URL
stringlengths 34
373
⌀ | Article Category
stringclasses 126
values | Publication Date
stringlengths 20
25
⌀ | Article Author
stringlengths 3
44
⌀ | Article Title
stringlengths 3
236
⌀ | Article Contents
stringlengths 3
49.8k
⌀ | Data Quality
stringclasses 2
values |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/mar/27/the-slowworms-song-by-andrew-miller-review-belfast-booze-and-a-lifetime-of-bad-nights | Books | 2022-03-27T12:00:25.000Z | Rob Doyle | The Slowworm’s Song by Andrew Miller review – Belfast, booze and a lifetime of bad nights | At the beginning of Andrew Miller’s ninth novel, a letter arrives. The narrator, a 51-year-old recovering alcoholic named Stephen Rose, is being summoned to Belfast from his home in Somerset by a body known as the Commission. The letter assures Stephen that this is not about bringing anyone to trial, but giving those involved in an incident that took place 30 years ago an opportunity to tell their side of the story. In short, the past is being dragged into the light. We know something terrible happened during Stephen’s service with the British army in Northern Ireland as a young man; the promise of learning the grisly details is what entices us through this sombre examination of shame, guilt and the long aftershocks of trauma.
Set in 2011, The Slowworm’s Song takes the form of a lengthy confessional letter that Stephen is writing to his 26-year-old daughter Maggie. While inching up to the tragic event that has blackened his life and led him to ruinous drinking, we hear about Stephen’s past and present. He works at a garden store named Plant World and fitfully studies English literature on an Open University course. He comes from a family of Quakers and is semi-estranged from Maggie and her mother Evie. At the tail-end of an adolescence marked by alienation and aggression, he enlisted for the army; his father, a devout Quaker, was startled, but quickly became supportive of his son’s choice.
These sections detailing Stephen’s army life, and particularly those covering his tour of duty in Belfast, are excellent
Stephen recounts his army training, notably his introduction to the SLR: primary weapon of the British infantry soldier, the self-loading rifle was nicknamed the ‘“paddywhacker” and used during the Bloody Sunday massacre of 14 unarmed citizens in Derry (that atrocity, and the subsequent Saville inquiry to establish what exactly took place during “15 minutes of mayhem” in 1972, run throughout The Slowworm’s Song as a parallel to the novel’s fictitious outrage). Stephen’s company is at first stationed in Germany, where the young soldiers are trained to take out tanks as the first line of defence against a Soviet invasion (“the Red Hordes pouring westward – sounds fanciful now, part of Cold War propaganda”. Well…) Then the order comes: they are heading to Belfast.
These sections detailing Stephen’s army life, and particularly those covering his tour of duty in Belfast, are excellent: immersive in their detail and atmosphere. During a tense patrol through the city’s Catholic enclaves, a woman on the street exposes Stephen to “a passionate hating I’d never come across before”. After his service is cut short by the incident around which the novel circles, Stephen returns to England and moves into a squat in Bristol with some weed-dealing hippies. There he meets Evie, the future mother of his child. When they live together as a couple she asks him repeatedly what it is, “this thing that would not let me be, that in different ways frightened us both”. Stephen bottles it up and hits the bottle. There follows a “drunk’s tour” of Europe and much self-destruction before he eventually returns to Somerset, goes into therapy and joins a 12-step programme.
The novel feels rudderless after the traumatic event is finally recounted, but gets back on track when the Commission renews its efforts to persuade Stephen to attend a special hearing. His expectation that he will be publicly shamed unhinges Stephen and his addiction rears up again. As far as what we might call Troublesome fiction goes, The Slowworm’s Song is the first novel I’ve encountered that assumes such a highly loaded perspective. Andrew Miller – a much-awarded writer stepping out of his comfort zone of omnisciently narrated historical fiction – has sufficient decorum, talent and sensitivity to do justice to his delicate subject matter. Stephen endures excruciating torments and a lifetime of bad nights, but the past remains the past: “It cannot be made less and it cannot be made safe and it cannot be hidden and it cannot be forgotten.”
Rob Doyle’s latest book, Autobibliography, is out now
The Slowworm’s Song by Andrew Miller is published by Sceptre (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/17/kate-grenville-sofie-laguna-julia-baird-and-others-the-20-best-australian-books-of-2020 | Books | 2020-12-16T16:30:15.000Z | Brigid Delaney | Kate Grenville, Sofie Laguna, Julia Baird and others: the 20 best Australian books of 2020 | 1. Lucky’s by Andrew Pippos
Picador
This novel is a saga in the truest definition of that word, spanning more than 50 years of one Greek-Australian family and the rise and fall of their cafe franchise.
The story of Lucky’s follows various twists and turns of fortune and highlights the role of luck and serendipity in fate – almost like a Greek saga. Pippos skilfully weaves multiple story threads throughout the novel – the literary fraudster; the plucky journalist; the entrepreneurial Greek man who escapes service by impersonating a famous musician – but the most memorable parts of this book are the beautifully drawn characters and its warm heart. – Brigid Delaney
Lucky’s by Andrew Pippos review – a must-read saga, and a gripping monument to Greek diaspora
2. Fathoms: The World in the Whale by Rebecca Giggs
Scribe
In 2013 an entire flat-packed greenhouse – hoses, ropes, flowerpots, glass – found its way into the belly of a sperm whale. “We struggle to understand the sprawl of our impact, but there it is,” writes Rebecca Giggs, “pollution, climate, animal welfare, wildness, commerce, the future, and the past. Inside the whale, the world.”
As we grapple with our Anthropocene anguish, some of the most alive, inventive writing on the planet is nature writing, and Giggs’ Fathoms is glorious proof. Ostentatious, mythic and strange, this is the kind of book that swallows you whole. Entirely fitting for its subject. – Beejay Silcox
Rebecca Giggs: After everything this year, what we hear when we listen to birdsong has changed
3. A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville
Text
Men wrote the early Australian colonial history. Women featured as bystanders at best. And so it was with Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of John Macarthur - colonial officer, inveterate political plotter who was seminal in the 1808 Rum rebellion and later credited with founding the Australian wool industry.
Kate Grenville conjures Elizabeth through a candid memoir that “came into my hands”. We meet Elizabeth, the imagined lover of the astronomer William Dawes. Elizabeth, who did more than John to establish the wool industry. And who realised history in the making was silencing the dispossessed local custodians too. – Paul Daley
A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville review – the untold story of an unruly woman
4. Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
HarperCollins
Book jacket comparisons can be the death of a good novel (stop it with the “for fans of Sally Rooney” already), but in the case of Sorrow and Bliss, the Fleabag nod on its cover is fair. Meg Mason’s second novel is narrated by the acerbic, observant and deceptively self-aware Martha, an anti-hero with a witty quip for everything – and a partner, Patrick, who has banter to match.
That’s why I thought I’d picked up a perfect holiday read when I took it to a beach getaway earlier this year. But as the novel unfolded, whipping back and forth in time as we fill in the gaps of what Martha isn’t telling us, the sorrow of this story – and of the character’s hidden illness – leaks out all over it. I started this book reading out the funniest lines to anyone who would listen. I ended it in tears, with a lingering grief for its characters that I still haven’t quite been able to shake off. – Steph Harmon
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason review – an incredibly funny and devastating debut
5. Ghost Species by James Bradley
Penguin Random House
James Bradley is an Australian novelist and critic. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian
The climate crisis has shaped James Bradley’s fiction and nonfiction for years. In his latest novel, Ghost Species, that concern takes a slightly unexpected direction: the humanitarian consequences of a corporation’s attempts to revive ancient, extinct species to somehow re-engineer the planet.
Kate is wary when the Elon Musk-style entrepreneur and billionaire Davis Hucken enlists her to help him resurrect Neanderthals. Her ethical misgivings overwhelm her when the highly secretive project is successful and a baby is born, and she kidnaps the not-quite human child to raise her as her own. It’s here that the not-so-speculative frame of Bradley’s novel falls away to become a story of grief and love and the nature of family – and also not quite that, as the question at the heart of the novel continually rears its head: how ought we relate to nonhuman beings? Ghost Species is a prescient reminder that it’s not merely imperative that we solve the problem of climate crisis, it matters how. – Stephanie Convery
Could bringing Neanderthals back to life save the environment? The idea is not quite science fiction
6. The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
Affirm Press
This debut meshes real and imaginary. It revolves around the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, led by the esteemed Sir James Murray – but the narrative is focused on the fictional Esme, one of the lexicographers who sorts out contributions sent worldwide for possible inclusion.
One day Esme finds a carelessly discarded word and rescues it; over the years she’ll add to her secret collection with others deemed unimportant by the grand and pompous men of letters. It’s a story as much about sexism and the suffragette movement as it is about the provenance of words. – Thuy On
‘All words are not equal’: the debut novelist who’s become a lockdown sensation
7. Show Me Where it Hurts by Kylie Maslen
Text
In a year that has had no shortage of incisive, wry and intelligent essay collections, Kylie Maslen’s Show Me Where it Hurts stands out. Maslen writes about her experience of chronic illness with generosity and warmth. While each essay begins from a place of lived experience, the collection covers a range of topics – from pop culture to aged care – and she brings the same depth to an essay about SpongeBob SquarePants as to a piece about the Australian economy.
Maslen delivers observations about the entrenched ableism in Australian society with a charming frankness that make this thought-provoking debut memorable. – Bec Kavanagh
The idea of ‘too much information’ is bad for our health. It’s time we ditched it
8. Sad Mum Lady by Ashe Davenport
Allen & Unwin
I am, arguably, not the target audience – with my own children old enough to make the travails of parenting newborns a distant, somewhat repressed memory – but Ashe Davenport’s debut was a brilliant read that transcended any idea of genre or the narrow relevance of one’s own experience. First and foremost it’s a sharp, funny, frequently moving book of essays from a serious new writer.
Buy it if you have a new parent in your life who is looking for a more honest take on the experience; or buy it for that fan of personal essays in the Sloane Crosley/David Sedaris mode, looking to snort-laugh in horrified recognition. – Michael Williams
9. Almost a Mirror by Kirsten Krauth
Transit Lounge
Photograph: Transit Lounge
Released in the early days of the pandemic, you may have missed this gem of a novel. A book about relationships, music, culture and youth, Almost a Mirror is set in the post-punk scene of 80s Melbourne (as well as the Blue Mountains, Sydney and Castlemaine).
There are echoes here of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip in the descriptions of Melbourne, music, drugs – along with the men who are in thrall to them and the women left behind. Krauth’s gift is to drop you into a fully formed and realised world, and the devil is in the details: what kids in the 1980s were wearing, listening to, drinking, ingesting and smoking is on point. It would all be very nostalgic except for the tragedy that runs through.
A bonus: the structure is set up as a mixtape, with each chapter of the novel an 80s song. It will have you trawling through Spotify as you read. – Brigid Delaney
Nick Cave, Andy Griffiths and the $10,000 suit: how Melbourne’s Crystal Ballroom launched a scene
10. Smart Ovens for Lonely People by Elizabeth Tan
Brio Books
Like her first book, Rubik (a novel of interconnected stories), Elizabeth Tan’s equally idiosyncratic follow-up is made up of 20 standalone tales that also touch on sci-fi, satire and fantasy. Smart Ovens for Lonely People is artful and fun as it explores pop culture in a futuristic but still recognisable setting. The title story deals with a talking, cat-shaped oven designed to soothe the downhearted.
Yet underneath the playfulness there’s poignancy in these stories. Their inventiveness and unpredictability add lustre and charm to the collection. You don’t know where Tan will go but she makes you want to follow. – Thuy On
11. Truganini: Journey Through the Apocalypse by Cassandra Pybus
Allen & Unwin
So much Australian history has miscast the Nuenonne woman Truganini as “the last of the Tasmanian Aboriginal race” and shaped her textured, fascinating life into a simple three-act tragedy. This cliched trope had her slipping between two worlds, the Indigenous and the British colonial. It overlooked her complexity, her resilience and her remarkable capacity to negotiate survival in what was, to the first Tasmanians, an apocalypse.
The historian and writer Cassandra Pybus restores Truganini’s agency in this rich, beautifully realised biography of one of the most significant Aboriginal women to experience and endure colonialism’s violent upheavals. – Paul Daley
Truganini’s story has always been told as tragedy. She was so much more than that
12. The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay
Scribe
The Animals in That Country is an uncanny book, in no small part because it was released in March and has a pandemic is at its centre. It follows Jean, a tough-talking older woman who lives and works in a rural wildlife park. When a new strain of flu sweeps the country – one whose main symptom is an ability to understand the language of animals – Jean flees her home, alongside a dingo named Sue, to try to track down her missing family.
McKay’s book is madcap and poetic by turns; concerned about exactly what constitutes the relationships between humans and animals, and how we see each other and interact in this world we share. – Fiona Wright
The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay review – an extraordinary debut
13. The Mother Fault by Kate Mildenhall
Simon & Schuster
Kate Mildenhall’s The Mother Fault amplifies the tension of motherhood in a gripping cli fi thriller. A near-future Australia is burdened by the increasing effects of climate change, its citizens living under the totalitarian rule of The Department.
When Mim’s husband goes missing, and The Department threatens to take her children, she embarks on a risky sea voyage in search of answers. Mildenhall’s novel is an intelligent, fast-paced and provocative about things to come. – Bec Kavanagh
For women in lockdown with kids, it’s impossible to be seen as anything other than a mother
14. Song of the Crocodile by Nardi Simpson
Hachette
Watched over by wakeful ancestors, the Billymil family have lived in rural Darnmoor – “Gateway to Happiness” – for three generations, trying to carve out space for themselves in a world that does not want them. In town, simmering animosities take violent shape. Under the river bed, the Crocodile spirit is stirring.
It’s hard not to drown Song of the Crocodile in awed praise but this book deserves every skerrick of hype. That it is Simpson’s debut feels like a magnificent question: what else might she bring us? For now, just surrender to her storytelling, rich with Yuwaalaraay language and song. – Beejay Silcox
15. After the Count: The Death of Davey Browne by Stephanie Convery
Penguin Random House
Guardian Australia’s deputy culture editor, Stephanie Convery, has a great many past-times: she sings, she knits, she birds, she does extreme exercise – and she also boxes. It’s this personal connection that drew her to the story of Davey Browne: the 28-year-old boxer who was knocked out and died in the final minutes of a regional championship fight held at an RSL in western Sydney in 2015. Convery sets out to discover who was responsible for his death in this meticulously reported and balanced book, which blends fact, history and the voices of those involved with her own experience and passion for the sport.
Ultimately – unsurprisingly – there’s no one person to point the finger at (“not I, says the referee ... not us, says the angry crowd ... not me, says his manager”, as Bob Dylan would put it), but instead a widespread misunderstanding of the rules, and a larger systemic issue: the sporting world has been glossing over the symptoms and risks of repeated brain injury for far too long. This beautifully written and well-argued book had me from start to finish. – Steph Harmon
Stephanie Convery: the sports world knows concussion can kill. So why does no one talk about it?
16. Infinite Splendours by Sofie Laguna
Allen & Unwin
Author Sofie Laguna. Photograph: Rochelle Van Der Merwe
Sofie Laguna’s achievement in her novel Infinite Splendours makes my hair stand on end. She is so deft at balancing the darkest material with luminosity that it seems impossible to tell you the core subject matter of the book and still have you believe that it is ultimately uplifting.
Written here, it would be confronting, possibly off-putting but in Laguna’s hands the human condition she excavates is wrapped in her extraordinary compassion. Suffice to say there is a terrible betrayal against a child, then a painstaking exposition of how that betrayal ripples along the long arc of a life. Brilliant. – Lucy Clark
Infinite Splendours by Sofie Laguna review – a sad and sublime tale of trauma and art
17. Future Girl by Asphyxia
Allen & Unwin
Future Girl blends art, activism and storytelling in a compelling young adult climate crisis narrative. Piper, a deaf teenager growing up in a near-future Melbourne, has spent her life trying to pass as hearing. But when an oil crisis plunges the city into an environmental and economic shutdown, Piper has the opportunity to rethink what skills (and friendships) are truly necessary to live.
Asphyxia has created an extraordinary book, filled with her own artwork. Reading it is like dipping into someone’s diary – intimate, engrossing, at times confronting. Future Girl is a reminder that art is not only a comfort but a provocation of how we might reimagine the world. – Bec Kavanagh
18. The Case of George Pell: Reckoning with Sexual Abuse by Clergy by Melissa Davey
Scribe
The journalist, Walkley award winner and Guardian Australia’s Melbourne bureau chief, Melissa Davey, spent years diligently covering the investigation, trials, appeals and eventual acquittal of Cardinal George Pell on charges of child sexual abuse for this news outlet. In this, her first book, she draws together all the evidence and counter-arguments, her observations, details of the courtroom procedures and her experience of them and the public’s reaction to her reporting.
She is methodical, diligent and direct – and studiously avoids giving her opinion on the court’s decisions or her beliefs about Pell’s guilt or innocence. As a consequence, her book is a thorough, detailed, and tremendously important document of one of the most high-profile court cases in recent memory, and a must for anyone who wants their own understanding of what happened, as Davey says, “to be, at the very least, informed by the evidence”. – Stephanie Convery
Defending George Pell: ‘I believe Pell’s a good man’
19. The Fogging by Luke Horton
Scribe
The Fogging is one of those books that creeps up on you: it’s quiet, often understated, and the dramas it’s concerned with are small, almost claustrophobic. But I’ve not been able to stop thinking about it. .
The novel follows the protagonist, Tom, over the course of a short holiday in Bali with his partner, Clara, as he slowly unravels and the dynamics of their relationship shift and change – and it’s a deeply enthralling, deft gem of a book. – Fiona Wright
20. Phosphorescence by Julia Baird
HarperCollins
If ever there was a book this year that was uncannily perfect for the moment, it was Julia Baird’s Phosphorescence. Just as the world fell further, further into a dark pit in August, Baird’s book brought wonder and grace and meaning and comfort, all the things we needed right then. It has generosity, too.
Among the stories she has gathered to pique the reader’s sense of awe, Baird shares her personal experience with cancer but not in a mawkish way. It’s purely in service to the idea that humans have the ability to dig really deep, and to find beauty everywhere. An inspiration. – Lucy Clark
Julia Baird on finding light in the dark: ‘Coronavirus will leave a massive psychic scar’
This article was corrected on 17 January. Sorrow and Bliss is Meg Mason’s second novel. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/sep/29/swedish-cientists-bet-bob-dylan-lyrics-research-papers | Music | 2014-09-29T06:44:45.000Z | Sean Michaels | Scientists sneak Bob Dylan lyrics into articles as part of long-running bet | Five Swedish-based scientists have been inserting Bob Dylan lyrics into research articles as part of a long-running bet. After 17 years, the researchers revealed their race to quote Dylan as many times as possible before retirement.
The bet began in 1997, following Nature’s publication of a paper by Jon Lundberg and Eddie Weitzberg, Nitric Oxide and Inflammation: The Answer Is Blowing In the Wind. “We both really like Bob Dylan so when we set about writing an article concerning the measurement of nitric oxide gas in both the respiratory tracts and the intestine ... the title came up and it fitted there perfectly,” Weitzberg recently explained.
That was as far as it went until several years later, when a librarian pointed out that two of the scientists’ colleagues, Jonas Frisén and Konstantinos Meletis, had used a different Dylan reference in a paper about the ability of non-neural cells to generate neurons: 2003’s Blood on the Tracks: A Simple Twist of Fate?. Soon the bet was struck: “The one who has written most articles with Dylan quotes, before going into retirement, wins a lunch at the [local] restaurant Jöns Jacob,” Lundberg said.
Word spread quickly through Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, where all four men work, and before long there was a fifth competitor: Kenneth Chien, a professor of cardiovascular research, who is also keen to win a free lunch. By the time he met the others, he already had one Dylan paper to his name – Tangled Up in Blue: Molecular Cardiology in the Postmolecular Era, published in 1998.
With five competing rivals, the pace of Dylan references accelerated. Lundberg and Weitzberg’s The Biological Role of Nitrate and Nitrite: The Times They Are a-Changin’, in 2009; Eph Receptors Tangled Up in Two in 2010; Dietary Nitrate – A Slow Train Coming, in 2011. The bet is not for strict scientific papers, Weitzberg said. “We could have got in trouble for that,” he said. “[This is for] articles we have written about research by others, book introductions, editorials and things like that.”
All the scientists are great fans of Dylan – he ought to win the Nobel prize for literature, suggests Weitzberg – but they are also realistic about his role in their careers. As Weitzberg told the Local: “I would much rather become famous for my scientific work than for my Bob Dylan quotes.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/26/scientific-journal-retracts-article-that-claimed-no-evidence-of-climate-crisis | Environment | 2023-08-25T15:00:14.000Z | Graham Readfearn | Scientific journal retracts article that claimed no evidence of climate crisis | One of the world’s biggest scientific publishers has retracted a journal article that claimed to have found no evidence of a climate crisis.
Springer Nature said it had retracted the article, by four Italian physicists, after an internal investigation found the conclusions were “not supported by available evidence or data provided by the authors”.
Climate sceptic groups widely publicised the article, which appeared in the European Physical Journal Plus in January 2022 – a journal not known for publishing climate change science.
Nine months later the article was reported uncritically in a page one story in the Australian newspaper and promoted in two segments on Sky News Australia – a channel that has been described as a global hub for climate science misinformation. The segments were viewed more than 500,000 times on YouTube.
The article claimed to have analysed data to find no trend in rainfall extremes, floods, droughts and food productivity.
“In conclusion on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet,” the article said.
Several climate scientists told the Guardian and later the news agency AFP that the article had misrepresented some scientific articles, was “selective and biased” and had “cherrypicked” information.
After those concerns were raised, Springer Nature announced in October it was investigating the article.
In a statement Springer Nature said its editors had launched a “thorough investigation”, which included a post-publication review by subject matter experts.
The authors of the article also submitted an addendum to their original work during the course of the investigation, the statement said.
“After careful consideration and consultation with all parties involved, the editors and publishers concluded that they no longer had confidence in the results and conclusions of the article,” the journal said.
“The addendum was not considered suitable for publication and retraction was the most appropriate course of action in order to maintain the validity of the scientific record.”
A retraction note appearing on the article says concerns were raised “regarding the selection of the data, the analysis and the resulting conclusions of the article”.
The note says the article’s conclusions “were not supported by available evidence or data provided by the authors”.
“In light of these concerns and based on the outcome of the post publication review, the editors-in-chief no longer have confidence in the results and conclusions reported in this article,” the note adds.
The article is still available for download, but the manuscript now has the words “RETRACTED ARTICLE” stamped over each page. According to the journal’s website, the article was accessed 92,000 times.
The Guardian asked why the issues with the paper were not picked up before publication. Springer Nature said it could not discuss “the specific history or peer review process of a paper with anyone other than the authors”.
The publisher and editors were “committed to maintaining the highest possible levels of integrity in the content published in the journal, and we are taking steps to ensure that similar issues do not occur in the future”.
“For example, we are supporting our editors-in-chief in increasing oversight of editors and guest editors to ensure that our policies and best practice are adhered to,” a statement added.
Prof Steven Sherwood, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales who was among those critical of the article, said it was important the journal had allowed the authors to defend their work.
“This shows the journal did not rush to judgment against the paper,” he said.
“I commend the journal, both for giving this initial benefit of the doubt to the authors and for having the resolve to retract the paper when the authors could not justify their claims.”
Two of the study’s four authors, retired nuclear physicist Renato Ricci and known climate science sceptic Franco Prodi, signed a declaration in early 2022 that there was “no climate emergency” and that “enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial”.
The study’s lead author, nuclear physicist Prof Gianluca Alimonti, argued in 2014 that there was no consensus among climate scientists that global warming was caused by human activity. At least six separate studies have shown that between 90% and 100% of climate scientists agree warming is caused by humans.
The Guardian emailed Alimonti for comment but did not receive a reply. The Australian newspaper and Sky News Australia were also approached for comment. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/apr/30/tesco-seeks-online-sales-tax-to-fund-business-rate-cuts | Business | 2019-04-30T16:16:33.000Z | Sarah Butler | Tesco seeks online sales tax to fund business rate cuts | Tesco has urged the government to impose a 2% online sales tax to help pay for a cut in business rates for shops, saying the current system is unfair and is damaging communities across the UK.
In written evidence to a Treasury select committee investigation, the UK’s largest retailer – which pays about £700m a year in business rates, making it one of the biggest payers of the property-based tax – has made detailed proposals for a shake-up of the system, which has been partly blamed for the problems facing high street shops.
Sainsbury's sales slide as Aldi continues rapid growth
Read more
The supermarket suggests the government could raise £1.5bn via an online sales levy of 2% on physical goods, as defined by existing VAT regulations.
Tesco says the government could use that revenue to fund a 20% cut in business rates for all bricks-and-mortar retailers. It says small businesses could be exempted from the online sales levy.
“There is overwhelming evidence that the business rates system is not equitable and is damaging investment and growth,” Tesco said in its submission.
“We believe action must be taken to avoid prolonging an anachronistic tax that has not materially changed since 1988 and is damaging communities across the UK.”
Tesco’s written evidence ramps up a campaign for change led by its chief executive, Dave Lewis, who first called for an “Amazon tax” last year.
In 2015, he warned against a “lethal cocktail” of £14bn in extra costs over five years from an increase in business rates and the introduction of the national living wage and apprenticeship levy.
Commenting on the proposal submitted to the Treasury committee, Lewis said: “The business rates system is increasingly outdated and in need of urgent reform. The burden of rates has become unsustainable in a retail sector that saw 7,500 net store closures last year, but still employs 3 million people.
“The introduction of an online sales levy would create a level playing field, incentivise investment and do so in a way which is revenue neutral for the government.”
Tesco’s submission says an online sales tax would be “economically robust” and would, according to Tesco legal advice, be compatible with EU state aid rules. It says “existing processes and mechanisms could be used to implement the reduction” in business rates.
The idea of an online sales levy has also been put forward by Mike Ashley, the founder and chief executive of Sports Direct and owner of House of Fraser. He has called for a tax on retailers that make more than a fifth of sales online.
He told MPs at the housing, communities and local government select committee’s investigation into the future of the high street that many town centres were “already dead” and more would be killed off without government intervention.
The Treasury select committee is looking at the impact of changes to business rates policy since 2017 and possible alternatives to the property-based tax.
Robert Hayton, the head of UK business rates at property advisers Altus Group, welcomed Tesco’s proposal.
He said: “There is now an overriding consensus of opinion that the tax playing field must be levelled, given the tax-to-turnover ratio disparity, whilst the proposal ensures additional revenue is ring-fenced for the good of the entire sector.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/04/tanya-plibersek-says-she-will-block-clive-palmers-proposed-coalmine-near-great-barrier-reef | Environment | 2022-08-04T05:52:38.000Z | Graham Readfearn | Tanya Plibersek says she will block Clive Palmer’s proposed coalmine near Great Barrier Reef | The environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, has said she intends to block a coalmine project backed by mining billionaire Clive Palmer that would have dug for the fossil fuel just 10km from Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef coastline.
Palmer’s Central Queensland Coal project would have mined up to 18m tonnes a year from two open-cut pits near Rockhampton.
It comes amid calls from the Greens to ban new coal and gas projects as the Albanese government’s bill to enshrine a 43% cut to greenhouse gas emissions made its way to the Senate.
The decision is the new environment minister’s first in the portfolio.
Environmentalists said the proposed refusal was a victory for the state, for the Great Barrier Reef, for the environment and for the climate.
A Queensland state government assessment said last year the Central Queensland Coal project was “not suitable” and would risk damaging the reef as well as wetlands, fish habitat and ecosystems that depended on groundwater.
An official notice said the minister is proposing to refuse the mine under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 and has invited public comment on her draft decision, with submissions closing on 18 August.
In a statement, the minister said: “Based on the information available to me at this stage, I believe that the project would be likely to have unacceptable impacts to the Great Barrier Reef marine park, and the values of the Great Barrier Reef world heritage area and national heritage place.”
“The available evidence also suggests that the project would be likely to have unacceptable impacts on water resources in the area.”
She said Palmer’s company had been contacted, adding a final decision would be made after public comments were received.
“While I am seeking comment on my proposed decision, and until I make my final decision on this project, I am unable to make any further statements on the matter.”
Last year Queensland’s state government sent a final assessment of the mine to the federal government, saying it posed “a number of unacceptable risks”.
Conservationists had called on the previous environment minister, Sussan Ley, to refuse the mine.
Palmer’s company had rejected claims the mine would do unacceptable damage. Guardian Australia called the Brisbane office of Central Queensland Coal, but was told nobody was available to speak as “everyone from the company is on site in central Queensland”.
Sign up to receive an email with the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning
Sign up to receive the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning
The director of the Queensland Conservation Council, Dave Copeman, said: “This prompt decision is a welcome change from the delayed and questionable decision making approach of the previous Morrison government.”
“It looks like we now have a minister that understands the science, is willing to listen to community concerns, and act accordingly.
“We won’t reach Australia’s 43% 2030 emissions reduction targets, that passed the House of Representatives today, without strong decisions such as this.
“This will be overwhelmingly positive news for the many locals and organisations who have been making clear the local and scientific opposition to this project.”
Cherry Muddle, a Great barrier Reef campaigner at the Australian Marine Conservation Society, said they hoped the minister “rejects this mine once and for all” and pointed to modelling suggesting mine sediments would have had disastrous impacts on an area that was rich in marine life.
“In the wake of the fourth mass bleaching event on the reef since 2016, it is vital new coal and gas projects like this one are refused,” Muddle said.
“It shows the government are serious about saving the reef and tackling the issues that threaten it.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/aug/07/psychoanalysing-trump-helps-us-stay-sane-troubled-times | Life and style | 2020-08-07T14:00:39.000Z | Oliver Burkeman | Psychoanalysing Trump isn't a distraction - it helps us stay sane in troubled times | Oliver Burkeman | It’s one of the less obnoxious self-help cliches – because it’s true – that virtually any everyday psychological problem can be traced back to some kind of fear. Procrastination is the fear of failure (or sometimes success). Relationship issues often arise from a deep-seated fear of being abandoned (or being overwhelmed by too much closeness). If you’re perpetually overworked, or feel others are taking advantage of you, it’s probably because you fear standing up for yourself. And so on: scratch the surface and you’ll find the fear.
At the root of all those fears, generally speaking, is the fear of having to experience certain feelings. As the therapist Bruce Tift puts it, most of us are subconsciously deeply invested in “making sure we don’t have to feel the feelings that were overwhelming to us as children”. To a small child, this theory goes, ordinary emotions often do feel overwhelming, and experiences such as rejection really are matters of life and death, because you can’t survive without your caregivers. The problem is that we carry these attitudes into adulthood – and end up, say, procrastinating on a work project, because deep down we’re convinced that experiencing the shame of failure would be more than we could handle.
Which brings us, I’m afraid, to Donald Trump – and specifically to Too Much And Never Enough, the memoir by his niece Mary, which reached the American public, despite the best efforts of the White House, in early July. Many of its revelations weren’t so revelatory: the orange authoritarian really is as spiteful, lewd, heartless and dishonest as you thought. But as a clinical psychologist, Mary Trump knows to look for the fear at the bottom of it all – and finds it in Trump’s ceaseless quest for approval from his “sociopath” father, and the desperate need to avoid what he saw happening to his older brother Freddy, bullied and disdained throughout their childhood. (He died from alcoholism, estranged from the family, at 42.) For Trump, writes his niece, “there has never been any option but to be positive, to project strength, no matter how illusory, because doing anything else carries a death sentence… He can never escape the fact that he is and always will be a terrified little boy.”
Psychoanalysing Trump this way tends to annoy people: his supporters, of course, but also those who see it as a distraction from understanding him as a symptom of wider forces. Others fear it’s an argument for sympathy. For me, though, the motive has always been more selfish. It’s simply easier to remain sane through insane times – and perhaps even do something to improve matters – if you can grasp why terrible people ended up that way. Otherwise, you’re left fuming in impotent rage at what looks like inexplicable, almost transcendental (and unconquerable) evil.
The miracle cure for life's problems? More of what you're already doing
Read more
It isn’t, though. It’s just a bunch of scared children, trying to avoid feelings they can’t bear to feel, and ruining the world in the process. Britain is serially governed by boys sent off to boarding school in their very early teens, or even younger, for goodness sake. What did we think would be the result? The fact that they’re motivated by buried fears doesn’t let our leaders off the hook. But it does bring them down to earth. Which, after all, is the only place we’ll ever be able to change anything.
Read this
A CIA profiler probes the bond between the “quintessential narcissist” Trump and his followers in Dangerous Charisma, by Jerrold Post and Stephanie Doucette. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/dec/14/jonny-woo-funniest-things | Stage | 2018-12-14T14:00:45.000Z | Harriet Gibsone | Jonny Woo: ‘I don't get heckled, I shut them up before they open their mouths’ | The funniest standup I’ve ever seen …
Myra DuBois. She’s the best standup on the gay scene in London. Best off script and she can rattle on without a break for two hours.
The funniest heckle I’ve ever had …
I don’t really get heckled at drag gigs; you shut them up before they get a chance to open their mouths.
The funniest book I’ve ever read …
The Andy Warhol diaries. His writing has a jolly, detached curiosity, telling stories about extraordinary people as if it were local tittle-tattle with a neighbour over a garden fence.
The funniest film I’ve ever seen …
Abigail’s Party. It’s the kind of film – well TV play – that is really funny to quote afterwards. All together: “I’ve got very beautiful lips.”
The funniest item of clothing I’ve owned …
My friend has made me this waistcoat thing covered in silk flowers. I’m not sure what to do with it. I can’t bear to get rid of it as it took her ages to make but I’m always like … WTF?
The funniest meal I’ve ever eaten …
I cooked fresh fish once but I didn’t know you had to take the guts out. It wasn’t funny at the time. The flat smelled horrid for weeks.
The funniest word …
Snatch – as in purse.
The funniest joke I’ve ever heard …
“What do you get with a second-hand toilet? Second-hand toilet roll. Someone used it and rolled it back up again.” Jonny Woo, aged six.
Jonny Woo’s All Star Brexit Cabaret is at London Coliseum, WC2, Monday 17 December | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2013/sep/20/david-orr-uk-housing-crisis | Housing Network | 2013-09-20T10:30:49.000Z | Jane Dudman | David Orr: government should consider capping private rents | The government would be "incomprehensibly stupid" not to consider capping private sector rents, according to the chief executive of the National Housing Federation.
David Orr told delegates at the federation's annual conference in Birmingham on Thursday that radical thinking was needed to address the UK's housing crisis, but too few politicians and housing providers were thinking long-term.
New figures show that private rents are close to a record high but Orr said the government was frightened even to start a conversation about capping private rents, despite 10,000 new housing benefits claims every month by working households as rents continue to rise and wages to fall.
On 9 September, writing for the Guardian Housing Network Orr said politicians at both central and local government level needed to be bold. "We need to ask some of the big questions that are deemed to be politically off limits," he said.
At the housing conference, Orr called for challenging conversations and new ideas, including a potential move away from arms-length management organisations to what he called "proper municipal housing companies."
He also said it was time to move the planning system out of the hands of councillors who were "conflicted" between their role in long-term place-shaping and short-term politics.
Planning, he said, should be visionary and implemented by officers, rather than councillors, whose re-election often rested on a tiny number of people, making it difficult to get large-scale housebuilding under way in many parts of the country.
Orr said such a move would not be undemocratic, pointing out that 30 years ago, council housing was allocated by councillors. That had now been delegated to officers and the same should be done with planning, he said.
This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Join the housing network for more news, analysis and comment direct to you. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/apr/14/ive-been-trying-for-months-to-get-scottish-power-to-disconnect-my-gas | Money | 2022-04-14T06:00:06.000Z | Anna Tims | I’ve been trying for months to get Scottish Power to disconnect my gas | I replaced my gas boiler and hob with an electric one and have been trying, for three months, to get Scottish Power to disconnect the gas supply. In the meantime, I’m having to pay standing charges.
AF, Bristol
Your email trail with Scottish Power records staggering incompetence. First, you were wrongly told that you had to call the National Grid to get your meter capped before booking a removal appointment. The National Grid referred you to network provider GTC, which confirmed that removal did not require capping and that Scottish Power could do it, or appoint GTC to oblige for a fee.
It asked Scottish Power to complete the relevant paperwork, but the latter told you it could not act as a go-between between customers and third parties. Scottish Power then referred you, bizarrely, to the National Grid emergencies helpline. Eventually, it conceded that it had given you the runaround and promised to book an appointment.
Three days later, you were informed, baldly, that an appointment was not possible and that was the end of it, until I invoked the press office. An appointment was instantly conjured up and standing charges refunded, with £75 in goodwill.
Scottish Power says: “We’re sorry for the incorrect advice the customer received. Normally, a customer would let us know they had made the switch and we would arrange for the meter to be removed.”
Meanwhile, JR of Canterbury was being pursued by bills to his address, but in a stranger’s name, culminating, 18 months later, in a debt collection demand for £2,748.
Scottish Power eventually issued an apology and a promise that the demands would cease, but JR was then warned bailiffs would enter his home if the debt wasn’t settled within 21 days.
Scottish Power decided it could only close the account in the stranger’s name if he opened one in his own, which he duly did. The result was a demand for more than £3,000 and the threat of court proceedings. “My wife and I are in advanced years and this stress is making us ill,” he writes.
Scottish Power’s press office discovered the mysterious truth: the stranger named in the bills had, for reasons unfathomable, applied online to move the electricity supply at JR’s address to Scottish Power in 2020 and paid the first bill before cancelling the direct debit.
This means Scottish Power was supplying JR’s house all this time. He should have received a “sorry you’re leaving” notification from his previous supplier, which ceased billing him after his unwitting departure.
Scottish Power reduced the bill to £1,000 and JR has now returned to his old supplier. According to Citizens Advice, householders may not be liable for bills if someone signs them up to a supplier without their permission, and should take advice before paying.
Email [email protected]. Include an address and phone number. Submission and publication are subject to our terms and conditions | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/may/09/rochdale-gang-jailed-exploiting-girls | UK news | 2012-05-09T13:34:40.000Z | Helen Carter | Rochdale gang jailed for sexually exploiting vulnerable girls | Nine men who were found guilty of being part of a child sexual exploitation gang that targeted vulnerable girls, plying them with fast food, alcohol, drugs and gifts so they could pass them around a group of men for sex, have been jailed.
The men were convicted after a lengthy trial at Liverpool crown court on Tuesday of a variety of offences, including trafficking within the UK, rape, sexual assault and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child. They were part of a gang who groomed vulnerable young girls in and around Rochdale, Greater Manchester, and they were given jail sentences ranging from four to 19 years.
On Wednesday morning Mr Justice Clifton told eight of the men they had been convicted of "very grave sexual offences" committed between the spring of 2008 and 2010 involving the grooming and sexual exploitation of several girls in their early teens. He said the men were driven by lust and greed.
He said in some cases "those girls were raped callously, viciously and violently". The judge said some of the victims were driven around Rochdale and Oldham and made to have sex with paying customers, "most of whom were many years older than they were". He said the victims were at a difficult point in their lives, one had been in care for many years and one had left her parents' home.
"All of you treated [the victims] as though they were worthless and beyond respect," he said. The judge said one of the defendants told the trial he "didn't want to be seen with young white girls in his community in Oldham".
He said some of the men had said their arrests were triggered by race "but this is so much nonsense" and the prosecution was prompted by their "lust and greed". He made the point that the sentences he passed "apply to all defendants be they white or Asian".
The longest sentence – 19 years – was for a 59-year-old man, who cannot be identified for legal reasons. He opted not to be in court to hear the sentence after being convicted of two rapes, aiding and abetting rape, sexual assault and trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Previously, he had accused the judge of being a "racist bastard".
The judge described him as an "unpleasant and hypocritical bully" who ordered a 15-year-old girl to have sex against her will with 25-year-old Kabeer Hassan as a birthday treat.
One 13-year-old victim became pregnant and had the child aborted. Another gave evidence of being raped by two men while she was "so drunk she was vomiting over the side of the bed" and said she later cried herself to sleep. The victims, who were said to be from chaotic backgrounds, were raped, physically assaulted and forced to have sex with several men in a day, several times a week.
The takeaway worker Kabeer Hassan, 25, of Oldham, was jailed for nine years for rape and three years, concurrently, for the conspiracy conviction.
Hamid Safi, 22, an illegal immigrant of no fixed address, was jailed for four years for conspiracy and one year, concurrently, for trafficking. He arrived in the UK on a lorry four years ago and claimed to have fled Afghanistan because his uncle was murdered by the Taliban. Safi was released from a detention centre in Birmingham in March 2009, when he moved to Rochdale. He will be deported back to Afghanistan following his sentence. The judge said it was difficult to pinpoint his role but his relative youth may have been used to create "a veneer of respectability".
Abdul Qayyum, 44, of Rochdale, was jailed for five years for conspiracy. He was a driver for Streamline Taxis in Middleton, Greater Manchester, and was known by the name "Tiger". His barrister said he was a hard-working man of significant character in the community.
Mohammed Amin, 45, of Rochdale, was sentenced to five years for conspiracy and 12 months, concurrently, for sexual assault. He was a driver for Eagle Taxis for 14 years. He is married with school-aged children and has no previous convictions or complaints about his character.
Adil Khan, 42, of Rochdale, was given eight years for conspiracy and eight years, concurrently, for trafficking for sexual exploitation. Khan, who is married with one child, fathered the baby of a 13-year-old victim who believed she was in love with him.
Mohammed Sajid, 35, of Rochdale, was sentenced to 12 years for rape, six years for conspiracy, one year for trafficking and six years, concurrently, for sexual activity with a child. Known as "Saj", he would regularly ply victims with alcohol before having sex with them at his flat, where groups of men would gather and "pass around" the girls. He will be deported back to Pakistan following the conclusion of his sentence.
Abdul Rauf, 43, a married father-of-five from Rochdale, was jailed for six years for conspiracy and six years, concurrently, for trafficking for sexual exploitation. The religious studies teacher at a local mosque asked a 15-year-victim if she had any younger friends and would drive some of the girls to other men, who would use them for sex, despite knowing they were underage.
Abdul Aziz, 41, a taxi driver from Rochdale, was sentenced to nine years for conspiracy and nine years, concurrently, for trafficking for sexual exploitation. The married father of three took over from the 59-year-old as the main trafficker of the victims and was paid by other men to supply girls. The judge said he was an intelligent man who had been referred to as "Master".
He said he took a victim to a flat "and plied her with weed and vodka" and coerced her into having sex with men several times a week for months. The judge described his behaviour as repugnant and said an additional aggravating factor was the real and severe coercion.
The judge praised the jury for their careful and painstaking deliberations and excused them from further jury service for 15 years. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/may/01/rapidly-rising-levels-of-tfa-forever-chemical-alarm-experts | Environment | 2024-05-01T04:00:45.000Z | Leana Hosea | Rapidly rising levels of TFA ‘forever chemical’ alarm experts | Rapidly rising levels of TFA, a class of “forever chemical” thought to damage fertility and child development, are being found in drinking water, blood and rain, causing alarm among experts.
TFA, or trifluoroacetic acid, is a type of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS), a group of human-made chemicals used widely in consumer products that do not break down for thousands of years. Many of the substances have been linked to negative effects on human health.
What are PFAS, how toxic are they and how do you become exposed?
Read more
Studies from across the world are reporting sharp rises in TFA. A major source is F-gases, which were brought in to replace ozone-depleting CFCs in refrigeration, air conditioning, aerosol sprays and heat pumps. Pesticides, dyes and pharmaceuticals can also be sources.
“Everywhere you look it’s increasing. There’s no study where the concentration of TFA hasn’t increased,” said David Behringer, an environmental consultant who has studied TFA in rain for the German government.
“If you’re drinking water, you’re drinking a lot of TFA, wherever you are in the world … China had a 17-fold increase of TFA in surface waters in a decade, the US had a sixfold increase in 23 years.” TFA in rainwater in Germany has been found to have increased fivefold in two decades.
“I’m worried about this because we’ve never seen in recent history a chemical that’s accumulating in so many media at such a high rate,” said Hans Peter Arp from the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. “It’s accumulating in our tap water, the food we’re eating, plants, trees, the sea, and all in the past few decades.”
He added: “We all have been experiencing rising TFA concentrations in our blood since the Montreal protocol [banned CFCs]. Future generations will have increasing concentrations in their blood until some kind of global action is taken. Accumulation [in the environment] is essentially irreversible and I’m afraid the impact on humans and the environment won’t be recognised by scientists until it is too late.”
Last month, the German chemical regulator informed the European Chemicals Agency that it wanted TFA classified as reprotoxic, meaning it can harm human reproductive function, fertility and foetal development.
Denmark and Germany have set limits for TFA in drinking water but the UK has not. England’s water companies have been asked to assess their drinking water sources for 47 types of PFAS but TFA is not on the list.
Britain’s Health and Safety Executive has identified TFA as “a substance of concern, since there are indications that it might cause developmental toxicity” and the Environment Agency says it is planning a targeted programme to test for TFA in surface and groundwater.
A Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs spokesperson said it would continue to “assess levels of PFAS occurring in the environment, their sources, potential risks and to inform policy and regulatory approaches.
“Regulations require that drinking water must not contain any substance at a level which would constitute a potential danger to human health. Should TFA be detected in drinking water we would expect companies to react in the same way as for other PFAS compounds.”
But TFA is incredibly difficult to remove from water. “There’s no way to get TFA out,” said Behringer. “Reverse osmosis is massively expensive and not scalable, so the logical course is to stop the input.”
The European Fluorocarbons Technical Committee, representing the F-gas and chemicals industry, says TFA occurs naturally in large quantities in the environment. It says industrial use of TFA is limited and environmental releases are very low. It did not respond to a Guardian request for comment.
But these assertions have been disputed. The US Environmental Protection Agency says TFAs are a breakdown product of F-gases. Moreover, studies of Arctic ice cores show TFA levels have been rising sharply since F-gases replaced CFCs in the 1990s.
“Every time the industry says it’s natural, they quote certain scientific papers,” says Prof Shira Joudan, an environmental analytical chemist at the University of Alberta. She said she had studied these decades-old papers and found they only suggested it was possible that TFA was naturally occurring because of a lack of knowledge of its origins at the time of the studies.
“None of the evidence says it’s natural,” said Joudan. “When industry says it’s natural it’s a danger, because then no one takes accountability for the pollution.”
Ariana Spentzos, of the NGO Green Science Policy, said: “We’re following the familiar PFAS playbook by allowing reckless environmental contamination and only figuring out after the fact the trail of harm left behind. We are just beginning to understand the health hazards associated with TFA.”
Environmental groups are calling on the UK government to take more action to tackle PFAS substances. “PFAS presents a global chemical pollution crisis which requires urgent action,” said Hannah Evans, from the campaign group Fidra. “We’re calling on the UK government to prevent PFAS emissions at source, which includes revising both F-gas and pesticide regulations to phase out PFAS.”
The German Environment Agency recommends using natural refrigerants instead. Its president, Dirk Messner, said: “TFA is found everywhere – in water, soil, food and the human body. It does not break down and can hardly be removed from drinking water. However, TFA-forming chemicals are numerous and on the rise. Persistent substances from multiple sources like TFA fall through the regulatory cracks. To reduce the release of TFA into the environment, we need consistent, precautionary regulation, cross-sectoral minimisation and a substitution with TFA-free alternatives wherever possible.“
This article was amended on 2 May 2024 to correct a misspelling of Shira Joudan’s surname. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/jul/19/karen-black-hollywood-actor-singer-dreaming-of-you | Music | 2021-07-19T11:43:54.000Z | Andrew Male | ‘Odd, free and uninhibited’: Karen Black, Hollywood’s great singer-actor | “I
first met Karen Black in 1970 in New Mexico, on a film called The Gunfight, with Johnny Cash and Kirk Douglas,” says actor Keith Carradine, 71, calling from his Dodge Charger on a warm California afternoon. “I was 20, not old enough to drink, too young to vote, a young man with typical interests and I was stunned. Here was this beautiful, beautiful woman. I was intimidated. I was shy. I shut up and I paid attention.”
She would soon be directed by Robert Altman, Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Nicholson, John Schlesinger and more, and earn three Golden Globe nominations, but at 30 years old, with a decade of theatre and TV roles behind her, Black was only just establishing a name for herself in New Hollywood cinema in 1970. The Illinois-born actor had helped Francis Ford Coppola with the making of his first film, You’re a Big Boy Now; and played the flame-haired hooker in Easy Rider, tripping on acid in a New Orleans cemetery with Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Toni Basil. Most importantly, she had just starred opposite Nicholson as singing waitress Rayette in Bob Rafelson’s meandering 1970 picaresque Five Easy Pieces – a role that would earn her first Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress.
With Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces. Photograph: Columbia/Sportsphoto/Allstar
“That must have been the film Robert Altman saw that convinced him to cast Karen in Nashville,” says Carradine of Altman’s 1975 music industry satire in which the pair both star as country singers. “She was just frickin’ brilliant, you know? She’s acting, improvising and when she sings, she’s doing it on a level that is legitimate, and would have been acceptable at the Grand Ole Opry. First time I heard her sing I said, ‘Oh yeah. She’s got it.’ I mean, I got a record deal with Asylum Records after Nashville but I’m only hearing now, from you, that Karen went down the same path.”
I’d been telling Carradine about Dreaming of You, a collection of song demos that Black recorded with producers Elliot Mazer and Bones Howe in 1971 and 1976, now unearthed by her husband Stephen Eckelberry and California singer-songwriter Cass McCombs.
“I’d become aware of Karen Black in high school,” explains McCombs, 43. “I worked at a video store and I was obsessed with her movies. Then I met her through some film-maker friends in 2009 and asked her to sing on one of my songs, Dreams-Come-True-Girl.”
The pair stayed in touch and started collaborating on an album. “When she was singing she was really self-deprecating but in a charming way,” says McCombs. “She created this casual space where you could just let go of all your egos and assumptions. It was fun. The vision was to make a complete studio album. She told me that she’d been trying since the early 70s.”
“She’d done some demos with Elliot Mazer in Nashville in 1971,” explains Eckelberry, “and the next thing you know she’s filming in New York opposite Richard Benjamin in Portnoy’s Complaint, she can’t turn that down. She’d do the [recording] sessions then forget about them. I mean, she loved singing but she was an actress first.”
But if the acting came naturally, the networking did not. “She’d call up people in the industry just to say hi,” says Eckelberry, “Which is weird in Hollywood, where everybody wants something. It worked against her in some ways, because she’d just follow her interests. I remember the after-party for [Jack Nicholson’s 1990 Chinatown sequel] The Two Jakes. A chance to network, right? Karen literally spent the night having an animated conversation with the doorman. She wasn’t built for business.”
As a result, the 90s and 00s saw Black working primarily in little-seen independent projects, and low-budget thrillers and horror movies such as Steve Balderson’s Firecracker (2005, starring opposite Faith No More singer Mike Patton) and Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses (2003).
“She was never generic,” says Rob Zombie. “There was always something odd, free and uninhibited about her. When I cast her as Mother Firefly in House of 1,000 Corpses, she was someone outside the normal thought process. She was kooky, eccentric; you’d be talking to her off camera and thinking, what the fuck is she talking about? And then boom, action! And she would nail her lines perfectly every time. She’s just terrifying in that film: overly friendly and completely insane at the same time; totally inviting and totally demented.”
Zombie and his wife, the actor Sheri Moon Zombie, both stayed friends with Black after the film finished. “We’d go for dinner or go see a new movie she’d made,” he says. “I mean, the industry had changed a lot from the 70s and 80s and you saw that. She was from a time when people cast Dustin Hoffman or Michael J Pollard as leading men. Not Vin Diesel. But if Karen wasn’t getting the same kinds of roles it wasn’t for lack of talent.”
“What never went away was that she loved being on camera,” says Eckelberry. “I filmed her for the last three years of her life as much as I could. I filmed her while she was dying of cancer. Somebody asked me, ‘Isn’t that kind of cruel?’ I said no, because to Karen when you’re making a movie things aren’t so bad.”
‘She was a shapeshifter’ ... Karen Black and Cass McCombs. Photograph: Aaron Brown
When Black died in 2013, McCombs dedicated his album Big Wheel and Others to her and set about trying to put together a posthumous collection of songs.
“The original plan had been for [late American record producer] Hal Willner to work with Cass,” says Eckelberry, “and bring together all the songs Karen had sung in movies throughout the years, but nothing came of that. Then I’m moving house in 2015 and I’m confronted by boxes in the garage. Karen was a pack-rat and she boxed up everything, and there were boxes and boxes of tapes full of songs.”
“The tapes were completely mouldy and degenerated,” says McCombs. “Not everything was salvageable.” Luckily, the songs from her two 70s album sessions were saved. “My original idea was to adopt the Beatles’ Free As a Bird approach,” explains McCombs, “you know, playing over the top of these old songs. But listening back, living with them, meditating on them, I grew to love them the way they were, just so intimate and real. I couldn’t improve on them.”
If you’ve seen Karen Black in any of those early-70s films such as Five Easy Pieces, Nashville, Born to Win or Cisco Pike, you’ll have heard her songs, self-penned for each film and delivered in a hypnotic, beguiling voice that moves with uncanny ease from warm and intimate Dolly Parton soprano to a haunting falsetto.
“Karen sang all the time,” explains her friend, the choreographer Toni Basil, who first met Black when the pair were filming Easy Rider in New Orleans in early 1968. “So directors would hear her on set and suddenly they’d want to add a scene to include her singing. I assumed she was a professional singer. I didn’t feel as though it was something that she was hesitant about. She approached songs from an actor’s point of view. She’d perform each song as a character. She’d inhabit these songs.”
Inhabit is a good word. Whether on her self-penned tracks or her startling acoustic cover of the Moody Blues’ Question, there is an eerie intimacy to the songs on Dreaming of You. While her movie voice could be gentle, inviting, here it can also suggest something a little more unsettling, an attenuated spirit cry with just a little dash of folk horror at the edges. A good comparison might be Broken English-era Marianne Faithfull, Appalachian folk singer Hedy West, or the early-70s home recordings of German actress Sibylle Baier; spellbound female voices possessed of an uncanny emotional honesty.
“To me, those songs just sound like Karen,” says Eckelberry. “She was like that in real life. She couldn’t help but mean everything. I think Cass saw that in her. He just loved her, and I think that’s what made him want to persevere with this project, and for that I’m so grateful.”
When I put the same question to McCombs he initially says he just wants people to watch more Karen Black movies. “You know,” he avers, “have a Karen Black film festival, check out Five Easy Pieces, and the songs. It can only enlighten us, give a little bit more insight as to who she was.”
Who was she, I ask. “A shapeshifter,” says McCombs. “I mean, there were a lot of different emotions going on. But on a basic level, she was always sensitive to what she was doing within the musical space. She’s was attentive. That’s rare. Even professional musicians don’t always have that quality.”
The cover of Dreaming of You 1971-1976
As for where next, both Combs and Eckelberry say that they haven’t ruled out a second volume, depending on what tapes are unearthed next. “It’s a rights thing,” says Eckelberry. “It’s complicated. We’re still trying to license all the songs she recorded for various movies. Also, we only allowed one cover on the album, which was Question by the Moody Blues, but you need to hear her cover of Paul McCartney’s Junk. Wow, that’s so good.
“But who knows. There was also an empty box we found that just said, ‘Karen Black – Randy Newman’. Maybe Randy has those tapes. Do you know Randy Newman? Could you maybe ask him if he remembers recording with Karen Black?”
Dreaming of You 1971-1976 is out now on Anthology Recordings. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2024/jan/18/ghana-nigeria-struggling-beneath-weight-afcon-history | Football | 2024-01-18T08:00:03.000Z | Osasu Obayiuwana | Ghana and Nigeria are struggling beneath the weight of Afcon history | Osasu Obayiuwana | Between them, Ghana’s Black Stars and Nigeria’s Super Eagles have won a total of seven Africa Cup of Nations titles. Nigeria won the last of their three titles 11 years ago. For fans in Africa’s most populous country, who view triumphs at Afcon as a birthright, that’s a triumph in another lifetime. For their perennial arch-rivals Ghana it is indeed approaching a lifetime since they won their fourth title, in Libya in 1982.
Having dominated African football in the 1960s and 1970s, the 42-year Afcon drought has left Ghanaians nostalgic for glories past. Anthony Yeboah, a two-time winner of the Bundesliga golden boot, with Eintracht Frankfurt and Hamburg, admits that a failure to win an Afcon championship for Ghana is a huge stain on an otherwise sterling career.
“When you become a successful footballer and there are one or two things you do not achieve, there will surely be regret,” Yeboah told the Guardian. “Teamwork is very important. When teamwork is not working, but you just have individual players, you can’t achieve anything. This was the problem that we had.”
What happened with that 1990s generation, which included the footballing legend Abedi Pele, is replicating itself with the current Black Stars, which includes André and Jordan Ayew, his two sons. A 2-1 defeat against Cape Verde in their tournament opener on Sunday left the manager, Chris Hughton, searching for the right words to explain to millions of angry Ghanaians why they had lost.
“We can’t concede the type of goal that we did in the last minutes of the game, particularly at that stage, because we were pushing to get the winner,” Hughton said. “We conceded a very poor goal and hence a hugely disappointing start for us.” The former Newcastle and Brighton manager was later almost attacked by an irate Ghanaian fan at their team hotel.
With a record of four wins in 11 matches since taking charge of Ghana last February, Hughton heads into a potentially defining game against the seven-time Afcon winners Egypt on Thursday. After Ghana’s first-round exit at the previous tournament in Cameroon, a repeat of that very poor performance will go down very badly indeed.
Chris Hughton looks on as Ghana fall to a shock 2-1 defeat against Cape Verde. Photograph: Themba Hadebe/AP
“There was a lot of confidence that Hughton would significantly improve the team, but none of that has happened,” the Ghanaian football expert Mike Oti Adjei said. “I think that whatever happens in Ivory Coast, it is highly unlikely he will stay in charge. The relationship between him and the Ghana FA has been rocky for a while, and I think they will go separate ways afterwards.
“Ghana has won once in the last 10 Afcon games and lost the last two games against Comoros and now Cape Verde. Unless the team improves in every aspect, I struggle to see how they would beat Egypt.”
José Peseiro, Nigeria’s Portuguese coach, is having an equally torrid time with the three-time winners. Successive 1-1 draws against Lesotho and Zimbabwe in 2026 World Cup qualifying did little to bolster his battered credentials with a critical Nigerian audience.
Sign up to Football Daily
Free daily newsletter
Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football
Enter your email address
Sign up
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
“I believe in the players. Each team has more quality in certain positions,” Peseiro said before the start of the tournament. “My job is to find the balance [in defence and midfield].” The 1-1 draw against Equatorial Guinea on Saturday has only fuelled the fury of Nigerians who have been calling for Peseiro’s dismissal during the past six months.
“The present Super Eagles are not strong in two major areas of the field – the midfield and goalkeeping,” the former Nigeria captain and 1980 Afcon winner Segun Odegbami said. “There is little that can be done about the team’s strength without the influence of a few players with exceptional skills and abilities in certain areas. There is a dearth of creative and attacking midfield players, who can hold and distribute the ball well.”
While the lack of a creative midfield – and the critical service it provides – has been a consistent frustration for the team’s star striker and reigning African footballer of the year, Victor Osimhen, it was his profligacy in front of goal on Sunday that played a huge role in Nigeria’s inability to secure a needed win. “We played well [against Equatorial Guinea] but I don’t know why we did not score,” Peseiro said. “We had six, seven, eight chances during the game. Scoring has been a problem and we have to improve on this.”
The Super Eagles, and Osimhen in particular, will have to find the tactical elixir to end their goal drought on Thursday in their must-win game against the hosts, who will be backed by a full house at Ebimpé. For Peseiro, divine intervention would not go amiss. “Sometimes God gives, sometime God takes,” he said. “Let’s hope God gives to Nigeria for the next match.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/jan/10/heres-one-that-sailed-earlier-sketch-that-launched-the-blue-peter-badge | Television & radio | 2021-01-10T06:15:42.000Z | Vanessa Thorpe | Here’s one that sailed earlier … sketch that launched the Blue Peter badge | Cresting the waves for nearly 60 years, the jaunty maritime emblem of the BBC children’s television programme Blue Peter, remains one of the most recognisable vessels in Britain. Designed by the popular English television artist Tony Hart, it has always suggested adventure on the high seas to young viewers, serving as the flag ship of BBC’s flagship children’s show.
Now Hart’s original drawings, due to go under the hammer this month, have revealed that the first crew of this famous ship were in fact a band of egg-shaped pirates. The galleon, with its trademark billowing sails and streaming pennants, was initially drawn by Hart for another BBC project, according to the son of the artist’s close friend and agent, Roc Renals.
The ship Tony Hart drew for a 1952 BBC programme Saturday Special. The drawing became the inspiration for his famous Blue Peter emblem.
“He drew those in 1952 and you only have to look at them to see how he worked up the design in the late 1950s for Blue Peter: there’s no doubt in my mind that this is where it came from,” said Nic Renals this weekend, ahead of the auction this month.
Renals, who knew Hart well as his late father’s friend and a regular visitor to their home, believes all the artworks in the sale reflect the gentle personality of the artist and television presenter, who died in 2009.
“The stuff he did in the 50s and 60s was exceptional. The characters and caricatures he created were full of charm. He really captured their personalities very nicely.”
Hart’s early drawings of the ship were commissioned to illustrate a story called Hurray for Humpty Dumpty, a feature on the show Saturday Special, and they later served as the inspiration for the Blue Peter shield logo.
The nautical theme of the logo matched the show’s title. For “Blue Peter” is actually the name of a simple naval signal flag, flown by ships as they prepare to leave port. The sight of a blue square around a white square being hoisted up the masthead alerted crew and passengers that the ship was ready to make sail.
Tony Hart presenting Hartbeat in 1991. Photograph: BBC
Hart’s little blue galleon has been plying the ocean since 1963 when editor Biddy Baxter launched the badges on the innovative children’s programme, with its sailor’s jig, Barnacle Bill, as the theme tune. Since then badges bearing the image have proudly adorned many significant guests on the show and been awarded to hundreds of thousands of children.
The single image of the lone galleon, on offer with other drawings and watercolours by Hart, is expected to fetch up to £1,200. One other sketch, showing the galleon ploughing through swelling seas, is likely to go for £1,000, as is a third image of the familiar galleon anchored in an island harbour.
Veteran Blue Peter presenters, from left: Peter Purves, Valerie Singleton and John Noakes. Photograph: Rex Features
Hart was the much-loved presenter of the BBC’s Vision On, where he was companion to Aardman’s first animated superstar, Morph, and then as the host of Take Hart and Hartbeat.
The paintings and drawings up for sale at Ewbanks were given to the Resnal family by the artist and include a watercolour of Beatles’ producer George Martin’s recording studio on Montserrat, later destroyed by a hurricane in 1989.
“I’ve had a lot of soul searching on whether to sell or not over the past few months,” said Renals, whose father died in 2014, “But, while I’m reluctant in many ways, I have also been thinking about what might eventually happen to it if I don’t.”
The 55-lot sale is expected to raise up to £20,000 on 29 January.
“They are such wonderful pieces of art and they really show what an amazing talent he was,” said Resnal. “Having known him for so long, I think making these things public once more is the right tribute to him and my father’s friendship.”
This article was amended on 12 January 2021. Biddy Baxter was not editor when Blue Peter launched as an earlier version indicated. And the badges with the famous logo were not introduced when the programme started in 1958, but rather in 1963 after Baxter had joined the show. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/aug/06/rishi-sunak-tory-leadership-private-school-prime-minister | Politics | 2022-08-06T06:00:06.000Z | Heather Stewart | Private school polish and big dreams: how Rishi Sunak became a contender for PM | “Let me tell you a story,” Rishi Sunak says in his soft-voiced campaign launch video, highlighting his status as the grandson of hard-grafting Indian immigrants.
If he wins the race for No 10, the 42-year-old would be the first person of colour to be the UK prime minister, and the first practising Hindu, in a historic break with the past. Yet, in other ways, his story is as establishment as it comes: private school, PPE at Oxford, the City, the Tory party.
He was born in Southampton, where he and his family still provide a meal once a year to local worshippers at the Hindu temple co-founded by Sunak’s grandfather, Ramdas Sunak, in 1971 – shortly after he emigrated from India with his wife and their son, Sunak’s father, Yash.
During this year’s visit, in July, the then chancellor was being introduced to a group of young children, aged four to nine, when one asked: “Are you the prime minister?”
“We all burst out laughing,” said Sanjay Chandarana, the president of the Vedic Society temple. “I don’t remember what [Sunak] said particularly but obviously there was a smile on his face.”
It was an apposite question. Sunak resigned as chancellor 48 hours later, helping to start a dramatic chain of events that forced Boris Johnson from Downing Street.
There was “no hint at all” that Sunak was considering quitting, said Chandarana, who spent almost five hours with him. Sunak led prayers with his wife, Akshata Murty, their daughters, Krishna and Anoushka, and his parents.
“He just came as a normal person – no one realised he was there – he just went and sat on the floor in the middle of everyone when the prayers were happening. The next thing he went in the kitchen and made chapattis,” said Chandarana, adding that they were “perfectly round” and “we were throwing jokes around that he must cook at home”.
Sunak is joined by his wife, Akshata Murty, and his daughters during his Tory leadership campaign last month. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA
Sunak’s roots may lie here in the local temple but his self-confidence and polish, which have propelled him into the final two in the hard-fought Conservative leadership race, are exactly what his parents hoped they were buying when they saved up to send him to Winchester – one of England’s top private schools.
“You can see the success of it. You get an education, you get a good job, you have respect, you go up in your status, and things become easier,” his mother, Usha, a pharmacist, told a BBC documentary in 2001.
With his easy manners and willingness to work hard, Sunak became head boy and won himself a place at Lincoln College, Oxford. He told the same documentary – filmed in his final year at university – “it does put me in an elite of achievement definitely in society, but I’ll always consider myself professional middle class.”
One of his economics tutors at Oxford, who preferred not to be named, praised the young Sunak as “a very mature undergraduate”.
They said: “He was a really excellent student. He was really interested, he really wanted to understand, he cared about things, and he worked hard. He couldn’t have been a better student really. He listened, he absorbed things, he asked good questions.”
His former tutor professes to have been “very surprised” when Sunak popped up years later on Newsnight – and “rather shocked” that he was there to speak for Boris Johnson, having shown few political leanings in his student days.
While he may not have set his sights on No 10, Sunak does appear to have been determined to make plenty of money. He joined an investment club at the University of Oxford, which hosted talks by City high-flyers – and scored himself a graduate job at Goldman Sachs.
Sunak never rose to be much more than a junior member of financial firms he joined and, when he became chancellor in 2020, the Guardian struggled to find many people in the City who had come across him. This is perhaps unsurprising, as Sunak had quit finance by the time he reached his early 30s.
He left Goldman Sachs to do an MBA at Stanford in the US between 2004 and 2006, where he met his wife, Murty, the daughter of NR Narayana Murthy (Akshata dropped the “h”), the billionaire founder of the global IT firm Infosys. She owns a near 1% stake in the company.
As well as finding a fabulously wealthy spouse, Sunak picked up key aspects of his political philosophy during his time in California.
As he told the US venture capital journalist Harry Stebbings, of his time at Stanford: “Other than an appreciation of the weather, it’s also a home of entrepreneurship, creativity, innovation, and those are probably the most important ways being out there in the US changed my life in terms of the trajectory that I was on.”
It was then back to the less heady climate of the City of London, before he and Murty were married in what was billed as “Bangalore’s wedding of the year” in August 2009. Friends from Stanford gathered alongside some of India’s wealthiest tycoons and stars from the world of sport.
Yet despite the stellar guest list many observers noted that the “big fat Bangalore wedding” was almost modest for Indian standards. Murty wore “minimal and basic jewellery”, said one media report, perhaps in tune with her parents’ “almost ascetic” lifestyle, in spite of their vast wealth.
That same year Sunak moved to the US to work, before ultimately leaving for politics, in 2013.
In another of his slickly produced campaign videos, Sunak’s predecessor as MP for Richmond in North Yorkshire, William Hague, describes the selection meeting at which Sunak was chosen as the candidate, when hundreds of local members gathered to cast their eyes over the hopefuls.
“A farmer would be good, or a military man, some of them chuntered on the way in. We need a local candidate, said others, or, obviously they have to come from Yorkshire, that’s a given.” But it was Sunak, with his combination of private school polish and the big ambitions he picked up in Stanford, who clinched the nomination.
Sunak campaign video
Hague then recalls him working tirelessly to hold the seat for the Tories. Footage from the time shows Sunak listening earnestly to flat-capped farmers and helping out with early morning milking – always spotlessly, and expensively, dressed.
In 2015, Sunak and Murty bought a £1.5m manor house in the ancient hamlet of Kirby Sigston in his constituency. His daughters are sometimes seen riding ponies around their Grade II-listed home and playing with local children when they visit.
The Sunaks’ garden parties are one of the hottest tickets in town. They have been known to splash out on feasts of roast venison, canapés and champagne – but most get-togethers are less extravagant. “They have a nice house with a lawn leading down to a little pond and we gather there and have cups of tea and chat,” said Carl Les, the Conservative leader of North Yorkshire county council.”
Sunak arrived in the House of Commons in 2015, as David Cameron secured a surprise majority after five years of coalition with the Lib Dems – and having reluctantly promised an in/out referendum on what came to be known as Brexit.
In his maiden speech Sunak professed his belief in “a compassionate Britain, that provides opportunity and values freedom”.
Freedom featured again when, eight months later, he explained to his local newspapers, the Yorkshire Post and the Darlington & Stockton Times, that despite his erstwhile mentors Cameron and Hague backing remain, he was plumping for Brexit.
“For me, this is a once in a generation opportunity for our country to take back control of its destiny. Of course, leaving will bring some uncertainty, but on balance I believe that our nation will be freer, fairer and more prosperous outside the EU,” he said.
Sunak won his first junior ministerial post in January 2018, when the embattled Theresa May carried out a botched reshuffle.
One longtime Tory special adviser who worked with him at that time said “he got to grips with a really difficult policy brief really quickly”, but showed himself to be a workaholic.
“It is a bit of a problem,” they said. “I have never known a minister in my life to work until 2am.” Another person who has seen how Sunak operates said it was “essentially like working for a banker”.
Having made one winning political bet with Brexit, Sunak made another when May’s troubled premiership finally crumbled. Alongside Oliver Dowden and Robert Jenrick he came out early and backed Boris Johnson to be the next Conservative leader.
“The Tories are in deep peril. Only Boris Johnson can save us,” said the headline on a Times article written by the ambitious trio, all of whom were subsequently given senior posts in Johnson’s first administration.
Sunak became chief secretary to the Treasury in July 2019. Just seven months later he was catapulted into the job of chancellor when Sajid Javid resigned in disgust, rather than accept a plan cooked up by Dominic Cummings, in which Javid’s special advisers would be replaced by a team shared with No 10.
Sunak sits on the Tory frontbench during his time as chief secretary to the Treasury in October 2019. Photograph: House of Commons/Jessica Taylor/PA
He arrived in post at an extraordinary moment, as the gravity of the Covid pandemic slowly began to dawn on Downing Street. Within weeks, Johnson was urging the public to stay in their homes, and Sunak was announcing the multibillion-pound furlough scheme.
One official who worked with him praised his ability to grasp the scale of the situation. “He did switch gear and realise it before the rest of the system, and pushed and pushed the system to think more radically about what you might do in that kind of environment,” they said.
Mark Harper, the former chief whip who was an early Sunak backer, said: “The thing that tells me about his character, is that if you throw an emergency at him, or something unexpected or left-field – and frankly that happens to prime ministers a lot – he’s got the capacity, both in terms of his intellect but also his character, to be able to grab it, understand it, and then make a well thought through decision at the right pace.”
Less praise was heaped on “eat out to help out”, however, the cut-price meal deal heavily branded with Sunak’s signature, which research subsequently suggested may have caused a sixth of new Covid clusters in that intra-lockdown summer of 2020.
And at the same time, Sunak was having to wrestle with how to work alongside Johnson, a very different political character.
“The Boris world was quite a weird one, and learning to navigate that,” said the official. “I remember when he first really understood that what Boris said and what Boris did weren’t really related. I think he was frustrated, he thought it was not how business should be done.”
Boris Johnson and Sunak use hand sanitiser during a visit to a restaurant in east London as business prepared to reopen following a Covid lockdown in June 2020. Photograph: Heathcliff O’Malley/The Daily Telegraph/PA
And as time went on, it became clear just how out of kilter that emergency furlough scheme was with his broader philosophy – small state fiscal conservatism with a dash of west coast “tech bro”.
While professing himself to be a tax-cutter, Sunak raised taxes in the UK more rapidly than most other major economies, rather than see Johnson’s spending plans funded by higher borrowing – an approach deeply unpopular with Tory members, if leadership polling is anything to go by.
And he has repeatedly been found wanting when confronting the cost of living crisis, displaying a habit of what one senior official described as “underreacting to events in prospect, and then eventually doing what’s necessary when the time comes”.
John McDonnell, the former Labour shadow chancellor, who was Sunak’s opposite number in his early months at the Treasury, said: “On a personal basis I had no problems with him, but I found him overconfident, very full of himself but very lacking in political depth.”
Harper rejects the characterisation of Sunak as slow to react to a crisis, saying: “I don’t think that’s fair: it’s been a rapidly changing situation.”
One sceptical Tory adviser described Sunak’s politics as “paternalism – it’s, I know best, trust me, look at me, I’m rich and clever,” adding: “I think the problem with him is he’s very politically naive, and he has no idea that’s how he comes across.”
With Johnson’s premiership on the rocks over Partygate earlier this year, scrutiny of Sunak, as leadership frontrunner, ramped up – including of his and Murty’s immense personal wealth.
The Sunaks are worth £730m, with their main asset being Murty’s £690m holding in Infosys, according to this year’s Sunday Times rich list, which also calculated the holding should have delivered about “£54m in dividends over the past seven and a half years – including £11m in 2021”.
Until public outcry prompted a U-turn, his wife was a non-dom, meaning she avoided UK taxes on her international earnings in return for paying an annual charge of £30,000. Without that status she could have been liable for more than £20m of UK tax on these windfalls.
Sunak himself admitted holding a US green card – signalling an intention eventually to become an American citizen – until October 2021, months after becoming chancellor.
Some colleagues assessing potential leadership candidates were unimpressed at the awkward way Sunak handled being questioned about these issues. “It showed he has a bit of a glass jaw,” said one veteran MP.
Yet when Sunak resigned – minutes after Javid took the same decision – colleagues viewed it as a clear signal that he had not surrendered his ambitions.
That fateful choice, together with his zeal for fixing the public finances, may have cost him this bitter leadership race, with many Tory members apparently still regretting Johnson’s demise.
Already, MPs are speculating that if he misses out on the big prize, the Sunak-Murtys could set their sights on a sunnier life away from the public gaze, and head to California, where, as Sunak gushed in an interview earlier this year: “everyone is interested in changing the world, and they start with the biggest of dreams”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/aug/24/england-cricket-brendon-mccullum-zak-crawley-south-africa-second-test | Sport | 2022-08-24T13:00:35.000Z | Mark Ramprakash | McCullum may see himself in Crawley but struggling in spotlight is tough place to be | Mark Ramprakash | After the hammering England took against a well-organised and talented South Africa side, it would be easy to jump on the bandwagon and pour criticism on the players and their approach. Personally I commend Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes for challenging convention since taking over as coach and captain of the Test team, which desperately needed a shot in the arm.
They have said from the start that it will be an up‑and‑down ride, that bumps in the road such as the defeat by South Africa last week are part of the process. However, there are clearly some legitimate questions and areas of discussion.
‘We’re lucky to have him’: Stokes backs Ollie Robinson after England recall
Read more
It would seem England’s coach and captain have concluded that for the modern player the traditional qualities associated with Test batting – staying in for long periods, impeccable concentration, carefully building an innings – are no longer widely held skills, and that in asking them to approach things in a different way they are playing to their strengths. I am trying to be open-minded.
At Lord’s last week they seemed determined to apply the same ultra-aggressive approach no matter the conditions, the opponents or the match situation, and that does go against the historical approach to Test batting. With this kind of one‑size‑fits‑all approach you end up with a fast‑food version of Test cricket, stripped of many of its ingredients and much of its nutritional value.
The fact remains that the best batters in the world are Joe Root, Kane Williamson, Virat Kohli and Steve Smith, players who are consistent, who can assess conditions and adapt. Root is always looking to score, has always played in a very busy fashion, but it’s calculated and done with a very high level of skill. That has to be the ideal.
Quick Guide
England and South Africa teams for second Test
Show
Stokes talks about releasing the handbrake and letting players play aggressively knowing they will be backed, which is fine for Root, Jonny Bairstow or Stokes himself – established players of international stature. But Ollie Pope, Alex Lees and Zak Crawley don’t have that bank of runs under their belt, and this method might be harder for them.
Pope played really nicely in the first innings at Lord’s, but the following morning he went after a ball that was a good length and wasn’t there to hit. When a bowler is in the middle of an excellent spell, are these players being told to make something happen, take risks, knock them off their line, or are they able to sit back and say no I’m doing fine, let’s build a partnership? More of the great Test innings I have seen ebbed and flowed, had periods of defence and periods of attack. Sometimes you just don’t feel in rhythm and it can take time to get into the swing of things. Are batters free to take that time, or are their instructions just to attack? Are they really being told that 40 off 40 balls is better than 70 off 150?
Zak Crawley goes for a header during a game of football with his England teammates as they prepare for the second Test against South Africa. Photograph: Stu Forster/Getty Images
I have been thinking about McCullum’s own career, in the knowledge that a coach’s experiences as a player often shape their philosophy, the way they later approach the game and the job of preparing people for it. I think it took him a considerable amount of time before he became a consistent batter at the highest level – he played 49 matches before the end of 2009 and averaged 32, and for long periods his batting looked very hit and miss, and then 52 Tests from the start of 2010 averaging 44. He scored 28 sixes in those first 49 Tests, 79 sixes in the next 52. He was always a very positive batter, but for him greater aggression and greater success came together. Now his philosophy comes across as “go out and give it a flat-out, red-hot go and if it doesn’t go your way don’t worry too much”.
His comments about Crawley’s form are fascinating. To say that poor scores are acceptable because “his skill set is not to be a consistent cricketer” is to say that Crawley is being judged differently to pretty much every opening batter who has been selected for England. I’ve seen a few, and when I was there, batting in the middle order, it was accepted that openers needed to show a calm temperament, they needed to know what to play and what to leave, to trust their defence, to withstand periods of very good bowling in unfavourable conditions. It would seem McCullum is not looking for any of those attributes.
Sign up to The Spin
Free weekly newsletter
Subscribe to our cricket newsletter for our writers' thoughts on the biggest stories and a review of the week’s action
Enter your email address
Sign up
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Ultimately, though, whatever a coach says, a batter will be judged by runs. In my career I was in and out of the England side and know from experience – not just my own – that sometimes an individual either loses confidence or isn’t quite up to speed against the calibre of the opposition they are facing, and quite frankly will be relieved to be taken out of the line of fire. There are times, when you are struggling, when every match, every low score, every press conference, you know you are being talked about – and that is not an easy place to be, I can tell you.
This summer Crawley has averaged 16.4 in 10 innings for his country, and 24.2 in 16 for his county
It is tempting to see in the slightly awkward defence of Crawley now a reflection of McCullum’s inconsistency towards the start of his own Test career, and his resulting empathy towards someone he is convinced is talented. This would be understandable, and nobody is disputing that Crawley is a very talented young player, but there must come a point when a less bullish attitude to selection would be more sensible.
Even this summer, when pitches have been dry, the Dukes ball has done very little, and scores have in general been high, Crawley has still not succeeded – either for England or for Kent. He has averaged 16.4 in 10 innings for his country, and 24.2 in 16 for his county. He has no run-scoring under his belt, no successful innings in first-class cricket to refer to, and is just feeling his way.
Coaches of course will try to instil confidence in players, and encourage them to play to their strengths. I have never come across a coach dictate to players how they have to bat all the time, in all conditions, especially when having been picked for their country they are at the pinnacle of their career. If that is to be the approach, it will not just be me who struggles with it. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/nov/05/neil-young-every-album-ranked | Music | 2020-11-05T15:16:54.000Z | Alexis Petridis | Neil Young – every album ranked! | 45. Landing on Water (1986)
If other 1970s greats, including Don Henley, were having 80s hits with modern, synth-heavy records then why shouldn’t Neil Young give it a go? A question to which the obvious answer is: because it might sound like Landing on Water, on which perfectly good songs – not least Hippie Dream’s devastating portrait of David Crosby in his coked-out ruin – were knackered by sterile, unsympathetic production.
44. Everybody’s Rockin’ (1983)
As a monumental middle-finger to a record label that had demanded a “rock” album from Young, the rockabilly and 50s R&B of Everybody’s Rockin’ is pretty impressive. As a listening experience, not so much. The digital production is horrible; the cover of Jimmy Reed’s Bright Lights Big City abysmal.
43. Old Ways (1985)
It has its moments, My Boy and Are There Any More Real Cowboys? among them, but Young’s 80s country record – produced again, it seemed, mainly to annoy his then-label, Geffen – is overproduced, syrupy and cliched to the point of sounding patronising. His subsequent courting of the conservative Nashville market by making reactionary statements in interviews is best overlooked.
42. Are You Passionate? (2002)
Young in the mid 70s. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
This collaboration with Booker T and the MGs, which attracted much attention for the bellicose, post-9/11-themed Let’s Roll, is otherwise forgettable: competent, aimless mid-tempo songs; low on thrills. Relief arrives when Crazy Horse lumber gracelessly into view on Goin’ Home.
41. Peace Trail (2016)
You cannot fault Young’s recent work ethic, or his political commitment, but Peace Trail – his second album of 2016, partly inspired by the environmental protests at Standing Rock reservation – was a mess: sketchy songwriting, half-baked musical ideas including a burst of Auto-Tuned vocals, platitudinous lyrics. Good title track, though.
40. Life (1987)
After hobbling Landing on Water with a cack-handed application of synths and drum machines, Young proceeded to hobble an album with his old muckers Crazy Horse in exactly the same way. It’s infuriating as the songs were often great, as evidenced by Prisoners of Rock and Roll, a virtual manifesto for Crazy Horse’s primitive musical approach: “We don’t wanna be good.”
39. Fork in the Road (2009)
“I’m a big rock star, my sales have tanked / But I still got you – thanks,” offered Young on the title track. He’s nothing if not honest, but his sales might have held up better had his later albums not sounded increasingly dashed-off, with more thought put into their messages – here about pollution and the ongoing financial crisis – than the music.
38. Broken Arrow (1996)
There is a pervasive theory that Young’s music has suffered since the death of his long-term producer, David Briggs, the one man who seemed capable of reining him in and calling out his less inspired ideas. Certainly the first album he made after Briggs’s death felt sprawling and directionless: long Crazy Horse jams alongside bootleg-quality live tracks.
37. Paradox (2018)
Darryl Hannah’s incoherent film about Young and his latest young collaborators, Promise of the Real, is an endurance test to rival 1972’s similarly aimless documentary Journey Through the Past, but the soundtrack – a patchwork of instrumental passages, outtakes and live recordings – is quite immersive and enjoyable as it drifts along, although clearly only diehard Young nuts need apply.
36. Colorado (2019)
The latest in a succession of middling albums with Crazy Horse, Colorado features some incendiary performances in the band’s patent ham-fisted style – there’s a moment midway through She Showed Me Love where drummer Ralph Molina appears to stop playing by mistake – but it also features some painfully on-the-nose political lyrics, and not much in the way of decent tunes.
35. Storytone (2014)
Fork in the road … a shot from Young’s difficult 80s. Photograph: Aaron Rapoport/Getty Images
Indecision plagued Storytone, which Young released in three versions: one orchestrated, one stripped back, one with a bit of both. Perhaps he realised that the album’s initial Neil Young-as-crooner concept didn’t quite work, veering as it did between charming (the big band-fuelled I Want to Drive My Car) and schlocky (Tumbleweed).
34. Prairie Wind (2005)
The least appealing of Young’s albums in the Harvest vein, Prairie Wind is still one of Young’s stronger latter-day albums. The autumnal, reflective mood of He Was the King and This Old Guitar were presumably influenced by the death of his father and Young’s own brush with mortality after a brain aneurysm.
33. Silver & Gold (2000)
Another album in the country-rock vein of Harvest. The highlights are high – the brooding closer Without Rings is particularly fine – but there is a lot of filler, and the rose-tinted nostalgia of Young’s paean to his former band, Buffalo Springfield Again, is particularly runny.
32. Greendale (2003)
Hailed by some as a return to form – which simply meant an improvement on its lacklustre predecessor, Are You Passionate? – Greendale was Young’s rock opera, a grandiose title that seemed antithetical to its rough, bluesy sound. The songwriting is too uneven to sustain interest: Be the Rain and Bandit are great; Grandpa’s Interview interminable.
31. Arc (1991)
It was Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore who suggested Young release a live album entirely comprised of the feedback-laden intros and outros of his live performances. Mixed in the studio into one 35-minute track, it is not quite as confrontational a statement as Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, but it’s worth hearing at least once.
30. The Monsanto Years (2015)
Young’s latest backing band, Promise of the Real, sound fiery here, and Young himself is audibly livid, but The Monsanto Years was another album that felt rushed to the point that actual writing had been overlooked. The lyrics – raining fire on GMOs – frequently feel more like ranting blogposts set to music than songs.
29. Trans (1982)
Inspired by his quadriplegic son Ben, an electronic Neil Young concept album with vocodered vocals was an incredibly bold move, so much so that Young padded it out with more straightforward material. The end result was a curious mess; the loveliness of Transformer Man was fully revealed only when Young played it acoustically on 1993’s MTV Unplugged.
28. Hawks & Doves (1980)
Distracted by family strife, Young’s follow-up to the classic Rust Never Sleeps was a ragged collection of thrown-together country tunes and sundry offcuts. Hawks & Doves is wildly uneven, its title track flatly awful, but the good bits – the sinister Captain Kennedy, the beautiful Lost in Space, The Old Homestead’s lengthy allegory for his own career – are fantastic.
27. Mirror Ball (1995)
Clearly proud of his “godfather of grunge” tag – Crazy Horse’s combination of looseness and intensity was a key influence on the sound – Mirror Ball saw Young collaborating with Pearl Jam. The results were solid, but never explosive or edgy enough to stop you wishing he’d chosen to work with his former tourmates Sonic Youth, who might have pushed him harder.
26. Chrome Dreams II (2007)
Classic Neil: 30 years after declining to release an album called Chrome Dreams, he puts out a follow-up. Chrome Dreams II hinges on one track, the astonishing 18-minute Ordinary People. Recorded in 1987, it casts most of the album’s newer material in an unforgiving light, but the frazzled, ultra-distorted Dirty Old Man holds its own.
Young in 2019. Photograph: DH-Lovelife
25. Americana (2012)
An album largely comprised of folksongs dramatically reassembled – Clementine and Oh Susanna among them – Americana is sporadically great, occasionally sloppy and sometimes genuinely surprising. Improbably enough, it concludes with Crazy Horse setting about God Save the Queen, as in the UK national anthem, not the Sex Pistols song.
24. Neil Young (1968)
“Overdub city,” protested Young of his solo debut, and he had a point. It is packed with fantastic songs that Young would repeatedly return to live – The Loner, Here We Are in the Years, The Old Laughing Lady – but frequently groans under the weight of Jack Nitzsche’s elaborate arrangements. From this point on, Young would prize simplicity and spontaneity.
23. Psychedelic Pill (2012)
Crazy Horse made their name playing extended jams, an approach Psychedelic Pill took to the extreme: the opener here, Driftin’ Back, goes on for the best part of half an hour. Whether it warrants that length is another question, although Ramada Inn, which clocks in at a mere 16 minutes, is terrific.
22. Dead Man (1995)
Young’s first film soundtrack, 1972’s Journey Through the Past, was a mishmash of live recordings and outtakes that succeeded in horrifying fans who thought it was the follow-up to Harvest. Performed live to a rough cut of Jim Jarmusch’s surreal western Dead Man, it is something else: a lengthy, stark, occasionally violent guitar instrumental.
21. American Stars ’N Bars (1977)
The weakest of Young’s 1970s studio albums, American Stars ’N Bars matched tracks taken from the then-unreleased Homegrown with lo-fi home recordings (the oddly creepy Will to Love), leaden country-rock and one undisputed Crazy Horse classic: Like a Hurricane (although there are better live versions out there).
20. A Letter Home (2014)
It sounds like a novelty – Young recording cover versions in a 1947 vinyl recording booth owned by Jack White – but A Letter Home works, leaping from songs Young would have played as a coffeehouse folk singer, such as Bert Jansch’s Needle of Death, to a haunting version of Bruce Springsteen’s My Hometown.
19. Living With War (2006)
Swiftly recorded and released, backed by a 100-voice choir, the anti-Iraq war tirade Living With War finds Young sounding energised by the urgency of his undertaking and, one suspects, by the furore he must have known it would cause. A subsequent Crosby Stills Nash & Young tour heavy on this material was greeted by boos and walkouts from their more conservative fans.
18. Re-ac-tor (1981)
A Crazy Horse album that’s grinding, dark and repetitious (deliberately so; it’s influenced by a gruelling programme of treatment undergone by Young’s son), Re-ac-tor is hard work, occasionally uninspired and sometimes magnificent, as on the ferocious din of Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze and the concluding Shots.
17. Harvest (1972)
That Harvest’s huge commercial success sparked a bout of wilful, even contrarian behaviour in Young wasn’t so inexplicable: he presumably knew his biggest album was nowhere near his best. The songs veer from fantastic (the title track; Words) to forgettable, while the arrangements are slick but sometimes overblown, as on A Man Needs a Maid.
16. This Note’s for You (1988)
By far the most successful of Young’s 80s genre experiments, and a creative rebirth of sorts, Young’s bluesy R&B album is best known for its title track, an evisceration of 80s rock’s growing penchant for corporate sponsorship, but its best moments are subtle and understated: the atmospheric Twilight, the small-hours melancholy of Coupe De Ville.
15. Hitchhiker (1976)
The sound of Young alone in the studio, “turning on the tap” as David Briggs put it, and letting new songs pour out (almost all of which ended up being re-recorded elsewhere). The fact that Young is audibly, heroically stoned throughout only adds to the album’s intimate charm.
14. Le Noise (2010)
Produced by Daniel Lanois, this is Young’s best album of the 21st century, and it took him somewhere new. Lanois added the occasional disorientating tape loop while Young accompanies himself on distorted electric guitar, which he is clearly playing at ear-splitting volume. Bringing this freshness of approach to a solo singer-songwriter album resulted in some strong material.
13. Harvest Moon (1992)
Harvest Moon is better than the classic album its title referenced, and whose backing musicians it reassembled. The sound fits the songs, which are wistful and streaked with nostalgia. The title track, its riff nicked from the Everly Brothers’ Walk Right Back, is a genuinely beautiful hymn to marriage and enduring love.
12. Ragged Glory (1991)
Crazy Horse at their most gleefully primitive – Young apparently recorded his vocals standing in a pile of horse manure – rampaging through garage-rock standards (the Premiers’ Farmer John), riotous jams (Love and Only Love, Mansion on the Hill) and paeans to their own limitations (F!#*in’ Up). A blast from start to finish.
Neil Young: Homegrown review – his great lost album, finally unearthed
Read more
11. Homegrown (1975)
“Sometimes life hurts,” wrote Young in explanation of Homegrown’s belated 2020 release, 45 years after he recorded it in the wake of his split from the actor Carrie Snodgrass. It’s certainly downcast, its tone set by the opener Separate Ways, but it is also Young at the peak of his powers, writing fragile, beautiful songs.
10. Comes a Time (1978)
The gentle country-rock album his record company doubtless wished he had released as a follow-up to Harvest, Comes a Time is far better than its spiritual predecessor. It is rougher round the edges – Crazy Horse show up on the wonderful Lotta Love and Look Out for My Love – and home to a brace of Young classics, the title track among them.
9. Freedom (1989)
After a confused 1980s, Young’s stunning return to full, raging power was perfectly timed, chiming with the nascent grunge movement he helped inspire. The widely misinterpreted Rockin’ in the Free World was the hit, but Freedom is packed with killer tracks, from the lengthy, horn-backed Crime in the City (Sixty to Zero) to a ferocious, feedback-strafed cover of On Broadway.
8. Sleeps With Angels (1994)
Kurt Cobain’s suicide note quoted a Young lyric, much to its author’s horror; the title track of Sleeps With Angels was his distressed response. Elsewhere, this is as bleakly compelling and creepy as his mid-70s work, with Crazy Horse on surprisingly muted form. Piece of Crap, meanwhile, introduces Young the cranky middle-aged refusenik, a role he would frequently inhabit.
7. Time Fades Away (1973)
Only Neil Young would follow up his commercial breakthrough with a chaotic audio-verité souvenir of a disastrous tour. But Time Fades Away isn’t just a screw-you gesture, it’s utterly compelling. The songs – Last Dance’s churning, hippy-baiting din; fragile piano ballad The Bridge; and the autobiographical Don’t Be Denied – are incredible, potentiated by the ragged performances.
6. Zuma (1975)
Lighter in tone than the “ditch trilogy” (Time Fades Away, Tonight’s the Night and On the Beach) that preceded it, Zuma reunited Young with a revitalised Crazy Horse, sparking Barstool Blues’s glorious evocation of a drunk mind meandering and the brooding, majestic historical epic Cortez the Killer. And its lambent closer Through My Sails is the last truly great song that Crosby Stills Nash & Young released.
Hippie dream … the godfather of grunge, reunited with Crosby, Stills & Nash in 2000. Photograph: Michael Brito/Alamy Stock Photo
5. After the Gold Rush (1970)
After The Gold Rush feels like Young’s morning-after-the-60s album, but unlike the consoling tone of Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, it is gaunt, troubled and affecting. Amid the relationship woes, there is ecological disaster, racism and Don’t Let It Bring You Down, which, Young noted, was “guaranteed to bring you down”.
4. On the Beach (1974)
Despairing and disconsolate, but set to beautiful music: the shimmering electric piano of See the Sky About to Rain, the epic acoustic closer Ambulance Blues (“You’re all just pissing in the wind,” it concludes), the title track’s stoned, misty take on rock. For contrast, there is Revolution Blues, a ferocious, unsparing portrait of Young’s old acquaintance Charles Manson.
3. Tonight’s the Night (1975)
Young’s tequila-sodden, no-filter response to the deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and their roadie Bruce Berry is harrowing, extraordinarily powerful listening, the drunken raucousness of the performances matching the raw emotion of the songs. The point when Young’s voice cracks during Mellow My Mind is perhaps the most starkly potent in his catalogue.
2. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969)
Young’s debut with Crazy Horse is an incredible album: the sheer potency of its songs and sound; the killer riff of Cinnamon Girl; the way the playing on the extended jams Down By the River and Cowgirl in the Sand embodies their lyrical angst, keeping the listener utterly gripped even as they tip the 10-minute mark.
1. Rust Never Sleeps (1979)
The line between Young’s live and studio albums has always been flexible. Rust Never Sleeps was recorded on stage in 1978, then overdubbed. In truth, most of his 70s albums could conceivably be called his best – he kept up a remarkably high standard – but Rust Never Sleeps offers a perfect summary of everything that makes him great, its quality perhaps spurred by the punk movement he references on Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black) and, more elliptically, on Thrasher. Side one’s sequence of acoustic songs is breathtaking, and Crazy Horse rage in thunderous style on side two, home to Powderfinger’s heartbreaking saga of violence, death and familial bonds – arguably his greatest song. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/oct/06/the-flavour-really-bursts-out-chefs-top-seafood-sandwich-recipes | Food | 2021-10-06T13:21:28.000Z | Leah Harper | ‘The flavour really bursts out!’ Chefs’ top seafood sandwich recipes | Räksmörgås
Julie Lin, owner of Julie’s Kopitiam, Glasgow
This prawn open sandwich has stayed in my memory since I ate it in Malmö a few years ago. You need good mayonnaise (enough to coat the shrimp), crisp lettuce, cucumbers, a squeeze of lemon (add some zest too), chopped up big king prawns and, most importantly, dill. Layer on nutty rye bread – no need for butter. Dill elevates this dish to a fresh and fragrant level that marie rose sauce doesn’t quite reach. It’s not traditional, but I also like to add capers. The result is a beautiful, showstopper sandwich, perfect for serving to friends. Pair with a strong black coffee.
Steamed turbot, salsa verde and aioli
John Javier, chef at Bar Flounder, London
This dish is very simple to make. Get a smaller turbot, so that the fillets aren’t too thick, and steam for four to five minutes. Steaming, rather than frying, gives fish like turbot more of a silky, gelatinous “mouth feel”. Make a quick salsa verde using two handfuls of parsley, capers, gherkins, anchovy fillets, red wine vinegar, two cloves of garlic and olive oil. Blend together, then use to dress the steamed fish. Take your brioche bun – I like those from St Pierre – and spread either side with aioli. Add your fish filling, and you’re good to go. Pair with a glass of pét nat.
Balık Ekmek
Mark Greenaway, chef-patron of Pivot and Greenaway’s Pie & Mash, London, and Grazing by Mark Greenaway, Edinburgh
A traditional Turkish fish sandwich, balik ekmek. Photograph: Alp Aksoy/Alamy
I was in Istanbul when another chef suggested I try balık ekmek: blackened mackerel in a crusty, buttered, baguette-like roll, with lettuce and a side of pickles. We went down to the river and got one cooked from the side of a fishing boat. It was the whole fillet, with fish hanging over the edges of the bread, and it was just sensational. You could recreate it by cooking lightly seasoned mackerel on a barbecue and pairing it with tiger bread. You can pickle thinly sliced cucumber and onions with a mix of equal parts water, vinegar and sugar – just pour over and marinate for 10 minutes. It’s so simple but the flavour really bursts out.
Tuna mayo with sautéed red onion
Pip Lacey, co-owner of Hicce, London
A homemade tuna salad sandwich. Photograph: Oksana Bratanova/Alamy
When I was about 20, I worked at a Zizzi’s where they made tuna mayo crostinis with red onion, and it changed my philosophy towards tuna sandwiches. You sauté the red onions then mix with tinned tuna, mayonnaise, salt and loads of pepper. You can use any bread, just toast it and cover it in butter. I hate cucumber and it always creeps into shop-bought tuna sandwiches. I also love prawn mayo sandwiches: use king prawns and add coriander, they’re a match made in heaven. It’s real nostalgic comfort food.
Crab stick roll
Jackson Berg, co-founder and head chef at Barletta at Turner Contemporary, Margate
This sandwich consists of crab sticks, chipotle mayonnaise and shallots combined in a brioche hotdog bun. You can also cook mussels and add them in too, along with chives and coriander. If you can’t get your hands on chipotle, you can mix Tabasco or harissa with mayonnaise instead. I first made it as a “dirty bar snack” at one of my previous restaurants and it turned out to be a huge crowd-pleaser. It’s best washed down with a black velvet (champagne and Guinness) cocktail.
Rocket, parmesan and anchovies
Leandro Carreira, executive chef at The Sea, The Sea, London
Mash wild rocket and parmesan with a mortar and pestle, as if you are making a pesto, then smear on one slice of sourdough or white bread. Top the other slice with slabs of raw, unpasteurised butter – it’s much more flavourful than regular butter. Then fill your sandwich with anchovies – I recommend “00” Yurrita anchovy fillets, which are salt-cured but not pressed, so they’re still really thick. Conventional anchovies would be too salty and bony. I used at least four – but you can use more – it depends how much you love anchovies. I love the combination of flavours and it’s so easy to put together.
Smoked eel sandwich
Jamie Barnett, head chef at The Castle Inn, Wiltshire
Take two slices of good old-fashioned granary bloomer bread and spread thickly with butter, followed by mayonnaise. Next, mix a tablespoon of creme fraiche with lemon juice, chives, parsley, fresh horseradish and black pepper, keeping it as chunky as possible. Spoon over one slice and top with mustard leaves. Take your eel – I recommend using wood-smoked eel – break it up, using your fingers, and scatter across the bread. Serve with deli-style pickles – the sweet acidity of the pickles cuts through the eel just right – and a nice cold IPA.
Fried oyster po’ boy
Luke Selby, head chef at Evelyn’s Table, London
A fried oyster po’ boy. Photograph: James Andrews/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Fried, breaded seafood sandwiches like this are traditional in Louisiana, but over here the idea of an oyster sandwich is a little bit unusual. I like to use extra-large, good-quality oysters from Dorset. Coat them in flour, followed by egg, then panko breadcrumbs, then shallow fry before tossing in a sweet chilli sauce. Place inside a brioche bun and serve with ribbons of pickled cucumber and wasabi mayo – you can make your own by mixing wasabi and mayonnaise for a creamy sauce that has some heat to it. Serve with a beer.
Sole ‘katsu’ sandwich
Endo Kazutoshi, co-owner and executive chef at Endo at the Rotunda, London
Remove the crusts from two slices of white bread, butter them on both sides and lightly toast. Take dover sole fillets, coat in egg yolk followed by panko breadcrumbs, then shallow fry in oil – not too hot – until golden brown. Add a little tartare sauce and a small drizzle of reduced balsamic vinegar to both pieces of bread. Sandwich the sole between the bread and slice in two. Top with very thinly sliced courgette and fennel as well as a drizzle of great-quality honey to serve.
Grilled sardine open sandwich
Tomos Parry, head chef at Brat, London
Roast 10 plum tomatoes, then puree and leave to cool. Use a mortar and pestle to finely grind ¼ tsp cumin seeds and ¼ tsp black peppercorns, then add to 60g mayonnaise, along with the cooled tomato puree, and season with salt. Brush olive oil over both sides of sliced, country-style bread and grill until lightly charred. Then grill or pan fry four fresh sardines (whole or filleted) and season with salt and lemon juice. Toss a thinly sliced fennel bulb with 1 tbsp each of chopped dill and parsley, 1 tsp capers and more lemon juice. Spread the toast with the mayo mix and top with your fish, followed by the fennel salad. Delicious!
The Guardian aims to publish recipes for sustainable fish. Check ratings in your region: UK; Australia; US. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/dec/20/uks-brexit-transition-period-end-2020-eu | Politics | 2017-12-20T14:15:25.000Z | Jennifer Rankin | Brexit transition period should end on 31 December 2020, says EU | The UK’s transition out of the EU should be complete by 31 December 2020, the EU’s chief negotiator has said as he outlined plans for the next phase of Brexit talks.
Michel Barnier, who is negotiating Brexit on behalf of the other 27 member states, said it would be logical for the transition to end then because that was the last day of the EU’s current seven-year budget.
“The transition period is useful and it will enable the public administration in Britain to get prepared for the challenges they have to face,” Barnier told reporters in Brussels on Wednesday.
Theresa May has called for a two-year transition and agreed that the UK will continue to make annual payments into the EU budget until 2021.
UK cannot have a special deal for the City, says EU's Brexit negotiator
Read more
Barnier confirmed that during the transition the UK would have to apply all EU laws, including new ones agreed after 2019, without any input from British ministers or MEPs. Under the EU’s take-it-or-leave-it offer on transition, the UK would be subject to the enforcement powers of the European commission, EU agencies and the European court of justice.
Gibraltar would not automatically be part of the transition, as the UK would have to reach a separate bilateral agreement with Spain. Barnier confirmed that Spain had an effective veto on the future of the British overseas territory.
In theory the UK’s withdrawal agreement only needs the approval of a weighted majority of EU member states; in practice, all Brexit decisions, so far, have been taken unanimously.
“We have always worked with the view that there has to be consensus and unity and we want to find with all our decisions a common position with consensus and unity,” Barnier said.
The question mark over Gibraltar’s place in the transition has angered the British government, which argues Brussels is being inconsistent and contradictory over the territory that Spain and the UK have been arguing over for centuries.
Draft negotiating documents published by the European commission on Wednesday showed that during the transition the UK “could be invited to attend” technical committees and expert groups, when the issues under discussion concerned Britain. But voting rights have been ruled out.
Britain and EU clash over status of Gibraltar under transition deal
Read more
The EU wants “specific procedural arrangements” on fish quotas. Barnier said British ministers would be excluded from the councils setting annual catch quotas: “When there are discussions, such as [those] establishing the fish quotas, after the UK’s departure, they will no longer be part of the councils.”
In a blunt message to the British government, the EU negotiator stressed that the only way to secure the transition deal was to agree the complete withdrawal agreement, including citizens’ rights, the financial settlement and the Irish border. “If we don’t have an orderly withdrawal, then there won’t be a transition period.”
He restated his position that the UK should not expect a special deal on financial services – a view he outlined in an interview earlier this week with the Guardian and other European newspapers.
Barnier said the UK’s red lines – rejection of the European court of justice and free movement of people – meant the logical choice was a free-trade agreement in the style of accords struck with Canada, South Korea and Japan. Each agreement was tailor-made to the country, but was underpinned by the same logic, he said.
He dismissed suggestions he had been ready to negotiate a deal on financial services with the US when he was the EU commissioner responsible for regulating banks.
He said the EU had considered “developing cooperation” with the US through the G20 to ensure a level playing field, but “as far as I am aware there is no free trade agreement that would allow privileged access for financial services”.
The EU negotiator also noted Britain would drop out of 750 international agreements on Brexit day on 29 March 2019. These go far beyond the EU’s 34 trade deals covering 60 countries, which Barnier said would have to be renegotiated by the UK.
The 750 also cover the bilateral accords Brussels has negotiated with almost every non-EU country on finance, environment, fisheries, transport, data-sharing, agriculture and nuclear fuel.
In a dig at Brexiters hoping to reduce “red tape”, Barnier said: “It is always useful to remember that when we talk about the red tape in Brussels this means, for the 28 member states, that they don’t need to have that bureaucracy.”
Barnier will now send his draft negotiating guidelines to national capitals, which will sign off the document.
The EU will adopt its official position on future relations with the UK in March 2018, with the aim of agreeing a political declaration on trade and the withdrawal treaty by October 2018. The treaty will go to the European parliament for approval before Brexit day.
The EU’s strict timetable underscores the stakes for the British parliament, after MPs voted last week for a “meaningful vote” on the final deal. Any attempts to re-open the deal after October 2018 could run into difficulty.
Asked whether the British government could return to the negotiating deal after October 2018, Barnier said: “I think that we have to build trust for the right conditions to be in place for ratification and not wait until the end of this process.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/aug/20/trevor-kavanagh-sun-ipso-board-regulator-comment | Media | 2017-08-20T06:00:35.000Z | Peter Preston | Mix of free-swinging comment and Ipso regulation is not so clever, Trevor | Trevor Kavanagh, Sun political editor-turned-columnist, is the only regular writing journalist on the board of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso). It’s a queasy slot when Kavanagh writes about immigration, Channel 4 presenters wearing a hijab or, last week, “the Muslim problem”, a piece that sent more than 100 MPs into orbit.
In one earlier Kavanagh imbroglio, the Ipso board issued a statement. “Ipso is committed to ensuring that individuals who believe that they have been wronged by the press are able to seek proper redress without fear of retribution or victimisation. In this instance, public comments by an Ipso board member brought the strength of this commitment into question. This should not have happened.
“The board has received an apology from the board member and an assurance that it will not happen again.”
But how does Kavanagh keep such assurances and simultaneously say what he feels he must say, however obviously inflammatory? He defends his latest comments with scornful ferocity – “a concocted explosion of Labour and Islamic hysteria”.
That’s his right, and there is nothing in the drafting of the Ipso code that specifically pulls against it. But the combination of board member and free-swinging columnist still doesn’t work. It’s a ball and chain for both of them. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/feb/23/cyrano-review-peter-dinklage-joe-wright | Film | 2022-02-23T14:00:03.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | Cyrano review – Peter Dinklage captivates as letter ghostwriter in musical version | The deeply strange tragi-romantic farce of Cyrano de Bergerac has been adapted for the movies many times, with famous versions starring Gérard Depardieu and Steve Martin. Now it is revived again as a musical, with screenwriter Erica Schmidt adapting her hit stage version of Edmond Rostand’s 1897’s play, and Joe Wright directing. As in the stage show, this stars Schmidt’s husband Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister from TV’s Game of Thrones), who brings a piercing commitment to the role and he is persuasive in the way that the likes of Depardieu and Martin weren’t. Dinklage takes the title role: the poet, soldier and poignantly insecure would-be lover, finessing the original by showing that the problem is society’s attitude to Cyrano’s restricted height, rather than the traditional silly and unfunnily phallic big nose. This Cyrano has a normal-sized schnoz and perhaps simply not having the tiresome fake prosthesis makes his performance more available and winning.
Haley Bennett: ‘I always felt like, what’s wrong with me?’
Read more
It is set in 17th-century Paris, although Wright cheekily shows a theatre with an electric follow-spot light. France is at war with Spain, and Cyrano is the hot-headed soldier and swordsman (the script makes a lairy allusion to Cyrano’s, ahem, endowment) who is hopelessly in love with Roxanne (Haley Bennett), a friend since childhood, but too self-conscious about his appearance to say anything. She is being courted by the wealthy, cruel and charmless Duc de Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn), but Roxanne falls head-over-heels for Cyrano’s fellow officer Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr) who is sweet-natured but hopelessly tongue-tied. So poor, self-effacing Cyrano, wanting nothing more than for his beloved to be happy, offers to ghostwrite Christian’s passionately eloquent love letters and coach him in the language of love.
Interestingly, having been bowled over by Christian’s supposed love-rhetoric with all its extravagance, she teasingly tells Cyrano that his own language is “coded”, and there’s something here for literary theorists about Christian and Cyrano standing respectively for high-flown language and base reality. The result is not exactly the screwball comedy you might expect, but something slower and more solemn, which in its final act decelerates further into the heart-wrenching misery which has – for me bafflingly – made the Cyrano myth perennially popular and may yet make this a success to rival the film version of Les Misérables. Dinklage always holds the screen with his natural charisma.
Cyrano is released on 25 February in cinemas. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/oct/28/ripper-street-tv-review | Television & radio | 2013-10-28T22:00:00.000Z | Rebecca Nicholson | Ripper Street – TV review | According to the rules of television, there are only three characters capable of driving a plot in Victorian London: prostitutes, murderers and murdered prostitutes. When I couldn't stomach seeing yet another woman's body on the slab, I decided to swerve the first series of Ripper Street (BBC1), as its name and setting promised, to me, another period thriller that played to our fascination with the gruesome Jack. Yet I was in a minority – it picked up steam as the series progressed, with an average of 7.1 million viewers tuning in every week, making a second run inevitable.
And here it is. I had imagined something akin to The Crimson Petal and the White, only more straight; instead, it turns out to be a cartoonish Dickensian romp, with its three amigo law-enforcement leads frolicking in the muck and mire of east London, 1890. Matthew Macfadyen returns as Detective Inspector Reid, a serious-minded, watery-eyed copper who insists on paperwork, efficiency and being on the right side of a wobbly moral line.
He is joined in the good fight by fellow plod Bennet, played by Jerome Flynn, who we last saw embroiled in corruption and slaughter in Game of Thrones, and Captain Jackson, an American surgeon who seems to have wandered across from the set of CSI: Muttonchops. All three men have love interests, but these subplots feel flat compared with their interactions with each other. This is a bromance so epic it makes Watson and Sherlock's relationship seem frosty.
Ripper Street often plays out as if it's been assembled from discarded Sherlock scripts, in fact. The frenzied plot in this opener is a precarious tower of double-crossings and missteps. A police officer finds himself thrown out of the window of an opium den and impaled on a railing; he's from the rival Limehouse division, and there is some confusion as to what he was doing there in the first place.
Reid's dogged investigations reveal that he is actually part of a huge heroin-smuggling operation – heroin is, at this stage, all shiny, mysterious and new – fronted by Blush Pang (really), a woman brought over to London from Hong Kong against the will of her brother. Her brother spends much of the episode punching or stabbing people to avenge the family's honour, and while Blush Pang turns out to be a wrong 'un in the end, we're left with a new villain for the series, in the form of bent police chief Jedediah Shine, the man at the heart of it all. In one last twist, Shine might have an unlikely nemesis in the Elephant Man Joseph Merrick, who saw Shine bumping off his protege. It's certainly pacy.
Its profound silliness means it is best to approach Ripper Street as a graphic novel; it has the same cartoonish, over-the-top approach to violence and gore as Luther, for example. Jackson pieces together crimes with a combination of primitive forensics and gung-ho experimentation. He identifies this new drug "heroin" by having a go himself: there is a subsequent dream sequence involving billowing white sheets. Apparently, just one dose is enough to cause his face to transform into that of a lifelong addict, all red eyes, sunken cheeks and hollow stare.
I find it hard to believe that there isn't a knowing raised eyebrow behind much of the dialogue. The characters speak in a hilarious mishmash of Dickens mimicry and anachronisms. While Bennet might say: "He was frighted, and earnest in that fright," Jackson will talk of Blush Pang's "low self-esteem". There are panto lines to usher on the story – "Evidence collected there brings us here" stood out, as did "He's got something here in his spinal column." A surgeon admonishes the detectives for smoking in the operating theatre. It doesn't so much stretch belief as etherise it, lay it out on a slab and start jabbing a rusty saw into its leg.
But that's all part of the fun. Ripper Street could have been a horrible show. Its rapid cuts are nauseating, and the incessant soundtrack clobbers viewers around the ears for the full hour, never letting up. But there is something irresistible about its gumption and swagger. And there was a brothel, and a brothel-keeper, but she wasn't dead. So that's progress.
This week's TV highlights
Full TV listings | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/06/kings-speech-tory-party-homeless-people-labour-rishi-sunak-britain | Opinion | 2023-11-06T17:00:43.000Z | Polly Toynbee | This king’s speech will deliver the final blows from a Tory party facing oblivion | Polly Toynbee | The silk bag holds the government’s plans not just for a year but for “the next 70”, says the prime minister, whose sands of time are fast running out. Improbably he promises to “address the challenges this country faces” with no “short-term gimmicks”; yet we expect a king’s speech short on the long-term and scattered with infantile banana skins that Labour will skip over lightly.
Little that is announced on Tuesday or in the autumn statement will even touch the edges of what troubles everyone most: the cost of living, rising NHS waiting lists, the climate crisis, declining public services, deepening hardship, regional inequality and immigration. Watch out for announcements that ignore all that matters, or make things worse.
A country teetering in a permacrisis – part accidental, but mostly of the government’s own making – suffers from austerity, Brexit and maladministration. Four prime ministers and five chancellors in five years, with inadequate ministers in a fast-spin cycle, have brought us to this.
Paying bills tops public anxiety, but inflation won’t drop to the “normal level” of 2% until the end of 2025, says the Bank of England, which expects food price inflation to still be around 10% at Christmas, with the UK’s inflation the highest in the G7. Despite an almost identical growth rate, France is unhindered by a tax-to-GDP ratio of 48%, compared with the UK’s tax take of 33.5%.
And it shows. You get what you pay for, and the Institute for Government’s survey of UK public services reveals that almost all of them are declining, crippled by underinvestment since 2010. Councils’ services, such as social care, care of children, homeless accommodation, libraries and leisure centres are collapsing, as they tumble into bankruptcy. Spending plans for after 2025 make the outlook even worse for all services, yet Tories clamour to use the £13bn the Treasury gains from extra tax receipts owing to inflation for tax cuts. That’s a “fiscal illusion”, says the Resolution Foundation, since it’s needed to cover inflation in all departments; or else yet deeper spending cuts will have to be made.
Expect some sensible measures: reform of feudal leaseholds (watered down) and a renters bill to end no-fault evictions (but not until solving an impossible court case backlog). A for ever smoking ban, in which the legal age will be raised by a year, every year, is the one policy Sunak can genuinely call “long-term” for the next “70 years”.
Anti-terror security for venues may come with the draconian banning of speech that “undermines” British values, one of which is free speech. A crime and justice bill extending whole-life sentences and jailing shoplifters will add to overflowing prisons. The Mail on Sunday got a tasty morsel with a “new law to crack down on airlines’ sneaky add-on charges”, while the Sun got “cops to be handed powers to bust into phone thieves’ homes without a search warrant”.
The rest will be “traps” for Labour, notably increasing North Sea oil drilling. Is Rishi Sunak’s anti-green, anti-rail, anti-Ulez, pro-car, pro-oil posturing a winner? Planet-boiling indifference is not “long-termism”, while voters will see weaponising the climate as political cynicism: drivers also worry about fires and floods. A bill banning councils from boycotting other countries, actions often targeted at Israel, may taunt Labour, as may Michael Gove’s ban on four-day weeks for council workers regardless of staff retention. His threats to council CEOs earning £100,000 are a useless decoy to explain council bankruptcies. These aren’t even “sticking plaster” policies for any of the country’s critical injuries.
Sunak licenses Suella Braverman as his outrider from hell to propose random cruelties. But are there really enough people who want to rip the tents off homeless people to force them to change their “lifestyle choices”? Enough who want even harsher disability tests to drive people into jobs, when the UK has the longest working hours in Europe, according to a Fabian report this week? Or enough who want to cut benefits yet again, despite rising poverty?
Showing the “true Tory Rishi” is reportedly No 10’s plan. But that’s the true Tory chuckling along with Elon Musk about AI killing off everyone’s jobs. Focus groups discussing that event last week were shocked, say Labour researchers: people saw mega-rich Sunak on another planet from those struggling to pay bills, as he told Musk he wanted people to be risk-takers “unafraid to give up the security of a regular pay cheque”. Sunak has sunk too far for any revival, when everything he does only confirms a settled public opinion.
Watch Labour sidestep this ragbag of gestures as it enters its third stage on Keir Starmer’s long march. Stage one was remaking the party. Stage two confronted a flailing government with a trustworthy shadow cabinet. Now is the stage for laying out Labour’s own programme. His own and his frontbenchers’ conference speeches were policy-rich compared with the government’s thin offerings: doubters should peruse Labour’s growing menu. Housing and building, new towns and green investment are centrepieces, with insourcing public services and employment rights in the first 100 days to end the Dickensian gig era.
No 10’s “red meat” to entice undecideds looks pretty rancid. Everyone sees where the Tory party is heading, with 70% of its members telling Conservative Home they want Nigel Farage let in. It will be no surprise if those who elected Boris Johnson and Liz Truss choose Farage next. Nothing in Sunak’s leadership nor in his meagre prospectus leads his party away from this abyss; nothing to compare with Starmer leading his party out of its own electoral no man’s land.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
Hear more from Polly Toynbee as she discusses the legacy of Brexit with other Guardian journalists in a livestreamed Guardian Live event on 23 November. Tickets available here. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/nov/13/world-chess-championship-game-4-carlsen-caruana | Sport | 2018-11-13T18:33:56.000Z | Bryan Armen Graham | Carlsen and Caruana still deadlocked after YouTube 'leak' controversy | Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana are no closer to a verdict in their world championship match after playing to a straightforward 34-move draw in Game 4 on Tuesday afternoon in London. There was added spice away from the board, though, as a clip that appeared to reveal tightly held secrets of the American challenger’s preparation was uploaded to YouTube and into the public domain.
Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana play to bloodless draw in Game 4 – as it happened
Read more
Carlsen, playing with the white pieces, delivered a surprise with the geographically appropriate English Opening, a choice he’d played only once in 37 previous classical meetings with his American rival. A predictable line followed through 10 moves until the Norwegian champion offered a novelty with 11. b4, yet Caruana, who had struggled with time in earlier games, immediately struck back with 11. ... Bd6.
Quick Guide
World Chess Championship 2018
Show
The world No 1 created a queenside weakness over the next few moves, but he eschewed any risk in exploiting it and the game appeared bound for a peaceful result after an exchange of queens and bishops (18. ... Bxe4 19. Qxf6 gxf6 20. dxe4).
A series of moves (25. ... Rdc8 26. Rc2 Ra4 27. Kf3) during the final hour exposed vulnerabilities on the b4 and c6 squares that balanced each other out and before long the players agreed to a draw, their fourth in as many games, after less than three hours.
Allow content provided by a third party?
This article includes content hosted on chess.com. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'.
Allow and continue
“He seems to have out-prepared me with the black pieces so far so I’ll have to try harder,” Carlsen said in a television interview.
An uncomplicated afternoon of play at the College in Holborn began with controversy off the board early Tuesday morning when a two-minute clip revealing details of Caruana’s top-secret preparation was uploaded to the Saint Louis Chess Club’s YouTube channel before it was quickly taken down, but not before crucial screen shots were captured and disseminated on social media.
This morning a 2-minute clip from one of Caruana's training camps was uploaded on YouTube (now deleted). It featured various activities, chess included. Viewers could also see a laptop screen with a ChessBase file laid open. The greatest intel blunder in chess history or a hoax? pic.twitter.com/nwHL75M2cC
— Olimpiu G. Urcan (@olimpiuurcan) November 13, 2018
The footage included pictures of an open laptop with a list of openings allegedly researched by the world No 2 along with the names of three grandmasters – Leinier Domínguez, Alejandro Ramírez and Ioan-Cristian Chirila – who could potentially be working as seconds in the American’s camp.
The apparently accidental release immediately prompted speculation as to whether it was a ghastly blunder by Caruana’s club – one that would spoil in one fell swoop months of secretive preparation for the €1m ($1.14m) match – or a deliberate misinformation campaign intended to spread false intelligence to the Carlsen camp.
Attendees play chess at the College in Holborn during Tuesday’s fourth game of the world championship match. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA
Caruana was polite but terse in declining to comment when asked about the video during Tuesday’s post-game press conference. The champion’s response was somewhat more glib.
“Well, I’ll have a look at the video and then make up my mind,” Carlsen said with a wry smile, prompting laughter from the gallery. “We’ll see then.”
How yoga and hip-hop helped Fabiano Caruana challenge for the world chess championship
Read more
Carlsen’s manager Espen Agdestein, who initially declined to address the video, later said he believed it was a mistake by Caruana’s camp in a quote reported by leading Norwegian chess journalist Tarjei Svensen.
“I think this is real,” Agdestein said. “It can happen by mistake, and we’ve been close to making the same mistake. It’s more likely that it was a mistake than that it was staged.”
Norwegian grandmaster Jon Ludvig Hammer said he believed the information revealed was authentic, representing a devastating setback to Caruana’s bid to become the first American to win the world championship since Bobby Fischer in 1972.
“This is the opening library of Caruana,” Hammer said on Norwegian television network VG. “This was so much detail and in-depth information on an opening he has already used in the world championship match.
“It is obvious that this is relevant.”
Both players will look forward to Wednesday’s rest day before the best-of-12-games match, the first world title showdown between the sport’s top two players in 28 years, resumes on Thursday with Caruana playing as white in Game 5. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/23/100-best-nonfiction-books-souls-black-folk-web-du-bois-african-american-consciousness-civil-rights | Books | 2017-01-23T05:43:25.000Z | Robert McCrum | The 100 best nonfiction books: No 51 – The Souls of Black Folk by WEB Du Bois (1903) | Just as Barack Obama, “the skinny kid with a funny name”, seemed to spring from nowhere in the summer of 2004 with his electrifying keynote speech in Boston to the Democratic convention, so – on the printed page – did William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) burst into American life in April 1903 as the passionate spokesperson for African Americans. Of mixed French, Dutch and African parents, Du Bois is emblematic of America’s complex relationship to slavery.
The Souls of Black Folk is a loosely linked collection of essays that explored in highly personal terms Du Bois’s prophetic assertion that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colour line”. It became an almost immediate hit.
Du Bois believed that African Americans must always see themselves as they are perceived by whites “through a veil”
Du Bois, once one of America’s greatest social activists, has become sadly neglected, but his work was far ahead of its time. The ideas expressed here not only inspired the renewed black consciousness of the 1960s, exemplified by the differing careers of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but also contributed to establishing The Souls of Black Folk as a founding text of the US civil rights movement. This is at once a work of advocacy, rhetoric and literature, a vital thread in the tapestry of American prose. In the acclaimed 2016 novel Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, the narrator describes Sonny reading The Souls of Black Folk in prison: “He’d read it four times already, and he still wasn’t tired of it. It reaffirmed for him the purpose of his being there, on an iron bench, in an iron cell. Every time he felt the futility of his work for the NAACP, he’d finger the well-worn pages, and it would strengthen his resolve.” This is how classics of this calibre work their way into the literary bloodstream.
The young man who would become one of the most famous African Americans of his day had already had a brilliant career at Harvard, where his tutors included Henry James’s brother William, and George Santayana. In 1895, after a stint in Berlin, Du Bois became the first black American to be awarded a Harvard doctorate. He went on to publish pioneering research into the condition of “Negroes in America”, culminating in 1899 with The Philadelphia Negro.
Du Bois, following the example of America’s first great black leader Frederick Douglass, used the essay as a genre in which to address the race question. By 1903, he had accumulated enough material for the volume that would become, in the words of one commentator, “the political bible of the Negro race”.
No one before Du Bois had spoken so vehemently about the depth and scale of American racism, indeed its profound atrocity, or demanded an end to it so vociferously. To make this case, Du Bois seasoned his argument with autobiography, drawing on his own life, from his first experiences as a teacher in the hills of Tennessee, to the death of his baby son, to his historic, and bruising, split with the moderate black leader Booker T Washington whose Up from Slavery (1901) is another important text in African American literature. There was probably some professional rivalry there, too. The Souls of Black Folk is a commanding, magisterial statement of tremendous authority by a young man who is taking no prisoners.
The Souls of Black Folk might appear to be a collection of essays (each chapter also has a musical epigraph derived from “10 master songs” from the Negro tradition) but it has a powerfully coherent inner structure. Three opening chapters explore the slave history of black America. These are followed by six chapters of sociology, Du Bois’s scholarly forte. To give the book the rhetorical shape of a debate – thesis, antithesis, synthesis – Du Bois concludes with five chapters of “spirituality”, culminating in a cry of freedom.
Within The Souls of Black Folk Du Bois explores the dominant metaphor of “the veil”. In simple terms, Du Bois believed that African Americans possess “no true self-consciousness” but rather a “double consciousness” and must always see themselves as they are perceived by whites “through a veil”.
Donald Trump starts MLK weekend by attacking civil rights hero John Lewis
Read more
Du Bois expressed his ideas about this “sensation” as follows: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
This concept of African American duality is – writes Henry Louis Gates Jr – Du Bois’s “most important gift to the black literary tradition”.
In turn, the veil metaphor alludes to St Paul’s famous phrase (1 Corinthians 13: 12) about seeing ourselves “through a glass, darkly”. Much of the rhetorical power of The Souls of Black Folk comes from a writer steeped in the language and cadences of the King James Bible.
At times, The Souls of Black Folk aspires to a kind of poetry. In chapter 14, Of the Sorrow Songs, Du Bois addresses the Negro spiritual, those “weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men”. Growing passionate, he asks “Would America have been America without her Negro people?” He concludes with a passage that leads directly to Martin Luther King: “If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time, America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free. Free, free as the sunshine trickling down the morning into these high windows of mine, free as yonder fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick and mortar below – swelling with song, instinct with life, tremulous treble and darkening bass.”
A signature sentence
“If it is true that there are an appreciable number of Negro youth in the land capable by character and talent to receive that higher training, the end of which is culture, and if the two-and-a-half thousand who have had something of this training in the past have in the main proved themselves useful to their race and generation, the question then comes, What place in the future development of the South ought the Negro college and college-bred man to occupy?”
Three to compare
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man (1952)
James Baldwin: The Fire Next Time (1963)
Barack Obama: Dreams from My Father (1995)
The Souls of Black Folk by WEB Du Bois is published by Yale University Press (£7.99). To order a copy go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/nov/29/its-accurate-peckham-viewing-of-blue-story-applauded | Film | 2019-11-29T17:04:16.000Z | Sarah Marsh | It's accurate': Peckham cinemagoers applaud Blue Story | “Sadiq Khan and Boris Johnson need to go watch this,” says Joseph Kemp (not his real name), a youth worker from south London, of Blue Story, the film which sparked controversy this week after Vue and Showcase Cinemas pulled it following a mass brawl in Birmingham.
The move led to accusations of “institutional racism”, “negative bias” and “a systematic and targeted attack”.
Both cinema chains have since resumed screenings after the outcry.
Outside PeckhamPlex in south London, where the film is set, many leaving the 6.30pm viewing on Thursday, are – like Kemp – bemused by the decision to ban Blue Story, with the film drawing applause from cinema-goers.
“The film is a good insight to bring people who are from the area to relate to and also people who are not from the area who don’t really understand it. Lots of people have opinions from an outside view and a lot of surface level understanding of what goes on, so this is a big insight to show what it is like and how young people can get coerced into violence and crime,” he says.
Cinemagoers say the film – a story of two friends who get caught up in gangs from rival postcodes – is vitally important in depicting some of the issues that are affecting London. The number of teenagers stabbed to death in the capital has reached its highest level since 2008.
Kemp, who brought some of the young people he works with to see the show, says the move by Vue was “ridiculous”.
Tim Richards, the founder and chief executive of Vue International, has said the company “agonised” over the decision to pull the film, but had to prioritise the safety of staff and customers. Richards said he knew Blue Story was “an important movie” and that he had never wanted to withdraw it.
Blue Story director questions motives behind Vue's cancelled screenings
Read more
Amid all the controversy, focus has shifted away from the issues the film’s director, (AKA Rapman) shines a light on. Kemp says a lack of “education, resources and funding” are driving youth violence. He says the problem needs to be tackled in a holistic way, starting with communities, families and schools. “That is where the work starts … intervention needs to happen at an early stage, from primary school.”
One of the young people he works with, Cairo Arif, 19, says the film did a good job of showing “what was happening in the area”.
“I don’t think it glamorises violence. It does happen. There are people with knives and in gangs. But you don’t hear about it in the media, it is not being shown, so people seeing it for the first time, of course, will say it glamorises violence but it is actually going on.”
Cairo Arif said she thought Blue Story showed ‘what was happening in the area’. Photograph: Susannah Ireland/The Guardian
Another cinemagoer, Mohammed Muazu, 38, says he used to work with Rapman in a cinema. “They [Vue and Showcase] jumped the gun too quickly … they made a decision and did not even assess the film. For me, I am from this area and grew up here when this was all going on … the message [of the film] is positive.
“The message is: you are fighting for a postcode you don’t even own.”
He again highlights the main drivers of youth violence. “Austerity, a lack of youth funding. I have seen how times have changed from when the coalition came in and youth funding was cut in 2011. I worked in that sector too. In Southwark alone about 10 youth clubs were shut down – where do young people go after that? To the streets.”
Elsewhere in London, the topic of the film is also a focus. It’s late afternoon in a building in King’s Cross that houses Only Connect, a service helping young people and ex-offenders through music.
Tèsharn Dundas, 19, said a lot of people in his circle have been speaking about Vue’s decision to pull the film and then reinstate it.
“They wanted to go and see it and for some reason it was taken down [by Vue] … It’s stereotyping. They are thinking, there are young people with knives in here, Blue Story is on at the same time, so let’s put two and two together. They think they have been influenced by this story but that is not the case.”
He added that the film was “basically what happens on the roads”.
“It’s accurate, the fighting between school kids, between different schools. We went to school and we went through that … It doesn’t glamorise violence, it is what happens. You cannot glamorise something that happens.”
Deandre Holder, 23, agrees: “Everyone grew up differently in a sense … [but] we are putting out our story of what is happening today.
“I feel like the media is just using it to give youths a bad name but not every young person is like that or dresses the same. Sometimes they just need to ask the youths what is going on instead of painting us with a bad brush. People are not going to get anywhere if you keep doing that.”
Dundas relates it to what happened with grime music. A report into the UK music scene earlier this year found grime artists face discrimination by music venues, police and local authorities over unfounded fears of violence at their concerts.
“The government wanted to try to ban grime in the same way,” Dundas said. “They are stereotyping Rapman’s story and saying, ‘look, this is what you are making young people do’ in the same way they did with grime and drill music. They say it is influencing kids so they try to ban it. The reason why grime is produced and why Blue Story was produced is that it is real shit going on.”
For these young people, Onwubolu, is an inspiration and they see his treatment as reflective of the wider way young people are treated.
Ashley Darcy, also at Only Connect, said: “There are a million people like Rapman out there, but only selective ones are able to tell their story. I respect what he is doing as an artist and everything he represents but there are many people doing what he does but get overlooked.”
Dundas said: “He is putting out a story that represents young kids and gets shut down. That represents us lot trying to reach out to people and getting shut down.”
This article was amended on 12 August 2022 to remove some personal information. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/may/26/true-detective-cary-fukunaga-quits-new-film-stephen-kings-it | Film | 2015-05-26T11:08:15.000Z | Benjamin Lee | True Detective's Cary Fukunaga quits new film version of Stephen King's It | Cary Fukunaga has left the ambitious two-film take on Stephen King’s novel It, after he fell out with New Line, according to TheWrap.
The director of the films Jane Eyre and Sin Nombre and TV’s True Detective was reportedly frustrated with budget cuts and was delivering drafts of the script that would cost more than the studio wanted to spend. Fukunaga was keen to turn It into two films, with the first focusing on the characters as children, and the second as adults.
This plan was a concern for New Line, as it meant both a higher budget (the first film was set to cost $30m; the second one more), and the difficult job of selling a film about children to an adult audience.
Production was due to start next month, and Will Poulter had been in negotiations to join the cast as Pennywise, the shape-shifting child murderer whose most memorable iteration is a clown. Fukunaga had also hoped to cast Ben Mendelsohn, but a source said that New Line refused to meet his salary demands.
Another insider claimed that the underwhelming opening for Poltergeist, which featured a clown at the centre of its marketing, caused New Line to get cold feet.
A source said that New Line will not be quickly replacing Fukunaga, and the film will now be delayed indefinitely.
Fukunaga will now focus on his forthcoming fact-based drama about a father who hiked across the US after the death of his son, who killed himself after homophobic bullying. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/20/hostages-families-clash-with-israeli-politicians-over-talk-of-death-penalty | World news | 2023-11-20T19:41:24.000Z | Jason Burke | Hostages’ families clash with Israeli politicians over talk of death penalty | Families of Israeli hostages held by Hamas have clashed with far-right Israeli politicians who want to bring in the death penalty as a possible sentence for captured Palestinian militants.
The families said on Monday that even talk of doing so might endanger the lives of their relatives. The row underlines the deep divisions in Israel over how to deal with the hostage crisis.
Reports have suggested that Israel and Hamas are edging towards a deal that would bring the release of a significant number of the more than 240 people seized by the extremist Islamist organisation during their attack in Israel last month, possibly in return for a limited ceasefire and the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.
The US president, Joe Biden, said on Monday he believed a deal was near to secure the release of some of the hostages being held by Hamas, telling reporters: “I believe so,” when asked at the White House about a possible agreement.
Israeli officials have sent mixed messages, repeatedly denying suggestions by senior US and Israeli officials, as well as the Qatari prime minister, that an agreement was close, but also hinting that progress was being made.
“I beg you not to capitalise on our suffering now … when the lives of our loved ones are at stake, when the sword is at their necks,” Gil Dickmann, whose cousin is a hostage, told Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, according to Haaretz.
Yarden Gonen, whose sister Romi is among the hostages, told Ben-Gvir and his far-right party colleagues during a parliamentary panel that the proposal to introduce potential capital sentences for convicted militants would mean “playing along with [the] mind games” of Hamas.
“And in return we would get pictures of our loved ones murdered, ended, with the state of Israel and not them [Hamas] being blamed for it …. Don’t pursue this until after they are back here,” she said. “Don’t put my sister’s blood on your hands.”
When confronted by relatives of the hostages opposing such a change, far-right politicians shouted that they did not have “a monopoly of pain” in comments that appalled many Israelis.
As many as 300 Hamas militants are being held by Israel, military officials have said. Some were involved in the bloody attacks last month, which killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians in their homes or at a dance party.
The Qatari prime minister on Sunday said that only minor differences between Hamas and Israel remained to be resolved, but the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said no deal had been reached.
Netanyahu is under domestic pressure to free the hostages. The challenge of doing this while completing the goal of eliminating Hamas as a military force capable of striking Israel again has led to disagreements among Israeli policymakers and the security establishment, as well as society more broadly.
Senior military officers say the two objectives can be reconciled as military pressure on Hamas would lead to concessions over hostages. It is not clear that all Israeli cabinet ministers agree.
Israeli media have reported divisions among senior ministers, with some favouring accepting the deal reportedly tabled by Qatar before international pressure or rising military casualties weaken Israel’s bargaining position. Others argue that Israel should hold out for better terms and that to accept those on offer would set a precedent for future negotiations to obtain the freedom of any remaining hostages.
US officials said a hostage deal appeared to be close, but also pointed out that it has appeared close for several days now. It was getting final agreement from the Israeli side, they said, that appeared to be the last hurdle.
The White House deputy national security adviser, Jon Finer, on Sunday said any deal to free “considerably more than 12” hostages would be likely to also include an extended pause in the fighting and allow for the distribution of humanitarian assistance in Gaza.
A staged release would be the first de-escalatory step since Hamas launched its assault on Israel on 7 October. So far, only four hostages have been released. It is thought 239 people from 26 different countries are still being held, including some dual nationals. One Israeli soldier was rescued early in the conflict.
Ben-Gvir’s proposal on capital punishment has moved slowly in parliament. The conservative Likud party of Netanyahu, which depends on support from far-right parties to remain in power, has shown little interest in advancing it during its long rule.
Israel’s justice ministry said earlier this month that officials were considering different procedures for putting suspected militants on trial and securing “punishments befitting the severity of the horrors committed”.
The hostages have already been threatened with execution by Hamas and are at risk of being hurt or killed in the military offensive launched by Israel. Israeli officials have said that two hostages were murdered by Hamas after being captured, citing forensic examination of their remains found by Israeli troops in northern Gaza.
The death penalty remains on Israel’s law books but the only ever court-ordered execution in Israel was that, in 1962, of Adolf Eichmann, a convicted Nazi war criminal who played a central role in the administration of the Holocaust.
Israeli military courts, which often handle cases involving Palestinians, have the power to hand down the death penalty by a unanimous decision of three judges, although this has never been implemented.
Hawkish politicians have, over the years, proposed making capital sentences easier to award, claiming executions deter terrorism.
Doing this was “more critical now than ever”, Ben-Gvir said, “first of all, for the sake of those murdered and who fell in the line of duty and, no less, so that there will be no more people kidnapped.”
Linor Dan-Calderon, three of whose relatives are hostages, accused Ben-Gvir’s party of having “confused priorities”.
“You’ve gotten mixed up, because we are a nation that pursues life, not one that pursues revenge – even if, in the past, we did something to Eichmann,” she said. “I am simply asking you to drop this from the agenda.”
Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition, said the heated argument in parliament on Monday was “shameful, a disgrace, and a terrible insult not only to the families of hostages but also to the entire state of Israel”.
Lapid said: “This is what happens when you take the craziest and most extreme people in the country and let them be in power.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/jan/27/phantasm-matthew-locke-consorts-flat-and-sharp-review-neave-trio-a-room-of-her-own-boulanger-chaminade-tailleferre-smyth | Music | 2024-01-27T12:00:34.000Z | Fiona Maddocks | Classical home listening: Phantasm: Consorts Flat and Sharp; Neave Trio: A Room of Her Own | Never assume that because viol music, by its nature, is soft, it is therefore safe and gentle. On Consorts Flat and Sharp (Linn), their second album of music by the English composer Matthew Locke (c1621-77), the viol consort Phantasm, directed by Laurence Dreyfus, demonstrate Locke’s striking originality and his tendency to swerve from the mainstream, freely breaking rules of harmony and taste. Born in Exeter, he wrote music for the London stage and spent a turbulent time in Oxford as part of Charles II’s court, which had upped sticks en masse to escape the great plague.
Our ears may not be attuned to Locke’s radicalism, but the more you listen, the more his stylistic adventures draw you in. Phantasm, joined by Elizabeth Kenny on theorbo, here complete the Little Consort of Three Parts (1656), for treble, tenor and bass viols, and groups suites from that collection with three from the Flats Consort for My Cousin Kemble. You won’t hear this music done better.
On A Room of Her Own (Chandos), a follow-up to their 2019 album Her Voice (piano trios by Farrenc, Beach and Clarke), the Neave Trio play works by Lili Boulanger (1893-1918), Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944), Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983) and Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), composers whose names, until recently, were better known than their music.
Smyth’s Trio in D minor has big-boned, Brahms-like richness, especially in the drama of the finale. Boulanger’s D’un matin de printemps and D’un soir triste are usually heard as orchestral works but adapt well to smaller forces. Chaminade’s early Trio No 1, Op 11 is fluent and airborne. Taillerferre’s Trio, revised at the end of her long life, encapsulates her stylistic variety. These chamber works are still not in the mainstream. The Neave Trio – Anna Williams (violin), Mikhail Veslov (cello) and Eri Nakamura (piano) – put their case eloquently.
Don’t miss Radio 3’s recorded broadcast of the new horn concerto by Gavin Higgins, written for Ben Goldscheider, which attracted widespread praise at its premiere earlier this month. Goldscheider is joined by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conductor Jaime Martin. Tuesday, 7.30pm/BBC Sounds. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/feb/15/worldcinema | Film | 2008-02-15T00:12:52.000Z | Phil Hoad | Continental drift | It's touch and go whether Fatih Akın is going to make it to a special screening of his new film, The Edge of Heaven. London's Turkish community are out in force, but someone announces he's been held up at customs. Happily, when the lights come up, Akın is out front. The following morning I ask him what the problem was. He chucks a chewed-up ID card across the table. "It looks a bit rocky. You cannot read my address any more," he says, "They didn't search me, but they were, like, 'You're German, but with a foreign name. Where do you come from - Greece?'"
The difficulty of crossing borders has become the 34-year-old Turkish-German director's specialist subject - and his ID will be pressed into many more palms in the next few months as his international profile grows. The raffish, party-loving son of postwar Hamburg, Akın became a fashionable spokesperson for Germany's 2.7 million Turkish immigrants after the breakout success of 2004's Head-On, a rage-filled, Berlinale-winning flick about two Turks in a fake marriage. The Edge of Heaven - also concerned with dislocation and identity, but more serene with it and garlanded with a Cannes prize - should cement his status.
The Edge of Heaven is a tightly structured dance of coincidence, presence and absence - of the kind that screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros; Babel) has made his name with. It kicks off with Ali, a widowed Turkish pensioner who pays prostitute Yeter to be his full-time companion. He falls ill with heart trouble, and she befriends his son Nejat, a professor of German. Ali kills her in a jealous rage; Nejat leaves for Istanbul to find her daughter Ayten to make amends. But she, a hot-headed political activist, has just fled Turkey and headed to Hamburg in search of her mother; left penniless and scrounging food, she falls in love with student Lotte.
Akın paints these itinerant lives as vividly as in his earlier work, but has a bigger framework in mind now. "I don't feel comfortable with the immigration cinema label at all," he says. "Globalisation, I think, explains it more. It's a continental dialogue." Akın's development as a director, in fact, proves this, if nothing else: Head-On was inspired by the careening energy of the Mexican-made Amores Perros. And, as much as it broods on the constrained circumstances and torn identities that his characters often struggle with, The Edge of Heaven, set against an exhilarating global canvas, feels liberated: coffins trundle between continents on airplane luggage conveyors up into planes as other characters go the other way, while spacey, Antonioni-esque driving sequences accompany Nejat digging deeper into his Turkish heritage.
The complex plot coalesced in Akın's mind on a long road trip in 2005 to the Black sea with his father and a friend. He had read in Bob Dylan's Chronicles that the singer's grandmother was from Trabzon, toward the Georgian border, "and I said, 'Get out of here - my grandparents are from there.' So if Dylan was from there, I had to go there and see what was going on."
Akın says he had been toying with several projects after he finished Head-On and Crossing the Bridge, his 2004 documentary about the Istanbul music scene, and had several disparate elements in mind: he wanted to write about the political resistance groups he met while filming Crossing the Bridge; he wanted to work with Turkish acting giant Tuncel Kurtiz (who plays Ali), as well as Fassbinder's muse Hannah Schygulla, who took the role of Lotte's mother.
Driving the 600 or so miles from Istanbul to Trabzon - where Nejat also ends up in the film - the stew thickened, and the film assumed its multi-layered form. Not only was Akın's own father around during the trip, but his pregnant wife, Monika, was in her third trimester at the time, and the director finished the bulk of the script later in the year at home in Hamburg, typing with his newborn son beneath his desk.
So the idea of the links between generations took centre stage, especially as Lotte's mother goes to Istanbul in search of her daughter, who has taken off after her lover. "I was scratching at this theme in my past work, but I never worked it out. Like, fathers and sons have their conflict and here I am, still with a father, but suddenly I am a father, so I'm in between. Like between Germany and Turkey. I'm always in between things," he says.
This can make pleasing everyone a bit tricky: his films tend to meet with a better reception in Turkey itself than among the emigres, perhaps because any uprooted traditionalists are more liable to be rubbed up by Akın's unvarnished, street-level portraits. He sees it as purely a matter of numbers, the same problem faced by any director working outside the mainstream: "It's just the avant-garde who like my films. In Turkey, you have 60 million people and an avant-garde of a couple of hundred thousand. But in Germany, you have just 2.5 million. Most came here for economic reasons and work, and they're not from well-educated circumstances - so the audience for my films is probably only 2,000 to 3,000." Ironically, the divide came in handy during filming: "Imagine you're Turkey, and you're the EU," is how he would instruct his actors.
Born in Hamburg, Akın rebelled against his Muslim upbringing and left home with his older brother at 18 to work as a waiter, bartender and DJ on the city's club scene while he launched his film-making career ("I was very interested in the night, always, the creatures of the night"). But he owes them his obsession with film: his father moved to Germany in January 1966 to work in a factory and his mother followed two years later. ("Were the Beatles in Hamburg then?" he wonders - shoehorning in the obligatory Akın rock'n'roll reference point. The answer, of course, is no.) Whenever friends or relatives came round to visit in the 80s, they would bring plastic bags full of VHS tapes; the only opportunity to stay in touch with Turkish culture. Five films in one sitting was the average. "We would get quadrant eyes, and everyone was crying with the brutality and the suffering of the things we had seen. Completely overloaded," he says. But as a film-maker, his Proustian madeleine is the first 15 minutes of Bruce Lee's Fist of Fury. His cousin only had the first reel on Super-8, and they watched it hundreds of times: "When you're that age - five - and you see him kicking all that ass, that's like taking speed for a kid. That's holy."
Like Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, Akın is of the VHS generation, and still keeps a youthful appearance - he looks like a slacker-dressed hybrid of Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie. He raced out of the blocks and had three features under his belt by the time he was 30. It began when he was spotted operating a boom mike for a small German production company and given the money to make a short. His debut feature, Short Sharp Shock, followed quickly afterwards, heavily indebted to Mean Streets. Scorsese was an early role model, "not just because of the films he was doing, but the whole person: the Italian background and the things he was saying and all the cocaine use," he says, laughing.
But what really stood out - beyond a weakness for voguish violence and the pithy rapport between its Greek-Turkish-Serbian protagonists - was that Akın was not afraid to put his feelings up on screen. He listened to criticism that Short Sharp Shock was too masculine and worked on writing female characters - which he does persuasively now. He draws from a well of humanism that gives his work a deeper resonance: Head-On deepens from a comedy into a burnt-out personal odyssey, and The Edge of Heaven's restless plot acquires affecting metaphysical overtones.
As for the metaphysics, he had a little, unwanted, help from real life. Andreas Thiel, Akın's longtime producer, had a fatal stroke six days before the end of the shoot, and the director found himself in the odd position of shooting things - a casket in transit - that were really happening elsewhere. He may have defected to the church of rock because his father "wanted us to pray like fuck", but through the film's distinct spiritual halo, maybe the remnants of his parent's religious beliefs can still be glimpsed. He says he can still be caught glancing upwards, occasionally: "I believe the place where babies come from and the place where we go when we die are the same," he announced to the crowd at the screening. At any rate, his dad must have been pleased when he won an award for best "promoting human values" at Cannes last year.
In person, of course, he's got the right to generalise as much as he likes, and gets worked up sketching a scatty overview of 21st-century apocalypse. "The amount of people coming into Europe is only going to rise. And there are certain groups and extremists who don't want that. Sarkozy has been using this kind of populism. There's always been this, ever since the stone ages, when you had this fear of foreign tribes coming and raping your wife and taking your land. We have to deal with that. This is my point. We have to deal with this mass movement without killing each other."
In the quest for answers, he's being swept along towards the ultimate immigrant's destination. He is contributing a short film to New York, I Love You, the follow-up to 2006's Paris Je T'Aime, and is sizing up a feature about Ellis Island, with a mind to building life-size replica of the gateway to America in a Berlin film studio. There's always the chance Akın will seek fast-track entry through the time-honoured Hollywood door, but we needn't worry too much: he may seem like the kind of guy to go with the flow, but you know he'll be sizing up his new surroundings with a concerned eye.
· The Edge of Heaven is released on February 22 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/03/greece-referendum-highest-court-rule-legality | World news | 2015-07-03T09:01:31.000Z | Jennifer Rankin | Greece's highest court to rule on legality of referendum | Greece’s highest administrative court will rule on whether the country’s bailout referendum violates the constitution, amid growing concern that the hastily organised vote falls short of democratic standards.
With less than 48 hours until polling day on Sunday, the yes and no sides will stage large rallies in Athens on Friday evening. The prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, is expected to turn out at the no rally, having attacked his eurozone partners for trying to “blackmail” his country into accepting a bad deal.
Greeks are being asked whether to support an EU bailout deal that would grant the debt-stricken country money in exchange for spending cuts and further reform.
However, the bailout plan no longer exists, having lapsed on 30 June. Eurozone leaders have lined up to say that voting no means saying goodbye to Greece’s eurozone membership, but Greece’s radical left Syriza-led government insists a no vote would simply boost its negotiating hand.
Later on Friday, the council of state will determine whether the vote violates Greece’s constitution, which bans referendums on fiscal policy.
Europe’s top human rights body, the Council of Europe, has already said the vote falls short of international standards, because the poll was called at short notice and the questions asked are not clear. The Strasbourg-based organisation, which is not part of the European Union, recommends that voters should be sent “balanced campaign material” at least two weeks before a vote.
Greek voters on eurozone crisis referendum: ‘We’re not afraid of fear any more’ Guardian
Instead Greeks will have had just eight days to decide on a question couched in jargon-heavy terms.
Europe’s top official in charge of the euro said the question being put to the Greek people was “neither factually nor legally correct”. Valdis Dombrovskis, a former prime minister of Latvia, but now the commissioner for the euro, told Die Welt newspaper that Sunday’s vote would send a political signal to Europe.
“A yes will mean that they want to work closely with the other eurozone countries to find a solution. A no would make the differences even more evident and a solution more complicated.”
The latest polls show that Greece is split down the middle, raising the prospect of a narrow win for either side pushing the country into deeper political turmoil. In one poll for Ethnos newspaper, the yes side have a narrow lead, with 44.8% of people ready to vote for the creditors’ proposals and 43.4% wanting to vote no, with 11.8% undecided.
Another poll commissioned by Bloomberg put no at 43%, compared with 42.5% for yes. That poll, conducted by the University of Macedonia, has a margin of error of 3%, suggesting that the result is too close to call.
European leaders have said that if Greece votes no, it will say goodbye to its place in the single currency. However, the country’s finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, has said a no vote will kickstart negotiations.
Adding to the uncertainty, the International Monetary Fund, one of Greece’s three creditors, revealed on Thursday that Greece would need need €60bn (£42bn) of extra funds over the next three years and large-scale debt relief to create “a breathing space” for the economy.
Varoufakis, who has promised to resign if Greeks vote yes, said the government had been in discussions with its European creditors this week and that a deal was “in the offing”.
Speaking on RTÉ radio in Ireland, he said Syriza would be the only force capable of governing the country, even if the yes side won. If Greeks did approve the bailout plan, the government would sign on the dotted line, he promised.
Dombrovskis said it would be wrong to assume that a no vote would strengthen Greece’s negotiating hand.
“The opposite is the case. Following the closure of banks and the introduction of capital controls to attain financial stability again, it has become more complicated and more expensive. Greece is in a substantially worse situation than it was last week.”
As the two sides spar, Greece is fast running out of money, although it appears to have enough to cover €2bn worth of welfare and pension payments this week. Cash withdrawals have been limited to €60 (£43) a day.
In a TV interview broadcast on Thursday, Tsipras said the banks would open once there was a deal, predicting that that would happen within 48 hours of the referendum.
However, most observers think this unlikely unless the European Central Bank restarts the flow of emergency aid to Greek banks.
One senior banker told Reuters: “We might run out of banknotes by Tuesday if people keep taking out €60 a day.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/oct/27/modern-and-major-how-gilbert-and-sullivan-still-skewer-englands-absurdities | Music | 2022-10-27T16:30:20.000Z | Michael Simkins | Modern and major: how Gilbert and Sullivan still skewer England’s absurdities | When I was a teenager in the 1970s, living above my parent’s sweetshop in Brighton, a terrible thing happened. I developed an obsession, a dark craving that threatened to derail my happy family home. My school work suffered, I found myself unable to sleep, and my poor parents feared for my sanity. Social services were even mentioned. The diagnosis, at least, was simple. I’d become addicted to Gilbert and Sullivan.
The gateway drug, if such there be, was an encounter with their operetta The Yeomen of The Guard; for it was here on Tower Green, among the Beefeaters, that my epiphany occurred. It may have been merely a homespun production at my boys’ secondary school, yet despite the wobbling scenery, the female roles played by first-formers with improbable bosoms and an orchestra resembling a sackful of traumatised cats, I was captivated by this perfect synthesis of drama, comedy and unforgettable melodies. There was even a promised live execution. What more could a boy want?
‘Joyously seditious’: Hal Cazalet as Richard Dauntless and Amy Freston as Rose Maybud in Opera North’s 2010 staging of Ruddigore. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
Within weeks of this life-changing encounter I knew all 13 “Savoy operas” (so titled after the London theatre most closely associated with their world premieres) by heart. I sated my urge to perform in them by forming my own Gilbert and Sullivan concert group with other afflicted souls from my peer group, while my evenings were spent travelling to see amateur productions of Ruddigore or The Mikado in far-flung corners of the county. And when I had sufficient funds, my precious savings went not on drink, drugs or girlfriends, but on trips up to London to worship at the shrine of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, keepers of the Savoy flame, at their home in Sadler’s Wells.
I was captivated by this synthesis of drama, comedy and unforgettable melodies. There was even a promised live execution. What more could a boy want?
Fifty years on and while my passion may have moved on to Verdi and Puccini, and the name of D’Oyly Carte is now little more than an occasional answer on Mastermind, I have WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan to thank for igniting my love of classical music in general, and grand opera in particular. And yet I still find myself occasionally having to defend their reputation. “All that tiddle-om-pom-pom stuff,” say sneering detractors of this very English art form; a classical music professional – and choral specialist – admitted to me recently that he’d “never really considered them”. That’s his loss. There’s so much more to Gilbert and Sullivan than whimsical stories and hummable ditties. As with all alchemy, it’s the suffusion of two disparate elements that transforms into something special. Gilbert may not have been an outstanding dramatist, and Sullivan may have been some way beneath Mozart or Beethoven as a composer; but mix them together and the result is pure gold.
William Schwenck Gilbert, left and Arthur Sullivan.
Inevitably critics of these bastions of Victorian propriety will question the relevance of the Savoy operas in modern, multicultural Britain. Are they not merely smug, silly relics of a far-off imperial age, especially since their original brilliance has been dulled by decades of often-threadbare amateur productions, slavishly adhering to the D’Oyly Carte template without question, criticism or inspiration?
If the operas illuminate how we still like to see ourselves, it’s in a distinctly bilious yellow
But they miss the point, for Gilbert’s barbed satire and Sullivan’s glorious pastiches have always been joyously seditious. The blinkered certainties of the class system are deftly lampooned in works such as Iolanthe and HMS Pinafore, the absurdities of cultural and political trends are revealed in all their transient folly in Patience and The Gondoliers, while the aspirations of Great Britain as a global superpower has never been more deftly skewered than in their penultimate work, Utopia, Limited. If the operas illuminate how we still like to see ourselves, it’s in a distinctly bilious yellow. All they need is for the crusted layers of stale tradition to be scraped away for them to shine once more in all their original glory.
Barbed satire: John Savournin (far right) in HMS Pinafore in English National Opera’s 2021 production. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
Yeomen is surely their most human and richly textured work. By the time it was written in 1888, the musical world’s most famous partnership was at the height of its powers; yet creative tensions that had been kept at bay through long years of success were now surfacing. Sullivan, whose soul yearned to be given a libretto that could serve his more expansive musical pretensions, pleaded for something more than satire and absurdity. Gilbert responded by forsaking his normal taste for topsy-turvy by penning a piece rooted in real life, real characters, and with real human emotion. The result was not only Gilbert’s most nuanced dramaturgy, but some of Sullivan’s greatest music. Libretto and score are perfectly blended into an operetta that by turns amuses, chills and tugs at the heartstrings.
But there’s no need to take my word for it. No less a lyricist than the great Johnny Mercer once wrote “We all come from Gilbert”, while Sullivan’s influence has been acknowledged by composers from Noël Coward and Ivor Novello through to Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber. You can find their words and music embedded in every layer of popular culture, from episodes of The Simpsons through to The West Wing; while even Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2015 smash hit musical Hamilton contains a reference to “A modern Major General”.
English National Opera’s new production The Yeomen of the Guard opens on 3 November at the London Coliseum. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/15/scarface-remake-to-be-helmed-by-luca-guadagnino-with-coen-brothers-script | Film | 2020-05-15T10:48:44.000Z | Andrew Pulver | Luca Guadagnino to remake Scarface with Coen brothers script | Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino is to take on the long-gestating new version of classic gangster film Scarface.
According to Variety, Guadagnino is the latest director installed on a project that goes back to at least 2011. There are two previous versions: the 1932 original starring Paul Muni and directed by Howard Hawks, and the 1983 reworking with Al Pacino and directed by Brian De Palma.
The new production has a choppy history. Martin Bregman, who produced the De Palma film, was named as a producer, with Harry Potter’s David Yates lined up to direct a script by David Ayer. In 2014 it was reported that Pablo Larrain, the Chilean director of No, The Club and Jackie, was set to take over directing duties, with a script from Homicide: Life on the Street’s Paul Attanasio that focused on “a Mexican hustler in Los Angeles”. Subsequent reports suggested that Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) had at one point been set to direct, and after Fuqua left the project, a script by the Coen brothers was about to be filmed with Diego Luna in the lead role.
The Variety report says Guadagnino will be working from the Coens’ script, with The Batman’s Dylan Clark on board as producer. (Bregman died in 2018.)
Guadagnino was Oscar-nominated for best picture for Call Me By Your Name, the Italian-set romance starring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer, and has since completed a remake of the Dario Argento horror film Suspiria, with Dakota Johnson and Tilda Swinton. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/28/zbigniew-brzezinski-obituary | US news | 2017-05-28T12:17:28.000Z | Godfrey Hodgson | Zbigniew Brzezinski obituary | Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has died aged 89, was one of the group of European exiles who did so much to steer American foreign policy in the second half of the 20th century. Like Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski was a graduate of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Unlike Kissinger, he was a Democrat, and it was under the Democrat president Jimmy Carter that he served as national security adviser from 1977 to 1981. Those were difficult years: the US was confronted with many traumatic events, among them the world energy crisis caused by the Arab oil embargo; the Iranian revolution and the subsequent capture of the staff of the US embassy in Tehran; and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Brzezinski also had to deal with the opening of diplomatic relations with communist China and the consequent severing of relations with Taiwan, and with the negotiations that led to the signing of the second strategic arms limitation talks treaty (SALT II). As the Roman Catholic son of an aristocratic Polish diplomat, Brzezinski, or “Zbig” as he was known, had always been strongly a political liberal (in the American sense) in domestic politics, but also a strong anti-communist, and he interpreted these events, more than either Carter or his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, did, primarily in cold war terms.
Indeed, one of the features of Brzezinski’s years in the White House was the acknowledged rivalry between him and Vance, a liberal Wall Street lawyer, who finally resigned in protest at Carter’s attempt to rescue the Tehran hostages with an ill-fated special forces operation. Before that, the principal cause of discord between national security adviser and secretary of state was Vance’s wish to continue Kissinger’s policy of detente, of which Brzezinski was highly sceptical.
Zbigniew Brzezinski with Henry Kissinger, right, at the Nobel peace prize forum in Oslo, Norway, last year. Photograph: Terje Bendiksby/AFP/Getty Images
Brzezinski was born in Warsaw, the son of Leonia (nee Roman) and Tadeusz Brzeziński. His father was a Polish nobleman and diplomat who served first in Nazi Berlin, then in Soviet Moscow, before being posted to Canada. Brzezinski Jr was meant to study in Britain, but because of immigration restrictions went instead to McGill University in Montreal, and then as a graduate student to Harvard. He arrived there in 1951, just as the study of international relations and regional affairs was being enthusiastically promoted and lavishly funded by foundations connected to the US foreign policy establishment and to the CIA.
The leading intellectual theory at the time was realism, in various competing versions, and doctrines that lent themselves well to the political requirements of the US’s cold war leaders, as well as to the emotional needs of the numerous and intellectually well-equipped émigrés from a Europe that had come to be dominated by Hitler. Unlike academic theorists such as Hans Morgenthau, Robert Strausz-Hupé or JH Herz, or strategic thinkers such as Kissinger and the American-born Herman Kahn, Brzezinski was not Jewish. The emotional theme for him was a Polish suspicion of both Germany and Russia, so anti-communism came naturally to him, more or less uncomfortably married to a liberal idealism.
In 2007, in an amicable joint interview with Kissinger, he professed an idealistic political credo: the next president, he said “should say to the world that the US wants to be part of the solution to its problems and not, in part, the maker of their problems”, and that “the US is prepared really to be engaged in the quest to get people in the world the dignities that they seek today, the social justice that they feel they’re deprived of”.
Earlier, he had subscribed to a more power-oriented view of international relations. He received his PhD from Harvard in 1953 for a thesis on the relations between the Leninism of the October Revolution and Stalin’s state. In 1958 he visited Poland for the first time since his childhood, and his travels in Europe, as well as his later friendship with leading eastern Europeans such as Adam Michnik, reinforced his view that there were profound divisions in Soviet-dominated eastern Europe, a view he developed in his first book, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (1967). He taught at Harvard but was not given tenure, and in 1959 moved to Columbia University in New York.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, left, with Jimmy Carter, centre in raincoat, and Cyrus Vance in 1979. Photograph: Bob Daugherty/AP
Politically, Brzezinski was a centrist, or conservative, Democrat. He criticised both the Eisenhower administration’s “rollback” policy towards communism in Europe, and the Nixon-Kissinger detente. He worked for John F Kennedy’s campaign in 1960, and for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and was in favour of Johnson’s domestic and civil rights policies. However, he was criticised by students and by liberal Democrats for his support for both the Vietnam war, and for the campaign of Johnson’s relatively conservative vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, for president, in 1968.
Brzezinski was active in many establishment foreign policy institutions, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderberg meetings. In 1973, with the backing of David Rockefeller, he helped to found the Trilateral Commission, where he consistently advocated moderation in US policies. All three institutions were the target of paranoid suspicion on the American right. It was through the Trilateral Commission, which advocated co-operation between the US, Europe and Japan, that he met Carter, then known mainly as a liberal governor of Georgia. In 1975 Brzezinski became Carter’s chief foreign policy adviser, and in 1977, when Carter was inaugurated president, his national security adviser.
Probably the most controversial of his policy decisions in the White House was his response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The question is clouded by secrecy and contradictory recollections by those involved, but Brzezinski himself recalled that a month or so after the Soviet invasion, he went to Pakistan to co-ordinate the distribution of money to the mujahideen to fight the Red Army. Some have alleged that Brzezinski was in favour of the US financing Osama bin Laden; the truth is that bin Laden’s al-Qaida was only one of many mujahid groups that fought the Soviet invaders and were supported by the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter, dies at 89
Read more
It has also been suggested that Brzezinski actually encouraged the Soviet Union to invade because of the damage he saw this would do to Soviet interests in the long run. This last suggestion Brzezinski very plausibly denied. He also denied reports that he encouraged China to support the genocidal dictator Pol Pot in Cambodia, because Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge were the enemies of communist Vietnam.
After leaving the White House Brzezinski taught first at Columbia and then as director of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. He continued to interest himself in Russia and eastern Europe, which he preferred to call central Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, and to write about international affairs.
In 1989 he received a standing ovation from an audience at the Soviet Academy of Sciences when he demanded that Moscow publicly acknowledge Soviet guilt in the murder of 22,000 Polish officers and other members of the Polish elite in the Katyn forest in 1940. He had visited the site of the massacre where he said: “Only with the truth can the new Soviet leadership distance itself from the crimes of Stalin and the NKVD.” Later he told Time magazine that he would not be human if he had not been delighted “when I stood in front of the foreign policy establishment in the Soviet Union”, he said, “and was given a generally empathetic reception, I had a sense of, if you will, historical vindication”.
Perhaps the most important of his later books was The Grand Chessboard (1997), in which he took the ideas of early 20th-century geopoliticians such as Halford Mackinder about the importance of “Eurasia”, and applied them to a world now dominated by a non-Eurasian power, the US. This short, learned, ambitious and even visionary book revealed the mindset of a man who, after almost half a century at the heart of the American foreign policy establishment, remained, in his basic intellectual assumptions, distinct from it.
In particular, he both advised US leaders how they could “perpetuate America’s own dominant position for at least a generation and preferably longer still” and at the same time warned that the US was destined to be not only the first but also the “last truly global superpower”.
Brzezinski is survived by his wife, the sculptor Emilie Benes, and by their two sons, Mark and Ian, and daughter, Mika, and five grandchildren.
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski, policy adviser and academic, born 28 March 1928; died 26 May 2017 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/06/wayne-gregory-astill-inquiry-womens-prison-cameras-sexual-assault | Australia news | 2023-10-06T04:00:35.000Z | Tamsin Rose | NSW women’s prison lacking hundreds of security cameras despite guard sexually assaulting detainees | The New South Wales women’s prison where guard Wayne Gregory Astill sexually assaulted detainees still lacks hundreds of security cameras required to properly monitor the facility, a special commission of inquiry has heard.
Astill was jailed for a maximum of 23 years earlier this year for abusing his position and assaulting women at the Dillwynia correctional centre, on the outskirts of Sydney, for several years.
He was an officer and then chief correctional officer at the centre before last year being found guilty of 27 charges, including aggravated sexual and indecent assault.
A special commission of inquiry is under way into what, if anything, Corrective Services NSW (CSNSW) staff and prison management knew about his offending.
Speaking in his role as a manager of technical security at CSNSW, Fergal Molloy told the inquiry there were almost 1,000 cameras across the Dillwynia centre – but the vast majority were in a newly built section.
The older area of the jail, where Astill worked and offended, had 195 cameras, which Molloy said was significantly below what was required, which would have been “around 400 to 500”.
Prison inmates to be charged 24c a minute for phone calls as NSW scraps cheaper providers
Read more
He said he had requested funding for more cameras.
“I have asked for substantial funding, to the figure of nearly $500,000, to upgrade CCTV functionality in that particular centre,” he said.
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup
“However, we have numerous requests for upgrade[s] statewide.”
When asked why there were security cameras had not been operating inside the offices of prison staff, including that of Astill, Molloy said there should have been.
“Anywhere we have inmates, we should have cameras,” he said.
He said CCTV cameras were “our best management tool” within corrections facilities for their role in understanding what was going on within a centre.
Molloy told the inquiry there were “shortfalls” in security, including in CCTV, across the state but there had been improvements in recent years.
“They are becoming adequate because we are in a constant process of upgrading,” he said. “We do have shortfalls in electronic security.”
Asked if the funding available at the moment was enough to make the upgrades required across the state, Molloy said: “not at present, no”.
Sign up to Morning Mail
Free daily newsletter
Our Australian morning briefing breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what’s happening and why it matters
Enter your email address
Sign up
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Failure to allow full UN prison inspections risks Australia’s international standing, experts say
Read more
The inquiry was announced in July by the state’s corrections minister, Anoulack Chanthivong, who said he was “shocked and absolutely appalled” after Astill’s conviction and ordered the review to be led by former judge Peter McClellan.
“The response to date hasn’t been adequate and I’m deeply troubled,” Chanthivong said.
Last week the inquiry heard from the CSNSW’s assistant commissioner, John Buckley, that it would have been difficult for inmates to report Astill because he was known to be in “good stead” with prison management.
He said that for junior officers it would be a “courageous decision to go to a manager at that time”.
“The power imbalance was there and a situation which was aghast, but certainly very difficult for the inmate,” Buckley told the inquiry.
A final report is due to be handed down in December.
The inquiry continues.
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/oct/30/biomimicry-institute-sxsw-eco-agriculture-bioinspired | Guardian Sustainable Business | 2015-10-30T19:13:32.000Z | Kristine Wong | Biomimicry: using nature's designs to transform agriculture | From lab-grown burgers to farms monitored by sensors and drones, technology lies at the heart of many of today’s sustainable food solutions. Now, the Biomimicry Institute, a Montana-based nonprofit, is taking the trend a step further with its new Food Systems Design Challenge, encouraging a cadre of entrepreneurs to improve the food production system by emulating techniques and processes found in nature.
At the SXSW Eco conference earlier this month, the institute announced the eight finalists in the challenge. “We want to help foster bringing more biomimetic designs to market … to show that biomimicry is a viable and essential design methodology to create a more regenerative and sustainable world,” said Megan Schuknect, the institute’s director of design challenges.
Just as natural processes often benefit multiple stakeholders, many competitors in the challenge are seeking to solve multiple problems. BioX, a finalist team from Bangkok, hopes to increase food security while helping users secure a steady source of income.
On the outside, BioX’s product, Jube, looks like a decorative hanging vase. Inside, it’s a bug trap that catches protein-rich edible insects. Lined with inward-pointing hairs that move insects downward and keep them from escaping, it mimics the structure of a pitcher plant.
“The product is designed to be artistic and crafted so that people in any community can make it and sell it to other people as an alternative source of revenue,” said Pat Pataranutaporn at the SXSW Eco Conference. Each vase is decorated with multicolored patterns designed to copy the plants’ mix of mottled colors. “We believe that we can spread biomimicry through culture and art,” Pataranutaporn said.
Easing into commercialization
By 2030, bioinspired innovations could generate $1.6tn of GDP worldwide, according to a 2013 report from Point Loma University’s Fermanian Business and Economic Institute. Another report from sustainable design firm Terrapin Bright Green, found companies that use biomimicry can reap greater revenues and have lower costs than those that don’t.
For years, large companies have increasingly employed biomimicry to solve difficult engineering challenges. Qualcomm’s Mirasol electronic device display imitates the light-reflective structure of a butterfly wing and uses a tenth of the power of an LCD reader, while Sprint worked with the San Diego Zoo’s Center for Bioinspiration to design more environmentally friendly packaging.
But developing biomimetic designs could be a steeper challenge for smaller companies. Tech startups have an estimated 90% fail rate, and biomimetic companies are no exception.
“Bioinspired innovation faces the same challenges as other forms of innovation – years of research, design and development, financial risk and market acceptance,” Terrapin Bright Green spokesperson Allison Bernett told the Guardian. “As they face increasingly rigorous testing and financial constraints, fewer technologies progress into the prototype and development stages, a typical pattern in product development.”
However, Bernett added, biomimetics can reduce the costs and difficulties of development. “Extensive prior research, a thorough understanding and a functioning model – with the living organism providing the ‘blueprint’ – can benefit a technology’s development costs by speeding up the R&D process,” she said.
The lessons of biomimicry could even extend to market politics. Portland-based business advisor Faye Yoshihara said that the disruptive nature of bioinspired products can be seen as a threat to entrenched competitors’ interests. “Market entrants need to identify mutually beneficial ways of working with industry players and points of entry into an ecosystem,” she told the Guardian.
Alternately, Yoshihara suggested, biomimetic firms could imitate the protected environments that encourage weaker species. “Innovators must sometimes create their own ecosystems to get their product or service to market,” she said.
With that in mind, the Biomimicry Institute has developed a business accelerator to help the competition’s finalists move their designs from the concept phase to the pre-commercialization stage. Over six to nine months, the program will give qualifying companies training and mentorship from experts such as Yoshihara.
Six-sided efficiency
Hexagro, another challenge finalist, has combined agriculture with the design genius of one of nature’s most famous structures. A modular aeroponic home-growing system, it is made up of individual hexagon-shaped bins that are inspired by bees’ honeycombs.
Designer Felipe Hernandez Villa-Roel wanted his product to circumvent some of the environmental problems associated with large scale agriculture, such as carbon emissions, pesticide use and fertilizer runoff. His solution was to make it easier for people living in small urban spaces to grow pesticide-free food at home.
“I wanted to solve this problem as efficiently as possible,” he said. “And since many people can’t spend the time to garden, it needed to be something that wouldn’t take up a lot of personal time.”
The bins – which can grow lettuce, carrots, cilantro, spinach, herbs and even potatoes – evoke the resource efficiency of a beehive. They can be stacked to fit any available space. And, because the plants’ roots are in the air, they can be misted with a nutrient solution placed on an automatic cycle. Hernandez Villa-Roel claims that his pods can cut down water use by 90% compared to traditional farming.
The designer hopes that Hexagro could help decentralize food production and provide an economic opportunity for growers, who can sell their excess produce. He envisions a community of growers and distributors bringing locally grown produce to market, cutting down on the CO2 emissions commonly associated with food transportation.
“This system could also be used in Syrian refugee camps to grow food, or with the disabled or elderly,” he said. “The social consequences of this project are much greater than the project itself.”
Taking it underground
A team of students from the landscape architecture department at the University of Oregon in Eugene designed the Living Filtration System, an agricultural tool that imitates filtration processes used throughout nature. Designed to reduce fertilizer and chemical runoff from farms, the system is a new spin on traditional tile drainage systems designed to remove excess moisture from the surface of the soil.
“A [drainage] pipe made out of renewable material that mimics an earthworm’s villi to slow down runoff is one of the major components,” said Wade Hanson, a member of the team.
The students say that their drainage system also incorporates the mechanism used by wetlands to filter pollutants from water. Next fall, they will join the seven other finalists when presenting their prototype to judges in a final round. Teams will be evaluated based on a number of criteria, including proof that their technology works, the feasibility of bringing their product to market and validation that it provides a solution that customers will use.
The winner will take home $100,000 in prize money provided by the Ray C Anderson Foundation. It’s not clear if that will be an adequate sum for the winning team to develop their concept, considering the several years it usually takes to get a product on the market.
Still, Schuknect is optimistic. “Looking to nature for inspiration on how we live on this planet is essential to our future,” she said.
“The more we can expose both professionals and young people to the power of looking to nature and the power of biomimetic design, the sooner we’re going to get to a place where we are all working towards developing elegant solutions that support the needs of all life on the planet.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/australia-culture-blog/2014/jun/06/muriels-wedding-rewatching-classic-australian-films | Film | 2014-06-06T00:48:54.000Z | Luke Buckmaster | Muriel's Wedding: rewatching classic Australian films | When audiences reflect on Muriel's Wedding, writer-director PJ Hogan's breakthrough 1994 romcom about a love-hungry sad sack who crashes to new lows after tasting the high life, they probably think of exuberant Abba renditions, awkward encounters at weddings and Toni Collette's endearingly dorky performance.
Collecting more than $30m internationally and a Golden Globe nomination for its star, the film – which follows hapless Muriel (Collette) as she experiences popularity for the first time – left an indelible mark on Australian popular culture.
Even in the era of Buzzfeed, Muriel's Wedding is still very much part of the zeitgeist. But the dark soul of Hogan’s unconventional hit, which satisfied audiences partly because it offered something different, has likely been forgotten.
The film's posters depict a jubilant-looking Collette in a wedding dress and a shower of confetti, but audiences who saw an advertisement for a frothy feelgood romance sat down to watch something quite different. Even the film's title seems to be a joke, and a bitter one too: the eponymous wedding marks a low point for an already morally dubious character.
Muriel’s Wedding is a tragicomic portrait of a pathetic woman who, after experiencing a lifetime of degradation, embraces the same kind of vacuousness that defined her as an outcast. The film opens at a wedding, where Muriel catches the bouquet and is taunted by the women around her.
“Throw it again – you’ll never get married,” she’s told. Muriel pleads to her friends that she “can change”, only to be assured that it doesn’t matter: “You’ll still be you.”
The story takes shape when the ugly duckling (sort of) comes good. Muriel happens across some money and discovers a party-going friend named Rhonda (Rachel Griffiths). Soon they’re performing Waterloo on stage; Muriel doesn’t look out of place in a low-lit nightclub; she even has a sex life.
If fate quickly twists in the protagonist's favour – including marriage to a celebrity swimmer and all the attention that comes with it – the pendulum swings back. Rhonda develops cancer and loses her ability to walk. Muriel shelves her as a friend and cosies up to the grown-up mean girls who taunted her. She eventually realises what's right and sets about changing her ways, but the moment of epiphany is far from saccharine and the end of the film points to a future anything but certain, morally or otherwise.
The warmth and heart that creeps into Hogan's screenplay saves Muriel's Wedding from being an exercise in emotional flagellation. If Muriel has a girl-next-door charm, the film has a sort of homely, film-next-door charm: unprepossessing and unpretentious, appealing cross-class and cross-culture.
At the heart of it is a shrewd and deceptively nuanced performance from Collette, then and now a great asset of Australian cinema (she reunited with Hogan for Mental). She wholly inhabits Muriel: her wide-eyed and slightly stupefied look; her Eeyore-like speech; the pathetic way she slumps on her bed and gazes at pictures of other people’s weddings, fantasising of a happiness she neither deserves nor experiences.
Muriel’s Wedding may be remembered as funny, spunky and spirited, and that’s true to a point. It’s also something dark and unusual. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/20/at-peace-with-herself-librium-liz-re-embraces-her-own-mediocrity | Politics | 2022-10-20T17:13:59.000Z | John Crace | At peace with herself, Librium Liz re-embraces her own mediocrity | John Crace | The agony was finally over. The week-long battle between Liz Truss and the Daily Star lettuce had been won. The lettuce had romped home at a canter with only a few leaves showing any sign of wilting. In the end, it hadn’t really been much of a contest.
Shortly after 1.30pm, Truss emerged from the front door of No 10, closely followed by her husband. She walked to the lectern and started speaking in her familiar, disconnected monotone. She had come into office at a time of great political and economic instability. Weirdly, she forgot to mention her part in adding to the instability. But the country will be paying for it in increased mortgages and borrowing for years to come.
Truss went on. She had delivered some fantastic achievements for the country. An energy package that literally any other prime minister would have introduced. And the reduction in national insurance contributions that Labour had first proposed. Amnesia prevented her from mentioning her U-turns. But her achievements had been so remarkable that it was best she went out on a high. The record for shortest-serving prime minister was hers. Though she would hang on for another week while the Tory party hastily scrabbled around for a new leader.
Her statement lasted barely a couple of minutes. Yet by the time she had finished she looked almost relieved. At peace with herself. No more trying to conceal her shame. Her humiliation. The shame and humiliation that had become the country’s own shame and humiliation. A lightning rod of despair.
The pretence of trying to appear competent could be abandoned. No further series of time-slip adventures in which she could enter parallel universes where she was a successful prime minister would be called for. She could re-embrace her own mediocrity. The authentic voice of those guaranteed to get most things wrong. Doomed to be forgotten. A footnote in the country’s history. A question in a pub quiz.
It had been quite the 24 hours. At prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, Librium Liz had insisted she was a “fighter not a quitter”. So what changed? Mostly, she allowed reality to finally intrude. It had been obvious to the rest of us for weeks that she was hopelessly out of her depth and that the Tory party and the country was falling apart around her.
Indeed, she had really been leader in name only since Colonel Jeremy Hunt had assumed control of the country last week. From then on she had in effect been a hostage inside No 10, with various captors having to give regular updates to an incurious nation about her wellbeing. “Liz has had a very productive day, sleeping under her desk.” “Liz has been allowed out to sack Suella Braverman.” Truss had tried to send messages by blinking desperately in morse code, but her pleas for help had gone unnoticed.
Lino Liz might still have been cooped up in her Downing Street gilded cage, had not Thérèse Coffey – Dr Feelgood – rushed down to the voting lobbies on Wednesday night with a bag stuffed full of mood-altering drugs. Tory MPs had surrounded her and Jacob Rees-Mogg and everyone had bundled one another through the no lobby during the fracking vote.
Everyone was so wired that no one had a clear recollection of anything. No 10 couldn’t even be sure if Liz had remembered to vote for herself in a confidence motion. Or indeed if it had been a confidence motion. It would be the most on-brand thing Truss had ever done, to vote for her own removal. There again, she wasn’t entirely clear if the chief whip had resigned or not. This was the tipping point for Tory MPs. Truss had to go. Blame the drugs.
With Liz out of the picture, the new regime rapidly unravelled. So much for a smooth takeover. Col Hunt tried to steady the ship by saying he would remain as chancellor and wouldn’t be standing for leader again. Probably just as well. He came eighth out of eight just a few months ago with the backing of just 18 MPs. His key policy had been to reduce corporation tax to 15%. In yet another space-time continuum shift of which the Tory party is increasingly fond, the new Hunt 2.0 had reinstated corporation tax at 25%. The wonders of quantum physics.
Next up came the chair of the 1922 Committee, Graham Brady, who had called a press conference to say that he didn’t really have much to say. Other than that the Tory party would try to stitch up the election process by the end of next week. He couldn’t provide any details as yet, as it wasn’t yet clear what rules would need to be bent. But there would be two candidates going through to the members’ ballot. Unless, that is, there turned out to be only one candidate. Then all bets were off.
We can see which way this one is going. The new regime going to its default position of a failed state. Yet another prime minister with no general election. No mandate. We used to laugh at Italy. Now the joke’s on us. The UK is far more chaotic, far more corrupt, than anything the Italians could dare dream of. Just 350 Tory MPs more concerned about holding on to their jobs for another two years than doing the right thing for the country. O brave new world …
To have such people in it. People such as Braverman, Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt. MPs who had tried and failed to become Tory leader only months ago. Wannabes who had been rejected either by their own MPs or by the Tory gerontocracy. Suddenly now fighting each other for another shot.
People such as Boris Johnson. A dozen or so Tories, led by the deranged Nadine Dorries, thought it was time to give the Convict another shot. To forget that he had been disgraced for his criminal behaviour. That more than 50 ministers had resigned from his administration just months ago because he was unfit for office. Now they wanted him back. The venality. The desperation. The neediness. All just nauseating.
This was a Tory party treating the country with contempt. It was only a matter of time before someone suggested Lino Liz had another go. After all, she’d been out of office for a few hours. Surely that was long enough? Theresa May called for a candidate to unify the party. Some hope. Has she seen the state of it? Everyone hates each other. The only thing holding them together is the fear of being in opposition.
But maybe there is a saviour. Someone who has the unwavering support of himself. Step forward Rehman Chishti. Your time has come. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/21/chemical-from-tyres-linked-to-mass-salmon-deaths-in-us-found-in-australia-for-first-time | Environment | 2022-03-20T16:30:00.000Z | Graham Readfearn | Chemical from tyres linked to mass salmon deaths in US found in Australia for first time | A toxic chemical released from tyres as they wear down on roads and implicated in mass deaths of salmon in the United States has been found in an Australian waterway for the first time.
Scientists detected the compound – known as 6PPD-quinone – among a cocktail of chemicals and hundreds of kilograms of tyre particles washed into a creek from a motorway during storms.
Researchers around the world are scrambling to understand the effect of the chemicals and particles from tyres after solving a mystery of years of mass deaths of coho salmon in Seattle.
The commonly used tyre additive 6PPD – which transforms into 6PPD-quinone – was turning streams toxic for salmon. Earlier this month, scientists in Canada found the chemical was also toxic to two trout species, but at much higher concentrations.
Scientists told Guardian Australia the latest finding should prompt urgent investigations to find out if Australian aquatic species are being harmed by 6PPD-quinone.
University of Queensland scientists took water samples from the middle of Cubberla Creek beside Brisbane’s M5 motorway after four storms in late 2020 and published their results in a journal.
Levels of 6PPD-quinone in the creek, which feeds into the Brisbane River, peaked at concentrations comparable to those found to be killing Seattle’s salmon.
Pollution from car tires is killing off salmon on US west coast, study finds
Read more
As much as 700kg of tiny tyre particles, up to 0.2mm wide and some much smaller, were estimated to wash off the roads and into the catchment after each storm.
Lead author of the study, Dr Cassandra Rauert, an environmental chemist at the Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Queensland, said they found elevated levels of the chemical for two days after storms.
“The aquatic species living there are going to be exposed [to the chemical] over this period. The amount of tyre wear we found was also very surprising.
“We have no idea of the effect of these particles or if fish are ingesting them. There are so many unknowns in this field. We should be worried, but we need to know more.”
Rauert and colleagues are planning to take samples at other sites throughout Queensland, including catchments flowing into the Great Barrier Reef.
Dr Edward Kolodziej at the University of Washington in Seattle was part of the team that linked the deaths of coho salmon to the tyre additive.
He told the Guardian 6PPD-quinone was “one of the most toxic compounds known to exist for aquatic organisms”.
After reading the Australian findings, he said: “Finding it at potentially lethal concentrations implies a substantial new and unmanaged risk for ecosystem health and sensitive aquatic organisms in these waters.”
He said more data collection was needed to show where and how tyre wear was entering sensitive habitats.
Prof Frederic Leusch, who leads research on aquatic toxicology at the Australian Rivers Institute, based at Griffith University, said the concentrations of 6PPD-quinone found in Brisbane were “not insignificant” and were likely representative of other areas around the country.
Leusch, who was not involved in the study, said “until we check and test we won’t really know” the effect on any Australian species but this work was now needed.
Race to exploit the world’s seabed set to wreak havoc on marine life
Read more
He said the emergence of 6PPD-quinone illustrated a failure in how chemicals were developed for use in products. While 6PPD as an additive in tyres was well-known, there was no prior knowledge of how it could transform when in use.
The tyre particles themselves could also be posing problems for fish. Leusch said: “A small fish might have an intestine choc-a-bloc with these tyre particles and they can come with baggage of toxic chemicals.
“All of these other chemicals I would wager we have no idea what they will do to fish or invertebrates in our rivers.”
Authorities in California are looking to regulate the additive, which is used to stop tyres degrading and cracking.
Kolodziej said because tyres were used “nearly everywhere people are present”, there was “a clear societal need to understand these products much better than we currently do”.
Tyre makers in the US say they have started several initiatives and research projects related to 6PPD-quinone in that country and globally.
Silvio de Denaro, acting chairman of the Australian Tyre Industry Council, said tyre manufacturing had not taken place in Australia for a decade, but added: “Obviously it is important to seek an alternative to [6PPD] in manufacturing.”
Many councils used either capture ponds or other methods for road run-off and these could catch some chemicals, he said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2017/oct/12/erdem-hm-collaboration-ballgown-faux-fur-coat-jacquard-dress | Fashion | 2017-10-12T08:01:35.000Z | Jess Cartner-Morley | Erdem x H&M: the ballgown is taking over the high street | Go big or go home: that is the new party dress code. Forget the little black dress, and get ready for the grand gown. When Erdem x HM drops on 2 November, the smart money will be snapping up a £149 party dress with intricate snowdrop embroidery on formal stiff jacquard, embellished with a traditional grosgrain bow and falling from a precisely gathered waist into a voluminous, ankle-length tiered skirt.
The November issue of British Vogue features Claire Foy in a floor-sweeping, dusty-pink ballgown by Christian Siriano. As the star of Netflix drama The Crown, Foy is no stranger to a ballgown. The Crown, Downton Abbey, the Queen’s 90th birthday last year, Gucci’s sponsorship of an exhibition of English aristocratic style at Chatsworth House and the resurgence of Princess Diana as a style icon that has accompanied the 20th anniversary of her death are combining to revive the ballgown, a style of dress that until recently seemed as anachronistic to modern entertaining as the bouillon spoon.
Faux fur and checks at Erdem x HM.
The snowdrop-embroidered ballgown is one of the standout showpieces of Erdem x HM, this year’s most eagerly awaited designer/high street collaboration, which goes on sale next month. Erdem Moralioglu was born in Canada to a Turkish father and British mother, moved from Montreal to Birmingham as a child and founded the Erdem label in 2005. In the past four years, Moralioglu has been awarded three top gongs at the British Fashion awards – red carpet designer of the year, womenswear designer and establishment designer – and has expanded his business from a space in Hackney, north-east London, to a Mayfair boutique and headquarters.
Designer Erdem Moralioğlu and his team.
This is the first time in eight years that H&M has partnered with a British fashion designer for its collaboration. In 2009, Matthew Williamson used the platform to fly the flag for the boho-chic style of loose muslin, kaftan shapes and hummingbird motifs then in vogue. The hype that surrounds the H&M collaboration increases every year – in 2015, jackets from the Balmain x HM collection were resold on eBay at 10 times their retail value, making them as expensive as real Balmain. It will bring the global spotlight back to British fashion this autumn, and bring into focus the new generation’s appetite for formal partywear. That Erdem is a consistent favourite wardrobe of the Duchess of Cambridge can only fuel the fervour.
Claire Foy in Christian Siriano on the cover of Vogue. Photograph: Courtesy of Conde Nast
The ballgown craze about to wow the high street has already swept the red carpet. Dresses with stiff, outsized skirts designed for airy ballrooms rather than crowded dancefloors have become de rigueur at the Met Gala, presided over by Anna Wintour and dubbed the fashion Oscars for the cut-throat competition on the red carpet. Actor Lena Dunham’s Elizabeth Kennedy dress and Rihanna’s infamous imperial-yellow mega-gown pointed at a trend for grand, formal dresses that was winning unlikely fans among independent-minded, modern young women.
Details at Erdem x HM.
Moraliogliu dressedFoy in a jacquard dress with courtly squared-off train at the most recent Met Gala. The designer’s fascination with the Queen was celebrated in the recent London fashion week show for his mainline collection, inspired by a meeting in 1958 between the Queen and jazz pianist Duke Ellington. His buttercup-yellow satin dress with ribbon epaulettes, a deep V-neckline and full, floral embroidered skirt, worn with long silk gloves, had a similar silhouette and mood to the high street equivalent that features in the H&M collection.
The Erdem x HM collection includes casual pieces, such as a logo-emblazoned grey hoodie for £49.99 and, in the designer’s first ever menswear pieces, a floral-printed army-green nylon rucksack. But the most intense competition among shoppers will be for the highest-priced pieces, which are produced in very limited numbers. The snowdrop ballgown and a multicoloured, floral-print jacquard dress with a high halter neckline, which will sell for £119.99, are likely to have stock of only 10 or 20 each per store. The high quality of the fabric, the workmanship of the embroidery and the elaborate construction of these dresses make them highly sought-after by fans of designer fashion priced out of Bond Street. While the quality is by no means equivalent to the dresses available in Erdem’s mainline store, the price tag constitutes a bargain compared with the £2,600 for which an Erdem jacquard evening dress sells.
The faux fur jacket by Erdem x HM. Photograph: PR image
Instead of totes or bumbags, the two handbags in the Erdem x HM collection are snap-fastening, faux-crocodile structured handbags of a type instantly recognisable from images of royal engagements over the past half-century. Princess Margaret, as photographed in fur coats on the arm of Lord Snowdon in the 1960s, is the icon conjured up by a leopard-print faux-fur coat for £149.99, with silk ribbon trim, patch pockets and the Erdem logo embossed on to its outsized gold press studs, which is set to be another highly prized item when the H&M collection goes on sale. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/26/artificial-intelligence-meredith-broussard-more-than-a-glitch-racism-sexism-ableism | Technology | 2023-03-26T14:00:19.000Z | Zoë Corbyn | AI expert Meredith Broussard: ‘Racism, sexism and ableism are systemic problems’ | Meredith Broussard is a data journalist and academic whose research focuses on bias in artificial intelligence (AI). She has been in the vanguard of raising awareness and sounding the alarm about unchecked AI. Her previous book, Artificial Unintelligence (2018), coined the term “technochauvinism” to describe the blind belief in the superiority of tech solutions to solve our problems. She appeared in the Netflix documentary Coded Bias (2020), which explores how algorithms encode and propagate discrimination. Her new book is More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender and Ability Bias in Tech. Broussard is an associate professor at New York University’s Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute.
The message that bias can be embedded in our technological systems isn’t really new. Why do we need this book?
This book is about helping people understand the very real social harms that can be embedded in technology. We have had an explosion of wonderful journalism and scholarship about algorithmic bias and the harms that have been experienced by people. I try to lift up that reporting and thinking. I also want people to know that we have methods now for measuring bias in algorithmic systems. They are not entirely unknowable black boxes: algorithmic auditing exists and can be done.
Why is the problem “more than a glitch”? If algorithms can be racist and sexist because they are trained using biased datasets that don’t represent all people, isn’t the answer just more representative data?
A glitch suggests something temporary that can be easily fixed. I’m arguing that racism, sexism and ableism are systemic problems that are baked into our technological systems because they’re baked into society. It would be great if the fix were more data. But more data won’t fix our technological systems if the underlying problem is society. Take mortgage approval algorithms, which have been found to be 40-80% more likely to deny borrowers of colour than their white counterparts. The reason is the algorithms were trained using data on who had received mortgages in the past and, in the US, there’s a long history of discrimination in lending. We can’t fix the algorithms by feeding better data in because there isn’t better data.
You argue we should be choosier about the tech we allow into our lives and our society. Should we just reject any AI-based technology that encodes bias at all?
AI is in all our technologies nowadays. But we can demand that our technologies work well – for everybody – and we can make some deliberate choices about whether to use them.
I’m enthusiastic about the distinction in the proposed European Union AI Act that divides uses into high and low risk based on context. A low-risk use of facial recognition might be using it to unlock your phone: the stakes are low – you have a passcode if it doesn’t work. But facial recognition in policing would be a high-risk use that needs to be regulated or – better still – not deployed at all because it leads to wrongful arrests and isn’t very effective. It isn’t the end of the world if you don’t use a computer for a thing. You can’t assume that a technological system is good because it exists.
A lot of people imagine a sleek AI future where machines replace doctors. This does not sound enticing to me
There is enthusiasm for using AI to help diagnose disease. But racial bias is also being baked in, including from unrepresentative datasets (for example, skin cancer AIs will probably work far better on lighter skin because that is mostly what is in the training data). Should we try to put in “acceptable thresholds” for bias in medical algorithms, as some have suggested?
I don’t think the world is ready to have that conversation. We’re still at a level of needing to increase awareness of racism in medicine. We need to take a step back and fix a few things about society before we start freezing it in algorithms. Formalised in code, a racist decision becomes difficult to see or eradicate.
You were diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent successful treatment. After your diagnosis, you experimented with running your own mammograms through an open-source cancer-detection AI and you found that it did indeed pick up your breast cancer. It worked! So great news?
It was pretty neat to see the AI draw a red box around the area of the scan where my tumour was. But I learned from this experiment that diagnostic AI is a much blunter instrument than I imagined, and there are complicated trade-offs. For example, the developers must make a choice about accuracy rates: more false positives or false negatives? They favour the former because it’s considered worse to miss something, but that also means if you do have a false positive you go into the diagnosis pipeline, which could mean weeks of panicking and invasive testing. A lot of people imagine a sleek AI future where machines replace doctors. This does not sound enticing to me.
Any hope we can improve our algorithms?
I am optimistic about the potential of algorithmic auditing – the process of looking at the inputs, outputs and the code of an algorithm to evaluate it for bias. I have done some work on this. The aim is to focus on algorithms as they are used in specific contexts and address concerns from all stakeholders, including members of an affected community.
AI chatbots are all the rage. But the tech is also rife with bias. Guardrails added to OpenAI’s ChatGPT have been easy to get around. Where did we go wrong?
Though more needs to be done, I appreciate the guardrails. This has not been the case in the past, so it is progress. But we also need to stop being surprised when AI screws up in very predictable ways. The problems we are seeing with ChatGPT were anticipated and written about by AI ethics researchers, including Timnit Gebru [who was forced out of Google in late 2020]. We need to recognise this technology is not magic. It’s assembled by people, it has problems and it falls apart.
OpenAI’s co-founder Sam Altman recently promoted AI doctors as a way of solving the healthcare crisis. He appeared to suggest a two-tier healthcare system – one for the wealthy, where they enjoy consultations with human doctors, and one for the rest of us, where we see an AI. Is this the way things are going and are you worried?
AI in medicine doesn’t work particularly well, so if a very wealthy person says: “Hey, you can have AI to do your healthcare and we’ll keep the doctors for ourselves,” that seems to me to be a problem and not something that is leading us towards a better world. Also, these algorithms are coming for everybody, so we might as well address the problems.
More Than a Glitch by Meredith Broussard is published by MIT Press (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/31/britain-only-g7-economy-expected-shrink-2023-imf | Business | 2023-01-31T01:30:32.000Z | Larry Elliott | Britain the only G7 economy forecast to shrink in 2023 | Britain is expected to be the only major industrialised country to see its economy shrink this year after the impact of Liz Truss’s brief premiership prompted a sharp growth downgrade from the International Monetary Fund.
Adding to growing political pressure on Rishi Sunak after the sacking of the Conservative party chair Nadhim Zahawi, the Washington-based IMF warned on Tuesday it expected the UK economy to contract by 0.6% this year – 0.9 percentage points worse than it had pencilled in just three months ago and slower even than sanctions-hit Russia.
Bank of England poised to raise interest rates for 10th time in a row
Read more
The IMF said that while the prospects for every other member of the G7 group of leading developed nations had improved or remained unchanged since October, rising interest rates and higher taxes had made the outlook for the UK gloomier.
Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the IMF’s economic counsellor, said 2023 would be “quite challenging” for the UK as it slipped from top to bottom of the G7 league table. “There is a sharp correction,” he added.
The UK chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, last week warned a sense of declinism was hampering the UK’s economic recovery, and has come under pressure to come up with a credible plan to boost growth. His speech, which focused on “enterprise, education, employment and everywhere”, was widely criticised by business leaders as being devoid of policies.
The UK growth downgrade came in the IMF’s update to its half-yearly World Economic Outlook (WEO) – a health check on the global economy published in April and October.
The October 2022 WEO was completed before the tax-cutting mini budget from the then-chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, in late September and pencilled in growth of 0.3% for 2023. In its update, the IMF said the UK had performed more strongly in 2022 than anticipated, growing by 4.1% rather than the 3.6% expected three months ago.
But it said the outlook for 2023 had deteriorated, with its updated forecast reflecting the higher taxes announced by Hunt after he replaced Kwarteng, the increase in interest rates from the Bank of England, tougher financial conditions for borrowers, and still-high energy prices. The Bank is expected to raise interest rates from 3.5% to 4% on Thursday.
“With inflation at about 10% or above in several euro-area countries and the United Kingdom, household budgets remain stretched. The accelerated pace of rate increases by the Bank of England and the European Central Bank is tightening financial conditions and cooling demand in the housing sector and beyond,” the IMF said.
Treasury sources said the IMF’s focus on the high level of inflation reinforced the need to tackle the UK’s cost of living crisis. They added that in 2021 Britain had outperformed forecasts made by the IMF and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Hunt said in response to the IMF forecasts: “The governor of the Bank of England recently said that any UK recession this year is likely to be shallower than previously predicted, however these figures confirm we are not immune to the pressures hitting nearly all advanced economies.”
Hunt, whose plan for growth includes developing the UK equivalent of California’s Silicon Valley, added: “Short-term challenges should not obscure our long-term prospects – the UK outperformed many forecasts last year, and if we stick to our plan to halve inflation, the UK is still predicted to grow faster than Germany and Japan over the coming years.”
Gourinchas said the UK’s high dependence on still-expensive natural gas, the “scarring” effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on the size of the workforce, and higher mortgage costs would have an impact on growth.
Sign up to Business Today
Free daily newsletter
Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning
Enter your email address
Sign up
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
“All together these factors will lead to a fairly sharp retrenchment in activity this year,” the IMF official said. Of the other G7 countries, it revised up its growth forecasts for the US, Germany, Italy and Japan, while leaving them the same for France and Canada. Russia’s growth prospects have markedly improved, the IMF said, with higher military spending and buoyant energy exports leading to forecast expansion of 0.3% in 2023 – a 2.6 point upgrade.
Overall, global growth is forecast by the IMF to be 2.9% this year, 0.2 points higher than anticipated in October, while the projection for 2024 has been revised down by 0.1 points to 3.1%.
Gourinchas said even after the modest improvement in the global picture for 2023, growth would remain weak by historical standards, as the fight against the strongest inflationary pressures in four decades and Russia’s war in Ukraine took their toll.
“Despite these headwinds, the outlook is less gloomy than in our October forecast, and could represent a turning point, with growth bottoming out and inflation declining.
“Economic growth proved surprisingly resilient in the third quarter of last year, with strong labor markets, robust household consumption and business investment, and better-than-expected adaptation to the energy crisis in Europe.”
The IMF’s economic counsellor said he was also encouraged by signs that inflation rates were falling in many countries, even though core inflation – which excludes energy and food prices – had yet to peak in most cases.
“Elsewhere, China’s sudden re-opening paves the way for a rapid rebound in activity. And global financial conditions have improved as inflation pressures started to abate. This, and a weakening of the US dollar from its November high, provided some modest relief to emerging and developing countries,” Gourinchas said.
“On the upside, a stronger boost from pent-up demand in numerous economies or a faster fall in inflation are plausible. On the downside, severe health outcomes in China could hold back the recovery, Russia’s war in Ukraine could escalate, and tighter global financing conditions could worsen debt distress.” Financial markets might also respond badly to higher than expected inflation news, the IMF added. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/may/12/secondworldwar.spain | World news | 2005-05-11T23:01:55.000Z | Giles Tremlett | Spain's concentration camp hero is exposed as a fraud | For almost 30 years Enric Marco was a living witness to the thousands of exiled leftwing Spaniards who ended up in Nazi concentration camps.
After he revealed how he had been arrested in Vichy France and imprisoned in the camps in the second world war, his plight symbolised the human cost of a secret alliance between Hitler and the Spanish dictator General Franco.
He had been chosen by fellow survivors of the camps, where more than 8,000 Spaniards died, to represent them as they sought, after decades of silence under Franco, to tell their story and demand compensation.
Several times a week Mr Marco would recount his tale to classrooms of schoolchildren, journalists and, recently, the Spanish parliament.
"They were not mad, or sadistic, they were worse than that, they were bureaucrats of a fascist Europe that believed it would last for a thousand years," he told the parliament in Madrid this year.
Spanish leftwingers in France had, he said, been rounded up by the Gestapo and sent to camps where the survival rate was little more than one in four.
Yesterday, however, Mr Marco admitted that he had made up the story. He was not prisoner number 6,448 in the the Mauthausen and Flossenburg camps. He had not even left Spain at the start of the war to join the French resistance.
Instead of being released from imprisonment by the allies in 1945, he returned to Spain in 1943 after spending two years in Germany, working in Hitler's armaments factories.
"It is deformed biography, which does not conform to reality," he admitted to Barcelona's TV3 television station yesterday.
Mr Marco insisted that he had only "half-lied". He had been held by the Gestapo for months and charged with treason, he claimed. "All I have done is change the scenario."
He was due to attend the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war this week, together with Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, at the Mauthausen camp in Austria.
But his fellow concentration camp survivors sent him home after Mr Marco's tale - first told in a 1978 autobiography called Memoir of Hell - was revealed to be a lie by a university researcher, Benito Bermejo.
"The alarm was first rung after listening to what this man had to say ... because normally the ex-prisoners felt a certain reluctance to dwell on the most painful aspects of their life," Mr Bermejo said yesterday.
"They can explain bad things but, precisely because they have lived them, they are reticent about making a 'show' out of them," he said.
Rosa Toran, a historian and vice-president of Spain's concentration camp survivors' association, said its members were stunned but, even as a cheat, Mr Marco had done a lot for their cause.
"It is difficult to decide what is behind a lie of this kind," she said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/may/19/cannes-2018-japanese-film-shoplifters-wins-palme-dor | Film | 2018-05-19T20:16:15.000Z | Vanessa Thorpe | Cannes 2018: unfancied Japanese film Shoplifters takes Palme d'Or | In a surprise verdict, the Japanese film Shoplifters, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, has been awarded the Palme d’Or for main feature at the close of the Cannes film festival. “The ending blew us out of the cinema,” said jury president Cate Blanchett.
Beating a field of 21, including two or three titles that had been hotly tipped for the top by the critics, the film took the prestigious prize on Saturday night ahead of the screening of the final film of the festival, Terry Gilliam’s long-awaited adaptation of Cervantes, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.
Cannes 2018 verdict: sombre brilliance wins day despite Von Trier's unwelcome return
Read more
A special Palme d’Or award was made to the 87-year-old French Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard for his film Image Book. Godard’s film, Blanchett explained, “almost sat apart from the other films, almost outside time and space”, and so could not be considered against them.
Spike Lee’s anti-Trump comedy BlacKkKlansman was runner-up, receiving the Grand Prix, with the third prize going to a film by a Lebanese female director, Nadine Labaki, that had been rewarded with an ecstatic ovation towards the end of the 10-day annual festival on the Côte d’Azur. Capernaum, Labaki’s heart-wrenching attack on the needless suffering of children, was the favourite of Oscar-winner Gary Oldman, who told the press he was backing the film as he walked the red carpet last night.
A still from Shoplifters: ‘The ending blew us out of the cinema’ Photograph: Fuji Television Network/Gaga/AOI Pro
Other favourites included Burning, made by Lee Chang-dong, which earned the highest score from critics ever recorded, and one of the earliest films screened at the festival, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War.
The prize ceremony was marked this year not just by the unexpected winner – the story of a family of petty criminals scraping a living in downtown Tokyo – but also by the passionate speech given at the closing ceremony by the actor Asia Argento. Argento named and shamed her alleged persecutor, the disgraced American film producer Harvey Weinstein.
Joining jury member Ava DuVernay on the stage at the Lumiere Theatre in the Palais du Festival, Argento said: “In 1997, I was raped by Harvey Weinstein here at Cannes. I was 21 years old. This festival was his hunting ground. I want to make a prediction: Harvey Weinstein will never be welcomed here ever again.
“He will live in disgrace, shunned by a film community that once embraced him and covered up for his crimes. And even tonight, sitting among you, there are those who still have to be held accountable for their conduct against women for behaviour that does not belong in this industry. You know who you are. But more importantly, we know who you are. And we’re not going to allow you to get away with it any longer.”
Weinstein denies all the allegations of non-consensual sex that have been made against him.
Asia Argento and Ava DuVernay at the closing ceremony. Photograph: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images
Blanchett said that choosing the winner for the 71st international film festival “was bloody difficult”. She added that her panel of judges had to put their own personal tastes aside at points to come to a joint decision. “We had to try to put our objective hats on,” said the Australian actor at the press conference that followed the announcement last night.
“There a lot of rules in France, surprisingly,” she joked. “And the Palme d’Or has to go to a film that brings lots of different things together. We felt that several films did that. It was quite painful but it [Shoplifters] is an extraordinary film.”
Fellow jury member Kristen Stewart, the American actor, said she had enjoyed her experience of sitting on the jury. “It was like the summer camp of my dreams. It was like a consolidated 10-day film school,” she said.
Last year the prize went to Ruben Ostlund’s The Square, a satire of the art world that went on to score an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film.
Speaking on the red carpet ahead of the screening of his film, Gilliam said he had been working on the Quixote project for 28 years. It stars Jonathan Pryce, who joined Gilliam in Cannes, as the legendary Spanish deluded hero.
Full list of winners
Palme d’Or Shoplifters (dir: Hirokazu Kore-eda)
Grand prize BlacKkKlansman (dir: Spike Lee)
Jury Prize Capernaum (dir: Nadine Labaki)
Special Palme d’Or The Image Book (dir: Jean-Luc Godard)
Best actor Marcello Fonte, Dogman
Best director Pawel Pawlikowski, Cold War
Best screenplay Alice Rohrwacher (Happy As Lazzaro); Jafar Panahi and Nader Saeivar (Three Faces)
Best Actress Samal Yeslyamova (Ayka)
Caméra d’Or Girl (dir: Lukas Dhont)
Short Film Palme d’Or All These Creatures (dir: Charles Williams); special mention: On the Border (dir: Wei Shujun) | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/17/pope-francis-kisses-feet-women-muslim-maudy-thursday | World news | 2014-04-17T18:39:07.000Z | Lizzy Davies | Pope Francis kisses feet of women and Muslim man in Maundy Thursday rite | Pope Francis washed and kissed the feet of 12 disabled people – several of them women and one a Muslim man – as he brought his inclusive touch to a Maundy Thursday rite restricted to men under previous pontiffs.
At the Don Gnocchi centre in Rome, the Argentinian kept to his ground-breaking choices of last Easter, when he stunned traditionalists not only by taking the ritual to a youth detention centre but also by becoming the first pope to include females.
The Vatican said that of the dozen people chosen this year, nine were Italian, one from Cape Verde and one from Ethiopia. A 75-year-old man from Libya who suffered serious neurological impairment in an accident, was Muslim. Between them, the group, many of whom were in wheelchairs, ranged in age from 16 to 86.
The ceremony represents Jesus's final act of humility towards his disciples. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/may/19/melvyn-bragg-sky-arts-south-bank-show | Media | 2009-05-19T06:10:42.000Z | Ben Dowell | Melvyn Bragg working on 'three or four ideas' for Sky Arts | The South Bank Show presenter Melvyn Bragg is working on programme ideas for the digital channel Sky Arts to be made by his team from ITV Productions' arts and specialist features department.
The veteran presenter has revealed that he has been working on "three or four ideas" with Sky Arts, but insisted that the programme proposals "were in the pipeline" long before he decided to call time on the ITV1's flagship arts strand.
"We have been working on these ideas for a year, long before the announcement was made," he told MediaGuardian.co.uk. "We have been talking to Sky several times over the past year and given theme a number of ideas and they are thinking them over."
However, the 69-year-old presenter added that he did not know what would happen if any of the commissions were greenlit or whether he would continue to work with Sky Arts once he leaves ITV next summer after the next and final series of The South Bank Show.
"I really can't say – do you know what you'll be doing in 14 months' time?" he laughed. "No, of course not."
Bragg said there was "nothing in the rumours" that The South Bank Show could moved wholesale to the BBC, or that he would be tempted by a move to work full-time at the corporation.
"These things are buzzing around – there are a lot of wasps buzzing around – but we have nothing with the BBC," he said.
Bragg's disclosure that negotiations with Sky Arts have been taking place for a year chimes with claims from a senior programme insider that The South Bank Show production team expected the programme to be axed last year.
"We all expected to be out of the door last year so in many ways this wasn't a surprise," said the source. "In fact people have been expecting the end of the programme for the last few years and we aren't surprised that it hasn't survived ITV's biggest cash crisis in its history. In many ways it was a simple decision for ITV and some of us are surprised it survives until next year. But maybe that is because it's Melvyn."
ITV announced earlier this month that is to its axe The South Bank Show after more than 30 years at the end of next year's series, when Bragg retires as presenter and series editor.
The broadcaster said that it will be receptive to programining ideas from Bragg and his department but the Labour peer indicated in an interview with Radio 4's arts show Front Row on the day his ITV retirement was announced that the broadcaster was "going to be without arts programmes" when he leaves.
ITV's decision to scrap the programme is widely understood to have been due to cost savings, with one report suggesting that ITV wanted to slash the programme's budget by 80%.
Michael Parkinson also supports a move by Bragg to the BBC in the latest edition of the Radio Times, published today.
"I believe Melvyn Bragg is a natural BBC man. He proves it on his Radio 4 show, In Our Time," Parkinson said.
"You have to go back to the dear departed days of Huw Weldon and Monitor to find a talent able to present a documentary about Billy Connolly one week and Francis Bacon the next with both joy and authority. More importantly, the BBC is the only organisation left able to accommodate the budget of The South Bank Show.
"Whatever happens, Bragg has already assembled a body of work that will be revisited many times, both as a treasure trove of cultural icons and a reminder of a time when television made programmes for an audience reckoned to have an IQ larger than the numbers you would find in a bingo bag."
Bragg has presented The South Bank Show since its launch in January 1978, with a programme that featured Germaine Greer, Gerald Scarfe and Paul McCartney, and a signature tune by Andrew Lloyd Webber out of Paganini.
To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email [email protected] or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.
If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication". | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/16/uk-eu-security-and-foreign-policy-ties-will-weaken-says-macron-ally | World news | 2020-06-16T11:37:59.000Z | Jennifer Rankin | UK-EU security and foreign policy ties will weaken, says Macron ally | The UK will have weaker ties with the European Union on foreign and security policy, an ally of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has said, amid bafflement in Brussels over Boris Johnson’s “global Britain” ambitions.
Nathalie Loiseau, Macron’s former Europe minister, who now chairs the European parliament’s security and defence subcommittee, told the Guardian that EU-UK foreign policy cooperation would decline in key areas, including some intelligence-sharing, military operations and the Galileo satellite system.
“The UK is an ally in Nato, but there are a few significant topics on which if there is no formal framework the cooperation will not be the same as before.”
At the launch of Brexit talks in February the government said that “friendly dialogue and cooperation between the UK and the EU” did not require “an institutionalised relationship”.
The UK’s decision not to seek any formal foreign policy links – reversing Johnson’s previous promise - has caused profound disappointment among EU allies.
Brussels diplomats are also puzzled by the prime minister’s ambitions for “global Britain” and unsure about where the UK is seeking to position itself vis-a-vis Europe, the United States and China. “Global Britain sounded more like a good weather motto and today we are in the middle of a hurricane with international tensions higher than ever,” Loiseau said.
Timeline
From Brefusal to Brexit: a history of Britain in the EU
Show
“We don’t hear much from the UK right now, on issues like Iran or Syria or Libya,” Loiseau said. “Even in Nato the voice of the UK is much weaker than it used to be. It may be temporary … but that’s a fact.”
While the UK has bilateral relationships with foreign security services, Loiseau said some intelligence-sharing “to assess terrorist risks and risks coming from third states willing to influence divide us or weaken us” would be lost without a formal agreement.
The former French diplomat said the UK would no longer be able to take part in EU military missions overseas. The UK has contributed personnel to an estimated 25 of 35 EU military and civilian missions, although usually less than other member states. As an EU member state, the British led a naval force to protect ships from Somali pirates, and remains involved in the EU peacekeeping force in Bosnia.
Similarly Loiseau said the absence of a foreign policy agreement would rule out British access to the Galileo satellite’s encrypted signal, which can be used to guide missiles and share information during national emergencies, such as terrorist attacks.
“We would certainly not deny the UK its rights provided that they come into a specific framework agreement which is needed,” Loiseau said. “This notion that everything can be clarified by diplomatic niceties is not correct, is not accurate.”
Her view chimes with regret and puzzlement across the EU over Johnson’s decision not to see any foreign policy agreement.
The EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, a former minister in the French government, recently said “I still don’t understand why” the UK was not seeking formal links on defence and security policy, noting that Johnson had signed up a foreign policy relationship in the political declaration last October.
One EU diplomat told the Guardian it was “really a blow for us” when Johnson revealed the UK no longer wanted any foreign policy ties, including on development and foreign aid. “We are very concerned that it is going to be much more difficult to have closer cooperation.”
A second EU diplomat said without a common agreement there was “the risk that the two sides drift further apart, which I don’t think is in our common interest”. EU diplomats argue that ad-hoc arrangements could never be as good and will be exposed as a poor substitute during a crisis.
Loiseau rejected suggestions that France had made it difficult for a post-Brexit Britain to cooperate with the EU on a new generation of defence projects, by ruling out British companies from contracts. Under Theresa May, the UK government said the then French position – excluding non-EU entities from contracts – made it impossible for the UK to get involved.
Loiseau said discussions were ongoing. “We have always been very much in favour or keeping the UK as much as possible on board on foreign policy, on security and defence.”
A UK government spokesperson said: “We expect foreign policy cooperation [with the EU] to be substantial – as indeed it is with many of our international partners – but we don’t think we need a clunky institutional framework to deliver it effectively.”
“We are already working closely with the EU on a wide range of issues including Iran, Libya, climate change, and Russia. These don’t require an institutional framework, and we see no reason why this cannot continue.” The spokesperson added the UK was open to discussing technical agreements “where genuinely needed” such as a security of information agreement to share classified information. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/aug/13/captain-webb-review-biopic-matthew-webb-swim-english-channel | Film | 2015-08-13T20:30:09.000Z | Mike McCahill | Captain Webb review – oafish biopic of first man to swim the English Channel | This attempt to elevate the reputation of Capt Matthew Webb, first man to swim the English Channel, suffers from a visibly stretched budget and a careworn structuring device, flashing back mid-crossing to detail how Webb got his toes wet. Among those dropping by the heritage locations to do Justin Hardy a favour, Steve Oram’s coach provides flickers of cheer, but Warren Brown’s oafish performance ensures a less than winning protagonist, and the supporting cast is awash with stick-on sideburns and phoney yokel accents. Sporadic handheld shots fail to lend a sexy modern edge, merely pointing up how unconvincing it all looks.
Watch the trailer for Captain Webb – video | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/27/funkadelic-10-of-the-best | Music | 2015-05-27T16:19:34.000Z | Stevie Chick | Funkadelic – 10 of the best | 1 I Bet You
The story of Funkadelic begins with their sister band, Parliament, who started life as doo-wop group the Parliaments, in bandleader George Clinton’s hometown of Plainfield, New Jersey. “I loved doo-wop music,” Clinton told me in 2007, “because it’s all about begging for pussy.” After scoring a hit with (I Wanna) Testify in 1967, contractual issues saw the group put on ice while Clinton signed their backing group to Westbound Records, as Funkadelic. As the name suggested, this new incarnation fused funk with psychedelic rock, taking the wild guitar noise of Hendrix and the acid-tinged groove of Norman Whitfield’s Motown productions in an altogether freakier direction. Their 1970 eponymous debut finds that sound in an embryonic state, a murky head-screw of an album that sets Clinton’s crazed, cosmic and carnal philosophising to lumbering heavy-funk jams doused liberally with echo and effects – a sound as wild as their stage show, with Clinton and his cohort dressed like hippies from Saturn. The result is purposefully disorientating – and initially impenetrable – though the clouds of dope smoke thin-out briefly for I Bet You, where the Parliaments’ five-part vocals make like psychedelic-era Temptations against a track that takes the turn-of-the-decade Motown sound on a lysergic trip. The song itself was strong enough for the Jackson 5 to cover on their ABC album that spring, though their take lacked the inspired noise-guitar excursions Eddie Hazel lent the original. Later that same year, a reactivated Parliament released their debut album, Osmium, a glorious set that proved Clinton and crew possessed able pop chops alongside their love for psychedelic noise, a sensibility that would filter through on later Funkadelic releases.
2 Friday Night August 14th
“Unusual, camp, today and now… A new concept,” was how contemporary radio ads described Funkadelic’s second album, Free Your Mind & Your Ass Will Follow, which Clinton says was recorded while the whole band were tripping on acid. Certainly that goes some way to explaining the freeform title track, which pitted wails of feedback against guttural guitar riffs and snippets of inspirational psychobabble, for 10 minutes or so, proving occasionally electrifying, but ultimately more baffling than funky. Better was this five-minute sprawl of Eddie Hazel guitar pyrotechnics, orgasmic backing vocals, and stabbing keyboards from new addition Bernie Worrell (whose gifts as composer and arranger would enable the group’s later ambitious steps). The track reaches its peak on the outro, as Hazel drops some meditative scree before raising the tempo and engaging in a duel with Worrell, while Tiki Fulwood’s drums take centre stage. That final minute or so – Fulwood hammering at his kit from deep within a cavern of dub, as singer/bassist Billy Nelson chases scales – still sounds futuristic, and if it didn’t quite invent drum’n’bass decades ahead of schedule, it certainly anticipates the avant-funk Miles Davis would explore five years later.
3 Wars of Armageddon
Funkadelic’s third album, 1971’s Maggot Brain, is today best-remembered for its opening title track, an aching and wracked ten-minute guitar solo recorded after Clinton told Hazel to play like his mother had just died. The album’s closing jam is its true masterpiece, however: 10 minutes of frantic, apocalyptic funk, howling guitar and vamping organ, with Fulwood’s restless and ever-shifting rhythms providing the bed for a riot of noise and pre-hip-hop sampling. Clinton glues together Looney Tunes sound effects, snippets of news broadcasts, screams, laughter, explosions, cuckoo clocks and flatulence to evoke the madness of modern life and its imminent demise. His vision of the apocalypse is very much Robert Crumb-meets-Lee Perry, gonzo and scatological and driven by black humour, the only “lyrics” being disembodied drawls of “right on, brother” and “more power to the people”, “more pussy to the power”, “more pussy to the people” and “more power to the pussy”, suggesting Clinton took a cynical view of then-current protest culture. It should be an unlistenable mess, but Hazel’s never-less-than-genius guitar and Fulwood’s brilliantly pulverising breakbeats ensure that Wars of Armageddon is electrifying until its final mass extinction event.
George Clinton … Keeping the freak flag flying in the 1970s. Photograph: Richard E. Aaron/Redferns
4 You Hit The Nail on the Head
If Maggot Brain marked the peak of Funkadelic MK 1 – their first brilliant full-length statement – their fourth album, 1972’s America Eats Its Young, proved a grander project still: a double-set that was, by turns, fiercely political, blackly hilarious and unexpectedly heartfelt. Encased within a lurid gatefold sleeve, the first by Funkadelic’s visionary in-house artist Pedro Bell, and containing sleevenotes penned by Scientology-exiled cultists The Process Church of the Final Judgement, America Eats Its Young caught a group in transition, striding proudly out of the primordial wah-drenched ooze of their earlier albums, towards a more accessible, considered, but no less twisted sound. “That was the album where I was trying to see if I had any brain cells left,” Clinton told me. “I’d been under the influence of psychedelics for so long, I thought, Damn, I wonder if I can be ‘logical’ at all?” Beyond a newly coherent lyrical sensibility lay a further musical mutation on the part of the Funkadelic arkestra, and this bold opening track gave full rein to their newfound ambition, an almost-proggy suite that shifts from frenetic, full-on jazz-funk (with a time-signature Stephen Hawking would struggle to decode) to sassy soul vamping, to double-time bluegrass-funk, with supernatural grace, as a soulful choir dispense wisdom over that marvellously manic wah-wah guitar. This grand overture set the tone for the eclectic spree that would follow, both across the double-album set (which encompassed lush string-led muzak, dreamy bedroom funk, sweet southern soul and swooning, sad gospel) and the rest of Funkadelic’s subsequent discography.
5 Loose Booty
A ridiculously slippery, rubbery slab of funk, so loose it’s barely hanging together, this track marked the arrival of the Collins brothers, Bootsy and Catfish, to Clinton’s motley crew. In 1970, the Collins’ band the Pacemakers stepped in to replace James Brown’s classic backing group following their exit over a wage-based dispute. The Pacemakers were duly renamed the JBs, helping the Godfather’s funk evolve into the 1970s, but the duo chafed under Brown’s infamously tight discipline and exited the following spring, again over wages, and also Booty’s predilection for LSD. Clinton, who had no problem whatsoever with acid, picked up the Collins brothers (after his own bassist and guitarist, Billy Nelson and Eddie Hazel, split Funkadelic over, yes, wages), and Loose Booty captures the duo on inspired form, Bootsy’s bassline an exercise in lazy brilliance, Catfish’s sleepy-eyed chicken-scratch guitar never not in the pocket. Loose Booty’s other chief attractions include some funky jaw harp in the left channel, Worrell’s baroque organ improvisations, and Clinton’s streetwise tales of various junkie misadventures, editorialising at one point “Why do you think they call it dope, dope?”
Funkadelic – 1o of the best Spotify
6 Better by the Pound
Clinton revived Parliament in 1974 as a more pop-oriented funk ensemble (albeit containing mostly the same musicians as his other group), maintaining Funkadelic as his outlet for freaky, guitar-heavy funk. However, as Parliament started racking up chart hits and Clinton began leading both bands on legendary joint-tours (wherein the P-Funk massive made the “Mothership Connection” under a gargantuan lighting rig that resembled a UFO), Funkadelic’s own brand of funk gained a newfound focus, paring back some of the layers of guitar excess and developing a fresh interest in the dancefloor. 1975’s Let’s Take It To The Stage – one of three remarkable P-Funk albums released that year, along with Parliament smashes Chocolate City and Mothership Connection – was the strongest of Funkadelic’s albums during this era, its second track, Better by the Pound, an irresistible funk riding an impossibly elastic, laser-guided bassline that was the work of Billy Nelson, briefly returning to the band four years after he quit. Alumnus Eddie Hazel also reconnected with Funkadelic for the track, joining with guitarist Gary Shider and a choir of soulful backing vocals to deliver a lyric caught between asceticism and bodily pleasure, ultimately plumping for the latter (“The preacher keeps promisin’ satisfaction / The ladies keep giving up the gratifaction”). The focus, though, is always that bassline, powered along by rasping high-hat and some seriously funky cowbell.
7 No Head, No Backstage Pass
From the same album, this track passed a jaundiced eye over backstage bacchanals, unspooling the woes of “a girl named Jan” who, despite her many connections to the band, won’t be allowed into the dressing room until she goes down on the doorman (hence the title). While the lyric recounts its tale with all the tastefulness of a late-60s underground comic (there’s little sympathy for Jan, and not a little leering at the hoops she’s expected to jump through to join the party), the track triumphs thanks to the lumbering, gonzoid middle-eastern riff (which suggests heavy metal if it were born from the Bedouin, or Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir retooled for the disco era), the spiralling guitar scree of Shider and Michael Hampton, and the wild scatting backing vocals (“Aroo! Aroo! A-chaka-chaka-chaka-chaka!”). Its tornado of weirdfunk was sampled to great effect on Rakim’s lacerating Lyrics of Fury.
8 Take Your Dead Ass Home
Subtitled Say Som’n Nasty, this highlight from 1976’s Tales of Kidd Funkadelic – a raid-the-vaults compilation of unreleased material to mark their exit from Westbound Records and signing to Warner Bros. – did exactly that, as Clinton and “the Maggotusi vocal choir” tell ribald tales of “some freaks from LA / Who come to New York to play”, and share a filthy limerick about a man from Peru who, having fallen asleep in his canoe, “was dreaming of Venus / And took out his penis / And woke up with a handful of goo.” The giddy Frankenstein funk to which the group set these rude rhymes marries a woozy Bernie Worrell synth riff to a lazily lurching groove and, in its circular way, feels like it could go on forever, its seven minutes never threatening to drag.
9 One Nation Under a Groove
As the 1970s wore on, Clinton’s two-headed beast swallowed up more and more funk talent from the ranks of his contemporaries and competitors. James Brown lost his feted horn players Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker, to the Parliafunkadelicment thang in 1975 (“Where James preached uniformity, punctuality and discipline, George didn’t have any of that,” Parker told me. “If some guy was into Tarzan, and wanted to dress onstage like Tarzan, or like a baseball referee, or a pilot, that was OK with George. I was used to tuxedos, bow ties, patent leather shoes … Uniforms. George said, ‘Life’s just a party, so you shouldn’t be uptight about how people dress’”). The Ohio Players, meanwhile, saw singer/organist Walter “Junie” Morrison switch groove allegiance to Clinton towards the end of the decade, taking on the role of musical director and sharing keyboard duties with Bernie Worrell. Junie’s skills are played to the fore on this chart-topping title track to Funkadelic’s 1978 album – their only LP to achieve platinum sales in the US. There’s arguably a Rizla’s width of difference between the pop-orientated sound of Parliament and Funkadelic’s more wired output by this point, and One Nation would prove feel-good enough an anthem to unite disparate tribes and win back at least some of the dancefloor from disco’s hedonistic hegemony. Junie’s wild and inventive synths embroider a vivid groove, delivering a sound futuristic enough to suggest Clinton and cohorts would survive a second decade of funk primacy, no sweat. But Funkadelic were soon to run aground, and during the 80s and 90s, the Parliafunkadelic sound would more often be heard via samples woven into the beats of the hip-hop generation than from the group themselves.
10 Not Just Knee Deep
Another unforgettable synth riff – later Iifted by De La Soul for their ineffable Me, Myself & I – drives this late-period epic, an ecstatic paean to lust, dancing and the joyous power of song, as our narrator recalls how a girl’s ability to do “the freak” drove him crazy, noting scientifically “Something about the music / Got into my pants”. The track lasts 15 minutes, but there’s not a second wasted, as guitarist Michael Hampton and former Spinners singer Philippe Wynne take turns in the spotlight, the former delivering enough wild fretplay to remind us this is Funkadelic and not Parliament, the latter adding enraptured scat to Funkadelic’s palette. Backing vocals from two-thirds of Parliament’s offshoot girl-group Parlet, and the restless itch of Larry Fratangelo’s cuíca are further treats hidden within its upbeat, irresistible groove. The track was Funkadelic’s second single to top the US R&B charts, and by 1979 Clinton’s restless franchise had spun off under numerous guises, Bootsy’s Rubber Band, the Brides of Funkenstein and the aforementioned Parlet just three of the more successful offshoots from the hedonistic hydra. But by the group’s next album, 1981’s The Electric Spanking of War Babies, Clinton was at odds with his label (who forced him to pare a proposed double-album down to a single disc and censor Pedro Bell’s phallocentric sleeve artwork), his bandmates (several of whom had already quit over wages, and a further number of whom were responsible for a renegade Funkadelic album, 1980’s Connections & Disconnections, released under their name but without Clinton’s permission or involvement, and featuring thinly veiled lyrical potshots at their former leader), and a debilitating drug problem. It would be the group’s final album-proper until last year’s triple-album, First You Gotta Shake The Gate. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/12/iron-resolve-steel-town-unites-to-fight-for-its-furnaces | Business | 2023-11-12T10:00:00.000Z | Jasper Jolly | Iron resolve: steel town unites to fight for its furnaces | Steve Barnes, co-owner of the Lucky Tuppence sweetshop on Scunthorpe’s high street, has experienced the decline of the UK’s steel industry first-hand: he was made redundant in 1981, when Margaret Thatcher’s government cut thousands of jobs. Barnes said the lack of investment in steel in the decades that followed has felt like “a way of punching the north”.
In between weighing lollipops and chocolate buttons from the array of jars that line his shelves, he is now contemplating the latest blow to the town: British Steel’s plans to axe more than 2,000 jobs in Scunthorpe, out of a workforce of about 3,800, in a shift to greener technology.
The steel industry must decarbonise if the UK is to hit its target of net zero additions of carbon to the atmosphere by 2050. Scunthorpe’s sister plant, the Port Talbot steelworks in south Wales, is the UK’s biggest single emitter, producing 5.7m tonnes of carbon last year, while the north Lincolnshire site is the third biggest, producing 4m tonnes, or about 1% of the UK’s annual total, according to government data.
The outlines of the UK industry’s future have become clearer over the past month. Last week, Chinese-owned British Steel announced it planned to close Scunthorpe’s blast furnaces in favour of electric arc furnaces, which it hopes to build by late 2025 (although unions suggest that could be too ambitious, given that the company is yet to start ordering the components). One furnace will be in Scunthorpe while another will be in Teesside, to which steelmaking will return for the first time since 2015.
Steve Barnes co-owner of The Lucky Tuppence Sweet Shop, was made redundant by British Steel in 1981. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer
Tata Steel, Port Talbot’s Indian owner, is considering a similar plan to close its two furnaces as soon as March, with 3,000 job losses. Union leaders fear as many as 2,500 redundancies at Scunthorpe, although there are a few years left before British Steel plans to let its two operating blast furnaces cool.
Earlier this month, Tata went as far as drawing up detailed plans for the redundancies, but pulled the announcement at the last minute. That has offered workers a chance to argue their case again, although unions have had little sign that Tata will change its mind.
The switch to lower-maintenance electric arc furnaces will cost jobs, the latest chapter in decades of decline for the UK steel industry. It could prove to be a historic turning point for the British economy, potentially taking away the ability to mass-produce steel from iron ore and coal for the first time since the Industrial Revolution.
‘One thing after another’
Scunthorpe’s modern steel industry started with iron ore discoveries in the 1850s, and the town’s fortunes rose as the steel industry become a mighty economic presence, producing more than 25m tonnes a year by the 1960s. Yet as other countries caught up in the industrialisation race, and China powered ahead, the UK’s steel industry declined amid underinvestment. It has been “one thing after another” in recent years, grumbles a man running a fast food stand in the town centre.
The plant has passed down through a series of owners for decades. It was once part of the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus, which Tata (also the owner of Jaguar Land Rover) bought in 2007 for a top-of-the-market £6.2bn, just before the financial crisis. Tata offloaded Scunthorpe to the private equity firm Greybull in 2019 for a nominal sum, which in turn abandoned the company to liquidation after three years. Chinese steelmaker Jingye eventually stepped in to buy the plant in March 2020 – after the taxpayer spent more than £600m propping it up.
Jingye’s purchase has not, so far, been a success. British Steel’s accounts for 2021 are almost a year overdue, but it lost £140m in 2020. The unions say that Jingye is yet to meet many of the investment pledges it made when it bought the plant. A British Steel spokesperson said Jingye has invested £330m.
The switch to electric arc furnaces will need investment on another level: British Steel said on Monday it would cost £1.25bn in Scunthorpe and Teesside. The company is thought to be negotiating for £500m in government support to match that promised to Tata.
Blast furnaces use coal to make iron that then has carbon removed to produce steel. That process produces unavoidable carbon emissions. On the other hand, electric arc furnaces can use electricity – ideally, generated from renewable sources – to melt down scrap steel or iron.
British Steel had been considering keeping one blast furnace open and storing the carbon emissions in empty oilwells under the North Sea, but on Monday it said that option was “not viable” for its steel. It is understood that the local carbon capture project will be able to continue without the involvement of the steelworks.
Unlike blast furnaces, electric arc furnaces are not capable of making iron from iron ore. Chris McDonald, chief executive of the Materials Processing Institute, which runs its own experimental electric arc furnace, said the British Steel and Tata Steel announcements were “necessary but not sufficient”.
“Whatever technology we end up with, the electric arc furnace will be at the heart of it,” he said. “What’s missing is any iron ore steelmaking.”
McDonald, who has been selected as a Labour candidate at the next election, said the government should invest further to build a direct reduced iron (DRI) plant that could use methane or, later, zero-carbon hydrogen to make iron without adding to the climate crisis.
The scramble for scrap
There could be other gaps in the plans. At Port Talbot, electric arc furnaces will be unable to make steel for cars such as Nissan’s Leaf, built in Sunderland with Welsh steel, because nitrogen from the air gets in, creating blemishes. Arc furnaces were capable of making all the products currently made at Scunthorpe, including the rails on which the UK’s trains run, British Steel said.
Both companies need to be able to source scrap metal at the correct grade. Some steel executives argue electric arc furnaces make sense because the UK exports 10m tonnes of scrap steel a year, more than the 7m tonnes it makes. McDonald said this argument ignored the quality of the steel; he suggests only 1m tonnes would be the highest-quality, most-sought-after grades.
Paul McBean of the Community union thinks supplying the new furnaces with enough good-quality scrap steel would be a struggle. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer
In a tired office block that still has traces of the works’ past under public ownership, Paul McBean of the Community union agreed, saying only about 13% of the UK’s scrap would be of the right grade. “The whole of Europe is going to be chasing that 13%,” he said, arguing that the previous approach of keeping a blast furnace open would avoid possible reliance on imports of higher-quality scrap.
British Steel said: “Detailed research shows we would be able to source the volumes and quality of material we would require.”
National security
Scunthorpe has its “four queens” – the blast furnaces named after English monarchs Mary, Bess, Anne and Victoria – that are visible for miles around in north Lincolnshire, although just Anne and Victoria are currently in operation.
What happens to them may have a bearing on national politics. In 2019, Holly Mumby-Croft became Scunthorpe’s first Conservative MP since 1983 – a key brick in the “red wall” – when Boris Johnson’s pro-Brexit wave helped win seats in areas that voted leave in the 2016 EU referendum. (North Lincolnshire, which contains Scunthorpe, voted two-thirds in favour of Brexit.)
The threat of thousands of job losses has put Mumby-Croft in a tricky position. She is calling for major intervention from ministers to save the blast furnaces. She wants any government support for British Steel to be accompanied by guarantees that they will remain burning for several years and that jobs will be retained.
Sitting in a cafe across the road from the steelworks, she said “if we’re going to use it, we might as well make it”. “I don’t think we should be one of the only countries in the G20 who can’t make our own steel”.
Mumby-Croft will probably be up against her predecessor, Nic Dakin, at a general election as soon as next year. Dakin has been reselected to fight the seat, and he is strongly critical of the Conservative government’s “sticking-plaster politics”. A loss of 2,000 jobs in Scunthorpe would be a “significant challenge to the local economy”, taking out relatively high-paying jobs, Dakin said at a cafe with a “Save our steel” poster in its window.
Charlotte Bumpton-Childs of the GMB, thinks the government has failed to understand the steel industry. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer
Labour has said it will invest £3bn in the steel industry if elected. It is not thought to have drawn up detailed plans, although references to hydrogen in one official document suggest that DRI could be an option. Conservative government investment in the sector would come to £1bn if both Tata and British Steel receive £500m.
Despite political differences, Dakin, Mumby-Croft and the unions all agree they do not want the UK to lose the ability to produce its own liquid steel from iron ore. The global chaos in supply chains from the pandemic and the Ukraine war have made some governments think more about resilience of key materials and parts, and Russia is the dominant global supplier of iron.
Charlotte Brumpton-Childs, national officer for steel at the GMB union and a descendant of several generations of Scunthorpe steelworkers, said: “If we go to war with Russia, they’re not going to send us their pig iron, are they?”
The government “fundamentally don’t understand the industry and the need for the ability to make primary steel”, she added.
That idea makes some in defence circles nervous: a Royal United Services Institute report this year worried that becoming “the biggest economy by far worldwide to have no significant domestic steelmaking capacity” could harm security and economic resilience.
Whatever the implications for the UK’s strategic interests, another large round of job losses would devastate Scunthorpe, which contains several wards among the 10% most deprived in Britain. “The steelworks is massive in Scunthorpe’s economy, but clearly not as much as it was in the 1980s,” said Barnes, the sweetshop owner. But “the impact it has on Scunthorpe when something like this happens is as much psychological as it is anything else.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/oct/23/marianne-faithfull-negative-capability | Culture | 2018-10-23T12:30:18.000Z | Alexis Petridis | Marianne Faithfull: the muse who made it on her own terms | If you’re looking for a study in contrasts, you could do worse than compare the two albums released this autumn with Marianne Faithfull’s name on the cover. The first is Come and Stay With Me, a collection of her 1960s singles that opens and closes with two Rolling Stones-related tracks: the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards composition As Tears Go By, and Sister Morphine, co-written by Faithfull and Jagger while their relationship was in its death throes. The second is Negative Capability, a meditation on loss, grief and loneliness recorded in Paris last winter with the Bad Seeds’ Warren Ellis and PJ Harvey collaborator Rob Ellis. It also contains a version of As Tears Go By, but there the similarities end. Thematically and sonically, it could be the work of a completely different artist to Come and Stay With Me. Given how often Faithfull’s personal life has overshadowed her music, it is worth noting the artistic distance she has travelled in her career – further than a lot of her more regularly lauded peers.
There was a time when the notion of either of these albums existing would have seemed like a joke. Faithfull’s musical career was not expected to last more than 50 years, nor was it supposed to have the kind of weight that might still interest people decades on. It wasn’t supposed to have any weight to it all. Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones’ manager who spotted her at a party and launched her career as a vocalist, dismissively described her as “an angel with big tits”. As she later recalled, she was “treated as somebody who not only can’t even sing, but doesn’t really write or anything, just something you can make into something … I was just cheesecake really, terribly depressing”.
Marianne Faithfull in 1967. Photograph: Marc Sharratt/Rex/Shutterstock
Loog Oldham seemed to view her as a repository for the cast-offs that Jagger and Richards would produce as they attempted to establish themselves as songwriters, and as an opportunity to live out his fantasy of being the British Phil Spector and prove that his powers as a svengali extended further than positioning the Stones as the stuff of middle England’s nightmares. He saw Faithfull as a posh adjunct to the ongoing folk revival, her cut-glass voice capable of primly essaying its staple songs for an MOR audience more used to finding music via Saturday variety specials on BBC One than in the spit-and-sawdust environment of a folk club or coffeehouse.
You might charitably describe the results as mixed. As Tears Go By, the Jagger/Richards offcut that became her first hit in 1964, was great, and her version of House of the Rising Sun has a certain unexpected bluesy power. But her cover of Blowin’ in the Wind was almost as catastrophic as the events the song describes, and a Spectorised take on Greensleeves sounds like light entertainment from the pre-rock’n’roll era.
She saw herself as a folk singer. In her mid-teens she had performed a cappella in Reading’s coffee bars. But what Faithfull turned out to be good at – really good at – was a certain kind of wintry-sounding orchestral pop, on which harpsichords, harps and 12-string guitars twinkled, and you could somehow imagine Faithfull’s breath forming clouds in front of her face as she sang. Examples: This Little Bird, Go Away from My World, Morning Sun, Tomorrow’s Calling. More recently, Faithfull has understandably traded on the more painful aspects of her personal history; here is a woman who understands the darkness of which she sings. But the truth is that there was something eerie about the records she made long before the heroin, homelessness and suicide attempts. On the best of her 60s records, her voice injected slightly too much yearning and melancholy into ostensibly lightweight songs.
Marianne Faithfull: This Little Bird – video
She was also much smarter and rather less biddable than you suspect Loog Oldham anticipated. She quickly ditched him as a producer and successfully lobbied her label to simultaneously release two albums – one pop (Marianne Faithfull) and one folk (Come My Way).
By her own admission, she lost interest in her music when she became Jagger’s partner, but in 1969 – coincidentally the year that Dusty Springfield and Sandie Shaw also began exerting more noticeable control over their careers, the former releasing Dusty in Memphis, the latter the self-produced Reviewing the Situation, replete with covers of Dr John and Led Zeppelin – Faithfull put out her first new single in two years, showcasing a very different sound and worldview. Something Better was gritty, country-inflected and featured Ry Cooder on slide guitar; the B-side, co-written with Jagger, was Sister Morphine, a song so bleak in its depiction of addiction that her UK record company withdrew the release. The Rolling Stones claimed it as their own, only giving her a writing credit on the song in the 1990s. Faithfull wouldn’t release another record for seven years.
In fact, her years of heroin-soaked seclusion weren’t quite as secluded as they’re often painted. She gave a remarkable interview to the NME, equal parts coy and frank, in which she said of the Rolling Stones: “I slept with three and then I decided the lead singer was the best bet.” (She declined to name the other two.) She appeared on David Bowie’s 1973 US TV special The 1980 Floor Show, performing Noël Coward’s 20th Century Blues and duetting with Bowie on I Got You Babe, sounding more like Nico than the singer of As Tears Go By.
The decadent Faithfull would have been good in the glam era, but that show with Bowie was as far as it went. A 1976 album, Dreaming My Dreams, was both very much of its era – slick country-rock was having a pre-punk moment – and apparently constructed with one eye on the past: there is occasionally something of Andrew Loog Oldham’s Spector infatuation about the production.
‘I decided the singer was the best bet’ … Faithfull and Mick Jagger in 1969. Photograph: Five/Rex Features
Marianne Faithfull: ‘This is the most honest record I’ve made. It’s open-heart surgery, darling’
Read more
Broken English, however, from 1979, was something else entirely. The punk era was not kind to most 60s icons, especially those such as the Stones, who had continued into the 70s, getting more successful, remote and aristocratic in their bearing. But Faithful turned out to be a very punk kind of 60s icon: a living embodiment not of some unsurpassable golden era, as smug baby boomers had it, but of its darker side. She was a figure wronged by the era’s casual sexism and ruined by its unthinking excesses; not a pampered rock’n’roll sun god, but someone who had wound up homeless and survived on the street. She was the snarling wronged woman on Why Did Ya Do It?, a ghost at the feast of nostalgia on What’s the Hurry? “Do you hear me? Do you fear me?” she sang, with the relish of someone who knew where the bodies were buried. She picked through the wreckage of the decade with a certain venomous glee on the title track, which concerned hippy-idealists-turned-killers the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and also on Brain Drain, about how turn-on-tune-in-drop-out idealism could curdle into a desperate scrabble of “trying to get high without having to pay”.
Broken English also demonstrated Faithfull’s ability as an interpreter. As sung by Dr Hook’s Dennis Locorriere, a man who frequently sounded as if he was on the verge of tears, the original version of The Ballad of Lucy Jordan was filled with sympathy for its titular heroine, a housewife bored to the point of suicide. Rasped by Faithfull, it was full of empathy.
Although it was critically acclaimed, Broken English didn’t quite re-establish Faithfull commercially in the way she may have hoped. In a 1984 interview, she complained that she was less popular than her manager’s other client, Toyah. Nevertheless, the album laid the foundations of her later career. Her music from then on was invariably tinged with darkness of varying degrees, the original material frequently dealt with bleak themes – bitterness and romantic perfidy, loss, dissolution of various kinds – and it increasingly leaned on her interpretative skills. She also displayed a genuine musical restlessness. Her 1987 album Strange Weather found her inhabiting the role of a ravaged torch singer performing The Boulevard of Dreams; the ensuing 20th Century Blues (1997) and The Seven Deadly Sins (1998) evinced her interest in Kurt Weill.
Her 2002 album Kissin’ Time demonstrated the regard in which Faithfull was held by a younger generation of musicians. A noticeably hipper record than anything the Stones had recorded in years, its supporting cast of players and writers included Beck, Blur, Billy Corgan and Jarvis Cocker. At its best, as on the dubby Blur collaboration of the title track, it took Faithfull’s voice into entirely fresh musical territory. It also found her burnishing her own myth on Sliding Through Life on Charm, which was perhaps understandable. As Faithfull was the first person to point out, younger artists were attracted to her as much by that as by her talent (“I’ve got all the stories,” she noted).
The follow-up to Kissin’ Time, Before the Poison, added Nick Cave and PJ Harvey to her list of contemporary collaborators, while its successor Easy Come Easy Go found her covering the Decemberists and Espers alongside Randy Newman and Smokey Robinson.
This isn’t the standard behaviour of a 60s rock legend, content merely to mine past glories in order to give them an album to tour the old hits around. But then, as Marianne Faithfull established some time ago, she wasn’t the artist people thought she was. “She walked through the whole thing on her own terms,” Warren Ellis noted recently, reflecting on her career. He has a point. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/government-computing-network/2011/sep/12/brent-council-parking-ict-deal | Guardian Government Computing | 2011-09-12T09:53:30.000Z | Gill Hitchcock | Brent council plans parking IT deal | Brent council is looking for a new contract to run its parking operations, including providing a management information system and IT to process penalty notices.
A notice in the Official Journal of the European Union says the north London authority expects to spend £18m on the initial deal, which will run for four years. This could be extended by a further four years, however, in which case the value will reach £36m.
The contract will cover the supply of an IT system for penalty notice processing, and includes scanning of all correspondence and the issue of statutory documents.
It also includes a compatible management information system for office systems and data capture, including modules for enforcement, cashless payments, a permits system and a monitoring and reporting function.
Enforcement of parking restrictions in bus lanes and off street parking and the use of CCTV will be included in the deal, along with the operation of car pounds.
This article is published by Guardian Professional. For updates on public sector IT, join the Government Computing Network here. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/mar/22/kenny-rogers-obituary | Music | 2020-03-22T16:07:34.000Z | Adam Sweeting | Kenny Rogers obituary | Kenny Rogers, who has died aged 81, was a prolific hit-maker from the late 1960s into the 80s, and with songs such as Lucille, The Gambler and Coward of the County helped to create a bestselling crossover of pop and country material. “I did songs that were not country but were more pop,” he said in 2016. “If the country audience doesn’t buy it, they’ll kick it out. And if they do, then it becomes country music.”
Rogers’s knack for finding a popular song – he was modest about his own writing skills and preferred to pick songs from other writers – was unerring, bringing him huge hits with Don Schlitz’s The Gambler (1978), Lionel Richie’s Lady (1980), and, with Dolly Parton, the Bee Gees’ Islands in the Stream (1983) among many others. Though his record sales waned in the late 80s, he bounced back in his last years with three successful albums, The Love of God (2011), You Can’t Make Old Friends (2013) and Once Again It’s Christmas (2015). Altogether he recorded 65 albums and sold more than 165m records.
Born in Houston, Texas, Kenny was the fourth of eight children of Lucille (nee Hester), a nursing assistant, and Edward Rogers, a carpenter, and grew up in the San Felipe Courts housing project. He attended Jefferson Davis high school, where he formed his first band, a doo-wop group called the Scholars, in which he sang and played guitar.
In 1956 he left school and within two years had scored a solo hit with That Crazy Feeling, which earned him an appearance on the TV show American Bandstand. He then played bass in the jazz trio the Bobby Doyle Three before moving to Los Angeles and joining the folk group the New Christy Minstrels.
In 1967 Rogers formed the First Edition (which also included New Christy Minstrels songwriter Mike Settle), and they proceeded to notch up seven Top 40 pop hits, including Mickey Newbury’s Just Dropped in to See What Condition My Condition Was In (1967, and later used for a memorable dream sequence in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski). Their most prominent hit was their version of Mel Tillis’s Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town, written from the viewpoint of a paralysed Vietnam veteran. Featuring the pained, sandpapery vocal delivery that would become Rogers’s trademark, in 1969 it reached No 2 in the UK and 6 on the Billboard pop chart.
Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton had huge success with their duet Islands in the Stream in 1983. Photograph: Beth Gwinn/Redferns
The First Edition also made a couple of movie appearances, and in 1971 began hosting their own TV show, Rollin’ on the River. But by 1975 the group were in commercial decline, prompting Rogers to start a solo career with the United Artists label.
In 1977 he topped the US country chart for the first time with Lucille (also a No 1 hit in the UK and several other countries), another storytelling song, which sold 5m copies worldwide. It paved the way for further Rogers classics including The Gambler (1978, another Country No 1 and a US Top 20 pop hit) and Coward of the County (1979, a UK and Country No 1, and a No 3 on the US pop chart).
Rogers’s yearning vocal tone also made him a natural ballad singer, as he demonstrated with the chart-topping Lady. Another of his talents was picking the right duet partners. He teamed up with Dottie West on a string of big country hits in the late 70s and early 80s, including three No 1s, and reached the US Top 5 with Kim Carnes on Don’t Fall in Love With a Dreamer (1980). That track came from a chart-topping concept album that Carnes and her husband, Dave Ellingson, wrote for Rogers, called Gideon, the story of cowboy Gideon Tanner.
Kenny Rogers and Jane Seymour in the TV show Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman in 1993. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/ITV
His collaboration with Sheena Easton on We’ve Got Tonight (1983) was a Country No 1 and reached No 6 on the pop chart. In the same year he achieved one of his best-loved career highlights by duetting with Parton on Islands in The Stream, an international smash. “Everybody always thought we were having an affair,” Rogers said of his great friend Parton. “We didn’t. We just teased each other and flirted with each other for 30 years.”
In 1985 he was one of the featured superstars on USA for Africa’s We Are the World. His album The Heart of the Matter of the same year, produced by George Martin, was his last to top the US Country chart, and the following year he was voted favourite singer of all time by USA Today and People magazine. He won a Grammy award for Make No Mistake, She’s Mine (1987), a duet with Ronnie Milsap that was his penultimate Country No 1 single.
But Rogers had several strings to his bow. His hit The Gambler had spawned a string of TV films in which he played the title role of Brady Hawkes. In 1991, with former Kentucky Fried Chicken chief executive John Y Brown Jr, he launched a string of chicken restaurants called Kenny Rogers Roasters. Having starred as a racing car driver in the movie Six Pack (1982), Rogers collaborated with Sprint car driver CK Spurlock to create the car manufacturer Gambler Chassis.
Kenny Rogers with his 1957 convertible Chevrolet in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, in 1990. Photograph: Paul Harris/Getty Images
A keen amateur photographer, Rogers was spurred to develop his skills further when he married his fourth wife, Marianne Gordon, a model. As well as taking portraits of her, Rogers studied with the photographers John Sexton and Yousuf Karsh. In 1986 he published Kenny Rogers’ America, featuring images taken while on tour, while Your Friends and Mine (1987) comprised portraits of superstars including Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson. Country music stars including Willie Nelson, Tammy Wynette and Parton were the subjects of This Is My Country (2005).
He was also an author. The book of his touring musical play The Toy Shoppe was published in 2000, his memoir, Luck Or Something Like It, appeared in 2012, and the following year brought his novel (co-written with Mike Blakely), What Are the Chances.
Among his countless honours were three Grammys, six Country Music Association awards and eight Academy of Country Music awards, and in 2013 he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Having delivered a rousing performance in the Sunday afternoon “Legends” slot at the Glastonbury festival in 2013, Rogers embarked on his farewell tour, The Gambler’s Last Deal, in 2016. On 25 October 2017, he was given an all-star send-off at Nashville’s Bridgestone arena by guests including Richie, Parton, Don Henley, Kris Kristofferson and Reba McEntire.
Kenny was wed five times. The first four marriages, to Janice (nee Gordon), Jean Rogers, Margo (nee Anderson), and Marianne, ended in divorce. He is survived by his fifth wife, Wanda (nee Miller), their twin sons, Justin and Jordan, a daughter, Carole, from his marriage to Janice, a son, Kenny Jr, from his marriage to Margo, and another son, Christopher, from his marriage to Marianne.
Kenny (Kenneth Ray) Rogers, singer and musician, born 21 August 1938; died 20 March 2020 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2019/aug/08/sorry-hargreaves-landsdown-apology-neil-woodford | Business | 2019-08-08T18:48:40.000Z | Nils Pratley | Sorry, Hargreaves Lansdown, but your so-called apology isn't enough | Amodern trend with corporate apologies is to get them in early while being gloriously vague about what it is you are apologising for. Hargreaves Lansdown adopted this approach with the Neil Woodford affair, as mentioned here on Wednesday, in the hope that its chief executive, Chris Hill, would offer clarity when unveiling the group’s full-year profits.
No chance. Hill wouldn’t budge from his flat script. He says he has apologised to clients trapped in the Woodford Equity Income Fund “because we all share their disappointment and frustration”. OK, but that reads like an airy expression of sympathy rather than an apology for any action by Hargreaves.
Does Hill, for example, think Hargreaves overstepped the role of a nominally neutral platform provider in being so bullish about all things Woodford? Does he regret sticking with the fund manager until the end? Does he think that Hargreaves should have yanked the Equity Income fund from its Wealth 50 list as soon it started to worry about liquidity risks, which was as long ago as November 2017, as detailed in Hill’s own letter to the Treasury select committee?
He won’t be drawn. He says there will be “learnings and improvements we can make” but, even two months after the Woodford fund suspended dealings, he’s not yet in a position to share them. His only substantive conclusion is that “we are confident in the robustness of how we analyse, research and compile our favourite fund list”.
It would, of course, be absurd to expect Hargreaves to pick only winners in its “best buy” list. That task would be impossible. But then we’re back at the beginning. What is the apology supposed to cover?
Hargreaves shareholders won’t care. For them, the important news was that waiving fees on the Woodford fund costs only £360,000 a month, peanuts for a company making pre-tax profits of £306m last year at its usual astonishing profit margin of 64%. The shares rose 12%.
It would be hard, though, to say Hill’s personal stock has risen during this saga. He waited until the 11th hour to forgo his bonus and still can’t say what, if anything, Hargreaves would have done differently. Not impressive.
Aviva’s new boss shows sign of being radical
Maurice Tulloch became chief executive of the giant insurer Aviva only in March, so long-suffering shareholders will have to wait until November to see his new strategy, which is fair enough. In the meantime, he’s serving an amuse-bouche – a review of the Asian operation.
This may ultimately amount to little, it should be said, since doing nothing is an option. But the outcome could also be the sale of a unit worth $2bn-plus, according to analysts, or a joint venture partnership with a local operator.
Even a formal review suggests a willingness to be radical, or so investors will hope. Asia, after all, was a pet project of the former boss Mark Wilson, whose grand claim to have transformed Aviva is not reflected in the share price. At 389p, the shares sit at 2013 levels. At the birth of Aviva, via a three-way merger at the turn of the century, the stock was at £11.
That long-term perspective should serve as a prompt to Tulloch. His many predecessors have voiced his same ambition to make Aviva “simpler” but none has achieved it. If the only effective way is to start by making the insurer smaller, go for it.
Burford Capital opens its defence
The litigation funder Burford Capital is as angry as ever about the attack from short-selling US hedge Muddy Waters, but let’s give it some credit. Thursday’s nine-page counter-blast was a decent production. It was written in English, rather than legalese, which was a virtue. Some of the tangled legal cases Burford fights almost became intelligible.
The reward was a 26% bounce in a share price that almost halved on Wednesday. There’s no knowing where it’ll settle, of course, but one moral is clear. If your business is as complex as Burford’s, keep explaining. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/feb/10/weekend7.weekend1 | Life and style | 2007-02-10T23:59:23.000Z | George Saunders | American psyche: George Saunders on the acceptance speeches of British actors | This column has afforded me a special relationship with the British. So, like one member of a married couple offering intimate, perhaps embarrassing, but ultimately loving advice, I write to counsel a subsection of your population, specifically British actors. I write in reference to your acceptance speeches.
Let me cut to the chase: they are no good. You are doing it all wrong. And, since you seem to be winning all our awards, it would only be polite for you to get up to speed on your speeches, and do it our way. When in Rome, as the saying goes, do it the way we Americans do.
First: your speeches are too articulate and grammatical. It's as if you are writing them up beforehand or something. The way we Americans prepare for a speech is, we don't. It's not hard to make an impromptu speech. Just get up there, hop around a bit, and exclaim, while pretending to fight back tears, "Oh, omigod, wow wow wow, this is amazing, I am so blown away! Whoa!" Then you may wish to hoot, or pump both fists in the air, in a gesture of absolute triumph.
Second: British actors seem to do a lot of talking about the process of making the film, your love of the craft, your noble predecessors, etc, etc, blah blah blah. Don't. Rather, emphasise how good this award is for you, how vindicated you finally are after all those miserable years when so many schmucks were overlooking your glory and treating you just like some regular nobody.
Third: always thank God. Thank God as one should thank God, when He has preferred you over those other losers in your category. God spends a good deal of time watching all those movies, deciding whose absolute virtue to reward, sometimes neglecting Iraq to do so, so don't disrespect Him by failing to look up at the ceiling and thanking the Almighty for smiting thine enemies.
Finally, when winning all our awards, avoid leaving the stage in such a timely manner. What better way to celebrate the crowning moment than by talking long past the signal you're given that indicates, "Shut up". A rambling speech signals that such petty rules no longer apply to someone of your stature.
Whereas you Brits, by concluding your self-effacing, grammatically flawless speeches with time to spare, appear so courteous. Don't be scared! You've just won a freaking award! Celebrate fearlessly, by temporarily forgetting anyone else exists.
This is where not having written a speech comes in handy. As you stand there stuttering, attempting to recall your wife's name, you'll be amazed how the time flies, and soon everyone will be yawning in annoyance, which confirms it: you've arrived, and are a star in America. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/apr/18/broadchurch-season-3-finale-bbc-legacy-mark-lawson | Television & radio | 2017-04-18T18:04:48.000Z | Mark Lawson | Bye bye Broadchurch: we're leaving darkest Dorset but the legacy lives on | Spoiler alert: this article contains spoilers for all three series of Broadchurch
Four years after we first met west country plumber Mark Latimer, striding to work one sunny morning through greetings from members of what seemed like a friendly community, we saw him for the last time on Monday night. He drove away along the picturesque Dorset clifftops, leaving behind Broadchurch, the fictional town where – across 24 episodes and three series – Latimer had lost his child (killed by a paedophile), his marriage (ruined by mutual recrimination), and almost his life (suicide attempt).
But Latimer – played by Andrew Buchan – had gained a place among the special memories of TV drama. When it launched in 2013, Broadchurch introduced to British TV lessons from Scandi-noir dramas such as The Killing, in which a terrible crime was explored at a very slow pace in an extremely beautiful place. Subsequently, other UK dramas – especially BBC1’s The Missing and ITV’s Unforgotten – learned from Broadchurch the benefits, in screenwriting, of spending more time looking at the map and less at the watch.
It’s unlikely viewers will ever know what happens next to Latimer, or to David Tennant’s DI Alec Hardy and Olivia Colman’s DS Ellie Miller, the tetchy but mutually dependent detectives who, in series one, solved the murder of Latimer’s son and, in the third, caught the rapists of Trish Winterman and other local women. This, the ITV announcer baldly declared, was “the last-ever Broadchurch”. Writer and creator Chris Chibnall had left the smallest possibility in interviews of more episodes one day, but he will be busy for the next few years, running Doctor Who.
If this is the end, then Chibnall has left viewers happy, if that word is appropriate for a show that started with an investigation of a child death and finished with a case involving serial rape. The success of the third run is even more notable after the disaster of the second, when Chibnall unwisely re-examined the original case (focusing on the trial of the man who had confessed to Danny Latimer’s murder), undermining the authority and impact of what had gone before.
The first and last scenes of a drama are the hardest to get right. Botch the beginning and the potential audience gets smaller, but fail to deliver an end that satisfies and the story immediately seems weaker in retrospect. With Broadchurch, it seemed only proper that the show should end with a gruffly chummy scene between Hardy and Miller, sitting on a bench with the spectacular cliffs of Dorset’s Jurassic Coast behind them. Here together were the three elements that have made Broadchurch a landmark. The eye-widening Dorset scenery achieves – in common with the Oxford of Morse and the Sweden of Wallander – the paradox of making you keen to live there, even as the storyline warns of the high risk of dying there.
And the performances of Tennant and Colman were magnetically complementary. There are few completely functional detectives in crime fiction but, even by generic standards, Hardy and Miller are dragging heavy baggage: he has survived a life-threatening illness, while she was married to the paedophile killer they apprehended first time out.
Cast against type … Ed Burnett, played by Lenny Henry. Photograph: Colin Hutton/ITV
These bleak CVs usefully complicated what could have been a standard hard cop-soft cop, boss-junior combination, in the Morse-Lewis mould. Miller was given the most brutal moment across the three series (almost kicking a suspect to death), while Hardy was occasionally opened to unexpected notes of vulnerability and comedy, especially in scenes with his daughter. Chibnall also deserves cheers for resisting any sentimental logic that the two divorced detectives should get together romantically.
Another advantage of the casting of Tennant and Colman, actors whose talents range from TV comedy to stage tragedy, is that they were able to make sense of the sometimes jerky mood swings of a Broadchurch script. Although Chibnall’s dialogue rarely contains direct jokes, there is some suggestion that he has a dry sense of humour. For instance, episodes regularly ended with a shot of a cliff, which could be a reference to the “cliffhanger” endings; while one suspect’s questionable alibi about having been catching fish was never explained, which may make it a literal example of a red herring clue.
While the show’s look and rhythm looked to Scandinavian models, there were also nods to Agatha Christie and even Midsomer Murders in the use of a tight community in which a multiplicity of residents have something to hide, which may not be to do with the crime under investigation. The local vicar and the newspaper editor sometimes seemed more like the sort of clerics and journalists Miss Marple might have encountered, rather than convincing representatives of the contemporary Church of England or the fourth estate.
In a way that may be Doctor Who’s gain but is certainly crime drama’s loss, Chibnall is deft at the concealed clues on which whodunnits depend. A detail that proved to be crucial to the solution of season three was that the serial rapist attacked only in summer. In a seaside resort such as Broadchurch, this could easily have pointed to seasonal labour, but the criminal turned out to be another kind of intermittent resident: a student, Leo Humphries.
But deceptive developments of the sort that Christie would have admired co-existed with a procedural realism unknown in classic detective fiction. Boldly, this series of Broadchurch was trying to be two things simultaneously: a quasi-documentary presentation of best police practice in the investigation of rape and a top-rating crime drama with the requisite outlandish twists and cliffhangers, in which compromising biographical details or items of abandoned clothing come to light just towards the end of the episode.
Chibnall succeeded in both these aims, but separately. Only intermittently did the lines of public information and crowd-pleasing overlap, as when Trish Winterman’s refusal to name the man with whom she had consensual sex on the day of her rape both thickened the mystery and reflected the legal issue of judging a victim’s prior sex-life.
Charlotte Rampling … ‘whose appearance almost justified the silly trial strand’. Photograph: Patrick Redmond/ITV/Kudos
The one big flaw of this Broadchurch also applied to the first season and afflicts, to some extent, all crime fiction. In the interests of making the puzzle tough to solve – the central pleasure of the genre – the eventual villain often has to be someone whose means and motives have been least clearly shown to the viewer: a detective’s spouse in season one, a largely peripheral guy in a fishing supplies shop on Monday night. The fact that Humphries ranked low in weekend media speculation ahead of the heavily embargoed denouement is a tribute to Chibnall’s plotting, but is also evidence of the way in which detective dramas sometimes have to gain narrative complexity by losing psychological plausibility.
Admittedly, the sick justification given by the multiple rapist – a desire to subjugate and control women – is a recognised psychopathology in such crimes, and reflected the series’ well-developed sub-theme of the effect on young men of the increasing availability and depravity of pornography. But the writer’s need to keep Humphries under the radar of armchair detectives resulted in him being one of the least fully explored and explained characters. The revelation as culprit of Lenry Henry’s Ed Burnett, Charlie Higson’s Ian Winterman or Mark Bazeley’s Jim Atwood might have been more inherently credible.
The presence of Henry and Higson, however, was an example of another of the strengths of Broadchurch: impressive star casting, either as suspects or, in the case of the second season, Charlotte Rampling as a star QC, whose appearance almost justified the silly trial strand. Also to the credit of the third Broadchurch is that, apart from having to overcome its own second series, the show also found itself for the first time up against a BBC rival in top form: Jed Mercurio’s police corruption series Line of Duty.
Until this year, the production schedules of the two mega-hits meant they had always spookily avoided each other: the earlier series of Line of Duty went out in 2012, 2014 and 2016, with the previous seasons of Broadchurch interleaved in the years between. On the evidence of Broadchurch 2 and Line of Duty 3, most would have expected the contest to be handed to Mercurio over Chibnall on an early knockout. But, abutting on Sunday and Monday nights this spring, the two cop shows have fought one of the great heavyweight ratings battles, and seem sure to compete again at TV awards ceremonies.
There will be delight among traditional broadcasters that – despite the increasing success of self-scheduling seasons on Netflix and Amazon Prime – the last series of Broadchurch and the latest of Line of Duty have confirmed the enduring power of weekly serials that millions (up to 10 for Broadchurch, over 7 for Line of Duty) watch at the same time each week, after seven days of wild anticipation and speculation. Broadchurch may be dead, but it has helped old-fashioned TV drama to live longer. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/10/dominique-strauss-kahn-case-settled | World news | 2012-12-10T21:05:00.000Z | Matt Williams | Dominique Strauss-Kahn settles sexual assault case with hotel maid | Dominique Strauss-Kahn settles lawsuit with New York hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo – video Reuters
A hotel maid who claims she was brutally sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn has settled her civil action against the former IMF chief for an undisclosed sum, in a move that allows her to "move on with her life", lawyers said.
In Bronx supreme court on Monday, a judge announced that an agreement had been reached just minutes before the session started, adding that the amount – which is rumoured to be as much as $6m – remained "confidential".
It brings to an end a lengthy New York court battle for the man once tipped to become French president, having earlier seen criminal charges of attempted rape dropped. Nonetheless, Strauss-Kahn's legal woes are not completely behind him – he is yet to hear if prosecutors in France will be allowed to pursue charges of aggravated pimping related to an alleged prostitution ring in France. A court is due to rule in that case on 19 December.
The lawsuit settled in New York on Monday relates to claims by Nafissatou Diallo, a 33-year-old former housekeeper at the upmarket Sofitel hotel in Manhattan.
She says Strauss-Kahn attacked her on 14 May 2011 as she attempted to clean his room.
Diallo alleges that Strauss-Kahn ran at her naked, molested her and forced her to perform oral sex on him. The claims led to a criminal investigation against the IMF boss last year, and to his house arrest in Manhattan.
But charges of attempted rape, sex abuse, forcible touching and unlawful imprisonment were eventually dropped, with prosecutors citing "substantial credibility issues" with Diallo.
Despite the collapse of a criminal investigation, Diallo continued to pursue Strauss-Kahn through the civil courts, leading to a counter defamation suit by the former IMF head.
At first, Strauss-Kahn's lawyers tried to claim that their client had diplomatic immunity him from being sued. But that failed, with the courts dismissing his claims of protection.
A settlement in the case was widely expected ahead of Monday's hearing. Strauss-Kahn's New York attorneys had previously acknowledged that talks had taken place. But they dismissed as "flatly false" a French newspaper's report that the amount agreed to was a payment of $6m to Diallo.
In court on Monday, judge Douglas McKeon confirmed that a deal had been struck, but not the amount.
"Ten minutes ago we reached a settlement in this case, which was put on the record," he said during a brief session.
He added: "The amount of the settlement is confidential."
McKeon also confirmed that a claim against the New York Post – which had reported that Diallo had worked as a prostitute – had also been settled. Again, the terms were not discussed in open court.
Diallo sat through the court proceedings accompanied by her legal representatives. Dressed in a snow-leopard skin print headscarf and emerald blouse, she made no statement while in the courtroom.
But in brief comments on the steps of the Bronx supreme court, Diallo, who was born in Guinea and who is the mother to a teenage girl, thanked her supporters.
"I just want to say I thank everyone that supported me all over the world. I thank everybody; I thank God," she said.
Her attorney, Kenneth Thompson, said Diallo was a "strong and courageous woman who never lost faith in our system of justice".
"With this resolution, she can now move on with her life," he added.
Strauss-Kahn was not in court. Nor did his legal representatives offer any comment after it was announced that settlement had been struck, other than to thank the court.
Monday's hearing marks an apparent end to Strauss-Kahn's New York legal battles. But it has come at cost for the 63-year-old. As well as losing his job at the IMF, it ended any realistic chance Strauss-Kahn had at a run at the French presidency as further lurid details of his lifestyle later emerged.
In addition, it led to a raft of other sexual allegations being made against him and likely contributed to his separation from his wife, French journalist Anne Sinclair.
Next week, Strauss-Kahn will hear if a separate attempt to get charges levied against him by French prosecutors thrown out has been successful. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/apr/05/angela-de-la-cruz | Art and design | 2010-04-05T21:00:01.000Z | Adrian Searle | Angela de la Cruz's brush with death | Angela de la Cruz's paintings are rumbustious, tragicomic and sometimes abject affairs. A canvas sits in a chair and admires its twin on the wall. Both paintings are brown, scuzzy monochromes, and the one in the chair has got mangled in its attempt to sit down. The stretcher has been broken, and the painting is wedged into the seat. De la Cruz's Self (1997) is a gag about reverie and narcissism, about paintings as objects and paintings as images, and about paintings as beings. Painting looks at painting, lost in thought. But they are just things of wood and canvas and paint; it's more a case of the dumb staring at the dumb.
The whole situation might be taken for a model of the kind of lonesome identification artists sometimes have with the things that they do. Day after day, artists sit in their studios and lose themselves in contemplation of their work. Sometimes they find themselves there, too, or think they do. Who knows what goes on in the artist's mind as they stare at their work on the wall? It's a conundrum. Self is one of the earlier works in De la Cruz's new exhibition at Camden Arts Centre in London. There has always been an element of buffoonery about much of her work. These are paintings whose condition as art is precarious, and whose sorry plight is dramatised as a kind of stoicism. Canvases are ripped, or falling off their stretchers; their surfaces are curdled, puckered, sometimes soiled and sometimes slick and shiny, like so much fetishistic rainwear. Her paintings cower and lean in corners, or flop exhausted from the sheer strain of being in public. These paintings are like so much discarded clothing or violated skin. If they have a life of their own, it is one of constant, unremitting effort.
Further paintings use the painted-over carcasses of metal cabinets, and old art deco sections of wardrobes. One of these, Still Life, incorporates an old wooden table that I kept in my studio for years, and gave to the artist along with some other studio paraphernalia when I stopped painting in the mid-90s. The legs poke out at an angle from beneath a great, lumpy brown canvas. The whole thing looks like the picked-over carcass of a dead animal.
Born in Galicia in north-west Spain in 1965, De la Cruz has spent her entire career in London; this small, deftly curated survey of her work is the first to be held in a public British institution. When I first knew her, De la Cruz worked in a studio so small and cluttered, it was hard to tell where her work began and ended; even a scrunched-up canvas torn from its stretcher and crumpled up under her chair might, in fact, be a finished work. What appears to be a black bin liner, a crumpled black canvas, lies on the floor of the gallery. It looks like nothing, and that's its title: Nothing. When does nothing become something?
A large white canvas, Homeless, is jammed in a corner of the gallery, like a child being punished. This big, off-white monochrome comes as a sort of apotheosis to a long history of other artists' white paintings – the purity and spiritual aspirations of Kazimir Malevich's white-on-white square, painted over 90 years ago; the expunged whites of Piero Manzoni's kaolin Achromes; and Robert Ryman's long career dedicated almost entirely to white paintings – recast, in De la Cruz's work, as a comedy of embarrassment. A tradition of aesthetic hygiene has been replaced with a careless painterliness. A second, smaller near-white canvas occupies another corner, almost shrinking from sight. This is titled Ashamed.
I first wrote about de la Cruz when she made Larger Than Life, a painting for the ballroom floor in the Royal Festival Hall, a vast thing that had to be painted by an army of assistants in an old dockyard building in Woolwich. This staggering wreck, crash-landed in the hall, was, the artist said, like a huge woman who couldn't dance and had fallen to the floor.One could see much of De la Cruz's work as a response to all the talk about the death of painting that periodically grips the art world. Painting may be dead, but it won't lie down – except that De la Cruz's does, and worse. Her paintings fall over, sprawl on the floor, sag, fold, appear gutted. If there is something clownish about the way her paintings mimic their demise, they are also often near-balletic. In 2001, a work by De la Cruz became a character in a dance choreographed for Ballet Rambert by Rafael Bonachela.Funny though her work might be, there has always been an air of vulnerability about it. Her work is a play on the folly of painting; it is also a kind of self-portraiture. Which brings us inevitably to De la Cruz herself, and her own body as well as her body of works; the artist and her work have always felt of a piece. Taken up by galleries throughout Europe, in 2005 she was midway through organising a major show in Lisbon (and in talks about this show) when she suffered a brain haemorrhage. While in a coma for several months, she gave birth to her daughter. Her recovery has been slow and is unlikely to be complete. A long hiatus ensued; last year, with the aid of assistants, she began working again.
One of the most recent works here is the sort of plastic and metal chair you might find in any waiting room. The legs have given way, and it is sprawled on the floor, as though it has collapsed under someone's weight. It is a dismal statement. Another new work, Hung, is a plain white rectangle with a dark border. Perfectly painted, Hung stares back at you like a face, or another self. But there is something wrong with the unseen stretcher behind the canvas, something that buckles the sheer surface; it makes it seem more human. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/bertolt-brecht-berliner-ensemble-eviction | World news | 2013-06-09T16:22:37.000Z | Louise Osborne | Bertolt Brecht's Berliner Ensemble faces eviction | The future of the Berliner Ensemble, the theatre company founded by the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht, hangs in the balance as a result of a row over the rental contract between the group and the owner of the theatre it calls home.
The company has been based at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm beside the river Spree in Berlin for almost 60 years, but the leader of the foundation that owns the theatre says he is cancelling the contract and evicting the company.
Rolf Hochhuth of the Ilse Holzapfel Foundation claims the BE and its director Claus Peymann have consistently flouted the contract's conditions, including a requirement to stage an annual performance of Hochhuth's 1960s play The Deputy, which criticises the perceived indifference of Pope Pius XII to the deportation of Jews from Rome during the second world war.
Brecht founded the BE in 1949 to perform his works, including A Life of Galileo and The Threepenny Opera. He died in in 1956, and after the death of his wife Helene Weigel in 1971, the theatre group has incorporated a wider variety of playwrights producing innovative and controversial pieces, which are performed regularly at the Berlin theatre.
"We have rented the building out at a very low price," said Hochhuth's foundation in a cancellation notice, adding that the BE had obligations that have "never been carried out according to the contract", according to the Berliner Morgenpost. The newspaper added that the Berlin senate, which leases the building on behalf of the theatre group, pays €214,000 (£182,000) a year.
The former owners of the theatre, the Wertheim family, sold the building after the fall of the Berlin Wall specifically to Hochhuth, so that it would not fall into the hands of the German government and so that The Deputy and other politically critical plays could be performed, the paper quoted the foundation as saying. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2021/nov/28/ivermectin-mask-wearing-quality-of-evidence-matters | From the Observer | 2021-11-28T10:00:23.000Z | David Spiegelhalter | With Covid studies, the quality of the evidence matters | David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters | In The Adventure of the Copper Beeches, Sherlock Holmes says: “Data! Data! Data! I can’t make bricks without clay.” Recent claims of massive benefits from wearing masks and using ivermectin against Covid-19 depended on mainly low-quality clay.
Meta-analysis is a technique for pooling the results from many studies, but it cannot make silk purses out of sows’ ears. A recent British Medical Journal review looked at six, fairly porcine, studies concerning mask-wearing and estimated an impressive 53% reduction in risk. But the single randomised controlled trial estimated the smallest effect: a reduction of about 18% (-23% to 46%) in Sars-CoV-2 infections. The “heaviest” studies, an analysis of US states and a survey of about 8,000 Chinese adults in early 2020, observed rather than experimented and its editorial highlights the risks of confounding variables influencing both wearing masks and infections and the impossibility of disentangling the effects of measures fluctuating simultaneously. Indeed, this review found an identical 53% reduction from handwashing.
After removing studies with a high risk of bias, the estimated effect dissipated
Physical models and laboratory testing suggest masks would be expected to have some effect, and to be fair, it is challenging to imagine rigorous randomised trials of the effects of mask-wearing or any other behaviour. But these are considered both feasible and essential for evaluating medical treatments and so in principle it should be easier to evaluate ivermectin, a cheap, anti-parasitic drug, heavily promoted as an overlooked treatment for Covid-19. One meta-analysis originally found ivermectin reduced Covid-19 mortality by about 56%, a huge effect. But then a preprint server withdrew the largest study and there have been further concerns over major errors and fraud in some ivermectin analyses. After removing studies with a high risk of bias, the estimated effect dissipated: the estimated decreased mortality was about 10% but with a wide uncertainty interval (- 42% to 43%), so no firm conclusions can be drawn.
Huge effort has been expended on scrutinising ivermectin research, even leading to the intriguing observation the drug appears to work in countries with a high prevalence of roundworm, whereas what is needed are the kind of good-quality studies that finally laid the claims about hydroxychloroquine to rest. Fortunately, these are now under way for ivermectin.
David Spiegelhalter is chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge. Anthony Masters is statistical ambassador for the Royal Statistical Society
This article was amended on 28 November 2021 to include reference to “physical models and laboratory testing” with regard to mask-wearing. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/10/boris-johnson-oven-ready-brexit-cummings-withdrawal-agreement | Opinion | 2020-09-10T13:18:46.000Z | Fintan O’Toole | Boris Johnson's 'oven-ready' Brexit had a secret footnote: we'll rehash it later | Fintan O'Toole | Everybody knows Boris Johnson can lie for England. To his supporters, it was one of his best assets. They believed he could bamboozle the European Union into giving him the only Brexit deal that is really acceptable – one that gives Britain all the advantages of being in the EU without any of the botheration of being a member. The problem is that congenital mendacity isn’t just for foreigners. If you lie for England, you will also lie to England.
This week, these two streams of fabrication finally became one. In openly admitting that it signed the withdrawal agreement with the EU in bad faith, Johnson’s Vote Leave government also implicitly confessed that it lied wholesale to the electorate in December’s general election. The cross-contamination of domestic politics by the deceit that is Brexit’s DNA is now complete.
This Brexit bill finally buries the Conservative party of law and order
Martin Kettle
Read more
On Tuesday, the Northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis brazenly informed the House of Commons that a bill to amend the Irish protocol of the withdrawal agreement with the EU would “break international law”, albeit in “limited and specific ways”. The qualification is nonsense. If one side can unilaterally change any bits of a treaty, nothing in it is binding. But in any case, Lewis’s declaration was part of a much wider contention: that the British never quite understood what they were signing.
That same day, Johnson’s court gazette, The Daily Telegraph, led with the headline “Brexit deal never made sense, PM to tell EU”. The story quoted “a senior government source” as claiming that some of its consequences “were not foreseen” at the time and that the treaty would have to be “rewritten to protect the union”.
In itself, this claim is fraudulent. The idea that Johnson has suddenly realised that the protocol effectively keeps Northern Ireland within the ambit of the EU’s customs union and single market, and thus has negative implications for the union, is risible. This was precisely what Johnson’s close allies in the Democratic Unionist party were screaming about when he made the agreement in October 2019. It was the reason why Johnson himself had sworn blind to the DUP that he would never agree to such a thing. If Johnson didn’t see that a radically different Brexit for one part of the UK would destabilise the union, he is an idiot. But in this case, he can be exonerated on that charge – he knew damn well and did it anyway.
He did it for the same reason he and his Vote Leave crew do everything else: because it suits their immediate interests. Theresa May’s Northern Ireland backstop was threatening to bring the whole Brexit project crashing down. The Irish taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, offered Johnson a way out – the so-called “border in the Irish Sea”. Johnson, the supreme opportunist, grabbed it, screwed the DUP, declared victory and the rest is history.
But this is where the real fakery starts. It is clear that Johnson and his most important confreres, Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove, never really saw this as anything other than a clever dodge, a tactical retreat. On his blog in March 2019, when May was in power, Cummings addressed “dear Vote Leave activists”: “don’t worry about the so-called ‘permanent’ commitments this historically abysmal Cabinet are trying to make on our behalf. They are not ‘permanent’ and a serious government — one not cowed by officials and their bullshit ‘legal advice’ with which they have herded ministers like sheep — will dispense with these commitments.”
In May, Steve Baker, former chair of the European Research Group, wrote in The Critic that Cummings “said we should vote for the original withdrawal agreement without reading it, on the basis Michael Gove articulated: we could change it later”. This had indeed been Gove’s line since December 2017: “If the British people dislike the agreement that we have negotiated with the EU, the agreement will allow a future government to diverge.”
This idea that Britain could sign the withdrawal agreement with its fingers crossed behind its back and then just ignore it later on is, in a way, perfectly consistent with the larger mentality of Brexit. At the heart of its theology is the fantasy that there is such a thing as absolute national sovereignty, a complete unilateral freedom of action that had been taken away by EU membership. Once Britain is “unchained” from the EU, Britain can do whatever it damn well pleases. The withdrawal treaty is not a set of permanent obligations, merely a route towards the obligation-free future that starts on 1 January 2021.
Brexit bill criticised as 'eye-watering' breach of international law
Read more
The Brexiters don’t much mind that this trick requires Britain to expose itself openly as a rogue state that treats international agreements as disposable handkerchiefs. In their solipsism, they presumably haven’t bothered to look up, for example, the membership of the House ways and means committee that would control any trade deal Britain might make with the US. (To save them the bother, it’s chaired by Richard Neal, and includes his fellow Irish-American Democrats Brendan Boyle and Brian Higgins, all highly engaged with Northern Ireland.)
The catch is that all of this doesn’t stop at smart-arse duplicity towards other countries. It involves the flagrant deception of English voters. More perhaps than any modern election, Johnson’s campaign in December was reduced to a single issue and three words: Get Brexit Done. This was to be achieved by electing a parliament that was absolutely committed to passing the “oven-ready” and “excellent” withdrawal agreement.
There was always one level of spuriousness in this – the withdrawal agreement was not the end of anything. But it is now clear that there was a much deeper and even more cynical level of fakery. It was not just that Brexit would not be “done” when the withdrawal agreement was duly passed, it was that Cummings and Johnson intended all along to undo it. What was presented to voters as a point of no return was, to them, a temporary arrangement that they would unpick later. “Oven-ready” had a secret addendum, “but we’ll go back and edit the cookbook to change the ingredients”.
Brexit is a promise that was made to be broken because the best of all worlds the voters were offered in 2016 was always a mirage. But that breach has grown and widened over time. It is now an open chasm in British democracy.
Fintan O’Toole is a columnist with the Irish Times | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/mar/04/aphex-twin-says-anti-vax-sentiments-attached-to-song-file-are-not-his | Music | 2024-03-04T10:54:05.000Z | Laura Snapes | Aphex Twin says anti-vax sentiments attached to song file are not his | Aphex Twin has clarified his stance on vaccines after anti-vax sentiments and other conspiracy theories appeared in the ID3 tag of a song posted to SoundCloud.
A Reddit user found an ID3 tag on a song posted by the Cornish producer AKA Richard D James in 2014, reading “vaccines are poisonous, mercury, aluminum can+ autism, cancer” and also referencing 9/11, and chemtrails.
James commented on SoundCloud to explain that the message was fake after receiving messages about the text.
“I put random things in id3 tags sometimes but this one about vaccines has been changed. When you get known, people will try and bring you down, comes with the territory. I recommend trying to find common ground with your fellow humans, rather than dividing yourself into smaller and smaller groups.”
He added his thoughts on vaccines: “For what it’s worth is that I’m not against them in principle but you should look at them on a case by case basis, see what’s in them, do your research and decide if it’s right for you or your loved ones, it’s up to the individual whether you have them or not.”
The famously trickster-ish musician also said: “I should also add for future reference that if you want to know my thoughts on any topic I believe in everything and nothing simultaneously.”
The matter follows a 2020 comment on SoundCloud in which he appeared to write “‘You stupid tin foil hat wearing idiot’, said the person wearing a 2 month old soggy mask”.
Following criticism, he posted again: “I definitely don’t think Covid is a hoax, I’m just very worried about the erosion of civil and human rights and how we are to get them back.” He added: “I mean what if we the people are not happy about any other government policies? We now can’t have more than 6 people in a protest, what are we to do?”
In 2023 James released the EP Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / in a room7 F760, which was nominated for a Grammy. His last full-length album, Syro, was released in 2014.
Sign up to Sleeve Notes
Free weekly newsletter
Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week
Enter your email address
Sign up
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
This article was amended on 19 March 2024. A previous version said the song’s ID3 tag contained a reference to Hamas, which was incorrect. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/31/new-year-sharm-el-sheikh-holiday | Opinion | 2016-12-31T14:04:41.000Z | Katy Brand | I spent new year by myself in Sharm el-Sheikh. I’ve never felt happier | Katy Brand | Winter, 2007. My first TV series had just gone out. I had just got my first tattoo. I needed a holiday, but having recently disentangled myself from a cul-de-sac of a relationship I couldn’t think who to go with. “Go on your own, you pussy,” a squeaky little voice said. I don’t like being called a pussy by anyone, least of all myself – so I booked an all-inclusive package, Boxing Day to New Year’s Day, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt’s Red Sea resort.
Holidays for one: why I love to hit the road alone
Read more
My first holiday alone. Would I like my own company enough to spend a week in it, exclusively, all-inclusive? Was I about to inadvertently take myself on a make-or-break holiday, and come back certain I was not meant to be?
First night: supper alone. First lesson: bring a book. Its mere presence will calm people down. On the second day I found a table that faced out to sea, and tipped the waiter to keep it for me all week. Then I and my fellow diners could all relax without the ever-present threat of catching one another’s eye.
I met another lone female traveller on the beach – she was around 60, and on a respite holiday from caring for her sick mother. She asked me to take her picture, and I got her to pose like a supermodel in the sand. We laughed about it, and she seemed pleased with the result; she was glamorous and I wondered what her life had been like before. I didn’t ask her though – it felt intrusive. She didn’t ask me anything, either. I don’t think she much cared what I did, she just wanted a bit of peace. That was why she had come alone.
‘I ate when I liked, slept well, swam, read books. I sat by the sea with a cocktail. I felt like a queen.’ Photograph: Slow Images/Getty Images
That was why I had come alone, I realised that evening. Looking back, I hadn’t really made much of an effort to find someone to come away with. The next day I saw her again and waved. Her smile, though friendly, firmly told me to keep walking. She was not lonely, not at all. And neither was I, I discovered.
I ate when I liked, slept well, swam, read books. I sat by the sea with a cocktail. I drank it watching the sun go down and felt like a queen. I got brown. I was happy. Better than happy: content.
There was to be a banquet in the hotel restaurant to see in 2008. I had a call from the reception desk anxious that I had not yet booked a seat for myself and my partner. I explained I had no partner. The pause was fractional, and then an apology, and then the request again. I confess, I balked at the thought of sitting alone in my room that night.
My sun-soaked solipsism failed in the face of monolithic New Year’s Eve.
There were seven of us on the table, the only group not divisible by two. The three couples were already seated. I had a drink. They looked curious, and a little put out – were they going to have to feel sorry for me, they wondered? Were they going to have to include me at the crucial moment, maybe even comfort me? That wasn’t what they’d bargained for. I tried to reassure them with my jaunty demeanour that I had not been jilted, or widowed, and had very much come on holiday alone on New Year’s Eve on purpose. I looked for the woman from the beach. She wasn’t there.
I wished everyone a happy new year and sauntered back to my room. It was all I could do not to whistle
Midnight approached and we were all pretty drunk. I felt a fibre of tension between the couple to my left. She was looking at her plate and whatever he was saying wasn’t working. Her nostrils flared. He went for a smoke. One of the other women was dancing drunkenly while her husband slept on his hand. She shoved him a bit, but nothing – so she started dancing with the waiter. The final couple sat side by side in a silence that wasn’t quite companionable. They were both thinking of other things. Other people?
The countdown began. The couple to my left took a break from what had become an all-out row to join in. We put on our complimentary 2008-shaped glasses. I peered out through the 00s, feeling pleasantly disguised. All the couples kissed each other at midnight. The man to my left kissed me too, and his wife clenched her fist. I took a step back. The man across the table fell comatose while his wife slow-danced with the waiter. The silent couple returned to silence. I felt awkward, and then … then there was the glorious realisation that I could just … leave.
I have been all these people before and since, but not that night. I wished everyone a happy new year and sauntered back to my room. It was all I could do not to whistle. I did not owe a thing to anyone in the world. I wished myself a happy new year, knowing all I would have to deal with in the morning was myself. I flew back refreshed on New Year’s Day. Alone, but complete.
Katy Brand is an actor, comedian and writer | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/18/ofm-awards-2015-best-cheap-eats-maxs-sandwich-shop | Food | 2015-10-18T07:00:08.000Z | Ed Cumming | OFM awards 2015 best cheap eats: Max’s Sandwich Shop | Max Halley claims to have worn a black polo shirt every day for the past eight years, before adding – reassuringly – that he owns about 40. On the day we meet, the look is completed by shorts, loud socks and Nikes. A simple outfit, if slightly eccentric.
You might describe his restaurant in similar terms. A small wood-lined room at the top of Stroud Green Road, north London, Max’s Sandwich Shop opened last November with an unusual premise. “My idea was to let other people do my three favourite things,” Halley says. “Sitting around getting pissed, eating sandwiches, and not getting ripped off.”
True to his word, the menu is short. A photocopied handwritten slip lists a few sides: jalapeño mac and cheese balls, pork scratchings and a selection of decent beers. But the main attraction is the four hot sandwiches: the “Ham, Egg N Chip”, “What’s Your Beef”, vegetarian “The Spaniard” and “Chris’s Robo-Coq”.
Your soggy staples these are not. Book-thick slabs of homemade foccacia are stuffed with well-planned ingredients. Ham, Egg’n Chip is hock ham, fried egg, mayo, piccalilli and shoestring fries. The Robo-Coq is confit guinea fowl, chicken liver parfait, chicory, sweet potato fries and a parsley and dill pickle salsa. All served in greaseproof paper, secured with a rubber band. Half is plenty for lunch; a whole one will have you waddling out into N4 like a Perigord goose.
“I wanted to make sure the fillings were things you hadn’t had before,” Halley says. “It makes it easier to manage expectations. If I did a Reuben, say, then people would remember the one they had on the Brooklyn Bridge looking at New York, and no Reuben I do is going to taste as good.”
They cost £8.50 – recently raised from £7. A handwritten sign explains that this is because they have at last turned over enough – £82,000 – to have to register for VAT. When I first visited, early this year, they didn’t have a card machine: “Eventually my accountant told me that I had to get one or I’d end up in prison.”
Yet Halley’s slightly scatty demeanour belies plenty of experience. His father, Ned, is a wine writer, and Halley has worked at Brindisa, LeCoq, Salt Yard and Arbutus, among others. This knowledge of hospitality’s highs and lows might explain Halley’s relaxed working hours. From Wednesday to Friday he opens at 5pm: “The bread takes three hours to bake, so for lunch we’d have to start at 8am – sod that.” They do open earlier at the weekend, but make up for it by being closed on Monday and Tuesday.
“People can’t quite believe that we’re a sandwich shop and we’re not open for lunch. They still think of a sandwich as something you pay £3 for at Boots. But we want to work somewhere fun, and part of that is that we don’t work too much. It helps us to be jolly.”
While we’re talking, a stream of people wander in to say hello or collect sandwiches. First names are cheerfully exchanged. “We’re very much a local place. Lots of good restaurants fail because they’re in the wrong area and misunderstand the demographic. I felt the simplest way to avoid that was to open where I lived. It made it easier to see what people wanted.”
19 Crouch Hill, London N4 4AP; maxssandwichshop.com | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/12/canada-federal-election-maxime-bernier-rhino-party | World news | 2019-10-12T12:00:19.000Z | Tracey Lindeman | ‘Stupid, but it works’: satirical candidate brings levity to Canada election | In the Quebec riding of Beauce, Maxime Bernier is bringing badly needed levity to Canada’s looming federal election.
Not the Maxime Bernier who leads the populist rightwing People’s party of Canada most known for its anti-immigration stance
The other Maxime Bernier – a candidate running for the satirical Rhino party in the same district.
Canada: why Doug Ford is kryptonite for Conservatives' election hopes
Read more
Bernier has been accused of intentionally trying to sow seeds of confusion in the riding (as Canada’s electoral districts are known), but he is taking his joke candidacy seriously by promising to focus on local issues close to residents’ hearts and wallets.
His campaign slogan? “If you’re not sure, vote for both.”
Political satire – whether it’s a joke party or delivered by a late-night television host – has long been considered an engine for apathy and cynicism.
However, poking fun at politicians and the power systems around them can actually make people more engaged, says Dr Sophia McClennen, a professor and researcher at Penn State, and the author of several books on the influence of political satire.
In the case of the Bernier stunt, she sees the joke as part of the Rhinos’ efforts to protect the nation’s democracy.
“We have data that shows people who watch satire shows vote, they send letters, they call Congress, they do all the metrics that you might use to determine whether somebody is politically [engaged],” said McClennen.
The Rhino leader, Sébastien Côrriveau, searched long and hard for a Bernier of his own, sending messages to at least 70 people with the name before Facebook blocked him for suspicious activity.
In the end, the chosen Bernier was the only one who agreed to run. “He is the best Maxime Bernier I could hope for,” said Côrriveau.
“It’s a stupid joke, but it works,” he added. “I’m very, very happy about it, because we have things to say as Rhinoceros. It sometimes sounds stupid, but there’s something hidden under it that’s very intelligent at the same time,” he says.
Political satire may be influencing Canadians in the same ways, too, particularly in these increasingly polarized times.
Canada’s Rhino party has unsuccessfully run candidates in federal elections off and on since 1963. In the party’s heyday, Pierre Trudeau once called them “the court jesters of the nation” – which the party took as a compliment.
The party has run on promises of repealing the law of gravity, reforming retail lottery laws by replacing cash prizes with senate seats and improving the economy by giving all Canadians a minimum of two jobs each.
How will Justin Trudeau's blackface photos affect Canada's election?
Read more
Meanwhile, the CBC’s satirical news program This Hour Has 22 Minutes has been on air for 26 years and, more recently, Canadians have welcomed the acerbic wit of the Beaverton’s news website and TV program.
There, Beaverton headlines poke at Canadians’ political cynicism: “Trudeau wondering how long until it’s cool for him to do blackface again” and “Putin impressed Canadian voters don’t need help spreading disinformation”.
Cynicism isn’t always a bad thing, says McClennen. In fact, it can rally people behind political issues. She points to protest signs, which today poke fun rather than make serious and direct calls for action.
“There’s some energy there, right?” says McClennen. “I’m being critical of the system, but I’m being sassy and sarcastic while I do it. And people are responding to that at a level that we’ve never seen.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/12/uber-cabbies-slow-lane-london-black-cabs-luddism-digital-advances | Opinion | 2014-06-12T09:21:35.000Z | Mark Wallace | Uber has consigned the horn-honking cabbies to the slow lane | Mark Wallace | Ijust took my first journey by Uber. One click, and eight minutes later a clean, smart Prius was outside my door. Twenty minutes on I was at my destination and the journey was paid for automatically. No wandering around in the hope of finding an orange light to flag down, no gruff "I don't go south of the river", no faffing round with change, no paying extra to stop at a cash point.
I'm not the service's only new user – on Wednesday Uber app downloads rose by 850%. The spike is entirely thanks to an impressively self-defeating protest by cab drivers.
Faced with a more affordable and more convenient competitor, the London Taxi Drivers Association decided to organise a massive snarl-up in central London to pressure Transport for London to ban it. While cabbies took to our streets to complain about the new entrant to the market (framed, appropriately, by "cash only" signs in their cabs), their former passengers logged on and downloaded.
Uber's clever social feature, which gives every user a code with which to sign up new people – for which both they and the new customer get £10 of free credit – turned the cabbies' error into a disaster. In short, the protest turned out to be the PR equivalent of machine-gunning your own feet.
This is more than just a spat between private hire drivers and traditional cabbies; it's about a much bigger economic revolution. As digital technology opens new opportunities to innovate, old markets are disrupted. Understandably, those whose cosy arrangements suddenly stop working aren't happy. Who would be?
The question is how they choose to respond. A wise approach would be to join the revolution, learning from their competitors' success. The alternative – the horn-honking luddism we saw on Parliament Square – is a one-way route to disaster. I am sure some horse-drawn hansom cab drivers objected to motorised taxis being allowed on to London's streets – how are they doing now?
The argument that London or any other city should protect its antiquated cabs from competition is simply hogwash. The capital's iconic vehicles have a remarkably protected position already – even with the advent of Uber they are still the only private cars allowed to use bus lanes, and the only players in the market allowed to pick people up on the kerb when flagged down. The fact they feel threatened despite those advantages shows how attractive the digital alternative is. Banning it would be an attack on passengers – if it's possible to do the job better, at a lower cost, we should have the right to choose.
There will be more battles between customers and vested interests, disruptors and protectionists, progress and the past, in all sorts of industries. HMV tried to reject technology and consumer demand – it lost. Now cab drivers seem to think they can stem the tide, only to find it washing over them.
There will always be arguments about quality – "proper" cabbies do the Knowledge, which remains the world's most impressive feat of rote learning. But in the age of the satnav how much is that really worth? The only true test of value can be the amount people are willing to pay – some may prefer to cough up for the privilege of knowing that your driver, not a computer, is plotting the route, but they'll be a minority.
If black cabs refuse to change, they'll go the way of those vanished old hansom cabs. Maybe one or two will drive well-off tourists around for a taste of London's past, but the rest of us will be booking and paying for journeys through our phones.
Regulators must choose the right side in the technology wars. If they try to preserve old systems in spite of a changing world, then they will eventually be discredited and overwhelmed by consumer demand.
Meanwhile, I and the rest of Uber's customers will continue to enjoy the new-found perks of progress. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jun/15/daniel-morgan-a-timeline-of-key-events | UK news | 2023-07-19T10:24:46.000Z | Jamie Grierson | Daniel Morgan murder: a timeline of key events | No one has been convicted over the murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan in 1987, despite five police investigations.
The Metropolitan police have previously admitted the initial inquiry into the unsolved case was blighted by police corruption.
Here is a timeline of key dates:
10 March 1987
Morgan is found murdered with an axe in his head in the car park of the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham, south-east London.
April 1988
An inquest into his death records a verdict of unlawful killing.
June 1988
Hampshire police begin investigating the murder and the Met’s handling of the case.
February 1989
Morgan’s business partner Jonathan Rees and his associate Paul Goodridge are charged with murder and Goodridge’s girlfriend, Jean Wisden, is charged with perverting the course of justice.
May 1989
The case is dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service. Goodridge later sues Hampshire constabulary.
1997
A new investigation is opened into Morgan’s death, but ends when separate crimes are uncovered. In September 1999, Rees is charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice over a plot to plant cocaine on a woman involved in a custody dispute, and later jailed for six years, raised to seven years on appeal.
Late 2000
A formal review is carried out of the case, which leads to another investigation opening the following year. It is closed in March 2003 with no charges brought.
February 2004
Morgan’s family call on the government to open a public inquiry into the case, but it is refused.
April 2008
Five people are arrested and charged in connection with the case. Jonathan Rees, his brothers-in-law Glenn and Garry Vian, and an associate, James Cook, were charged with Morgan’s murder, while former police officer Sid Fillery was charged with perverting the course of justice.
March 2011
The prosecution collapses after police failings relating to disclosure of evidence and handling of informants. In the wake of the collapse, DCS Hamish Campbell and the acting commissioner, Tim Godwin, both acknowledge that corruption hampered the early investigations into Morgan’s death.
2013
The then home secretary, Theresa May, announces that an independent panel will be set up to examine the case.
July 2019
Rees and the Vian brothers are each awarded six-figure sums in damages after successfully suing the Met for malicious prosecution. A high court judge rules that Rees and Glenn Vian should each receive £155,000, and Garry Vian should get £104,000.
18 May 2021
The independent panel is due to publish its report, but suffers delays due to the Home Office initially claiming no parliamentary time can be found to make publication possible, and then insisting it wishes to review the document and make redactions as it deems necessary on national security or human rights grounds.
28 May
An agreement is reached that a small team of Home Office officials will be allowed to read the report before its publication on 15 June, with any redactions marked in footnotes. Morgan’s family will also be allowed to read the full report.
8 June
The Home Office confirms that the full, unredacted report will be published on 15 June.
15 June
The report of the independent panel inquiry into Morgan’s killing heavily criticises the Met, and the then commissioner, Cressida Dick, for obstructing its access to documents.
13 December
Morgan family announce they will sue the Met
3 August 2022
The Independent Office for Police Conduct announces that no officer past or present will face any new action, be it criminal or disciplinary. It spent 14 months considering the panel’s findings. It says former Met commissioner Cressida Dick may have broken the rules but no action will be taken.
19 July 2023
36 years after Morgan’s murder, his family win admissions of failings and a financial settlement from the Met to avoid the case going to court.
The Met admits it prioritised its reputation, with a cycle of corruption, incompetence and defensiveness blighting the search for justice. The Met commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, publicly accepts the family were fobbed off with “empty promises”, as well as accepting “multiple and systemic failings” in the Met. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/aug/14/rural-areas-being-hit-hardest-at-pumps-as-fuel-prices-rise-again-says-aa-supermarkets | Money | 2023-08-14T13:49:06.000Z | Tom Ambrose | Rural areas being hit hardest at pumps as fuel prices rise again, says AA | Supermarkets have been accused of overcharging customers in rural areas for fuel, as petrol prices on forecourts in the UK hit their highest level for six months.
The cost of petrol reached 149.13p a litre on Sunday, the dearest since early February, while diesel broke 150p a litre for the first time since May, at 150.61p, as increases in oil prices caused by global production cuts fed through to pricing at the pump, the motoring group AA said.
The price rises will crimp spending for holidaymakers travelling on Britain’s roads and already under pressure from the cost of living crisis, it added.
Separately,the AA said drivers in rural areas were paying, on average, between 10p and 15p a litre more for supermarket petrol despite scrutiny from MPs and the competition watchdog.
The motoring group said many drivers in rural areas were paying about 145p a litre, compared with 135p or less in bigger towns and cities, at supermarket pumps. Even in towns and cities there was a difference of up to 6p a litre between neighbouring areas, it said.
The energy secretary, Grant Shapps, last month rowed back on plans for a law to force supermarkets to make fuel prices more transparent, instead backing a voluntary comparison scheme in a meeting with bosses from the big retailers.
The executives he met from Asda, Tesco, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s – as well as from the fuel providers BP, Shell and Esso – were under pressure to explain why they had failed to fully pass on savings to customers after a drop in their wholesale fuel costs.
The Competition and Markets Authority said in July that prices had risen since 2019 because of “a decision by the traditional price leaders to compete less hard”.
Luke Bosdet, the AA’s spokesperson on pump prices, said: “Despite the government and CMA taking the supermarkets to task for over-charging drivers for fuel, this past weekend still showed major differences in supermarket pump prices around the country.
“Bad habits are proving hard to shake off among the UK’s fuel retailers and that is not solely the fault of the supermarkets.”
He added: “Over the decades, a supermarket policy of shaving a penny or two off what other local fuel stations charge has stunted competition within those higher-priced communities; oil company-branded forecourts could have undercut those expensive supermarkets but they were happy to play along.”
Over the past month, supermarkets have brought prices down by just half a penny when compared with company-branded retailers – but the cost of diesel has gone up by a similar amount.
This month, Asda began publishing fuel prices at its forecourts online, becoming the first retailer to launch such a service after questions about widened profit margins at the pump. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jun/01/pop-holograms-miley-cyrus-black-mirror-identity-crisis | Television & radio | 2019-06-01T08:00:09.000Z | Owen Myers | It's ghost slavery': the troubling world of pop holograms | In the star-making Disney Channel switcheroo Hannah Montana, Miley Cyrus played a teenage girl who is able to metamorphose from regular eighth grader to pop icon, simply by donning a streaked blonde wig. Most of the show seems quaintly dated now, but one moment taps into a very 2019 pop anxiety. On The Other Side Of Me. a featherweight single from the programme’s soundtrack album, Cyrus sang: “I flip the script so many times I forget / Who’s on stage, who’s in the mirror.”
Cyrus has shifted her image from foam-finger humper to wholesome cowgirl since, but her new acting role centres again on the self-searching theme of that forgotten 2006 pop classic. In the new season of Black Mirror, Cyrus plays Ashley, a tween-friendly pop star whose latest marketing gimmick is “Ashley Too,” a miniature talking robot toy that replicates both her Pepto-Bismol hairdo and platitude-spouting persona. The episode’s trailer ends with Ashley Too acquiring potty-mouthed sentience, screaming for her owner to “get this [USB] cable out of my ass! Holy Shit!” Specifics are under wraps, but the episode seems centred around a big, knotty question: if someone’s essence can be transplanted into a mechanised clone, where do we end and robots begin?
The Other Side of Me … Hannah Montana’s take on identity
I’m not saying that Hannah Montana is a millennial Tiresias — a modern-day seer with supernatural visions of the future — but I’m also not not saying that. The binary between man and machine is growing increasingly porous, with virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa taking up residence in our phones and homes, and growing increasingly humanlike by the day. When instructed to rap, Alexa performs a string of Tom Lehrer-esque nonsense about rocks and sediment. If you ask Siri if she can dance, her response is: “I do a pretty mean robot.” Software that replicates the personality of celebrities may be a while off, but it’s not inconceivable that well-liked celebrities could lend their voices similar products in the future, à la Ashley Too. You can certainly imagine a market for the RuPaul Alexa who tells users to “step your pussy up” every morning.
It’s a given that celebrity image is built on smoke and mirrors. But we’re in a curious spot today, where the music industry is manoeuvering to convince audiences that the veneer of an artist’s presence is a compelling substitute to watching a flesh-and-blood performance. Enter the pop star hologram.
Pop holograms started out as a trompe-l’œil trick. Initially, these rudimentary likenesses weren’t technically holograms at all, but light projections on to a thin piece of glass or gauze that evoked a spectral presence, using a Victorian sideshow technique called Pepper’s Ghost. At the 2006 Grammys, this old ruse was used to make Madonna appear to duet with Gorillaz, before the apparition was swapped out for her spandex-clad real-life counterpart. In the 2010s, Pepper’s Ghost enabled Tupac to rise from the dead at Coachella, Michael Jackson to moonwalk at the VMAs, and Mariah Carey to appear simultaneously in five European cities for a T-Mobile gig in 2011. (“It feels like the whole universe is connected! It’s T-Magic,” she said.) In a sublime bit of kitsch that only she could pull off, Celine Dion duets with a projection of herself in her current Las Vegas residency, and lightly banters with her ephemeral clone. “Come back tomorrow, I’m here every night,” smiles the hologram. “Yeah right!” Dion hits back, as the projection disappears with a swipe of her hand.
Snoop Dogg, left, duets with a hologram of Tupac Shakur (who died in 1996) at Coachella festival in 2012. Photograph: Christopher Polk/Getty Images
Today’s top VR firms have moved on from Pepper’s Ghost techniques to use military-grade lasers to create a kind of humanoid light effigy. In the past couple of years, technological advancements have enabled long-dead artists including Maria Callas, Frank Zappa and Roy Orbison to float on to stages worldwide, often accompanied by a live band. In the wake of a postponed Amy Winehouse tour, last month brought the biggest news in the pop hologram’s young history, with an announcement that Whitney Houston would return to the stage thanks to VFX company Base Hologram — the first in a raft of projects which will also include an album of unreleased music (culled from 1985’s Whitney Houston album sessions) and a Broadway show. “She adored her audiences,” said Pat Houston, Whitney’s sister-in-law and the president of the late singer’s estate. “That’s why we know she would have loved this holographic theatrical concept.”
Would Houston really have loved it, or is this simply a cold-blooded manoeuvre to squeeze every drop of cash from her legacy? The pop star’s cousin Dionne Warwick has already blasted the hologram tour. “It’s surprising to me,” she said. “I think it’s stupid.”
Marty Tudor, CEO of production at Base Hologram, explains that his team has been working on the “elaborate” hologram creation process for a few months now. “We do everything very closely in conjunction with the family, with the estate,” he said. “Frankly, we give them approvals over most of what we do, because we do not want to violate somebody’s legacy.”
‘We know she would have loved it’ … a PR image of the Whitney Houston hologram Photograph: The Voice
The actual process of creating Digi-Whitney is secret, but it essentially involves filming an actor performing every beat of the show, and then mapping her body with Houston’s image. (Think of Andy Serkis against a green screen to create Gollum, and you’re not far off.) Audiences won’t see the real Houston’s movements, but an actor’s studied interpretation of what she was like. Tudor was defensive when confronted with the idea that a hologram of a dead person is, for some, inherently ghoulish. He pointed to the case of Peter Cushing, who was able to appear in 2016’s Star Wars: Rogue One thanks to CGI trickery, even though he died two decades prior: “When you went to see that, and Peter Cushing was all the way through that movie, I guarantee you nobody was thinking about the fact that he’s dead.” Well, apart from the widespread outcry over Cushing’s reanimation, which was described as “a digital indignity” in this newspaper.
Compliance with the law is only a small part of ethics. Long-dead people who coudn't imagine this technology would likely never have consented to this use of their image
Hollywood is catching up to this. Before his death in 2014, Robin Williams made the unprecedented move to create a legal document that safeguarded the use of his image for 25 years after he died. That decision prevents anyone from inserting a CGI Williams into a movie, or, say, putting his hologram in a new Patch Adams Broadway spectacular. Crucially, Williams went as far as to ban even authorised uses of his image, meaning that his wishes will stay watertight even if his estate tries to push something through. A Prince hologram was planned to appear as part of Justin Timberlake’s 2018 Super Bowl performance, but was nixed in the wake of an old interview from 1998 resurfacing in which The Purple One called holograms “demonic.” But few public figures could have Prince’s foresight, or Williams’s meticulousness. (Timberlake ended up projecting Prince on what looked like a giant bed sheet.)
“This is a case where the difference between law and morality is important,” says Robin James, a professor of philosophy, gender studies and music at the University of North Carolina. “Contracts are usually written so that images or recordings can be used in perpetuity, for whatever reason the owner wants. However, compliance with the law is only a small part of ethics. Long-dead people who couldn’t imagine that this sort of tech would ever exist would likely have never consented to this specific use of their work and image.”
In this way, we’re still in what the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori called the “uncanny valley”. Back in 1970, Mori coined the term to describe our repulsion to things that seem almost human, but not quite right. Last year, Base Hologram brought the adored opera singer Maria Callas back to life for string of performances backed by symphony orchestras. Writing of Callas 2.0’s performance in Blacksburg, Virginia, NPR journalist Tom Huizenga described the production’s “absurdities and technical deficiencies” — Callas’s voice was flattened to a blanketing blare, and her hologram bizarrely accepted a proffered “real” rose on stage — as well the unsettling, tear-jerking power of seeing a long-dead diva perform “live”.
The hologram Maria Callas in concert. Photograph: Jose Mendez/EPA
Even so, hologram tours do have one indisputable thing going for them: they’re cheap to attend. Pop concerts are pricier than ever, with tickets going for well into the triple digits. Meanwhile, you’ll pay just £60 for the best seat in the house at Base Hologram’s upcoming Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison’s hologram tour, which premieres in the UK this September. For some fans, the novelty factor and affordability will be a worthwhile tradeoff for an imperfect show created without the explicit consent of its star.
For the music journalist and author Simon Reynolds, the wave of hologram tours is an affront to the core notion of live performance. “To what extent are these performances in any real sense?” he asks. “A performance – whether showbiz entertainment or performance art – is by definition live, involving the unmediated presence of living performers, whereas the hologram tours are ‘un-live’ and involve non-presence.
It's unfair competition: established stars continuing their market domination after death and stifling the opportunities for new artists
“On an ethical and economic level, I would liken it to a form of ‘ghost slavery’,” he continues. “That applies certainly when done without the consent of the star, [but rather] by the artist’s estate in collusion with the record company or tour promoter. It’s a form of unfair competition: established stars continuing their market domination after death and stifling the opportunities for new artists.”
Prof James agrees. “I’m not sure it’s always going to be fans remembering artists,” she says. “Imagine if there was a Beatles hologram show. With their ongoing popularity, having seen the Beatles in concert won’t be just a boomer thing any more. It could have a sort of flattening or homogenising effect across eras and generations.”
Today’s explosion of hologram tours could sow the seeds for a future in which androids no longer dream of electric sheep, but are manipulated for chart domination. Reynolds imagines the unscrupulous use of technology to capture and replicate performers’ vocal timbre and bodily mannerisms. “You would get a sort of digi-simulacrum of the artist singing new songs, guesting as vocalist or rapper on other people’s records, or appearing in videos or movies,” he says. “In the recording studio, you’d just need the software which would generate the voice.”
Part of live music’s magic thrill is breathing the same air as your pop idol, hearing that night’s vocal tics and jaw-dropping high notes up close, as well as their obligatory groan-worthy stage banter. For many fans, that will remain preferable to a seamless, stitched together performance from a dead artist who never agreed to be reanimated in the first place. Might it be seen as unconscionable to resurrect an artist without their explicit approval, a depressing symptom of greedy music industry vampirism where not even the dead are able to rest in peace?
Beyoncé Knowles on stage at Coachella … captured in detail for posterity. Photograph: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Coachella
But hologram technology for current — and consenting — artists offers more enticing possibilities. Executive producer John Canning of Digital Domain, the company that enabled Tupac’s Coachella cameo, predicts that capture and display technology will enable us to watch holographic performances from awards shows like the Grammys in our living rooms. “You can see the glimmers of what is possible when you put on a high-end VR headset,” he says. “That experience is just going to get better.”
Similar technology could also give fabulous depth to pop history. Last year, Beyoncé meticulously recorded her epochal Coachella headline slot for Netflix, creating a electrifying visual and audio archive of a performance which centred black culture and marked her artistic peak. It’s not hard to imagine that she could have created 3D scans of her every ad-libbed gesture and dutty-wine for a global hologram tour of the concert. Would The Beychella Experience have the same magic as the original live performance? No way. Would it redefine the possibilities of concert films? Yep. Would it sell every ticket every time? Absolutely.
Black Mirror season 5 launches on Netflix on 5 June.
Watch a trailer for Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/jul/15/mason-mount-chelsea-five-year-deal | Football | 2019-07-15T16:02:00.000Z | Dominic Fifield | Mason Mount commits future to Chelsea by signing five-year deal | Mason Mount has become the latest Chelsea youngster to commit his long-term future to the club after signing a new five-year contract at Stamford Bridge.
Chelsea’s Frank Lampard era begins with Bohemians bump in Dublin
Read more
The midfielder follows Ruben Loftus-Cheek in signing a deal through to the summer of 2024, with his new terms understood to be worth around £75,000 a week. Mount, who has yet to represent the Chelsea first-team in a competitive game, has already enjoyed time on loan at Vitesse Arnhem and spent last season impressing under Frank Lampard at Derby County in the Championship, scoring 11 goals in 44 appearances.
The 20-year-old’s form in the second tier earned him a call-up into Gareth Southgate’s full England squad last autumn – he has yet to be capped at that level but has represented the under-21s – and he scored for Lampard’s Chelsea side in Saturday’s 4-0 win over St Patrick’s Athletic in Dublin.
Mount has since travelled to Japan with the senior squad for the forthcoming friendlies against Kawasaki Frontale and Barcelona and is expected to remain at the club as part of the first-team set-up, rather than being loaned out again, in the campaign ahead.
“It’s a massively proud moment for myself and my family,” said Mount, who joined Chelsea’s academy at the age of six. “I joined this club at six years old and it was always my goal to play for the first team one day. I’m really looking forward to the coming season now and working hard to have an impact here at Chelsea. I’ve been at the club for a long time already and hopefully I’ll stay for a long time to come.”
Lampard is also likely to retain the Scotland under-21 midfielder Billy Gilmour around his senior squad in the domestic campaign, with Chelsea hopeful of following up Mount’s deal by agreeing a new contract with Callum Hudson-Odoi, who is still a target for Bayern Munich.
“Mason has come right the way through the Chelsea academy and has always stood out as a fantastic talent and dedicated individual,” said the Chelsea director, Marina Granovskaia. “We have monitored his development extremely closely while he has been out on loan and believe he is now ready to be a member of our squad competing at the top of the Premier League. Like another of our academy graduates, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, we are delighted Mason has committed himself to the club this summer and look forward to an exciting future ahead.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/04/mark-ronson-uptown-special-interview | Music | 2015-01-04T18:00:08.000Z | Alexis Petridis | Mark Ronson: ‘I’ve made something so good, people don’t think it’s me’ | It feels slightly odd to be meeting Mark Ronson on a rainy industrial estate near Caledonian Road, north London. A certain glitziness attached itself to his name even before he was famous – his mother is a New York socialite, his father a music business grandee, his stepfather a rock star – and glitziness is a commodity in fairly short supply in this particular area of King’s Cross. Now resident in London – handy for Paris, where his wife, model and actor Joséphine de La Baume, has most of her work – the industrial estate is where Ronson keeps his recording studio. Inside, it is substantially more alluring than its exterior suggests: gold discs and Grammy awards, framed vintage gig posters and flickering scented candles.
A courier arrives with a gift and a card from his record company, celebrating the arrival at No 1 in the charts of Uptown Funk, a collaboration with singer Bruno Mars that Ronson laboured over for six agonising months. He claims that he worked so hard on it that his hair started to fall out; at one point, the stress of trying to come up with a suitable guitar part caused him to vomit and faint.
“We did 45 takes of it and I just couldn’t get it, it sounded like horrible bullshit, so we went to lunch, walked down to a restaurant. Everyone was saying: ‘Dude, what’s wrong with you? You’ve gone totally white.’ Because I was going on pretending everything was just fine; you don’t want to admit that you’re just not there, you’re not where you want to be. And I went to the toilet and just … fainted. I threw up, and fainted. They had to come and carry me out of the toilet.”
Still, it all worked out OK in the end. En route to No 1, Uptown Funk managed to break a British record for being streamed the most times in a week: 2.3m times, evidence of how thoroughly the track dominated the Christmas party season. Anticipation for his forthcoming album, Uptown Special – co-produced by Jeff Bhasker, who has previously worked with everyone from Beyoncé to Ed Sheeran to Lana Del Rey to Kanye West – is extremely high. No wonder your record company has sent you champagne, I say. “The ‘record company’,” says Ronson, mordantly. “I arranged to have that delivered myself to make me look good in front of a journalist.”
He made a similar joke last time I met him, in Manhattan, seven years ago. A fan came up in a restaurant, mid-interview, and started gushing about his second album, Version. “Thanks for making me look good in the Guardian,” Ronson called to her as she left.
In fact, Ronson spent a suprising proportion of our time together dolefully insisting he didn’t lead a glamorous, charmed life while giving every impression of leading a glamorous, charmed life. The previous year, he had co-produced Lily Allen’s debut album, Alright, Still, and Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. The former went on to sell 3m copies, the latter 20m. Version had become almost as ubiquitous: you couldn’t turn the television on without hearing Ronson’s cover versions of Coldplay’s God Put a Smile on Your Face and The Zutons’ Valerie, also sung by Winehouse.
The tabloid press seemed almost as fascinated by him as they were by her and they wouldn’t leave her alone for five minutes, this being the start of Winehouse’s horrible descent. Record producers tend to be shadowy, backroom figures, but Ronson was almost needlessly handsome, dated supermodels and came from a family so famous in New York society that Tatler magazine had claimed, perhaps a little hysterically, that anyone who didn’t know them should leave Manhattan. He had recently played Tom Cruise’s wedding to Katie Holmes.
Over the course of the few days we spent together, Ronson was mobbed by female fans and hounded by tabloid reporters, one of whom thrust a recording device under his nose and demanded to know if he had “a message for Amy”. “If I did,” he frowned, “I’d probably ring her, not say it into your tiny Dictaphone and have her read it in the papers.” As if to underline his status as the hottest producer around, a young British singer and her manager turned up at the studio where Ronson was recording his radio show. The singer was looking to work with him on her debut album and offered to make herself useful by popping out to buy everyone beers. It was Adele.
Mark Ronson. Photograph: David Levene/Guardian
In the middle of all this, Ronson affected a kind of bemused detachment, patiently explaining that his background hadn’t much helped his career (“Ghostface Killah isn’t going to work with me because my mum’s in Tatler and my stepdad was in Foreigner”), declining to say much about Winehouse and her troubles, and claiming he found all the attention “fucking weird”. Today, too, he seems in a noticeably more downbeat mood than you might expect someone in recent receipt of a No 1 single to be. At least part of that might be down to jetlag: he flew from the US to Paris yesterday, saw his wife briefly, tried to sleep, woke up at 2am this morning and arrived in London a couple of hours ago.
It renders his already languid transatlantic drawl more languid and drawly than ever, causing a few of his answers to tail off (“Sometimes I keep talking like I’m trying to get to a point,” he frowns, “and then I realise there isn’t actually a point to what I’m saying and I’m making it even worse by keeping going”). Occasionally, it appears to restructure his vocabulary in some intriguing ways: I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean to say that Allen and Winehouse were two of the leading figures in British psychology, but listening back to the recording, that’s definitely what came out of his mouth.
But you also get the feeling that Ronson may just tend to a slightly lugubrious view of life. He is drily witty about the state of his career, which he claims had “definitely gone cold” prior to Uptown Funk. It’s perhaps worth noting that Ronson’s notion of a fallow period in his career involved working with Paul McCartney and co-producing Bruno Mars’s Unorthodox Jukebox, the fourth biggest-selling album in the world last year. “You know you’re cold, industry-wise, because you see all the gigs going to your friends. OK, I understand, so they think that I’m just the guy that did Back to Black six years ago, and that’s pretty much all. I don’t know, it’s probably all my weird hangups and neuroses, a lot of it.”
Neurotic or not, there may be a grain of truth to what he says. The sound he minted on Back to Black and Version proved to be one of the most pervasive in modern pop – nearly a decade on, people are still making records indebted to it, not least Sam Smith and John Newman – but Ronson’s 2010 album Record Collection, a bold attempt to break free of his trademark retro-soul formula, “sold way less than Version”. His position as the celebrities’ wedding DJ of choice has apparently slipped, a state of affairs he doesn’t seem terribly bothered about.
Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse at the Brit awards in 2008. Photograph: Arnold Slater/Rex Features
“Put it this way, there was some massive wedding in the south of France earlier this year and they had Elton John performing the first night, Mariah Carey and Calvin Harris on the big night and I think I was, like, DJing in the lobby while the guests were checking out,” he laughs. “If you’re at the level where you can get Mariah and Calvin to headline, I’m like the Sunday afternoon chillout set DJ, which I have absolutely no problem with.”
And the tabloids stopped following him around, a state of affairs he seems less bothered about still. “I was linked with these two really captivating, charismatic people, Lily and Amy, and it was just a byproduct of that. They so captured the public’s attention and I guess I just got my lucky break because of that, or my unlucky break, depending on your view of being in the tabloids.
“And I guess I was probably going out a little too much in 2007 and 2008. I kind of wish I’d been drinking and partying a bit less, because when I look back on it, it’s all a bit of a blur. I wish I could remember a bit more about things like winning the Grammys and shit, because stuff like that’s kind of special. Maybe because it wasn’t as much fun as it had been, maybe just because I’m a little older or married, I don’t do that any more. But they really stop chasing you around because you’re not having hit records and your name isn’t going to sell papers, so they go and follow Harry Styles or Professor Green instead.”
“You purposely kept out of the press,” offers his publicist.
“I was desperate to get into the fucking press,” says Ronson, deadpan. “I was literally hanging around outside Bungalow 8, going: ‘Where’s the photographer from Metro?’”
Mark Ronson and Lily Allen at the Wireless festival in 2008. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA
He doesn’t think his decision to calm his lifestyle down had anything to do with Winehouse’s death from alcohol poisoning in 2011, although it’s pretty clear it had a huge impact on him. On the wall of Ronson’s studio, there is a frame featuring a bass drum skin with a heart and “Amy” painted on it in the style of a tattoo, a gift from Bruno Mars, who performed a tribute to the singer at that year’s MTV awards. “I was asked to perform at that event, but I just wasn’t ready at that point to, like, go and perform with anybody, around that … whole thing.”
Last time I met Ronson, he joked that one of his main roles as her producer was to stop the singer sloping off to a bar near the studio midway through recording sessions. Today, he talks about their working relationship in wistful, vaguely mystical terms; something magical happened between them that he hasn’t recaptured with anyone else.
“No one’s ever going to compare to Amy because of the talent she had and the unique bond we had, that rapport, that energy in the studio. For all the stuff that I did on Back to Black, I think we only ever spent five or six days together in the studio. Maybe 10. Valerie was done in two hours. Her thing was so effortless in a way, because … well, because she would just … it was just what came out – that’s it. ‘That’s it, I’m not changing anything, that’s what came out of me and it’s good enough.’ And every time it was obviously good enough, and special. It was just … a thing.”
If Ronson genuinely thinks his career was in the doldrums, then Uptown Special certainly seems the album to pull him out. Mars heads up a remarkably starry cast of collaborators that includes Stevie Wonder. There is also a singer called Keyone Starr, who Ronson found in Jackson, Mississippi, after touring churches in the deep south of America in search of “a young singer who has that feel of a late 70s Chaka Khan record”.
“It was kind of amazing. You’d meet these people that could outsing anyone in the top 10, but they’d explain that they didn’t really enjoy singing secular music or Beyoncé or whatever, because unless they’re really singing for God, they just don’t feel it. In the era of music reality shows, where people basically start singing in order to become famous, it’s so anti that, it’s incredible. You’d start talking to them, like: ‘We’re making this record, would you be interested in coming up to LA to record a song?’ and they’re like: ‘Well, I can never miss my choir rehearsal on Wednesdays and Thursdays,’ which is really touching.”
A young Mark Ronson in 1990. Photograph: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
More bizarrely, the lyrics were written by Michael Chabon, the author of Wonder Boys and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Ronson apparently approached him after turning up at a book signing in New York. “I wrote him a letter and he was just kind of instantly into it,” he says. The Pulitzer prize-winning novelist proved surprisingly amenable to being told that the characters he came up with for one song were “too sordid and unlikable to inhabit the same world as this music I’ve written”, and that his words weren’t right because they didn’t fit the correct pop formula. “He came down to the studio and it was like a Jeff Bhasker songwriting boot camp. You know, Jeff has all these amazing stringent policies on songs and what words sing good, and what you can’t sing, how everything must adhere to the note, the chorus must start this interval higher than the verse, all these things. And Michael, obviously he has no problem in the words department, but he just seemed to love taking in all these songwriting boot camp ideas. He was incredibly patient.”
The end result is hugely impressive: Uptown Special sounds like a hit. Moreover, it might well become a hit in America, a country where, as Ronson puts it, “my records to date haven’t done shit”, but where Uptown Funk unexpectedly made the top five. He played some of it at a DJ gig the other night, he says, and “2,500 kids were totally going for it, which I thought was kind of amazing. It’s so different to what everyone’s ears are attuned to right now, but it completely works. That just kind of makes me psyched for music. You know, ‘Oh, it’s not just that I like it because I’m an old man,’ or whatever.”
Indeed, talking about the album, Ronson becomes about as animated as his voice and the jetlag will allow. If it was someone else’s album and he heard it, he says, he’d be jealous. As I’m leaving, he starts talking again about the guitar part on Uptown Funk that made him faint. He played it to his stepfather, Mick Jones, of AOR titans Foreigner. “And he said: ‘Oh, that’s good, is that Nile Rodgers?’
“That’s what I’ve done,” he says, a little heavily. “I’ve made something so good that people don’t actually think it’s me.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/05/lena-dunham-statement-abuse-claims | Culture | 2014-11-05T20:50:00.000Z | Alison Flood | Lena Dunham apologises after critics accuse her of sexually molesting sister | Lena Dunham, the creator of the hit television series Girls, has issued an apology after being attacked in the US for passages in her recently released memoir which critics have said amount to the sexual abuse of her younger sister.
Dunham, 28, who this week cancelled a planned appearance at book events in Antwerp and Berlin, initially struck a defiant tone after parts of the book, Not That Kind of Girl, were highlighted by the right-wing press.
The passages cited include one that describes an incident when Dunham was seven and her sister was one and playing on the driveway. Dunham writes that “curiosity got the best” of her and she opened her sister’s vagina only to call for her mother when she found the toddler had “six or seven pebbles in there”.
“My mother didn’t bother asking why I had opened Grace’s vagina,” Dunham wrote. “This was within the spectrum of things that I did.”
Lena Dunham: 'I can't even understand what the alt-right is saying'
Read more
In another passage that has attracted critics she describes trying to persuade her sister to “kiss her on the lips for five seconds” by offering gifts of sweets or coins. “Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl, I was trying,” wrote Dunham.
The website Truth Revolt, which says its mission is to “unmask leftists in the media for who they are” wrote that the book sees Dunham describe “using her little sister at times essentially as a sexual outlet”.
Kevin Williamson in National Review wrote that there is “no non-horrific interpretation” of the episode with the stones. Dunham’s parents, he said, “were, in their daughter’s telling, enablers of some very disturbing behaviour that would be considered child abuse in many jurisdictions”.
Dunham initially took to Twitter in what she described as a “rage spiral”.
“The right-wing news story that I molested my little sister isn’t just LOL – it’s really fucking upsetting and disgusting. And by the way, if you were a little kid and never looked at another little kid’s vagina, well, congrats to you,” she wrote.
“Usually this is stuff I can ignore but don’t demean sufferers, don’t twist my words, back the fuck up bros. I told a story about being a weird seven-year-old. I bet you have some too, old men, that I’d rather not hear … Sometimes I get so mad I burn right up.”
But Dunham has now released a more conciliatory statement, in which she says she is “dismayed over the recent interpretation of events described in my book Not That Kind of Girl”.
“First and foremost, I want to be very clear that I do not condone any kind of abuse under any circumstances,” wrote Dunham. “Childhood sexual abuse is a life-shattering event for so many, and I have been vocal about the rights of survivors. If the situations described in my book have been painful or triggering for people to read, I am sorry, as that was never my intention.”
She added she was “also aware that the comic use of the term ‘sexual predator’ was insensitive, and I’m sorry for that as well”.
“As for my sibling, Grace, she is my best friend, and anything I have written about her has been published with her approval,” concluded the statement.
Dunham’s lawyers have also written to Truth Revolt demanding an apology and threatening legal action. The letter,
obtained by the Hollywood Reporter, sees Dunham’s lawyer write that the article “is false, fabricated, and has the obvious tendency to subject my client to ridicule, and to injure her in her occupation”.
Truth Revolt’s Ben Shapiro, editor-in-chief, wrote that “we refuse to withdraw our story or apologise for running it, because quoting a woman’s book does not constitute a ‘false’ story, even if she is a prominent actress and leftwing activist. Lena Dunham may not like our interpretation of her book, but unfortunately for her and her attorneys, she wrote that book – and the First Amendment covers a good deal of material she may not like.”
Dunham tweeted at the weekend: “I wish my sister wasn’t laughing so hard” about the situation. Grace Dunham has also now defended her sister. She tweeted: “Heteronormativity deems certain behaviours harmful, and others ‘normal’; the state and media are always invested in maintaining that … As a queer person: I’m committed to people narrating their own experiences, determining for themselves what has and has not been harmful,” and that “2day, like every other day, is a good day to think about how we police the sexualities of young women, queer, and trans people”.
Fellow writers have also come to Dunham’s defence. The author Emily Gould wrote on Salon that “Williamson fixated on a few details in the book that, divorced from context and from any understanding of how humour and writing work, made it possible for many well-meaning people to take seriously Williamson’s claim that Dunham had ‘sexually abused’ her younger sister Grace”.
“Imputing predatory motives to a seven-year-old girl and assigning a role of victim to her sister, who apparently doesn’t feel victimised in the slightest … seems more predatory and abusive than anything that Dunham describes in the book, which also includes descriptions of masturbating in bed next to her sleeping sister (who hasn’t?) and bribing her with candy for kisses (come on),” wrote Gould, advising: “If you’re on the fence about whether Dunham is an ‘abuser’, you should probably read her book, and not a right-wing blogger’s cherry-picked version of its contents.”.
Author and Guardian columnist Roxane Gay, meanwhile, blogged: “There is a great distance between thinking LENA DUNHAM IS A CHILD MOLESTER and thinking, yeah, inspecting her sister’s vagina seems like an awesome choice.
“There are multiple places within that distance,” she continued, “and I stand in that place where I think the shit is weird, it makes me uncomfortable, but I understand why the information was disclosed in the memoir, and it did not diminish my experience of reading the book or my opinion of Dunham as a talented but flawed young woman,” wrote Gay, adding that the Truth Revolt blog and Williamson on National Review “were using Dunham’s words, but they were doing so utterly without context and here, context very much matters”.
“People want Dunham to perform acts of contrition but I am not at all clear on what those acts of contrition should look like. I don’t feel like Dunham owes me or anyone outside of her circle of family and friends, anything,” wrote Gay. “I don’t understand the assumption that Dunham published this memoir without her sister’s consent. That simply didn’t happen. If Grace is okay with these disclosures, that’s good enough for me.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/23/this-builder-used-to-be-sceptical-about-green-homes-now-hes-a-convert | Australia news | 2020-07-22T17:30:20.000Z | Lane Sainty | This builder used to be sceptical about green homes. Now he’s a convert | Tony O’Connell used to build whatever was put in front of him.
The 53-year-old from Wonthaggi, a coastal town in Gippsland, Victoria, has been in construction for 34 years. “What was on the plan was what was on the plan,” he says. “I wouldn’t question it.”
That is, until he attended a meeting for a proposed development in the area – one of a number of locals gearing up to run the interlopers out of town.
“We all went along thinking, yep, it’s going to be a greenwash and just someone else doing a cookie-cutter development to cut our lovely little town up,” O’Connell says.
Sand dunes at Cape Paterson separate The Cape from Bass Strait. Photograph: Alana Holmberg/Oculi for The Guardian
But he left thinking they might have a point. More than a decade on, that development is The Cape, one of Australia’s leading eco-villages, in the nearby town of Cape Paterson. And O’Connell is one of a growing number of builders trying to improve Australian houses.
Now, when a plan lands in front of him, he’s the first to point out how it could improve, coaxing homeowners into making small changes that he calls “two percenters”. A window shifted to a different wall, a patch of concrete floor that soaks up the winter sun – these tweaks can make a big difference. “I get a lot of irate calls from architects,” says O’Connell.
According to Trivess Moore, a senior lecturer and researcher into sustainable housing at RMIT, builders – and plumbers, electricians, people who sell appliances and others – are “critical intermediaries” in delivering sustainable housing.
3:39
The Green Recovery: how to fix Australia's energy-inefficient homes – video
Most people build new homes or do renovations rarely, Moore says, which leaves them reliant on tradies for information.
“Quite often it might be that someone is recommended to you, ‘Oh, my friend used that builder, I’ll trust whatever they say,’” he says. “[The ideal is] when you do have builders who are going the extra mile, and also going ‘If this was my house, this is what I’d want for a better outcome.’”
Tony O’Connell on site at one of the homes he and his team are constructing at The Cape, one of Australia’s leading eco-villages. Photograph: Alana Holmberg/Oculi for The Guardian
But green builders have a lot of work ahead of them. Building better houses from scratch is one thing. Improving Australia’s dismal existing housing is another.
The national building code currently requires new houses to have a six-star energy-efficiency rating. The majority of houses built before 2005 have ratings between 1.5 and two.
“They’re pretty shocking,” says Alan Pears, a senior industry fellow at RMIT who has been working in housing policy since the early 1980s. “[Problems with] windows, the building fabric, poorly insulated, poorly shaded and the houses leak like sieves.”
O’Connell says many older homes are so leaky, the air in the house changes over about 15 times each hour. As well, they are full of inefficient appliances, spanning from hot water systems to fridges to lightbulbs to televisions.
It all adds up – and exacerbates inequality. People on lower incomes are more likely to be living in older and poorer quality homes, and then either cannot afford or are not in control of upgrades.
People are starting to see sustainability as a long-term benefit instead of a drain on their bank accounts, Tony O’Connell says. Photograph: Alana Holmberg/Oculi for The Guardian
According to Kellie Caught, senior advisor on climate and energy at the Australian Council of Social Services, low-income households spend 6.4% of their income on energy bills, against a national average of 2.4% and just 1.5% for high-income households.
Poor quality housing is also detrimental to people’s health, a factor likely to worsen as the climate crisis unfolds.
“We’ve got a lot of people who in winter are suffering from cold,” O’Connell says. “And in summer, we have a higher death toll from people living in heat who can’t afford air conditioning than we do out of bushfires.”
There are ways to make older homes more efficient, but some are harder than others.
It’s easy enough to put insulation in ceilings and sometimes under floors, to replace lightbulbs with LEDs, and to plug gaps to keep out the cold and heat. Other changes, like upgrading to double-glazed windows, putting insulation into the walls, and buying better appliances can be costly, difficult or both.
The poor standard of Australian buildings has prompted calls for a nationwide efficiency drive as part of federal and state coronavirus stimulus spending, which would also help tackle the climate crisis. About a quarter of national emissions are from buildings.
The Australian Council of Social Service and the Australian Industry Group are among those to have urged the Morrison government to support an efficiency and solar power package for low-income and social housing, finding it could create 60,000 jobs.
The chief scientist, Alan Finkel, has also highlighted the benefits of fixing the country’s leaky buildings, as have groups representing business, the energy industry, the property sector, unions and major investors.
Beyond Zero Emissions, a climate change thinktank, analysed what it would take to transform Australia’s building sector as part of what it calls a “million jobs plan”. It found there would be about 200,000 jobs in a five-year program to perform 2.5m “deep energy retrofits” on existing homes and construct 150,000 7.5 star-rated social houses.
Tony O’Connell at The Cape. He says many older homes are so leaky the air in the house changes over about 15 times each hour. Photograph: Alana Holmberg/Oculi for The Guardian
Separately, researchers from the Australian National University set out to test how Covid-19 stimulus spending could have lasting economic value, cut emissions and improve people’s lives. They found energy retrofits, particular for low-income households, ticked all boxes.
“You can just get the dollars out the door and into the community really quickly,” says Prof Frank Jotzo, director of ANU’s Centre for Climate and Energy Policy. “It would be a much better investment economically, socially and environmentally than the Homebuilder program, which is paying money to people who already have a project under way.”
Advocates are clear that a nationwide housing overhaul is needed. But it just hasn’t happened.
“We’ve been talking about regulating upgrading of older buildings since the 1980s,” Pears says, breaking into resigned laughter, “and we haven’t done it.
“I think it’s fair to say there is a lack of will and leadership to drive this because it is tricky.”
In the early 2010s, Heidi Lee was the project manager of Beyond Zero Emissions’ ambitious plan to retrofit every single building in Australia.
“If you committed to doing it wholesale, it’s much cheaper,” Lee, now the project lead on BZE’s “million jobs plan”, explains. But when it comes to upgrading inefficient homes, you have to spend money to save it, and lots of Australians don’t have the cash sitting around.
‘I think if you went back 10 years ago and talked about sustainable construction, people would think you were proposing to build an igloo somewhere.’ Photograph: Alana Holmberg/Oculi for The Guardian
Another big weak point is the rental market. “The landlord would have to spend the money to upgrade the building and the tenant is the one getting comfortable and having lower bills,” Pears says. “Why would a landlord do that?”
One way around this, and a major solution to unlocking mass retrofits, Lee says, is the expansion of environmental upgrade agreements across Australia. Under these agreements, owners can get low-interest loans that cover the upfront cost of energy retrofits and are paid back through council rates.
If you get the design right, it doesn’t cost a lot of money to build sustainable
Tony O’Connell
Such schemes are currently available in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia, but only for commercial buildings. Victoria recently passed legislation to extend the schemes to homes. The space is still developing, Lee says, but could be extended to social housing.
“We see upgrade agreements as a key plan for a green recovery, particularly coming out of Covid,” says Scott Bocskay, CEO of Sustainable Fund Australia.
Bocskay says there are a number of other energy-saving schemes and incentives out there – for instance, Solar Victoria offers interest free loans for solar panels – but generally the approach is “fragmented”.
Tony O’Connell inspects the masonry. Photograph: Alana Holmberg/Oculi for The Guardian
Another option for prompting retrofits, Moore and Pears suggest, is putting a minimum energy-efficiency standard on houses that are put up for lease or sale. The Australian Capital Territory intends to introduce such a law for rental properties in 2021.
“That’s a way of using the market to lift the bottom, but it also means if you choose not to sell your house for 10 or 15 years or whatever it might be, you don’t have to worry about that,” Moore says. “It doesn’t force everyone to make the change right now but it ensures that over time there is that lifting of standards.”
There’s also the question of how to gain public momentum. People building new homes are often pushing for sustainability in the long term, but decision-making for renters tends to be more multifaceted. Plus, a house’s energy performance isn’t exactly visible.
“It’s pretty hard to tell if there’s insulation in the walls. A lot of people don’t even know which way the house is facing,” Pears says.
“And look, to be honest, most Australians have never lived in a decent house in terms of energy performance. We’ve all grown up in 50- or 20-year-old buildings that are pretty awful, and we don’t even know what a good building is until we live in it.”
There’s no doubt homes being built in Australia today are better than those constructed last century. But experts and builders say the six-star requirement is already out of date, and leaves Australia in Europe’s dust.
“While that may have been a big step 10 years ago, now six stars is so easy to achieve for a builder,” O’Connell says. “We’re building a lot of homes at the moment that people can’t afford to live in through extremes of temperature. We’re not planning for the future.”
If you design a house well enough, O’Connell says, you can get to six stars with single-glaze windows and no insulation. Add a bit of insulation, and it rises to seven or eight. These are the kinds of dwellings he is working on at Cape Paterson, which he sees as a benchmark for better housing in Australia.
Tony O’Connell outside a home he and his team at TS Constructions built at The Cape. Photograph: Alana Holmberg/Oculi for The Guardian
“If you get the design right, it doesn’t cost a lot of money to build sustainable,” O’Connell says. “It’s when you don’t get the design right and you try to get your energy ratings by putting increasingly more expensive product in to try and achieve the rating, that it does cost a bit.”
There are hopes the 2022 revisions to the National Construction Code will see the minimum standard for new homes and significant renovations lifted to seven stars.
O’Connell delivers talks to other builders and to councils about building more sustainable homes. Change is slow, he says, but happening.
“I think if you went back 10 years ago and talked about sustainable construction, people would think you were proposing to build an igloo somewhere,” he says.
Now, people are starting to see sustainability as a long-term benefit instead of a drain on their bank accounts.
“It’s hip pocket. They get their quarterly power bill, they know how much it’s costing, you demonstrate how little it can cost,” he says. “I think the thinking has changed now, where people are considering a lot of these things to be a benefit rather than a cost.”
The coronavirus pandemic has devastated the economy but also presented a unique opportunity: to invest in climate action that creates jobs and stimulates investment, before it’s too late. The Green Recovery features talk to people on the frontline of Australia’s potential green recovery. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/26/welsh-law-early-support-prevents-homelessness-crisis | Society | 2016-04-26T10:00:16.000Z | Kate Murray | Welsh law shows that early support prevents homelessness | Kate Murray | Alist of landlords’ phone numbers would have been the only support Alice Rivers could have expected from her local council if she had become homeless a few years ago. But following trailblazing legislation in 2015, Welsh councils have transformed the way they respond to people who have been evicted, as well as those at risk of losing their home, by intervening earlier and more creatively to prevent homelessness. So when Rivers, 18, was recently thrown out of the family home after coming out as transgender, Flintshire council found her a place in a temporary “nightstop” and is now helping her to move on to a place of her own in north-east Wales.
“I was so worried – I thought the council wouldn’t be able to help,” says Rivers. “I burst into tears when they told me they could find me somewhere.”
Under the Housing Wales Act, all Welsh local authorities are now required to work with anyone facing homelessness, whether through family breakdown, rent or mortgage arrears or eviction, and to help all those who actually become homeless, rather than those who reach certain thresholds of priority need. According to Flintshire, it is an approach that has seen staff able to move from “tick-box” decision-making to a much more supportive role.
We need to change the law so homeless people get the help they need
Jon Sparkes
Read more
“With a case [like Rivers] we will now say, ‘Here’s a young person who’s got a job and can’t go home – what can we do?’, whereas a few years ago we might have been saying, ‘There’s a narrow gap to help – will we let them through?’” says Katie Chubb, the customer services manager in charge of Flintshire’s Housing Solutions service. There’s been a real culture shift, she adds, so that, where once the focus was on sifting out those such as young single people who were not considered a priority, now staff are able to focus on offering some help and advice to all those who get in touch.
Flintshire, which borders the English county of Cheshire, was piloting the preventive approach before it came into force in April 2015. It has been praised by Shelter Cymru for the way it has been prepared to spend its share of the Welsh government’s £5.6m implementation fund on a range of measures to prevent homelessness. The council’s £228,000 spending in the first year has included helping with rental deposits and letting agents’ fees, paying off rent and mortgage arrears for those who might otherwise be evicted, and funding support workers and an environmental health officer to help sort out poor housing conditions in the private rented sector. It has also paid for a Shelter Cymru caseworker to work alongside its own officers, so transforming the once adversarial relationship between those making the decisions on homeless applicants and those challenging them. “Rather than sending letters to each other, we are working together,” says Shelter Cymru caseworker Ashleigh Stevens. “It’s a real change of focus – it used to be very prescriptive, but we now cooperate on how to resolve each situation, and there’s buy-in from everyone.”
Across Wales, initial results of the new approach are encouraging. While the number of households accepted as homeless in the last quarter of last year rose by 6% in England to 14,470, in Wales the number fell by some 67% to 405 in the same period. Lesley Griffiths, Welsh minister for communities and tackling poverty, says about two-thirds of those who have received help under the new legislation have successfully avoided homelessness. “The legislation is a UK first – it addresses the issues that cause homelessness and seeks to ensure that everyone who is homeless or at risk of homelessness gets the help they need to secure a stable home,” she says.
The success so far in Wales is fuelling calls for a similar homelessness prevention duty to be introduced in England. But isn’t it just easier to tackle homelessness in a smaller country like Wales where the pressures on housing simply aren’t so great? Not so, according to those on the Welsh frontline. Welfare reform and the bedroom tax have hit Wales particularly hard, adding to the problems of those who need to find a home they can afford. Simon Rose, housing needs manager at Newport council and chair of Wales’s homelessness network, says many areas in Wales including his own are struggling to meet the demand for social housing, while the private rented sector is becoming increasingly unaffordable. While the new prevention framework doesn’t solve those problems, it does give the council the flexibility to find new ways of helping people with their housing difficulties.
We estimate that for every pound we spend, we are saving £4
In Newport, that means the south Wales council, alongside offering rent deposits and clearing arrears, has even helped pay everyday bills in order to ensure one pregnant tenant could get settled in her home without the fear of running up debt. And, like Flintshire, Newport is also working closely with support services, and to ensure the most vulnerable people don’t get trapped in the revolving door of evictions, B&Bs or failed tenancies, which would end up costing the council more in the long run. “We estimate that for every pound we spend, we are saving £4,” says Rose. He adds that the new set-up gives housing officers much more autonomy to help people whatever their circumstances. “It changes the mindset of staff on the frontline,” he says. “They can now have an open and frank discussion with people about their options. It gives staff a bit more confidence in delivering – they become almost like salespeople in presenting the options.”
For someone like Anna Williams there is no doubt the new approach is working. Williams was helped by Rose and his team to avoid eviction after her marriage broke up and she was left with mortgage arrears. “Being a homeowner, I never thought I’d get the help I did. It was amazing,” she says. “I’m told councils in England don’t intervene till you’re on the doorstep and have got the bags in your hand, and that’s no good – you need help before that happens.”
But despite the success stories, how sustainable is the prevention approach given the squeeze on resources across the UK? Frances Beecher, chief executive of the Welsh homelessness charity Llamau, says there is a real drive in Wales to bring organisations together to tackle homelessness, but financial constraints and rising demand make it difficult. “It’s great that Wales is trailblazing, but there’s still an awful lot of work to do and the real difficulty will be carrying this through as austerity is pushed more,” she says. Nonetheless, she adds, Wales is taking an important lead. “It’s a phenomenally brave step to take in times of austerity, not to wait for a crisis point but to take a step back, get behind the issues and try to tackle them,” she says. “What’s so important is that we’ve now got a momentum, saying this is how we treat homeless people in Wales. I’m very proud of that as I believe you measure a society by how it respects and takes care of the most vulnerable.”
Some names have been changed
‘Helping people much sooner is crucial’
Crisis estimates that every person who is not helped to avoid homelessness costs the public purses between £3,000 and £18,000 in the first year alone Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA
When the housing charity Crisis sent out “mystery shoppers” back in 2014 to test how English councils dealt with single people facing homelessness, the results were disturbing. Of 87 cases, 50 received inadequate help, often being sent off with a leaflet about private landlords or turned away altogether. After those findings, Crisis set up an independent review of homelessness law in England and its verdict is clear: the law in England needs to be reformed to give homeless people, particularly single households, a better deal. The review, chaired by Suzanne Fitzpatrick, professor of housing and social policy at Heriot-Watt University, says a new law for England based on the Welsh experience would “provide robust support to a far greater number of people at a much earlier point”, while also giving cash-strapped councils more flexibility to deliver.
Hannah Gousy, senior policy officer at Crisis, says: “Helping people at a much earlier stage is crucial. In Wales it’s working very well and we know that local authorities are having to be much more flexible in coming up with new and innovative ways of preventing homelessness .”
Many English authorities already do good work on prevention, Gousy adds, but making it a legal duty would mean it was it a must, not an add-on. “There is lots of good prevention and relief work out there, but some local authorities can get away with doing very little,” she says.
Some councils at the sharpest end of the housing shortage have already come out for reform – among them Newham in east London which has said it is studying the Welsh model. Gousy says Crisis research shows every person who is not helped to avoid homelessness costs the public purse between £3,000 and £18,000 in the first year alone, so prevention in the areas of highest demand makes sense.
“London local authorities are at breaking point when it comes to homelessness,” she says “You could argue that it’s even even more important for them than for Wales to focus on tackling homelessness at an early stage.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/nov/18/unfinished-business-cosy-world-lord-david-cameron-chipping-norton | Politics | 2023-11-18T06:00:12.000Z | Daniel Boffey | ‘Unfinished business’: the cosy world of Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton | Wearing a polo shirt, ear defenders, a Peaky Blinders-style hat and black wellington boots, David Cameron was driving Jeremy Clarkson’s tractor this time last year on a sunny Saturday morning when it exploded. “There was a bang and a Ukraine-sized mushroom cloud,” wrote Clarkson, who lives in a village neighbouring the hamlet of Dean in Oxfordshire where the former prime minister has a £1.5m home. “Oil splattered into all the blackberry bushes and bits of iron were to be heard landing several minutes later,” Clarkson said of his “mate’s” accident on his drive. Cameron had borrowed the red 1961 Massey Ferguson to mow his paddock, the broadcaster explained in a Sunday Times column. “He claims of course that he didn’t do anything wrong.”
Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, as he will be introduced in the House of Lords on Monday in order to allow him to serve in Rishi Sunak’s cabinet as foreign secretary, is no stranger to making such pink-cheeked denials of blame. There was the holding and losing of the Brexit referendum, the accusations of familiar relations with a pig’s head in his Oxford days and more recently the pocketing of $1m (£800,000) a year for his lobbying of ministers on behalf of the distressed finance company Greensill Capital. “I am riding to the rescue with supply chain finance with my new friend Lex Greensill,” texted Cameron in one of 12 messages to the then permanent secretary to the Treasury Sir Tom Scholar on 6 March 2020, when the financial markets were in freefall at the start of the Covid pandemic.
Through all of it, Cameron has retained a coterie of rather closer, albeit not always less controversial, friends than Greensill. Indeed, while global politics may have completely changed in the seven years since he left Downing Street, Cameron’s cosy social world has remained familiar. The groups can be loosely defined as those of the west London Notting Hill (twinned with Westminster) set, where the couple have a £4m home, and then, of course, the glamorous community around the town of Chipping Norton, near where Cameron and his wife bought a cottage in 2001, and the name of which the new peer of the realm has adopted in his title.
The London scene naturally includes his former chancellor, George Osborne, with whom he remains in constant contact, along with “some of the old team”, as one friend described them, such as the ex-Tory party chair Lord Feldman, the former communications director Craig Oliver and Cameron’s deputy chief of staff in Downing Street, Kate Fall. Fellow former Tory leader William Hague remains a close confidante. He is thought to have been in on the recent surprise appointment.
Then there are the journalists to whom he is more than a contact, including Daniel Finkelstein and Alice Thomson of the Times along with her husband Edward Heathcoat Amory, as well as Robert Hardman of the Daily Mail who attended the Camerons’ wedding in 1996.
He regularly speaks to Lord Vaizey of Didcot, formerly Ed Vaizey the MP for Wantage, and lunched in recent days with the former energy minister Greg Barker and the current development minister, Andrew Mitchell, two members of a Cameron supporters club.
It once also included the former MP for East Devon, Hugo Swire, up to the point that his wife, Sasha, revealed all about the inner workings of Cameron’s “mateocracy” in her memoirs, Diary of an MP’s Wife. “Dave” stayed up late to watch the film Atonement, with the aim of “admiring” Keira Knightley’s nipples, Sasha reported of one of the couple’s visits to see the Camerons at Chequers. “As for his own personal game plan, he tells us seven years,” she wrote in her diary in 2010, “then a return to the back benches, some outside interests, and then leave altogether but also adds he would quite like to be foreign secretary one day.”
Rebekah Brooks with her husband, Charlie, who went to Eton with Cameron, in 2013. Photograph: Olivia Harris/Reuters
It is, however, the Chipping Norton set, of which Clarkson is a member, that is the most intriguing aspect of Cameron’s world to many, perhaps tantalised by the stories of cheese parties on the estate of the Blur bassist Alex James and jolly pilgrimages to the Cornbury music festival, known as Poshstock, at Tew Park. Both Clarkson’s anecdote and sources in regular contact with the former prime minister today suggest that this set remains one of Cameron’s touchstones despite all the outside pressures upon it. “An incestuous collection of louche, affluent, power-hungry and amoral Londoners located in and around the prime minister’s Oxfordshire constituency,” was how the columnist Peter Oborne described them in 2011.
Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry into media ethics the following year fleshed out the nature of the set when a cache of text and email exchanges between Cameron and Rebekah Brooks, at a time when she was head of Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper group in the UK, as she is today. Brooks and her husband, Charlie, who went to Eton with Cameron, live a mile from the former PM’s home in Dean, three miles south-east of Chipping Norton. Thanking Brooks for letting him ride one of her horses, Cameron had texted that the animal was “fast, unpredictable and hard to control but fun”. Brooks reminisced to the Leveson inquiry that Cameron signed some of his missives to her “LOL” – until she told him it meant “laugh out loud” not “lots of love”.
Charlie Brooks, a racehorse trainer, later admitted to having been disappointed with the way Cameron had suggested his wife should resign at the height of the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World. Charlie Brooks was subsequently cleared of charges of perverting the court of justice. But the door was left open to a renewed friendship. He told LBC radio: “When this is all over, I’m sure he’ll explain; ‘I’m sorry but I was … these are the pressures I was under on that particular day.’ He also has pressures in this whole thing as well. So I don’t feel any anger towards him at all.” Asked if they could be friends again, he had replied: “Yeah, I do, yeah.”
David and Samantha Cameron at the Injured Jockeys Fund Charity Race in May 2022. Photograph: David Hartley/Rex/Shutterstock
It took a while for relations to normalise and the set is arguably not what it was since the divorce of Rupert Murdoch’s daughter, Elisabeth, from the PR guru Matthew Freud. They had lived and regularly entertained at their sprawling country house in nearby Burford. But the Brooks are firmly back in Cameron’s world, sources say. “He does still see Charlie and Rebekah, there are drinks,” said a friend. Charlie Brooks was very close to Cameron’s older brother, Alex, who died in March this year aged 59 from pancreatic cancer. There has been further bonding in their shared grief.
Sources concede it may indeed be the case that there has been more contact with those around Chipping Norton in recent years due to Cameron’s rather light diary commitments. Immediately after leaving Downing Street, the position of the head of Nato had been floated “but it would have meant living in Brussels and Samantha was building up her business”, said a source. “The optics of commuting from London would have been awful so that came to nothing.”
Chipping Norton. David Cameron was believed to have been ‘a bit bored’ with life outside politics. Photograph: Ian Dagnall/Alamy
Cameron told friends that he would instead spend the first two years out of Downing Street on the “speaking circuit” to avoid conflicts of interest. That took him around the world, as did being asked to lead a billion-dollar investment initiative agreed between the UK and China. But it left Samantha at home with their three children to fleetingly worry that they were not “getting on very well”, she told the Happy Mum, Happy Baby podcast in 2020. Then Covid, the embarrassing collapse of Greensill Capital and the change in relations between the UK and China put paid to Cameron’s global adventures. Samantha would go on to speak of her husband’s excellent cooking skills and dedication to serving up a family meal every night for her and Nancy, 19, Elwyn, 17, and 13-year-old Florence.
Sky News’s Kay Burley had commented on Monday about Cameron’s growing waistline when he astonished many by turning up at Downing Street but he has taken up playing more tennis with Feldman, a source said, runs a lot (something he had only taken up after becoming Tory leader in 2005) and is back shooting once in a while at the Salperton estate in Gloucestershire, a pastime he shed when he started leading the Conservatives.
After securing a reported £800,000 advance, he wrote his memoirs in £25,000 shepherd huts in the gardens of their homes in Dean and Trebetherick in Cornwall and is president of Alzheimer’s Research UK while Samantha has been establishing her fashion brand, Cefinn.
For three weeks in January this year Cameron lectured students at the New York University in Abu Dhabi on politics in the age of disruption. His company, the Office of David Cameron, became an unlimited company several years ago and no longer has to file company accounts but it is understood that he has been looking to move into “geopolitical consultancy”.
Friends admit, however, that they could not immediately recall much of late that has been taking up the 57-year-old’s time beyond golf, tennis and taking his younger daughter riding. He had been a “bit bored” and “public service genuinely means something to him”, said one. The hope of forging a new legacy, distinct from the Brexit disaster, is a driving force, friends say. “He was only 49 when he stopped being prime minister and I think having been elected for a five-year term with lots of ideas and then blowing it 12 months in by your own hand was very frustrating for him,” said another who spoke to Cameron recently. “I think it is a case of unfinished business.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/07/fox-says-public-wont-accept-lower-food-standards-in-chlorinated-chicken-row | Politics | 2017-11-07T09:48:02.000Z | Jessica Elgot | Fox says public won't accept lower food standards in chlorinated chicken row | The international trade secretary, Liam Fox, has said the British public will not accept the diluting of animal welfare standards, a day after Donald Trump’s most senior trade adviser said a US-UK trade deal hinged on scrapping EU food standards regulations, including on chlorinated chicken.
On Monday, Wilbur Ross, the US commerce secretary, suggested any post-Brexit deal with Washington would hinge on the UK scrapping some EU rules that hinder imports of US chicken washed in chlorine or other products currently prohibited, such as hormone-treated beef.
Fox has previously been sympathetic to the change, though Michael Gove – secretary of state at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – has repeatedly said Defra will not allow a weakening of UK food standards.
Speaking to business leaders in London at the CBI conference on Monday, Ross said changing the regulations would be a “critical component of any trade discussion” between the UK and the US.
Fox said the UK would learn lessons from the EU’s trade negotiations with the US for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which had significant public resistance.
“We have made very clear we are not going to see reductions in our standards as we move forward, partly because British consumers wouldn’t stand for it,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday.
‘We are entering an era where I think people will take a much bigger interest in trade agreements than they might have done in the past, on environmental standards, quality and safety, they will clearly have very strong views.”
Fox said the government would commit to a wider consultation process before signing new trade deals.
Chlorinated chicken? Yes, we really can have too much trade
George Monbiot
Read more
“Consumers will want to be consulted – we don’t want to get into a situation where we’ve been with the TTIP agreement with the US and the EU where a huge amount of work is done only to find the public won’t accept it. We need to understand those parameters early on,” he said.
In his comments on Monday, Ross said it was important for the UK’s deal to leave the EU to take into account America’s “commercial interests”.
He said current EU regulations on food products, as well as automotive industry standards and chemical exports, were some of the “key impediments … Something we hope to be able to quickly fix between our two countries”.
Fox’s response to the US commerce secretary’s comments on Tuesday are markedly different to his previous approach to the issue, which led to a rift with cabinet colleagues.
He told a committee of MPs last week there were “no health reasons why you couldn’t eat chickens that have been washed in chlorinated water” when quizzed about whether the UK intended to relax its standards. “Most of the salads in our supermarkets are rinsed in chlorinated water,” he said.
In a separate committee however, Gove said the cabinet remained united in its opposition to the practice, but said that was on grounds of animal welfare, rather than because the chlorine wash was unsafe to eat.
The practice of washing chickens in the chlorine solution has been said to lead to an overall relaxing of hygiene standards for industrial meat production, therefore lowering welfare standards for the birds. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/16/mining-multinational-bhp-starts-talks-exit-oil-gas-industry | Business | 2021-08-16T16:55:39.000Z | Jillian Ambrose | Miner BHP starts talks to exit oil and gas industry | The mining multinational BHP has begun talks to exit the oil and gas industry by merging its hydrocarbon business with Australia’s top independent gas producer, Woodside Petroleum.
BHP said a merger with Woodside was one of the options being evaluated as part of a strategic review of its oil and gas business, and its place in the company’s long-term portfolio.
BHP added that a merger of Woodside and its oil and gas business, which is valued at between $13bn and $15bn, could include distributing shares in Woodside to BHP shareholders, but that “no agreement has been reached on any such transaction”.
The talks have emerged after recent speculation that BHP planned to shake off its oil and gas assets, ranging from oil and gas fields in Australia, Algeria and the Gulf of Mexico, to focus on producing metals that can help the green energy transition.
The $181bn Anglo-Australian miner, which owns one of the world’s largest copper mines, earns the majority of its profits from producing iron ore and copper and plans to accelerate its shift towards these raw materials used in electricity infrastructure.
Only about 12% of BHP’s revenues come from fossil fuels, and the company promised this time last year to sell off its remaining coalmines by next year as part of its plans to ready itself for a low-carbon future.
BHP will retain its stake in a venture that produces coking coal which is used to make steel because it believes steelmakers will adopt cleaner processes in the future to help cut their carbon emissions.
Saul Kavonic, an analyst at Credit Suisse Group, said BHP’s petroleum division “simply no longer fits within BHP’s portfolio or future-facing strategy”.
“BHP should know it’s better to exit petroleum sooner rather than later,” he added.
BHP has halved its oil and gas production in recent years after the sale of its US shale business to BP in 2018. The company’s oil and gas production fell from 235m barrels in 2013 to about 103m in the 12 months to June.
Sign up to the daily Business Today email or follow Guardian Business on Twitter at @BusinessDesk
Shareholders have criticised BHP’s ongoing investments in oil and gas, which are linked directly to the sharp rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions responsible for the climate crisis.
At the company’s annual shareholder meeting last October, its chair, Ken MacKenzie, said that although BHP accepted “the science around climate change” and supported the Paris climate accord “the reality is that all current plausible scenarios show that fossil fuels will be part of the energy mix for decades”.
The BHP chief executive, Mike Henry, said the company saw oil and gas as “something to invest in for the short to medium term”.
The company is expected to double its underlying earnings for the full financial year in its results on Tuesday after a post-pandemic boom in commodity prices. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/mar/26/the-week-in-audio-who-is-aldrich-kemp-i-must-have-loved-you-some-kind-of-black-kiss-breakfast-jordan-perri-hits-radio-fleur-east | Television & radio | 2022-03-26T17:00:01.000Z | Miranda Sawyer | The week in audio: Who Is Aldrich Kemp?; I Must Have Loved You; Some Kind of Black | Who Is Aldrich Kemp? BBC Sounds
I Must Have Loved You BBC Radio 4
Some Kind of Black BBC Radio 4
Kiss Breakfast with Jordan & Perri Kiss FM
Hits Radio Breakfast with Fleur East Hits FM
In search of a bit of fun last week, I listened to Julian Simpson’s five-part drama Who Is Aldrich Kemp?. I’m a fan of Simpson’s The Lovecraft Investigations – three series of incredibly engaging, madly spooky mysteries, based on the stories of HP Lovecraft – but Aldrich Kemp doesn’t form part of those. At least, not entirely. What Simpson has done is create a spy/crime caper that overlaps ever so slightly with his Lovecraft world. You know how the Marvel universe has different superhero gangs operating in different films and occasionally there’s an intersection? It’s like that. When it happens in Aldrich Kemp, if you’re familiar with the Lovecraft cast, it’s a delight. You hear a new voice, you think: “Is that…?” and then the character introduces themselves and they are exactly who you’d hoped. I found myself shouting “Yes!”
Even if you have no idea about the overlap (it happens at the end of episode 2), the series appeals on its own merits. Which are many: it’s gripping, funny, with charismatic characters and lickety-split pace. It’s also ludicrously far-fetched, in a 1970s James Bond/The Avengers manner. We meet dashing cads who greet adversity with quips as well as bullets, baddies who want to reshape the world for no particular reason and well-spoken old ladies who are more violent than they might appear. Tea and cake are offered before shoot-outs. It’s a hoot from start to finish.
The plot – and yes, it’s ridiculous – is this: secret service researcher and excellent fencer Clara Page is sent to find Aldrich Kemp, who’s the leader of an underground criminal gang. Kemp, it turns out, lives in a house (hice) in the country (cantreh) where everyone, from butler to shopkeeper, turns out to be part of his gang. Page keeps being given drinks that knock her out and coming to in sillier and sillier situations. There are dead bodies, comatose bodies, bodies who appear to be one person and turn out to be another.
Simpson, who directs as well as writes, is very good at sound: there are entire shoot-outs constructed simply through click-click noises and “come on, old chap” quips. Plus, as this is radio drama, he can go full tonto; people drop from a helicopter on skis, a mountain lair is blown up, a baddie decides to kill his enemies by flooding a room with water. The film costs would be millions upon millions. Aldridge Kemp, in contrast, was recorded on location in Brighton, for, one imagines, a budget that would struggle to get into four figures. But the mind pictures were fabulous and I enjoyed myself throughout.
‘Perhaps just tune in for the music’: Radio 4’s blues drama I Must Have Loved You, co-created and starring Sting. Photograph: Eric Ryan Anderson
Bolstered by such fun, I thought I might try out some regular Radio 4 drama and went for the full Saturday afternoon 90 minutes with I Must Have Loved You. No Aldrich Kemp effect, sadly: no wit, no pace, no purpose, no charm. The big pull was Sting (he co-created the show with writer Michael Chaplin), playing Vince, a (dead) blues musician: he was fine in his role and his repurposed songs were nicely recorded. But a weak story and dreary writing let every thing down. Perhaps just tune in for the music.
Last week’s Saturday afternoon drama was distinctly better. Some Kind of Black, a two-parter, has been adapted byDiran Adebayo from his own wonderful 1996 novel and tells the story of Dele and his sister, Dapo. It suffered a little in its translation into a radio play. Dele moves between very different social worlds in London and Oxford; sadly, those worlds weren’t very differentiated, audio-wise (a bit of chatter and chinking glasses does not a party make). And Kenneth Omole, playing Dele, occasionally struggled for the necessary depth of emotion. But this is a great tale, nicely adapted, plus, for any 90s music fans, there are some excellent tunes.
For more light relief, here are a couple of breakfast shows that keep things upbeat. Jordan and Perri on Kiss FM have long been a bright and breezy tonic in the mornings. And over on Hits, a station I’ve only recently started listening to, Fleur East is brilliant (listen out for her “rap roulettes”). Both stations bring in every listener through banging music selection and an inclusive attitude. Lovely stuff. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/aug/07/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries | Global | 2004-08-06T23:00:02.000Z | John Francis Lane | Obituary: Laura Betti | The Italian actor and cabaret performer Laura Betti, who has died aged 70, was the driving force behind the Pasolini Foundation, which she set up in Rome after the death of the poet and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975. The foundation has now found a home in Bologna, where both of them were born, and where Pasolini studied at university.
A barrister's daughter, Laura acted with several theatre companies, including that of Luchino Visconti, with his 1955 production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. She was a singer in the late 1950s, and among her first important cinema cameos was a role in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), as one of the authentic Roman personalities/ freaks in the beach villa orgy sequence. Exchanging insults with Marcello Mastroianni's journalist, was a role she would enjoy playing always.
In the early 1960s, Laura helped launch literary cabaret in Milan and Rome. In addition to her own droll songs, she performed sketches and lyrics by the likes of Alberto Moravia and Pasolini, whom she met in 1963. They hit it off immediately, and he became a regular guest at her home near the Spanish Steps.
The first Pasolini film in which Laura appeared was La Ricotta, his controversial 40-minute episode in RoGoPaG (1963). Thanks chiefly to Laura's foundation, it is now available as a minor classic in its own right, whereas the episodes by Jean-Luc Godard and the others are forgotten.
La Ricotta featured Orson Welles as an American director shooting a film about the passion of Christ in Rome. Laura was the temperamen tal star playing the Madonna, who was seen in the tableau vivant inspired by Pontormo's painting of the Deposition. Laura played herself - with a cross-section of Hollywood-on-the-Tiber café society - in the press party sequence under the crosses, when the sub-proletarian Roman extra playing one of the thieves died from indigestion.
Laura returned to the theatre in 1968, in a revival of Giordano Bruno's heretical Candlemaker, and then appeared, under Pasolini's direction in a Turin art gallery, in his verse drama Orgia. Even if his ideas on "theatre that is not theatre" were confused, the play was well in advance of its times. For the 10th anniversary of his death, Laura reprised the role of the woman in a tormented sado-masochistic relationship, and was more convincing under the direc tion of an experienced theatrical professional.
She appeared in two more Pasolini episodes of omnibus films. In The Earth Seen From The Moon (1967), with Toto, Silvana Mangano and Ninetto Davoli, she played the cameo of a tourist; in What Are The Clouds? (1968), an inspired comic puppet play, she was Desdemona.
In 1968, she had a more substantial Pasolini film role, as the maid in Theorem, for which she won the best actress award at the 1968 Venice festival. As the only peasant member of an otherwise bourgeois household, she alone finds redemption among those seduced by Terence Stamp's mysterious visitor, and at fade-out is seen flying from the rooftop while mother, father, son and daughter are left to rot.
In 1970, Laura performed Samuel Beckett's Not I for the Rome Municipal Theatre. Having done the translation of the playlet into Italian for the director Franco Enriquez, I was asked to help her memorise the monologue. It was a gruelling but rewarding experience, though I had to give up trying to convince her that Beckett did not want a realistic rendering of the words he had put into the "mouth". In the end, she gave an electrifying performance, even if it was not what the author had intended.
Her next Pasolini role was in his film The Canterbury Tales (1972), shot in England, in which she was the Wife of Bath. When Pasolini's chum Ninetto broke the director's heart by telling him he had decided to get married, Laura found herself obliged to play the role of a consolatory sister.
In the early 1970s, she appeared in films by Marco Bellocchio, Mauro Bolognini, Miklos Jancso and the Taviani Brothers. She was also in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango In Paris (1972), 1900 (1976) and La Luna (1979). She continued to be Pasolini's hostess and cook, while jealous of his relationship with Maria Callas.
Pasolini also convinced Laura to write a Rabelaisian novel about the sexual follies of 1960s swinging Rome, which she called, at his suggestion, Teta Veleta - only to find out later that the words were the name he had invented, at the age of three, to explain his first sexual fantasies, inspired by his mother's breasts and the knees of a boy his own age.
After Pasolini's murder, Laura led the defence of his memory. She probably realised that the truth of what happened may indeed have been as the boy Pelosi described it, but she preferred the idea of a rightwing conspiracy, or anyway of an improvised queer-bashing attack.
It has been suggested that Pasolini might have organised his own murder as a martyrdom, prompted by depression not only in his private life but also with the way Italian society was developing. But Laura refused to accept this: "He loved life too much," she maintained.
Indeed, she sacrificed her own career to protecting his memory, travelling throughout Italy, and around the world, for the cause. It is thanks to her aggressively passionate dedication that Pasolini's restored films and interviews have been made available for international viewing and his writings archived. In 2001, she made a 90-minute documentary, Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Reason For A Dream, emphasising what she considered to be his optimistic vision of the future. When health permitted, she continued to appear in films and on the stage.
In 1971, Pasolini wrote an affectionate obituary notice about her in Italian Vogue - imagining her death in 2001. It ended: "This is, in fact, the obituary notice of a heroine. It should be added that she was a witty person and an excellent cook."
· Laura Betti (Laura Trombetti), actor, born May 1 1934; died July 31 2004 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/23/the-guardian-view-on-inequality-and-the-super-rich-the-status-quo-is-unsustainable | Opinion | 2024-01-23T19:20:05.000Z | Editorial | The Guardian view on inequality and the super-rich: the status quo is unsustainable | Editorial | In an intriguing study about to be published, the Dutch political philosopher Ingrid Robeyns poses a question that very rarely gets asked in mainstream politics. When it comes to the personal income and assets of the super-rich, how much is too much? The answer, she suggests in Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, should be anything above €10m. At that point, taxation should intervene, redeploying the surplus for the common good.
Ms Robeyns is not naive. She thinks of her €10m figure as a guiding ideal to be striven for, but one that is unlikely ever to become a reality given the current way of the world. Quite. Nevertheless, her provocative intervention is valuable, because it draws attention to a curious disjunction: as the wealthy have got steadily richer in recent times, soaking up the benefits of free capital movement, share price surges and rising asset values, political talk about wealth taxes has diminished to a barely audible murmur.
In pre-election Britain, the Labour party has flatly refused to contemplate “mansion” taxes on property, an increase to capital gains tax, or higher top rates of income tax. Across the rest of Europe, there has been a similar reluctance to address an asset wealth boom comprehensively analysed in Thomas Piketty’s influential work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Meanwhile, cash-strapped governments – and the European Union as a collective entity – struggle to find resources to deal with colossal challenges relating to the green transition and reviving moribund economies.
This ugly combination of undertaxed private wealth and public austerity not only gets in the way of necessary and broad-based economic renewal. It is an active source of social divisions, resentment and corrosive conspiracy theories – to an extent that is endangering the health of democracies. This should hardly come as a revelation. Writing in the 4th century BC, Plato prescribed that in the interests of political stability, richer citizens should have no more than four times the property of the poorest. In our own time, the far right is successfully piggy-backing on eroding faith in politics to prosecute its own authoritarian agenda.
Ms Robeyns is not alone in sounding the alarm. In another new book, the Labour MP and former Treasury minister Liam Byrne makes similar points about our age’s normalisation of an “absurd affluence”. Last week, a report published by Oxfam found that, while the wages of more than 800 million workers have failed to keep pace with inflation, the wealth of billionaires has grown three times as fast since 2020. The damning statistics are all out there. But still the sun never seems to set on the vacuous trickle-down theory of economics first popularised by Ronald Reagan.
The prospect of any version of “limitarianism” finding its way into a manifesto is therefore remote. But it is past time for social democratic parties, in particular, to show less deference towards the interests of the very wealthy in ever more unequal societies. Backed by Mr Piketty among others, two social democrat MEPs have launched a citizens’ petition calling for a European wealth tax to help finance the green transition. A million signatures would mean the European Commission had to listen. But when it comes to questions of “how much is too much?”, it should not be left to individual citizens to force the pace. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/24/uk-citizenship-test-arbitrary-facts-nationalist-myth-imperialism | Opinion | 2020-07-24T11:00:27.000Z | Simukai Chigudu | Doing the UK citizenship test taught me nothing about the reality of living here | Simukai Chigudu | Almost 10 years ago to the month, I was a newly qualified junior doctor, working in Oxford’s major teaching hospital, the John Radcliffe. On one of my first on-call shifts, a characteristically busy Saturday evening, I was summoned to the ward by a kindly Filipino nurse. She was distressed about a patient, an elderly man delirious with infection, who was shouting racial slurs at the nursing staff.
“How are you feeling today, sir?” I asked with a cheerful, if insincere, lilt.
“I’m not arrogant, I’m English, which is more than I can say for you, you black bastard!” he replied with equal buoyancy.
I considered a cheeky retort but opted instead for a wry smile and a gentle dose of lorazepam to settle the matter quickly. I scurried away, more patients to see and blood tests to review before handover to the night team.
Such encounters had long ceased to rattle me. I arrived in the UK as an international student from Zimbabwe in 2003. After a brief spell at a boarding school in Lancashire to complete my A-levels, I earned a placed at Newcastle University to study medicine. The north-east was unlike anywhere I had lived before. One of sparingly few black faces in the university, I felt like a misplaced peppercorn in a bowl of salt. My first year was especially difficult. The loneliness sank me into a deep depression. I felt fearful that I would never adjust to my new life. All the while, I watched Zimbabwe’s unfolding economic crisis at a distance with feelings of guilt, shame, loss and longing.
Over time, things slowly changed. My survival strategy was to mimic the English and downplay other aspects of my identity. As I rotated through clinical placements in Newcastle, Gateshead, Sunderland and South Shields, I took a keen sociological interest in the geographic inequalities that divide Britain. I learned how to decipher the Geordie accent. I occasionally attempted to greet my patients with affectionate colloquialisms (“You alreet pet?”). I cheered energetically for the Toon Army. I developed a taste for real ale. I made friends, went on many disastrous dates and participated in student politics.
I always kept one eye on Zimbabwe and wrestled with my sense of belonging in Britain. Could I ever call this country home when I was frequently reminded of my outsider status? At times, these reminders were aggressive: patients calling me a “golliwog” or drunk partygoers in Newcastle’s Bigg Market instructing me to “fuck off back to Africa”. More typically, these reminders were subtle. People marvelled incredulously at the eloquence of my spoken English. They took liberties when touching my hair. Some casually called me the “whitest black man” they knew. The “only black man” would have been more accurate.
After graduation, I worked as a junior doctor in hospitals in Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire before a stint in the School of Public Health at Imperial College London. Rather than specialise in a particular area of medicine, I turned my attention to academia. A fortunate recipient of a full scholarship to Oxford University, I studied African history and politics. Towards the end of my PhD, I was offered a faculty job in my department conditional on attaining the right to work. After 16 years, half my life, perhaps it was time to think of the UK as home, and apply for indefinite leave to remain (ILR).
The application process was costly and anxiety-inducing. My university had awarded me a prestigious writing fellowship to complete my doctoral thesis, but I spent all £3,000 on the ILR application and lawyer fees. I also had to sit the Life in the UK test as one of the requisites for the application.
Leaving nothing to chance, I studied like a demon for the test, reading the syllabus repeatedly and doing practice questions online. I crammed the trivia in the handbook: facts about the bronze age, the National Trust and the number of dry ski slopes in Scotland. I gleaned some interesting morsels of information about the structures of government, social struggles for equality such as Chartism and women’s suffrage, and a truncated history of the monarchy. The horrors of colonialism and slavery were unsurprisingly glossed over, incorporated into a triumphalist narrative of Britain as an unequivocal force for good in the world. The combination of arbitrary facts and nationalist myth-making would, under less exigent circumstances, offend me.
There's a hidden epidemic of racism in UK schools – but it's finally coming to light
Aditya Chakrabortty
Read more
Test day arrived. Nervous and overprepared, I completed the 45-minute test in four, finishing with a perfect score. I left the examination centre, certificate in hand, and promptly forgot everything I had learned in my preparation. Instead, I reflected on my own journey to this point and lamented how regressive the entire ILR application process is. To be eligible demands adherence to stringent restrictions on travel (you can’t, for example, leave the country for more than 540 days in a 10-year period, even if the travel is work-related). The sheer cost is prohibitive and the Life in the UK test is reductive.
Many migrants spend years building their lives in this country, contributing immeasurably to society and developing a textured grasp of the richness and diversity of British life. Unlike me, I suspect the majority do not have the time or resources to memorise a selection of dates and figures that bear little resemblance to daily life. The test can neither authenticate the experience of living in the UK nor meaningfully affirm civic values; rather it functions as a signal to the general public that immigrants have been vetted for their loyalty to Britain.
As the UK reckons with its history, there are strong grounds for updating the content of the test. A good start would be an even-handed account of how slavery and colonialism shaped the country and the world in profound and destructive ways. This might help to contextualise Britain’s challenges with structural racism and inequality. Better yet, I would suggest more public education on school curriculums about the ugly legacies of imperialism – and scrapping the test altogether.
Simukai Chigudu is associate professor of African politics at the University of Oxford | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/sep/11/ronald-bell-obituary | Music | 2020-09-11T15:53:35.000Z | Garth Cartwright | Ronald Bell obituary | Garth Cartwright | Kool & the Gang were one of the first fully fledged funk ensembles – taking the influence of Sly Stone and James Brown’s pioneering recordings and blending it with strong jazz leanings, their distinctive sound emphasised by bright horns, percussive congas and cowbells. Where Stone and Brown were highly charismatic band leaders, Kool & the Gang were an anonymous ensemble, with few fans even being able to identify which of the 10 musicians was “Kool”. Ronald Bell, who has died suddenly aged 68, wasn’t Kool – that was his older brother Robert’s nickname – but he co-founded the band with Robert in 1964 and remained a pivotal member for more than 50 years, playing multiple instruments, co-writing all their hits and producing much of their material.
Kool & the Gang’s hits from 1973 to 1985 are still favourites on radio and in clubs, regularly played at sports events and weddings. Their US chart-topper Celebration (1980) – a UK No 7 – became the victory anthem of the early 1980s: it greeted American hostages as they arrived home from Iran in 1981 and also served as the theme song for that year’s Super Bowl. Their songs appeared on the soundtracks of such films as Rocky (1976), Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Pulp Fiction (1994).
Ronald was born in Youngstown, Ohio, to Aminah Bayyan and Robert “Bobby” Bell. The family lived an impoverished existence in an apartment above a dry cleaners. When Ronald was still a boy, Bobby, determined to further his career as a professional boxer, shifted the family to Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1961. Bobby was a jazz devotee and the pianist Thelonious Monk became his close friend, while the trumpeter Miles Davis would drop by at the family home to discuss boxing.
Attending Lincoln high school, Ronald and Robert formed their first band, the Jazziacs, with fellow pupils (most of whom would remain band mates for the following decades), playing jazz clubs and bars. Their sound began to change when, in 1968, they became part of the Soul Town Band, learning recent soul hits to accompany singers. Deciding to perform under Robert’s nickname, they settled on Kool & the Gang. “I wanted to be like John Coltrane and the trumpet player wanted to be Miles Davis,” Bell told the Citizen newspaper in 2018, noting, “We transitioned to Kool & the Gang when we found we could make some money doing this.”
Releasing their debut single, Kool and the Gang – a fast-paced, jazz-inflected dance instrumental – in 1969 on the tiny Redd Coach Records, led to De-Lite Records signing the band and reissuing the 45. It reached No 19 in the US R&B charts. They were on their way, and the album Wild and Peaceful (1973) showcased their dynamic blend of jazz and funk mixed with heavy percussion and vocal chants. Jungle Boogie and Hollywood Swinging broke the band into the US Top 10 R&B and pop charts.
Although their 1976 song Open Sesame featured on Saturday Night Fever’s bestselling soundtrack, the band struggled to adapt to disco, with the albums The Force (1977) and Everybody’s Dancin’ (1978) failing to find favour. They hired the club singer James “JT” Taylor and, with the Brazilian musician Eumir Deodato as producer, the album Ladies’ Night (1979), and its hit title track, gave the band their greatest success so far (and broke them in the UK). This was a new Kool & the Gang, black pop rather than funk/disco.
It was a wise move: as disco’s popularity dived, Kool & the Gang went on to even greater success with Celebration. Bell wrote the basis of the composition – although publishing credits tended to be shared among the entire band – noting he was inspired both by the creation story in the Qur’an and the last line of Ladies’ Night, where the band sing “let’s all celebrate”. Ronald and Robert had both joined Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam in 1972. Ronald was given his Muslim name, Khalis Bayyan, by Elijah Muhammad’s son, Warith Deen Mohammed, and followed Mohammed when he shifted the NOI into a mainstream Islamic organisation.
Kool & the Gang were among the few Americans on Band Aid’s 1984 charity single Do They Know It’s Christmas?, as the band happened to be in the UK when its recording took place. Their single Cherish was a Top 5 US and UK hit in 1985. But, as the band continued to make their sound ever poppier, it cost them their core fanbase. Taylor left the band in 1988 for a sporadically successful solo career, often produced by Bell, who freelanced as a producer in the US.
The band continued with new lead vocalists, yet never troubled the charts again. Having sold upwards of 70m records, they remained a very popular live attraction, notably getting tens of thousands of Glastonbury festival revellers dancing in 2011. Rappers found their early albums fertile ground for samples and the band embraced this on the album Gangland (2001), for which they re-recorded 17 of their earlier tracks with rappers reinterpreting them. Alongside their many music awards, the band were given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a stretch of Jersey City road was renamed Kool & the Gang Way.
Bell is survived by his third wife, Tia Sinclair Bell, 10 children and Robert.
Ronald Bell (Khalis Bayyan), musician and songwriter, born 1 November 1951; died 9 September 2020
The photographs accompanying this article were changed on 12 September 2020. The main image of Kool & the Gang was replaced with an individual picture of Ronald Bell; a secondary image of band members Dennis Thomas and Robert Bell, which was incorrectly described as showing Ronald Bell, was removed.
This article was amended on 14 September 2020. Kool & the Gang were not the only Americans on Band Aid’s 1984 charity single Do They Know It’s Christmas?, as was originally stated. The singer Jody Watley also took part in the recording. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/dec/23/biggest-tv-disappointments-killing-eve-game-of-thrones-line-of-duty | Television & radio | 2019-12-23T16:02:00.000Z | Hannah J Davies | Killing Eve to Game of Thrones: the biggest TV disappointments of 2019 | Line of Duty
Buoyed by the success of his disbelief-stretching smash Bodyguard, Jed Mercurio’s cop drama began its fifth series, and Line of Duty fever swept the country. Bookies took bets on the identity of H, and the show finally got the respect it deserved after years of providing gasp-inducing twists. The addition of Stephen Graham as a mysterious gangster with a connection to Adrian Dunbar’s Supt Hastings only bolstered the show’s reputation for quality guest stars (see also: Keeley Hawes, Thandie Newton).
Then, just as it finally had the attention of the nation, Line of Duty went dramatically, catastrophically off-piste. Much of the conspiracy Mercurio had slowly built, shading in its edges with doubt, and seemingly implicating Hastings, was revealed to be little more than a red herring, because H was in fact (drum roll) four separate people. Yes, the one dastardly person was in fact four dastardly people, dividing the menace considerably. Sure, we didn’t think it would be Hastings – lovely, principled, late-life-crisis-plagued Hastings – but we needed something, anything other than villainous morse code. Yes, morse code – morse code! – was the baddie. Time for a lie-down, Jed? HJD
Killing Eve
Second time around, its pitfalls became sinkholes ... Killing Eve. Photograph: Aimee Spinks/BBC America
It wasn’t that Killing Eve was bad this year; I still looked forward to every second of Jodie Comer being lethal in couture. But as the second season progressed, some of what had been fun the first time around was lost in translation, and some of the pitfalls it had avoided in season one became gaping sinkholes. There was a bit of queer-baiting to answer for, with an abrupt about-turn on Eve’s part – at least when it came to her feelings for Villanelle. And to see the assassin repeatedly beaten up and cornered by bad men, even though she is one of the bad men herself, grew tiresome and a little sadistic. It had a lot to live up to after its debut, sure, but the absence of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s writing this time was certainly felt. RN
Game of Thrones
The be-horned bad guy ... Game of Thrones. Photograph: Home Box Office (HBO)
So Bran is sitting there, right, and the Night King is about to do him in. Seems fair. After all, Bran’s side is comprised of a few thousand humans of varying levels of military training and the Night King has ALL OF THE DEAD on his side. It’s a tragic way for the Three-Eyed Raven to go out, but after six years building up the be-horned bad guy, the outcome at least has a logic to it. There’d be nothing worse than some kind of infans ex machina at this point, would there. Sorry, what’s that? Oh.
Maybe it’s the regret at having spent so many hours following Game of Thrones through its eight seasons, all those characters, all that mud. Maybe I invested too much in a drama that was just dragons and shagging. Or, maybe, just maybe, a show that had raised the bar, which mixed the personal and the political, high fantasy and low life, and which had assiduously built tension over the course of years, botched its landing big style. PM
MotherFatherSon
I was stoked for BBC Two’s MotherFatherSon, not just because of the cast – Richard Gere, Sarah Lancashire, Helen McCrory – but because it was the work of Tom Rob Smith, writer of The Assassination of Gianni Versace and the masterful London Spy. But this was a glossy, empty mess, with multiple storylines all faltering over an eight-episode run that was at least two too long, and a political message about rising fascism and a media oligarchy that aimed for understated power but came off as lofty and pompous. Smith will be back with something visceral and authentic soon, no doubt. MotherFatherSon was sadly neither. JS
Criminal
Netflix’s Criminal had a great premise: what if you took the thrilling interview scenes from Line of Duty and made an entire show out of them? It had a solid cast, including David Tennant, Hayley Atwell and Deutschland 83’s Sylvester Groth, and the nifty idea of filming separate series set in the UK, France, Germany and Spain, to explore each country’s justice system. What a shame the execution was so off. This was less Line of Duty, more Law & Order: The International Edition, minus the flashes of knowing wit that made the latter so popular. Criminal was a series so po-faced, so in love with its own concept and the cast it had landed, that it forgot to bother with decent scripts or plots. Instead we got a series of would-be cat-and-mouse moments that were as interesting as watching paint dry. SHu
The Mandalorian
Is it too little too late for Baby Yoda? ... The Mandalorian.
I dislike the word “simulcast” as much as the next person, but we are meant to be frolicking in a digital garden of Eden where any and all content can be freshly clicked (for a fee). Yet the staggered global rollout of the Disney+ streaming mega-service meant there has been no legal way for UK Star Wars fans to watch one of the most hyped new shows of 2019. What a slap to the helmet. How dare those Disney+ execs forbid us from watching Pedro Pascal’s bucket-headed bounty hunter saunter through a space western full of eccentric character actors! I’ve been forced to glean info about the first ever live-action Star Wars show the old-fashioned way: reading the proud tweets of guest stars and watching endless Baby Yoda memes. By the time Disney+ launches in the UK next year – in what those dumbos better be calling Imperial March 2020 – it will all be too late. GV
Years and Years
Upload me to the cloud! ... Years and Years. Photograph: Matt Squire/BBC/Red Productions
Boasting a cast that included Emma Thompson, Rory Kinnear, Russell Tovey and Jessica Hynes, Russell T Davies’s sweeping dystopian drama followed the fortunes of a family for 15 years, beginning in the immediate future. It started very well: the sheer terror in the household as air raid sirens resound following Donald Trump’s decision to launch a nuclear bomb rang terrifyingly true. Yet multiple implausibilities soon piled up, including a general election contested exclusively by Labour and the Conservatives, plus wildly inconsistent character arcs. By the end of the series, in which a dying character attempts to “upload” herself to the cloud, Years and Years had strayed from authentic speculation fiction into Doctor Who territory. DS
Modern Love
Hard to wash the smug off it ... Modern Love. Photograph: Christopher Saunders/Amazon
The talent thrown at Modern Love was incredible: Sharon Horgan; Tina Fey; Anne Hathaway; Dev Patel; Andrew Scott. It had pedigree, too, being based on the beloved New York Times column. But, god, it was hard to wash the smug off it. Modern Love just couldn’t adore itself any more. Watching the whole thing in one go was like drowning in fudge. SHe
This Time With Alan Partridge
No one wants to watch Alan on the up ... This Time with Alan Partridge. Photograph: Andy Seymour/BBC Studios
Alan Partridge is at his best when he’s in the doldrums – living in a Travel Tavern, binging on Toblerone, networking at a funeral. For almost three decades, we had watched Britain’s least in-demand broadcaster fall further and further from grace – until, that is, he landed an unexpected guest-hosting gig on This Time. Since when did glossy BBC magazine shows start recruiting from North Norfolk Digital? Not only did Alan’s appointment make frustratingly little sense, his freedom to interrupt the studied blandness of teatime TV with bombastic VTs failed to ring true. Nerdy rationality aside, something else was awry with Partridge 9.0 – namely, the fact that he was flying high. Despite his endless gaffes, he suddenly had status, and the hubris-fuelled nightmare that had hitherto been his career was abruptly ended. Of course, you cringed for him, but it turns out it’s hard to feel affection for a Partridge on the up. Thankfully, judging by the closing episode’s cliffhanger, Norwich’s finest seems to have blown his chance at the big time once again. RA
The Good Place
Like being in purgatory itself ... The Good Place. Photograph: NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty
The Good Place started so promisingly: a comedy about life in an afterlife limbo for four unlikely pals – Eleanor the selfish partier, Chidi the morally-upstanding ethicist, Jason the wannabe DJ and British socialite Tahani – all held together by dapper Ted Danson starring as afterlife “architect” Michael. There were in-jokes aplenty (“forks” and frozen yoghurt) as well as goofy slapstick, heartbreak and genuine suspense. But its fourth and final season swiftly spiralled downwards into a marathon to tie up loose ends. The writing team swapped humour for the kinds of moralistic lessons you’d find on a “live, laugh, love” cushion, pushing the characters through stale scenarios propelled by well-worn jokes (Jason loving the Jacksonville Jaguars, Tahani name-dropping celebs, Eleanor loving a margarita). Watching The Good Place now feels like being in purgatory itself, waiting for the interminable torture to end. AK
The Crown
In the opening episode of series three, the nostalgia Olivia Colman’s Queen expressed for her former self felt depressingly appropriate. Wasting its distinguished new cast – especially Colman – The Crown became sluggish, humourless and painfully introverted in its latest run. Prince Philip feels sad about not going to the moon, so he flies really high in his private plane? Cry me a river. Prince Charles sulks that no one understands him: “Am I seen for who and what I am?” The Crown wasn’t all bad – the pedigree of its acting talent ensured this, and the Aberfan episode was endlessly moving. But, for the most part, it was sad to see such high-quality ingredients so boringly misused. DA
This article was amended on 24 December 2019. In the Game of Thrones section, an earlier version referred to Jon Snow as being under threat from the Night King, when in the scene described it was the character of Bran. This has been corrected. In the same section, the expression “deus ex infans” has been amended to “infans ex machina”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/26/hannibal-buress-how-a-comedian-reignited-the-bill-cosby-allegations | World news | 2018-04-26T21:07:48.000Z | Lucia Graves | Hannibal Buress: how a comedian reignited the Bill Cosby allegations | Allegations of sexual assault had swirled around Bill Cosby for years, but it is the comedian Hannibal Buress who is often credited with helping to put the actor’s treatment of women front and center in public consciousness.
Bill Cosby found guilty in sexual assault trial in milestone for #MeToo era
Read more
Cosby was convicted by a Pennsylvania jury on Thursday of drugging and molesting Andrea Constand in 2004. Dozens of other women have now come forward to say that Cosby sexually assaulted them or attempted to, with some claims dating back as far as the 1960s. But the allegations didn’t stick until 2014, when Buress mocked Cosby as part of a standup routine in Philadelphia.
“Bill Cosby has the fuckin’ smuggest old black man public persona that I hate,” Buress said at the time. “He gets on TV, ‘Pull your pants up black people, I was on TV in the ‘80s! I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom!’ Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches.”
Buress also asked members of the audience to “Google ‘Bill Cosby rape’” when they got home, joking that it would have a whole lot more results than a search for his name, “Hannibal Buress”.
In the following days, the joke went viral, prompting dozens of women to step forward to accuse the star of The Cosby Show of assault.
Among them was former radio host Kathy McGee, who told the Hollywood Reporter: “For 40 years, I didn’t say anything because I thought it was just me,” adding she stayed quiet because she thought “nobody would believe me”.
Bill Cosby found guilty in sexual assault trial in milestone for #MeToo era
Read more
In July 2015, New York Magazine dedicated a cover story to 35 women accusing Cosby of assault – and from there, the numbers of accusers grew. He now faces accusations of sexual misconduct from more than 60 women.
On Thursday a Pennsylvania jury found Cosby guilty of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand, who first reported Cosby’s behavior back in 2004. In 2005, a district attorney declined to bring charges against Cosby, citing “insufficient credible and admissible evidence”.
Buress has rejected the notion he played a pivotal role in bringing claims against Cosby to light, telling GQ in 2015: “People are going to put on you whatever they want to put on you.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/oct/20/company-sondheim-gielgud-review-measure-for-measure-donmar-stories-nina-raine-national | Stage | 2018-10-20T14:00:08.000Z | Susannah Clapp | The week in theatre: Company; Measure for Measure; Stories – review | How marvellous that the most certain hit of the theatrical autumn turns certainty upside down and inside out. In 1970 Stephen Sondheim’s Company was credited with reinventing the musical. It is a supercharged show with a sceptical centre; a play that hinges on marriage but doesn’t exactly like it; a drama that has the rhythms – the soaring and the stutter – of romance but an ironic, unsentimental plot; a slice of life that lives in dreamtime. It is a glorious paradox.
Marianne Elliott’s production doubles the stakes. This is more than a revival: it is a remaking. At the suggestion of her business partner, Chris Harper, and with the approval of Sondheim, she has changed the central character from man to woman: just a little tail-docking required to turn Bobby to Bobbie. Elliott & Harper Productions has a pledge to put women at the centre of its programming, but this gender change is dictated not by policy but by sense. Bobbie is a 35-year-old being lent on by friends – and an internal clock – to get hitched. What man gets that pressure these days? What woman doesn’t?
This is real – and it is dream. Elliott dazzlingly turns the show into the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland of musical theatre. Actors and audience step through glamour into disillusion – and then back again into something that looks suspiciously like real life. The most traditionally escapist of theatrical forms turns out to be one of the most true.
Patti LuPone in Company. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
In New York – but primarily in her own mind – the central character, a solitary, is assaulted by couples who urge the benefits of being together while displaying themselves as the opposite of warm. The pulse of Sondheim’s music – mocking and melancholy woodwind, teasing dance beat – runs through the evening like a twitching nerve. Bunny Christie’s design, both gaudy and chic, is crucial. It has the colour scheme of the 2000s (violet and smoke) and its own coercive force. The action is framed in a fluorescent square that shrinks and expands, contains and releases. It is not just other human beings who are bullies: it is also one’s own mind. This Lewis Carroll way of looking at the world is first hinted at – Rosalie Craig is set up to look like a lissom version of Tenniel’s drawings – and later becomes explicit as Craig stoops to manoeuvre herself into her own space. She is a wonderful lead, singing creamily and acting wirily, both gorgeously rapacious and finely isolationist. Most melting when most free. Meanwhile, Patti LuPone delivers The Ladies Who Lunch languorously, sardonically, swilling the lines as if they were new cocktails, then dropping them out of the side of her mouth.
There is gender-switching, too, in Josie Rourke’s production of Measure for Measure, which is both vivid and mechanical. There is always eagerness to embrace a Shakespeare play as a drama of the moment. Often the equivalence is a broad landscape. Occasionally it is more precisely pointed. It is hard not to gasp at the epoch-leaping dialogue in what used to be called a “problem play”. The novice Isabella is told by the temporary ruler of the state, Angelo, that only if she goes to bed with him can she can reprieve her brother, whom he has condemned to death for getting his lover pregnant. Isabella threatens to denounce him. “Who would believe you?” swaggers Angelo: he is too powerful to be dented by a girl’s accusations.
Rourke, a prime mover in the feminisation of today’s theatre, has produced a pared-down version of the play that, halfway through, rewinds the action, switching from 17th-century to modern dress, plainchant to pop, and male to female aggressor. Hayley Atwell, a fervent novice, becomes in the second half an overbearing boss in a black dress, like someone who might win The Apprentice. Jack Lowden edgily turns from dominator to recovering addict (telling himself off with an elastic band on his wrist).
Jack Lowden (Angelo) and Hayley Atwell (Isabella) in Measure for Measure at the Donmar Warehouse. Photograph: Manuel Harlan
The switch makes an important point. Bullying isn’t just done by men. But it does not solve the problems of this problem play. “More than our brother is our chastity,” says Isabella, refusing to rescue her sib from execution, and from going “we know not where”. I find it hard to be on her team. “The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?” asks Angelo, confronted with the nun he finds alluring. In what sense is Isabella being a temptress? By existing? I find it hard to be on his team too. This dark ambivalence – with two characters whose blood is “snow-broth” – may prove Shakespeare’s genius, but it is not examined here, simply fitfully illuminated.
There is now no question, surely: Nina Raine is a complete theatrical kit. The sweep of her subjects – deafness, coercion, the National Health Service – is enormous. Her dialogue scythes its way through the plots. She directs her own work with needling precision.
Stories draws on all these talents. But it is not her best play: that is Tribes, a drama about deafness that hinges cunningly on the idea of what it is to listen as an audience, and unforgettably demonstrates what it is not to hear. Stories is turned in on itself – with the magnetism of obsession.
The heroine, played by Claudie Blakley with a beautifully judged mixture of zeal and doggedness, is transfixed by the idea of having a baby. She is nearly 40, has been left by her bloke, who does not want to be a father, and is reviewing the possibilities for getting pregnant. She researches sperm donors online, attended by her hyper-vigilant parents. In a jittering succession of brief scenes, she seeks out daddy candidates, ingeniously evoked by Sam Troughton, who is a whirligig of varieties of hopelessness: dopey, pretentious, earnestly incoherent and piously solipsistic – ah, the cherishing look he casts over the little bowl that bears his exquisitely chosen tea. Her desperation is controlled: no rending of garments; no throbbing speeches (Raine is unusual in favouring dialogue over monologue); increasingly gimlet focus.
Tethered to this crisp comedy are speculations about destiny: do we believe in it; are the stories we tell our children a bulwark against randomness? These are questions intrinsic to a consideration of becoming a parent, but they don’t spring naturally out of the action here. The boldest aspect of Stories is more fundamental: it incarnates an impulse. The yearning for a child is not as universal as it is deemed to be. Raine shows how it works. She makes it seem like faith: mysterious, immutable and definite.
Claudie Blakley in Stories at the Dorfman. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
Star ratings (out of five):
Company ★★★★★
Measure for Measure ★★★
Stories ★★★★
Company is at the Gielgud theatre, London, until 30 March
Measure for Measure is at the Donmar Warehouse, London, until 1 December
Stories is at the National Theatre (Dorfman), London, until 28 November | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/23/zosia-timothee-how-to-say-the-names-of-hollywoods-superstars | Culture | 2018-01-23T09:01:05.000Z | Gavin Haynes | Zosia? Timothée? How to say the names of Hollywood’s superstars | I am very Irish, and I have an extremely Irish name,” announced Saoirse Ronan as she guest-hosted Saturday Night Live last year. “It means ‘freedom’. But I’ve got a little problem: it’s spelled wrong. It’s a full typo …” Ronan then went on to sing a ditty about how her name should be pronounced. Not Circei, not Sushi, but SIR-Sha. Since her charming turn as the lead in Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s latest indie wisecrack-marathon (coming to the UK on 16 February), Saoirse has been the inconvenient name on many lips. But it certainly isn’t the first to flub underprepared interviewers. Even fellow actors can struggle when it comes to pronouncing the names of their peers. In 2014, Hollywood’s Scientology overlord and occasional actor John Travolta awkwardly introduced Let It Go hitmaker Idina Menzel to the Oscars stage via a mumbled “Adele Dazeem”. To save your blushes, we’ve compiled a rundown of the tricksiest names in Tinseltown.
Timothée Chalamet
Photograph: Latour/Variety/REX/Shutterstock
Almost deliberately deceptive, with a first name that makes it look as if he’s trying to create purely phonetic versions of English names. The fleck above the first “E” is a clue, though; his last name follows the French, as per his father’s heritage: Tim-o-thee Shall-uh-may.
Charlize Theron
Photograph: Tara Ziemba/Getty Images
The Afrikaans pronunciation is actually “Tron”, as in “big 80s laser-bike films”, with a nice hard trill on the “R”. Yet for the sake of an easy life, South African Charlize seems to have simply gone along with the American take on her last name.
Joe Manganiello
Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images
The Magic Mike XXL actor has one of those names so long that the eyes go squiffy midway through reading it. He reports that Js routinely turn up in obscure places. Manja-nello? Manjan-Jello? The solution, though, is a simple “I” removal: Manga-nello.
Téa Leoni
Photograph: Noam Galai/WireImage
A name best pronounced on the way back from the dentist – the vowels are mainly wide “E” sounds. TAY-ah LAY-oh-ni.
Zosia Mamet
Photograph: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Marc Jacobs
The Girls actor and daughter of playwright David Mamet pronounces her first name “Zah-shah”. Just think of Zsa-Zsa Gabor naming the Persian king, and you’ve got it.
Matt Czuchry
Photograph: Startraks Photo/REX/Shutterstock
It’s pronounced “Matt”, like the carpet.
Ralph Fiennes
Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Observer
Not content with confusing us by having a cousin whose name is a longer version of his own, Ralph-not-Ranulph Fiennes also has a first name that is a shibboleth of his aristocratic background. It’s pronounced “Rayf”, exhibiting the upper-class’s habitual boredom with the middle of words.
Gal Gadot
Photograph: REX/Shutterstock
Wonder Woman is just an ordinary “Gal”, but instead of rhyming with Bardot, her Israeli surname is actually pronounced “Guh-doht”. The “T” shouldn’t be hit particularly hard, either.
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
Photograph: Lauren/Variety/REX/Shutterstock
Also known as Game of Thrones’ Jaime Lannister. The secretly Danish actor’s first name ends in “lie”, not “lay”. And his last ends in “Dow” as in Jones, not “dough” as in scones. Nee-ko-LY
COS-ter Wall-DOW.
Milo Ventimiglia
Photograph: Christopher Polk/NBC/Getty Images
An open-and-shut “G”-removal job for the This Is Us actor. Everything else checks out phonetically: Venti-Mi-Lia.
Quvenzhané Wallis
Photograph: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images
The youngest ever best supporting actress Oscar nominee is a human portmanteau (“Port-Man-TOW”) – “Quven”, the first part of her name, combines the first syllables of her parents’ first names. Kuh-VEN-zhu-Nay. Think of a giant “Q” saying “no” to “revenge” in a medieval style, and bam, you’ve got it.
Domhnall Gleeson
Photograph: Dave J Hogan/Getty Images
By the standards of the nation that also produced Niamh (“Neev”), Aoife (“Ee-fa”) and Caoilfhionn (“?!*?@!?”), this is a doozy. It’s DOH-nall. “The ‘M’ is just there to confuse Americans,” as Doh-nall freely admits.
Mia Wasikowska
Photograph: Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagic
Vash-ee-KOV-Ska. Despite being born and raised in the Australian suburbs, the Alice in Wonderland star’s last name still follows the Polish habit of substituting”v” for “w”.
Chloë Sevigny
Photograph: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
Over-Frenchifying her last name, as if ordering a bouillabaisse in the Dordogne, spelled social death for many a 90s hipster. It’s simply Seven-E. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/nov/15/steve-clarke-plots-path-to-elevating-scotland-after-qualification-success | Football | 2023-11-15T16:00:10.000Z | Ewan Murray | Steve Clarke plots path to elevating Scotland after qualification success | There was a time when Scotland spending the lead-up to a fixture in Georgia at a training base in Antalya would have be seen as ostentatious. With major tournaments flashing by without Scottish involvement, frugality was essential.
Demonstrable success means Scotland’s current manager, Steve Clarke, has his paymasters precisely where he wants them. When Clarke wanted a five-star hotel base in Glasgow, the Scottish Football Association agreed.
Myanmar face Japan hoping for a miracle amid anxiety at home
Read more
The stop-off in Turkey this week was booked long ago, on the basis that the match in Tbilisi on Thursday could be meaningful, but there was never any prospect of plans changing after Scotland sealed their place at Euro 2024 last month. Back-to-back European Championship qualifications have boosted the Scottish FA’s coffers. Clarke’s on-field work diverts attention from unimpressive custodians of the national sport. So, when the manager says jump …
Clarke approaches this double- header – Norway are in Glasgow on Sunday – with much to ponder. There has been a backdrop of celebration to Scotland securing a spot in Germany next summer but Clarke appears aware of the dangers of treading water. Defeat to France in Lille was hardly disastrous yet that was a third in a row for the Scots. The losing run sits uneasily with the man in charge.
Clarke agreed to friendlies with France and England – Spain also saw off Scotland in October – with the short- and medium‑term future in mind. Barring a lucky draw, Scotland progressing to the second phase of a major tournament for the first time depends on them excelling against elite opposition.
Thereafter, Clarke will lead his team into the top section of the Nations League; it’s a galling prospect given how dominant France and England (yes, they were relegated from Group A, but the point stands) were against Scotland. By virtue of nothing but their own strong showings, Clarke’s men face the quandary of how to take the next step.
The manager’s biggest victory has been emphasising the ability of the collective. There is no other way to explain Scotland emerging from a section where Erling Haaland’s Norway have been left behind. The team which earned a precious win over Spain earlier this year had Lyndon Dykes of Queens Park Rangers at centre-forward.
Scotland have talent, especially at wing-back and in midfield, but still lack a final-third difference-maker. Privately, Clarke must know that will be a problem as the stakes are raised. His resource pool remains small. Injuries to Andy Robertson and Kieran Tierney illustrate that much. The absence of Angus Gunn leaves the Scots glaringly short in the goalkeeping area. A patchwork side will close out the qualifiers.
The injured Newcastle forward Harvey Barnes is on Scotland’s radar for Euro 2024. Photograph: Darren Staples/AFP/Getty Images
Scotland are an attractive proposition. Clarke is confident enough in his environment not to ferociously pursue players who may qualify for his squad via bloodlines just because they see Scotland as a viable international platform. Archie Gray and Tino Livramento have been mentioned in recent days.
Sign up to Football Daily
Free daily newsletter
Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football
Enter your email address
Sign up
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Elliot Anderson was briefly seen as the great Scottish hope. The Newcastle midfielder seemed ready to commit to Clarke’s team, only to beat a hasty exit from training before September’s trip to Cyprus. If Anderson – who is as Scottish as Paddington Bear – felt uneasy, he is due praise rather than criticism for backing away. This is a 21-year-old who is still trying to earn regular starts at club level. Anderson should be allowed to determine his own future.
More intriguing, on grounds of experience, was Scotland’s courting of Harvey Barnes. The 25-year-old also seemed ready to declare for the Scots before sustaining a serious foot injury. If Barnes returns to the Newcastle side in the new year, it is reasonable to think he could target the Euros. For that to be a serious prospect, Barnes would need to be picked and perform strongly in the March friendly window. Ché Adams declared for Scotland just months before the delayed Euro 2020 finals. Barnes would undoubtedly enhance Scotland.
Scotland’s Under-21 squad provides slim pickings. Ben Doak’s development at Liverpool has not been as rapid as many had predicted or hoped, which can partly be explained by injury. Doak’s direct running and pace would translate perfectly to Scotland’s senior team but he needs to be playing consistently at first-team level.
Scotland’s experiences in Georgia in 2007 and 2015 were wounding, defeats coming with qualification on the line. There is no such pressure this time. Clarke simply wants a return to the no-fuss winning culture which has served him so well. He will still see a bigger picture, which is essential if Scotland are to avoid making up the numbers in Germany. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jun/29/andy-murray-blown-out-of-wimbledon-by-sheer-power-of-john-isner | Sport | 2022-06-29T20:54:47.000Z | Sean Ingle | John Isner’s heavy metal game drums Andy Murray out of Wimbledon | Amid fevered scenes akin to a revivalist meeting, Andy Murray tried his damnedest to conjure up one last famous late night Centre Court miracle. But father time – and the crunching heavy metal tennis of John Isner – offered a crushing riposte.
Afterwards Murray pledged to be back at Wimbledon if his creaking 35-year-old body holds up, but he conceded that was not a given. It only made this 6-4, 7-6 (4), 6-7 (3), 6-4 defeat, his earliest ever in 14 appearances here, sting even harder.
Wimbledon day three: Murray and Raducanu knocked out – as it happened
Read more
Some of it, though, was out of his control. Over three hours his opponent was a gunslinger who refused to miss, crashing down an extraordinary 36 aces and 80 winners to secure a deserved win. “It’s no secret that I am not a better tennis player than Andy, but I may have been a little bit better today,” he magnanimously conceded. “This was one of the biggest wins of my career.”
As Isner later acknowledged, there is nothing particularly sophisticated about his game. Yet why reinvent the wheel when you possess a howitzer of a serve, and a forehand that tears seven strips of nylon off the ball? The American might be the tennis equivalent of a garage band who has mastered three chords. But he still confounded Murray with his Blitzkrieg Bop.
“I’ve played many times against those players and found ways to make enough returns to turn the matches, whether that’s been against Karlovic, Isner, Raonic, those sorts of guys,” said a downbeat Murray afterwards. “But tonight he was very close to the lines in important moments.”
But, as much it will pain the Wimbledon crowd who have cheered him royally down the years, this was Murray offering a portrait of the artist as an older man. Still supremely talented, sure. But a little slower in the eyes, and between the lines. In a game of millimetres and microseconds, it made all the difference.
“I think most of the players on the tour would tell you that a match like that is won or lost based on a few points here and there,” Murray said. “I didn’t play well enough on those points.”
Beforehand, the bookies had made Murray, who had won all eight of his previous contests against Isner, a strong favourite. But he also knew those victories were all years ago, before his body broke down and his hip was resurfaced.
Given the supreme difficulty of breaking Isner’s serve it was vital Murray made a fast start. Instead he was broken in the third game. The Scot immediately had two chances to return the favour, only for Isner to save them – first with a deft volley and then a 128mph first serve. Incredibly, Murray did not get another opportunity to break in the contest.
John Isner serves for the match against Andy Murray. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
After the losing the first set 6-4, Murray stabilised and had half a chance of a break when 30-15 up on Isner’s serve at 5-4 in the second. But then the American hit two exquisite drop volleys, showing that he had a surprisingly good touch for a big man, to hold serve before racing away with the tie-break.
Murray was now in desperate straits. To add to his woes, Isner was getting 79% of first serves in – a staggering percentage given many were flying past the speed gun at 130mph-plus – and winning 88% of his first-serve points.
Norrie and Dart lead way in best British start to Wimbledon since 1984
Read more
Murray’s best hope now was that his fellow veteran, at 37 and having played a five-setter on Monday, might start feeling some lead in his legs. “Come on Andy, he’s older than you!” cried one wag, but Isner’s serve held firm as we headed into another tie-break.
This time it was Murray who made a fast start, rushing to a 3-0 lead. And with the crowd urging him on, he was able to capitalise. By now the fans were on their feet and punching the air. Murray couldn’t do it, could he?
But Isner was not in any mode to oblige. A break at 2-2 in the fourth set put the match on his racket and he was able to hold his nerve even after a delay to close the stadium roof.
Murray, meanwhile, was left to hope that this will not be his final day on this most famous of courts. “If physically I’m in a good place, I will continue to play,” he said. “But it’s extremely difficult with the problems I’ve had with my body in the last few years to make long-term predictions.”
His words felt bruised, and a little dazed. That, though, was only to be expected given the battering he had just experienced. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/13/google-android-wear-5-1-watch-review-simple-useful-best-for-now | Technology | 2015-05-13T05:00:02.000Z | Samuel Gibbs | Android Wear 5.1 review: simple, useful and the best – for now | Google’s smartwatch operating system, Android Wear, is on its third major revision, and this time it is a coherent and useful platform that does what a smartwatch does best – handle notifications – making it the best platform out there.
Setup
The pairing process is simple and fast. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Android Wear watches are only compatible with Android devices with version 4.3 Jelly Bean and up. Pairing the two is easy. The Android Wear application downloaded from Google Play handles the setup.
Turn the watch on, note the name of it and find it in the list of devices inside the Android Wear app. Hit yes to pair, let it sync for about a minute, and you’re good to go.
Using it
At its heart, Android Wear is all about cards. Cards can be apps, notifications, information, controls and interactive tiles. They pop up as and when required, for glanceable information and more.
A notification, for instance, can display a small snippet of information such as an email subject and sender. Tapping on the email allows you to read the whole thing. A swipe to the left and you can archive the email or reply to it via voice, emoji or canned answers.
Dismissing notifications is easy, as is getting them back if you swipe them away a little too readily. Swipe up to reveal the undo button for the last one dismissed. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Navigating Android Wear is simple. Swipes to the left for more, to the right to dismiss or go back, up to scroll and down to hide. Tapping the watch face brings up the app launcher, new for Wear 5.1, with a small list of apps. Swipe to the left to bring up a list of recent and favourite contacts to send them an email or a text, or call them, then once more to talk to Google Now.
Users can also just say “OK Google” to the watch to fire up Google Now for voice searches or commands for setting timers, making notes or launching apps, for example.
A palm over the face puts the watch to sleep, as does a press of the button if there is one. Wrist-flick gestures can also be used to scroll up or down through cards without needing another hand.
Allow content provided by a third party?
This article includes content hosted on gfycat.com. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'.
Allow and continue
Connectivity
Android Wear 5.1 introduced the ability to connect to Wi-Fi direct from the watch. Wear mirrors the connections on your smartphone, pulling Wi-Fi passwords and networks so there’s no need for manual setup.
When out of range of Bluetooth, the watch can automatically switch to Wi-Fi to connect to the phone as long as it has internet access. It works both across the same Wi-Fi network and remotely over the internet using Google’s servers, which means notifications, searches and any other function works even when not in the vicinity of the smartphone.
It works reasonably well, with little lag over a local Wi-Fi network, but the handover between Bluetooth and Wi-Fi isn’t the smoothest, taking around 20 seconds. It is only noticeable if you’re trying to use the watch at the time.
Android Wear can also store music from Google Play music on a smartphone and connect directly to Bluetooth headphones to play it back. Typically up to 4GB of music can be stored, either from playlists or albums and browsed through album cards. Syncing the tracks over Bluetooth takes a while and hits battery life quite hard, meaning that doing it overnight while charging is recommended.
Wear 5.1 now includes a lockscreen, which replicates Android’s pattern lock and is meant to kick in when the watch is taken off your wrist. I have had issues getting it to work on certain watches.
Notifications
Notifications are clear and easy to read, covering the full screen of the watch when active. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The primary function of any smartwatch is to display notifications from a smartphone and Wear does it best out of any smartwatch platform, including the Apple Watch, Pebble and Samsung’s Tizen.
The way Wear connects with Android on the smartphone means any notification shows up if you want it to, without the developer of the app needing to do anything.
If the developer has added quick actions for the notification, they show up, too, while small extensions can be made to the app to provide more options on the watch.
The card interface is perfectly suited for displaying notifications. New ones crop up at the bottom of the screen with a small snippet and can be expanded. It means they’re ever present unless dismissed, with the latest one shown first, which makes triaging notifications easy and fast.
Unwanted notifications can be blocked either directly on the watch or by using the Android Wear app on the smartphone. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Apps you don’t want notifications from on the watch can be blocked, turning it into a filter to prevent overload. Wear also obeys Lollipop’s “none, priority or all” notification schemes or KitKat’s silenced mode, depending on what version of Android is running on the connected phone.
Android Wear has no keyboard as standard, instead relying on canned answers such as “I’m on my way”, voice dictation or emojis. Voice dictation works well even in relatively noisy environment, but is difficult for complex messages. Emojis are often the best way to respond, either picked from a list or by Google recognising a finger drawing of what you want, which works surprisingly well. All responses require a solid data connection on the smartphone.
Allow content provided by a third party?
This article includes content hosted on gfycat.com. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'.
Allow and continue
Apps built-in and otherwise
Because Android Wear is mostly based around notifications and information snippets, many dedicated apps simply aren’t needed.
Google’s apps include Fit, standard time-keeping apps, Google Play Music, Agenda for calendar, a torch app and Google search.
Google Play Music allows caching of music on the watch, or control of music on a connected smartphone, while Fit tracks steps, activity and monitors heart rate, feeding back to the Google Fit Android app.
Other Google apps, such as Gmail, Camera and Maps, are triggered through searches or via the phone, with the later capable of delivering turn-by-turn walking or driving directions to the wrist.
Both apps and watch faces can enter a lower-power ‘ambient’ mode, which switches the display to black-and-white, and stays on the screen. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Manufacturers such as Motorola, Asus and LG include their own fitness apps for monitoring heart rate and activity, as well as other apps for controlling smartphone apps. Often these duplicate functions, but users can pick which app they want to use as the primary heart rate monitor, for instance, either on the watch or through the Android Wear app on a smartphone.
Dedicated Android Wear-only apps are few and far between, with notable exceptions being watch faces and the UK Trains app that displays train times on the wrist.
Most apps are extensions of Android apps and the list is hundreds long, including big names such as Evernote, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Uber.
Fitness apps such as Runtastic, Strava and Runkeeper are also available, taking advantage of built-in GPS functions in some watches.
Watch faces
There are hundreds of faces available for Android Wear from Google, watch manufacturers and third-party developers. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Google ships a small but functional selection of watch faces with Android Wear. Some of the best, however, are third-party watch faces, which can add any number of features and functions; some free, some paid.
Manufacturers also bundle their own watch faces with their watches. Motorola’s Pascual is of particular note because it seamlessly integrates calendar appointments into an analogue face. Others include the weather, steps, battery life and even speed, should you need it.
Watch faces have a lower-power ambient mode, which is displayed when the watch face isn’t actively being used. This can be turned off to extend battery, but most Android Wear watches make it through a day with a watch face constantly displayed.
Cinema mode disables the ambient screen and the wrist-turn gesture so that the screen only lights when tapped or a button is pressed, which is handy for situations where the screen lighting up would be distracting.
When and where?
Android Wear 5.1 is launching on LG’s new G Watch Urbane and will be rolling out to all of the Google’s watches released since June last year. Not all of them will support all the new features. The LG G Watch, for instance, doesn’t have Wi-Fi, while Sony’s Smartwatch 3 is the only one to have GPS.
Verdict
Android Wear 5.1 has reduced Google’s emphasis on talking to your wrist, which is a good thing. The new menu system makes it easier to get to apps and settings, and the simple swipe-based interface is intuitive.
The emoji-drawing support is excellent and being able to connect remotely to a smartphone using Wi-Fi is useful for when Bluetooth won’t stretch far enough.
Android Wear’s notification-handling and quick, useful interactions powered by Google Now make it the best smartwatch platform currently available, but only if your life is plugged into Google services such as Gmail, calendar and Play Music.
Pros: Solid notifications, always-on screens, draw-an-emoji, decent voice recognition.
Cons: App duplication, fitness functions not as good as a fitness tracker without third-party apps, buggy security.
The competition
Apple Watch review: beautiful hardware spoiled by complicated software
Samsung Gear S review: can a smartwatch with a phone built in replace a smartphone?
Review: Pebble’s smart watch doesn’t try too hard, but does what you need | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/04/the-force-awakens-883m-north-american-box-office-star-wars | Film | 2016-01-04T09:41:28.000Z | Ben Child | The Force Awakens rings in new year with $88.3m at US box office | George Lucas apologises for describing Disney as 'white slavers'
Read more
Star Wars: The Force Awakens hit the $1.5bn (£1.01bn) mark at the global box office this weekend after earning $88.3m in North America during its third week of release.
JJ Abrams’ sequel has now made $740.3m at the US and Canadian box office, putting it in second place on the chart of highest-grossing films in North America, behind Avatar’s $760.8m from 2009/2010. Disney’s film is expected to take the No 1 spot by midweek.
The third-highest weekend haul ever in the US means that The Force Awakens could challenge Avatar’s $2.78bn all-time global box office record. The latest instalment of Star Wars opens in China, the world’s second-largest box office, on 9 January amid huge expectations.
Elsewhere at the US box office, it was a good weekend for Oscar contenders. Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight climbed to No 3 after a successful limited release on Christmas Day in the 70mm screening format. The blood-spattered western took $16.2m on its wide-release debut. It is considerably less than the opening weekend results of Tarantino’s two most recent films, Inglourious Basterds ($38m) and Django Unchained ($30.1m). Expectations for The Hateful Eight, however, have been dampened by the ongoing success of The Force Awakens. Tarantino’s new movie has made $29.6m so far.
Samuel L Jackson stars in Quentin Tarantino’s western The Hateful Eight – trailer Guardian
David O Russell’s Joy dropped three places to sixth with $10.4m, for a two-week total of $38.7m, while the financial crisis-themed comedy drama The Big Short held seventh place with $9m in its fourth week ($33m total). The Will Smith-led sports drama Concussion dipped to eighth spot with $8m, for a two-week total of $25.4m.
Jurassic World and the 'legacyquel': 2015 global box office in review
Read more
North American box office, 31 December-3 January
1. Star Wars: The Force Awakens: $88.3m. Total: $740.3m
2. Daddy’s Home: $29m. Total: $93.7m
3. The Hateful Eight: $16.2m. Total: $29.6m
4. Sisters: $12.6m. Total: $61.7m
5. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip: $11.8m. Total: $67.4m
6. Joy: $10.4m. Total: $38.7m
7. The Big Short: $9m. Total: $33m
8. Concussion: $8m. Total: $25.4m
9. Point Break: $6.8m. Total: $22.4m
10. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2: $4.6m. Total: $274.2m | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/jul/28/olympic-opening-ceremony-concert-review | Music | 2012-07-28T00:41:08.000Z | Dorian Lynskey | Olympic opening ceremony celebration concert – review | There are tens of thousands of cheerful people in Hyde Park but it's not entirely clear why. While the closing ceremony line-up of Blur, New Order and the Specials has a coherent vision, following a thread of left-of-centre British pop, this one seems to have been assembled by somebody who has no knowledge of pop music beyond what he has gleaned from a tattered fragment of an old V festival flyer, but senses deep in his bones that it is a business best left to white men.
It's not easy to construct a populist bill of four bands representing each country in the United Kingdom but this one underwhelms before a note has been played.
The crowd is so full of Olympic bonhomie (also booze) that the first hour of the opening ceremony, screened during a hiatus in the bill, elicits far bigger cheers than any of the bands.
The smart booking would have been Wenlock and Mandeville dancing to Chariots of Fire. It would have been smarter, at any rate, than Paolo Nutini, who starts briskly by performing perky pop reggae beneath a giant digitised Scottish flag, but proceeds to play an awful lot of midtempo blue-eyed soul, during which he pulls a pained grimace which denotes either intense soulfulness or significant gastric discomfort.
He addresses the crowd rarely, and when he does it's to announce that some new material is coming up, which proves about as welcome as a bomb threat.
Duran Duran, on the other hand, are nothing if not generous with the hits. Some might have chosen alternative ambassadors for English pop tonight but the likes of Notorious, Wild Boys and Save a Prayer come thick and fast, and it's hardly their fault if a vigorously orchestrated singalong to The Reflex is upstaged by the Red Arrows trailing streams of red, white and blue smoke in the opposite direction.
Simon Le Bon, wearing a jacket that looks to have been fashioned from the hide of an anglophile zebra, has a sense of occasion, gushing tirelessly about the Olympics at every opportunity.
"May we have a peaceful Games," he says, a little ominously, before a stirring Ordinary World. What does he know that we don't?
Then comes the hour-long break in which the screens flanking the stage broadcast what's going on in Stratford. It's rather unfair to the Stereophonics, or indeed any band, to have them come on directly after everybody has witnessed the ceremony's absurdly thrilling, decade-spanning medley of British pop classics.
For the audience, it's a bit like an old episode of Bullseye where Jim Bowen shows the losers what they could have won. For the band, it must be dispiriting to see so many people streaming away in order to continue watching telly elsewhere on site. A bit more charm would help.
The Stereophonics' visuals may put Nutini's Scottish flag in the shade but frontman Kelly Jones is equally taciturn between songs, plugging away professionally when he needs to be doing some Le Bon-style pandering.
Hence what would be, on a night where the biggest spectacular in London's history wasn't taking place on the other side of town, a decent Stereophonics gig proves murderously anticlimactic, although they've got enough festival experience to get the crowd back on side by the time they end with Handbags and Gladrags and Dakota.
Snow Patrol fare much better, partly because of frontman Gary Lightbody's easy rapport with the crowd and partly because they specialise in the kind of billowing, bittersweet anthems that might soundtrack closing-night montages of athletes weeping in their moments of triumph or defeat – one of them's even called Run.
Towards the end of their set, there's an incident of marvellous synchronicity. Just as they're about to play Chasing Cars, the big screens show Team GB entering the stadium and, for the duration of the song, Hyde Park and the Olympic Stadium feel genuinely connected for the first time. This may be a fundamentally misconceived and unnecessary event but it ends on an unexpected high. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/02/millennials-tax-gamechanger-income-redistribution-rightwing | Opinion | 2023-06-02T05:00:07.000Z | Gaby Hinsliff | Millennials are a growing electoral force, and their thinking on tax is a gamechanger | Gaby Hinsliff | Taxes are the price paid for living in a civilised society.
That founding belief in the moral imperative to stump up for the public good lies deep in progressive bones, just as the belief that people should be able to keep more of their own hard-earned cash does for rightwingers. British liberals are so used to arguing that you can’t have lovely, Scandinavian-style public services on American-style taxes that most of us could probably do it in our sleep.
Meanwhile, even the embarrassment of being sacked over his own complex tax affairs seemingly hasn’t deterred the multimillionaire Tory MP Nadhim Zahawi from solemnly campaigning this week to scrap inheritance tax, on the grounds that taxing the unearned income of rich people’s children is supposedly a “spectre that haunts” us all. The battle lines on tax have been so firmly drawn for so long that this week’s report by the centre-right thinktank Onward on the political instincts of millennials – the late-20s-to-early-40s demographic poised to overtake baby boomers as the biggest electoral grouping – landed initially as something of a shock.
Unusually, this generation isn’t getting more rightwing as it ages, with only 21% willing to vote Tory at the next election. Yet Onward finds it is also more hostile than average to the idea of government redistributing income (as opposed to people keeping more of their own money) and it prioritises taxes over the social justice it is often thought to be devoted to. Something is going on under the bonnet here that neither Labour nor the Tories are properly addressing, and it’s about who genuinely gets a raw deal from the tax system. (Spoiler alert: it’s not Nadhim Zahawi.)
If millennial pips are squeaking, that’s because, compared with previous generations at the same age – or older people now – many of them really do pay higher marginal tax rates. Or more accurately, they’re paying what feels like an extra tax.
When Tony Blair first introduced tuition fees in 1998, he made it very clear that the system wasn’t intended as a graduate tax. But years of tweaking later, it doesn’t half feel like one. Graduates from English universities currently begin repaying student loans once they’re earning more than £27,295 a year, with 9% of anything over that threshold deducted from pay packets either for 30 years or until they’ve paid everything off – which for many would be never, given that their debt is growing with a punchy interest rate of RPI (currently 11.4%) plus 3%. (From this August, the repayment threshold drops to £25,000, while the repayment period stretches to 40 years, but with interest charged at RPI.)
Treat it as the tax it has effectively become, and, by the end of last year, young graduates were facing a marginal rate of 41% for basic-rate taxpayers or 51% for higher-rate ones. That’s on top of everything else millennials struggle with – such as expensive childcare and soaring rents and the gloomy prospect of never being able to buy a house, plus the same painful food and fuel inflation everyone is experiencing – and means that, even before housing costs, a 30-year-old earning a theoretically good salary just doesn’t have the spending power of previous generations on equivalent wages.
Why are millennials so turned off by the Tory party?
Read more
The struggle, as the saying goes, is real: the longing for tax cuts is totally understandable. Arguing about whether Keir Starmer should or shouldn’t have ditched Labour’s promise to scrap tuition fees, meanwhile, now looks way behind the curve. Scrap them for next year’s intake and millennials would still be saddled with their old debts, plus the burning resentment of knowing they’d paid more than either previous or future students as a result of being caught up in what would be branded a failed experiment.
Similarly the message of Onward’s research isn’t just that young people are, in its words, “shy capitalists”, who might vote Tory if only the government built more houses. It’s that millennials are a new kind of voter, shaped by very particular economic circumstances, who demand new thinking from all the major parties.
The overall trend for taxes isn’t going to be downwards any time soon, in an ageing country with a shrinking tax base, public services crying out for repair, and an expensive but unavoidable decarbonisation programme ahead. Bim Afolami, the thoughtful 37-year-old Conservative MP for Hitchin and Harpenden who co-authored the Onward report, argues that the answer is to cut national insurance for the under-40s and hike it for older workers, a bold idea that might be too bold by half for Rishi Sunak. The alternative is taxes on wealth, which the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has begun edging towards, with commitments to end tax breaks for non-doms and VAT on school fees.
Wealth taxes are also a way of shifting the burden away from under-40s, who are understandably furious that they haven’t been able to build up many assets, and on to older people, who have accumulated more by dint of being born at the right time and have previously enjoyed an effective veto on wealth taxes given their power at the ballot box.
But, as Onward points out, it’s millennials who are now the biggest age cohort in just over half of British constituencies. Factor that in, and ideas Ed Miliband tried in vain to popularise in 2015 – such as mansion taxes on houses worth more than £2m – may start to look less electorally toxic, and more simply ahead of their time. The basic progressive case for paying your taxes remains unchanged. It’s who, and what, we tax that now must move with the times.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2012/dec/05/portsmouth-coventry-stadium-football-finance | Football | 2012-12-05T11:33:23.000Z | John Beech | Shared woes match Portsmouth and Coventry amid football and finance | Guardian Sport Network | The battle over Fratton Park is shortly to be resolved in court (1). The twisted history of Portsmouth's financial ills and, indeed, its ownership ills seem to be moving towards a denouement (the topics of the stadium which has become separated from its club in ownership terms, and the mixed blessing that a new stadium can bring, are ones that I have covered in previous postings (see postings passim). Certainly as a member of the Pompey Supporters Trust, and a strong advocate of fan ownership, I want the Trust to "win" the case (they are not a directly participating party, hence the quotation marks). The case for a much lower valuation is a strong one, and for once I'm optimistic that the result will, for once, go the right way. If it doesn't, it will almost certainly mean the liquidation of the club, and the fight to establish a resurrection club will begin in earnest no doubt.
Nearer to home, literally, as I live in work in Coventry, if not metaphorically, the issue of the ownership of the Ricoh is almost as prominent on my radar.
Its origins go back to the heady days when Coventry was enjoying a notably long and unbroken run in the top flight, dating back to 1967 and the managership of Jimmy Hill. Its then stadium at Highfield Road dated from 1899, and, with a post-Taylor capacity of approximately 23,500, it lacked any of the facilities that a Premier League stadium needed to compete from a business point of view. It was not a million miles from Fratton Park to be honest.
In 1997, under the Chairmanship of Bryan Richardson, grand plans were announced for an ultra-modern stadium to be built on a brown-field site on the northern edge of the city, close by Junction three of the M6 (and adjacent to the Coventry-Nuneaton railway line). Arena 2000, as it was originally to be called, was to be the envy of many a self-respecting Premier League, with a retractable roof and a removable pitch, making it ideal for other revenue-generating activities such as pop concerts. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, just about everything:
The brown-field site, which had been the site of Foleshill Gasworks, proved problematic. Contamination of the site required two years of remedial work to make it reusable (2).
The club was being operated unsustainably. By 2003 debts were at a level of £20m (3) and continued to rise (4) and rise (5).
On the pitch, Gordon Strachan failed in the battle to keep the club up in 2001.
In 2002 it was only possible for the building project to continue with the formation of a new joint company, Arena Coventry Limited (6), 50% owned by Coventry City Council and 50% by the Alan Edward Higgs Charity, a wealthy local charity for children which has a strong sports interest.
Sponsorship of the stadium by local car manufacturer Jaguar, itself under financial pressure, fell through as production of their cars in Coventry ceased (7).
To cut a long and tortuous story short, the stadium was built, but to a significantly lower specification than originally planned (capacity was reduced to 32,500), Ricoh took on the sponsorship, and Championship Coventry played their first game there in 2005. Not that this proved a particular turning point for the club. In 2007 a potentially club-saving takeover by American consortium Manhattan Sports Capital Partners fell through (8). Then, having come within twenty-five minutes of going into Administration, the club was acquired by venture capitalists SISU (9).
Although SISU planned to buy at least the 50% of the shares owned by the Alan Edward Higgs Charity, this has not happened, and the club continues to rent the stadium from Arena Coventry Limited. From the club's financial perspective, the stadium is thus a monthly liability rather than the major asset and revenue generator originally envisaged.
Relegation from the Championship to League 1 in 2011 exacerbated an already difficult situation. Attendances and revenues were hit. The agreed rent, reported to be £100,000 per month, became significantly unrealistic for a League 1 club to sustain. Again cutting a long story short, the owners and club have been unable to agree a compromise rent that is realistic, and the club, SISU that is, started a 'rent strike' in March last year (10). Obviously this is a situation that cannot run on indefinitely, and in the last few weeks matters have come to a head, with both sides apparently digging their heels in and maintaining collision course. On the one hand, Deputy Conservative leader John Blundell says that ACL may have to seek a winding-up order over the unpaid arrears (11), while on the other Coventry City Chief Executive Tim Fisher accuses Arena Coventry Limited of pulling out of talks (12). Whatever the rights and wrongs of the respective protagonists, some compromise needs to be reached, and rapidly.
As well as the two confrontational tales of Fratton Park and the Ricoh, there is a crumb of comfort on the stadium front at Stockport County's Edgeley Park (13) where a deal has been announced that will see the club running the stadium at a reduced rent and retaining the revenues from it. Let's hope there will positive news to report shortly from both Coventry and Portsmouth.
This is an article from our Guardian Sport Network. To find out more about it click here.
This article first appeared on John Beech's Football Management blog. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2024/feb/08/rba-company-profits-inflation-interest-rates-rises-reserve-bank-australia | Business | 2024-02-07T14:00:49.000Z | Greg Jericho | The RBA says it’s still worried about inflation, but few believe this will mean higher interest rates | Greg Jericho | Despite a new year and a new way of doing things, the thinking at the Reserve Bank remains the same – inflation is all about people having too much money to spend rather than the actions of companies which are actually the ones raising prices.
With the first Reserve Bank board meeting of the year behind us – and the first under the new arrangements where the board only meets every six weeks rather than monthly – the prospect of more rate rises looks unlikely.
While the governor, Michele Bullock, tried to talk a big game about the RBA still being worried about inflation, few believe that will mean higher rates.
The market for some time now has pretty much banked in a rate cut by August and a few more to follow:
If this graph does not display, click here
And yet my concern is that the RBA, despite the new arrangements, which include a much shorter and less fussy statement by the board, continues to see inflation as a nail that can only be hammered by interest rates.
The latest statement on monetary policy, also released on Tuesday, makes this very clear when it rather blithely states on the summary page in bold that “overall demand is still greater than supply, but the economy is moving towards a better balance”.
Excuse me. Demand is greater than supply? By what measure?
And is it because we have too much demand or too little supply? Because if it is the latter, interest rates rises won’t do a thing.
Australian inflation is under control – now it’s time to worry about the economic health of households
Greg Jericho
Read more
The RBA has now downgraded GDP growth for 2023 from 1.6% to 1.5%. And whereas in November it thought the economy this year would grow by (a still pathetic) 1.8% in the year to June 2024, now it predicts a mere 1.3% growth.
The bank also estimates that gross national expenditure (GNE), which is essentially GDP minus trade, grew a lousy 1.4% across 2023 and expects it to rise to a very tepid 1.9% by the end of this year.
During the period from the end of 2011 until the end of 2019 when the RBA cut the cash rate from 4.5% to 0.75% in an attempt to stimulate the economy, GNE averaged annual growth of 2%.
But now apparently growth of 1.4% is a sign that we have too much demand in the economy!
If this graph does not display, click here
Perhaps the RBA thinks we are all getting paid too much?
That would seem odd given the RBA also now estimates real wages grew just 0.1% in 2023 and by the end of this year will only be growing at 0.4%.
That means average Australian real wages are now 4.5% below where they were at the end of 2019 and by the middle of 2026 will only be back at 2011 levels:
If this graph does not display, click here
Maybe it’s not wages but all the other income we have that is fueling this excess demand?
Certainly during the pandemic, stimulus such as temporary (and now finished) increases in the low-middle income tax offset boosted our incomes.
But the RBA estimates that not only have we lost all that pandemic stimulus, we are now back to where we were in 2019. Even worse, total household disposable income is an astonishing 5.1% below where we would have expected it to be given the trend of the decade before the pandemic:
If this graph does not display, click here
Of course, the RBA needs to keep that line that the problem is excess demand because if it starts admitting that inflation is more driven by supply-side factors and company profits then people might start to wonder why they increased interest rates so much.
The governor also argued that while rate rises could not directly affect the prices of things like insurance and electricity, it was still worth raising rates because they “go into business costs” and that “tempers the ability of [businesses] to pass on costs”.
Implicit in that line is that businesses can and have been passing on costs. And in doing so they have driven inflation.
This is why the Allan Fels inquiry into price gouging and unfair pricing practices released on Tuesday remains extremely pertinent.
Lack of competition allows supermarkets, banks and airlines to gouge Australians, report finds
Read more
The inquiry (to which I gave evidence in my role with the Centre for Future Work) found a decided lack of competition across a broad range of sectors including electricity, grocery retailing, banking, aviation, and early childhood education and care.
Crucially for how the RBA goes about lowering inflation, the inquiry found that “higher interest rates only served to see the banks, led by Westpac, the Commonwealth Bank, NAB and ANZ increase their profit margins above long-term levels”.
Fels also argues that companies have used “broader inflation trends as ‘cover’ to justify higher prices for their own products, even if their own production costs have not increased accordingly”.
Perhaps when the RBA thinks about inflation, it might consider how much cover it gives to these companies when it continually says demand factors are the main reason rather than putting the spotlight on their pricing decisions.
It might also ponder that the four major banks are laughing with glee every time the RBA decides to raise rates yet again, all in the interests of reducing supposedly excess demand.
This article was amended on 8 February 2024 to give the correct RBA GDP growth forecasts
Greg Jericho is a Guardian columnist and policy director at the Centre for Future Work | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2024/feb/02/multigenerational-holiday-tips-bathroom-each-easyjet-promotion | Travel | 2024-02-02T15:00:06.000Z | Sarah Marsh | Have a bathroom each: tips for a successful multigenerational holiday | One memory that has stayed with Janette Clark, 60, from her big family holiday last year is evenings spent in a hot tub looking up at the Cornish night sky. “It was absolutely beautiful,” she says. She adds that there was no light pollution. Everyone, from her children to her grandchildren, enjoyed the water.
Clark is a proponent of multigenerational holidays, where different generations of one family go away together. In a poll of 2,000 British adults, more than half of those surveyed (56%) said they regretted not spending more time with grandparents and 54% said they hoped to bring them on future holidays.
EasyJet’s holiday wing is now offering “grans go free” places on trips to Europe, after research found half of UK families had never holidayed abroad with their grandparents.
Clark says that these holidays can be illuminating. She went to Cornwall with her three children, their partners and her three grandchildren for her birthday and learned a lot about her relatives.
The multi-generation game: is living with your parents and your children a good idea?
Read more
“We got to spend more time with my daughter’s girlfriend. When they met, they lived in Amsterdam, and we had never spent a whole week with her. It was so lovely,” Clark says.
“Being with her was revealing. We learned more about our children’s partners’ politics, the books they had read and their feelings about climate change and the world. We had lively discussions and also boring nights where we sat and chilled out with wine and the TV. We watched some great films. I never realised what a massive fan of Harry Potter my daughter’s partner was.”
Clark and her family rented out a big house with four bathrooms, one big lounge and a large dining room. “We could spread out as well … it was a treat as it was for my 60th birthday,” she says.
One downside, Clark says, however, is the cost. They had to travel in school holidays because of the children, which is much more expensive, so saving up for another big family trip will take time.
To keep harmony, Clark suggests ensuring each guest has their own bathroom. “We also ate together every day and then planned what we would do the following day during dinner. I recommend daily communal eating,” she says, adding that each couple cooked for everyone one night of the week.
Perrin Debock, right, enjoying Egypt with her mother and mother’s partner
Annalisa Barbieri, who offers relationship advice in her Guardian column, says her main advice on multigenerational holidays is “don’t go unless you’re sure”. She adds: “There’s also nothing like finding out about family when you go on holiday, because seeing someone over a 24-hour period is very illuminating.
“If you tend to be the responsible one, then the chances are you will end up organising everything as people look to you. If you are the only one who speaks a foreign language you will be the de facto translator (this happens to me). Ditto if you are the only driver or the one who doesn’t drink – you will end up doing the driving after meals out.”
Barbieri suggests thinking about what you want to achieve on holiday. “Are some of you late risers? If so, then maybe you need to split the groups so that some of you go out early. I am an early riser and it drives me nuts waiting for everyone to get ready and by the time we get out, everything is super busy.”
She adds that she “would always suggest a separate space if possible so you can retreat to your own space”. This includes staying in a hotel “so that someone else is ‘in charge’ – someone else decides when breakfast for example, ie the hotel does! Or adjoining villas or Airbnbs.” She says sharing one big space can lead to tensions. “One person inevitably does the cooking or cleaning if that hasn’t been decided. So set boundaries early.”
Perrin Debock, 52, from Paris, said her parents divorced when she was two. For almost a decade she has taken a big trip with either her mother and her partner, or her father and his wife. She says: “For me, my daughter, now 15 years old, and my husband, these holidays ‘en famille’ are special because we bond and share the everyday little surprises of travelling.”
Last Christmas they went to Egypt for 10 days with her mother’s side. Their next planned holiday will be to Mexico with the other side of the family. “My daughter is growing up. It is a precious time to share things and moments with her. I know my parents treasure those. Of course, after a week or 10 days, we are happy to each go back home and not hear about them for some time, but those shared transgenerational holidays are great moments to learn from each other. It is a lot of money and planning to please everyone, of course, but definitely worth it.
She adds: “The preparation before, and the pictures after, offer tons of opportunity to bond over things. I know my daughter will always remember those shared holidays. When my parents disappear, I will have no regrets of not sharing enough with them.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/dec/25/rafael-benitez-everton-brightest-young-talents-future | Football | 2021-12-25T22:30:06.000Z | Andy Hunter | Rafael Benítez urges Everton’s brightest young talents to commit futures to club | Rafael Benítez has held talks with several of Everton’s brightest academy prospects to convince them to commit their long-term futures to the Goodison Park club.
Everton lost the promising left-back Thierry Small to Southampton in the summer after the 17-year-old, who became the youngest first-team player in the club’s history in January, rejected their offer of a professional contract. The club are in a similar predicament with the highly rated forward Lewis Dobbin, who is out of contract next July and free to sign a pre-contract agreement with a continental European club from 1 January.
Everton’s game at Burnley off after Premier League agrees to new request
Read more
Benítez, however, has made a personal intervention to reassure Everton’s young talents that a pathway to the first team remains open after Marcel Brands’ departure as director of football. The academy fell under Brands’ remit and, while the club conduct a review of their internal structure, the Everton manager has sought to persuade academy players to extend their Goodison careers.
The Everton manager said: “When the situation of the club changed a little bit in terms of the structure, the first thing that we did was to have two or three meetings with young players, their agents and their families to try and make sure they could stay with us for a long time. I did it personally with some of them.”
The defender Jarrad Branthwaite and the forward Ellis Simms have signed new contracts at Everton recently, until 2025 and 2024 respectively, but negotiations on a new deal for Dobbin have reached an impasse. The 18-year-old has represented England at under-16, 17 and 19 level and has attracted interest from other Premier League clubs, whom he could join for a development fee next summer, and clubs in Germany. But Benítez is hopeful of reaching an agreement.
Guardiola makes strike claim as angry Benítez joins chorus over player welfare
Read more
“I don’t like to talk too much about that but I think the player is quite happy and our conversations with him have been quite positive,” the Everton manager said. “I have confidence that he will be delighted to stay with us in the future.”
Benítez has given Dobbin three substitute appearances in the Premier League this season, including in the recent draw at Chelsea, when five Everton players are believed to have contracted Covid-19, and he would have been involved in the Boxing Day game at Burnley had the match not been postponed.
The Premier League initially rejected Everton’s request for a postponement due to their Covid cases and six injuries but “regrettably approved” the request on Friday. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/14/kate-garraway-reveals-horror-story-of-husband-derek-draper-long-covid-ordeal | Media | 2021-03-14T11:37:36.000Z | Maya Wolfe-Robinson | Kate Garraway reveals 'horror story' of husband's long Covid ordeal | Kate Garraway has said she does not know whether her husband will ever have any kind of life again in an interview describing the “horror story” of his year with coronavirus.
The Good Morning Britain presenter recounted the months since Derek Draper, a 53-year-old former political adviser and lobbyist, was first hospitalised last March. A year on, he remains in intensive care, experiencing only “fleeting glimmers of consciousness”, Garraway told the Sunday Times magazine.
Although the virus has not been present in Draper’s body since the late summer, it has led to kidney failure, damage to his liver and pancreas and heart failure. He has holes in his lungs following bacterial pneumonia and several infections. Doctors do not know why the virus has had such a destructive effect on Draper’s health and have said it is unlikely he will make a full recovery, Garraway said.
Kate Garraway pictured with her husband, Derek Draper, in 2008. Photograph: Tim Ireland/PA
Garraway, who has been unable to visit him since December, when the third lockdown was imposed, said his condition deteriorated dramatically without human contact. “I feel like he is in an ocean of unconsciousness and sometimes he comes up to the surface. In the run-up to Christmas there were moments of consciousness where I felt like we were really communicating,” she said.
The presenter described the early months after Draper was hospitalised and on a ventilator as “months and months of horror, of live-or-die phone calls”. She said she was told several times to prepare herself for his death, and on one occasion was told on the phone: “He may have died. Somebody will call you back.” She found out 24 hours later that somebody else with a similar sounding name had died.
When the doctors first withdrew the drugs that were inducing his coma in June, Draper did not regain consciousness. Garraway said: “The very worst moment was when they said he could be locked in for ever.” She said that she is conscious of having a voice that others do not, and therefore felt “it’s really important to say stuff that I’ve experienced because I will not be alone in those experiences”.
The couple, who have two children, will feature in a documentary aired later this month on ITV. Garraway has also written a book, The Power of Hope, which she hopes can help others facing crises. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/apr/10/the-fate-of-the-furious-review-fast-furious-8-vin-diesel-dwayne-johnson-helen-mirren | Film | 2017-04-10T22:22:50.000Z | Gwilym Mumford | The Fate of the Furious review - Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson ensure franchise still has va-va-vroom | The resurgence of Fast and the Furious from straight-to-DVD-destined three-wheeler to multiplex monolith has been one of the more unlikely cinematic successes of recent years. This was a franchise that, with 2006’s endlessly lampooned Tokyo Drift, looked less in need of a tune up than to be scavenged for parts and left up on bricks. Five instalments later and it’s as close to a bankable vehicle as it gets in Hollywood.
Of course, cynical sorts might suggest that the untimely death of Paul Walker midway through filming of Fast and Furious 7 gave the series a sympathetic second-look from audiences that might have otherwise abandoned it. That though would underplay the strangely appealing alchemy of the franchise in the past several instalments, which has seen it evolve from a gruff drag race B-movie to something far more universal: a turbocharged mix of cars, quips and explosions, with just the merest hint of sentimentality to keep the date-movie crowd sweet.
The Fate of the Furious trailer: The Rock, Vin Diesel and Charlize Theron star in new film Guardian
For The Fate of the Furious – variously referred to as Fast & Furious 8, Fast 8 or, for those really pressed for time, F8 – another bolt-on has been attached to its action-film chassis, that of the high-stakes cyberthriller. It’s an incongruous addition, and one that frequently seems in danger of lurching into techno-jargon incomprehensibility; but things race along at such a ferocious lick you scarcely have time to question the moments of incongruity (chiefly, how can so many supercars be also somehow explosion-retardant).
The set-up: Dom, Vin Diesel’s sonorous-voiced crim with a heart of gold, is living in Cuba with his belle, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez). Life is sweet, and there’s talk of starting a family, but crashing into view comes Charlize Theron’s Cipher, a tech-savant terrorist, whose aptitude with a keyboard would make Anonymous blush. With one swipe of her smartphone, she’s blackmailed Dom with some inconvenient detail from his past, and he’s soon helping her steal a series of powerful doohickeys that together might just bring about nuclear destruction.
Standing in Dom’s way in this endeavour are his old racing pals, including Dwayne Johnson’s law-enforcement-officer turned speed-racer, and – in a nice twist – Deckard Shaw, Jason Statham’s big bad from the last outing, now performing the role of acid-tongued antihero. Statham’s inclusion is F8’s smartest move, his snarky one-liners and aptitude for hand-to-hand combat helping to break up the sometimes exhausting in-car sequences. Indeed, there’s one gloriously goofy action sequence, where Shaw battles his way through a plane full of goons, that equals anything from the adrenalised mania of Statham’s Crank films.
Theron too has great fun with the nefarious Cipher, despite the character often seeming drawn-on-the-back-of-a-napkin flimsy. She does an awful lot with very little, purring out extended monologues about choice theory and human nature just like Malcolm Gladwell with access to the nuclear football. And there’s an enormously entertaining cameo from Helen Mirren, channelling her inner Pat Butcher as the gobby mother of Statham’s Shaw.
Crank call ... Jason Statham in The Fate of the Furious. Photograph: AP
Of course these brief flourishes of character acting are merely aperitifs to F8’s main course: to batter you into submission with pyrotechnic set pieces. There are three here, of which one – a confusingly edited sequence on the Siberian wastes – falls somewhat flat. Better is an opening sequence in which Diesel races a supercar with a nitrous-oxide-fuelled old banger, which should appeal to anyone who enjoyed the franchise in its early, motor-obsessed iterations. And, in the film’s central set piece, Cipher hacks into seemingly every car in New York City and points them in the direction of a motorcade protecting the Russian defence minister. There’s a convincing thriller to be made about our technophobia around the self-driving-car revolution. Make no mistake, F8 isn’t it; but it’s still an effective – and spectacular – scene.
Ultimately, you suspect that the future of the series rests on its ability to find new ways of making cars bash into each other feel somehow novel. For now it’s managing to do that – and the series’ broadening of its action palette is a sensible way of keeping things fresh. But what kept the franchise afloat during those lean times was its melodrama-soaked character moments and, bar some extended relationship turmoil between Dom and Letty, and a couple of nice nods to the late Walker, they’re relatively thin on the ground. Instead this is a big dumb action movie in its purest, most honourable sense: fast, furious and frequently fun.
This article was amended on 11 April to correct the spelling of Michelle Rodriguez’s character. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jun/20/lush-founders-from-bath-bombs-to-spy-cops-row | Media | 2018-06-20T05:30:33.000Z | Emine Saner | How the Lush founders went from bath bombs to the spy cops row | At the beginning of the month, the cosmetics company Lush launched its latest campaign, this time highlighting the undercover police officers who had infiltrated activist groups and formed intimate, deceptive relationships with some of their members. Some relationships lasted years, and produced children, only for the men to mysteriously disappear. The company put posters in windows, along with fake police tape, and the slogans “paid to lie” and “police have crossed the line”. A row immediately erupted, with many people believing the company was attacking the police in general. “Never thought I would see a mainstream British retailer running a public advertising campaign against our hardworking police,” tweeted the home secretary, Sajid Javid. “This is not a responsible way to make a point.”
Cosmetics retailer Lush criticised by police over 'spycops' ad campaign
Read more
It’s the day after the “spy cops” campaign finished – there were a few days when shops removed the posters after staff received threats and intimidation, but then the campaign was resumed. The company founders seem happy with how it went. Never mind the backlash and the deluge of 30,000 one-star Facebook reviews from people who have never shopped at the store – the issue was talked about endlessly on social media and in newspapers and TV, it drew a response from the home secretary, the film on Lush’s website got more than one million views and many of the victims were happy. “I think we put a stick in a hornets’ nest and all the hornets came out and we got stung,” says Mark Constantine, one of Lush’s seven founders. “If you’ve put the stick in the nest you can hardly complain.”
The ‘spy cops’ campaign material in the window of Lush’s Cambridge shop. Photograph: Julian Simmonds/Rex/Shutterstock
We sit in a bright room above the small Lush shop in Poole – the company’s first, where many of its products are invented. Despite the 932 shops globally (including 105 in the UK and Ireland), the 22,000 employees and the £995m turnover, this still feels a bit like a cottage industry, run from these slightly ramshackle rooms above the shop. Constantine describes this as his lab, where he tries out scents. He and his wife Mo sit next to each other on one side of a large desk. One of the other founders, Helen Ambrosen, is busy with products at the other end of the room. It smells, as anyone who has ever walked past a Lush shop will know, strongly of a heady mix of oils and perfume. A day later, I can still smell it on my clothes. Are they used to the stink yet? “Absolutely,” says Mo. “We’re oblivious. Everyone else is wiping tears from their eyes and we’re ‘how lovely’.”
Mark had become increasingly worried about undercover policing following the Guardian reporting on the issue that began in 2011, even thinking that perhaps he and the company had been targeted because of their support for hunt saboteurs and environmental campaigners. The spy cops campaign was done in collaboration with the organisations Police Spies Out of Lives and Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance, which were involved in every stage of the planning and design. With any Lush campaign, says Mo, it’s up to individual store managers to decide whether to run it or not. About 40 stores put the initial posters up and the response was immediate.
Shop staff had been followed home, they say, and attacked on Facebook. One uniformed police officer came to a shop and said they were going to organise an anti-Lush campaign. “The one that made me laugh was two policemen on horses who sheltered their horses from the sun outside our Leeds shop in the hope they were going to leave us a present on the doorstep, which at least showed wit and humour,” says Mark, smiling, but the intimidation was serious enough that the company paused the campaign for a few days.
There was a feeling that Lush was criticising the police as a whole. Were there things they could have done differently? “We worked with the groups and the victims and that [campaign] is what they wanted. They chose the words, the sentiment,” says Mark. He might have modified the campaign, but he felt it wasn’t up to the company to tell the victims what they could and couldn’t say. “It was a successful campaign. If we had done something that was less striking perhaps this issue wouldn’t have been so highlighted to people.”
“I thought it was unfortunate that it looked as if we were anti-police,” says Mo, “which had never been the intention.”
The day before they took the initial posters down, sales were up 13% but overall Mark says he expects the effect of the campaign on sales to be “negligible”. Was it a marketing ploy? “If we were making something out of nothing it would be different,” he says, not quite answering the question. “But it’s not something out of nothing.” The police did this, he says, and so far the public inquiry has been lacking – set up in 2015, it is yet to hear evidence.
As the son of an undercover cop, I support what Lush did | Letters
Read more
For people who only know the company for its bath bombs and the pungent shops, it might have seemed a strange choice of campaign, but Lush has a history of supporting a variety of causes. Last year, the company donated £13.3m to charities and activist groups (the founders make their own donations, too). As a teenager, with a difficult relationship with his stepfather, who eventually threw him out, Mark was homeless for a while. “I received charitable help,” he says. “It was a small sum, but it made all the difference to me. What I realised was that if you give small sums to people then that works very well. Someone who is very keen can do an awful lot with a small sum. Our giving is based on that.”
They have paid the legal fees of activists from the campaign group Plane Stupid who were arrested at a protest in Stansted airport, and donated money to hunt saboteurs and anti-badger cull activists. They have run campaigns against Guantánamo and fracking. In the aftermath of the Grenfell disaster, when the local council failed to provide translations of vital information for the tower’s traumatised and vulnerable survivors, Lush put up the money.
With Grenfell, Mark says, “that’s purely being a responsible citizen”. But he won’t acknowledge that there is something troubling when funding comes at the goodwill (or not) of rich individuals. In 2011, Mark was in talks to fund the police’s Wildlife Crime Unit; the Police Federation warned it was “policing for the rich”. “I think it’s part of being a modern society and making a bloody contribution when you can,” he says. “Leaving other people behind because it’s someone else’s job is not right.” But it’s not that it’s someone else’s job, it’s that it shouldn’t be up to the rich to decide what is and isn’t important. He sighs. He had these arguments with one of his employees, who opposed philanthropy. “I think it’s irrelevant. We’re not going to do it when [public money] will. We do it when no one else will do it.”
How do they decide who to support? “I have a huge bias towards human rights,” say Mo, “and I have sympathy towards animal welfare and environmental issues.” How do they square human rights campaigning with, for instance, running shops and making a profit in Saudi Arabia? “It’s the same everywhere, it’s not just there,” says Mark. “How do you do it in America … with Black Lives Matter? In Saudi, we try to have shops that have women working in them, then [you think] what are their rights, then this, then that. You just push where you can in a way that doesn’t put anyone in any danger. Does that mean we will always trade there? No.” So why do business there now? “Because we believe we can make a difference, I suppose. We can do a bit of business and we can do a bit of politicising. But why do we do business in Russia? In America? There are so many reasons not to.”
The Constantines, who are both in their 60s, have been together since they were teenagers, and have three children who all work for the business and also live in houses nearby. Lush came out of the collapse in 1994 of Cosmetics to Go, the Constantines’ previous mail-order company (Mark had started creating products earlier, becoming the Body Shop’s biggest supplier). They launched Lush that same year, along with five other founders, from this small shop in Poole, using equipment and ingredients the receivers weren’t interested in taking. The no-packaging ethos was a necessity – they couldn’t afford it.
The campaign provoked anger – but also support from the victims of undercover police operations. Photograph: Kirsty O'Connor/PA
They are, he says, capitalists but they’re interested in “creating a situation that could perhaps be a model for other businesses”. Much is made of their ethical credentials – they pay the right tax and carefully source their ingredients, for instance, and are audited each year by Ethical Consumer – but he knows the company is not perfect. One of their current aims is to “innovate out of packaging, and preservatives” that are flushed down the drains, and which can be found in products including some of those made by Lush, and may cause harm in the marine environment. He fantasises about winning a most ethical company award “so I can stand up there and go ‘if we won, how shit are the rest of you?’”
Last year, pre-tax profits were up 70% to £73.5m, but the company has warned that 2018 will see profits fall by more than 40%. Lush shouldn’t be another high-street victim – the fall can be explained, says Mark, in large part because the company increased staff wages, and it is cushioned by some highly profitable years. “We’ll see a pretty lacklustre performance in Britain this year and it’s just as well we’re trading in other countries because otherwise we’d be in trouble,” says Mark.
He, blames the government for the high-street troubles, from the Brexit referendum, which devalued the pound, to business rates: “Twenty per cent of everything you buy from us goes to the government in tax. That’s enough. You’re taxing the shops to death.” Brexit, he says, “is a bloody nightmare”.
More than a quarter of Lush’s factory staff are foreign nationals. “They were in a real stir,” says Mo. “They didn’t know whether to leave or what to do and it has a far-reaching effect on their entire families, so it’s been difficult. We had the foresight to open up a factory in Germany but it has been really hard. There aren’t enough British citizens living and wanting work down here to fill the 800 jobs we need to have throughout the year and the additional 600 at Christmas. Brexit was a huge blow. We’ve had to rally round, work out how we are going to move on.”
The Constantines have no immediate plans to step down. Mark, who likes to say the years between 55 and 75 are the most creative, says he wants to be making the products for ever. And the campaigning gives them a sense of purpose. “We’re fortunate,” he says. “The company is fortunate. Why shouldn’t we make a contribution beyond our tax? What else are we going to do with [the money]? Buy a yacht? And it’s not staying in the bank for some future generation to buy a yacht either.” He smiles. “The question I get asked most often is: ‘What do you want to do? Sell bath bombs or save the world?’ I see no reason why I can’t do both.” | Full |
Subsets and Splits