up even higher.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jun/02/the-city-where-diego-maradona-rose-from-the-dead-documentary-asif-kapadia-senna-amy | Film | 2019-06-02T11:00:38.000Z | Tim Lewis | The city where Diego Maradona rose from the dead | Diego Maradona didn’t know it would be his last match for Barcelona. It was the final of the Spanish Cup against Athletic Bilbao in May 1984, but from the start, it went badly: he was relentlessly hacked at by the opposition, including a man not long christened “the Butcher of Bilbao” for a tackle on Maradona that almost ended his career, and racially abused by the crowd. On the final whistle, Barça had lost 1-0 and he received more taunts, this time from the Bilbao players. Now he cracked. He launched an extravagant kung-fu kick at one of them and knocked another out cold with his knee. The brawl escalated and became one of the most infamous in football history. Eric Cantona’s 1995 lunge into the crowd looks tame in comparison. King Juan Carlos and more than half of Spain watched as Maradona, his shirt in tatters, was dragged off the pitch.
It wasn’t the first problem Maradona, then 23, had encountered at Barcelona, either. The club chastised him for going out too much. He replied that it was none of their business. He took cocaine for the first time in a nightclub there. “One hit,” he remembers in Asif Kapadia’s engrossing new feature-length documentary Diego Maradona, “and I felt like Superman.” The Argentine was brilliant, no question, but he had to go. The question was: who would have him?
The answer was SSC Napoli. Back then, Napoli were not one of the world’s great teams – they had never even won a league title. The club entered each season more content to dodge relegation than chase honours. “It was the equivalent of [Lionel] Messi going to Nottingham Forest,” says Kapadia, whose previous films Senna and Amy won three Baftas and an Oscar and revolutionised feature documentaries. “But Nottingham Forest have won something. Let’s say Plymouth. It’s that thing where if you wrote it down, no one would believe it, because it will never happen again.”
Maradona didn’t have any choice: Napoli were the only club willing to pay his fee of £6.9m, then a record. On the flight to Italy, he told reporters of his hope for a fresh start in Naples. “I expect peace,” he said, “the peace I didn’t have in Barcelona. But, above all, respect.”
Looking around Naples today, searching out some of Maradona’s old haunts with Fiammetta Luino, a translator and archivist on Kapadia’s film, the city has a lot going for it. In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was renowned as the place to study opera. Naples has long been home to some of the world’s most skilled tailors. It is one of the great food destinations: a city that maybe didn’t invent pizza but perfected it and one that certainly pioneered the delicacy that is fried pizza. It is poorer and, yes, dirtier than Italian cities in the north, but also wilder: more primal, less buttoned-up. Its dialect is theatrical and full of passion. Children bomb down dark alleys on scooters, eschewing helmets as a point of pride. People you’ve just met buy you coffee. Under your feet are tunnels used by gangsters to avoid detection. Maradona might be the first person in history who came to Naples searching for “peace”.
Maradona during a Serie A match between Napoli and Juventus in 1985. Photograph: Stefano Montesi/Corbis
This was especially true in 1984 when he arrived. Four years earlier, the Irpinia earthquake had killed about 2,500 people and left 250,000 homeless in the region. In the aftermath, the local Camorra crime syndicate had become more powerful than ever: they hogged the funds set aside for rebuilding the area and tightened their grip on the construction industry. A turf war started that ran throughout the 1980s. “Every day in those years, there was a murder in Naples,” Simone Di Meo, an investigative journalist who specialises in the Camorra, tells me over a bicerin in the very grand Galleria Umberto I in central Naples, a location picked because it is open and very public, something a man with powerful enemies has to keep in mind. “So that gives you an idea of the scale of the fighting.”
In those years, Di Meo says, “Naples was a city that lived waiting for Sunday” – that is, match day. Opposition fans would wave bags of rubbish in their direction; those were the nice ones. The nasty ones sang songs with lyrics such as: “Sick with cholera. Victims of the earthquake. You never washed with soap. You are the shame of the whole of Italy!”
Luino says: “In Naples, there is a strong belief in the idea of a saviour who comes from outside the city and redeems the people who live there. It all started with San Gennaro, the patron saint, who saved the city when Vesuvius was erupting by changing the direction of the wind.”
Kapadia agrees. “Diego and Naples are perfect for one another,” he says. “It’s almost like he is Neapolitan and he found his home. So he has this awful time in Barcelona and he left there, he’s rock bottom and he goes to Naples and suddenly there’s all this love. And he’s like, ‘Perfect!’ The problem is that you can’t switch it off: the touchy-feeliness, the intensity of the place, the absolute obsession with football.”
A troubled, charismatic man lands in a troubled, charismatic city. Maradona would spend seven years in Naples, the longest and most fecund period of his career: he won two league titles, various cups, including the 1986 World Cup with Argentina, and proved definitively that he was the great player of his era. But it was also disastrous for him personally: he became mixed up with the Camorra, had chaotic personal relationships, multiple infidelities and developed a full-blown addiction to cocaine.
“It does go wrong there,” Kapadia goes on. “Diego already had that tendency of excess: when he goes out dancing, he’s going to keep going dancing. If he’s going to go partying, he’s going to party. If he’s going to do something, he’s going to keep doing it. He does everything to the max.”
Enduring love: Napoli fans with a banner of Maradona in 2017. Photograph: Cesare Abbate/EPA
Kapadia was approached about making a film about Maradona in 2012. A producer, Paul Martin, had unearthed hundreds of hours of candid footage shot on U-matic video between 1981 and 1987. Jorge Cyterszpiler, Maradona’s agent, imagined they would make a film of it, but he was fired before he could realise the project. Kapadia liked the idea of finishing the job Cyterszpiler started, but he’d not long completed Senna, his documentary on the Brazilian F1 driver Ayrton Senna, and he felt it was too soon to return to sport and South American tragi-heroes. He made Amy, about Amy Winehouse, instead.
In 2015, with an Oscar and Bafta for Amy, to add to the two Baftas Senna won – and also with the commercial heft of having made the two highest-grossing British documentaries ever – Kapadia returned to Diego Maradona. By this stage, his signature style was well-established (and widely emulated). He made immersive, densely researched films that eschewed talking heads in favour of archive footage and previously unseen home videos. Action is slowed, sound effects heightened. He describes his films as “mosaics” and compares them to pop art; this approach to documentaries, Kapadia says, owes more to the fact that his early films were art projects made at the Royal College of Art than a radical desire to subvert the genre.
Kapadia, who is 47 and from north London, calls Diego Maradona the final instalment of a trilogy. Personally, it was the hardest of the three films to make, both practically and emotionally. “He’s a really hard one to pin down, Diego,” says Kapadia. “It’s the equivalent of trying to nail jelly on the wall, because the minute you think you’ve got something, he’ll do something else. So it’s been a really challenging project to try to get the essence of this man. In a way, Senna was consistently charismatic and incredible, amazing and eloquent. I just fell in love with Ayrton Senna and people who see the film fall in love with him.
“Amy is like the inverse,” he continues, “because she was amazing, but the whole thing around her was a mess. And she was lost. And she needed love and she needed attention and sadly everyone that she went to, or who went to her, seemed to be not great for her. And Diego is a bit of both. Wherever he goes, he also creates trouble. If there isn’t trouble, he’ll make it or he’ll search it out. But I like him… I don’t know if I ever fell in love with him, the same way I did with Amy and Ayrton Senna, because he’s not easy to love. But I do feel for him.”
Early on, Kapadia realised he had enough original material – and a compelling-enough protagonist – to make a long film for television, similar in scope to OJ: Made in America, which ran for seven hours 47 minutes and won the Oscar for best documentary in 2017. A story that would follow Maradona from his upbringing in one of the poorest, most miserable slums of Buenos Aires and tell how a player with no physical advantages became the best in the world, through his relentless controversies to the present day. But, ultimately, Kapadia decided against working with a TV channel or streaming platform and Diego Maradona is a tight two hours 10 minutes and will be released first in cinemas.
A mural depicting the infamous “Hand of God” goal scored by Maradona against England at the World Cup finals in 1986. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
“The honest truth is: I’m old-fashioned, I’m a movie guy,” he says, laughing. “I love going to the cinema. I love being engrossed in a dark space with a group of people and experiencing something collective. I know also that I’m not the best person at watching 10 hours on TV. I fall asleep, I check my email, I’m on Twitter. I’ll suddenly have an urge for chocolate or a biscuit or something. I’m human, I’m not able to do it. I don’t have the time to watch 10 hours on every subject. I never get to the ending of most of them. For me, it’s that Mark Twain line: ‘I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.’”
Besides, Kapadia had started to notice a pattern in Maradona’s behaviour: “death and resurrection”, as the Argentinian’s biographer Daniel Arcucci calls it. It happens at every club he played for, in every job he’s had since he retired. “His life is a series of cycles,” says Kapadia. “He goes somewhere. He’s a great hero. He does something brilliant. They love him! It all goes a little bit wrong. Someone tries to control him. He says, ‘Don’t tell me what to do!’ It ends in disaster. He leaves. He’s rock bottom. His career’s over. He goes somewhere else, starts again. He’s a great hero…
“I spend a lot of time with my brilliant team making these films. Because we’ve done all the work for you. I’m not gonna expect you to watch 10 hours of it. I want you to watch the essence of it. And his time in Naples was the greatest cycle of Diego Maradona’s life.”
Twenty-eight years after he left Naples, Diego Maradona still looms large in the city. He features on two giant murals that cover the sides of buildings: one was completed in the 1980s and is given regular touch-ups; the other was done in 2017 by the street artist Jorit Agoch. Maradona’s face appears everywhere on scarves and posters; in Bar Nilo, in the old town, there are a couple of strands of his hair behind glass like a holy relic. The owner tells me that he flew to Milan to watch Napoli play and happened to be on the same flight home as the team. As he walked past Maradona’s seat, he scooped up the hair and popped it in a cigarette packet.
“Naples is full of votives for saints and I played on that idea,” he says. “Though, for sure, he’s not a saint to you English people.”
The bar owner is, naturally, talking about the “Hand of God” incident: the quarter-final of the 1986 World Cup that Argentina won 2-1 against England, with Maradona contributing both the most sneaky and sublime of goals. For Maradona, scoring with his fist was never a particularly big deal – he’d done it ever since he was a kid, in fact – but the 1986 World Cup did represent a significant moment for him: it was his chance, he felt, to prove that he was the best player in the world. Some felt he arrived in Mexico in the shadow of France’s Michel Platini and Brazil’s Zico, but after leading a mediocre Argentina to victory, the debate was settled.
“We tend to think he’s always been the best player, but he wasn’t,” says Arcucci, who has interviewed Maradona since the 1980s. “He became the best player in Mexico in ’86. And if you want to summarise the whole Maradona myth, you can do it through this game against England. At the time, he said it was nothing but a football game, but that was a lie. Ten years after, he confessed that it was a revenge, that he was taking revenge for the soldiers who’d died in the Falklands war.”
Footage from the film showing the young Maradona at home in Argentina, 1980. Photograph: Cannes Film Festival
At this year’s Cannes film festival, where Diego Maradona had its premiere, footage of his second goal, where he ties the England team in one giant knot, received a spontaneous ovation. “Everyone started clapping,” recalls Kapadia, before musing, tongue in cheek: “I wonder if that happens a lot in England? We’ll see.”
Once Maradona had left Napoli in 1991, after ignominiously failing a drugs test, neither the player nor club returned to the same heights. “You have to bear in mind that Naples is a city that eats up – devours! – its own heroes, its legends,” explains Di Meo. Not long after Maradona’s departure, Napoli were relegated and then declared bankrupt. Maradona, meanwhile, moved into management after retiring, with reliably mixed results. He is currently the boss of a second-division Mexican team, Dorados de Sinaloa, who he led to the brink of promotion this year before losing a second-leg, winner-takes-all match in extra time. “Dorados is my home,” he said recently, echoing comments he’s made regularly throughout his career. “Dorados is pure life.”
Even now, Maradona remains reliable tabloid material. A couple of weeks ago, he was reportedly detained at Buenos Aires airport, returning from Mexico, and presented with a charge to appear in court: his ex-girlfriend Rocio Oliva claims that he owes her £5m. In March, he finally acknowledged the paternity of three children born in Cuba, where he went to treat his cocaine addiction between 2000 and 2005; the 58-year-old is now the father of eight.
For Kapadia, it’s all another round of “death and resurrection”. “If you understand where he’s from, then you will look at him differently,” he says. “Even if you’re the most ardent, hardcore England fan who was in the stadium in Mexico in 1986, who felt ripped off. You look at him and think, ‘Man, how can you survive that experience? How can anyone come out the other end?’ And what I’ll give him: he’s a street fighter because he’s still going. The number of times he’s been knocked down, the number of times he’s literally died! And he comes back again.
“While we were in Cannes someone said, ‘He’s come back more times than Jesus!’ But Jesus has got nothing on him: this guy dies and comes back, dies and comes back every few years. He’s amazing.”
Diego Maradona is released on 14 June | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/01/the-guardian-view-on-a-and-e-waiting-times-a-warning-from-emergency-doctors | Opinion | 2024-04-01T17:30:13.000Z | Editorial | The Guardian view on A&E waiting times: a warning from emergency doctors | Editorial | On one half of Rishi Sunak’s NHS pledge to voters, there has been some modest progress in recent months. Waiting lists for pre-planned hospital treatment and outpatient appointments in England fell from 7.8m to 7.6m between September and December last year. Given the intense pressures on the health system from multiple directions, this improvement is a remarkable achievement by the trusts that brought it about – even while the overall situation remains dire, with waiting lists predicted to remain longer than before the pandemic until 2030 at the earliest.
But the prime minister’s commitment was not limited to waiting lists. The pledge he made in January last year, as one of five priorities on which he said voters should judge him, was that “NHS waiting lists will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly”. New calculations by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) show that, with regard to the broader aim of delivering speedier treatment, his government is falling shockingly short.
The RCEM points to the grave dangers that treatment delays continue to cause. People who need to be admitted to hospital are a minority of A&E patients. In February this year, for example, an average of 13,373 people were admitted out of a total of about 45,000 seen daily in A&E departments. But based on analysis of people who are stuck in A&E for 12 hours or more while waiting for hospital beds, the RCEM estimates that 268 excess deaths are likely to have occurred each week in 2023 – adding up to a total of close to 14,000 unnecessary deaths.
These are terrible figures. People should not be dying because of a lack of beds – or because of delays in putting people in them caused by staff shortages. The NHS lost 25,000 beds across the UK as a whole in the decade to 2022, and emergency specialists have previously highlighted the dangers of a situation where seriously ill or injured people cannot be quickly admitted.
A&E waiting-time targets have sometimes been criticised as a poor proxy for overall NHS performance. As with any targets, there is a risk of perverse incentives and inappropriate skewing of what ought to be clinical judgments. Currently there is a powerful case for prioritising new investment in primary care, community mental health and social care in preference to hospitals. But research showing that risks to life are increased by A&E delays must also be addressed. Greater public familiarity with the epidemiological concept of “excess deaths” since the pandemic should help to ensure that the emergency doctors’ warning is heeded.
A&E is just one window on the wider health and care system, but it is a crucial one. In emergencies, or when GP surgeries are closed or hard to access, these departments function more like a front door. The principle underpinning the UK’s health system – that care is free at the point of need – is tested every time a person goes through.
Voters should take Mr Sunak at his word and look beyond the headline waiting-list figures. There are other areas of care that require scrutiny, including in relation to timeliness. The risks caused by delays in A&E are a frightening prospect, particularly for anyone living with a potentially life-threatening condition. Emergency doctors have performed a valuable public service in highlighting the threats to life that can be caused by excessively long waits. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/oct/23/my-week-as-a-muslim-review-a-cynical-concept-and-spectacularly-odd | Television & radio | 2017-10-23T21:00:28.000Z | Rebecca Nicholson | My Week As a Muslim review – a cynical concept and spectacularly odd | It has been 20 years since Brass Eye first appeared, but the spirit of the satirical news show lives on in My Week As a Muslim (Channel 4), a documentary so spectacularly odd in every respect that it’s hard to believe it wasn’t conceived as a dare. It follows Katie Freeman, 42, ex-RAF, who now works as a healthcare assistant in the NHS. Katie lives in Winsford, Cheshire, and is frightened of Muslims. She explains her belief that people are coming to this country and stretching its resources. The voiceover notes, with withering timing, that she lives in one of the whitest areas of Britain and rarely mixes with anyone outside of her own ethnicity.
In order to challenge her prejudices, such as avoiding sitting next to women in headscarves because she’s scared they’re about to blow something up, the producers make Katie spend the week in Manchester, talking to some real-life Muslims. But what is this, a radio documentary? This is TV, so for that visual point of view, that hashtag talking point, she goes full immersive, like Wife Swap meets Undercover Boss meets Snog Marry Avoid meets the bits of Little Britain that everyone has decided were a bad idea. Katie is turned into a British Pakistani Muslim, with prosthetics, a hijab and enough foundation to sink an ITV2 reality star. That way, the thinking seems to be, she – and crucially, insultingly, the viewers – will really learn what life is like for Muslims in the UK today.
I produced My Week As a Muslim. Its intention was to educate, not offend
Fozia Khan
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The patience of Saima Alvi, Katie’s host for the “experience”, is seemingly endless, and you can see why she might want to use a TV show such as this as a platform to challenge the simple misconceptions and racist views that seem increasingly commonplace. “I genuinely saw in Katie, she’s just not had that experience …” she says, with clear-eyed comprehension. “All you’re going to be left with is assumptions.” There are moments of compassion such as this that transcend the tawdry package in which they’re presented; moments of understanding on both sides that are funny because they’re so daft, such as a discussion about wolf whistles and whether they’re nice or not.
Then Manchester Arena is attacked and 22 people are killed. It happens in the middle of filming. The fear shifts, transparently, from Katie to Saima. It allows Katie to hear additional tales of prejudice that she might not have heard – a woman in a niqab tells her she had to walk on a treadmill because her son told her not to go outside that day; another woman says her kids are not to take public transport. You can’t help but wonder if wringing out the same planned format, in such dramatically changed circumstances, makes it even more queasy. The subsequent lurches in tone, from amusement to horror, are desperately hard to balance.
My Week as a Muslim documentary sparks racism row
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Despite the efforts of those on camera to make it serve a better purpose, My Week As a Muslim is too cynical a concept for that to happen. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Katie already knew her opinions were ill-informed and flimsy, which is why she seeks an explanation of “why they live like that”, as she puts it. She isn’t going to Saima’s house to challenge her on the tenets of Islam. She’s going because she’s aware that she’s afraid and doesn’t understand what she’s afraid of. Any bravado is paper-thin, and when she meets people who are not like her, of course, it dissolves into nothing. Her mother, Joyce, is so scared of the hijab that she cries when she sees her daughter wearing one; within minutes of discussing it, she realises she’s ashamed of her beliefs. These women are not Tommy Robinson. “We’re all just the same, aren’t we?” says Katie at one point, adding variations on that realisation throughout the hour.
But are we really reduced to needing such a feeble and simplistic premise to understand racism in the UK? There are easy, surface moments of hope here, for Katie at least, and she forms a lasting friendship with Saima, so we’re told. But how is it possible that, according to this programme, we have to have a white person in “brownface” getting shouted at outside a pub in order to reach some understanding of the fact that racism is a disgrace? Why is it not enough to have Saima and her friends talking about their experiences? Why not just listen to them, instead of pursuing the bleak notion that viewers need it filtered through Katie to truly get it? “This is the only way I could learn,” says Katie, gravely, at the end. If that really is true, for her and for the audience, then we have a long, long way to go. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/feb/19/the-gold-review-brinks-mat-robbery-drama-better-inside-our-autistic-minds-chris-packham-the-piano-claudia-winkleman-mika-lang-lang | Television & radio | 2023-02-19T09:30:04.000Z | Barbara Ellen | The week in TV: The Gold: Better; Inside Our Autistic Minds; The Piano | The Gold (BBC One) | iPlayer
Better (BBC One) | iPlayer
Inside Our Autistic Minds (BBC Two) | iPlayer
The Piano (Channel 4) | All 4
I didn’t expect much from new BBC One drama The Gold, written and created by Neil Forsyth and plonked in the old Happy Valley slot on Sunday night. Based on the real-life £26m Brink’s-Mat bullion robbery from a warehouse near Heathrow in 1983, the title makes it sound like a naff chart hits compilation album from the same era. But watching it (all six episodes are on iPlayer), my reservations melted – or should I say smelted? – away. It’s less about stolen gold – bars gleaming in hands like lightsabers – than human nature: how far people are prepared to go and how hard others work to stop them.
Directed by Aneil Karia, The Gold starts with a gang setting out to steal a million in cash and ending up with £26m in ingots. The police task force is led by DCI Boyce (Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville, exuding the dogged decency of Martin Clunes in Manhunt), with officers played by Charlotte Spencer and Emun Elliott. The gold-laundering criminals include south London wide boy Kenneth Noye (brilliantly portrayed by Jack Lowden as the dark side of Harry Enfield’s character Loadsamoney); John Palmer (Tom Cullen), smelting gold in a shed; and one of The Gold’s fictional characters, suave but fragile social-climbing solicitor Edwyn (Dominic Cooper), whose pricey shirt collars look like they’re choking him. They’re united by their greed for money and status. “I’m ready,” says a puffed-up Noye at the end of the first episode. “I can be king.”
Brink’s-Mat is an extraordinary ongoing story, including still unaccounted for gold, rumours about what the money funded (property regeneration in London’s Docklands has been cited), even talk of it being cursed. The drama focuses on police efforts to penetrate the labyrinthine international criminal network, alongside freemasonry and corruption (“there is a hidden hand”).
Claudia Winkleman is restored to her nice/bubbly factory settings after her mean girl turn on The Traitors
While it’s important not to glorify criminals (Noye, who successfully pleaded self-defence after fatally stabbing Brink’s-Mat officer DC John Fordham, was later convicted of the 1996 road-rage murder of Stephen Cameron), The Gold manages to humanise, not sanitise. A major flaw, however, is the relentless, clunking “likes of us!” speechifying about class/unfairness. Granted, it’s is set in Thatcherite times, but the repetition borders on the farcical. Still, potent performances and no-frills storytelling deliver a series with grit and shine.
Another new BBC One drama, Better is a five-parter (also all on iPlayer) set in Leeds. Leila Farzad (I Hate Suzie) stars as bent copper DI Lou Slack, who has spent nigh-on two decades fixing problems for crime lord Col – played by Andrew Buchan (Broadchurch, This England) with such a convincing Northern Irish accent, I initially thought James Nesbitt had wandered on set for a cameo.
Basically, Lou is H from Line of Duty given their own series. She and Col have a warm, mutually beneficial relationship, causing friction between her and her husband (Samuel Edward-Cook), but it’s given them the requisite swanky house with uber-fancy kitchen. Then Lou encounters challenges, not least her son (Zak Ford-Williams) falling seriously sick. She vows to be “better” and bring Col down.
‘Dark sparks’: Leila Farzad and Andrew Buchan in Better. BBC
Early on, there are niggles: have none of her colleagues noticed that Lou has the lifestyle of a Yorkshire Gwyneth Paltrow? Then again, there’s much to enjoy in Lou and Col’s relationship: her hammering nerves, his silky charm camouflaging the vicious monster beneath. As tensions rise, Lou must also keep fellow detectives at bay.
I wish Better had continued in this fashion, with dark sparks flying between the leading pair. Sadly, as the series progresses, plot holes turn into craters and absurd developments make for an increasingly daft story. The ending is so peculiar, it turns anti-formulaic into a negative. For all that, the cast is strong – Anton Lesser pops up as a disgraced former detective – and Better is strangely compelling. Even after plausibility goes awol, you still want to find out what happens next.
Comedian Flo in Inside Our Autistic Minds: ‘powerful viewing’. BBC
On BBC Two, Chris Packham continues the good work of his 2017 documentary Asperger’s and Me with the two-part docuseries Inside Our Autistic Minds, in which he meets others with autism, helping them to make films giving insights into their minds.
In this opener, Flo, 28, performs live comedy, but she’s exhausted after years of “masking” (suppressing atypical behaviour; imitating others) for everyone bar her husband. Flo’s film reveals to her devoted, tearful mother her wholly authentic self, complete with the anxious rocking/hand-flapping Flo always feared would upset her. There’s also Murray, 20 (radio presenter Ken Bruce’s son), who is non-verbal but communicates via a tablet. His film uses origami and animation in a plea to be heard: “I have no voice but yearn to say so much.”
This is powerful viewing with tough moments; when Packham visits a school for autistic girls, it emerges that intelligent autistic females are statistically eight times more likely to take their own lives. The programme also showcases the complexities of autism: “When you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person,” says Packham. The perfect presenter for the subject, he quietly waits for people to express themselves, with a look in his eye that says he knows exactly how hard it is.
We’ve all seen the public pianos in shopping centres, town squares and stations around the country. In new six-part Channel 4 series The Piano, presented by Claudia Winkleman, amateurs play, aware they’re being filmed, but not realising that pop artist Mika and world-renowned Chinese pianist Lang Lang are secretly watching them. Each week, one pianist is selected to perform in a special concert at the Royal Festival Hall.
‘Sometimes the sweetest ideas are the best’: Claudia Winkleman, right, with A Miss Tori at the St Pancras station piano in Channel 4’s The Piano. © Mark Bourdillon/Love Productions
The opening episode, at London’s St Pancras station, drives home that beyond the piano, it’s about people: the pianists (young, old, skilful, self-taught) and their music (classical, rap, jazz, self-written). Mika and Lang Lang observe, rapt, while Winkleman is restored to her nice/bubbly factory settings after her mean girl turn on The Traitors.
Be warned, you will feel yourself manipulated – fingers scampering over emotions as surely as the keys – but it’s all in good spirit. With Lang Lang, Mika and the Royal Festival Hall gig revealed at the end of each episode, it gives the performances a spontaneous purity distinct from talent show culture. Sometimes the sweetest, simplest ideas are the best.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Gold ★★★★
Better ★★★
Inside Our Autistic Minds ★★★★
The Piano ★★★
What else I’m watching
Prue and Danny’s Death Road Trip
(Channel 4)
I didn’t realise that The Great British Bake Off’s Prue Leith’s son is Tory MP Danny Kruger. This documentary takes them on a US/Canada road trip to examine their opposing views on assisted dying: she’s pro; he’s against.
Prue and Danny's Death Road Trip. Channel 4 Photograph: Channel 4
The Twelve
(ITVX)
An award-winning, 10-part Australian courtroom murder drama, starring Sam Neill and Kate Mulvaney. Based on 2019 Belgian series De Twaalf, it puts laser focus on the motivations and prejudices of the jury.
Couples Therapy
(BBC Two)
Third series of the counselling show with Dr Orna Guralnik, in which you get a ringside seat for couples’ relationship problems. Emotional issues, sexual dysfunction, ancient gripes – it all comes spilling out. Don’t pretend you’re not fascinated. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/marketforceslive/2011/mar/23/itv-fades-miners-lift-ftse | Business | 2011-03-23T18:00:31.000Z | Nick Fletcher | ITV fades on advertising worries, but miners help push FTSE 100 higher | On a day that included - among other things - the UK budget, the latest minutes from the Bank of England's interest rate setting committee, a bombing in Jerusalem and Portugal's vote on its austerity measures, it was no surprise investors seemed uncertain which way to turn.
An exception was ITV, which was in decline all day. The broadcaster fell 4.35p to 80.35p - a 5% drop - on worries about falling advertising sales and increased competition. Media buyers have reported a slowdown in TV advertising bookings for May after a strong start, according to analysts at Nomura. The bank said:
Late money is not being spent in the way that it has been for the past few months. It is not yet possible to identify a particular sector as the culprit but it seems more of a general slowdown. This is perhaps not terribly surprising given the weak UK economy, subdued retail sales and weak consumer confidence. However, the most recent expectations were for an increase of 4-5% for the TV market in May, and if the media buyer information is correct, this could lead to a short-term loss of momentum for advertising for ITV. [So] there is potential for a pullback in ITV. However, we regard its valuation as still attractive at 11.2 times 2011's PE, and 2012 advertising should be strong owing to the London Olympics, by which time the UK economy could be improving.
Analyst Nick Bell at Jefferies was more concerned about the prospect of new rivals. He downgraded ITV from hold to underperform with a 75p a share price target, saying:
The plethora of consumer devices to connect TVs to the internet are set to change the broadcast landscape as much as digital TV did. While the broadcasters may eventually benefit from supplying targeted advertising on a mass market scale, we see greater risks from continued viewer fragmentation, global competitors entering traditionally national markets, and even a longer term risk of disintermediation [or, cutting out the middleman].
After trading in a 70 point range the FTSE 100 finally finished 33.17 points higher at 5795.88. Angus Campbell, head of sales at Capital Spreads, said:
Another rejection of the 5800 level caused the FTSE to pull back from its highs as investors continue to tread cautiously. Generally on the whole the news flow would normally be expected to send equity markets higher by a greater margin as it was revealed that the Bank of England voting pattern for interest rates had not changed and the chancellor's budget speech announced some interesting measures to help boost the economy, but not even all this was enough to push us significantly higher.
Weakness in supermarkets - Tesco excepted - following disappointing sales figures from J Sainsbury, down 19p at 335.3p, was outweighed by a revival in mining shares after a rise in metal prices on renewed hopes of Chinese demand. Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation climbed 31p to 929.5p after announcing a doubling of 2010 profits to $3.19bn, while Kazakhmys rose 61p to £14.31 and Xstrata added 48p to 1422.5p. Iron ore producer Ferrexpo saw full year profits rise from $81m to $498m, pushing its shares 18.7p higher to 421.2p.
Marks & Spencer added 5p to 345.5p, lifted by the television launch of its spring range and a positive trading update from Zara-owner Inditex.
As for the budget, it had little impact on the market as a whole, although a few individual stocks reacted to the chancellor's measures. Housebuilders benefited from the £250m kitty designed to encourage first time buyers. Redrow rose 4.1p to 129.7p, Barratt Developments was 2.9p better at 109.2p and Taylor Wimpey finished 1.04p higher at 41.96p.
Pennon, the owner of South West Water, put on 1.5p to 622p after the government promised help to reduce water bills in the area.
But a number of oil and gas companies fell back following a move to increase taxation on North Sea production. Centrica - which bought North Sea gas producer Venture in 2009 - lost 8.4p to 317.6p, BG fell 30.5p to £14.75p, Enquest lost 19.7p to 137.6p, Premier Oil dropped 79p to £19.11 and Valiant Petroleum was 48p lower at 556p.
A rise in the bank levy left Lloyds Banking Group 0.92p lower at 60.24p, while Barclays fell 1.25p to 287.25p and Royal Bank of Scotland dipped 0.37p to 41.42p.
Lower down the market SkyePharma jumped 6.63p to 44.5p following better than expected results and optimism about the outlook for its asthma therapy Flutiform. Analysts at the company's broker, Singer Capital Markets said:
Despite the company's expectation of slightly lower royalties and manufacturing fees, the outlook for 2011 remains generally upbeat, with expectations of a second half European approval and launch of Flutiform by partner Mundipharma, and potential (significant) milestone income should [pain management treatment] Exparel gain its expected US approval.
However, we believe it is essential that [£83m of] bond debt is restructured, if new investment in the stock is to be attracted. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2023/jun/08/fleabag-star-andrew-scott-to-bring-one-man-uncle-vanya-to-west-end | Stage | 2023-06-07T23:01:49.000Z | Mark Fisher | Fleabag star Andrew Scott to bring one-man Uncle Vanya to West End | Andrew Scott is to return to London’s West End to play every character in Uncle Vanya. The star of Sherlock, Fleabag and His Dark Materials will appear for a five-week run at the Duke of York’s theatre from 15 September in a one-man staging of Anton Chekhov’s 1898 classic.
It means Scott will appear not only as Vanya, the morose manager of a rural Russian estate, but also as the landowner Professor Serebryakov, his daughter Sonya and glamorous young wife Yelena. He will also play Vanya’s widowed mother, his romantic rival Astrov, the tenant Telegin and the nurse Maria.
“Heartbreaking, hilarious, sexy, devastating – the singular genius and extraordinary humanity of Mr Chekhov just knocks me out,” said Scott, last seen on stage at London’s Old Vic in Three Kings, livestreamed during lockdown in 2020. “It’s a genuine honour and a singular challenge to bring this giant of a play to life in the West End in this new way and I’m so excited to be doing it alongside such brilliant, playful and talented people.”
I’ve worked with many great actors. But I’ve never worked with one more intelligent, playful, rigorous, sad or ferocious
Simon Stephens
The new version is by playwright Simon Stephens, who first worked with Scott on Sea Wall (2008) and again on Birdland (2014). Stephens said he was thrilled at the casting. “I have worked with many great actors,” he said. “But I’ve never worked with one more intelligent, thoughtful, playful, rigorous, searching, sad or ferocious.”
It is the playwright’s third time adapting Chekhov, after The Cherry Orchard (2014) and The Seagull (2017) for directors Katie Mitchell and Sean Holmes respectively. He called this version of Uncle Vanya a “subtle distillation” that was faithful to the original play, despite being performed by a single actor.
“There is no writer I love more deeply,” said Stephens. “No writer has existed in that remarkable space between grief, yearning, sex, murder, vulnerability and fearlessness. Uncle Vanya is one of the great plays about ambition, regret and redundancy.”
The idea to turn Uncle Vanya, now simply called Vanya, into a solo show was an accident of the rehearsal room. Stephens and director Sam Yates had invited Scott to a read-through. Taking it in turns to speak the parts, they became aware of the similarities between the underachieving Vanya and the eco-minded doctor, Astrov. They suggested Scott should try reading both.
“Something rather magical happened,” said Stephens. “As an audience member, you had to interpret. You had to figure out. That process of investigating where a character starts and ends – how a character’s gender, age, class, wealth, background makes sense of themselves – was rendered so alive. I found it haunting. We kept saying, ‘What if you do a little bit more?’”
Andrew Scott: ‘There was no Hamlet rivalry with Benedict Cumberbatch’
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Scott follows in the footsteps of actors including Alan Cumming, who once played all the characters in Macbeth, and Robert Lepage, who turned Hamlet into the hi-tech one-man show Elsinore. Hamlet is a play Scott knows well, having taken on the lead role at London’s Almeida in 2017 in a production that, like Vanya, was produced by Emily Vaughan-Barratt.
“The great theatrical question is, ‘To be or not to be?’” said Stephens. “Andrew asked that with such astonishing force in Robert Icke’s production. Vanya is Chekhov’s answer to that question and his answer is: you keep going, you try. It is a play written by a doctor who understands the fallibility of human beings because he has been surrounded by them in extremis all his working life. The conclusion of his working medical life is the urgent need to continue to be. That’s what Andrew brings to it.”
Vanya is at Richmond theatre, 28 August–2 September, then at Duke of York’s theatre, London, 15 September–21 October. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/feb/03/letter-to-my-daughter-what-is-it-like-to-be-a-girl-in-2016 | Global Development Professionals Network | 2016-02-03T07:00:27.000Z | Leyla Hussein | Letter to my daughter: what is it like to be a girl in 2016? | My dearest Feyrus,
I hope my words find you kicking ass as always. As you are now 13 I thought I’d write you a letter to explain how I see the world in 2016, and my fears for you and other girls. Most of all I want to celebrate the young woman you are becoming.
In 2016, my saga of the angry feminist continues. I’m happy and privileged to carry that torch, though many may wonder why, including yourself. The answer is very simple: I express my anger and use my position to speak for those who can’t.
I don’t expect you to take up the mantle, but I’m impressed by the way you challenge sexism. Like the time you asked a teacher why he moved a couple of girls to the front of the class because they were being harassed by some boys. You expressed how unfair it was to move the girls, who hadn’t done anything wrong. Even though you were angry and upset, as a parent it was a proud moment to see that you saw the injustice.
I see the world through your eyes, my London-born African Muslim girl. I see the challenges based on your skin colour, gender and faith. One of the hardest things I’ve seen was you asking Muslim girls to accept you without wearing a hijab. I’ve always said I will always support the path you choose as long as you are not harming others. You are a girl who is free from FGM, as you know by now, this is something all the women in our family have endured, but we celebrate that we broke that cycle.
You are free from FGM, as you know this is something all the women in our family have endured, but we broke that cycle
You are now experimenting with your own voice and I’ve noticed you are extremely aware of your self-worth. I know at times your confidence is not well received by others just because you were born a girl. Sadly, I feel you still face challenges I faced as a young girl. You are still expected to sit quietly, look pretty and accept daily sexist comments while the boys play football and do as they please. I want to make the world safe for you and to give you the opportunity to be the person you want to be. I made sure you were protected from one of the worst crimes committed against women. But I also know that to this date, millions of mothers like me cannot guarantee that basic safety for their daughters.
Every year, 3 million girls are at risk from FGM (the partial or total removal of the female genitalia for non-medical reasons) in Africa alone. For girls with type 3 FGM, where the labia majora, minora and clitoris are cut and the opening sealed with stitches, simple acts like urinating and menstruating are an everyday painful occurrence. Imagine that, Feyrus; periods can be painful enough as it is.
Many of the girls subjected to FGM are being cut in preparation for child marriage. By the end of this decade, 142 million girls will have been married as children. I personally reject the word marriage when talking about children. It’s no more than legalised child rape and enslavement. The word marriage sugar-coats the real crime. Girls who are subjected to it suffer a multitude of physical and emotional complications such as domestic violence, fistula (this is where the vaginal wall breaks down due to forced sex), which leads to being incontinent, to then being ostracised for smelling of urine and faeces. Post-traumatic stress is very common among girls who live under such an environment and many resort to suicide or self-harm such as setting themselves on fire.
Breast ironing in Cameroon: empowering girls to speak out
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As a psychotherapist I once worked with a woman who, as a girl had been subjected to both FGM and breast ironing. Breast ironing is where the breast tissue is burned with hot iron to flatten it, a procedure that is extremely painful and damaging. The UN estimates 3.8 million young women are at risk of breast ironing in central and west Africa. Thousands of girls from Cameroon, South Africa, Nigeria, the Republic of Guinea, Togo and Ivory Coast may also be at risk.
Only 12% of girls and women around the world have access to sanitary products. For many, menstruation means missing out on education. These girls are trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty and abuse that must be broken. Maybe here in the UK we should be grateful for the Tampon tax! Who knew it’s such a luxury keeping yourself clean while you bleed and go through painful cramps every month.
Globally, girls are faced with many challenges. Giving girls a chance means providing them with safe spaces so they can go to school without worrying about being kidnapped or shot in the head, not worrying about being raped on their way back from the cinema or groped during a concert. Girls also need spaces where they can express their true authentic selves without being judged or harmed.
Girls need spaces where they can express their true authentic selves without being judged or harmed
Some of these spaces do exist in parts of the world. For instance I had the honour of meeting one of my heroes Agnes Pareyo, from Kenya, who runs a safe house called Tasaru, for girls who escaped FGM and forced marriage. These girls are her hope and Agnes gave them a safe space to become whoever they wish to be. I remember one of the girls telling me “Leyla, I will be a doctor and a banker.” To my dismay, I questioned “Can you do both?” She quickly replied “If I survived my flesh being butchered and being raped by my husband every day, reading books and exams won’t be such a challenge.”
Feyrus, I want you and other girls all around the world to thrive in 2016. We need to invest in you 100%. No more token actions. We want a better and safer world for our girls. I would like to end with an African proverb: “If you educate a boy, you educate an individual. If you educate a girl, you educate a community.”
#HeForShe: how to engage men in the fight for gender equality
Read more
So my dearest Feyrus please know that I’m very proud of you. But in all honesty, as your mother I still worry about your safety, just because you are a girl. That’s just my own fear and I don’t wish to impose that on you. Just remember what I’ve always told you – the world is a better place because you are in it.
Lots of love,
Mummy xx
PS Please tidy your room
This piece was corrected on 3 February 2016. Leyla Hussein is a psychotherapist and not a psychologist.
Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow @GuardianGDP on Twitter. Join the conversation with the hashtag #SheMatters. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/18/foreign-office-historic-files-secret-archive | Politics | 2013-10-18T12:55:21.000Z | Ian Cobain | Foreign Office hoarding 1m historic files in secret archive | The Foreign Office has unlawfully hoarded more than a million files of historic documents that should have been declassified and handed over to the National Archives, the Guardian has discovered.
The files are being kept at a secret archive at a high-security government communications centre in Buckinghamshire, north of London, where they occupy mile after mile of shelving.
Most of the papers are many decades old – some were created in the 19th century – and document in fine detail British foreign relations throughout two world wars, the cold war, withdrawal from empire and entry into the common market.
They have been kept from public view in breach of the Public Records Acts, which requires that all government documents become public once they are 30 years old – a term about to be reduced to 20 years – unless the department has received permission from the lord chancellor to hold them for longer. The secret archive is also beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act.
The Foreign Office is not the only government department that has been unlawfully hoarding files. This month the Guardian disclosed that the Ministry of Defence was unlawfully holding more than 66,000 historic files at a warehouse in Derbyshire, including thousands of files from the army's Northern Ireland headquarters.
However, the Foreign Office's secret archive, which is estimated to hold around 1.2m files and occupies around 15 miles of floor-to-ceiling shelving, is believed to be far larger than the combined undisclosed archives of every other government department. One of Britain's leading historians describes its size as "staggering".
A basic inventory of the hidden archive gives a clue to its enormousness: batches of files are catalogued according to the length of shelf space they occupy, with six metres and two centimetres dedicated to files about Rhodesia, for example, and four metres and 57 centimetres holding files about Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, the KGB spies who operated inside the Foreign Office and MI6. There are 50 metres of files on Hong Kong, 100.81 metres about the United States and 97.84 metres of "private office papers".
No length is given in the inventory for other categories such as Colonial Office files or records from the permanent under-secretary's department, the point of liaison between the Foreign Office and MI6.
The inventory says there is one bag of records from the Foreign Office's now notorious cold war propaganda unit, the Information Research Department. And buried away within the archive, wedged between files from the British military government in post-war Germany and lists of consular officials, are papers about the treaty of Paris, which concluded the Crimean war in 1856.
The Foreign Office's realisation that it would eventually need to admit to the existence of such a vast repository appears to have come at a time when its lawyers were waging a court battle with a group of elderly Kenyans. It was a battle that it eventually lost, with the result that it was obliged to issue an unprecedented apology and pay millions of pounds in compensation to thousands of men and women who suffered severe mistreatment during the 1950s Mau Mau insurgency.
During those proceedings the Foreign Office repeatedly denied the existence of a much smaller secret archive of 8,800 colonial-era documents, known as the migrated archive. It was eventually obliged to admit that this did exist, and that its contents corroborated the Kenyans' allegations about widespread acts of murder and torture by the colonial authorities.
As a first step, the Foreign Office gave its colossal secret a name, the Special Collections. Then last November the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, was asked to sign a blanket authorisation that is said to have placed the retention of the files on a legal footing for 12 months. No announcement was made.
Finally, a written statement about "public records" by the Foreign Office minister David Lidington was quietly issued in the Commons on a Friday afternoon. The statement included two sentences that referred to a "large accumulation" of documents.
As a result of the manner in which the matter was handled, the existence of the archive has remained all but unknown, even among historians. Anthony Badger, the Cambridge history professor who has been overseeing the declassification of the migrated archive, has written that he believes "it is difficult to overestimate the legacy of suspicion among historians, lawyers and journalists" that resulted from the concealment of those 8,800 files.
The discovery that the colonial-era documents are just a very small part of a hidden archive of more than a million files is certain to cause enormous damage to the Foreign Office's reputation among historians and others. A Foreign Office spokesperson said the archive had accumulated over time and that "resources have not been available to review and prepare" them for release.
The handful of historians who have become aware of the archive are deeply sceptical about this claim, however. Richard Drayton, Rhodes professor of imperial history at King's College London, said the size of the hidden archive was staggering, and it was "scandalous" that papers of such significance could be concealed for such a long time. "It's a working archive, for a department which believes it has a long-term, historic interest in many parts of the world," he said.
It was unclear whether there is any "truly explosive" material within the files, Drayton said, or whether officials were attempting to manage the country's historic reputation. "It may be that from the perspective of the state, 50 years is a short time. But the idea that the British state today has an obligation to protect the reputation of the British state of 50 years ago seems to me wholly inappropriate. It would be a manipulation of history, which we associate with iron curtain regimes during the cold war, regimes that managed and controlled the past."
Mandy Banton, senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, said it was "extremely likely" that the archive had been culled to remove material that would most damage the reputation of the UK and the Foreign Office. Banton, a Colonial Office records expert who worked at National Archives at Kew, south-west London, for 25 years, said she had been "very angry" when she discovered that the migrated archives had been withheld. "I would have been incandescent had I learned while still working there. In lying to me, the Foreign Office forced me to mislead my readers."
Freedom of information campaigners believe that the hoarding of such a huge amount of papers is symptomatic of a culture of secrecy and retention at the Foreign Office and across many other UK government departments. Maurice Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information, an NGO that works to ensure the Freedom of Information Act is properly implemented, said: "The FoI system depends on people knowing what they hold and being transparent about what they hold."
The archive is kept at Hanslope Park, a sprawling Foreign Office and MI6 outstation in the heart of the Buckinghamshire countryside. Sometimes referred to by Foreign Office staff as "Up North" – although it is only 60 miles north of London – Hanslope Park is also home to Her Majesty's Government Communications Centre, a facility where hundreds of government scientists and technicians develop sophisticated counter-espionage measures.
They include measures intended to protect the UK government and its allies from the sort of surveillance that Edward Snowden's leaks have shown to have been perfected by the National Security Agency and Britain's GCHQ.
Two wire fences, one 10ft high and topped with razor wire, encircle the cluster of buildings at Hanslope Park. Between them is a no man's land with intruder alarms. CCTV cameras are positioned every few yards and the entire perimeter is covered by floodlights. Inside, posters on the walls carry the half-joking warning: "Careless talk costs jobs."
Curiously, many of the offices are said to house row after row of typewriters rather than computers, with incinerators at the end of each room for the disposal of typewriter ribbons – a measure to reduce electromagnetic emissions, which can travel for hundreds of yards and be deciphered by foreign governments.
Hanslope Park is not only a highly secure facility, it is also a place that appears to be accustomed to handling – and destroying – large amounts of paperwork. This, possibly, explains why the special collections have been held there.
The blanket authorisation signed by Grayling put the secret archive on a legal footing for 12 months, during which time the Foreign Office is expected to devise a plan for its declassification and transfer to Kew. A spokesperson said a plan would be presented next month to a committee that advises the National Archives and the Ministry of Justice.
It will be quite a task. Declassification of the migrated archive has taken two and a half years, with the final tranche of documents due to arrive at Kew next month. At that rate, clearing up the special collections would take around 340 years. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/sep/05/brexit-lords-agree-to-push-through-bill-preventing-no-deal-by-end-of-friday | Politics | 2019-09-05T09:48:18.000Z | Peter Walker | Lords agree to push through bill preventing no-deal Brexit by end of Friday | The House of Lords has agreed to progress a backbench bill seeking to block a no-deal Brexit, as Boris Johnson prepared to make a speech calling again for Labour to allow a general election.
At about 1.30am on Thursday, following hours of debate, peers were told that the cross-party bill, tabled by Labour’s Hilary Benn, would be returned to the lower house by 5pm on Friday, ruling out the prospect of fresh attempts at a filibuster.
It could then be voted on again by MPs on Monday and presented for royal assent, the Lords heard. Peers are due to debate the Benn bill itself and amendments on Thursday.
The bill had already been passed by the Commons with the assistance of rebel Tories, after they helped to seize control of the parliamentary agenda to rush the measure through. Johnson responded to the backbench efforts on Wednesday by seeking a snap election under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. However, opposition parties abstained or opposed the vote, denying the PM the necessary two-thirds majority – and meaning he has lost every Commons vote so far.
Johnson was scheduled to make a speech in an as-yet undisclosed location later on Thursday, and take questions from the media. A spokesman for No 10 said the prime minister would “speak directly to the public, setting out the vital choice that faces our country”.
He added that Johnson would refuse to abide by the Benn bill, which would mandate him to seek an extension to Brexit until at least 31 January if, by the end of next month’s crucial European council summit, he has not secured a deal or gained MPs’ consent for no deal.
“The PM will not do this,” he said. “It is clear the only action is to go back to the people and give them the opportunity to decide what they want: Boris to go to Brussels and get a deal, or leave without one on 31 October.”
The other alternative, the spokesman said, was Corbyn taking over the negotiations, “begging for more delay, more dither and accepting whatever terms Brussels imposes over our nation”.
Labour has said it will back an election after the no-deal blocking bill becomes law, which would guarantee that Johnson could not force no-deal on 31 October. However, the party remains undecided whether it would back Johnson’s choice of a 15 October polling day, or want to wait.
After the marathon Lords session, Lady Smith, Labour’s leader in the upper house, said she hoped that there would be “no further frustrations” of the bill on Friday.
“It has been quite a night. It has been a long debate – and I am grateful to the noble lords who have stayed the course – it shows the importance of the work we do but also the issue on which we are debating,” she said. “I am grateful that we are now able to confirm that we will be able to complete all stages of the bill in a time-honoured way by 5pm Friday.”
Richard Newby, the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the Lords, told the chamber he was very pleased that he would no longer need to use a duvet he had brought to parliament: “I don’t think that carrying on through 24 or 48 hours as we have been doing in a sort of pathetic attempt to set a new Guinness world record … would do anybody any favours.”
Government chief whip announces government cave-in at 1.20 am - they are lifting the filibuster after 10 hours, with a commitment that the EU Bill will pass by 5pm Friday. We have stopped no deal - & we can now go home 🆒😊😍🇪🇺
— Andrew Adonis (@Andrew_Adonis) September 5, 2019
#WhiteSmoke...
Govt commits to allowing #BennBill to complete all stages in course of Thurs & Friday - with the bill then going back to the Commons for any further consideration on Monday@LadyBasildon confirms that fresh business motion in her name will appear on Thurs am
— LabourLordsUK (@LabourLordsUK) September 5, 2019
'PM cornered': how the papers covered Johnson's horror day in Commons
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There had been fears that the bill would be stalled in the Lords, with the Labour peer and leading lawyer Lady Kennedy of The Shaws accusing the Tory peer Lord True, who submitted a raft of amendments, of time-wasting. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/sep/23/chelsea-barnsley-carabao-cup-match-report | Football | 2020-09-23T20:48:17.000Z | Jacob Steinberg | Kai Havertz hits hat-trick to ease Chelsea through against Barnsley | It turns out that writing off Kai Havertz two games into his Chelsea career was somewhat misguided. After the sniping that greeted the German’s rusty displays against Brighton and Liverpool, he burst into a life with a hat-trick as Chelsea reached the fourth round of the Carabao Cup with a thumping win over Barnsley.
This was a reminder everybody deserves to be given time to settle after a big move, even when they happen to be one of the best young talents in the world. After all Havertz was playing in the quarter-finals of the Europa League a little over a month ago. The 21-year-old has barely had a break since the end of last season and has been thrown straight in after his move from Bayer Leverkusen.
West Ham carrying out Covid tests after positives for Moyes and two players
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Yet Havertz’s class was obvious. He combined brilliantly with Tammy Abraham and although he needs to do more than destroy Barnsley to justify the hype, Frank Lampard was delighted with the former Leverkusen attacker. “It was everything I wanted,” the Chelsea manager said. “He’s had no pre-season. It was a great night for Kai and the first of many.”
It was a satisfying night for Lampard. Thiago Silva had an authoritative debut in central defence and Abraham shone up front, although Callum Hudson-Odoi looked a little tentative after a week of speculation over his future. Hudson-Odoi’s attitude was good, though, and there were flashes of the winger’s ability. “I thought he did well,” Lampard said. “He looked sharp.”
Callum Hudson-Odoi (left) bursts away from Barnsley’s striker Cauley Woodrow. Photograph: Neil Hall/AFP/Getty Images
Lampard’s selection demonstrated why he wants to trim his squad before the window shuts on 5 October. Ruben Loftus-Cheek’s absence summed up the competition for places and Antonio Rüdiger looks certain to leave after being left out of the squad for the second successive game. “Nothing is concrete,” Lampard said. “Don’t read too much into those selections at the minute.”
While Rüdiger was off nursing a bruised ego, there was an opportunity for Hudson-Odoi, who has been out in the cold of late. The winger had an opening to make his point to Lampard in the first minute, only to shoot too close to Brad Collins.
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At times Hudson-Odoi seemed too eager to please. While the 19-year-old worked hard on the right, he needed to relax and follow the example of Abraham, who was keen to show that he can compete with Timo Werner. The striker gave Chelsea the lead in the 18th minute, finishing well after a mix-up at the back.
But the stage belonged to Havertz. He was inventive in the No10 role and he scored his first goal in blue when Abraham dummied a pass from Mason Mount through to him. Havertz strode clear and finished calmly.
At the other end Chelsea were shaky, even with Silva alongside Fikayo Tomori. Emerson Palmieri struggled at left-back and Barnsley forced Willy Caballero to make far too many saves for Lampard’s liking.
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It should have been harder for a Championship side to carve Chelsea open. Yet it is hard to see Rüdiger working his way back. Lampard has five centre-backs and he will not stand in Rüdiger’s way if Chelsea receive offers for the German.
Lampard wants more leadership at the back and Silva was vocal. The 36-year-old Brazilian had a good workout before making way for Kurt Zouma in the 61st minute.
Ross Barkley added a third with a firm shot and Havertz scored again in the 55th minute, clipping past Collins after a lovely flick from Abraham.
Havertz completed his hat-trick just after the hour, rounding Collins before tapping into the empty net, and then he made way for another debutant. Ben Chilwell came on and Chelsea, who will face Leyton Orient or Tottenham next, added a sixth when Olivier Giroud headed in after coming off the bench. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/jun/28/bad-nights-and-odd-days-review-prescient-and-daring-caryl-churchill | Stage | 2021-06-27T23:01:37.000Z | Mark Lawson | Bad Nights and Odd Days review – prescient and daring Caryl Churchill | If Caryl Churchill were a runner, she would hold gold medals for both the 100- and 10,000-metre races. Long-distance pieces (Top Girls, Serious Money) alternate with sprint scripts: What If If Only, a new play at the Royal Court in September, is predicted to last 14 minutes. Later Churchill has also featured meaty evenings – Love and Information and Glass.Kill.Bluebeard.Imp – comprised of short pieces.
Director James Haddrell fascinatingly explores the dramatist’s middle distance by bringing together four of the 10 texts collected in a 1990 anthology, Caryl Churchill: Shorts.
Seagulls is a 1978 theatre piece unstaged for decades because the writer thought the story of an elusive superpower was too bald a metaphor for writer’s block. Now, it seems an intriguing reflection on urgent concerns – celebrity and credulity.
Cleaning up? Dan Gaisford and Verna Vyas in Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen at Greenwich theatre. Photograph: Lidia Crisafulli
Most familiar is 1980’s Three More Sleepless Nights, where four characters (in different combinations) occupy a double bed that hosts none of the most common activities – sleep, sex, death – though comes close to featuring one of these. An early workout for the writer’s now signature overlapping dialogue, this remarkable play is Churchill’s darkest hour.
In a pair of two 50-year-old radio plays, Abortive, another argument between a non-sleeping couple, feels too slight for its themes of female sexual and reproductive jeopardy. Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen is, though, a rich curiosity. Originally imagining a far-off 2010, it feels unnervingly current in depicting a respiratory crisis in a society also tensed against terrorism.
Caryl Churchill at 80: theatre's great disruptor
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In that play, someone written as Claude becomes Claudia, but Churchill’s prescient tendency to leave characterisation fluid allows varied opportunities to six fine actors. Gracy Goldman excels as a twice unhappy lover in the double bed, and Verna Vyas finds clarity in the daringly repetitive dialogue of the dystopian drama.
The old Radio 3 plays were originally directed by a crucial early Churchill champion, John Tydeman, who died last year, making this show both a memorial to him and a celebration of the restless and prolific originality of a great dramatist.
Bad Nights and Odd Days is at Greenwich theatre, London, until 10 July | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/31/2020-will-trump-win-democrats-on-factors-losing-election | US news | 2020-01-31T08:00:39.000Z | Daniel Strauss | We can lose this election': what top Democrats fear could go wrong in 2020 | Donald Trump has a huge campaign war chest and a vast, aggressive digital operation. And the US economy has shown stubborn resilience throughout the president’s three years in office, keeping unemployment levels low and stock markets high.
But as they seek to oust Trump in 2020’s election what most worries many top Democrats is what’s shaping up in their own party: an extended Democratic primary resulting in a fractured party struggling to rally around the eventual nominee.
That’s the overall sentiment of Democrats based on interviews with over a dozen senior party figures – including ex-mayors and former governors – and top strategists during a chaotic month in the Democratic primary leading up to the Iowa caucuses.
Recent polling has shown the progressive senator Bernie Sanders surging in Iowa, to the chagrin of centrist Democratic leaders who hoped a candidate like former vice-president Joe Biden or even the young and charismatic former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg might score an early win.
Even though the field has now shrunk from two dozen candidates, Democrats are increasingly expecting a drawn-out primary with deep-pocketed frontrunners bashing each other and long-shot candidates refusing to drop out, further splintering the vote and leaving scars that will last in the general election.
“I think this is going to be a longer, more protracted primary fight and we’re going to have certainly weeks, if not months where we’ll be doing our primary and we won’t be talking to swing voters in, say, Tampa Bay,” warned Florida-based Democratic strategist Scott Arceneaux.
Senator Elizabeth Warren during a campaign event in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on 26 January. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP
Despite this strategists and veteran lawmakers from across the political spectrum of the Democratic party expressed strong confidence that there is still an opening to oust Trump from office.
“I’m still very bullish on 2020. I think Trump’s going to have a very difficult time winning re-election,” said the former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe.
But no one is taking victory for granted. The almost universal sentiment shared by those the Guardian spoke to is that Democrats could also be in the process of shooting themselves in the foot.
“The most important thing for people reading to come away with is that we can lose this election,” said a top adviser for a former 2020 Democratic candidate.
Money money money!
There’s plenty of reason for Democrats to worry about money. Donald Trump has raised over $100m already with effectively no real opposition within the Republican primary.
“I think someone who’s not worried about the money is crazy. Trump’s sitting on $100m right now and we’re nowhere close to having a nominee and they will be able to raise money but we’re still so fractured,” said Democratic consultant Brandon Hall. “That worries me. I mean I don’t know how that doesn’t worry everybody, that we’re always going to be playing catchup on the money.”
Donald Trump speaks at a meeting of the Economic Club of New York in November 2019 during a multi-day visit to New York to attend private fundraisers in the city. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA
But others argue the question isn’t whether Democrats will be able to raise money competitively, it’s when they’ll be able to raise that money. After an exhausting primary, Trump will be able to just dump money against the newly minted nominee, warned the former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. That nominee will have to immediately start fundraising again to catch up to the war chest Trump had been hoarding away.
“I don’t think it’s going to be hard to raise all the money you need but that early advantage is not inconsequential given that this is coming down to a few voters in a few states,” Emanuel said.
Trump’s digital operation
A staple of the Trump re-election campaign has been its large digital operation. A Guardian analysis found that Trump’s re-election campaign has already spent $20m on more than 218,000 Facebook ads. And Democrats have noticed.
“On the digital side Trump’s digital operation is two things: smart and dangerous,” said Democratic strategist Jennifer Holdsworth. “It’s both. So I think that we are playing checkers and they’re playing chess in that particular lane of strategy and it’s something we are not going to wake up to until we’ve gotten past the primary and they are miles ahead in terms of messaging and we’re going to have to catch up.
That’s why, Holdsworth continued, Democrats needed to quickly rally around the eventually nominee “either before or immediately after the convention or we’re never going to catch up”.
Incumbency and what history tells us: Trump is strong
By the traditional metrics on which an incumbent’s re-election chances are usually judged, Trump should be viewed as unbeatable. Unemployment remains low. During the Trump administration US special forces killed the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Democrats control only one chamber of Congress. And Trump’s approval rating within the Republican party remains sky high.
But Trump is a divisive figure, to put it mildly. Democrats point to their gains in suburban districts across the country and flipping seven governor’s mansions in the 2018 midterm elections. They see that as a herald of Democratic competitiveness in Republican-leaning parts of the country. Democratic strategists hope fatigue from seemingly daily national crises will see reluctant moderates and swing voters vote Trump out of office.
Democratic strategists hope fatigue from seemingly daily national crises will see reluctant moderates and swing voters vote Trump out of office. Photograph: UPI/Barcroft Media
Emanuel said the deciding issues will be the key aspects of the economy versus a set of issues Democrats have run and won on in recent years.
“He’s got three and a half per cent unemployment. Three per cent real wage growth. And three per cent real home value growth,” Emanuel said. “And our threes are the three Hs: healthcare, higher education, housing. Meaning we’re going to emphasize the challenges, crises in those three areas.”
Trump will argue “everything’s copacetic,” Emanuel added. “And it’s really those three economics against each other.”
The Democratic primary: no end in sight
The most persistent source of Democratic handwringing is a traditional aspect of any presidential cycle: the months-long primary where fellow candidates turn on each other. After months of relatively respectful campaigning, the knives are finally coming out just before the first vote in Iowa next week.
“Trump has had an incredible advantage as the incumbent and has been effectively running a general election campaign online and off since he was inaugurated and so the sooner we have a nominee that we can consolidate resources and momentum and energy around, the sooner his advantage will diminish in the race,” said Tara McGowan, co-founder of the progressive political not-for-profit group Acronym.
After months of relatively respectful campaigning, the knives are finally coming out just before the first vote in Iowa next week. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA
Former vice-president Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders have been trading blows over social security and electability. Buttigieg has unsubtly been contrasting his youth and novelty with the competitors who have been in politics for years. In one of the most heated exchanges the detente between Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren morphed into a red-hot rivalry when Warren said that during a closed-door meeting Sanders had told her a woman could not win the 2020 election.
Running out of money – and a brokered convention?
All four top-tier candidates have deep war chests, allowing them to continue campaigning – and fighting each other – far into 2020.
“The thing that I would be most concerned about would be is if we don’t lock down this nomination and we allow it to go on all the way to the convention,” McAuliffe said. “That would make it more problematic. We’ve got to build a field operation in all of these states and get them staffed and up and running.”
Democrats worry a long, bloody primary could advantage Trump. It could also drain Democrats’ resources.
Democrats worry a long bloody primary could advantage Trump. It could also drain Democrats’ resources
“The exhaustion, not that Trump has too much money but that the Democrats have spent all of theirs,” said the former California governor Jerry Brown. “That’s possible.”
Senior party leaders are already grumbling about the prospect of no candidate winning a decisive victory during the primaries and having a brokered convention which has to elect a nominee from its competing factions. That could push some embittered voters to sit out the general election, depending on which figure emerges as the winner.
“I’m concerned about candidates who might not win – their folks just take a pass,” Democratic strategist Amy Chapman said.
“We saw in 2016 the damaging outsized, unbelievably detrimental effect the convention had on Hillary’s candidacy into the fall,” said Holdsworth, a former executive director of the New Jersey Democratic party. “That has the potential to be just exacerbated this time around.”
Appealing to swing voters
A persistent fear throughout the Democratic primary has been picking a viable nominee. The 2020 Democratic primary has been full of ideological and policy debates over Medicare for All, immigration, a Green New Deal and whether a veteran or young charismatic leader can beat Trump.
But eclipsing all of that is worries among some party leaders that Democrats will nominate a candidate who can’t attract key swing voters. Centrist Democrats have begun to argue that if Sanders won the nomination, it would doom Democrats chances. Recently, Buttigieg’s campaign has begun sending out fundraising pitches with subject lines like “Bernie Sanders could be the nominee”.
Recently, Pete Buttigieg’s campaign has begun sending out fundraising pitches with subject lines like ‘Bernie Sanders could be the nominee’. Photograph: Gary He/EPA
It’s a view contested by Sanders supporters, who argue that running a centrist candidate failed to beat Trump in 2016 and that the eventual nominee’s campaign needs an energized base to beat the president’s fervent fans.
As Sanders has risen to the front of the field in Iowa and New Hampshire, Democrats have begun worrying no more moderate candidate could beat him.
“The thing that concerns me the absolute most right now is Bernie being the nominee,” a veteran Democratic strategist with ties to multiple candidates said.
Health concerns
Healthcare has been a major flashpoint within the Democratic primary. At the beginning of 2020 it seemed like any candidate who didn’t support Medicare for All wouldn’t last more than a week. Now, though, some lead candidates have argued that the proposal would alienate some crucial general election voters. It remains a contentious policy topic for Democrats.
“I think some voters look at Medicare for All and say, ‘I don’t support that plan but at least Democrats are trying to think big thoughts about how to fix the problem.’ And in reality the system will probably make it a more moderate program in the end,” said Marie Harf, the executive director of the Serve America political action committee. Harf added: “I do think the Medicare for All option is not as palatable to some voters in the general.”
Bernie Sanders at a campaign rally Sunday in Sioux City, Iowa, on 26 January. Photograph: John Locher/AP
The veteran Democratic strategist pointed to questions about where Warren stands on healthcare and Medicare for All. “I think Warren’s a problem. I think any candidate who would lose the healthcare debate to Trump is a problem. I think her stance is a problem. I think a lot of what’s ailing her is correctable. I think it’s not correctable with Bernie and he has no desire to correct it.”
Guy Cecil, the chairman of the Priorities USA Super Pac, said skeptics of Medicare for All worry that it will take longer and more resources to win them over with the plan.
“I think the proponents see it as an opportunity for cost as well. There’s a recognition that given how close the Senate will be, the chances of passing Medicare for All are almost nonexistent without a significant political sea change or some huge surprise in the United States Senate,” Cecil said.
“So the concern is that you’re risking with a lot of voters needing to explain why they’re taking away your private insurance. Now you can win that argument but it takes a lot of resources, a lot of focus.”
Priorities has been preparing ad campaigns and other work in case either the Democratic nominee supports Medicare for All or a different healthcare plan.
Still, more moderate Democrats remain skeptical of their options in the centrist lane of the party who advocate for less radical healthcare change. Buttigieg is too young and inexperienced, said the top adviser to a former 2020 candidate.
“I do not believe he can win a general election. One, he’s 37. Two, he’s a mayor. Three, I think,” the adviser said, adding, “If by Super Tuesday I see that things aren’t moving towards Biden I will be deeply concerned.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/27/popes-john-paul-ii-and-john-xxiii-saints-canonisation | World news | 2014-04-27T14:26:00.000Z | Lizzy Davies | Popes John Paul II and John XXIII declared saints in double canonisation | Pope Francis has declared two of his predecessors, John Paul II and John XXIII, saints of the Roman Catholic church in an unprecedented double-canonisation mass in St Peter's Square.
The two towering figures of the 20th-century church were canonised to great applause from hundreds of thousands of pilgrims gathered in the Vatican piazza.
Pilgirms attend the canonisation mass of Popes John XXIII and John Paul II on St Peter's at the Vatican. Photograph: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images
"We declare and define Blessed John XXIII and John Paul II to be saints and we enrol them among the saints, decreeing that they are to be venerated as such by the whole church," said Francis in the official proclamation at about 10.15am.
People prepare to spend the night in Piazza Navona in Rome ahead of the double canonisation. Photograph: Massimo Percossi/EPA
Later, in his homily, the Argentinian pontiff paid tribute to "two men of courage" who he said had "co-operated with the Holy Spirit in renewing and updating the church". "They were priests, bishops and popes of the 20th century. They lived through the tragic events of that century, but they were not overwhelmed by them," he said.
John XXIII, he said, was a pastor to the church, "a servant leader" who had called the Second Vatican Council. John Paul II, meanwhile, was "the pope of the family".
Pilgrims gather on Saint Peter's Square ahead of a ceremony that will see popes John Paul II and John XXIII recognized as saints. Photograph: Claudio Peri/EPA
As the church approaches a crucial synod at which thorny issues to do with the family are expected to be tackled – such as the status of remarried divorcees in the church – Francis said he hoped the two new saints would intercede with God "so that … [the church] may be open to the Holy Spirit in pastoral service to the family".
Pope Francis celebrates mass during the canonisation ceremony in St Peter's Square at the Vatican of Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II. Photograph: Max Rossi/Reuters
Carrying flags, backpacks and rolled foam mattresses, pilgrims from all over the world had flocked into Vatican City overnight and were let into St Peter's Square from 5.30am when the piazza was opened by authorities. The Vatican said they totalled around 500,000 in St Peter's Square and the surrounding streets, while 800,000 people were thought to have gathered for the mass in Rome as a whole. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/nov/06/the-uk-drill-project-review-pit-barbican-london | Stage | 2022-11-06T13:09:27.000Z | Arifa Akbar | The UK Drill Project review – arresting journey into demonised rap scene | Seven balaclava-clad actors emerge on stage, rapping and filming each other. They tell the story of the drill scene through its own medium of song, social media posts and music videos. A joint winner of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust award 2022, The UK Drill Project explores the criminalisation of a subculture with originality of form.
“Writing a lyric has never been so dangerous,” says a character, and we hear reports of how young black rappers are convicted of inciting gang violence based on their songs, despite lack of forensic evidence.
The story features the 079 gang, whose members variously lounge on a sofa, make social media posts or spit lyrics on a central platform. The drama of their lives is overlaid with news reports on the greater sociopolitical realities – youth centres being shut, for instance – and the moral panic around drill.
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It is produced by the HighRise Entertainment theatre collective and while the layered use of music, video projection and snatches of testimonies is inventive and arresting, the story itself is confusing and disjointed with awkward comic interludes, although there is one effective scene which sees police officers “decoding” lyrics wrongly.
Written and directed by Dominic Garfield, with additional material and lyrics by the cast, characters speak in authentic MLE (multicultural London English) but they seem too generic. Some personal moments are explored – one character’s memory of racist bullying at school, another man’s unnerving entry into prison life – but these are too brief. Dialogue comes in snatches and sometimes actors talk over each other. The final scene, which digs into a character’s psyche as he identifies his dead brother, contains a depth of emotion that is missing from the rest of the drama.
Watch a trailer for the show
The music, though, is truly exciting (executive music director Kwame “KZ” Kwei-Armah Jnr with thrilling live music and composition by Skanda Sabbagh). The cast are strongest when they are singing too. Its visual effects are immersive and evoke the feel of a drill club (lighting by Simisola Majekodunmi; video design by Dan Light).
Whatever its shortcomings, the production has energy and brings a symbolic validation of drill as an expressive art form, worthy of a central London stage.
At the Pit, Barbican, until 12 November. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2024/mar/18/afl-australian-rules-football-melbourne-demons-clayton-oliver-western-bulldogs | Sport | 2024-03-17T14:00:40.000Z | Jonathan Horn | Melbourne’s troubled soul takes giant leap towards redemption with trademark display | Jonathan Horn | At times over summer, it seemed unlikely that Clayton Oliver would ever play football for Melbourne again. “I think everyone had doubts,” Simon Goodwin said on Sunday. “I think even Clayton had doubts.”
His club’s unwillingness, or inability, to be upfront about what was happening, and to speak in normal sentences, only exacerbated the situation. Every time they used the word “culture” – and sometimes they used it four times in the one sentence – the scepticism grew and the situation worsened.
It grated on his teammates. They kept being asked about him. They kept sticking up for him. They used all the right lingo – “we hope he’s in a good space”, “we just want the best version of Clayton” – but they said it through increasingly gritted teeth.
Sam Docherty’s endless ‘kicks in the guts’ show us the power of overcoming adversity
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That narrative changed in recent weeks, and it was mainly player driven. Last week, Christian Petracca spoke well about how Oliver had won back his teammates’ trust. It showed in the Demons’ round one clash with the Western Bulldogs.
There were some outstanding individual performances in round one: Isaac Heeney on Friday night, Jesse Hogan in Sydney’s west and Patrick Dangerfield in Geelong. But Oliver arguably surpassed them all.
Oliver hunted, tackled, cleared, created, and averted trouble. He didn’t stop moving all afternoon. He finished with 35 touches, despite spending at least a quarter of the game on the pine.
There are troubled souls and difficult-to-manage men at every club. But few have won four club champion awards by the age of 25. Few are as important to the overall fortunes of their club as Oliver.
There are very good judges – those who watch Melbourne every week, those who’ve watched them when they were untouchable, and when they were unspeakably bad – who reckon Oliver is the best Melbourne player they’ve seen.
There’s nothing elegant or complex about how Oliver plays. He just keeps getting the ball. He has a phenomenal work rate. He’s one of those footballers who seems to run on batteries.
Melbourne midfielder Clayton Oliver starred against the Western Bulldogs as he returns to form and fitness. Photograph: Julian Smith/AAP
The Demons struggled with the soapy ball and Sydney’s pressure in “opening round”. But they had conditions to suit this time. It was weather for building sandcastles but the MCG, on the back of three games in a row and two Taylor Swift concerts, was billiard table perfect.
The Dees entered to the wah-wah pedals and tom-tom drums of Metallica’s Enter Sandman. They play the metal lullaby at Virginia Tech college football games, which, it must be said, draws a different demographic to the MCC Members’ Reserve.
Melbourne were a bit sleepy early but with Oliver, Petracca, Steven May and captain Max Gawn completely dominant, they gradually took control. They moved the ball in straight lines last week and gave their forwards no chance. They were smarter, cleaner and far less rigid against the Bulldogs.
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Geelong’s new seatless terrace lets AFL fans stand up for revived tradition
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The heat will come for the Dogs. It’s the third year in a row they’ve dropped their opening game to Melbourne, and the previous two years were a portent of things to come. It can be tempting to read too much into round one, particularly as the AFL edges closer to playing games in summer, and it would be folly to write them off in the third week of March.
Their two debutants were impressive. Harvey Gallagher threaded a clever goal, his first at AFL level, while Ryley Sanders acquitted himself well. But they continue to frustrate and coach Luke Beveridge continues to confound.
The Bulldogs squandered too many easy opportunities in the second half. They’ve always been a team that relies on high energy, on total buy-in, and when that wanes even a fraction, they look ordinary. Melbourne exposed them and repeatedly left them flat-footed on turnover.
On a completely different note, what on earth is going on with the AFL’s goal umpiring fraternity? All around Australia, they seem completely spooked after the Adelaide Oval error last year. Over four days of football, they were second guessing, reviewing decisions and wasting time for the most bleedingly obvious of calls.
But this was all about Melbourne and Oliver. Since their premiership, the challenges have come from all sorts of places – from disgruntled former club presidents, tabloid hit pieces, Mornington Peninsula rumours, door stoppers, drug testers, breathalysers. The club hasn’t always convinced with its messaging: Everyone’s out to get us. Everything’s OK. We’re united. We’re connected. Don’t make us say “culture” again.
You suspect all they really wanted was for the football to start, to get back to the MCG and to have Oliver healthy again. That’s why the Melbourne faithful gave him a standing ovation. For the Dogs, it was death by 35 of Oliver’s cuts. One was reminded of Arthur Ashe describing a young John McEnroe. “It’s a slice here, a nick there, a cut over here. Pretty soon you’ve got blood all over you.” That was the Dogs’ lot. Imagine how much damage Oliver will inflict when he’s fully fit. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/oct/27/post-your-questions-for-rush-frontman-geddy-lee | Music | 2023-10-27T12:06:31.000Z | Aneesa Ahmed | Post your questions for Rush frontman Geddy Lee | The end of much-loved Canadian rockers Rush was sealed with the death of drummer Neil Peart in 2020 – but Geddy Lee, their remarkably dextrous bassist, singer and keyboardist, is still immersed in the world of the band. On 14 November he’s publishing a memoir titled My Effin’ Life, which charts his career and journey, and going on a book tour, where he’ll discuss the memoir with audiences across the UK.
Lee was born in Toronto, Canada, to Jewish parents who were Holocaust survivors from Poland. He started playing music at school and took a liking to guitars, basses, and fretboard techniques, and joined Rush in September 1968 at the request of his friend, guitarist Alex Lifeson. After starting out as a bluesy power-trio, the band flourished as one of the great prog rock acts, and achieved worldwide commercial success by the early 1980s with key albums including Moving Pictures and Permanent Waves. Lee wowed fans with technically impressive basslines, and as the band progressed further, he tested out ways of playing bass with his hands while controlling (sometimes numerous) synthesisers with foot pedals and singing into multiple microphones.
Rush took a four-year hiatus in 1997, but regrouped in 2001 and released three more studio albums. During the hiatus, Lee released his only solo album My Favourite Headache; other work outside Rush has included appearing in charity supergroup Northern Lights and Bob and Doug McKenzie’s hit comedy single Take Off. His forthcoming memoir isn’t his first book, as in 2018 he released Geddy Lee’s Big Beautiful Book of Bass – which showcases his own collection of more than 250 instruments, features interviews with bassists and gives recommendations of songs.
Lee has inspired generations of bass players and musicians of all stripes, so there’s plenty to ask him. Ahead of the book tour starting in Wolverhampton on 10 December, post your questions by 4pm on Tuesday 31 October – we’ll publish his answers in the 17 November edition of the Film & Music section, and online. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/20/andrea-levy-wins-walter-scott-prize | Books | 2011-06-20T15:02:53.000Z | Alison Flood | Andrea Levy wins Walter Scott prize | Andrea Levy's story of the end of slavery, The Long Song, has won the £25,000 Walter Scott prize for historical fiction.
Told as the memoir of an old Jamaican woman who was once a slave on a sugar-cane plantation in early 19th-century Jamaica, The Long Song beat titles including David Mitchell's tale of 18th-century Japan, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and Tom McCarthy's experimental take on the life of a first world war radio operator, C, to win the award.
Levy said she was "very honoured" to have been chosen by judges as this year's winner. "This is a generous literary prize which focuses attention on an important aspect of the role of fiction. Fiction can – and must – step in where historians cannot go because of the rigour of their discipline. Fiction can breathe life into our lost or forgotten histories," said the author, who won the Orange prize for her evocation of a Jamaican immigrant couple in postwar London, Small Island.
"My subject matter has always been key to what and why I write – the shared history of Britain and those Caribbean islands of my heritage," she added. "So lastly I would like to remember all those once-enslaved people of the Caribbean who helped to make us all what we are today."
The judging panel, which included children's author Elizabeth Laird and journalist and historical novelist Allan Massie, said The Long Song was "quite simply a celebration of the triumphant human spirit in times of great adversity".
"Andrea Levy brings to this story such personal understanding and imaginative depth that her characters leap from the page, with all the resilience, humour and complexity of real people," they said in a statement. "There are no clichés or stereotypes here."
The Walter Scott prize is sponsored by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, whose ancestors were closely linked to Scott, and uses Scott's famous novel Waverley to pin down what constitutes historical fiction: events must have taken place at least 60 years before publication, making them outside the author's own "mature personal experience". Last year's inaugural award was won by Hilary Mantel, for her story of the life of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/apr/18/nigella-lawson-i-can-be-ecstatically-happy-with-just-bread-and-cheese | Food | 2021-04-18T07:00:03.000Z | Nigella Lawson | Nigella Lawson: ‘I can be ecstatically happy with just bread and cheese’ | What were you doing 20 years ago this month?
I’m afraid I have only a rather muddled memory of that time. My husband, John Diamond, who’d had his cancer diagnosed in March 1997, had died in March 2001, and consequently all I can remember of this time 20 years ago, is feeling dazed, and mainlining bagels and cream cheese from Panzer’s. I know I’d been filming (and this must have been for the second series of Nigella Bites) as I had – ridiculous as it now seems – just a week off in the middle of it, and my one acute memory is feeling painfully aware that the herbs we had back of shot when John had died were still alive and flourishing when I resumed. I suspect most of April, once the series had been finished, was spent taking the children, who were then four and six, to school then going back under the duvet until it was time to collect them.
What were you mostly cooking then?
I dare say none of us is impervious to fads and fashion, but my cooking seems to change mostly according to where I am in my life, and at that time I remember rolling endless meatballs – or rather, getting my children to do so, their small hands perfectly suited to the job. The pasta machine, a basic hand-cranked model, was often clamped to the kitchen table, too. My kids used to love turning the handle. Makes me feel I should reclaim it from the back of the cupboard and bring it into play again, even if I have to turn the handle myself!
I never had much time to spend on cooking when friends came over, and there always seemed to be a tableful of them in my kitchen – which I operated on an open-door policy – and very loyally they never seemed to mind that they nearly always got the same Thai yellow pumpkin and seafood curry. I used to live near Sri Thai in Shepherd’s Bush: their curry pastes and produce made everything easy. And I was still in the first few years of my baking life, and marvelling – as indeed I still do, 20 years on – at how uplifting and comforting just mixing up a cake, rolling out biscuits or having my hands in dough could be. And, of course, it’s another thing particularly well suited to keeping children occupied.
When did you know food would be central to your life?
Cooking, certainly, had always been central, but in such an ingrained way, I didn’t even register it. I suppose I just didn’t see it either as a separate, observable entity. True, I knew I wasn’t one of those eat-to-live types, and I had first got a glimmer that not everyone cooked as a matter of course when I was at university, but it had never occurred to me to regard it as anything other than entirely natural, as much part of my life as breathing. In the sense that breathing is absolutely central to life, without one’s having to pay attention to it, cooking was just an essential part of being alive. But while I took that for granted, I never thought that it might be central to my working life. Even after How To Eat came out in 1998, I still saw myself as a (non-food) journalist who had happened to write a book about food. I had no idea that I would go on to write another 11 books, or that it would be a career. I think I’ve accepted only very recently that it has been my life, rather than a divergence from what I really did. There’s not a day that goes past when I am not immersed in what I’m going to eat, and it seems a quite extraordinary piece of good fortune, bafflingly so actually, to find that the greed, obsessiveness and culinary curiosity that are an inextricable part of who I am have provided me with a living. And it gives so much pleasure.
What is more important when it comes to devising a recipe: the writing, the cooking or the eating?
In terms of the actual birth of a recipe, the eating always comes first. But when it comes to devising a recipe, I find it hard to separate the cooking from the eating. That’s to say, my starting point is always a response to what I might feel like eating, but it’s not really until I get cooking that it starts taking shape. I can’t make decisions about food in the abstract: I have to rely on my instincts as I cook. And because of that I need to be as loose as possible, clearing my head of too many preconceived notions, and as much as possible forgetting that it might end up as a recipe. I find that too constricting, and I also think it prioritises an idea or one’s thoughts in a way that seems to be essentially antithetical to cooking; smell, touch, taste are much more helpful guides. Not that everything I cook becomes a recipe. But every recipe begins with my clattering about my kitchen, and has to be part of a real meal. This is one of the reasons I couldn’t write a book a year. The recipes that come out of what I cook have to be tested and retested. Even if I don’t feel that a recipe needs changing, the more often I cook it, the more of a sense I get of it. And this is necessary to convey to the reader what is essential, what can be changed and what to look out for while cooking.
The writing is both afterthought – I don’t write up a recipe until I’m happy with it, although I scrawl endless, often indecipherable notes as I go along – and prerequisite. Until it’s written, I’m not sure it’s a recipe: it’s just something I’ve cooked. Not that this is always the final word. Often, while writing a recipe, I get a sudden insight into how it could be simplified, for example, which sends me back to the kitchen. But to some degree, these are all technicalities, and for me, a recipe has to be more than just a practical description. It needs to be able to evoke a dish, and tell the story of it. Why am I suggesting you cook it, and why – importantly – now? In that sense it is a marriage between lyricism and journalism. But the most important thing in writing a recipe is to be precise enough to be utterly reliable, without inhibiting or hobbling the person following it.
Cooking a dish on Nigella Bites, her first TV cookery show (1999-2001). Photograph: CHANNEL 4 PICTURE PUBLICITY
Do you have an internal monologue when cooking? And recipe writing?
My friends tease me that I give a running commentary on everything I do – which certainly lends itself to making television programmes – and so I fear what should be an internal monologue is actually external. Frankly, whether voiced or not, there is always a jumble of thoughts and questions in my head as I cook, though – at the risk, I know, of sounding pretentious – I don’t think of it as a monologue, but as a dialogue with the food.
I wish I could remember who said that cooking was about communicating with ingredients, but I think it has to be exactly that. I don’t like to listen to music or the radio while I cook: I need full immersion in the process, so that I can respond to what’s going on in the pan. I’m not sure it counts, though, as an inner monologue while writing, as – apart from the first sentence of a recipe introduction – I don’t decide exactly what I’m going to say before I start writing. While I know I have thoughts and words percolating, it’s the act of writing that reveals them clearly, if that makes sense. Or even if it doesn’t!
Are there any memories that bubble up to the surface when absorbed in cooking a particular dish?
It’s strange how one can occupy two spaces at the same time while cooking. I can feel myself entirely in the present – something I value enormously about cooking – and yet I’m also, to some extent, reliving or revisiting all the other times I’ve cooked. I tried to explain that in the recipe for cherry and almond crumble in Cook, Eat, Repeat, which I quote here, as it expresses what I mean, even if I should be embarrassed to do so: “When I stand at the kitchen counter, with my hands immersed in cool flour, fluttering my fingers against the cold cubes of butter to turn these two disparate ingredients into one pile of soft and sandy flakes, I feel, at one and the same time, that I’m not only repeating a process but reliving the memory of all the times I’ve done so before, and yet utterly immersed in the present, alive only to the sensation of flour and butter in my fingers, as they scutter about the bowl.”
Perhaps that sense of being reunited with the past while cooking isn’t about conjuring up memories, but just having a sense of the emotional hinterland of food. And that’s there even when cooking a new recipe, as the process is always a repeated one: peeling an onion, and chopping it, for example. Not having great knife skills, I have to concentrate while chopping that onion, and yet somehow I do sometimes get a flash of my mother’s hands doing the same. And I can’t roast a chicken without thinking of her, or make a white sauce, or mayonnaise, without remembering being a small child and nervously doing so under her impatient instruction.
What I became aware of only during lockdown is how much cooking a dish can make me think of those I’d cooked it for before. I found myself nourished rather than simply saddened by cooking myself food that I had initially made to eat with my children. I’d cite soupy rice with celeriac and chestnuts, and wide noodles with lamb shank in aromatic broth – to give just two examples of recipes that bolstered me in that way. Also, I mentioned meatballs in an earlier answer, and I just cannot ever make them without having an intensely physical flashback of my children with their plump little hands making them with me when they were small.
Which recipes do you always tinker with when cooking?
It’s hard for me to think of a recipe I don’t tinker with when I cook. And unless I’m baking, I don’t tend to follow a recipe anyway. I’m referring here to my own past recipes, which I go through to inform my shopping list, and to remind myself of what’s involved, but then tend to disregard once at the stove. If I’m trying out someone else’s recipe, I try as much as possible to stick assiduously to it the first time out. More often, I’m not reviewing a book of recipes, but merely leafing through one for interest and inspiration, in which case I don’t feel shackled to obedience.
Restaurants aside, what does a night off from the kitchen usually involve?
As I’m neither a professional cook, nor have a full house to feed every day, I don’t quite have the concept of a night off from the kitchen. But on those evenings I don’t cook, I am ecstatically happy with bread and cheese, or, frankly, just bread and butter, or a beautiful, creamy-fleshed smoked mackerel from Rex the fishmonger (so very different from the fillets that come vacuum-packed) with some fierce horseradish sauce.
Which is more enjoyable, eating alone or cooking for others?
While I admit to being something of a feeder, to say the least, I love cooking just for myself. I can’t help thinking more people would enjoy cooking if they didn’t think that the whole point of it were to feed others. What makes so many of us anxious in the kitchen is feeling we’re going to be judged, and from that can come such a crippling fear of failure. And that in turn engenders a self-consciousness that can really get in the way of unencumbered spontaneity.
When you’re cooking just for yourself, of course you don’t want to end up with something disgusting, or even disappointing, but it’s not quite the same as having a tableful of people to feed. And by being less stressed about the result, you can really concentrate more on the process, allow yourself to experiment and take risks, and feel your way and find ease in the kitchen. When I cook for myself I’m essentially just thinking aloud by the stove, and I relish that. (And while this is liberating for all cooks, I do think making food to eat just for oneself can be essential for women, in particular, as it frees cooking from being an act of service to others.) However, I don’t feel that the food I cook when I’m alone differs appreciably from the food I cook for others. To a large degree, the way one cooks is so much a function of personality that I’m not sure how I would begin to cook any differently.
Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver at the OFM Awards in 2017. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian
Something that didn’t exist 20 years ago was the ability to chat to the world’s cooks on social media. How are you finding it?
It gives me so much pleasure. I can’t think of more of a gift to a food writer than seeing people’s pictures and reports of cooking your recipes in their home. I will never grow tired of it, or stop finding it touching and profoundly happy-making. Obviously, it’s gratifying, but there’s more to it than that: it feels like the proper recognition of a relationship. The person following a recipe is not a passive recipient, but an essential part of the dialogue.
I really grew to understand the importance of it all at the beginning of the first lockdown. It was the first time in my life, really, that I wasn’t feeding other people; sharing recipes with others made me feel that I still was. And it became apparent that my Twitter feed provided kitchen companionship for others, too. It’s certainly true that more people had recipe queries, but that’s only one part of it; chiefly, what I’d say is that it was about finding community in a time of isolation. The need for connection is such an essential part of being human, and although social media is much disparaged, I think it can provide that, and positively. It can be hard to keep up with it all, though. And if I slip too much behind, I can start feeling rather overwhelmed. I just hate the idea of letting people down.
There’s more thinking aloud and sharing your enthusiasms in Cook, Eat, Repeat than in previous books and you described the title as “more than just a mantra … the story of my life”. Was it a deliberate book end with/companion piece to How to Eat?
I didn’t set out to write a sequel to How to Eat, but I don’t deny there are parallels, and I’d agree that Cook, Eat, Repeat is very much a companion piece to it. But I would also put both Feast and Kitchen in the same series. And even in books of mine that are less emphatically text-led, I’d say the tone is similar, really. This is not surprising: my feelings about food and life are central to how I approach even the most basic of recipes. But it’s certainly true that in setting out to write Cook, Eat, Repeat I hungrily chose to return to a type of food writing that allowed for digression, reflection and free association – the kind of culinary stream of consciousness that feels most natural to me.
In Cook, Eat, Repeat you say that a successful recipe is “a hopeful act of communality”. With that in mind, which of your recipes have been the most successful and why?
Television always has the most impact on what recipes people cook of mine, and that’s just inevitable. I’m grateful, but perhaps it makes me more particularly moved when the recipes that become popular haven’t been on TV. I feel it gives them their moment in a quiet way. My recipe for sweet potato macaroni cheese from Simply Nigella is a case in point, as are the salt and vinegar potatoes from At My Table. But it’s always a thrill when I see people cooking a recipe of mine for their dinner, and I suppose most recently the recipes that have got the most traction are the fish finger bhorta, black pudding meatballs, crab mac ’n’ cheese, and chocolate peanut butter cake. But it’s the recipes that people have carried on cooking, and that have become part of their family life, that mean the most to me. Recently, someone tweeted a picture of the Malteser cake they’d made for their son’s 18th birthday, and told me she’d made it – at his request – for every birthday of his for the past 12 years. It’s an honour and a privilege, and I know it sounds a bit gushy and Oscar-acceptance speech to say so, but it’s the truth.
Which foods are underrated? Which are overrated?
I’m really bad at questions like this. I tend to shrink from the what’s in/ what’s out or ratings approach to food writing. Personal taste is no more than that: if you like a foodstuff I don’t, I’m not sure it makes sense for me to see it as overrated. And if an enthusiasm is billed as celebrating a food that’s underrated it seems to be claiming a discernment lacking in others. I’m uncomfortable with either stance, really. But OK, I’ll play. If pushed, I’d say that I don’t really understand the fuss made about black truffles. I don’t hate them, but they rarely taste of anything more than mildly scented bark to me. It’s true, I once had a potato gratin with black truffles in the Périgord that made a convincing case for them, but that was a one-off. Mostly they seem to me to do no more than confer a certain smugly celebrated luxury status.
It’s quite hard to think of a foodstuff that’s underrated rather than merely divisive. I offer up beef dripping here: if you’re making a beef stew, why would you choose to cook the onions for it in olive oil, rather than beef dripping? It brings such glorious meaty flavour, and even if you don’t like fat, it’s much easier to remove solid fat from a casserole after it’s been chilled in the fridge than oil. But I love fat, all fats, and feel that policing them can only be to the detriment of proper cooking.
Cook, Eat, Repeat: Ingredients, Recipes and Stories is published by Chatto & Windus, £26. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jun/15/the-conjuring-2-demonic-nun-spinoff-horror-film | Film | 2016-06-15T21:33:19.000Z | Nigel M Smith | Wimple and wail: The Conjuring 2's demonic nun gets own movie | The hit sequel to The Conjuring has conjured a spinoff.
The lead villain of The Conjuring 2, a demonic nun who terrorizes real-life paranormal investigators and married couple Ed and Lorraine Warren (played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), will be the subject of a new film, titled The Nun.
James Wan, who directed the two Conjuring films, is on board as producer, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The screenplay will be penned by Leslie Johnson, who co-wrote The Conjuring 2. No director has been announced as of yet.
The Conjuring 2 review: devil's in the detail as horror sequel ramps up scares
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The Nun marks the second spinoff from the popular horror franchise, following 2014’s Annabelle, which centered on the demonic doll from the first film. Like the two Conjuring films, Annabelle was a hit, grossing over $256m worldwide, on a budget of just $6.5m. A second Annabelle film is slated for release in 2017.
As the Hollywood Reporter notes, the nun almost didn’t make it into The Conjuring 2, as she was only added during last-minute reshoots to replace the original antagonist – a demonic figure with horns. Bonnie Aarons, under heavy makeup, played the nun. It’s not confirmed whether she will return for the character’s stand-alone film.
The Conjuring 2 recently opened to $40.4m over the weekend, marking the biggest opening for a horror film since the original opened with $41.9m in 2013. It was also the best-ever debut for a horror film in June. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/1990-1999 | World news | 2014-07-30T23:30:10.000Z | Harry Slater | Guardian Century: how the Guardian saw the 20th century | 1899-1909
1899 - American Imperialism
Fighting at Manila
“The Filipinos attacked the American position around this city at half-past eight last night. It began with sharp firing on the outposts from several quarters at once, and grew to a furious conflict as the night advanced. The insurgents fought savagely, but the defending lines, which have been ready for this for weeks, held their own steadily. At this hour there is still hot firing. The Americans are still successfully repelling the assault.”
1900 - The Boer War
The relief of Ladysmith
“To describe with any degree of adequacy the excitement in London, and indeed throughout the country, consequent upon the announcement yesterday of the relief of Ladysmith would be an almost impossible task. The news was made known a few minutes before ten o’clock at the War Office, and soon after the hour the welcome intelligence was proclaimed by the Lord Mayor from a window of the Mansion House.”
1901 - Queen Victoria dies
Death of the Queen
“The Lord Mayor of London last night received the following:- Osborne, Tuesday, 6.45pm. The Prince of Wales to the Lord Mayor. My beloved mother the Queen has just passed away, surrounded by her children and grandchildren. (signed) Albert Edward.”
1902 - End of the Boer War
Conclusion of peace
“The announcement of peace was made at the evening service at St. Paul’s Cathedral to a fairly large congregation. Apparently the message came as a surprise, as evensong had commenced before the gratifying tidings were generally known even in the central parts of the City. There was an audible murmur of satisfaction when the telegram from Pretoria was read by the Bishop of Stepney.”
1903 - Race hate in the US
Anti-negro riots in the United States
“The town of Evansville, in Indiana, has been the scene for several days of anti-negro riots, which have been attended by the loss of ten lives. A negro was imprisoned in the gaol on a charge of murdering a policeman who was endeavouring to arrest him, and on Sunday a mob set out to break into the gaol and lynch the negro.”
1904 - The Russo-Japanese War
The war in the Far East
“According to a St. Petersburg telegram, the Russians are far from intending to allow the Japanese to advance unmolested from the Yalu to Feng-huang-cheng - General Kuropatkin’s first line of defence. On the contrary, it is declared they mean to offer serious resistance either at Antung or Shakhedz.”
1905 - Pogroms in the Ukraine
Days of terror
“The events in the Odessa suburbs of Moldavanka, Slobodka, and Bugaieoka last night were of a most terrible nature. Immense bands of ruffians, accompanied by policemen, invaded all the Jewish houses and mercilessly slaughtered the occupants.”
1906 - The Big ‘Quake
Earthquake in San Francisco
“San Francisco has been devastated by an earthquake. The shock occurred shortly after five o’clock yesterday morning, and lasted three minutes.”
1907 - Millions starve in China
The famine in China
“It is estimated that four millions are starving and tens of thousands reduced to utter destitution wandering over the country, in the North of Anhui, the East of Honan, and the whole of the North of Kiang-Su provinces of China.”
1908 - The Persian civil war
Fighting in Teheran
“Fighting between Royalist and Parliamentary forces began at Teheran yesterday morning. The Shah and his ministers have been preparing for a coup d’etat for the last week or two.”
1909 - Bleriot’s cross-channel flight
Airship feat
“The feat of flying across the English Channel in a heavier-than-air machine, a thing which had never before been done, was accomplished yesterday morning by M. Louis Bleriot, in a monoplane of his own construction.”
1910-19
Franz Ferdinand, archduke of Austria, and his wife Sophie riding in an open carriage at Sarajevo shortly before their assassination in 1914. Photograph: Henry Guttmann/Getty Images Photograph: Henry Guttmann/Getty Images
1910 - The murderous Dr Crippen
Crippen & Miss le Neve
“A great crowd assembled early yesterday morning outside the famous police court in Bow street, London, where Dr. Crippen and Miss Le Neve were to be brought before the magistrate later in the day in connection with the mystery surrounding the discovery of human remains in the cellar of 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Camden Road.”
1911 - Churchill, have-a-go Home Secretary
Murderers’ siege in London
“A raid made by London police early yesterday morning on a house in Stepney - 100, Sidney-street - in which two of the gang that murdered the three police offficers in Houndsditch last month were believed to be hiding, developed into a pitched battle or siege.”
1912 - Sinking of the Titanic
The Titanic sunk
“The maiden voyage of the White Star liner Titanic, the largest ship ever launched, has ended in disaster. An unofficial message from Cape Race, Newfoundland, stated that only 675 have been saved out of 2,200 to 2,400 persons on board.”
1913 - Scott of the Antarctic
Captain Scott’s last journey
“Captain R. F. Scott, the famous Antarctic explorer, and four other members of the British South Polar Expedition have died amidst the Southern ice. The five men were the whole Southern party. They had reached the Pole on January 18, 1912, just over a month after Captain Amundsen, the Norwegian, and had struggled far back towards safety when they were overcome.”
1914 - The Great War
Assassination of the Austrian royal heir and wife
“The Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria, nephew of the aged Emperor and heir to the throne, was assassinated in the streets of Sarayevo, the Bosnian capital, yesterday afternoon. His wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, was killed by the same assassin. Some reports say the Duchess was deliberately shielding her husband from the second shot when she was killed.”
1915 - Sinking of the Lusitania
The Lusitania disaster
“The death roll in the Lusitania disaster is still not certainly known. About 750 persons were rescued, but of these some 50 have died since they were landed. Over 2,150 men, women and children were on the liner when she left New York, and since the living do not number more than 710, the dead cannot be fewer than 1,450.”
1916 - The Easter Rising
Sinn Fein outbreak in Dublin
“A very serious outbreak organised by Sinn Feiners occurred in Dublin on Monday. A large body of men, mostly armed, seized St. Stephen’s Green and the Post Office, and also houses in St Stephen’s Green, Sackville Street (where the Post Office is situated), the adjacent Abbey Street, and on the quays along the Liffey. The telegraph and telephone lines were cut.”
1917 - The Russian Revolution
How the Bolsheviks took the Winter Palace
“The Palace was pillaged and devastated from top to bottom by the Bolshevik armed mob, as though by a horde of barbarians. All the State papers were destroyed. Priceless pictures were ripped from their frames by bayonets.”
1918 - The Armistice
The end of the war
“The war is over, and in a million households fathers and mothers, wives and sisters, will breathe freely, relieved at length of all dread of that curt message which has shattered the hope and joy of so many.”
1919 - First transatlantic flight
Manchester men first to fly Atlantic direct
“The first direct Transatlantic flight from America to Europe has been achieved by Captain Alcock, D.S.C., a Manchester pilot flying the Vickers Vimy-Rolls aeroplane with Lieutenant A. W. Brown as navigator.”
1920-29
After Lenin’s death in 1924, a power struggle ensued, with Stalin emerging as his successor. Photograph: AP Photo/Sovfoto Photograph: AP Photo/Sovfoto
1920 - The Prohibition
America ‘dry’ tonight
“One minute after midnight tonight America will become an entirely arid desert as far as alcoholics are concerned, any drinkable containing more than half of 1 per cent alcohol being forbidden.”
1921 - Speech hits the movies
The talking kinema
“The invention of the talking kinema - reported the other day from Sweden - promises to endow the art of the actor with some sort of immortality.”
1922 - The rise of Fascism
Italy in Fascist control
“At the moment when Mussolini, the leader of the Italian Fascisti, was seizing control of the country by force, the governing authority has been placed in his hands by the King, who yesterday asked him to form a Cabinet.”
1923 - The Beerkeller putsch
Bavarian monarchist rising broken
“The German reactionaries have struck and failed. News of their overthrow comes close upon the heels of the announcement of the coup, which appeared in our later editions yesterday. The coup’s leaders, Ludendorff and Hitler, were captured.”
1924 - Stalin succeeds Lenin
Death of Lenin
“Lenin, who was at Gorki, a village twenty miles from Moscow, had a sudden relapse yesterday, became unconscious, and died an hour later, just before seven in the evening.”
1925 - Advances in atomic science
Remarkable claims for new ray
“The remarkable discovery of Dr. Millikan, a Nobel prize-winner for physic, of new penetrating rays far shorter and more powerful than any hitherto known, has aroused the keenest interest of authorities in this country.”
1926 - The General Strike
Ugly disturbances
“The first day of the strike passed off, in a sense, uneventfully. The absence of trains and trams is not a new thing; it was borne good humouredly, and in no part of the country did any kind of serious disturbance occur. Already, by the second day, there have been ominous signs that this peaceful state of affairs is gradually giving way to a more dangerous temper.”
1927 - Lindbergh flies the Ocean, solo
Alone across the Atlantic
“Captain Lindbergh, the young United States airman, reached Paris at 10.22 on Saturday night on his non-stop flight from New York. He is the first pilot to have crossed the Atlantic by himself, the first to fly from America to France, and the first to make an uninterrupted flight of 3,600 miles. The journey took 33 hours.”
1928 - Hirohito takes the throne
Japan’s emperor
“The enthronement of Emperor Hirohito was the culminating ceremony here to-day. It was cold but bright with a passing shower. Over a thousand people assembled at the Shishinden, or Throne Hall, your correspondent being one of a privileged group viewing the ceremony through the Kemei Gate.”
1929 - The great Crash
£1,000,000,000 crash on New York stock exchange
“The heavy break on the New York Stock Exchange, which began on Saturday and has been increased on each succeeding day except Tuesday, when there was a slight recovery, reached catastrophic proportions yesterday with a crash described as the worst in the history of the Exchange. It is estimated that £1,000,000,000 in paper values had been swept away by the close of the market.”
1930-39
Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of Great Britain 1937-1940. Photograph: Getty/Hulton Archive Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty
1930 - Gandhi and civil disobedience
Gandhi’s march to the sea
“At 6.30 yesterday morning “Mahatma” Gandhi left Ahmedabad on foot at the head of a band of civil resistance volunteers on a 100-mile march to the sea at Jalalpur, on the Gulf of Cambay.”
1931 - The depression
Huge increase in unemployment
“The unemployed total on Monday, December 29 - 2,643,127 - was the highest recorded since the unemployment insurance statistics began in 1921.”
1932 - The Five-year Plan
Soviet output to be trebled
“Instructions by the Soviet Premier, Mr. Molotoff, and head of the State Planning Commission, Mr. Kuibisheff, for the second Five-year Plan were published to-day.”
1933 - Persecution of Jews begins in earnest
Anti-semitism in Berlin
“Demonstrations against the big stores in Berlin to-day developed later in the evening into an active outbreak of anti-Semitism.”
1934 - A foretaste of Nazism
Dachau concentration camp
“The concentration camp at Dachau is often represented as a model of its kind. The truth is that this camp is in no sense a model, although it is no worse than many of the Hitlerite concentration camps. The total number of prisoners who have been killed or who have died of their injuries at Dachau cannot be far short of fifty.”
1935 - Fascist expansionism begins
Fascist troops march into Ethiopia
“Mussolini’s Fascist troops marched into Ethiopia today - and as the war-drums called Emperor Haile Selassie’s people to fight, the League of Nations in Geneva was facing its greatest test since it was formed in 1919.”
1936 - Franco’s rebellion in Spain
Civil war in Spain
“On July 12 Calvo Sotelo was taken from his house by night and shot. There is some mystery in this assassination.”
1937 - The Middle Eastern question
Partition of Palestine
“Partition of Palestine between Arabs and Jews and the termination of the mandate are recommended by the Royal Commission, whose unanimous report is published to-day.”
1938 - “Peace for our time”?
Return from Munich
“Mr. Chamberlain went to a first-floor window and leaned forward happily smiling on the people. ‘My good friends,’ he said - it took some time to still the clamour so that he might be heard - ‘this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany ‘peace with honour.’ I believe it is peace for our time.’”
1939 - The declaration of war
Britain at war with Germany
“Britain and France are now at war with Germany. The British ultimatum expired at 11 a.m. yesterday, and France entered the war six hours later - at 5 p.m.”
1940-49
A mushroom cloud rises more than 60,000 feet into the air over Nagasaki, Japan after an atomic bomb was dropped by the US bomber Enola Gay, 9 August 1945. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Feature Photograph: Everett Collection / Rex Feature
1940 - The Battle of Britain
Never in the field of human conflict ...
“The gratitude of every home in our island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unweakened by their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of world war by their prowess and their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
1941 - The attack on Pearl Harbor
Japan declares war on United States and Britain
“The Japanese, without any warning, yesterday afternoon began war on the United States with air attacks on the naval base at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, and the adjacent city of Honolulu.”
1942 - The Holocaust
The German massacres of Jews in Poland
“The Note on Jewish persecution in Poland which the Polish Government in London has addressed to the respective Governments of the United Nations contains a comprehensive account of the horrors being perpetrated by the Germans on Polish soil.”
1943 - Italy defeated
Italy surrenders unconditionally
“Italy has surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, and hostilities between the United Nations and Italy ended early yesterday evening. There were unconfirmed reports this morning of new Allied landings at several points north and south of Rome.”
1944 - D-day
Weather held up invasion for 24 hours
“There is a feeling of confidence at this headquarters to-night. No one imagines that the supreme battle which began on the beaches of of Normandy early this morning will be won by the Allies without bitter fighting against a determined and desperate enemy, but there is a general sense that the ‘first hurdles’ of invasion of the European Continent have been successfully surmounted.”
1945 - The atomic bomb
Destruction at Hiroshima
“One hundred thousand Japanese may have been killed or wounded by the single atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. This was the unofficial estimate at Guam to-night after reports of the tremendous devastation wrought had come in.”
1946 - The Iron Curtain descends
The Cold War
“In Czechoslovakia life is normal. This does not seem so surprising if you go from London to Prague by air, travelling more easily and more quickly, than from London to Edinburgh. It is incredible and bewildering if you come to Prague overland through the chaos and starvation of any of the surrounding countries.”
1947 - Independence for India and Pakistan
India and Pakistan celebrate
“British rule in India ended at midnight last night after 163 years. To-day the new Dominions of India and Pakistan are in being. At midnight in Delhi, capital of India, Lord Mountbatten ceased to be the Viceroy and became Governor General of India.”
1948 - The State of Israel proclaimed
The Jewish state born
“The Jews yesterday proclaimed in Tel Aviv the new State of Israel. It was formally recognised last night by the United States. In Jerusalem firing began as soon as the Army and the police left and increased steadily as the Jews began to take buildings in the central zone and to hoist the Zionist flag on them.”
1949 - The Berlin airlift
Blockade of Berlin over
“The blockade of Berlin ended at one minute past midnight this morning when a British convoy started its journey through the Soviet zone. Less than two hours later the first cars had reached Berlin without incident.”
1950-59
Black students are escorted into Little Rock High School, Arkansas in 1957 having previously been prevented from entering by the state governor. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
1950 - TV viewing habits
Television tastes
“Owners of television sets seldom switch off even programmes which they admit to disliking, so that the extent to which television is watched seems to depend only to a limited extent upon the nature of the programme transmitted, said Mr Robert Silvey, head of Audience Research, B.B.C., when he addressed the Manchester Statistical Society last night on methods of viewer research employed by the corporation.”
1951 - Theft and return of the Stone of Destiny
Return of the Stone
“Three and a half months after its removal from the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey early on Christmas morning, the Stone of Scone was to-day deposited in Arbroath Abbey in Scotland. Three men drove up to the abbey and carried the stone, which was draped in a St. Andrew’s flag along the main aisle before laying it at the high altar.”
1952 - The death of Evita
Eva Peron’s lying-in-state
“Senora Peron’s body was brought to the Ministry to-day from the Presidential Palace. It will lie in state, in a coffin draped with the Argentine flag and white orchids and other flowers, until Tuesday.”
1953 - The death of Stalin
How Moscow broke the news
“The news of Stalin’s death had just been released to the outside world by Moscow’s foreign services. Now, surely, was the moment for the Russians to be told. But they were not told anything - except perhaps by implication.”
1954 - The four-minute mile
The mile in 3min. 59.4sec.
“Roger Bannister, aged 25, to-day became the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes. His time at the Iffley Road track, Oxford, in the annual match between the Amateur Athletic Association and Oxford University, was 3min. 59.4sec.”
1955 - ITV launched
ITV makes its bow
“One thing must be said immediately. In 365 days’ time, Independent Television will have been with us for a year. So far, it has been with us for a bare hand-count of hours, and although the conclusions are crying to be jumped to, the temptation to jump must be resisted.”
1956 - The Hungarian rising
Soviet tanks crush resistance
“At 8 p.m. yesterday the Soviet High Command in Hungary ordered Mr Nagy’s Government to surrender by noon “or Budapest will be bombed.” Soviet armoured forces then went into action.”
1957 - Little Rock
Heavier guard for negroes
“About 75 white pupils walked out of the Central High School in Little Rock after eight Negroes went in to-day, and one boy hung a straw effigy of a Negro from a tree.”
1958 - Music in stereo
Stereophonic sound
“Within a few months, so we are promised by the big record companies, stereophonic discs will be available in this country. The question all record-collectors will want to ask is whether we are going to be faced with yet another gramophone upheaval on the scale of the L.P. revolution.”
1959 - The Cuban revolution
Castro in control of Cuba
“All of Cuba to-day was under the precarious control of Fidel Castro, the 31-year-old rebel whom the Batista Government pictured to its graceless end as a ragamuffin hiding in the scrub hills of Oriente Province.”
1960-69
Neil Armstrong walks on the moon, 1969. Photograph: Neil Armstrong/AP/Press Association Images Photograph: Neil Armstrong/AP/Press Association Images
1960 - UK seeks entry to Europe
Britain will ask to join EEC
“Mr Macmillan, a weary-looking father figure, at last held out his hand yesterday and offered to try to lead the Commons and the country into Europe, if he can find the way. There was a good deal of kicking and screaming and this was to be expected.”
1961 - Russia puts a man in orbit
What it feels like in space
“Major Yuri Gagarin described today how it felt to be the first man in space - how he was able to write and work and how he burst out singing for joy as his ship plunged back towards the earth. ‘Everything was easier to perform? legs and arms weighed nothing,’ he told an interviewer.”
1962 - The Cuban missile crisis
The Cuban crisis
“People who thought the Cuban crisis was easing - and who sent Stock Exchange prices rising - had better think again. The situation is still full of danger.”
1963 - The shooting of JFK
President Kennedy assassinated
“President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was shot during a motorcade drive through downtown Dallas this afternoon. He died in the emergency room of the Parkland Memorial Hospital 32 minutes after the attack. He was 46 years old.”
1964 - Beatlemania
Beatle hysteria hits US
“Physically, the Beatle invasion was launched just after 1 p.m. when their air liner touched down to pandemonium at Kennedy Airport. But in fact New York has been in the tightening grip of Beatlemania for some weeks.”
1965 - The Vietnam war
US paratroops go into attack against Vietcong
“An Australian battalion joined United States paratroops and South Vietnamese forces today in an attack on a Vietcong stronghold about 30 miles north of Saigon. This was the first time US troops were employed in an offensive role.”
1966 - England wins the World Cup
Let Us Now Praise Famous Footballers
“To the accompaniment of expressions of praise, thanksgiving, and, in some cases, undisguised disbelief, England became football champions of the world by defeating West Germany 4-2 on Saturday at Wembley.”
1967 - The six-day war
Israeli forces hit back - and cut off Gaza town
“Fighting broke out today on all Israel’s borders with its Arab neighbours. Official Israeli statements said that attacks had been launched in the area of the Negev, in Jerusalem, and along the Syrian border near Dagania.”
1968 - The soixante-huitards
Paris gripped by insurrection
“An insurrection, there is no other word for it, swept a stupefied Paris last night in the hours that followed General de Gaulle’s television address.”
1969 - Neil Armstrong takes one small step
The Moonwalkers
“Men are on the moon. At 3:39 am this morning - nearly four hours ahead of schedule - Armstrong, the lunar module commander, opened the hatch and clambered slowly down to the surface of the moon.”
1970-1979
Margaret Thatcher, with husband Denis Thatcher, waves to well-wishers outside 10 Downing Street following her election victory, on 4 May 1979. Photograph: Tim Graham/Getty Images Photograph: Tim Graham/Getty Images
1970 - Beginning a decade of industrial action
Hospitals work by candle
“Nationwide power cuts averaged 31 per cent yesterday, with 40 per cent in some areas, and hospitals faced their most critical 24 hours of the strike so far with staff struggling to keep going by candle and battery power.”
1971 - The Vietnam war drags on
What Vietnam does to a man
“The men of D company were discussing the question of why in hell they had had no beer, or at least soda, for a whole month when I arrived on their hill. They wanted to tell me about those in the rear who were stealing the beer and soda from them, but I wanted to talk about ‘the action.’”
1972 - Bloody Sunday
13 killed as paratroops break riot
“The tragic and inevitable doomsday situation which has been universally forecast for Northern Ireland arrived in Londonderry yesterday afternoon when soldiers firing into a large crowd of civil rights demonstrators, shot and killed 13 civilians.”
1973 - Britain joins the EEC
We’re in - but without the fireworks
“Britain passed peacefully into Europe at midnight last night without any special celebration. It was difficult to tell that anything of importance had occurred, and a date which will be entered in the history books as long as histories of Britain are written, was taken by most people as a matter of course.”
1974 - The end of Tricky Dicky
Nixon resigns
“The last that we saw of him as President was his limp right hand flapping occasionally like a dying fish, trying to wave a laconic farewell through the bulletproof glass of the shiny green helicopter.”
1975 - Indonesia invades East Timor
Indonesians capture capital in air-sea invasion of Timor
“An Indonesian-supported force launched a full-scale attack by air and sea on the former Portuguese colony of Timor at dawn today. More than 1,000 army commandos parachuted into the capital of Dili in the first wave of the attack.”
1976 - The death of Chairman Mao
Power vacuum after Mao’s death
“The Chinese people, sad but hardly surprised, began to consider their future last night without their country’s great helmsman.”
1977 - Punk hits Britain
Punk record is a load of legal trouble
“The manager of a record shop in Nottingham who displayed in his window the new best-selling LP record by the Sex Pistols, which displays on its sleeve the title ‘Never mind the Bollocks, here’s the Sex Pistols’ has been charged with offences under the 1889 Indecent Advertisement Act.”
1978 - The Met’s attitude to race relations
Race causes an initial confusion
“The man who answered ‘human race’ when asked to what race he belonged would get short shrift at West End Central police station, London. For there human classifications have achieved an elaborate formality, as a bemused magistrate heard yesterday.”
1979 - Thatcher in power
Thatcher takes over No.10
“Mrs Margaret Thatcher looks certain this morning to be the next tenant of 10 Downing Street and the first woman prime minister in the western world.”
1980-89
A man stopping a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square, 5 June 1989. Photograph: Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos Photograph: Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos
1980 - The Iran - Iraq war
Open war as Iraq is bombed
“The border conflict between Iraq and Iran turned into a full-scale war yesterday after both sides bombed each other’s airbases and clashed repeatedly on the ground and at sea along the 720-mile frontier.”
1981 - The Brixton riots
How smouldering tension erupted to set Brixton aflame
“On Friday afternoon, a police patrol in Brixton stopped to help a black youth who had been stabbed in the back. The incident marked the beginning of a build-up of police strength and a confrontation began which erupted into violence on Saturday afternoon when a black youth was arrested outside a minicab office.”
1982 - The Falklands war
Patriotism has worked its old magic
“A thousand dead, terrible wounds; the Union Jack flying again over the Falklands (pop. 1,800); rejoicing and mutual congratulation in the House of Commons; champagne and Rule Britannia in Downing Street - each must draw his or her own balance sheet and historians must decide where to place the Falklands War in the annals of Britain’s post-1945 adjustment to her reduced circumstances as a declining power.”
1983 - The AIDS epidemic
The lurking killer without a cure
“Aids surfaced in Haiti. West Coast homosexuals brought it back to San Francisco. Cheap transatlantic travel flew it into England. And next year the handful of known cases will become hundreds as the four-year incubation period comes to an end for gays, and maybe even for their heterosexual partners.”
1984 - The apogee of Thatcherism
Commentary
“One of Thatcherism’s most startling gifts to British society is to have thoroughly politicised it. Little now occurs, in large reaches of public and sometimes private life which does not have political importance and is not subjected to a test of its relevance to the prevailing ideology.”
1985 - The miners’ strike
Pit strike ends in defiance and tears
“One of the most significant chapters in Britain’s trade union history was closed last night when the miners reluctantly agreed to call off their strike in a mood of bitterness and tears, almost a year after it had begun.”
1986 - The Chernobyl meltdown
Russia admits blast as death fears rise
“After three days of virtual news blackout, the Soviet authorities finally admitted last night what Scandinavia had already deduced from radioactive fallout - that the Chernobyl nuclear accident is a “disaster”, that some people have been killed and thousands evacuated.”
1987 - The Stock Market crash
Black Monday
“A record #50.6 billion rout on the London Stock Exchange yesterday was followed by a fall on Wall Street which far exceeded the 1929 crash.”
1988 - Reagan’s second term ends
Goodbye, Ronald Reagan
“As Ronald Reagan journeyed triumphally from Texas to California in the closing hours of campaign ‘88, tipping his stetson to the crowds lining the streets for a glimpse of the Gipper on his last hurrah, it was plain that, whatever his failings, the American people are both forgiving and adoring.”
1989 - The Tiananmen Square massacre
The horror of a people attacked by its own army
“Students had been bayoneted to death, others had set fire to two armoured personnel carriers and trucks, tanks had crushed to death 11 students who had left the square and were lagging behind the others, more students had been crushed to death in their tents. ‘How could the Communist Party do this? How could they shoot children?’ asked a worker in blue overalls.”
1990-99
Nelson Mandela and his then wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela raising fists upon his release from 27 years of imprisonment, 11 February 1990. Photograph: Alexander Joe/AFP/Getty Images Photograph: Alexander Joe/AFP/Getty Images
1990 - South Africa releases Mandela
Mandela free after 27 years
“Mr Nelson Mandela walked out of prison a free man yesterday, and within hours told an ecstatic crowd of supporters in Cape Town that the armed struggle against apartheid would continue.”
1991 - Allies attack Iraq
Kuwait’s liberation begun, says US
“Bombs rained down on Baghdad and other targets in Iraq and Kuwait early today as the long months of waiting in the Gulf crisis finally ended. Allied planes launched wave after wave of air attacks on the city and on Iraq’s Scud missile bases.”
1992 - War in Bosnia
Escape from Sarajevo
“Jordi had his doubts on Sunday morning. He wanted to leave. At 12.10 on Sunday afternoon a mortar bomb dropped out of the sky like a shot putt and killed him.”
1993 - The middle-east peace process
Symbolic gesture seals hopes to end blood and tears
“With faith, hope and a careworn charity, Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organisation shook hands on a joint accord at the White House yesterday and rolled the dice of history in what President Bill Clinton called ‘a brave gamble for peace’.”
1994 - Genocide in Rwanda
Rwandan PM killed as troops wreak carnage
“The Rwandan capital of Kigali descended into chaos yesterday as troops, presidential guards and gendarmes swept through the suburbs killing the prime minister, United Nations peacekeepers and scores of civilians.”
1995 - Unstoppable rise of Microsoft
Bill Gates: The world’s richest private individual
“Bill Gates, founder of the Microsoft Corporation, is the world’s richest private individual, with $12.9 billion ($8.3 billion).”
1996 - The Dunblane massacre
Schoolchildren shot dead
“The small Scottish town of Dunblane was racked with grief and horror last night as details emerged of the killer who had lived in their midst until yesterday, when he shot dead 16 small children and a teacher in three minutes of carnage in a primary school gym.”
1997 - Hong Kong transferred to China
A last hurrah and an empire closes down
“With a clenched-jaw nod from the Prince of Wales, a last rendition of God Save the Queen, and a wind machine to keep the Union flag flying for a final 16 minutes of indoor pomp, Britain last night at midnight shut down the empire that once encompassed a quarter of the globe.”
1998 - Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky
Zippergate is a scandal for him, for her and for us
“Insomniacs and obsessives couldn’t wait till the morning. They stayed up until 3am to watch Bill Clinton give his TV address live - and they weren’t disappointed. It made gripping viewing.”
1999 - Allies attack Serbia over Kosovo
Defeating Milosevic: Troops may be needed
“As the bombers go in, for the first time in the long evolution of the Balkan crisis, the outside powers are directly confronting the author of that crisis. Always before, the Serbian leader has distanced himself from the tragic situations which he has played such a large part in creating.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/20/cost-of-living-payments-failing-to-help-low-income-households-in-uk | Business | 2023-06-19T23:01:25.000Z | Patrick Butler | Cost of living payments failing to help low-income households in UK | Emergency cost of living support payments have had negligible effect on the finances of millions of low-income households facing a “new normal” of debt, skipping meals and fuel poverty, according to a survey.
The latest cost of living tracker by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) found the government’s £900-a-year payments, which are paid in three £300 instalments, provided only short-lived respite for poorer households struggling to afford everyday basics from food to shampoo.
The anti-poverty charity warned high levels of hardship had hardly budged over the past 12 months and were in danger of becoming “baked in”. It said record food inflation and soaring energy bills, combined with inadequate universal credit rates, emphasised how unaffordable everyday life had become for many.
Although the £300 payments on average amounted to the equivalent of a fifth of eligible households’ monthly income, the survey found they provided little in the way of breathing space for families and were rapidly used up, mainly to pay down debts and buy food.
Although the support payments were appreciated by many claimants, they were “clearly insufficient to reduce ongoing day-to-day financial strain,” the charity said. Instead, it concluded, “they appear to have prevented already worrying high levels [of debt] getting worse.”
JRF’s survey of 4,000 UK households earning less than £26,000 a year – the bottom 40% of incomes – found that 39% were behind with at least one bill with average arrears of £1,600. A third of households had applied for a loan but were rejected, while more than a fifth said they had borrowed from loan sharks or payday lenders.
Although 80% of those surveyed who were on universal credit had received a cost of living payment at the time of the survey in May, 90% said they had gone without essentials, and 69% said they had cut back on fresh food, with a similar proportion saying adults in the household had skipped meals.
Rachel Earwaker, a JRF senior economist, said: “Over the past year people have been telling us about being unable to afford hot meals, shampoo or a warm shower. We are seeing these levels of hardship persist and it has become a horrendous new normal.”
She added: “That places a huge burden on families in the here and now, but we need to get real that this is a hardship crisis that won’t end as inflation starts to fall. Higher prices will remain baked in, and cost of living payments, while necessary, are not even providing breathing space for people who desperately need it.”
Households have been hit by average price rises of more than 18% over the past two years, with energy prices climbing by 110% over the same period. At the same time earnings rose by 13% and benefits by 14%, with many low-income households – a third have savings of under £200 – having little in reserve to cope, said JRF.
A government spokesperson said: “We are providing record financial support to those who need it most, with a £94bn cost of living support package worth around £3,300 per household.
“On top of this we have raised benefits, including universal credit, by 10.1%, increased the national living wage and are helping families with essential costs through the household support fund. We also remain committed to halving inflation which will ease pressures and help everyone’s incomes go further.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/08/next-pandemic-bird-flu-mink-farms-transmission | Opinion | 2023-02-08T07:00:11.000Z | George Monbiot | Be warned: the next deadly pandemic is not inevitable, but all the elements are in place | George Monbiot | If you wanted to kill as many people as possible, deniably and with no criminal consequences, what would you do? You’d do well to start with a bird flu. Bird flus are responsible for all the known flu pandemics: the great influenza that started more than a century ago, “Asian flu”, “Hong Kong flu” and “Russian flu”, which killed tens of millions between them. They also cause many of the annual outbreaks that slaughter hundreds of thousands of people.
Once you have found a suitable variant, two further components are required to weaponise it. The first is an amplifier. The best amplifier is a giant shed or factory in which thousands of birds are packed. These birds should be genetically homogenous, so that your viral strain can travel freely between them. Intensive poultry farms would serve very well. Before long, a low-pathogenic strain should mutate in these circumstances into a highly pathogenic variety.
To ensure maximum transmission, you should move some of the birds around, faster than the flu’s incubation period. You might carry them across borders. Some would be shifted to free-range or hobby farms, to enhance the possibility of infecting wild birds.
But it’s difficult for a flu virus to travel directly from birds to humans, so another component is required: a mixing vessel. This is a species that can simultaneously harbour the newly pathogenic bird virus and a flu variety already adapted to humans. Then the viruses, conveniently brought together, can exchange genetic material – a process known as “reassortment”.
Pigs are reasonable mixing vessels. They might have played this role in some previous outbreaks and pandemics. But there’s a much better candidate: mink. Mink readily harbour human and avian flu viruses. As predators, they can easily acquire avian flu from the meat they eat. The distribution of sialic acid receptors – a key determinant of infection – in their respiratory tracts is similar to that of humans. Human flu strains can pass between them through aerosol transmission.
Mink also possess, to a remarkable degree, what scientists call “zoonotic potential”: in other words, they can be infected by, and infect, many different species. During the first phases of Covid-19, they proved to be highly effective intermediaries, partly because the virus seemingly evolves faster in mink than in humans. They appear to have generated at least two new variants that spread to humans, one in Spain and one in Italy. Mink are the only known species that both received Covid-19 from humans and passed it back to them.
To enhance their mixing ability, you would cram hundreds or thousands of the tiny cages housing them together, so that this usually solitary animal is forced into contact with others. You would reduce genetic diversity by breeding only those with a particular fur type. In other words, you would do what mink farms do today. Then you would sit back and wait.
The next pandemic might not have been seeded by a murderous psychopath, but, unless we are lucky, the effect could be the same. H5N1 was a fairly harmless bird flu until a highly pathogenic variant was hatched in a Chinese goose farm in 1996. It is deadly to humans. On the rare occasions when people have contracted this variant, it has proved fatal more often than not: of 868 infected up to October last year, 457 have died. Though it has been devastating to both poultry flocks and wild birds, however, its transmissibility from birds to most mammals, and from person to person, is thankfully extremely low.
But mink farming offers the mixing vessel it needs. In 2021, a paper in the journal Emerging Microbes & Infections reported that about a third of the mink the researchers tested harboured both bird flu and human flu antibodies. It warned that this joint infection could generate novel viruses “with high human infectivity”. The public health threat “should not be ignored”, as it had “pandemic potential”. Needless to say, it was ignored.
A few days ago, the journal Eurosurveillance revealed the first known case of large-scale mammal-to-mammal transmission of the H5N1 flu virus. It happened, to no gasps of surprise, on a mink farm; in Galicia, northern Spain. While the mink were fed with poultry products, a practice scientists have long warned against, it seems that the likely cause of infection was contact with a sick wild bird that might have fallen against the bars of a cage, and was dragged through and eaten. Once inside its mixing vessel, the virus mutated to become transmissible to the other mink, then spread rapidly in this farm of more than 50,000 animals from cage to cage.
This epidemic was contained before it left the farm. All the mink were killed, and we might narrowly have missed a pandemic potentially more deadly than Covid-19. But farming mink for their fur, a cruel and pointless practice, continues in Europe, North America and China. There’s a high chance that the next pandemic, whatever it may be, will emerge in one of these places. Because of both the abominable cruelty suffered by the animals and the grave threat it presents to human life, we need a global treaty to ban mink farming.
The H5N1 virus, having acquired its deadly mutations on a poultry farm, is now raging through wild bird populations with horrific consequences. It is killing so many that, in conjunction with other threats, it could drive some species towards extinction. In particular, it is shattering colonies of seabirds. As they reproduce late and slowly, they’re especially vulnerable to extinction. Wild birds could easily introduce the virus to another mink farm.
Bird flu is a huge problem now – but we’re just one mutation away from it getting much worse
Devi Sridhar
Read more
This threat is bookended by grotesque cruelty: the poultry, mink and pig farms whose horrors we have somehow normalised and accepted. If you treated dogs or cats in the same way as we treat these animals, you would be sent to prison. But do it to farmed species on a large enough scale and you are treated with the special respect accorded to a “captain of industry”. Governments will sweep the dust from your path. Newspapers will write panegyrics of the kind once accorded to emperors.
So who is the homicidal maniac in this story? It’s a scarcely examined abstraction we call “the economy”, a monster to whom anything and everything must be sacrificed without question or resistance: farmed animals, wild ones, even, unless we are fortunate, human beings in their millions. We will prevent the pandemics of the future only when we value life ahead of money.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/oct/21/pandemic-knee-surgery-return-barnstorming-musical-rent-pulitzer-bohemians | Stage | 2020-10-21T05:00:27.000Z | Ryan Gilbey | I needed knee surgery after it!' The return of barnstorming musical Rent | When a new production of the musical Rent opens in Manchester this month, it will provide proof of two kinds of endurance. The first is that of the theatrical community. Social-distancing restrictions have forced the Hope Mill theatre to halve its capacity and to install plastic screens between audience members from different households. (All seats sold out within 48 hours but online streaming tickets are still available.) Meanwhile, the show’s company will be living in their own bubble of shared accommodation throughout the run. Cosy.
The other example of staying power is Rent itself, the rock musical phenomenon that updates Puccini’s La Bohème to early 1990s New York and follows a group of friends – including the drag queen Angel, the dancer Mimi and the performance artist Maureen – who are grappling with poverty, gentrification and Aids. “For many musical theatre fans, it’s a gateway show,” says Luke Sheppard, who is directing the new production. “It always celebrated inclusion so it reaches very widely across sexuality and gender identity, touching people in specific ways.”
Sheppard has no doubts about the show’s relevance, though even he was taken aback by how closely it reflects our times. On the day when a government advertisement encouraged unemployed ballet dancers to consider retraining in cyber security, the cast were busy rehearsing the scene in which Maureen rails against performance spaces being closed and replaced by Cyberland. “It was quite spooky. You only have to glance at the news to see people in the arts who’ve been left behind and are now struggling to pay the rent.”
Still relevant … rehearsals for the new production. Photograph: Dujonna Gift-Simms
It is almost a quarter of a century since the show opened at the tiny New York Theatre Workshop with a cast that included Idina Menzel, Anthony Rapp and Taye Diggs. The circumstances of that first preview in January 1996 were uniquely tragic: the show’s 35-year-old creator, Jonathan Larson, had died unexpectedly from an aortic dissection the previous night. “It’s unbelievably sad that Jonathan didn’t get to enjoy the success of the show,” says Michael Greif, its original director.
“There wasn’t a moment that I wasn’t thinking about him,” recalls Wilson Jermaine Heredia, who won a Tony award for originating the role of Angel before reprising it on stage in London and in the 2005 film version. “I would gaze out at the audience at the Shaftesbury theatre and say to him, ‘Look where we are, Jonathan. I wish you were here to see this.’”
Daphne Rubin-Vega, who played Mimi, remembers Larson as “this lanky, curly-haired geek in dirty sneakers. Awkward-looking but adorable as fuck.” He lived in a shabby fifth-storey walk-up apartment not dissimilar to the one in the show, right down to the bathtub in the kitchen and the keys that had to be tossed down to visitors to let themselves in. “The hand-to-mouth existence was his world,” says Greif. “What was remarkable was how fully Jonathan’s heart and heartbreak were in the material. He was writing a contemporary musical and honouring a group of people he knew very well who were suffering and dying in the Aids crisis.”
Hand-to-mouth existence … Jonathan Larson died the night before Rent’s first preview. Photograph: AP
The music itself felt radical, too, introducing a youthful MTV energy into a landscape dominated by cobwebbed monoliths. “It was all Andrew Lloyd Webber and Les Mis and Grease,” says Heredia. “That didn’t interest me. Whereas reading Rent and hearing the music, I felt for the first time that here was something that spoke to me and my generation. I was a club kid. I knew these characters.” Greif saw that urgency and immediacy reflected in the audience. “The crowd always skewed young,” he says. “It was pretty amazing.”
Many of the cast members felt validated by this show with diversity in its DNA. “All the reasons why I didn’t qualify to be a useful member of the theatre community became assets,” says Rubin-Vega, who is Panamanian-American. “The liabilities, the limitations, every time I’d heard, ‘No, sorry ’– they became the reason I was there.” Heredia felt the same. “Broadway was a no-go for me,” he says. “One, because I’m Latin. Two, because I’m brown Latin on top of that. But when I auditioned for Rent, I thought: ‘Even if I don’t get the part I know this is going to change musicals forever.’” I ask whether Larson knew the impact the show would have, and Heredia howls with laughter. “Oh, Jonathan knew!” he says. “Anthony was at a party with him where he introduced himself to people with the words, ‘Hi, I’m the future of musical theatre.’”
That vitality and self-belief only made his death more shocking. “Idina called in the morning to tell me,” Rubin-Vega recalls. “She was almost laughing because it was inconceivable. He was just here. How could he not be here?” It was decided that the first night’s show would go ahead as a seated reading. “We were all in shock,” says Greif, “and I wanted to let everyone simply celebrate Jonathan. I didn’t want Wilson to worry about jumping on the table in heels.”
Zeitgeist … the original Broadway cast take a curtain call. Photograph: Wally Santana/AP
In fact, that’s exactly what happened as the evening blossomed into a fully fledged, barnstorming performance. “That was very moving and meaningful,” says Greif. “I stood up during the song Out Tonight,” Rubin-Vega explains. “And by La Vie Bohème at the end of the first act, we were all on the tables. You can’t do that show sitting down!”
After three heaving months in that intimate space, the show exploded on to Broadway. “We got a fast pass,” laughs Rubin-Vega. “I think that was the moment I understood what ‘zeitgeist’ meant.” Rave reviews rained down along with four Tonys, six Drama Desk awards and a posthumous Pulitzer for Larson. Throughout the acclaim, Rent retained what Sheppard now calls its “joyful messiness”. There was a reason for this. “Some things in the show I was uncomfortable with, or felt were unfinished,” says Greif. “But we didn’t touch them because we’d already had those conversations with Jonathan and we knew he hadn’t wanted them changed.”
Rent ran for more than 12 years on Broadway, spawning a film version and hundreds of productions around the world. It suffused pop culture, whether it was being celebrated (in the US version of The Office, co-workers sing its big number, Seasons of Love, to their departing boss) or mocked (as in Team America: World Police, with its musical show-stopper Everyone Has Aids). It also inspired a generation of younger talent, such as Layton Williams, the star of Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, who played Angel in the UK 20th anniversary tour in 2016. “It’s a demanding show to do,” he says. “I had to take four or five weeks off and have surgery on my knees. Playing Jamie was a walk in the park after that. But it’s a great ensemble piece. Everyone in it gets a chance to shine.”
‘It’s a show you can’t do sitting down’ … Idina Menzel (centre) and Tracie Thoms (right) in the 2005 film. Photograph: Everett Collection/Alamy
Accepting his Tony award in 1996, Heredia had said: “Here’s to a new era in theatre.” Did that come to pass? “It took a while,” he admits. “But if it weren’t for Rent, producers wouldn’t have taken a chance on In the Heights and Hamilton.” Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of those musicals, has repeatedly cited Rent as one of his main inspirations, and is now directing Andrew Garfield in a Netflix adaptation of Larson’s lesser-known musical Tick, Tick … Boom! “Jonathan and Lin are so alike,” says Rubin-Vega, who stars alongside Miranda in the forthcoming film of In the Heights. “They both have this incredible range of musical reference points, and they both make it look easy.”
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Unlike Larson’s friends and family, audiences have only ever known Rent as the work of a writer snuffed out in his prime: he was dead, after all, before the show was famous. What that means is that its seize-the-day sentiments, exemplified by lyrics such as “No day but today”, seem now to comment on his early demise, almost as if they were written with that foreknowledge. But this isn’t why people are still staging Rent today. “It’s a very healing show,” says Heredia. “People have told me that it has got them through tough times.”
Sheppard is clear about its appeal. “Jonathan Larson wanted it to be a piece about hope rather than despair. That’s one of the reasons it has been so cathartic doing it now. It offers a light at the end of the tunnel.” For Rubin-Vega, Rent is something more than just a show. “It became a purpose,” she says. “And it was the ride of our lives.”
Rent is at Hope Mill theatre, Manchester, from 30 October to 6 December. Online tickets are available. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/02/tavistock-trust-whistleblower-david-bell-transgender-children-gids | Society | 2021-05-02T09:00:28.000Z | Rachel Cooke | Tavistock trust whistleblower David Bell: ‘I believed I was doing the right thing’ | To talk to David Bell is to have some small sense of what it might be like to be his patient. At 70, his energy puts mine to shame. He cycles everywhere. His diary is full. I’ve rarely interviewed someone so engaged (there are days when he emails me several times, each message more exacting than the last). But ask him a question and he’s unlikely to rush in. Certainty is not a given. His open-mindedness belongs to someone far younger. Above all, he is so calm: a reassuring presence. There are times during our conversation when it’s hard to believe we’re discussing experiences that must have caused him so much anxiety and even, at moments, some fear.
Bell, a distinguished psychiatrist and practising psychoanalyst, is the doctor who in 2018 wrote a controversial report about the activities of the gender identity development service (GIDS), a clinic at the Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust in north London, where he worked in adult services from 1995 until his retirement earlier this year. GIDS, the only clinic of its kind in England, specialises in treating children with gender identity issues and in recent months has been in the news even more than usual. Last December, a judgment by the high court ruled that those under the age of 16 were unlikely to be mature enough to give informed consent to the prescription of puberty blockers (such drugs delay the development of secondary sex characteristics in patients, in theory enabling children more easily to transition into their desired gender identity as an adult). This ruling, the result of a judicial review brought by 23-year-old Keira Bell – born female, she was prescribed blockers by GIDS at 16 and now regrets her transition – has effectively curtailed medical intervention for children with gender dysphoria. (The Tavistock is to appeal; the case will be heard in June. David Bell will be what is technically called an intervenor in the appeal, which means he can give evidence.)
Bell’s report anticipated the concerns of the high court and he feels vindicated by its judgment. “It was jaw-dropping,” he says. “Because it was very strong.” As he read it, he was struck by details that have not been widely reported, particularly those involving a lack of data, a problem he had raised himself (GIDS was unable to produce for the court any data relating to outcomes and effects, whether desirable or adverse, in children who had been prescribed puberty blockers; nor could it provide details of the number and ages of children who had been given them). But the experience was painful, too: “I felt concerned that we’d moved away from the values [of care] the trust has embodied for so long.” He is astonished the judgment seems to have had so little effect on the organisation of GIDS. “Ordinarily, heads would roll,” he says. “The management structure has changed slightly, but it feels like window-dressing.”
Keira Bell outside the high court after its recent ruling on puberty blockers. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA
But whatever the court’s verdict, it cannot change the fact that the organisation to which Bell devoted the greater part of his working life did not respect his rights as a whistleblower. Nor has it taken the heat out of the debate about the medical treatment of trans children – if anything, the discourse has only grown more entrenched – which is why he’s talking to me now. This is the first time he has spoken in detail about his experiences: about how he came to write his report and the grave consequences that doing so had for him. His retirement means that the threats of disciplinary action against him are over. He is free, at last, to say what he likes.
Writing the report was, he says, a matter of conscience. In 2018, 10 GIDS staff brought their worries to him unsolicited, a figure he estimates to be around a third of those then working there. He had no choice but to act and would do the same again. Nevertheless, it was not easy. Far from being grateful to him for alerting it to a potentially dangerous situation, the trust’s position appeared defensive – having read the correspondence involved, perhaps aggressively so – almost from the start. It tried to silence him and instituted proceedings against him. Was he frightened? Yes and no. “I believed I was doing the right thing,” he says. “I never doubted that, and most of my colleagues in the adult department supported me, so when I went up to my floor at the Tavistock, I could be oblivious and get on with my work. The real betrayal wasn’t of me personally, but of the trust’s duty to whistleblowers and to its wider mission [since 1920, the Tavistock has specialised in talking cures]. But the thing that enables you to sleep at night is a good lawyer.” To pay for this lawyer, he launched two crowdfunding appeals.
How, exactly, did the trust attempt to silence him? The trust told the Observer that it is proud of the GIDS service, which is committed to providing high-quality support and care for young people experiencing issues with gender dysphoria, and that the claims made by Dr Bell are historical and were dealt with following proper processes at the time. It vigorously denies that any steps were taken against Bell for being a whistleblower. It says that it has a duty to safeguard its staff, who have faced intense, personalised and upsetting harassment, and has taken a series of actions, following proper processes, to do this.
By Bell’s telling, its approach was at once Kafkaesque and cack-handed. In the months after he delivered his report, a book to which he had written an introduction was removed from the Tavistock’s library. When he spoke at a conference about de-transition in Manchester, a member of GIDS’ staff travelled there, he says to spy on him. “They wrote it up very accurately,” he says, with a laugh. Finally, he was told that he was not allowed to write about, or to talk in public about, anything that wasn’t directly connected to his NHS employment, “which sounded odd to me… was it the case that if I was going to write a paper about the psychology of King Lear, I’d have to ask permission?” (As his lawyer informed him, this was against the terms of his contract.)
The story begins in February 2018, with a knock on Bell’s office door. “I was often the person people came to when they had problems,” he says. Having worked as a consultant at the Tavistock for more than 25 years, he was one of its most senior doctors: for 10 years, he was in charge of its scientific programme; in 2018, he was also an elected staff governor of the trust, for the second time. Of the 10 GIDS staff who would talk to him over the course of the next seven months, only the first saw Bell at the Tavistock; the others, who spoke of intimidation, worried about being seen. What did he make of what they told him? “My blood ran cold. Their concerns were similar, but not in a choreographed way. One or two were severely troubled.”
The Tavistock Centre in north London. Photograph: Alamy
Among these concerns were the fact that children attending GIDS often seemed to be rehearsed and sometimes did not share their parents’ sense of urgency; that senior staff spoke of “straightforward cases” in terms of children who were to be put on puberty blockers (no case of gender dysphoria, notes Bell, can be said to be straightforward); that some were recommended for treatment after just two appointments and seen only infrequently thereafter; some felt that GIDS employed too many inexperienced (and inexpensive) psychologists; that clinicians who’d spoken of homophobia in the unit were told they had “personal issues”. One told Bell that a child as young as eight had been referred to an endocrinologist for treatment. “I could not go on like this… I could not live with myself given the poor treatment the children were obtaining,” said another.
Was he surprised? How much did he know about GIDS before these conversations? (The clinic, which was established in 1989, had grown hugely during his time. In 2009, it saw 80 patients. By 2019, this figure had risen to 2,700.) “That’s a good question. It started as a small service, then it became nationally funded; a contract with NHS England meant a guaranteed income. It was peculiar. You could see that everyone knew about it and yet no one wanted to know about it. In the adult department, there was a sense that we didn’t want to find out what went on there, because we might not have liked it if we did.”
Bell wondered what he should do. “In July, I met with hospital management. I told them I would write a report. They said: OK. While I was writing it, I contacted GIDS. I needed to know some basic stuff: the number of patients they’d seen; their gender; what psychiatric problems they may have had.” He received no answers. “I then got a rather unpleasant letter from Paul Jenkins, the trust’s chief executive. It said that GIDS was very busy and that its staff were not obliged to answer me.” Was it that GIDS didn’t have the data or that it didn’t want Bell to have it? “Both.”
In September, Bell sent his report to Jenkins and to Paul Burstow, the chairman of the board. For unspecified legal reasons, he says, they forbade him to send it to the council of governors, which oversees the board. “That was when I got myself a lawyer,” says Bell. His lawyer told him that, on the contrary, a failure to send it out might make him culpable in the event of any future legal case taken against the trust. When he did so, however, he received what felt like a “very hostile and threatening” note from Burstow. Nevertheless, the report was discussed at the next council, where it was agreed that a review of GIDS would be led by Dinesh Sinha, the trust’s medical director. In spite of this, in November 2018, Bell received two letters threatening disciplinary action. One of the grounds was “bullying”. He was not told whom he had bullied. He was also asked to agree not to speak any further to Sonia Appleby, the trust’s director of child safeguarding. (Appleby is bringing a whistleblowing claim against the trust in which she alleges that when she made “protected disclosures” regarding concerns raised by GIDS staff over patient safety, she was subjected to detriments.)
While Sinha’s review was taking place, Bell asked for its terms of reference. He wanted to ensure that those who’d talked to him could speak to the review safely, that their anonymity would be protected. He says he got no response. Bell wrote to staff at GIDS, reminding them of their right, as NHS workers, to speak confidentially. At this point, he says, the trust “went ballistic… they interfered with my emails so I couldn’t write to them again”. The trust’s review delivered its report in February 2019. Initially, Bell was not allowed to see it. He was then given 30 minutes to read its 70 pages (it was later leaked to him in full). “There was still no data. It mentioned intimidation, but no action was [to be] taken. However, it did acknowledge the inappropriate involvement of trans ideology groups in the work of the service.” The report was approved by the board and the council of governors, although one consultant psychotherapist, Marcus Evans, accused the trust of having an “overvalued belief” in GIDS expertise and resigned. Soon after this, Bell’s report was leaked to the press. “That disturbed me, until I read [the article],” he says. “The reporting was accurate. I started to think it was a good thing.” He says the trust began to suggest that Bell was unqualified to write such a report and to suggest that the cases in it were hypothetical. (They were not.)
In early 2020, procedures were set up for disciplinary action to be taken against Bell. “All the grounds were in connection with my activities as a whistleblower,” he says. In the meantime, Bell announced that he would retire, as he’d always planned to, in June 2020. But then the pandemic hit; wanting to see his unit through it, he decided to delay his departure until January 2021. The trust attempted more than once to set a date for the hearing, but these were always dropped. Bell felt all this was just for show.
His retirement was only weeks away.
Last January, he retired as planned, only a month after the Keira Bell judgment. He had long believed a case would be brought against the trust, though he thought the most likely scenario was that a former patient would sue for damages (Keira Bell instigated a judicial review). “It was inevitable,” he says. “I warned the trust of this.” But the Keira Bell judgment has done little to alleviate his concerns. Whatever the outcome of the appeal, he believes more questions must be asked, particularly about the rise in the number of girls presenting at the clinic (three-quarters of patients are now girls; the gender balance used to be closer to 50:50). “We do not know why this is happening.” He worries that too much emphasis is placed on gender and not enough on sexuality – “the children are often gay” – and he continues to be anxious about co-morbidities such as anorexia, autism and history of trauma in its patients. “Some of the children are depressed. It’s said that it’s their gender that is the cause of this, but how do we know? And why don’t we try to treat that first?”
‘Consent is the issue here, nothing else,’ says Bell. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer
Bell is not against puberty blockers per se – “a doctor should never say never” – but he believes that halting puberty only makes it more frightening to the child: “The child will never want to come off the hormones and 98% do now stay on them. This could be a dangerous collusion on the part of the doctor. The body is not a video machine. You can’t just press a pause button. You have to ask what it really means to stop puberty.” It should be possible, he believes, to manage the distress of a child who is suffering gender dysphoria in a less interventionist way, until he or she is an adult and can make a decision: “Consent is the issue here, nothing else.” He does not doubt that some patients will want, and need, to transition in the future. But, he says, not all children with gender dysphoria are trans. The two have been elided. More work needs to be done locally. “Gender dysphoria clinics should be part of child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) and available nationwide,” he says. “At the moment, children who are suffering extreme distress in relation to their bodies are sent to the Tavistock and the problem then goes away at local level, where psychotherapy services are on their knees.”
There is anger on both sides of the debate. But given his politics – Bell describes himself to me as a “Corbyn-supporting Jew” – he has been most shocked by the reluctance of the left to engage with the issues. “They think this is to do with being liberal, rather than with concerns about the care of children. Mermaids and Stonewall [the charities for trans children and LGBTQ+ rights] have made people afraid even of listening to another view.” It surprises him that the left is unwilling to consider the role played by big pharma. In the US, a journal that published a paper about the effect of puberty blockers on suicide risk recently had to disclose that one of its co-authors received a stipend from the manufacturer of another drug.
When he appeared on Channel 4 News earlier this year, Bell was asked if he feared being on the wrong side of history. “I’ve often thought about that question,” he says. “It’s a good one. Psychiatry has a sad past. Homosexual men were given behavioural therapies and so on. But history isn’t always right. What matters is the truth. I hate the weaponisation of victimhood, the fact that the fear of being seen to be transphobic now overrides everything.” The current campaign to ban so-called gay conversion therapy is, he believes, likely to become a Trojan horse for trans activists who will use it to put pressure on any clinician who does not immediately affirm a young person’s statement about their identity, decrying this, too, as a form of “conversion”. For Bell, the prospect of not being able to talk openly about such things is a tyranny: just another form of repression. “This is about light and air,” he says. “It’s about free thinking, the kind that will result in better outcomes for all young people, whether transgender or not.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/jun/10/ian-mcdiarmid-to-tour-show-based-on-julian-barnes-stories-about-ageing | Stage | 2021-06-10T05:00:11.000Z | Chris Wiegand | Ian McDiarmid to tour show based on Julian Barnes stories about ageing | A pair of Julian Barnes stories about old age are to be performed on tour by Ian McDiarmid in a one-man show this autumn.
Michael Grandage will direct The Lemon Table, which adapts two tales with a musical theme from Barnes’s 2004 story collection of the same name. In Vigilance, a concertgoer is driven into a fury by the fidgeting, rustling and vigorous throat-clearing of his fellow audience members. In The Silence, an unnamed composer modelled on Sibelius reflects on his career and how silence follows both music and life.
McDiarmid, 76, said that he was drawn to how the stories in The Lemon Table consider ageing not with an elegiac or regretful air but with defiance and “an attitude that is more: so what?”. The way Barnes writes about mortality is engaging, necessary and not depressing, added the actor, who has adapted the stories himself. Talking about death, as the composer in The Silence observes, is a useful and companionable activity, McDiarmid suggested. The characters in both monologues feel a need to confess, he said, “maybe because they’re getting close to the end of their life”.
The Scottish actor, who played Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars films, has previously performed The Silence for a BBC Radio 3 recording used to fill the interval of a classical music broadcast. For years he thought it would work well on the stage, too. When he came to re-read the collection of stories before lockdown he alighted on Vigilance, whose fuming concertgoer is thwarted in his attempts to listen to Shostakovich without distraction. Shostakovich has been switched to Sibelius for the adaptation in order to link the two pieces. Barnes, who had written to McDiarmid many years ago after the BBC broadcast of The Silence, welcomed the idea of the adaptation.
“One of the reasons I like [Barnes’s] writing so much is that it doesn’t conform to any particular pattern,” said McDiarmid. “His next book is quite likely to be completely different to the last, in form as well as content.”
Grandage said McDiarmid had been his collaborator and mentor for more than a quarter of a century. “We’ve worked together many times, many of those times on tour – we both believe passionately in presenting work to as wide an audience as possible.”
The Lemon Table opens at Salisbury Playhouse (part of Wiltshire Creative) in October and tours to Sheffield Theatres, Yvonne Arnaud theatre in Guildford, Home in Manchester and Malvern Theatres. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/23/sadiq-khan-devolution-unemployed-programme | Politics | 2016-07-23T19:19:30.000Z | Daniel Boffey | Devolve schemes for unemployed, says London mayor Sadiq Khan | Control over programmes to get the unemployed into work should be handed to cities, according to the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and the frontrunner in the race to be mayor of Greater Manchester, as a new report suggests huge savings to the taxpayer could be made by the move.
Leading thinktank IPPR North claims that devolving the government’s current work programme could boost employment by freeing up funding for established and innovative ways of getting people into jobs.
As much as £9,000 could be saved for each benefit claimant if the work programme were devolved and mayors given freedom to use innovate methods, it is claimed.
The IPPR’s report claims the current programme, run centrally by the Department for Work and Pensions, is not sufficiently sensitive to local conditions and lacks the funding it needs to help the most vulnerable into work.
Khan called for the new prime minister, Theresa May, to act on the report to allow London to best deal with the consequences of Brexit. “The best way to protect London from the economic fallout of leaving the EU is for the government to grant more autonomy to the capital, so we have more control over how taxes raised in our city are spent and how public services are run,” he said.
“As part of this, it is clear that London should have direct control of the work programme so we can better help Londoners to find employment.
“I have spoken to London’s political and business leaders regularly over the past month and it is clear that further autonomy is key to ensuring London’s continued economic success.”
Andy Burnham, the shadow home secretary, who looks set to be Labour’s candidate in the 2017 election for the first mayor of Greater Manchester, said that he would ensure that the city’s welfare policies were effective and free from the “cruel, tick-box, sanctions-based” regime run from Whitehall.
He said: “Rumours that Theresa May has gone on cold on English devolution are deeply concerning. It is helpful to have such authoritative backing from the IPPR for a call I made on the prime minister this week.
“The right response to the EU referendum result is not to abandon the devolution journey but to deepen it.”“The exclusion of DWP from the devolution settlement in Greater Manchester leaves a missing piece in the jigsaw. If I am mayor of Greater Manchester, I will make an immediate case for the devolution of the DWP budget. I am certain that by linking it with our voluntary and community organisations, we can do more to help people than the cruel, tick-box, sanctions-based DWP regime.
“The referendum result reveals a deep disenchantment with the way Westminster works. It has given us a very unequal country and the time has come to balance it.”
The IPPR North’s report claims that mayors or local authorities would be better placed to invest-to-save.
The tax-benefit saving for a moving a single man living in council tax band C private rented sector housing in Sheffield from long-term job seekers allowance into a minimum wage job for 30 hours a week is £8,600 per year, the report says.
The annual tax-benefit saving for moving a single woman on employment and support allowance, living in council tax band C private rented sector housing in Southwark, who moves into a job paid at £8.25 per hour, is £9,000 for a 20-hour week.
Josh Stott, head of cities at Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which commissioned the report, said: “The UK is benefittng from record levels of employment which is welcome news. But many people, particularly in the north, are locked out of the country’s prosperity because they don’t have skills or the right level of support to find a suitable job.
“These proposals recognise the opportunities that greater devolution can provide – more joined-up, efficient and effective support for people out of work and incentives for town halls to foster more inclusive growth. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/aug/29/richard-bacon-q-and-a | Life and style | 2015-08-29T05:00:06.000Z | Rosanna Greenstreet | Q&A: Richard Bacon, broadcaster | Born in Nottinghamshire, Richard Bacon, 39, was a Blue Peter presenter before he was sacked in 1998 for taking cocaine. The following year he joined Channel 4’s Big Breakfast. More recently he was a presenter for BBC Radio 5 Live. In 2014 he moved to Los Angeles, from where he will present AOL’s new series, 30 Something, this autumn.
When were you happiest?
About twice a week I think I’m having the best day of my life. When was I happiest? Er, Tuesday.
What is your greatest fear?
I regret that I don’t have more fear. If I had, I’d have been more focused. But I’d have had less fun.
What is your earliest memory?
When I was six, I took an apple pie from the oven. The glass dish was still hot, and it shattered.
Which living person do you most admire?
Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
I can’t focus on something until it’s right in front of me.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
When successful people refuse to acknowledge that – irrespective of how hard they’ve worked – they have been lucky.
What was your most embarrassing moment?
I introduced a rapper on stage at a music festival, but I was drunk, and as I said “Please go mad for...” my mind went blank. So I decided to make up a name, and said, “Please go mad for... Stevie A”. “Stevie A” went mad at me on stage. I still don’t know his real name. Ice Magic?
What is your most treasured possession?
Several works by the portrait artist Jonathan Yeo.
Property aside, what’s the most expensive thing you’ve bought?
A hot tub.
What is your screensaver?
My baby daughter, Ivy.
What would your superpower be?
I already have one. I can breathe out of my eye.
What makes you unhappy?
I have that fear of missing out.
Who would play you in a film of your life?
I don’t know – who would put money into this project?
Which book changed your life?
Stick It Up Your Punter! The Uncut Story Of The Sun Newspaper, by Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie.
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
A local radio reporter. Oh, don’t worry, I’ll get there.
What do you owe your parents?
A lot. I’m a massive enthusiast. I like (almost) everyone. I’m happy.
To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why?
To Rebecca, my wife, for buying her a coffee yesterday from a chain we hadn’t tried before. Turns out I should have run this by her.
What, or who, is the greatest love of your life?
My first girlfriend, Kate. There’s not a day goes by when I… Not true; I’m only saying this to wind up Rebecca.
Which living person do you most despise, and why?
A half-wit who beat me up in a toilet a few years ago; but I don’t despise him, I feel sorry for him.
When did you last cry, and why?
Reading Joe Biden’s son’s tribute to his late brother, Beau, at his funeral.
How often do you have sex?
Why are you asking? Pervert. About twice a week.
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
To have sex three times a week. But who’s counting? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/aug/13/theeb-review-bedouin-boy-in-the-fog-of-war | Film | 2015-08-13T20:45:10.000Z | Mike McCahill | Theeb review – Bedouin boy in the fog of war | The Oxford-born, Jordanian-bred film-maker Naji Abu Nowar tells an intimate story of betrayal and survival in a wide-open space, while rewriting an especially contentious chapter of movie history. During the first world war, a young boy in a Bedouin encampment (Jacir Eid) grows curious about the blond-haired, blue-eyed Englishman (Jack Fox, with decidedly Lawrentian mien) who’s appeared from nowhere with a trunkful of gold.
The enforced naivety of observing events from the child’s perspective places certain plot elements beyond our reach, but also allows others to hit us with unexpected force. The narrative meanders along the way to the chastening punchline, but Eid proves a dolefully expressive lead, and Wolfgang Thaler’s ever eloquent camerawork is as fascinated by the discovery of bullet shells in the sand – a clue, and a warning – as it is by the punishingly craggy landscape. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/nov/07/fabiano-caruana-chess-interview-world-championship-magnus-carlsen | Sport | 2018-11-07T15:42:43.000Z | Bryan Armen Graham | How yoga and hip-hop helped Fabiano Caruana challenge for the world chess championship | Chess has fallen almost completely from the American public eye in the four decades since Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky waged their Cold War proxy battle in Reykjavik, but another Brooklyn-raised prodigy is poised to bring the sport’s most prestigious title back to US soil.
Over the next three weeks in London, the American grandmaster Fabiano Caruana will challenge for Magnus Carlsen’s world chess championship. The best-of-12-games match will begin on Friday at the College in Holborn, with each contestant awarded one point for a win and a half-point for a draw. Whoever reaches six and a half points first will be declared the champion, earning a 60% share of the €1m ($1.14m) prize fund, or 55% if it’s decided in the tie-breaker stage, in addition to cuts of the digital pay-per-view receipts and sponsorship revenue.
Chess: Magnus Carlsen against Fabiano Caruana expected to be tight battle
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No player born in the United States has won or even competed for the world title since Fischer, who surged to it dramatically in 1972 and held it until his controversial abdication in 1975, after which he mostly disappeared from public life. The 26-year-old Caruana, a rare American contender in a sport historically dominated by Russians and Eastern Europeans, is accustomed to, and flattered by, the comparisons.
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“I’d say the one player who has always blown me away and inspired me has been Bobby Fischer,” Caruana tells the Guardian. “I mean some of the personal stuff was not great, but his approach to chess and his willpower was just phenomenal and was always an inspiration. We’re just so different in so many ways. It’s great to be compared in a historical context to Fischer, but in terms of our personalities and our playing styles and our approach to chess, we’re both very different.”
A dual US-Italian citizen who was born in Miami and spent his childhood in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, Caruana – who goes by Fabi – started playing chess aged five in an after-school program that he had joined to address issues concentrating in school. He recalls an early tournament, perhaps his first though he’s not certain, in which he lost all four of his games and forgot to hit the clock after most of his moves. “It was an inauspicious start,” he admits.
Chess players don’t take the physical aspect as seriously as they should.
Fabiano Caruana
Before long Caruana was defeating far older players, showing enough promise that his family pulled him from school at the age of 12 and moved to Spain where he could train with better instructors and play in higher-caliber tournaments.
“I haven’t been in New York for so many years, but living there so long, especially as a kid, it kind of gets in your blood in a way,” he said. “So I still consider myself a New Yorker. It’s the most unique city, just such a diverse and vibrant place, culturally and in terms of the energy of the city. I generally prefer quieter, slightly smaller cities, but it’s still the best place to visit, in my opinion.”
He competed internationally for Italy from 2005 until 2015 – his mother is from Sicily – reaching international prominence in 2007, when he became the youngest American-born grandmaster in history less than two weeks before his 15th birthday, a mark since bested by Sam Sevian.
Following a dominant performance that included a victory over Carlsen at the 2014 Sinquefield Cup in St Louis – the tournament named for the financier Rex Sinquefield, whose $50m investment has made the midwestern city an improbable world mecca for the sport – Caruana moved back to the United States and changed federations to compete under the US flag.
He’d come agonizingly close to competing for the world title in 2016, but was forced to play for a win against the Russian Sergey Karjakin in the final round of the candidates tournament due to tie-breaker rules and fell short. Instead, it was Karjakin who pushed Carlsen to the limit in that year’s world championship in New York City.
Now Caruana, who has climbed to No 2 in the world rankings and survived the eight-man candidates gauntlet in March, highlighted by a late-stage win over pre-tournament favorite Levon Aronian of Armenia, will take his crack at an opponent widely regarded as the greatest player of all time.
Carlsen, who is 27, has been ranked No 1 for eight straight years and was already regarded as the world’s best player even before he saw off Viswanathan Anand for the title in Chennai five years ago. He is the closest thing to a celebrity in the sport today: handsome and media trained, having done ads for Porsche and modeled for G-Star Raw alongside Liv Tyler and Lily Cole. Known as the ‘Mozart of chess’ since before he was a teenager, he enjoys an outsized celebrity in his native Norway, where the games will be broadcast on primetime TV. Carlsen’s peak rating of 2882 is the highest in history – even better than Fischer – a point frequently cited by those who have called him the best to ever do it.
Fabiano Caruana faces Magnus Carlsen, seen by many as the greatest player of all time, for the world chess championship. Photograph: Eduardo Muñoz/AFP/Getty Images
It’s a stark contrast with the mild-mannered Caruana, who enters as a decided underdog, though the gap between the pair has closed in recent years to the point where many insiders are saying the forthcoming match is too close to call.
Both Carlsen and Caruana were born in the 1990s and brought up in the age of computer chess, which has drilled in players a sort of machine-like objectivity in tactical evaluation that can be an advantage against older rivals who are more prone to be influenced by the aesthetics of a move. And both are dedicated sportsmen in a trade where physical fitness has become essential at the top level.
“That’s probably one of the common misconceptions, that [chess] is not really a professional sport, that it’s more like a game that you play as a hobby or in your spare time,” Caruana says. “If you’re in the mix of things and you spend time with a player during the tournament, you realize that they actually have all the same ups and downs and emotions and physical strain and stress that any other athlete would have.”
He adds: “It’s not like we go to the game and then after we’re done it’s over and we can relax. The preparation and the stress continues for the entire event and a lot of it takes on a physical form, which is also why chess players generally try to look after their health, because it’s a very energy-draining and physically demanding as well as mentally demanding activity, so you can’t just show up and not have the mindset of an athlete.”
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Caruana’s hobbies away from the board are varied. He became serious about swimming for a few years (and became pretty good), then tried his hand at squash (with markedly less success). Most recently he’s taken up yoga, which he’s found to be an effective means for alleviating stress amid the rigors of tournament play.
“Chess players don’t take the physical aspect as seriously as they should,” he says. “Other athletes, if you look at basketball players or baseball players or football players or whatever, they do things chess players should do. We generally don’t have the money to take it quite as seriously as other top athletes. Magnus, I think, does, and I think that’s part of the reason for his success, because not only his chess strength but also his physical form and his psychological conditioning is at the highest level and not at the same level that traditionally chess players have gone lengths to achieve.”
Caruana, an aspiring filmmaker who has studied screenwriting in his spare hours, calls himself a fan of Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Guillermo del Toro and David Cronenberg, though he admits the latter is “still a bit too extreme for my tastes”. He grew up on classic rock and spent many tournaments listening to Metallica and Led Zeppelin during his downtime, but has taken a shine to hip-hop in the last few years. “I’ve been listening to a lot of Kendrick Lamar and a lot of Killah Priest,” he says. “But it changes all the time. When I’m bored and I have nothing to do, I’ll just listen to random pop music.”
But those idle pursuits will take a necessary backseat over the next month as Caruana straps in for the most important match of his life.
“The general advice which I’ve always been given is just to apply myself very consistently regardless of what my results are,” he says. “If I’m doing well, to apply myself just as much as if I was doing badly, not to become complacent. This is something which is difficult because when you when you achieve something, you feel like the work is done. But the work never is really done.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2012/oct/10/theatre-richard-peppiatt | Media | 2012-10-10T14:01:13.000Z | Roy Greenslade | Telling it like it is - a rogue reporter and a piece of promenade theatre | Here are two shows not to miss in London - Rich Peppiatt: One Rogue Reporter and Enquirer - both trying, in very different ways, to tell it like it is.
One. Peppiatt's show, which was a hit at the Edinburgh Festival, is playing for just two nights - Monday, 22 October and the following Monday at the Soho Theatre in Dean Street.
The roguish Rich Peppiatt
The former Daily Star reporter turns the tables on the tabloids by doorstepping a couple of editors and also has an encounter with former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie.
Here's a selection of comments about the Edinburgh show: "Breathtaking… Fleet street's very own angel of vengeance" (Guardian); "Scabrous and highly entertaining... a demolition job with jokes" (Independent); "Peppiatt has charm, wit and an ear for comedy – and, jokes apart, this is an important show" (Telegraph).
For further information and tickets go to www.oneroguereporter.com or www.sohotheatre.com
Two. Enquirer is described as "a site-specific production based on interviews with leading figures in the UK newspaper industry."
The promenade drama, edited and directed by Vicky Featherstone and John Tiffany, is co-edited by Andrew O'Hagan. It's jointly produced by the National Theatre of Scotland, the Barbican and the London Review of Books.
It has been showing at the Mother at the Trampery in Clerkenwell and will run there until 21 October. It was first produced in Glasgow.
Here are some of the reviews of both the Glasgow and London productions (in The Guardian; in the Daily Telegraph; in the Financial Times; in the London Evening Standard; in The Scotsman; and on Radio 4's Front Row).
Also, see Ruth Wishart's Scotsman article, A drama out of a press crisis. She was one of the three journalists who interviewed 43 journalists (including me) in order to compile material for the play.
More information and tickets can be found here or here. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/04/london-gay-centre-refused-grant-archive-1985 | World news | 2018-05-04T04:30:13.000Z | Alan Travis | London lesbian and gay centre refused grant – archive, 4 May 1985 | Mr Kenneth Baker, the minister for local government, yesterday refused an application from the Greater London Council for his consent to a £143,000 grant to the London Lesbian and Gay Centre.
Under new powers in the paving bill to abolish the GLC, Mr Baker has the power to veto grants of over £100,000. He said that his refusal was based on the fact that there was no evidence that the lesbian and gay community constituted an economically deprived group of the population.
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He said he had not judged whether the centre was justifiable, nor whether the intended users of the social centre constituted a group of the population who suffered social discrimination. He did question whether the centre would be able to raise an anticipated income of £90,865 a year.
Conservative politician Kenneth Baker with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at the party conference in Blackpool in 1986. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images
Miss Valerie Wise, the chairman of the GLC’s women’s committee, said that if the users of facilities like the gay centre now had to prove they were economically deprived hundreds of voluntary organisations would be denied grant assistance.
‘He is wrecking a £1 million project, 11 full-time jobs, and the efforts of hundreds of volunteers,’ said Miss Wise, who opened the centre in Cowcross Street, Smithfield, three weeks ago.
Staff at the centre reacted to the decision with dismay. Mr Spike Aldridge, information officer, said: ‘All this investment may be completely wasted by this thoughtlessness.’
How to access past articles from the Guardian and Observer archive
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/16/ecb-raises-interest-rates-despite-banking-fears-credit-suisse | Business | 2023-03-16T17:30:12.000Z | Phillip Inman | ECB raises eurozone interest rate despite banking sector fears | The European Central Bank has raised interest rates across the eurozone by 0.5 percentage points, despite fears that higher borrowing costs could set off a domino effect across a banking sector already reeling from a collapse in confidence in Switzerland’s second largest lender, Credit Suisse.
Officials at the ECB, the central bank covering the 19-member euro bloc, said inflation was likely to remain high “for too long”, forcing it to continue with its planned run of rate increases.
The 0.5 percentage point rise pushes the bank’s main rate up to 3.5%, while the rate paid on eurozone bank deposits left at the ECB increases to 3%.
At its last meeting in February, the ECB clearly signalled its intention to hike the rate this month, but financial markets had been betting on a last-minute U-turn in light of this week’s turmoil.
The decision to push ahead with inflation control measures came hours after the Swiss Central Bank stepped in with a 50bn Swiss francs (£44bn) loan facility for Credit Suisse. The intervention was designed to calm fears over the finances of the lender, one of 30 banks globally deemed too big to fail.
Without referencing the overnight rescue loan, the ECB said on Thursday that its governing council was “monitoring current market tensions closely” and stood “ready to respond as necessary to preserve price stability and financial stability in the euro area”.
In a statement designed to quell fears over contagion in the banking sector, the ECB said: “The euro area banking sector is resilient, with strong capital and liquidity positions. In any case, the ECB’s policy toolkit is fully equipped to provide liquidity support to the euro area financial system if needed and to preserve the smooth transmission of monetary policy.”
Christine Lagarde, the president of the ECB, said the central bank would treat the heightened tensions in financial markets separately from its strategy for bringing down inflation.
While the ECB recognised a link between the two, Lagarde said: “We don’t see a trade-off between price stability and financial stability and handle them separately. We are not waning on our commitment to fight inflation and we are determined to return inflation back to 2% target in the medium term.”
She added that “there were three or four dissenters” on the ECB’s governing board who had argued for a pause in rate rises, but otherwise it “moved quickly” to a decision in favour of a 0.5% rise.
Fears over Credit Suisse, the world’s 17th largest bank, wiped more than £75bn off the FTSE 100 on Wednesday, with banking stocks across Europe taking a pummelling.
The sell-off was triggered after the chair of Saudi National Bank, the largest Credit Suisse shareholder, ruled out any further investment. The comments spooked markets as they came days after the collapse of the US lender Silicon Valley Bank.
While the share price rebounded on Thursday, speculation is mounting that Credit Suisse will be forced to spin off parts of the business or consider a takeover. Analysts at JP Morgan said withering confidence in its operations left the bank with three credible options: fully closing its investment bank, convincing the central bank to guarantee all of its customers’ deposits and potentially part-nationalise the lender, or welcoming a sale to larger Swiss rival UBS.
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Analysts at US investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods agreed that a break-up of the bank was the “most likely solution” to restore trust. “Given recent events, we believe further asset sales are likely, in our view.” Credit Suisse declined to comment.
Thursday’s ECB decision ups the stakes for eurozone banks. Several economists, including Nouriel Roubini, the New York University professor credited with predicting the 2008 banking crash, had warned that a 0.5% interest rise by the ECB could be the trigger for a broad-based solvency problem across the financial industry.
The credit ratings agency Moody’s said the Swiss government’s AAA rating was safe, despite the large loan to Credit Suisse, because Berne’s economic fundaments were strong. The Swiss government had ample firepower to protect consumers and its institutions were “highly effective” and able to deal with financial shocks, Moody’s added.
Josie Anderson, a senior economist at the CEBR consultancy, said the sixth consecutive rate rise by the ECB was aimed at tackling inflation, which remained high across the eurozone at 8.5% in February
“However, this was a bold move in light of the banking sector crisis which has emerged over the past week. Indeed, concerns about financial stability could lead to more moderate interest rate rises in the future.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/nov/15/lady-in-van-review-maggie-smith-alan-bennett | Film | 2015-11-15T08:00:03.000Z | Mark Kermode | The Lady in the Van review – a wonderfully warm-hearted romp | When Alan Bennett offered the temporary use of his drive to a homeless woman in the 1970s, she parked her battered van outside his front door and stayed for 15 years. Already the subject of a memoir and a play, Miss Mary (or perhaps Margaret?) Shepherd now comes to our screens courtesy of Maggie Smith, who starred in the award-winning 1999 stage production. Smith is magnificent as the fearsomely opinionated interloper who left Camden residents torn between liberal middle-class guilt and baser territorial horror. “One seldom was able to do her a good turn without some thoughts of strangulation,” says Bennett.
Yet amid all the dictatorial ravings (“I’m a busy woman!”), divine delusions (“I’ve had guidance from the Virgin Mary”) and unsanitary lavatory habits (stout plastic bags, apparently), Miss Shepherd emerges from this wonderfully warm-hearted romp as a perversely lovable and profoundly poignant figure, albeit utterly cantankerous.
The Lady in the Van - video review Guardian
Having come a cropper with his screen adaptation of The History Boys in 2006, director Nicholas Hytner here hits the high notes that distinguished his 1994 stage-to-screen triumph The Madness of King George. With Alex Jennings pitch-perfect in the bifurcated dual role of Bennett (one half writes, one half lives, both bicker), The Lady in the Van taps into the author’s anxieties about his distant, ailing mother while still wringing uproarious laughs from her vagabond stand-in’s misbehaviour. Delightful supporting turns from Roger Allam and Frances de la Tour add breezy charm, but we never lose sight of the underlying sadness (mixed with something more sinister) that haunts Miss Shepherd’s past. Bravo! | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/29/ovo-reportedly-planning-bid-for-shell-household-energy-customers | Business | 2023-03-29T13:57:19.000Z | Jillian Ambrose | Ovo reportedly planning bid for Shell’s 1.4m household energy customers | Ovo Energy is reportedly planning to make a bid to buy 1.4 million household energy customers from Shell’s UK supply business as the oil company prepares to leave the retail market.
Ovo is expected to put forward a takeover offer that would swell its business to 5.4 million customers, according to Sky News, once again making it the second-largest energy supplier in the UK market.
If it goes ahead, the Shell takeover would be Ovo’s second recent high-profile acquisition after it struck a deal in 2019 to take on 3.5 million SSE customers and became the largest supplier behind British Gas.
Ovo lost that No 2 position late last year to Octopus Energy after the latter agreed to buy Bulb, which had collapsed into administration a year earlier. The deal took its customer base to 5 million homes.
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The Guardian understands that Shell has hired the financial services firm Lazard to oversee the sale of the business, with Octopus Energy also considering putting in a bid.
It comes after Shell decided in January to undertake a “strategic review” of the household energy supply business, which it set up less than five years ago with the acquisition of First Utility. That review is expected to take “a number of months” and has not yet concluded.
Ovo and Shell declined to comment on the Sky report.
Shell’s move into supplying gas and electricity directly to households had formed part of its ambition to widen the scope of its business from producing and selling fossil fuels to becoming the world’s biggest electricity company.
Its entry into the British energy market coincided with a period of intense political scrutiny on UK energy companies, which have struggled to make a profit from supplying energy to households under the government’s energy price cap and soaring wholesale market prices.
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The decision to review the business underlines the difficulties in the UK’s energy market, which has been dogged by a string of company failures and increasingly poor customer service. About 30 energy supply companies have gone bust, triggering a wave of consolidation across the market as larger energy suppliers pick up the customer books of the failed operators.
The collapse of Bulb and purchase by Octopus has sparked a bitter legal battle between the government and energy suppliers including E.ON, Scottish Power and Centrica, which were also eager to snap up the supplier from a special administration process.
The rival bidders have argued in a judicial review that Octopus was given preferential treatment in its deal-making with the government. Octopus has countered that it was more “nimble” and “saw an opportunity that others missed”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/oct/19/something-magical-mother-daughter-artist-duo-on-reviving-the-lost-art-of-weaving | Art and design | 2020-10-19T02:44:57.000Z | Jane Howard | Something magical': mother-daughter artist duo on reviving the lost art of weaving | The first works you see as you come down the stairs into the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Tarnanthi exhibition – the gallery’s annual show of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art – are large cyanotype prints.
The edges of the deep blue cotton gently flutter, capturing a sense of the life of the ocean that surrounds North Stradbroke Island in Queensland. These prints, by Ngugi/Quandamooka artist Sonja Carmichael and her daughter, Elisa Jane Carmichael – who goes by the name Leecee – express the life of the island. The life in weaving, in shucked shells, in fallen leaves, in sharp white relief against the blue.
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Developed in the 1840s, cyanotype is one of the earliest forms of photography. Objects, or negatives, are placed on paper coated with chemicals and then exposed to the sun; the chemicals would develop in the spaces touched by UV light. When developed, the final image is white negative space against a background of Prussian blue.
In the face of decades of stories of the Quandamooka people and their craft being told by information cards in anthropological collections, for the Carmichaels this process is a way of allowing their culture to speak for itself. The cyanotypes, says Leecee at the opening of Tarnanthi, capture the “process of the forms actually making their own mark on the fabric”.
Yagabili wunjayi (make today) by Sonja and Elisa Jane Carmichael. Photograph: Grant Hancock
This is the sixth year of Tarnanthi, bringing together contemporary work from First Nations artists across Australia. The size of the program fluctuates: every other year the festival takes over multiple galleries across Adelaide; in alternate years it is “focused” in the temporary exhibition space at AGSA, although the 2020 exhibition also includes an international offshoot in France.
Much of the work by the 87 artists this year was made in communities while they were under coronavirus lockdown. Despite this, there is a sense of freedom and joy to much of the work. Wawiriya Burton has made her first works on paper, where simple lines and circles in black paint capture the native plants of the APY lands. Naomi Hobson’s bright pops of colour against black and white photographs is loving and hilarious.
Along with cyanotype, the Carmichaels have also made dilly bags of ungaire (swamp reed), following a millennia-old tradition of weaving. Before European contact, Sonja says, these bags were essential to every aspect of daily life on the island. After invasion, the bags were taken and placed in museums across the world, the practice of making them was discouraged, and the knowledge of weaving was almost lost to the community.
Leecee held one of these bags at the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford. Bags from North Stradbroke Island have been identified in Scotland and Pittsburgh and the Smithsonian. Closer to home, there are some in the University of Queensland Anthropology Museum, and it was there, alongside elders from the island, that Sonja studied the bags and taught herself to weave.
There was “something magical” in reviving the craft of looped weaving, says Sonja. “It’s more than the technique; it’s how we capture and reimagine [knowledge], go with the stories of our elders, and come together and sit with the bags.”
Wunjayi (today) by Sonja and Elisa Jane Carmichael. Photograph: Grant Hancock
The Carmichaels had planned to start creating work together for Tarnanthi in March. Instead, as the country went into lockdown, they – like so many families – became separated. Leecee was at home in Brisbane, while Sonja was on the island.
It was a time of global tragedy coinciding with personal tragedy. Aunty Joan Hendriks, Sonja’s mother and a respected elder in the community, died in January. (Her name is used here with permission.) After the funeral and under the lockdown, Sonja says: “I just weaved and weaved and weaved.”
She points to an image in one of the cyanotypes. “You can see the diamond shape in our bag, in our gulayi (Quandamooka women’s bag)?” she asks. “That’s the diagonal knot.”
These diagonal knots are unique to weaving from North Stradbroke Island, and the knowledge of how to create them was stamped out under colonisation. It was during this time of processing her grief that Sonja “really got to understand” how this part of the traditional bags was formed, taking her observations of the bags at the university and putting this knowledge into practice.
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“It is like this umbilical cord,” she describes. “It started to come together at last, because of that connection and time.”
Among Sonja’s mother’s items, the family found a certificate from Queensland’s chief protector of Aboriginals, giving Sonja’s great-grandmother permission to marry.
This document, as a physical representation of colonisation and trauma, brought out another level of grief in the family. Leecee’s response was to create art to capture who her great-great-grandmother was, rather than the name being held in this certificate, a woman who was under the control of the Queensland government.
One of the prints in the exhibition, named Bulgagu gara (come celebrate), was made for her: giving her the Quandamooka seafood feast she deserved. On the gallery wall, shells seem to tumble down towards the floor from a ghost net: food for a big marriage at the midden at Capembah Creek.
“We wanted to give her a celebration,” says Leecee. “It was quite an emotional piece.”
At the midden, alongside the flowing clear freshwater, says Sonja, “you can visualise the coming together. It’s where the grannies – even my grandmother – used to go.”
Wagari Djagun (carry country) by Sonja and Elisa Jane Carmichael. Photograph: Grant Hancock
Just one of the four cyanotypes on display at Tarnanthi features text – words Leecee cut out of paper and pinned to the cotton so they could develop alongside the natural materials, the weaving and the ocean debris.
Mara mibul wunjayi, “hands alive today”, it reads, alongside budjong (mother), maran (aunty) and jadin (sister). It is a nod to the curatorial focus of Tarnanthi 2020 – Open Hands – but also to the strong matrilineal history Leecee and Sonja are following, rediscovering weaving techniques and reviving language, considering their ancestors and passing this on to the next generation.
When they originally received the commission, Leecee says they wanted to create something small. “I was worried about taking up too much space,” she says with a laugh. Instead, they have created hangings that take up whole gallery walls. “We cried when we saw this,” says Sonja.
This collection, says Sonja, captures the importance of “getting our weaving back, the memories. Acknowledging our ancestors and our artwork, and our aunties and our women’s business. Keeping it alive.”
Tarnanthi is showing at the Art Gallery of South Australia until 31 January 2021 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/20/us-fastest-growing-cities-risk-becoming-unlivable-climate-crisis | US news | 2022-07-20T09:00:15.000Z | Oliver Milman | Alarm as fastest growing US cities risk becoming unlivable from climate crisis | The ferocious heatwave that is gripping much of the US south and west has highlighted an uncomfortable, ominous trend – people are continuing to flock to the cities that risk becoming unlivable due to the climate crisis.
Some of the fastest-growing cities in the US are among those being roasted by record temperatures that are baking more than 100 million Americans under some sort of extreme heat warning. More than a dozen wildfires are engulfing areas from Texas to California and Alaska, with electricity blackouts feared for places where the grid is coming under severe strain.
San Antonio, Texas, which added more to its population than any other US city in the year to July 2021, has already had more than a dozen days over 100F this summer and hit 104F on Tuesday.
Phoenix, Arizona, second on the population growth rankings compiled by the US census, also hit 104F on Tuesday and has suffered a record number of heat-related deaths this year. Meanwhile, Fort Worth, Texas, third on the population growth list, has a “red flag” warning in place amid temperatures that have reached 109F this week.
Cities that stretch across the “sun belt” of the southern and south-western US have in recent years enjoyed population booms, with people lured by the promise of cheap yet expansive properties, warm winters and plentiful jobs, with several large corporations shifting their bases to states with low taxes and cheaper cost of living.
But this growth is now clashing with the reality of the climate emergency, with parts of the sun belt enduring the worst drought in more than 1,000 years, record wildfires and punishing heat that is triggering a range of medical conditions, as well as excess deaths.
“There’s been this tremendous amount of growth and it’s come with a cost,” said Jesse Keenan, an expert in climate adaption at Tulane University. Keenan pointed out that since the 1990s several states have gutted housing regulations to spur development that has now left several cities, such as in Scottsdale, Arizona, struggling to secure enough water to survive.
“The deregulation is really catching up with communities and they are paying that price today,” Keenan said. “We are seeing places run out of water, no proper subdivision controls to ensure there are enough trees to help lower the heat, and lots of low-density suburbs full of cars that create air pollution that only gets worse in hot weather. We’ve reached a crunch point.”
The sprawl of concrete for new housing, mostly within unspooling suburbs rather than contained in dense, walkable neighborhoods, has helped heighten temperatures in many of these growing cities. The spread of hard surfaces has also led to flash flooding, as Houston found to its cost during the devastating Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
Some cities have attempted to respond to the rising temperatures by planting trees, which help cool the surrounding area, and provide emergency centers where people can cool down, but these efforts are often piecemeal and underfunded, according to Sara Meerow, an expert in urban planning at Arizona State University.
“The extreme heat that cities are experiencing now is caused by a combination of climate change and the urban heat island effect,” Meerow said. “Rapid urban expansion, which means more impervious surfaces like roads and buildings and waste heat from cars and buildings, typically exacerbates the urban heat island effect, which means these cities are even hotter.”
As the US, like the rest of the world, continues to heat up, the climate crisis should become more of a factor when choosing a place to live, with retirees already starting to shun Arizona, traditionally a favored spot for older transplants, according to Keenan.
“We are looking at increased premature mortality, even increased diabetes because of dehydration, cardiac impacts and so on,” he said. “Mortgage lenders are starting to look at the risks of lending for somewhere that doesn’t have a water supply, as that’s not a good investment. Capital markets are getting wise to this stuff.
“We are seeing the limits to growth and housing affordability and the impacts of poor-quality decision making of where and how to build. We are paying the price for all that now.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2023/jun/20/national-theatre-artistic-director-rufus-norris-potential-candidates | Stage | 2023-06-20T13:55:39.000Z | Arifa Akbar | Safe pair of hands or time for a shakeup: who’s going to get the biggest job in UK theatre? | Rufus Norris’s announced departure from the National Theatre last week sounds the starting gun for its own succession drama: who is in line for the biggest job in UK theatre? Will the NT reach for a safe pair of hands at a time when arts funding is squeezed and theatre is clawing back revenue lost over the pandemic? Or will it continue Norris’s project of opening up the venue to new audiences and daring to be different? The theatre may well follow the trend for appointing co-directors rather than a single figurehead, to balance risk with tradition. Several high-profile artistic directors have recently left their jobs so there is a lot of talent in the system. Here is the Guardian’s shortlist of potential contenders:
1. Indhu Rubasingham
The favourite by a long shot, Rubasingham has all the flair, leadership and creativity for the job and the confidence to take the NT to new places. Artistic director at the Kiln theatre for a decade and the first woman of colour to run a major London theatre, she faced down heavy criticism for changing the theatre’s name (who cares now that it used to be called the Tricycle?) and led with programming that was full of fire. Rubasingham announced her departure from the Kiln two weeks before Norris. Significant timing?
2. Clint Dyer
Appointed the NT’s deputy artistic director in 2021, Dyer is still fairly new in the job but has decades of experience as an actor, writer and director, and has certainly made his presence felt at the NT: programming has become more daring under his tenure with new and challenging work to balance against the canon, with a third instalment of his own acclaimed series, Death of England, in collaboration with Roy Williams, coming this September. Whoever is given the top job may well share it with Dyer.
3. Rupert Goold
Goold is without doubt one of the most successful theatre-makers of our time. A prolific director across screen and stage, he has made a real splash as artistic director of the Almeida theatre. His programming has heft but a starry quality, too: he has pulled in some of the biggest names in film, including Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal, and zeitgeisty directors and writers (Rebecca Frecknall, James Graham). If there is pressure on post-pandemic theatre to bring in the A-listers, Goold is the NT’s main man.
4. Lynette Linton
A dynamo of an artistic director at the Bush theatre, it has become a far more exciting venue since she took over in 2019, with small but mighty productions such as Red Pitch and this year’s Olivier award-winning The P Word. Born in 1990, her youth works in her favour: she would bring freshness and fearlessness. Linton has proved herself a director of a high calibre, too, taking Lynn Nottage’s Sweat from the Donmar Warehouse to the West End in 2019 to award-winning acclaim. She has all the energy and passion to take the NT into uncharted waters.
5. Robert Hastie
The artistic director of Sheffield theatres since 2016, Hastie has taken the venue to new heights, championing local talent and recently scoring a big win with storming Sheffield-based musical, Standing at the Sky’s Edge, which twinned veteran musician Richard Hawley with fantastic young writer Chris Bush. The show was named best musical at this year’s Olivier awards, so he is high on the industry’s radar. Currently directing the West End run of Operation Mincemeat, he is outside the London bubble and would bring a different perspective to the NT.
6. Rachel O’Riordan
An impressive artistic director who has earned her place at the helm of the Lyric Hammersmith, she is of Irish heritage and has been an artistic director in Scotland and Wales. She knows how to fill a big-seater venues, too, and has produced some big hits including her super-successful production of Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott, which has toured the nation. O’Riordan is immersed in metropolitan theatre-making but has a vision way beyond London.
7. Sam Mendes
Long ago at the helm of the Donmar Warehouse and back making theatre now via stratospheric Hollywood success, would Mendes return to stage work on a full-time basis? He is showing some signs of this, having recently directed a revival of The Lehman Trilogy for the West End, and filling out the auditorium with Jack Thorne’s The Motive and the Cue at the NT. He is classic, old-school NT fare: highly accomplished as a programmer and polished as a director, he would be a starry appointment with the mother of all contacts books – but would he be willing to push the envelope?
8. Jamie Lloyd
Finally a wildcard: gloriously unpredictable, undoubtedly a rare talent from a working-class background, Lloyd is one of Britain’s powerhouse directors who combines an avant-garde vision with commercial acumen. His tenure would never be boring: he knows how to turn the canon on its head in the most divisive of ways (think Cyrano de Bergerac starring James McAvoy or his recent West End take on The Seagull). Currently dazzling Broadway with A Doll’s House starring Jessica Chastain, this appointment might be out of the NT’s reach, although he is set to direct Lucy Prebble’s play, The Effect, at the NT this August. | Full |
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