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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/22/tragedy-infinite-loop-hitting-replay
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Opinion
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2014-08-22T11:30:02.000Z
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Roxane Gay
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Tragedy plays on infinite loop. Do you really want to keep hitting replay? | Roxane Gay
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The expansive anarchy of the internet continues to lull us into believing that, because we can see something, that something should be seen. Because we can say something, there is something that must be said. When there’s nothing to be seen, we are more than willing to create a spectacle so that we might have something to say.
On 9 August, unarmed, 18-year-old Mike Brown was killed by Darren Wilson. In the days since, Ferguson, Missouri – where the shooting occurred – became the site of an occupation by militarized police, a series of protests and exploitation by opportunists of all stripes. Before long, the media will leave and Ferguson will remain a troubled town with a police force that disproportionately targets its black citizens; a town where the majority of the residents are black and the majority of the elected officials and police officers who should be protecting and serving are white.
Before too long, another city will become another spectacle because another unarmed black man will be gunned down by another overzealous police officer.
In the wake of the events in Ferguson, we want information. We want to understand why Michael Brown was killed. We want to understand the events leading up to it. We are all forensic analysts. We are all detectives. We are all journalists. We are anything we want to be in any given moment because we have so much access to the spectacle – live feeds from citizen journalists, tweets from reporters and people who are in the thick of it all, images splashed across the internet, information from news feeds and, once in a while, on the major news networks.
And then we have the commentary. There is the spectacle, and then we must deliberate on the spectacle. We must demand that our favorite thinkers offer their deliberations, whether they are qualified or not, as if we cannot truly make sense of a spectacle until we are told how to do so.
Much of what we now know as spectacle is mediated through technology. We have cellphones and smartphones and iDevices and laptops and the ability to be perpetually connected. We never have to miss anything significant or insignificant.
In some ways, this unprecedented access means injustice is no longer customarily ignored or brushed aside. We do not remain silent as we mourn and rage against, for example, the deaths of Troy Davis, Renisha McBride, Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner. In other ways, it means we see too much, and are forced into spaces where it is hard to feel an appropriate amount of horror or make sense of anything.
We bear witness to the worst of human brutality, retweet what we have witnessed, and then we move on to the next atrocity. There is always more atrocity.
Journalist James Foley was kidnapped in 2012 while on assignment in Syria. On Tuesday, terrorists from the Islamic State posted a video of what appears to be Foley being beheaded. The video was posted on YouTube and AlFurqan media (though YouTube quickly took the video down). It didn’t matter. Once this sort of thing slithers into the world, the spectacle swells. The images are shared and re-shared and discussed – mostly in horror. But is it horror, really? To click on the video, knowing what you are about to see is to make yourself, in some small way, part of the story. It is to invite the horror upon yourself. We cannot absolve ourselves.
Of course, the terrorists understand this perfectly. They knew what they were doing when they uploaded the video. They understand the economics of spectacle. They supplied an insatiable demand.
In St Louis, Missouri, Kajieme Powell was also killed by a police officer, in broad daylight. The police said that he had a knife raised over his head but, in a video released on Wednesday, we see that, though Powell was agitated and demanding, “Shoot me”, he was several feet away from the police officers. And then, in the video, on YouTube, there is the staccato of 12 gunshots.
The entire tragedy became spectacle because a passerby was filming the incident before, during and after. He was armed with his cellphone. He was primed for a spectacle because this is the culture we have wrought, one in which we are perpetually ready to bear witness even if we do not know, in advance, what we will bear witness to. “I got everything on tape,” says the man with his cellphone, over and over and over again.
In the last minutes of the video of the killing of Kajieme Powell, several other witnesses are seen holding their cellphones up so that they, too – so that we, too – might have a piece of the testimony. No matter where we are, no matter who we are, we can be part of the spectacle. Far too few of us question whether or not we should be.
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https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/feb/24/privately-educated-elite-continues-to-take-top-jobs-finds-survey
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Education
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2016-02-24T00:01:23.000Z
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Sally Weale
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Privately educated elite continues to take top UK jobs, finds survey
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A privately educated elite continues to dominate the UK’s leading professions, taking top jobs in fields as diverse as the law, politics, medicine and journalism, according to new research.
The Sutton Trust educational charity has been carrying out similar surveys for more than a decade, and though it reports “small signs” of progress, this year’s results confirm what has long been known – that if you have a private education, you are considerably more likely to get to the top of British public life.
Although just 7% of the population attend independent fee-paying schools, the survey reveals that almost three quarters (71%) of top military officers were educated privately, with 12% having been taught in comprehensive schools.
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In the field of law, 74% of top judges working in the high court and appeals court were privately educated, while in journalism, more than half (51%) of leading print journalists went to independent schools, with one in five having attended comprehensive schools, which currently educate 88% of the population.
In medicine, meanwhile, Sutton Trust research says 61% of the country’s top doctors were educated at independent schools; nearly a quarter (22%) went to grammar school and the remainder to comprehensives.
In politics, the picture is a little better, with under a third (32%) of MPs having been privately educated, though that figure goes up to half of the cabinet, compared with 13% of the shadow cabinet.
Graduates of Oxford and Cambridge universities also continue to dominate the field, though they educate less than 1% of the population. In law, nearly three quarters (74%) of the top judiciary went to Oxbridge; 54% of the country’s leading journalists went to Oxbridge, and just under half (47%) of the cabinet attended Oxbridge, compared with 32% of the shadow cabinet.
Award-winning British actors are more than twice as likely to have had a private education than award-winning pop stars. Adele, pictured. Photograph: Frank Micelotta/Rex/Shutterstock
The Sutton Trust’s Leading People 2016 report, which is published on Wednesday, tracks the educational backgrounds of leading figures in 10 areas of public life, among them film and music, which make an interesting contrast.
It reveals that award-winning British actors are more than twice as likely to have had a private education than award-winning pop stars. While 42% of British Bafta winners went to an independent school, just 19% of British winners at the Brit music awards were educated privately.
While Eddie Redmayne, star of The Danish Girl; Homeland actor Damian Lewis; and Tom Hiddleston, now starring in the BBC series The Night Manager, famously went to Eton College, the Sutton Trust points out that British music stars like Adele, Imogen Heap and Jessie J found success after attending the state-funded Brit School in Croydon.
The report welcomes a new focus on diversity and professional access, especially in the legal profession and the civil service, and says there are small signs that things may be “slowly changing in certain fields”.
In law, for example, while 76% of top judges attended private schools in the late 1980s, that went down to 75% by the mid-00s and is now at 74%. The report points out leading law firms have adopted a number of social-mobility programmes and the Solicitors Regulation Authority now collects data on solicitors’ educational backgrounds.
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In business too, partly because of the internationalisation of top posts, the report says the proportion of FTSE 100 chief executives educated at independent schools has fallen from 70% in the late 1980s to 54% in the late 2000s and 34% today.
And in journalism the tide may be starting to turn; in the mid-80s more than 90% of leading editors had attended either private or grammar schools. That figure has gone down to 80% today.
In politics, too, there are fewer privately educated members in the current cabinet (50%) than the 2010 coalition cabinet (which had 62%), but the proportion is still slightly higher than Tony Blair’s cabinet (44%) after the 2005 general election.
Sir Peter Lampl, chair of the Sutton Trust, said: “Our research shows that your chances of reaching the top in so many areas of British life are very much greater if you went to an independent school.
“As well as academic achievement, an independent education tends to develop essential skills such as confidence, articulacy and teamwork, which are vital to career success.
“The key to improving social mobility at the top is to open up independent schools to all pupils based on merit not money ... as well as support for highly able students in state schools.”
Russell Hobby, general secretary of school leaders’ union NAHT, called for better – and earlier – careers education in schools. “Once again the Sutton Trust has shown that not all professions are representative of the country at large, something school leaders will read with interest.
“Schools are engines of social mobility, showing that through hard work and application, all pupils can aspire to fulfil their potential, whatever that may be.”
Alan Milburn, chair of the social mobility commission, said: “This report underlines how those from less privileged families are too often shut out from Britain’s top jobs. But it also shows that where firms commit to fairness, progress is possible.
“From the civil service to the law, new schemes to widen access have been announced. But it is time to turn early promise into enduring commitment. Every profession and every large firm should have a clear strategy on social mobility and should publish data showing what impact their strategy is delivering.”
A Department for Education spokesperson defended the government’s record on social mobility and said thanks to its reforms 1.4 million more pupils are being taught in good or outstanding state schools than in 2010.
“University entrants are at an all-time high, with rising numbers of children from disadvantaged backgrounds going to university and the number of disadvantaged students attending Russell Group universities doubling since 2010.
“We are determined to spread this educational excellence everywhere, extending true social mobility for all. We are continuing the pupil premium at current rates for the duration of this parliament, providing billions of pounds to support disadvantaged pupils reach their potential.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/may/22/australian-greens-hails-best-result-ever-with-dramatic-gains-in-lower-house-and-senate
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Australia news
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2022-05-21T14:03:07.000Z
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Caitlin Cassidy
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Australian Greens hail ‘best result ever’ with dramatic gains in lower house and Senate
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Adam Bandt has hailed a “greenslide” as the Greens recorded its best ever election result, winning two lower house seats and holding hopes for two more.
The Greens have won the inner Brisbane seat of Ryan, held Bandt’s own seat of Melbourne and were ahead in the counts for the seats of Brisbane (held by the Liberal National party) and Griffith (Labor’s Terri Butler).
The party also expects to increase its numbers in the Senate, with hopes of winning seats in New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia.
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With uncertainty remaining over whether Labor could form government in its own right, Bandt said the Greens were “willing to talk” with Anthony Albanese.
Bandt said his party always believed a grassroots campaign on climate placed them in a strong position in Queensland, but they had largely been ignored by major parties and the media.
“The Greens are on track for our best result ever,” Bandt said. “People have backed the Greens in record numbers and delivered a massive mandate for action on climate and inequality.”
The Greens launched a huge door-knocking effort in Queensland in a bid to pick up inner-city seats in Brisbane, pushing on climate inaction in the face of the floods that have devastated the region.
The party’s primary vote has increased nationally by 1.9% to 12.3%.
Bandt said the outcome was a result of voters flocking to the party for the first time because of its strong commitment to climate action, including a commitment to net zero by 2030, and its alternative economic policy.
The Greens attracted about 2m primary votes.
“On key questions, economic questions, cost-of-living questions, we’ve offered a real alternative,” Bandt told reporters on Saturday evening.
“On climate, you’ve seen … how much of an issue it was and there was an attempt from Labor and Liberal to bury it.”
The Greens candidate for Ryan, Elizabeth Watson-Brown, told the Guardian she was “still processing” the news of her victory.
“We are witnessing a tectonic shift in Australian politics ... and Queensland is leading the way,” she said.
There was an 11.2% swing to the Greens in Ryan with 54.1% of the vote counted.
The Greens were also ahead in Griffith and leading in Brisbane, but with postal votes still to be counted the final result may not be known for some days.
Teal independents punish Liberal moderates for inaction on climate crisis and integrity commission
Read more
There was an 11.9% swing to the Greens in Griffith, previously held by Labor with a margin of 2.9%. Greens candidate Max Chandler-Mather was leading with 35.6% of the primary vote, with almost 60% of votes counted.
Max Chandler-Mather, Greens candidate in the seat of Griffith, hands out how-to-vote leaflets at the Brisbane State high polling booth on Saturday. Photograph: Darren England/AAP
The Greens took the seat of South Brisbane in the last state election, which is in the same area as Griffith, turfing the former deputy premier Jackie Trad out of parliament.
Chandler-Mather, to chants of “Max, Max, Max”, told a crowd of Greens supporters the results were a “beacon of hope” for people across the nation that you “do not have to settle for the political status quo”.
“Let’s be very clear, we are only just getting started,” he said. “Think about how far we’ve come and imagine were we can go over the next 10 to 15 years if we continue on this trajectory.
“The biggest asset that the political establishment has is low expectations. Well tonight, we raised those expectations.”
There was also a 6.6% swing to the Greens in Brisbane. With almost 60% of the vote counted, Greens candidate Stephen Bates had 28.5% of primary votes, ahead of Labor and just behind sitting LNP member Trevor Evans.
Greens candidate for Brisbane, Stephen Bates. Photograph: Jono Searle/AAP
Bandt, who also received a 2.9% swing in his seat, said the party was hopeful it would pick up Brisbane.
“We’ve run hard in those seats and we will find out soon enough what the results are,” Bandt said.
The Greens also achieved swings in excess of 9% in some regional seats in other states. In the northern NSW seat of Richmond, Greens candidate Mandy Nolan was leading the primary vote at 29.4% with just shy of half of the vote counted.
In the inner Melbourne seat of Macnamara, Greens candidate Steph Hodgins-May had received a 7.2% swing and was trailing 31.4% to Labor’s 32.5% with just over half of the vote counted.
If the party wins the three Senate seats it would bring their number in the upper house to 12 and put them on track to hold the balance of power.
“If we manage that we’ll be the biggest third party in the Senate,” Bandt said.
“We’ve just had three years of droughts and then fires and now floods and floods again. People can see that this is happening and it is unfolding, and I think increasingly what we are seeing is that that cuts across all voting situations, cuts across all demographics.
“In the coming days, if there is a minority parliament we will work towards delivering a stable, effective and progressive government for the country.”
Queensland Greens senator Larissa Waters. Photograph: Jono Searle/AAP
Greens senator Larissa Waters wiped away tears at a party in West End’s Montague Hotel on Saturday evening, where candidates from Brisbane, Griffith and Ryan gathered.
Waters said she was “completely overwhelmed” by results coming through in Brisbane and nationally, and told supporters to “revel in the glory”.
Waters said it was “looking good” that she would soon be joined in parliament by three lower house MPs and one senator from Queensland.
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/apr/02/federal-liberals-preselect-select-nine-election-candidates-in-nsw-seats-despite-legal-challenge
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Australia news
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2022-04-02T00:40:03.000Z
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Anne Davies
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Federal Liberals select nine election candidates in NSW seats despite legal challenge
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A special committee of the federal Liberal party has forged ahead with appointing election candidates in New South Wales, despite a legal challenge now before the NSW court of appeal about the validity of the committee’s previous actions.
Lawyer Jenny Ware has been selected as the Liberal party candidate for Hughes, which is one of the Liberals’ safer seats with a margin of 9.8%, ahead of Melanie Gibbons who is the state MP for the overlapping seat of Holsworthy.
Another lawyer, Katherine Deves, has been selected the Liberal party candidate for Warringah, while businesswoman Maria Kovacic has been selected for Parramatta, which is currently held by Labor with a margin of 3.5%. The local member, Julia Owens, is retiring.
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Kovacic was an ANZ franchisee for 16 years, is a chair for the Hills Community Aid and is on the steering committee of the Parramatta Eels’ Women@Eels.
While Deves will have an uphill battle to defeat independent Zali Steggall, who holds the seat with a 7.2% margin, the move represents a significant boost to the number of women being nominated in blue ribbon or winnable seats.
Jerry Nockles, an executive at the Pharmacy Guild and a former Liberal staffer, has been selected as the Liberals’ candidate for Eden-Monaro, which is also winnable from Labor, which holds it with a slender 0.8%.
It is regarded as one of the bellwether seats in the state.
Finance professional Pradeep Pathi has been selected for Greenway, in Sydney’s north-west, which Labor currently holds on a 2.8% margin.
The committee, comprised of the prime minister, Scott Morrison, the NSW premier, Dominic Perrottet, and a former president of the federal Liberal party, Chris McDiven, took over the NSW branch a week ago, despite a number of preselections being scheduled.
The same committee reappointed two ministers, Sussan Ley and Alex Hawke, as candidates in Farrer and Mitchell, and Trent Zimmerman to North Sydney in March.
That temporary takeover is now the subject of a legal challenge by a member of the state executive, Matthew Camenzuli, whose cousin, Charles Camenzuli, was contesting the preselection for Parramatta.
The case before the NSW court of appeal was heard on Friday as a matter of urgency, and a judgment is expected on Monday.
If Camenzuli wins the case, it could invalidate the actions of the committee, both in relation to the endorsements of the ministers, and this latest intervention.
Morrison could call the election as early as this weekend.
The committee also endorsed candidates for a number of Labor-held seats, which are unlikely to change hands. They include real estate agent Courtney Nguyen in Fowler; small businessman Wenjie Zhang for Grayndler (currently held by the opposition leader, Anthony Albanese), finance executive Vivek Singha in McMahon and nurse Katrina Wark in Newcastle.
“Liberal candidates have been selected and endorsed across nine seats, where they will campaign on behalf of their communities to ensure that people and businesses are able to benefit from our strong economy,” the NSW branch said in statement.
The management of the NSW branch will now be returned to the NSW party at 6pm tonight.
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/mar/06/some-life-problems-arent-especially-hard-to-fix-as-long-as-theyre-not-rushed
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Life and style
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2020-03-06T15:00:39.000Z
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Oliver Burkeman
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Some life problems aren’t especially hard to fix – as long as they're not rushed
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The other day, I fixed a problem with the way our dishwasher connects to the water supply. I’m sharing this story partly because the news headlines are often extremely alarming at the moment, and I thought my stupefyingly boring anecdote might numb you into a few moments of calm. (You’re welcome!) But it also demonstrates the wisdom of an insight I first learned from the psychiatrist M Scott Peck’s classic self-help book The Road Less Travelled: sometimes, all you need to do in order to fix things – in your kitchen, in your life – is to stop, and look, and wait.
Peck recalls chatting with a neighbour who was in the process of repairing his lawnmower, and mentioned his own ineptitude at such practical tasks. “That’s because you don’t take the time,” the neighbour shot back – a comment that gnawed at Peck and resurfaced a few weeks later when the parking brake on a patient’s car got stuck. Normally, he writes, “I would have awkwardly stuck my head under the dashboard; immediately yanked at a few wires without having the foggiest idea of what I was doing, and when nothing constructive resulted, would have thrown up my hands and proclaimed, ‘It’s beyond me!’” Instead, he lay down, got comfortable and looked for several minutes until he could trace the course of the brake apparatus. Finally he noticed a tiny latch that was jammed, and needed only a fingertip’s pressure to release it. Voilà! It wasn’t that the problem had been especially difficult; it was just that it couldn’t be rushed.
This bit of wisdom would be useful enough if it applied only to fixing home appliances and cars. But Peck’s larger point is that we hurry our personal problems, too: we race toward a resolution because we can’t tolerate the discomfort and uncertainty of waiting to work out the best one. And so we snap at our partners, discipline our kids in unhelpful ways, abandon creative projects, break off relationships, and much more, because at least then the matter’s been “dealt with”. But usually badly – because if dishwashers and cars are complex things, human affairs are more so.
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One ironic result is how it can feel more comfortable to embrace being terrible at something than risk getting better at it, even though the latter might prove more rewarding. There’s a certain type of parent, for example, who strikes me as a little too invested in how triumphantly rubbish they claim to be at parenting. To be fair, that’s probably a healthier attitude than anxious perfectionism. But you can’t help wondering what’s driving their performative incompetence. Is it that they’re unwilling to work on getting better, because that would entail spending time in the uneasy place between acknowledging they had problems and knowing how to solve them?
What makes our intolerance for un-dealt-with problems so absurd is that life, from one perspective, is nothing but problems – or “challenges”, if you prefer – and a completely problem-free life would be devoid of anything worth doing, and thus of any value. So there’s no sense in rushing to solve any given problem solely to get it dealt with. There’s always another one waiting to replace it – and thank goodness for that.
Listen to this
The psychiatrist Judson Brewer explains why staying present with unpleasant emotions is key to breaking bad habits in an episode of the Deconstructing Yourself podcast.
[email protected]
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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/mar/13/uk-save-money-brexit-obr-divorce-bill
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Politics
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2018-03-13T17:08:42.000Z
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Richard Partington
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UK will save no money from Brexit for next five years, says OBR
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The UK will save no money from leaving the European Union over the next five years and could be paying its Brexit divorce bill until at least 2064, according to the government’s independent budget watchdog.
Outlining the cost of severing links with the EU, the Office for Budget Responsibility said government spending up until 2023 would have been the same if the UK had voted to remain in the 2016 referendum.
On the current course assumed by the OBR, the financial settlement required to leave the EU and spending to replace European funding in the UK will cost the country just as much as full membership.
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The latest estimate for the cost of settling the UK’s debts with Brussels comes after Theresa May agreed to a financial settlement in December so that talks could move on to the country’s future trading relationship. The OBR, in documents released alongside the chancellor’s spring statement, said it expected the total settlement would be about £37.1bn, which is in line with the sum previously quoted by the prime minister of between £35bn and £39bn.
However, the independent economic forecaster also revealed payments could be made to Brussels until at least 2064, a period after leaving the EU next year equal to the entire duration of Britain’s membership since the mid-1970s. The payments mainly relate to the country’s share of €76.7bn (£68bn) in EU pensions scheme liabilities.
Although the prospect of long-term payments to Brussels is likely to infuriate hardline Tory Brexiters, the OBR said the costs were front-loaded so the bulk of payments would be made over the next few years. The payments are likely to peak at about £10bn in 2020 before falling sharply and amounting to less than £300m in every year after 2027.
The budget watchdog said it was important not to view these costs in isolation as there were likely to be much bigger consequences from leaving the EU. It said lower migration, sluggish productivity growth and an economic slowdown – as well as higher inflation due to the fall in the pound – would lead government borrowing to increase by about £15bn a year by 2023.
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https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/jul/18/norman-rees-obituary
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Television & radio
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2023-07-18T16:54:43.000Z
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Anthony Hayward
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Norman Rees obituary
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Norman Rees, who has died aged 84, spent three decades travelling the globe as an ITV news reporter. Home and abroad, he was usually in the right place at the right time – through luck or design – and enterprising in getting the story.
In Washington in 1974 during the Watergate hearings, he elicited a response from the disgraced president Richard Nixon that he “screwed it up and paid the price”.
Six years later – by now ITN’s Washington correspondent – Rees drove through the night to New York to report on the murder of John Lennon, arriving just before dawn to compile a report and get the reactions of grieving fans.
Not averse to taking risks, following his time in the US, in 1981 he reported on a massacre by government troops in a village outside Kampala that led to his deportation by the Ugandan president, Milton Obote.
A year later, he covered the Falklands war from Argentina and, in the immediate aftermath of the Belgrano sinking, sought reactions from the public. “It was not the best moment to be a British reporter in Buenos Aires,” he reflected.
ITN, the producer of ITV news programmes, won Bafta’s award for best actuality coverage with his dispatches from Lebanon in 1983, when the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was based there and rival PLO factions were fighting each other – with children caught in the crossfire.
Rees could also find humour in news. Accompanying the new Labour party leader Neil Kinnock on a photo opportunity at the 1983 Brighton conference, he witnessed the politician’s famous fall on the beach and ventured in his report: “Now that sort of thing is just not supposed to happen.”
More seriously, he travelled with Diana, Princess of Wales on her 1989 tour of the far east, where she shook hands with leprosy patients in Indonesia, dispelling myths surrounding the condition. Rees eloquently observed: “She touched the untouchable.”
In 1996 he was deeply affected by covering the shooting of 16 pupils and a teacher at Dunblane primary school, near Stirling. Later, he said: “In scenes of great tragedy and conflict, a reporter has to be touched by what he’s seeing. I don’t think the reports would be as valuable if we didn’t get a feeling of involvement and concern on behalf of the reporter.”
Norman was born in Cardiff to Maisel (nee Fish) and Daniel Rees, a newspaper packer, and attended Canton high school. The future broadcaster John Humphrys was a friend in the Splott area of the city. He joined the Western Mail in Cardiff as a junior reporter in 1956 and displayed another skill, as a singer, on forming the Weavers pop group, who won a national talent show and appeared on the BBC show Six-Five Special in 1958.
Norman Rees, centre in hood, on an National Union of Journalists’ picket line in 1974. Top row from left: Michael Nicholson, Peter Sissons and David Rose. Bottom row, from left: Gerald Seymour, Anthony Carthey, Rees, Keith Hatfield and Gordon Honeycombe. Photograph: ANL/Shutterstock
He moved to television as a reporter in 1963 with TWW, the ITV company covering Wales and the west of England. He rose to become deputy news editor, then in 1968 joined ITN in London as a news editor. Four years later, he switched to reporting, covering Northern Ireland and also the cod war fishing dispute – from aboard an Icelandic gunboat.
Sometimes, the best laid plans went adrift. In 1975, Rees arrived in Australia for Scotland Yard’s extradition of the “missing” MP John Stonehouse after faking his own death. Rees had an agreement that detectives would not interfere if Stonehouse agreed to talk to him on the flight home, but the politician proceeded to give an interview to the BBC, then refused to speak to Rees because of a previous row with an ITV company boss.
This left him in despair, realising that not only would he be unable to send an interview back to London by satellite during a stopover in Hong Kong, but that he was being scooped by the opposition.
His Australian camera operator came to the rescue, reminding the married Stonehouse that he had provided refuge for his secretary and lover, Sheila Buckley, when she was besieged by the press. The interview was completed just before touchdown in Hong Kong and the film headed to ITN.
After standing in several times for Michael Brunson in the US, Rees became Washington correspondent (1977-81). One of his last assignments was the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. He reported the president broadly quoting Winston Churchill to say: “There’s no more exhilarating feeling than being shot at without result.”
In 1984, he became ITN’s chief assistant editor – and continued to present weekend and early-morning news programmes occasionally – but soon returned to the field and in the 1990s was on News at Ten’s special reports team.
Rees retired from ITN in 1999, the year when News at Ten was axed by ITV (only to be revived later) and he presented a seven-minute “obituary” in what was believed to be the final bulletin.
He is survived by his wife, Andrea (nee Norton), whom he married in 1961, and their children, Nicola and Andrew.
Norman Charles Rees, television journalist, born 2 March 1939; died 14 June 2023
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/sep/22/chvrches-bones-what-you-believe
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Music
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2013-09-21T23:05:10.000Z
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Ally Carnwath
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Chvrches: The Bones of What You Believe – review
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Chvrches' first album comes loaded with considerably more expectation than their first single, Lies, which emerged online without fanfare last summer, before nagging its way into influential ears. The Glasgow trio ranked highly in the BBC's new year industry poll, and toured with Depeche Mode, but there's enough crunch to their hooky electropop to dispel accusations of unwarranted hype. They are more robust and melodic than arty peers such as Grimes and Purity Ring – choruses are foregrounded, synthy jabs pummel Lauren Mayberry's vocals, beats drop from satisfying heights – but Mayberry's lyrics also carry a subversive twist of angst and obsession.
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https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/mar/30/arts-council-funding-winners-losers
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Culture
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2011-03-30T20:16:41.000Z
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Maev Kennedy
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Arts council funding: the winners and losers
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Almost one in four of the Arts Council funding losers – 47 of the 206 organisations losing their entire grants – are based in London. The capital and the south-east were hit hard, but that partly reflects the number of arts organisations based there.
Although a cash increase was announced for 321 organisations nationally, allowing for inflation running at over 4% only 275 will see an increase in real terms. Most of the organisations get well under £500,000 a year, with only 65 over the £800,000 mark – and of those, 54 will suffer a real-terms cut. Many of the biggest, including the Royal Shakespeare Company, will see their money cut by 15% in real terms over the three-year funding agreement. In percentage terms many small regional organisations, particularly those with contemporary art and music and touring ambitions, have done best. Here are some real-term winners and losers by region and discipline:
London
Art
ICA, where new director Gregor Muir took office only last month: 42% cut
Barbican arts centre: 108% increase
Theatre
Shared Experience: entire grant cut
Almeida: 49% cut
Arcola: 82% increase
Punchdrunk: 141% increase
Music
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment: 15% real-terms cut
Dance
The Place: 20% cut.
The Cholmondeleys and the Featherstonehaughs: entire grant cut
Literature
English Pen, promoter of writers and writing: 190% increase
Poetry Book Society, established by TS Eliot in 1953: entire grant cut
North-east and north-west
Art
Baltic centre for contemporary art, Gateshead: increase to nearly £3m
Mima (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art): 143% increase
Yorkshire Sculpture Park: 15% cut
Museums
Sheffield contemporary art programme: grant cut
Theatre
Theatre by the Lake, Keswick: 22% increase
Maltings Theatre, Berwick: 270% increase
Dance
Ballet Lorent, Gateshead: 35% increase
Music
Psappha, a new music group based in Glossop, Derbyshire: 40% increase
Literature
New Writing North: 50% increase
Midlands
Art
Phoenix Arts, Leicester: new grant
Lincoln Arts Trust: almost 300% increase
Threshold Studios, Northampton: 108% increase
Theatre
Buxton Opera House: 10% cut
Red Earth Theatre, Derbyshire: new grant
Dance
Retina dance company, Nottingham: 25% increase
Dance4, Nottingham: 47% increase
Literature
Tindal Street, a Birmingham-based independent publisher: entire grant cut
East, south-east and south
Art
Colchester Arts Centre: 53% increase
Norfolk and Norwich festival: 87% increase
ArtSway, New Forest: entire grant cut
Towner Gallery, Eastbourne: 81% increase
Theatre
Watermill Theatre Newbury: 28% increase
Trestle theatre, based in St Albans: grant cut
New Theatre Royal, Portsmouth: 50% cut
Music
Britten Sinfonia: 12% increase
Glyndebourne touring opera and education: 2% cut
Academy of Ancient Music, Cambridge: £171,000 first-time grant
Aldeburgh Music: 10% cut
Dance
Dance East, Ipswich: 27% increase
South-west
Art
Cornwall Arts Centre, Truro: 24% cut
Dorchester Arts Centre: 56% increase
Watershed Arts, Bristol: 106% increase
Theatre
Bristol Old Vic: no change
Forkbeard Fantasy, Bristol: entire grant cut
Northcott theatre, Exeter: entire grant cut
Music
Bath Festivals: 11% cut
Wren Music, Devon: entire grant cut
Dance
Dance South West: 103% increase
this article was amended on 1 April 2011. The original said incorrectly that Phoenix Arts, Leicester and Red Earth Theatre, Derbyshire had had their grants cut. In fact they have new grants. This has been corrected.
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/no-helmets-required/2023/sep/21/championship-finale-season-thriller-top-bottom-rugby-league-second-tier
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Sport
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2023-09-21T10:10:14.000Z
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Gavin Willacy
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Expect a thrilling finale in the rugby league Championship this weekend
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When IMG “reimagined rugby league”, they would have struggled to come up with climaxes to the season that are as tight as the ones we have this year – not just in Super League but also in the Championship. The last weekend of the season in the second tier is going to be thrilling, with almost everyone fighting for their lives and little decided until the final whistle.
Going into the final round of regular season games, only two of the 14 clubs in the league know which division they will be in next season: midtable Widnes and relegated Newcastle. The top four clubs – league leaders Featherstone, runners-up Toulouse, surprise package Sheffield Eagles and Bradford Bulls – have booked their spots in the playoffs. The four sides below them are scrambling for the final two playoff spots. And the four teams above Newcastle are still fighting to avoid going down with them when the music stops on Sunday evening.
This time next year clubs near the top of the Championship will be comparing IMG points as much as league positions, working out how they can garner more points than the club that finishes bottom of Super League. It may well be a shambles. With Wakefield finally relegated after years of circling the Super League plughole, any other club hoping to pip them to promotion next year will not only have to win the Championship grand final but also have more IMG points than both Trinity and whoever is bottom of Super League. Given that Wakefield have a revamped stadium, an academy, a women’s team and an average gate of 4,000 fans, that seems unlikely.
This season was the last chance for wealthy owners to invest heavily in players to win promotion to the top flight. From next year, widespread investment in club infrastructure will be required to secure sufficient IMG points to reach Super League. None of this year’s promotion contenders resembles a Super League side, as Leigh did a year ago and Toronto, to a lesser degree, in 2019. Even Featherstone, the odds-on favourites who eased to the League Leaders Shield, did so with few experienced top-flight players still at their peak.
Below Featherstone, in an intense penultimate round last weekend, two games were decided by a single point, another pair by two. One of those games was at Wimbledon, where Bradford Bulls edged London Broncos 12-10 to leapfrog above them into fourth. Bradford looked solid and extremely hard to break down.
London Broncos making capital gains as they target Super League return
Read more
At the heart of that effort was former France captain Jason Baitieri. A veteran of 250 appearances with Catalans, he is having his first taste of the Championship after a season in Elite 1, the top tier in France. “Going from Super League to Elite 1 was a big drop, and the Championship is a step back up,” says the Paris-born loose forward.
“There’s less speed than Super League but it’s a lot more physical. We’ve played Featherstone, York and London in the last three weeks and the physicality really stepped up. London are in really good form but we understood what they wanted to do and executed the gameplan really well. We were a lot more disciplined than we’ve been in the last couple of weeks.”
Bradford are unpredictable but a win over Sheffield would take them to third, their highest finish since 2015. “It’s not just Bradford – most teams in the Championship have been inconsistent,” says Baitieri. “But for us to get consistency is about individual preparation. It’s about individuals doing their jobs for 80 minutes: that’s where you get good performances. We need four more now.”
At 34 and with a family vineyard in the south of France beckoning, Baitieri is hoping to end his storied career in style: “I’m in the twilight end and I’m here to do a job. If we get to the playoffs, get to the final and win, that would be great. I’d be so happy for the club. It would be the cherry on top. As far as playing in Super League, I don’t think I would. I’d love to go out on a high.”
Keighley are in the thick of the relegation battle. Photograph: Olly Hassell/SWpix.com
The relegation battle is as exciting as the race for the playoffs. The four clubs above Newcastle – Barrow Raiders, Whitehaven, Keighley Cougars and Swinton Lions – go into the final day knowing a victory could keep them up, but might not.
It’s all change from a year ago. This time last season we wondered if Barrow might gatecrash the top flight against all odds. The year before, Whitehaven secured an equally extraordinary playoff place. They have both spent this summer aiming for the safety of 12th place.
“We’ve got one of, if not the, lowest budgets and our target all the way has just been to stay up,” says Whitehaven coach Jonty Gorley. “I told my backroom staff at the start of the season I didn’t want to have to go into the last three games needing anything, but that’s what’s happened.”
The survival battle is closer than a Mikey Lewis buzzcut. Swinton’s extraordinary 21-20 win over Whitehaven on Sunday means four teams are separated by just one point. Barrow’s hugely superior points difference means they could survive even if they lose at home to York this weekend, but the other three clubs have the same number of points and near identical points differences. A dead heat remains a possibility.
Gorley is aware that points difference could be crucial. “We’ve been blown out a few times – both games against Featherstone, away at Toulouse and Halifax – and at the time you think those aren’t the results that impact on where you finish, but they have,” he says. “Every point counts.”
All four strugglers have beaten clubs who are heading to the playoffs and yet, until Barrow beat Swinton in early September, none had won more than half of their four-pointers against each other. “Keighley and Barrow have done the double over us and we’ve done the double over Sheffield and York – it’s bizarre,” says Gorley, who grew up in Whitehaven and is desperate for them not to drop out of the second division on his watch.
“When we go into games with no pressure on us and are a bit more relaxed, we’ve done well,” says Gorley, whose injury-ravaged side have lost five on the bounce at the worst possible time. “My lads are looking at the floor and I’m trying to get their heads up and get my belief into them.”
Quick Guide
Championship fixtures
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There is hope for Whitehaven yet: Toulouse are guaranteed a playoff spot so might not send their a full strength team on the mammoth trip to west Cumbria on Saturday afternoon. Swinton and Keighley, who go to playoff chasers Halifax and London, respectively, will be desperately hoping that Toulouse do them a favour. Someone is likely to go down via points difference, and three small clubs, who would all look equally at home in the third division, will stay in the second.
If Barrow stay up, the relegated clubs can argue that the extra fixture caused by the Summer Bash ended up dictating the outcome of the whole season. Barrow were alone among the bottom five to win that weekend in late May. But for their victory over Haven, Barrow would be second bottom going into their win-or-bust game at home to York on Sunday.
Whatever happens, nothing IMG comes up with will match the excitement levels of this Championship climax.
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/sep/18/joseph-gordon-levitt-edward-snowden-the-walk-interview
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Film
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2015-09-18T14:00:12.000Z
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Tom Lamont
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Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 'Edward Snowden was warm, kind, thoughtful'
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There are only a dozen customers in the restaurant in Los Angeles, but even then it takes three passes of the room to pick him out. Joseph Gordon-Levitt sits alone, folded in on himself – right leg tucked over left, shoulders hunched, an Anglepoise-like arm on his thigh propping a smartphone in front of his face. The 34-year-old actor wears a pair of black specs, a navy T-shirt and dark jeans. He looks so unremarkable, sitting there, I have to peer close to make sure this is the guy who was in one of the Batman movies; who starred in two of the smartest summer blockbusters of recent years, Looper and Inception; whom I watched on TV every week in the 90s sitcom 3rd Rock From The Sun.
Um, Joseph?
“Joe!” he says, glancing up and smiling. He puts away the phone.
His was the name you always noticed in the credits of 3rd Rock, a smart comedy about aliens who lived on Earth. A six-syllable mouthful, and that “Gordon” never quite confirming itself as a middle or last name. When he disappeared for a time, emerging several years later as a credible indie-flick actor, I already felt inclined to root for him: a young man who’d somehow managed that rare transition from cheesy primetime to real actors’ acting. In the decade since, Gordon-Levitt has built up a genuinely varied CV, strong on festival-circuit thinkers, smart action movies, edgy comedies. This autumn, he enters biopic territory, the customary stalking ground of Academy voters.
In The Walk, directed by Robert Zemeckis, he plays Philippe Petit, the guy who walked on a wire between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974 (you’ll know him as the subject of James Marsh’s Oscar-winning documentary Man On Wire). And in Snowden, Oliver Stone’s much anticipated movie about the NSA whistleblower, he will play the title role. To prepare for The Walk, Gordon-Levitt learned a bunch of circus skills and magic tricks; and ahead of Snowden, he flew to Russia for a secret meeting with the exiled whistleblower himself. The two experiences have combined to make him an expert at hiding in plain sight. In the restaurant, I tell him I could have gone another couple of laps without noticing him.
“What were you expecting?” he asks, interested. “Something like this?” And with a deft, thespy shift, he transforms himself into That Guy: the eyebrows cocked, his mouth pursed, arms winged out on seat backs either side, the legs spread belligerently wide. I like him immediately.
We settle in, Gordon-Levitt inspecting the menu and ordering their one thing with avocado (“always avocado”). When the food comes, he spreads a napkin on his lap and eats with neat little movements of his knife and fork. “He was in good spirits,” he says of his meeting with Snowden. “Certainly there was that note, that he very much would like to come home. He doesn’t want to live in Russia at all.”
Gordon-Levitt comes from a long line of Californian liberals: his grandfather was a director who was once blacklisted by Hollywood; his parents are Jewish intellectuals who met while working on a leftwing radio station. He once made a self-funded documentary about the Occupy movement, and has spoken in support of internet freedoms. When he met Snowden, he was in research rather than support mode, “wanting to understand this person that I was going to play, observing both his strengths and his weaknesses”. Even so, he was dying to keep a record of their four-hour conversation, but was advised not to. For a long while afterwards, Snowden’s lawyers did not even want Gordon-Levitt to admit the meeting had taken place. This is the first time he has spoken publicly about it.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Oliver Stone’s Edward Snowden biopic. Photograph: Rex
“I left knowing without a doubt that what [Snowden] did, he did because he believed it was the right thing to do, that he believed it would help the country he loves. Now, as he would say, it’s not for him to say whether it was right or wrong. That’s really for people to decide on their own, and I would encourage anybody to decide that on their own. I don’t want to be the actor guy who’s like, ‘You should listen to me! What he did was right!’ I don’t think that’s my place. Even though that is what I believe – that what he did was right.”
He says Snowden reminded him a lot of Petit, the wire-walker. “What I found was someone warm, kind, thoughtful: a lot like Philippe. Both of them are incredibly driven towards something they believe in.” In preparation for The Walk, he all but moved in with Petit, spending a week in a disused warehouse with the Frenchman, learning to juggle, perform tricks and, above all, how to walk on a wire.
For insurance reasons, Gordon-Levitt was supposed to wear a safety harness whenever he was up on a wire, but Petit is no great follower of rules. Long ago, the Frenchman illegally wire-walked between the spires of Notre Dame; his subsequent stunt at the World Trade Center became world famous, not only as an act of bravery, but also as a symbol of civil disobedience. So, as early as day two in their training, Petit came up with a ruse to get around the insurance business: he invited the actor up on to a wire that was 6ft above the ground, and then winkingly recommended he try wearing a “special, technologically advanced, Russian-made safety harness that looks invisible”. Six feet might not sound that high, Gordon-Levitt tells me, but try being up there with only a make-believe safety harness.
He came to agree with Petit’s world view – that wire-walking was not only a physical skill, but “a metaphor for life itself”. And if you know a little about Gordon-Levitt’s background, it’s easy to see why he might think this way. He recently got married, to a business director in the tech industry called Tasha McCauley. (His wife works for a software company that makes explorable virtual maps of cities. At the time of our lunch, she was weeks away from giving birth to their first child.) He doesn’t like to discuss their relationship, and all he wants to say is, “I feel content. I feel lucky.”
At the same time, he knows what it’s like to be unsteadied by professional disappointment – and, worse, to be toppled, outright, by personal tragedy. In 2010, he lost his older brother Dan (“my best friend”) in what he has previously described as a “drug-related accident”. Gordon-Levitt’s grief is still real and knotted up with all sorts of contradictory impulses, as he goes on to explain. For now, he alludes to his brother in passing, telling me that “wire-walking is a metaphor for just waking up in the morning and being alive. Which sometimes feels impossible. Which sometimes feels meaningless. In which it can sometimes be really hard to provide yourself with a good answer to, ‘Why should I wake up and get out of bed? Why should I care? Does this mean anything at all?’”
A
s a boy, Gordon-Levitt would blow out the candles on his birthday cake and wish for employment. Not for a 10-speed bike or a Nintendo – a gig. “I just loved being on set so much. I always wanted to be working.” He grew up in LA with his parents, Jane (the Gordon) and Dennis (the Levitt), and brother Dan. The family lived a few roads away from a Hollywood casting agency, so it was not all that unusual for the youngest to be tapped up by an agent after playing the scarecrow in a school production of The Wizard Of Oz at the age of six.
He went on to make guest appearances in Quantum Leap, Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman, LA Law and Murder, She Wrote. In the early 1990s, he won an industry award for being the best actor under 10, after a brief appearance in Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It. He remembers wanting a job as a recurring character in a sitcom more than anything: “Then you’d get to work all the time.” When 3rd Rock From The Sun started in 1996, Gordon-Levitt was one of four leads and, at 15, the youngest. “To be involved! As a kid! To play as important a role as all these adults!”
Stylist: Jenny Ricker at Starworks. Grooming: Sabrina Bedrani for Dior Beauty. Shirt, ATM. Chinos, Levi’s. Trainers, Adidas Gazelle. Photograph: Patrick Fraser/The Guardian
These days, he still looks much younger than his years: sub-6ft, slight, blemishless skin. A founding conceit of 3rd Rock was that the aliens hadn’t managed to choose human bodies that matched their extraterrestrial identities. Gordon-Levitt played Tommy, an elderly alien who’d wound up a human teenager. It was a bit of casting that Gordon-Levitt’s co-star in the show, John Lithgow, found very appropriate. “He was a very mature boy,” Lithgow once recalled. “I remember him carrying on about the ecological damage that is done when people build new golf courses. What teenager worries about that?”
I ask Gordon-Levitt if his youthful looks factored in him taking outsize satisfaction in gaining adult employment as a boy. “When I was a teenager, I was insecure about looking so young,” he says. “I had long hair. People thought I was a girl. I remember the dude at the shoe store once being, like, ‘Can I help you, miss?’”
High school was a tricky time for him; he was never consistently present because of filming. “Whether it was playing sports or, as I got older, meeting girls, I very much wanted to have those experiences. But it was challenging, sometimes, to have them be normal while also working.” He loved being a child actor, but he had some unwelcome responsibilities even then, among them “a very special kind of hell” that was his obligation to attend an annual teen celebrity conference.
“I found it stomach-turning and uncomfortable. But they used to do these yearly super-conventions of teen magazine press, and that was my compromise when it came to promoting 3rd Rock – that I would go to these and I wouldn’t do the other shit.” At one conference, when he was about 14, a journalist noticed he didn’t look comfortable and asked why. “I think this is all pornography,” Gordon-Levitt replied. The answer didn’t cause offence, he remembers; the interview just carried on.
We talk about a difficult time in his life after 3rd Rock ended. Gordon-Levitt fell into a slump, part of him keen to stay in the business, part of him desperately wanting out. “I was 19. I wanted to know what it was like to have a different future.” He enrolled to study French at Columbia University in New York, but only completed what he later termed “about half a bachelor’s degree”. He couldn’t quite shake the acting bug, and drifted back towards an industry that didn’t fully seem to want him. Before his hiatus, he’d been a bit-player in a couple of mainstream movies, playing a first-act murder victim in a Halloween reboot, a supporting nerd in the teen comedy 10 Things I Hate About You. His agents suggested he might try to get more work such as this. Perhaps he could try for another sitcom?
“I really didn’t want to,” Gordon-Levitt says. “I was lucky to have made money when I was young, so I didn’t have to take jobs that everyone said I should take.” When asked what sort of acting he did want to do, he would reply: I want to be in a movie that might play at Sundance. Or something by Quentin Tarantino.
There was “a good year, if not more” of being turned away by casting directors. “There were moments, days even, of listlessness. You know, wallowing in self-rejection and loathing and despair. I also had pretty strong moments of intense optimism.” With Dan, then working as a computer programmer, he had founded a small online collective called hitrecord.org. It was a gathering place for filmmakers, artists, writers, musicians and techies that started as a messageboard and grew to become a giltzy hub from which people could launch creative collaborations. “My resolution was, ‘I might never get another acting job again. But I’m not cool with never getting to make any more of these things that I love making, so I’m going to do it myself.’”
The grieving I do for my brother has evolved. I feel lucky to report that, now, it's usually accompanied by some beauty
With his late brother, Dan. Photograph: Getty Images
Through hitrecord.org, he starting making his own short films, including an adaptation of a Jacques Prévert poem about snails. Maybe the industry sensed his new industriousness: Gordon-Levitt’s losing streak came to an end, and he started getting cast in the sort of low-budget, juicily scripted, commercially unpromising films he’d longed for. In Mysterious Skin (2004) he played a troubled teenage drug hustler. In Brick (2005), which won a jury prize at Sundance, he was a troubled teenage private eye. In 2009, he fronted a quiet little romcom, (500) Days Of Summer, that became a surprise smash.
Around then, he was called in to meet with Christopher Nolan. “I didn’t even know what the script was – you couldn’t read it.” Nolan was preparing to make Inception, his ambitious sci-fi movie in which Leonardo DiCaprio would lead a team of stick-up artists through a string of robberies that took place inside people’s dreams. Nolan was looking for a last member of the gang, Arthur, who’d spearhead a wacky, zero-gravity sequence. The scene wound up being the movie’s most memorable, with Gordon-Levitt taking part in a balletic feat of floaty wire work as he fought and subdued a gang of hoodlums. In the pantheon of insanely cool Hollywood heists, it’s up there with the Italian Job subway chase, or the Mission: Impossible ceiling-drop. Nolan used Gordon-Levitt again two years later, casting him as one of Batman’s sidekicks in The Dark Knight Rises. That summer, he played the lead in Looper, a big‑budget action film made by the director of Brick, Rian Johnson.
When he was approached to be in the Tarantino movie Django Unchained – the dream! – Gordon-Levitt surprised people by saying no: his heart was set on directing a small movie he’d written himself. “There were people asking me, ‘Are you sure?’” he recalls.
Don Jon, written while he was making Batman, was a film about an internet-porn addict. The kernel of the idea had lodged in his mind years earlier, at that hateful teen magazine convention. “It was that idea of objectifying people, what happens when people treat each other like things. In Don Jon, that took shape in a guy watching porn, but it also took shape in how he treated the women he met at bars, how he treated his friends, his parents, his church, his car… Everything was a thing, an object, in his mind.”
Odd and original, Don Jon captures, in a Nora Ephron-ish or Woody Allen-like way, a very specific cultural moment as 21st-century society began its struggle with the availability of 24-hour porn. Critical reaction was mixed – “How does a nice Jewish boy like him come up with an idea like this?” one interviewer asked – and the film did not make money. “There were people who warned of the downsides,” Gordon-Levitt says, “and there were downsides that came to pass. If I’d wanted to, I could have made a standard romantic comedy that made more money. But why should I?” He says this was something he learned from his brother, not automatically to take the path of least resistance.
Dan, who was seven years older, was clearly a big influence on his younger brother. “He was my idol,” Gordon-Levitt says. “Then, as we got older, we became more like peers. Confidants.” Dan died just as hitrecord.org was beginning to flourish; when news of his death hit the site, tributes were uploaded – videos of a raggedly handsome man with a beard and dreadlocks and a fantastically bizarre dress sense, camouflage matched with sequins. Gordon-Levitt uploaded a message to say he’d be taking a short break to grieve, but he added: “[Dan] would absolutely positively insist that we not let this bad news deter us on our collective mission.”
That word, “mission”, was selected with care, he tells me now. “It was one of Dan’s favourite words. He would say it all the time, sometimes with profundity, sometimes with perfect triviality. Like, ‘We’re going on an orange juice mission!’ That’s exactly how my brother was.”
Gordon-Levitt’s demeanour when he talks about his brother is one of halting animation. He leans forward on his elbows and speaks in excited blasts, only to cut himself off and pause, looking off to the left or right.
Not so long ago, he gave an interview to GQ in which the writer said Dan had died “of an alleged drug overdose”. Gordon-Levitt posted a message denying this overdose on Tumblr, describing it as “an irresponsible claim”. (GQ stood by its story.) “I’ve had negative experiences in the past talking to journalists about my brother,” he says, “and, I don’t know, I’m hoping that you’re going to be considerate. Especially to my parents, who are going to read this, because they’ve really been hurt in the past. But I do want to talk about this, because, I guess, I trust you, and also because, as I was grieving, I found it helpful to… I mean, just reading different people talk about their grieving processes, it helped.”
‘Wire-walking is a metaphor for just waking up in the morning and being alive. Which sometimes feels impossible,’ says Gordon-Levitt. Photograph: Sony Pictures
He says that not so long ago, while he was training with Petit, he felt a potent reconnection with his brother. It was during one of those sessions in which the actor was up on a 6ft-high wire in his invisible harness. He was inching along, utterly terrified, “and halfway across, I guess Philippe noticed that I was getting scared. He said one word: ‘Breathe’.” “Breathe” was another of his brother’s words. “Dan used to say it all the time. Just that one word. It was the most powerful moment, to be up there on the wire, and to have him say that very thing.”
Was it a happy sensation, or a sad one? He pauses for a long time, staring away. Finally, he says, “The grieving that I do for my brother, it’s evolved over five years. I feel lucky to report that the grief, now, is usually accompanied by some beauty. But the beauty, it’s accompanied by more grief. Things have sort of become more nuanced. That moment with Philippe, was there a sadness to it? Yes, it was deeply painful. But that pain was sort of simultaneous to – and inseparable from – a rare elation.”
It occurs to me, sitting there, that Gordon-Levitt had said he felt Snowden reminded him of Petit, and also that Petit reminded him of his brother. “Why not make a mission out of it?” is how Gordon-Levitt sums up the trio’s common attitude. “Whether it’s getting orange juice or walking on a high wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center, why not make it a mission and really go for it? Why amble? You could go through life saying, ‘I have this vision of walking on a high wire between the World Trade Center towers. But that’s impossible, I’ll never do it.’ That’s the path of least resistance. I do that all the time, every day, we all do, we pick the path of least resistance sometimes. But isn’t life sort of made of those moments where you make the decision… to go on the mission instead?”
The Walk is released on 2 October; Snowden in early 2016.
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/aug/14/candide-review-scottish-opera-leonard-bernstein-glasgow
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Music
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2022-08-14T14:32:41.000Z
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Rowena Smith
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Candide review – Voltaire and Bernstein enter the social media era
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At the time of year when Edinburgh is considered to be the epicentre of Scottish culture, Scottish opera has just staged the not to be missed musical event of the season in Glasgow with its inventive, invigorating production of Candide. The company has pedigree with Leonard Bernstein’s flawed masterpiece: the definitive “Scottish Opera version” was created with the maestro’s protege, John Mauceri, at the helm and Bernstein himself overseeing in Glasgow in the late 80s.
If that was a thoroughly traditional affair, all big wigs and bigger frocks, then Jack Furness’s brilliant and bold new production takes an entirely fresh look at the piece. Staged as a promenade performance in a marquee in the company’s production studios – the setting for last summer’s memorable Falstaff – this production reimagines Candide for the social media age. It’s a brilliant conceit: the glib superficiality of Dr Pangloss’s philosophy that “this is the best of all possible worlds” is a perfect fit for the vacuous nature of an age of reality TV and Instagram celebrity. At the same time, the series of disasters that befall the hapless Candide and his companions – war, religious persecution, slavery and violence – remain all too relevant today.
Perfect fit … Ronald Samm as Dr Pangloss. Photograph: James Glossop
This is a totally immersive production in which the action takes place around, above and through the audience, the visual focus shifting as the action moves from one location to the next. Particularly powerful is the use of the community choir, flashmob style, blurring the boundaries between performers and audience. Turning the narrator figure (intended to be the author Voltaire) into a series of TV anchors and journalists works superbly, as the action is captured in real time by the video cameras of the press.
The visual spectacle of the production is underwritten by some fantastic musicality – no mean feat given that the Orchestra of Scottish Opera is fixed in position as the action romps across the space. With the use of cameras and a couple of assistant directors, conductor Stuart Stratford ensures the action moves forward with unerring pace. He’s aided by a series of superbly sung and characterised performances from his cast. Ronald Samm is a flamboyantly scarlet-suited Dr Pangloss, as much a celebrity as the young people he instructs: William Morgan’s wide-eyed Candide; Paula Sides’ slinky Cunegonde (whose set piece Glitter and Be Gay is a tour de force); and Dan Shelvey’s seductively androgynous Maximilian. Susan Bullock and Jamie MacDougall have a lot fun as the old woman and a rogues gallery of senior men respectively while Lea Shaw is suitably coquettish as the wily servant Paquette.
Seductive … the community choir with Dan Shelvey as Maximillian. Photograph: James Glossop
For all its humour and witty one-liners, Candide’s subject matter is strong stuff – sensitively handled here, although not glossed over. The result is a performance that is witty and engaging but ultimately also deeply moving.
At Scottish Opera Production Studios, Glasgow, until 20 August.
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/mar/22/waiting-for-a-star-to-fall-boy-meets-girl-on-how-they-made-a-pop-classic
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Music
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2021-03-22T15:33:32.000Z
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Dave Simpson
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Waiting for a Star to Fall: Boy Meets Girl on how they made a pop classic
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Shannon Rubicam, singer-songwriter
We’d written How Will I Know and I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) for Whitney Houston, so were given tickets when she played the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on her first tour in 1986. After she sang How Will I Know, I glanced up and there was a shooting star in the night sky above the amphitheatre. I pulled out my notebook and wrote down: “Waiting for a star to fall.” It felt like a sign from the heavens.
We’d just turned our rental garage into a studio. I don’t think we’d put up insulation yet so you could hear the cars going by. But we sat down and the song just flowed out. I usually do a page of lyrics I call “the blah” and hand it to George, who can identify the gems. We were a married couple, but I had a past like anybody does. I wrote the song about an unattainable person – that moment everyone has in their teens or early 20s where they have a longing for someone they can’t reach.
We made a demo in the garage and offered the song to Whitney’s label boss, Clive Davis. He said it wasn’t right for her and he was right – it was too poppy and she was going R&B, so we decided to record it ourselves. Our label told us that the producer Arif Mardin was in LA, so we went to his hotel and sat there really quietly and nervously as he popped on his headphones and paced around the room, listening to the song. He took his headphones off and said: “This is a hit! I can work with this.”
In the studio, Arif added multiple layers and musicians. He pushed us to make everything grand and perfect. Then we went to New York and Andy Snitzer added sax. He’s well known now, but back then he was this kid who’d just come from playing a barmitzvah. He came to the studio still in his barmitzvah band uniform and played this incredible solo.
Weirdly, before we became successful, someone had introduced us to some wine that had supposedly been meditated over in a pyramid in Egypt resulting in mystical, magical qualities. It came with a sort of caution – that if you drank it, there would be an effect. After Waiting for a Star to Fall became a global hit, we looked back and went: “Hey, we drank the magic wine and look what happened.”
George Merrill, singer-songwriter and keyboards
The phrase “waiting for a star to fall” just seemed so perfect I could feel the beat in it right away. The way the song just tumbled together felt like really good math. But one of the first things Arif Mardin said was that the song had a very unusual chord structure. “Did I screw up?” I thought. But he was actually giving me a compliment. At that point, Robert Palmer was all set to do the song – but Arif intervened. I was actually in the room when he called Robert in his wonderfully gentlemanly way to ask if he “would mind awfully if he didn’t do anything with it just yet”. It was the funniest, coolest thing. Belinda Carlisle did a version but apparently was unhappy with it so it didn’t get released.
‘The song just tumbled together’ … the single cover.
Much of what we did in the garage made it on to the studio version. I played my Juno 6 synthesiser that I still have. Arif’s son Joe played synth too. Our friend Susan Boyd did the backing vocals, which gave it such full-throated power, but when we came out of the studio we knew it still wasn’t quite there. We adored Prince, so we looked over his album covers to see who mixed his records, saw the name David Leonard, and called him. He mixed the song and, in between telling us amazing Prince stories, took the track where it needed to go.
For the video, the director really liked the idea of us being a couple. We’re still musical partners – but Shannon and I are now married to other people, so the video is like a document of our home life at that time. Our daughter Hillary is in it with her preschool friends. We had to make sitting on the couch interesting so they filmed us riding a bicycle around the living room, which of course we did all the time!
I never asked if Whitney regretted not doing our song, but by then she was on to I Will Always Love You and that incredible body of work. I doubt she looked back.
The 5 EP, Boy Meets Girl’s first new material for 19 years, is out now.
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https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/apr/20/fox-forcing-out-bill-oreilly-could-appease-critics-of-the-sky-deal
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Media
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2017-04-20T05:12:00.000Z
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Graham Ruddick
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Fox forcing out Bill O’Reilly could appease critics of the Sky deal | Graham Ruddick
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The controversial Fox News host Bill O’Reilly has been dropped from the network after allegations of inappropriate behaviour and sexual harassment, in a development that could have significant implications for the Murdoch empire on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ofcom, the British media regulator, is considering whether 21st Century Fox, the parent company of Fox News, is a “fit and proper” owner of pay-TV broadcaster Sky.
Campaigners say the allegations against O’Reilly should alarm the watchdog, which can recommend that the government blocks 21st Century Fox’s £11.7bn bid for the 61% of Sky that it does not already own. Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan are the joint executive chairs of 21st Century Fox while James Murdoch, Rupert’s other son, is chief executive.
Maggie Chao at campaign group 38 Degrees, which opposes the Sky deal, said: “There’s a mountain of evidence that the Murdochs are not fit or proper to own Sky. The recent allegations of sexual harassment at Fox News in the US are just another reason to doubt whether the Murdochs can be trusted to control even more of the UK’s media.
“Hundreds of thousands of people in the UK already don’t think they should be trusted. If Ofcom’s alarm bells weren’t ringing already, they certainly should be now.”
O’Reilly had been an anchor on Fox News since 1996 and was the most-watched host on cable television in the US.
However, the New York Times revealed earlier this month that O’Reilly and 21st Century Fox, the parent company of Fox News, have paid out about $13m (£10.1m) to settle allegations from five women about inappropriate behaviour and sexual harassment. More women have subsequently come forward with allegations against O’Reilly.
The scandal has led to dozens of companies pulling adverts from Fox News and protesters targeting the Fox News headquarters. It has also triggered an internal investigation conducted by the same New York law firm that looked into sexual harassment allegations that ultimately forced out Roger Ailes, the founding chair of Fox News, last year.
Lisa Bloom, an attorney who is representing women who have made allegations against O’Reilly, has made a direct link between the scandal and 21st Century Fox’s bid for Sky by writing to Ofcom to protest about the deal.
In the letter Bloom accused Fox News of having an “utter disregard for the rights of women” and creating a “toxic culture”. She added: “Fox’s failure to intervene to protect the rights of its female journalists, its secret payouts, and use of intimidation tactics are reminiscent of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid phone-hacking scandal in 2011, when it emerged that News of the World reporters had hacked the voicemail of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.
“The similarities between the current harassment scandal and the phone-hacking scandal reveal the company’s approach to business and management – a lack of oversight, intervention, and decency.”
Tom Watson, the deputy Labour party leader and the shadow culture, media, and sport secretary, urged Ofcom to consider the O’Reilly scandal as part of its investigation into whether 21st Century Fox is a fit and proper owner of Sky.
“The conduct of senior executives at Fox and their consistent failure to meet corporate governance standards in the recent past has a direct bearing on whether it is a suitable owner of one of the UK’s most powerful broadcasters,” he said.
Karen Bradley, the culture, media and sport secretary, has indicated that she expects Ofcom to look into the corporate governance of the Murdochs’ companies.
In a letter to 21st Century Fox and Sky last month Bradley’s department said she wanted Ofcom to look at whether the “culture or corporate governance” at 21st Century Fox explained why the services it operated, such as Fox News, had proportionately breached the broadcasting code more than Sky. The letter also referred to the “huge failings of corporate governance at the News of the World and its parent, News Corporation” during the phone hacking scandal.
Ofcom is scheduled to make a decision before 16 May. The Murdochs’ previous bid for Sky was scrapped in 2011 when the phone hacking scandal was at its peak. Since then, the family has restructured its empire. The publishing businesses, including the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times in the UK, were spun into a company called News Corp while the entertainment arm, including Fox News and the film studios, was spun into 21st Century Fox. However, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch remain co-chairs of both businesses, while James Murdoch is on the board of News Corp as well as being the 21st Century Fox chair.
The decision by 21st Century Fox to force out O’Reilly could appease Ofcom and critics of the Sky deal. In the past Rupert Murdoch has stood by high-profile employees when they have faced heavy public criticism, including Rebekah Brooks, who was appointed chief executive of News UK, the UK arm of News Corp, after being found not guilty of phone-hacking charges, and Kelvin MacKenzie, the controversial former editor of the Sun.
MacKenzie was suspended as a columnist by the Sun last week after comparing the Everton footballer Ross Barkley, whose grandfather is Nigerian, to a gorilla and writing that the only other men in Liverpool who are paid £60,000 a week are drug dealers. MacKenzie was already a contentious figure in Liverpool because of the Sun’s coverage of the Hillsborough disaster while he was editor.
In a statement about the proposed Sky deal, 21st Century Fox said it “takes its regulatory and compliance obligations very seriously”. It added: “We have a strong record of compliance in all our markets, including in the UK.
“We are confident that our proposed transaction to acquire the outstanding shares of Sky that we don’t already own will be approved following a thorough review by regulators.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/21/downton-abbey-film-fantasy-reality
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Opinion
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2019-09-21T05:00:25.000Z
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Michael Henry Adams
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Downton Abbey, like plantation houses, delivers fantasy over brute reality | Michael Henry Adams
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The son of a Scottish immigrant who worked as a servant, Donald Trump could hardly wait for his banquet at Buckingham Palace. A seat next to Elizabeth II conferred a sense of accomplishment little else could.
To many, such behavior from an American president appeared downright unseemly. But how could we scoff? How else have so many of us been eagerly awaiting the return of Downton Abbey?
Downton Abbey review – mostly harmless TV spin-off
Read more
TV and film can be transporting, giving us glimpses of lives we can only imagine imperfectly. Decades before Julian Fellowes’ creation came forth to conquer America, PBS offered a steady diet of British clotted cream. Royals, aristocrats, castles, servants, sex. Such is the stuff of which Downton daydreams are made.
We make our own fantasies too. As a boy, watching Gone With the Wind, I saw plantation houses for which I thought I could sell my soul. It seemed such an alluring way of life.
No wonder people complain of being lectured about slavery when they visit Savannah or Charleston. They, like me, have imagined themselves in the master’s place. No work to be done, fanned on white-pillared porches, sipping cooling drinks, pondering pleasures to come. Is it surprising so many, confronted by the nightmare behind the reverie, recoil in unacknowledged shame?
I came to this crossroads early, no longer able to overlook the anguish of my ancestors. I saw exquisite architecture and ideas of gracious hospitality but knew both to be built on the worst criminality.
How alike our ruling classes are. How nefarious the sources of their vast wealth, on which beautiful homes were built
Fortunately, thanks to green England, I was able to transfer my affections. The Forsyte Saga, Upstairs Downstairs, Brideshead Revisited, The Admirable Crichton. The Shooting Party, The Remains of the Day, Gosford Park. They became my refuge and taught me much. Entranced by an elegant aesthetic, reading countless books, even attending the Attingham Summer School to study famous country houses, I sought an elusive loveliness, untroubled by oppression.
I know I never escaped. I had only embraced a new quagmire of contradictory caprice.
At the very lightest level, all this means I know that Downton – the whole phenomenon, the TV series, the film, the traveling exhibition, the merchandising – is a ludicrous and ahistorical fancy.
I know, for example, that contrary to what we see on Fellowes’ screen, non-royal butlers did not wear white waistcoats and that waiters did not wear dinner jackets at all. I know ladies were never gloved while drinking or eating, candles were never used on a luncheon table and candle shades, now found only in royal residences, were in fact universal. For enthusiasts like me, it’s such esoterica which makes Downton so enjoyable.
But as in my love affair with the plantations of the American south, there was a wriggling worm in the bud.
How alike our ruling classes are. How nefarious the sources of their vast wealth, on which such beautiful homes were built.
In the UK, to take just one example, a house as sublime as Harewood, near Leeds, altered by Robert Adam, was funded by the infamous triangular trade. Even English currency came to be defined by slavery. With abolition by Britain in 1833 came compensation to 46,000 slave owners for 800,000 liberated Africans, until the banks were rescued in 2009 the largest government bailout in history.
There were other sources of income. Indian opium, imposed on China. Farms in Ireland. The wealth behind many of the estates of England was no less tainted than that which built plantations in Virginia, Alabama and Georgia.
The Treasury’s tweet shows slavery is still misunderstood
David Olusoga
Read more
Fellowes was careful to give his great house a more benign foundation. The Earl of Grantham, we are told, derives his affluence straight from his Yorkshire estates.
Hit hard by agricultural depressions, he takes an option not available to his tenants: he marries the daughter of an American millionaire. That said millionaire is an untitled Jew, a dry goods merchant from Cincinnati, is among storylines meant to show us what a good egg the earl really is, an unlikely egalitarian in tweeds. But he’s an imprudent one too: by investing his wife’s millions in a Canadian railway that goes bankrupt, Grantham places all his loved ones in peril.
Worse occurred in real life, of course. Much worse. Take the brutal, polluting mills and mines, like so many plantation fields, that often lay just outside the gates.
Of course, Downton isn’t real. So, to stay in the realm of art, consider Shipley, the neo-Palladian masterpiece DH Lawrence invented for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. There, Squire Leslie Winter talks of the miners who work his pits with all the condescension a planter might have for his slaves.
Chatting with the Prince of Wales, Winter quips: “The miners are perhaps not so ornamental as deer, but they are far more profitable.”
We are the heirs to those who did all the work, those who built the Downtons and the plantations
HRH replies: “If there were coal under Sandringham, I would open a mine on the lawns and think it first-rate landscape gardening. Oh, I am quite willing to exchange roe-deer for colliers, at the price.”
In the real world, many fine homes have been lost. Their deaths, like their lives, are all about the money.
In Lawrence’s book, the squire dies and his heirs tear down his hall to build semi-detached “villas” for workers. Lady Chatterley is shocked to learn such people are as capable of love as she is. One suspects Fellowes, the author of a novel called Snobs, no less, might feel a similar shock if told us ordinary people who love Downton, his facile but beautiful and seductive creation, are capable of sincere feeling too.
We are. And while we are equipped to daydream of such luxury for ourselves, or to pick nits with Fellowes’ staging while we swoon at his stars in their gorgeous firmament, we are also the heirs to those who did all the work, those who built the Downtons and the plantations.
We know a profound truth behind all their costly beauty and misery. Every stately home, in every land, belongs to us too.
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/sep/04/no-gym-fees-no-fancy-equipment-skint-bouncers-guide-to-fitness
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Life and style
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2023-09-04T09:00:37.000Z
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George Bass
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No gym fees, no fancy equipment: it’s the skint bouncer’s guide to fitness!
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Even a basic gym membership in Britain can easily cost you £30 a month or more. This means it’s likely to be one of the first things to get binned if you’re on a low wage during this cost of living crisis. In my job as a licensed bouncer and security guard, I earn £11.76 an hour. Even if I work my contracted 48 hours a week plus all the overtime I can grab, and door work on the side, I’ve got as much chance of signing up to KX Life Chelsea’s £615 per month membership, which includes a wellness assessment and access to the spa, as I do of getting handcuffed to a ghost.
But I also can’t afford to be lazy: my job needs me to have a basic level of fitness. Along with my shift mates, I’m a first aider and emergency responder as well as just a human roadblock. I need to be able to sprint, restrain people, carry cones, stand upright for hours, and sometimes jump up to catch an escaped 18th birthday balloon. Away from work, I also need to be confident my heart won’t pop when I open my notifications and see the gas bill has shot up from £25 a month to £143.
Despite the cliched image of the muscle-bound doorman, I’ve never wanted to look hench. Standing around flexing is more likely to invite trouble than keep it at bay. Also, off-duty, not many people want a life partner who spends all their downtime at the gym.
As a natural-born skinny bloke (or “Where’s Wally with an asbo,” as my girlfriend calls me), I’ve found I’m well suited to bodyweight exercises. When I was a kid, I was transfixed by Clubber Lang’s basement drills in Rocky III, and Sarah Connor doing chin-ups in her cell in Terminator 2. As an adult, I’m too knackered to go running at night when my shift ends.
In 20-odd years of working in frontline security, here are the exercises that have kept me in decent enough shape to protect people – and to tackle all the day-to-day lifting, swinging and pushing when I’m off the clock.
Push it
The advanced move: a one-arm push-up. Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian
Forget flashbacks to PE: you can do a push-up. Start by pushing yourself away from a wall, then choose something lower, eventually building to horizontal on the floor. Then, for an added challenge, go back to the wall with one arm.
Building up to just a few one-arm push-ups has taken me decades, but arguably paid off when a bloke tried to drive through me while I was guarding an entry gate. Obviously, I couldn’t repel his hatchback, but the sight of my arms not bending on his bonnet may have convinced him to do a three-pointer.
Don’t neglect your overhead pushing skills, either: they’re useful if you need to get crates down from high shelves, or if you’re the Leader of the House of Commons and have to carry a ceremonial sword without painkillers.
You can develop strength in this movement pattern by working up to a pike press: get into a plank position on your toes, then lift your hips back and up until you form a triangle. Carefully bring your head down towards the floor by bending your elbows, and then straighten your arms to push back and reset.
For some added core work, swoop your chest up at the bottom of the descent to perform what’s known as a Hindu push-up. Just beware that the next morning your arms might feel like you’ve had two BCG injections.
Pull it
Dead hangs will prepare you for chin-ups and pull-ups. Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian
Chin-ups (where your palms face toward you as you lift yourself up to an overhead bar) are slightly easier than pull-ups (palms away). Start slowly by practising dead hangs, where you dangle from any overhead surface with your feet off the ground. If you’ve got stairs, you can use your balustrade if you can reach it. If you’re in a flat, you can try “fridge-ups”, raising your bent legs up behind you while you grip the top of a standard 70in combi unit and lift yourself up.
I once watched my fiftysomething boss put his vertical pull skills to good use when we were guarding a house occupied by a stoned squatter. Using the edge of the downstairs bathroom roof, he was able to lift himself up, walk across it and politely ask the squatter through a window on the top floor whether they’d mind opening the door.
To anyone carrying a heavy backpack who wants to keep their spine and lat muscles in good condition: I recommend also developing rowing power, which you build by doing Aussie pull-ups. Lie on your back under a knee- to waist-high bar; grab it, then lift yourself up and lower yourself down again while keeping your midsection straight.
Leg it
Bulgarian split squats work your leg muscles. Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian
When we were learning about burns and acid attacks during first aid training, the instructor told us legs make up 36% of your body. So anyone who focuses solely on their upper muscles will only ever be 64% healthy.
If you want to be able to hike, race up ladders, or in my case hurdle over traffic barriers when a fight breaks out in a car park, Bulgarian split squats are fantastic for training glutes, hamstrings and quads – and improving your mobility at the same time. Push a chair back against a wall, stand a few paces in front of it, facing away, and put the toes of one foot on the seat. Sink lower until the thigh of your front leg sinks to parallel with the ground, or just below. Watch that your knee doesn’t track over your toes, and jump lightly or hold a dumbbell to progress further.
To develop a hip-hinge movement – essential for doing the “bargain bend”, when you try to reach the cheaper own-brand products that hide on the bottom shelf in supermarkets – you can try Romanian deadlifts, folding forward from the waist with your hands either in line with your knees, or outstretched holding a weight. Focus on keeping your back straight rather than how much iron you can carry. No one cares about your numbers unless you’re a professional powerlifter.
Core
Some of the bodybuilders I’ve worked with will add sets of crunches to the end of their barbell session. My thinking is, if my midsection’s valuable enough to qualify for a protective vest on the job, it probably needs a session to itself.
Russian twists can be done anywhere, and involve turning from side to side while sitting on the ground with your heels raised. Handy for quickly unloading a van.
Short circuit
Don’t rest between sets for a cardio challenge. Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian
What about running or cardio? Strength is essential, but your body’s most important muscle – the one that beats through your chest on the run-up to payday – is life or death.
If you want to get your breathing up but have childcare duties or duff trainers, do a combination of the above exercises without resting in between sets.
That’s what the 1950s fitness pioneer Jack LaLanne did. Aged 54, he infamously beat a 21-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had challenged LaLanne to a push-up and chin-up competition after claiming the youngest-ever Mr Universe title. Twenty minutes is enough for me to feel as if I’ve done cross-country without leaving my kitchen.
Rep recipe
A one-legged Romanian deadlift. Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian
Generally, it’s accepted that sets of one to five reps (repetitions) of an exercise will build power, five to eight build strength, eight to 12 build muscle and more than 12 build endurance.
So which is best to focus on? Is pushing a car once a more useful life skill than stacking bricks for an hour?
Before you fall down the Google hole and get analysis paralysis, research suggests that you should “periodise” your workouts. Spend a few weeks focusing on strength, then change to endurance, then power … whatever order you like. Just remember that doing five sets of five reps forever will eventually plateau.
Downtime
‘Deloading’ is important too. Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian
Every few weeks, I’ll get my head turned by the newest fitness fad. My mates start talking about battle ropes; I start wondering if I could make my own by connecting a load of bike locks.
That’s when I’ll take a “deload” week and focus on yoga. Controlling your breathing comes in useful – if someone’s trying to spit on you, for example, or you’re trying to hold your emotions together while explaining to your kid why you can’t get a dog – and my favourite yogi is Cosmic Kids on YouTube.
The instructor combines poses with movie plots, telling my daughter and me that we’re Charmander from Pokémon while ordering us into the downward dog position. It costs nothing, but the fun we have is invaluable.
I only hope Cristiano Ronaldo got the same buzz when he was paying £295 (plus £350 joining fee) to cool off in the cryostasis therapy chamber at CPASE. I might have a go at that myself this winter. I reckon all I’ll need will be a stopwatch and my thermostat.
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https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/oct/06/this-week-best-tv-legacy-jean-michel-basquiat
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Stage
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2017-10-06T11:00:42.000Z
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The Guide
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This week’s best TV: pondering the legacy of Jean-Michel Basquiat
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Basquiat: Rage to Riches
Since his death in 1988, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s artistic resonance has grown in parallel with his work’s monetary value. This feature-length documentary – including the thoughts of close friends and family members – ponders his legacy and reassesses the livid, striking output of his sadly brief career.
7 October, 9pm, BBC2
The Gifted
Another X-Men TV offshoot; this time, a group of mutant teens acquire superpowers, much to the dismay of the population at large. Can their parents deliver them to the mutant underground before the authorities intervene?
8 October, 9pm, Fox
Louis Theroux: Dark States – Heroin Town
Quietly devastating ... Louis Theroux with heroin user Nate Walsh, who lives in a tent on the banks on the Ohio river. Photograph: Freddie Claire
At a grim moment in US history, this latest Louis Theroux series goes to the dark side, exploring marginalised areas of American life. He begins, in his customarily empathic yet searching style, with heroin addicts in West Virginia. Quietly devastating.
8 October, 9pm, BBC2
The History of Comedy
A major new series from Sky Arts exploring the cultural and historical underpinnings of comedy in the US. It begins with a look at female comics: with contributions from Sarah Silverman, Betty White and Kathy Griffin, it ponders the sexism women in the business have faced.
12 October, 9pm, Sky Arts
GameFace
Three years on from a promising pilot, Roisin Conaty’s feisty comedy about the flounderings of a struggling actor finally gets a well-deserved full series.
12 October, 9pm, E4
Back
Are you sitting comfortably? David Mitchell in Back. Photograph: Mark Johnson
David Mitchell and Robert Webb’s comic chemistry is now so finely honed that it activates automatically. And Back has illustrated this perfectly, with Stephen and Andrew’s symbiotic antagonism mirroring that of Mark and Jez in Peep Show. The series concludes with enough questions about Andrew’s backstory to leave a second season looking likely.
11 October, 10pm, C4
Mindhunter
If TV and film tropes have taught us anything, it’s that trying to empathise with serial killers is a risky business. This new series – adapted from a book by Mark Olshaker and John E Douglas – reiterates this truism in satisfyingly creepy style. Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany are our two at-risk agents.
Available from 13 October, Netflix
Timewasters
Louis CK once memorably observed that black people can’t risk messing with time machines. So good luck to the quartet in this cheerful new sitcom in which a struggling south London jazz band slip through a portal and somehow finding themselves plying their trade in 1926.
9 October, 10pm, ITV2
Red Dwarf
Blockheads … Red Dwarf XII.
The boys from the Dwarf return for a 12th series, their fourth since being resurrected by Dave following a 10-year hiatus. Things onboard are much as they’ve ever been, the passage of years having been kept at bay by extensive cast wiggery. If we’re completely honest, it’s not as good as it was during its 1988 to 1993 imperial phase. But that’s OK; very little TV comedy is.
12 October, 9pm, Dave
Lore
Amazon celebrates Friday the 13th with this spooky true-horror series probing the hideous reality behind common folk tales.
Available from 13 October, Amazon Prime
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/aug/18/ben-whishaw-great-pelvis-ira-sachs-franz-rogowski-passages
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Film
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2023-08-18T04:00:39.000Z
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Ryan Gilbey
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‘Ben has a great pelvis and it’s wonderful to show it’: Ira Sachs, Franz Rogowski and Ben Whishaw on their erotic new film
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‘T
hese interviews are full of shit,” says Franz Rogowksi, eyeballing the webcam in his Berlin apartment, a slash of Sunday morning sunshine streaking the wall behind him. This would be an awkward moment were the vulpine 37-year-old actor not wearing a lopsided smile, his voice free of rancour or complaint. What he is trying to get across is that there are certain conventions when promoting a movie. “People say: ‘Oh, this is so amazing, the project was so amazing.’ You and I would be having this exact same conversation even if this movie was shit. But I truly love what we’ve done.”
The movie in question is Passages, a caustic, concentrated, jaggedly funny and aggressively erotic portrait of a relationship in freefall. Rogowski plays Tomas, a film-maker living in chic luxury in Paris with his husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw). After wrapping his new film, also called Passages, Tomas goes home with a schoolteacher called Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), whom he meets in a club. Martin is bruised by this dalliance, not least when Tomas starts crowing about how blissful it was, but he takes it wearily in his stride. “You’re always like this when you finish a film,” he says. “You just forget.” This, however, is no fling.
From the opening scene, in which Tomas’s direction of his actors drifts into bullying, we are in the company of a character who is as transfixing and unfiltered as he is capricious. “The character appeared very rude to me at first and hard to justify,” says Rogowski. “On the other hand, it’s interesting to play someone who doesn’t follow codes of good behaviour or make it easy for you to like him. He’s just: ‘I’m searching, I’m in pain, I’m in love.’ He’s not a very conceptual guy.”
Adèle Exarchopoulos as Agathe. Photograph: Courtesy of SBS Productions
Ira Sachs, the 57-year-old director and co-writer of Passages, has a strong record in knotty, queer dramas, such as Keep the Lights On, his autobiographical tale of a relationship blighted by an ex-partner’s drug addiction. He wrote the part of Tomas for Rogowski after seeing Michael Haneke’s Happy End, in which the actor performs an acrobatic rendition of Sia’s Chandelier that tips from karaoke into kamikaze. “I’ve shown that scene to hundreds of people,” the director says when we meet in London. “Franz is such a creature of cinema. He ignites the relationship between the body and the screen. He’s forceful, compelling, mysterious, magnetic. He’s like this empathic animal. And he’s really hot.”
I speak to Whishaw, 42, the night before the Sag-Aftra strike and he uses similar imagery to describe his co-star. “Franz has got an animal-ness and an otherworldliness about him,” he says via video call, his bushy hair and chunky Harry-Palmer-esque specs filling the screen. “His perspective is never quite what you think and never like anyone else’s. That’s part of what Tomas and Martin have: it’s stimulating and intense, in good ways and bad.” Ask Rogowski about his feelings for Whishaw and the praise comes tumbling out. “I adore him. I love him. I love his micro-gestures, his incredible capacity to say 10 things in a split of a second. Ben is so well-prepared, but then he manages to kind of forget his lines and find them again in the very moment he needs to say them.”
Although Martin is the wounded party, at least until Agathe gets caught in the couple’s crossfire, it doesn’t do to underestimate Whishaw; he may be the voice of Paddington, but he is no teddy bear. “Ben is seemingly more recessive than Franz,” says Sachs. “I’ve discovered, though, that he’s a bit of a knife. He has a sharpness that is very active. It has a precision and it can be violent. There are moments in the film where he causes pain with great force.”
The director introduced Whishaw and Rogowski in a bar in Paris, then immediately made himself scarce. “I try not to get between the actors. I want them to form something that I am as much a witness to as anyone.” Costume fittings are a shortcut to intimacy, especially for a film that features such expressive, exuberant outfits: crop-tops, mesh and leopard-print for Rogowski and a wispy, red silk dressing gown for Whishaw that heightens his femininity and lends him an imperious decadence.
“I don’t rehearse, but I do get the actors to spend a lot of time trying things on,” says Sachs. “Franz said to me: ‘I’ve never had a director be more interested in clothes than you.’ I felt shame and pride at the same time. I felt like it was drawing attention to my homosexuality in a way that made me wonder: ‘Is that a good thing? Do I feel good about that?’ But it’s part of a strategy of making people feel comfortable.”
Exarchopoulos as Agathe and Rogowski as Tomas. Photograph: Courtesy of SBS Productions
It did the trick. “Ira was a true companion,” says Rogowski. What does that entail? “It means being willing to have a level of confrontation or friction that for a European might be normal, but to an American can seem offensive. It took us only a couple of minutes to realise it’s fun to have a little argument: it can be a great pleasure to disagree instead of constantly empowering or blaming one another.”
Sachs concurs. “Franz and I had a romantic relationship, in some ways, without it being sexual. Or rather, not particularly sexual. We trusted each other enough to disagree in a way that was stimulating. Usually, when I’m disagreeing with an actor, I’m thinking: ‘How can I get what I want?’ Forcing them is usually all you can do, because they’re never going to understand. Whereas, with Franz, I felt that, if we kept talking, we’d understand each other. And that’s very intimate.”
I ask Whishaw about Sachs and Rogowski locking horns. “They enjoy that,” he says. And him? “Less so.” He laughs nervously, like a child remembering a parental set-to. “I was raised in such a way that it makes me extremely anxious. But I’m getting better at going: ‘Oh, this is not the end of the world. It’s an argument that we can get through.’ Ira and Franz get energy from it. Something creative emerges.” What does he do while the sparks fly? “I just listen.”
Sparks of a different kind are generated by the sex scenes, which have earned Passages an 18 certificate in the UK and an NC-17, seen as the commercial kiss of death, in the US. (The film is instead being released unrated in North America.) One unbroken two-minute shot shows Martin with his back to camera as he makes love to Tomas, who then reaches around to his husband’s behind and lets his fingers do the talking.
“They are trying to fuck off their problems,” says Rogowski. “Often in your life, you’ll have sex for different reasons and sometimes you’re not even aware why. But it helps.” The moment has a value for him that transcends narrative. “It’s a shot that shows the landscape of Ben’s beautiful spine. And, you know, he’s a great fucker. He has a great pelvis and it’s wonderful to show it. I find it disappointing how much we surrender to psychology. It sounds esoteric, but it’s limiting to always see people as hungry, tired, happy, sad. It’s, like, 10 emotions and that’s it. But there’s a whole other breadth to the world we live in.”
Sachs calls the scene “really impressive as a moment of acting. Not to say there aren’t physical things going on between Franz and Ben that are real. I mean, they’re not robots. They’re responding to each other’s bodies. Something is happening that’s erotic – positive or negative.”
For all the vividness of these emotions, I confess to Sachs that I prayed none of the characters would end up together in any permutation. He smiles knowingly. “I don’t think this is necessarily good for marketing, but I was always aware this was not a love story,” he says. “It’s like how some viewers – usually younger people who haven’t had much life experience – watch Keep the Lights On and feel sad that those two men don’t stay together. And I’m, like: ‘My whole experience of that relationship is: why didn’t I get out of it in the first week?’ The fact I stayed for 10 years is a tragedy.” If Passages isn’t a love story, what is it? “To me, it’s about a man who begins in a position of power and authority and ends up …”
Rogowski and Whishaw as Martin. Photograph: Courtesy of SBS Productions
No spoilers. But many of Sachs’s films articulate the damage wrought on the world by obliviously powerful white men. From his fraught 1996 debut The Delta, about an upper-middle-class Memphis native (not unlike Sachs himself) who becomes involved with a poor Vietnamese hustler, to his 2016 coming-of-age drama Little Men, in which the friendship between two adolescent boys is jeopardised by their parents’ real-estate dispute, the director is sensitised to every power imbalance. Whishaw sees Passages as a continuation of that theme. “Tomas and Martin are capable of being cruel and using their power to get what they want,” he says.
For all her resilience, the film’s real victim is Agathe. The scene in which she spends the night with the couple at their second home is, Sachs insists, “like something from a horror movie. You’re like: ‘Get out of the house!’ That dynamic is about class and gender and what it is to be a woman. The potential to be treated violently for women is one of the master narratives of our culture and our lives, right? The possibility for abuse seems everywhere.”
Rogowski muses on his resemblance to the entitled, swaggering Tomas. “One wonders how much he is me, or how much I’m like him. It’s left me asking: how capable am I of loving? How pure is my empathy?”
It is Sachs who comes closest to confessing that Tomas is at least partly a self-portrait. He describes to me a recent situation where he and a group of friends were having drinks after a Q&A session after a screening of Passages. Then he noticed a stranger had joined their table. “I told this person: ‘Please leave.’ There was this very strange moment. I was appalled at myself, but also I was creating boundaries.” Very Tomas. Then again, who wants an interloper tagging along? “Well, that’s what I thought. But as this person was leaving, it turned out someone in the group did know them. I thought they were just a fan joining us.” Ah. That is a bit more awkward.
“It’s an example of me being comfortable with power and using it. Someone once described me as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, which is true, but I can also be the reverse: a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Scared, exposed, embarrassed about the authority I have.” No wonder Sachs makes the films he does. He is living them.
Passages is in cinemas from 1 September
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/17/harvey-weinstein-us-gun-lobby-meryl-streep-senators-wife
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World news
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2014-01-17T10:55:43.000Z
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Ben Child
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Harvey Weinstein to take on US gun lobby with film starring Meryl Streep
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Hollywood superproducer Harvey Weinstein is planning to take on the US gun lobby with a new film starring Meryl Streep.
Weinstein said the project, titled The Senator's Wife, would directly target pro-gun advocates such as the National Rifle Association. Speaking on shock jock Howard Stern's SiriusXM radio show, he said: "We're going to take this issue head-on, and they're going to wish they weren't alive after I'm done with them. It's going to be like crash and burn."
Weinstein said he did not own a gun and believed the US would be a better country without firearms. "I never want to have a gun," he said. "I don't think we need guns in this country, and I hate it, and I think the NRA is a disaster area." He said the film would be a "big movie like a Mr Smith Goes to Washington". Frank Capra's Oscar-winning politically themed 1939 classic was a controversial film at the time for its thinly veiled diatribes against government corruption.
According to the Hollywood Reporter there is no writer or director yet attached to The Senator's Wife and no plot details have been unveiled. However the combination of Weinstein, an ever-present awards season figure, and the multiple Oscar-winning Streep should augur well for the film's critical currency.
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/jun/12/richard-hawley-review
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Music
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2012-06-12T17:02:40.000Z
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Dorian Lynskey
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Richard Hawley – review
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It's hard to be a guitar hero with a broken leg. Richard Hawley's broodingly heavy sixth album, Standing at the Sky's Edge, is a dramatic departure from his usual retro melancholy, and surely not a record he would have imagined having to perform in a wheelchair until a slippery marble staircase in Barcelona intervened. "I feel like Davros from Doctor Who," he says ruefully.
The painkillers limit his traditional between-song anecdotes, which have often been as entertaining as his music, though he is still a witty and self-deprecating host. Gesturing at the half-dozen trees that decorate the stage, he says: "It's like the back of B&Q, isn't it?" The foliage looks like an attempt by the Sheffield singer to stamp his identity on a less intimate venue (and noisier) than he's used to.
It's maddening to hear audience chatter in the back of the room almost drown out a song as exquisitely stealthy as Remorse Code, which highlights the rich charm of Hawley's croon: it has a well-worn, comforting quality, like pub upholstery. Conversely, the new album's most derivative song, Down in the Woods, sounds grippingly muscular, broken down midway through to a cosmic Bo Diddley beat and built back up into a wild roar. The two styles merge on Soldier On, which starts out hushed before exploding skywards with a jolt. Sometimes, it seems, howling guitars are the only way to ensure an audience's attention.
After a droll thank you on behalf of his band ("We're so grateful; without you guys, we couldn't buy booze and cocaine"), he offers a choice of two encores: one quiet, one loud. The crowd votes for the first, which Hawley calls "the shut-the-fuck-up option". And when he closes with The Ocean, an old song given a spectacular, soaring new arrangement, everyone does.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/sep/17/cbi-seeks-3m-from-members-within-days-to-avoid-financial-oblivion
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Business
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2023-09-17T11:51:06.000Z
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Rob Davies
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CBI seeks £3m from members within days to avoid financial oblivion
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The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) risks financial oblivion unless it can convince its remaining members to stump up £3m within the next few days, according to reports.
The scandal-hit business lobby group is in a race against time to stave off collapse, even as rival organisations jockey for position to replace it as the voice of British business.
It follows an exodus of the CBI’s members triggered by revelations in the Guardian about sexual misconduct – including two alleged rapes – which have shaken the organisation to its core.
Despite a clear-out of management, an internal investigation and a pledge to overhaul its culture, the reputational crisis has snowballed into a financial one as the CBI struggles to woo the companies whose membership fees provide most of its income.
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What is the CBI and who funds it?
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The CBI has reportedly asked the companies that remain members to help patch up its balance sheet while it continues discussions about a potential merger with MakeUK, the manufacturers’ trade body.
Those talks have been complicated by questions over whether the CBI can find a buyer to take on its pension scheme, which would have to be hived off for the union to proceed.
Just days before its annual meeting, the CBI has asked its members for £3m to tide it over while it tries to secure its future, the Sunday Times reported.
The CBI’s accounts are usually presented at its annual meeting, scheduled for Wednesday, putting the organisation under pressure to come up with a plan to show that it can continue operating.
In a message to members before the meeting, the group promised to build a “renewed” CBI under the leadership of Rain Newton-Smith, who took over after former director-general Tony Danker was dismissed after separate allegations were made about his behaviour.
A spokesperson for the lobby group said: “As has been widely reported, the CBI has experienced some short-term cashflow challenges following an incredibly difficult year for the organisation.
“A number of options are being explored to resolve this issue and secure the footing of an organisation that remains in a strong medium- to long-term position.”
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The bank HSBC is trying to convince other CBI members to back the £3m cash call, the Sunday Times reported. The Guardian has approached HSBC for comment.
The board of the CBI, led by its president, Brian McBride, has been meeting regularly to assess its financial situation amid mounting speculation that the group could run out of cash imminently.
As the CBI fights for survival, a potential successor as the voice of British business is waiting in the wings.
The business council of the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) was launched in June – with its stated aim being to “design and drive the future of the British economy” – just weeks after the CBI was plunged into crisis.
It held its first meeting at the House of Lords last week, chaired by the BCC’s president, Martha Lane Fox.
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https://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/2018/may/04/brexit-nhs-recruit-retain-european-staff
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Healthcare Professionals Network
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2018-05-04T12:26:38.000Z
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Richard Vize
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Brexit deal must allow NHS to recruit and keep European staff
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With chronic workforce shortages now overshadowing financial pressures as the biggest problem facing the NHS, it is vital for public services that the Brexit deal allows the health service to recruit and keep European talent.
Analysis for the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy Brexit advisory commission for public services lays bare the scale of the EU recruitment issue across the public sector and how the negotiations might address it (full disclosure: I wrote the report).
Theresa May 'blocking requests' to allow in more overseas doctors for NHS
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EU staff make up about 5.6% of the NHS workforce in England, not far off the total of 6.9% from the rest of the world. This includes about 41,000 working as doctors, nurses, health visitors, midwives, therapists or scientific and technical staff. About 9% of doctors in England qualified in EU countries.
Cities and major towns are particularly dependent on EU workers. Figures from 2015 highlight the vital importance of staff from the European Economic Area (EU plus Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein) to a number of high-profile trusts, accounting for 20% of nurses at the Royal Brompton and Harefield, 15% at Papworth hospital and around 10% at Frimley foundation trust.
Against this high-risk backdrop, the government’s hostile approach to immigration has repeatedly made a difficult situation worse. Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) data last November revealed a 67% year-on-year increase in EU staff leaving its register – on top of a near total collapse in new EU registrations. A big factor deterring recruits was the government’s insistence that public bodies introduce a stricter language test, in which even native English speakers struggled. The NMC and General Medical Council have since introduced a more proportionate test.
If the stubborn hostility towards recruiting from overseas continues, the results will not just be seen in the chronic levels of vacancies
Trusts are contributing to the drop in numbers, because they see little point in recruitment drives when the prospects for EU staff are uncertain. The fall in the value of the pound has also made the UK less attractive.
The number of EEA doctors has held up better than nurses, but is still sliding. In 2012 there was a net increase of more than 1,000 EEA doctors on the GMC register; in 2016 there was a net loss of about 1,500.
The UK is in a global competition for clinical talent. The World Health Organization estimates that in the region of 80 million healthcare staff will be needed by 2030, compared with a probable supply of 65 million. Yet whether it be Brexit, the treatment of students from India or the folly of blocking the recruitment of at least 100 desperately needed overseas doctors, the government is discouraging that talent from coming here.
The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has recently announced an increase in medical training places from 6,000 to 7,500 annually, but talk of becoming “self-sufficient” in doctors is unrealistic and misses a key reason for recruiting overseas.
We don’t recruit from abroad simply to make up the numbers. The NHS wants to attract people from across the world who are at the forefront of developments in medical science, technical skills and ways of delivering care. It is that cross-fertilisation of skills, ideas and ambition that marks out world-leading institutions from the also-rans.
I've been an NHS doctor for five years. The Home Office wants to deport me
Read more
If the stubborn hostility towards recruiting from overseas continues, the results will not just be seen in the chronic levels of vacancies. It will sap the talent of the teams and institutions that provide the intellectual leading edge of our healthcare system. To compound the problem, more home-grown talent will look overseas if our top hospitals cease to be regarded as international centres of excellence.
As for the Brexit negotiations, there are about seven possible approaches to recruitment, including free movement for particular groups of workers, free movement for people with a job offer and a points-based system. The difficulty for the health and care system is finding a solution that allows the recruitment of top-end talent alongside large numbers of skilled workers such as nurses and technicians and lower-skilled but equally vital care workers. While the movement of goods is grabbing the headlines, the government must not lose sight of the importance of the movement of people to our public services.
Richard Vize is a public policy commentator and analyst
Join the Healthcare Professionals Network to read more pieces like this. And follow us on Twitter (@GdnHealthcare) to keep up with the latest healthcare news and views
If you’re looking for a healthcare job or need to recruit staff, visit Guardian Jobs
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/07/spiritland-brilliant-corners-london-audiophile-bars
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Music
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2016-01-07T19:29:10.000Z
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Joe Muggs
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Sonic boom: why clubs are cranking up the quality instead of the volume
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Outside a former kitchen on an east London street called, perhaps fittingly, Club Row, there’s a chalkboard advertising “COFFEE, EGGS & BLOODY GOOD SPEAKERS”. You might pass it by thinking it was just another bit of café-culture whimsy, but this is more than an eatery and lounge with challenging music in the background. This is Sonos Studio, which provides an extraordinary set of sonic experiences in a cafe and lounge space that is designed to be as acoustically perfect as a high-end recording studio.
This is far from the only place to have opened in recent times where the quality of the loudspeakers is a selling point. The monumental Spiritland soundsystem has brought billionaire-level hi-fi to London restaurant-bars and will move to a dedicated home in spring. Tucked away among the hustle and grot of the east London district of Dalston is Brilliant Corners, an initially unassuming little bar owned by brothers Amit and Aneesh Patel, where jazz, disco and electronic music can be heard over the kind of huge Klipschorn speakers that make sound enthusiasts and club historians go weak at the knees. For a couple of months last autumn, avant-garde music magazine the Wire set up a listening room in collaboration with Vitsoe furniture: an oasis of obscure Japanese music, groovy art books, Dieter Rams chairs and shelves, and beautiful loudspeakers.
Meanwhile, touring venues and festivals round the world is the gorgeous Despacio soundsystem conceived and run by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem with the 2ManyDJs duo, and the Bowers & Wilkins Dome created by the speaker company “with the aim of exposing a broad range of music lovers to the experience of great sound”.
Played Twice sessions at Brilliant Corners in Dalston, east London Photograph: Brilliant Corners
Before all of these came Classic Album Sundays, the session run by Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy where fans gather to listen to a record in its entirety, played from original vinyl over speakers and amps that cost more than most of their homes. Public hi-fi sound has, without question, become A Thing. In some cases, this boom in high-end audio experiences has been unashamedly driven by lifestyle salesmanship. The Wire’s publisher, Tony Herrington, is upfront: “It’s about marketing, partly,” he says, “plus a chance to be part of the London Design festival. Vitsoe asked us to be part of their installation to show off how nice their shelves look laden with stuff, we had a relationship with them as they’d advertised with us, and we couldn’t think of a good reason to say no.” And obviously while Sonos Studio and Bowers & Wilkins Dome exist to engage with music fans and create experiences, the idea of getting people to go out and upgrade their home stereo kit is a vital part of their raison d’etre.
But just as often there’s a strong sense of a personal mission about it. Spiritland’s Paul Noble has the air of an evangelist when he talks about a “revelatory trip” to Japan a few years ago that showed him how very good quality sound could be achieved in a public venue. “I don’t just mean the high-end places in Tokyo: this also extends to tiny bars in towns way out of the main urban areas. I’d find a wall of original jazz issues on vinyl, EMT turntables, valve amps and JBL speakers – and no mixer or limiter. Just a record collector carefully playing the music they loved, and a few people sitting there digging it.”
Amit Patel says Brilliant Corners was created “because my brother and I are obsessive music-lovers, and we wanted somewhere to share that where it would sound its very best”. The bar is a no-frills affair except where it matters: quality but affordable wines, and moon-globe lanterns to set off the plain decor – and those speakers.
“I think everyone should be able to have good things,” says Patel. “It’s not elitist, it’s just the desire people from all backgrounds have to get dressed up at the weekend and hear great music.”
Originator … David Mancuso, the godfather of the modern club scene, and an audiophile obsessive. Photograph: Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images
Even Bowers & Wilkins’s Danny Haikin – although initially as on-message about the technical qualities of the speakers as a brand director should be – quickly becomes much more lyrical, talking about the “sonic wisdom” of the B&W engineers and the joy of watching 2,000 dancing people “all experiencing an epiphany” about musical clarity. There’s something about the sharing of hi-fi experience that is miles away from the usual dry, technically-obsessed, overgrown boys’ club of home “audiophiles”: something that seems to remind people of the pleasure principle in music, technology and socialising.
There’s nothing new about this, though. Subcultures from reggae to disco have long valued and even fetishised their soundsystems: witness the ICA exhibition Radical Disco: Architecture and Nightlife in Italy, 1965-1975 (which closes on 10 January).
A vital point of reference for almost everyone I speak to in the new wave of hi-fi sound is David Mancuso’s Loft parties – the cosmopolitan all-night New York gatherings that began in 1970 and which created disco and modern club culture, held by Mancuso in his own apartment set up with Klipschorn speakers.
Murphy has a longstanding working relationship with Mancuso and puts on Loft parties in London with the Lucky Cloud soundsystem. Like Patel, she is quick to push aside a sense that connoisseurship of sound is elitist: “Quite the opposite, in fact,” she says. “What David did from the beginning of The Loft, and what we try and do, has a strong egalitarian drive. We don’t want this technology to just be for the 1%, once you hear music in all its glory, it’s an experience you want to share as widely as you can.”
Patel also underlines the importance of east London’s Plastic People club, which closed at the start of 2015 after 20 years of dancers immersed in the output of owner Ade Fakile’s legendary soundsystem in near total darkness. “There were no distractions, people would appreciate even stuff they wouldn’t normally listen to, whether that’s jazz or African records or whatever, on an instant level. And sharing that experience can bring together a really diverse lot of people.”
That, he says, is what he wants from Brilliant Corners: “I want it to be more like a family party where you’ll meet all sorts and hear all sorts: not a club where you have to be part of a scene, and DJs have to pump it out to keep the energy up.”
Sonos’s Tom Panton also namechecks Plastic People as a crucial incubator. “I think when it closed, people realised that they’d taken it for granted,” he says, “and the instant nostalgia that generated made people start to really understand what’s lacking in standard club spaces that are kitted out with sound-systems built for brute power, and done up with all that bare brickwork and concrete, which might look great but is actually about the worst possible surface you could have acoustically. I think there’s definitely a growing appetite now for somewhere you can come closer to music that’s not that club blasting experience but isn’t your iPhone headphones either. There’s kind of a renegotiation going on about where and how we listen.”
The holy grail … a Klipschorn corner speaker
Noble enthusiastically echoes this: “People just coming in for a drink often can’t believe what they’re hearing – and that they’re hearing music you’d never normally hear ‘out’. We’ve had someone in tears when a DJ played One Day I’ll Fly Away by Randy Crawford. One of our regular DJs played Abbey Road from start to finish on the original vinyl: so simple, but such a pleasure to hear on a great system.” Meanwhile, Classic Album Sundays plays everything from Jay Z to Art Of Noise to Ride albums, while, alongside their DJ sets from new-generation fidelity obsessives such as Four Tet and Floating Points, Brilliant Corners do regular play-throughs of classic jazz albums followed by a reinterpretation by a live band.
Sonos Studio listening room Photograph: Edward Park
Both Sonos Studio and Spiritland will run workshops, artists’ residencies and more. But it is all driven by the thing that is at the heart of what they offer: listening to music in a way you can’t at home. These spaces offer people with cheap separates or computer speakers the chance to hear music differently, and if you doubt that hearing music in this way is different, consider what Alexis Petridis recently wrote in this paper about hearing a favourite old LP by Ride through the best equipment: “It sounded astonishing, weirdly tangible, like the music was happening in a space just in front of me, like it was in 3D. You could walk around it, you could reach out and touch it. I was genuinely overwhelmed.”
The ownership of high-end audio is likely to remain the pursuit of the few. Either those who have £500,000 to put together a system, then the spare cash to build a special room for it. Or those for whom devoting all their spare time and spare cash to continual upgrades is their hobby, their lifestyle – the people who listen not to music they like, but to music that showcases their system. It’s prohibitively expensive and complicated for most. But, finally, you don’t have to be a millionaire to hear music in the highest fidelity.
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https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/may/01/queens-university-belfast-charlie-hebdo-conference
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Education
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2015-05-01T15:06:12.000Z
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Henry McDonald
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University to go ahead with Charlie Hebdo conference after outcry
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Queen’s University Belfast has reversed its earlier decision to cancel a conference on the Charlie Hebdo massacre on security grounds.
The university came under sustained criticism from novelists, poets, academics and intellectuals over the cancellation of the symposium, which was due to be held on the campus in June.
A spokesperson for QUB’s communications office said on Friday: “Following the completion of a comprehensive risk assessment, undertaken in line with approved protocols, the university is pleased to confirm that the Charlie Hebdo Research Symposium, organised by the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities, has been approved.”
Academics at the college disputed the university authorities’ claim that the gathering was cancelled because its organisers had not properly filled in a risk assessment form.
The conference, organised to discuss the implications of the attack on the magazine and featuring academics, novelists, journalists and commentators, was due to take place at the Queen’s University Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities in June.
The institute claimed that the university’s vice-chancellor, Patrick Johnston, had cancelled the event because of the security risk and also out of concern for the university’s reputation. A number of Belfast-based writers claimed the college was worried about deterring prospective students and jeopardising potential investment from parts of the Islamic world, especially the oil-rich Gulf states.
Robert McLiam Wilson, the award-winning Paris-based, Belfast-born novelist who writes for Charlie Hebdo, said he was “delighted and pretty proud that QUB have done the hardest thing there is to do, they changed their minds”.
The author of Ripley Bogle and Eureka Street, which the BBC later adopted into a television drama, had described Queen’s University’s decision last month to cancel the symposium as “not cowardice or surrender but part of one long defeat in an unfought war”.
McLiam Wilson has also written a television documentary on paramilitary punishment attacks in Belfast and recently recorded an essay for Radio 4 about his love for Paris in the aftermath of the attack by two gunmen on the Charlie Hebdo offices in January, in which 12 people were killed.
Speaking from his home in the French capital, McLiam Wilson added: “There will be a conference now. Something which is pretty lengthy and often boring. But complexity and truth often is lengthy and boring. It is not best served by Twitter tempests and Wikipedia wisdom. If we take the time for respectful discourse, information and opinion can be shared, and who knows, maybe even some approximation of truth can be found.
“We’ve said too much about the surface of things. We’ve all seen the repellent and disgusting cartoon of Christiane Taubira (the black French justice minister portrayed as a monkey in the magazine) to which so many people object. But how many of us have seen the extraordinary and moving tribute that remarkable woman made herself at the funeral of one of the murdered cartoonists? Don’t we all need time to absorb and understand such complex contradictions? I was a glib idiot for saying I was not proud of my hometown.”
Ulster Unionist party leader and former television journalist Mike Nesbitt welcomed QUB’s U-turn on the conference. “It is important that an organisation which enjoys such international renown as Queen’s should be seen to stand up for the promotion of freedom of speech, a key component of any democracy,” he said. “I also welcome the fact that Queen’s has shown the corporate courage to tackle sensitive and controversial and potentially divisive issues.”
Nearly five months after the attack by Islamist gunmen on its offices, Charlie Hebdo continues to be a focal point for controversy. Last month ,two dozen writers including Peter Carey and Joyce Carol Oates publicly distanced themselves from international writers’ organisation PEN over its decision to give the magazine a freedom of expression award in the wake of the atrocity.
In response, novelist Salman Rushdie defended PEN for bestowing its Free Expression Courage award to the French magazine and criticised writers who objected to it on the grounds of alleged racism. “The Charlie Hebdo artists were executed in cold blood for drawing satirical cartoons, which is an entirely legitimate activity. It is quite right that PEN should honour their sacrifice and condemn their murder,” he said.
“This issue has nothing to do with an oppressed and disadvantaged minority. It has everything to do with the battle against fanatical Islam, which is highly organised, well-funded and which seeks to terrify us all, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, into a cowed silence.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/01/the-us-supreme-court-just-declared-war-on-the-earths-future
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Opinion
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2022-07-01T12:46:21.000Z
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Kate Aronoff
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The US supreme court has declared war on the Earth’s future | Kate Aronoff
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In remarks to the first Earth Day gathering in 1970, the Maine senator Edmund Muskie made the case for the Clean Air Act – a bill he helped draft – in stark terms. “There is no space command center, ready to give us precise instruction and alternate solutions for survival on our spaceship Earth,” he told the crowd. “Our nation – and our world – hang together by tenuous bonds which are strained as they have never been strained before – and as they must never be strained again. We cannot survive an undeclared war on our future.”
In its Thursday ruling on West Virginia v EPA – in line with a string of decisions that will make life here more dangerous – the US supreme court all but declared that war, curtailing the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate power plants under a provision of the Clean Air Act and – more worryingly – striking an opening blow to the government’s ability to do its job.
It hasn’t done so alone. The foundations for today’s ruling, like the other disastrous ones delivered this term, were laid well before Muskie gave his speech in Philadelphia. Along with the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act – passed during the Nixon administration – was a last gasp of the New Deal order, putting the government to work on an audacious and unprecedented task. Muskie hoped, as he said that day, that it might bring about “a society that will not tolerate slums for some and decent houses for others, rats for some and playgrounds for others, clean air for some and filth for others” through “planning more effective and just laws and more money better spent”.
That approach to governance is precisely what a coterie of rightwing philanthropists and legal activists found so threatening, and why they became a core part of the right’s decades-long crusade against the kinder, bigger state.
The crowning achievement of that crusade was the election of Ronald Reagan, who proved to be a useful cipher for fossil fuel-funded thinktanks and neoliberal economists to get their message out. It was none other than Justice Neil Gorsuch’s mother who helped Reagan try to strip the federal government’s environmental protection apparatus for parts. As Reagan’s pick to lead the EPA, Anne M Gorsuch made it her personal mission to shrink the body tasked with enacting the Clean Air Act. She railed against what she described as a “set of commands from Congress”. Looking back on her term, Gorsuch – who slashed the agency’s budget by a quarter – took pride in having helmed the “only agency in Washington that was truly practicing New Federalism”, devolving as many of its responsibilities as possible down to the states. Following in her footsteps, Judge Gorsuch has railed against the Chevron Doctrine that’s been a main target of the conservative legal movement (not overturned today, thankfully), saying it allowed “executive bureaucracies to swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power”.
But the roots of this ruling run deeper than Neil Gorsuch wanting to make mom proud. Polluters have always been happy to throw small fortunes at the right’s quest for minority rule, keen to protect fossil fuel profits and their ability to dump waste into the air and water from pesky things like democracy. As Nancy MacLean writes in Democracy in Chains, Charles Koch took a special interest in destroying public education, thus maintaining de facto segregation, before leading the charge against climate policy at every level of government. He continues to be a generous funder of the Federalist Society, an instrumental force in building and filling the pipeline of clerks, judges and cases that has created the judicial branch as we know it, and rulings like the one that overturned Roe v Wade last week. Secretive dark-money outfits like Donors Trust, as well as Chevron and the Scaife Foundation – furnished by old oil and aluminum money – have joined him.
West Virginia v EPA itself was brought with the help of the Republican Attorneys General Association, a network of state attorneys general whose own funders include the country’s biggest fossil fuel companies and the beleaguered coal barons who had the most to lose from the modest power plant regulations. They also spent $150,000 sponsoring Trump’s rally on 6 January.
The interests of the country’s wealthiest residents and corporations are at odds with the vast majority of people who live here. Luckily for the right, a political system designed by slaveholders provides an easy on ramp to concretize minority rule, encasing their power within definitionally undemocratic institutions. With a young, ideological rightwing majority on the court, there’s no telling how far they might go. And there’s not much that can stop them.
Gorsuch, ironically, put it well in his concurring opinion. But the line applies better to him and his colleagues than to the federal bureaucrats he was railing against: “a republic – a thing of the people – would be more likely to enact just laws than a regime administered by a ruling class of largely unaccountable ‘ministers’.”
Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at the New Republic and the author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet – And How We Fight Back
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/21/how-did-the-cult-of-cute-take-hold-and-does-it-have-a-dark-side
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Life and style
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2024-01-21T14:00:29.000Z
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Rhik Samadder
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Clumsy kittens, pigs in costumes and glittery unicorns: how the cult of cute took hold
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Every day I rise early, like a stock trader, to start the daily business of sending and receiving adorable videos. Pigs wearing pig costumes, alien creatures spanking each other’s botties, relationship dynamics explored via gibberish, talking cats and noodly cartoons. My friends and I are in deep, but how did this happen? “Cuteness has been slowly taking over our world,” says Claire Catterall, curator of the Cute exhibition at London’s Somerset House. “It’s now accepted as one of our languages.”
It’s a language that wouldn’t exist without the internet. Even in 2014, Tim Berners-Lee expressed surprise at how his invention was being used. “I’m amazed to see the many great things it’s achieved.” Another thing that surprised him? “Kittens,” he told Reddit readers.
‘Cuteness is a manipulation, designed to trigger our protective instinct.’ Photograph: Mauro Rodrigues/Alamy
You could see the origins of cute, its Rosetta Stone, perhaps, in one memorable cat meme from 2007, “I can haz cheezburger?” which gave rise to lolspeak, still influencing the way we talk online. Words like zoomies, gorlies and besties are still riding high. Clearly, something in this squishy way of talking captivates us, even shapes our identity. “We don’t know where cuteness will go or how it will be used, but we do know it’s powerful,” says Catterall. (Of course she has the word “cat” in her name.)
So why is cuteness everywhere and what does it mean for us? To answer, we must consider a more basic question, that turns out to be surprisingly slippery. What is cuteness?
At the basic level, it’s an evolutionary adaptation, developed by babies so we don’t abandon them for being useless. Yet it’s also cultural. Most of our sparkly, rainbow vocabulary of cuteness comes from kawaii, an aesthetic that developed in Japanese girls’ schools around 1900. It influenced manga and anime, before being commercialised by brands. Particularly one.
In the 1990s, every girl I knew – all five of them – was obsessed with Hello Kitty. They stuck her on their books, bags and hearts. Author Christine Yano has coined the term “pink globalisation” to describe the domination of the demure, cat-like figure created by entertainment company Sanrio to rival Mickey Mouse. In her wake came San-X bears, Tamagotchi, Pokémon and Pusheen in the US. Hello Kitty mewed so that they could… make whatever noises they make. Actually, I don’t know if she mewed. She has no mouth.
Ice baby: Hello Kitty cone. Photograph: ARTBOX
Kawaii evolved, influencing Korean culture, its current torchbearer. We can detect it in playful, street-style subcultures, including Decora, which focuses on charms, hairbows and other accessories. If young people are wearing something you don’t understand – well, now you do.
This is where things get weird. Cuteness is a manipulation, designed to trigger our protective instinct, but it isn’t just triggered by human offspring. In 1943, animal behaviourist Konrad Lorenz described the “child scheme”: a set of physical features that make certain creatures adorable to us. It includes big heads and large eyes, short, thick extremities and round bodies. He’s talking about chonky bois.
Studies have proved we actually find puppies cuter than babies. This makes sense of the hapless, round, bumbling anthropomorphic figures that deluge social media. They, too, in a sense, have been selectively bred. In an attention economy, cuteness hacks our brains, emotionally attaching us to almost anything. How is it advantageous that if someone sticks eyes on a watermelon, we’d take a bullet for it?
Things get more nuts when you consider the odd range of stuff we find cute. Kittens and bunnies, but also hairless cats and killer dolls. In his book The Power of Cute, philosopher Simon May proposes that cuteness exists on a spectrum. At one pole, childlike objects that arouse our protective instincts; towards the uncanny end, “sweet qualities get distorted into something darker, more indeterminate and more wounded”.
Tamagotchi. Photograph: Olekcii Mach/Alamy
This “unpindownability” explains how cute objects can be simultaneously ugly and appealing, young and old, monstrous and sweet. Catterall points to ET and Yoda, but I’m immediately reminded of Gus, the three-legged, one-eyed Chinese crested dog voted “ugliest dog in the world” eight times, before dying of cancer. I have a picture of Gus on my wall, liver spotted and tongue-lolling, hideous really, but he makes my heart burst with love.
The most disturbing aspect of cuteness, though, is its amorality. I’m addicted to the Instagram account @sylvaniandrama, which enacts tales of prison breaks, casual drugs and slatternly behaviour with family dolls. In an essay for the Cute exhibition, Isabel Galleymore describes how wholesome imagery can equally lend its affective power to extremists. She gives the example of Moominvalley, which has been appropriated by eco-fascists, who are both white supremacists and environmentalists. In one meme, “Snufkin, a deep thinker who enjoys fishing and playing his harmonica, bears a swastika on his green felt hat.”
‘In an attention economy, cuteness hacks our brains.’ Photograph: gabes1976/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Cuteness is deeply subversive, according to Cute Studies scholars (bet they have amazing stationery). Why is it everywhere now? The answer is in our cultural moment. We’re drawn to naïve things as a form of magical thinking – a desire to live in a cruelty-free world, where everything is safe. We use “adulting” as a verb now, as if there were another option. Glittery unicorns are one way off this collapsing planet, with its daily horrors.
But you know how anxiety works. It gets through. That’s why the other side speaks to us, too. Figures like Gloomy Bear, a pink ursine with blood perpetually dripping from his paws. While writing this, a friend on holiday in Thailand sent me a picture of a T-shirt emblazoned with a cartoon sun, dolphins with dog faces, and the words “I’m dead inside!” I asked her to get me two.
As Simon May tells me over email, dark cuteness “both comforts us in a world of unnerving uncertainty – and gives voice to that same world, but crucially in a lighthearted register”. Look at Gudetama, a more recent Sanrio figure, described as “Hello Kitty for millennials”. An egg yolk with a butt, but no neck, the blobby, genderless figure is notable for its low-octane personality. It mostly lies in its albumen, feeling lazy and defeated. It is vulnerable, but more than that, it’s tired, boss. Gudetama is all of us.
We don’t take cute things seriously, but we do listen, says Catterall. They “allow difficult things to be said openly. It’s a safe space.” The Somerset House exhibition shows how artists like Rachel Maclean are drawn to the boundary-less, fluid nature of cute, the way it undermines rigid categories and provides space for otherness. The language of cuteness is getting more sophisticated. But most of us are not artists and not sophisticated. I worry that I’m slowly boiling myself into idiocy. I overuse exclamation marks and kisses, whether I’m replying to a plumber’s quote or the prime minister’s press secretary. The childish excitability is another way I have grown cute. I routinely have to do a “derangement proofread” of work emails, removing 60% of the punctuation, before signing off, “No worries!”
‘We look at non-human faces and think we know what they feel’: Domo Kun. Photograph: Katharina Brandt/Alamy
In real life, I’m very worries. I think this is why many of us scrape and cringe our way through written exchanges. We’re aware how easily tone can be missed – what if we’re offending someone, without realising? In this paranoid atmosphere, a short sentence looks dismissive. A full stop, downright rude. “OK”, once an unremarkable response, now feels like slamming dog-mess through a letterbox.
Online communication seems to boil down to a simple choice: charge into a possible war every day, guns out, or else recuse ourselves on the grounds that we are just a silly lil’ floofer.
‘In the 1990s, every girl I knew was obsessed with Hello Kitty.’ Photograph: Ben Molyneux/Alamy
Cuteness has a solution – enter our friend, the emoji. The colourful, non-aggressive stickers have transformed messaging. I use them in every message, every reaction. But to what end? Over Zoom, I consult Jo Nicholl, a relationship therapist and podcast host who has lived in Asia.
Before I ask a question, Nicholl demonstrates the new cute craze from Vietnam that her son has taught her. It’s similar to the photo trend of joining one’s hands together, shaping a heart in negative space. Instead, Nicholl crosses the tops of her thumb and first fingers – think a pinch of salt, but slightly wider. “It’s like a heart emoji, but it’s two little baby hearts!” she squeals, before dropping her voice ominously. “Fuck off already. I’m over it.”
What’s wrong with using emoji? “It’s an emotional bypass,” she explains. We rely on them to represent how we feel, the problem being that “they’re an expanded range of Mister Men cartoons.” How many times a day do we send the heart emoji? Does it mean the same thing every time? Unlikely.
Photograph: Sebastian Enache/Shutterstock
Emoji homogenise feelings and shortcut personal expressions, says Nicholl, whose work involves teaching people to have adult conversations and better understand themselves. We hide in cuteness, she says. Our true feelings are usually ambivalent and complicated. Her concerns extend beyond the personal. “We are being trained to look at objects of limited emotional width and say, ‘This is my feeling’,” Nicholl explains. The problem is, identification cuts two ways. “We are being led into a world in which we get used to looking at non-human, AI faces and think we know what they’re feeling. A world in which AI tells us how we feel.” This will probably be how we diagnose emotional distress in future, she predicts. “We won’t sit with a therapist, we’ll be with an AI.”
Who loves cute things most? Advertising executives! There’s a reason meerkats peddle boring, insurance-based price-comparison websites. Rebecca Hughes, a brand strategist, cites the example of Guide Dogs for the blind. For “a charity that provides much needed support for blind people, their early ads didn’t feature blind people very much,” she notes. Bouncy labrador puppies were simply the more effective sell.
‘There’s a reason meerkats peddle boring, insurance-based price-comparison websites.’ Photograph: Kristian Bell/Getty Images
Advertising is an industry that grasps the dark power of an amoral appeal to feelings. Cuteness reduces price sensitivity, which makes us happier to hand over money. Research also suggests that when companies transgress, having a cute mascot makes consumers want to protect them. The brands themselves are seen as “malleable”, or in the process of growing and learning.
Here is a sleeping giant, overlooked for being feminine and trivial. Don’t doubt that this is a force shaping us. As the web evolves and self-presentation becomes ever more important, cuteness offers us a way to hide and expose, be perfect and vulnerable, irresistible yet anarchic. Cuteness may be everywhere, but it’s far from clear it has our best interests at heart. The horizon is pink, but hazy.
Daruma doll. Photograph: Sudowoodo/Alamy
It strikes me there’s a comparison with humour. Both feel good, while undermining fixed categories – that’s how punchlines work. Comedy was considered low art before it came to dominate the mainstream. It has since become a cultural battleground. Something as affable as being funny can undermine democracies, its rock stars carrying the darkness of their work into life. Am I saying we should cancel kittens? Don’t get cute.
We should perhaps try to interrupt its manipulations, though. Hack the hack, as it were. Working on the exhibition has changed Catterall. She’s no longer affected the way she once was by images of “anything maimed, hurt or pathetic, tugging at the heart strings”. She finds the knowledge of what they’re trying to do strangely repulsive. “At the same time, give me a puppy and I’m a puddle.”
Cute is at Somerset House, London WC2, from 25 January to 14 April. For more information, go to somersethouse.org.uk
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/nov/14/government-to-finally-drop-plan-for-hs2-link-to-leeds-reports
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UK news
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2021-11-14T15:39:53.000Z
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Helen Pidd
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Government to finally drop plan for HS2 link to Leeds – reports
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The government has refused to confirm or deny reports that it will finally cancel plans for the HS2 link to Leeds this week, and instead fund a hodgepodge of disparate projects which favour Conservative constituencies and leave mysterious gaps in the rail network.
The transport secretary, Grant Shapps, is expected to announce the outcome of the long-delayed integrated rail plan on Thursday.
The Sunday Times suggested he would commit to building HS2 from Birmingham to Manchester but not Leeds, which has earmarked a large part of the city centre to accommodate a new station.
To soften the blow, Shapps is expected to announce two shorter high-speed routes, the paper said. One would run between Leeds and Sheffield and another from Birmingham to East Midlands Parkway, which is in the Conservative constituency of Rushcliffe, 10 miles south of Nottingham. There would apparently be a puzzling non high-speed gap of 50 miles between the two new lines.
According to the Mail on Sunday, Leeds will receive its own tram system “in consolation” for not being connected to HS2.
The director of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership thinktank, Henri Murison, said: “Without the benefits to areas such as Yorkshire and the north-east, HS2’s status as a project to drive the whole of the UK is undermined considerably.
“Will this be a government that levels up, or levels down and walks away from the northern powerhouse they promised with city leaders across the north?”
Behind the scenes in the northern mayoralties, there are also major jitters about Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR), a new trans-Pennine railway line from Liverpool to Leeds via Bradford.
Details about the line were conspicuously absent from Sunday’s newspaper leaks, though building it was one of Boris Johnson’s first pledges as prime minister. Three days into the job in 2019, he gave a speech at Manchester’s Science and Industry Museum, saying: “I want to be the prime minister who does with Northern Powerhouse Rail what we did for Crossrail in London.”
He committed in February 2020 to bringing HS2 to the north of England, building “a rapid connection from the West Midlands to the northern powerhouse, to Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds”.
Crossrail is a new £18.6bn east-west rail line in London. It is currently three years behind schedule and £3.8bn over budget, but seen as a key driver of economic growth in the capital.
NPR is the brainchild of Transport for the North (TfN) , a statutory body set up to advise ministers on the region’s transport needs. It says NPR would reduce road usage by 58,000 car trips per day, and create 100,000 jobs in the urban north.
TfN has been adamant the line should include a new through-station in Bradford, which was named last week as Britain’s worst-connected major city.
The Mail on Sunday said other announcements expected this week included the £78m electrification of the line from Wigan to Bolton, which now has two Tory MPs, and a reinstatement of a passenger service from Sheffield to Stocksbridge, which in 2019 elected its first Tory MP since 1935.
Murison said the government’s priority should be to build HS2 south from Leeds “as well as securing a new station in Bradford on the critical new line across the Pennines”.
HS2 protesters Swampy and Satchel leave Wendover tunnel after 35 days
Read more
The Guardian asked TfN what the point of its existence was, if the government ignored its key recommendations.
Its chief executive, Martin Tugwell, said it would be premature to comment before Thursday.
“What does remain clear though, is our commitment to securing the best possible rail connectivity for the 15.2 million people of the North, and fundamental to that connectivity is the work we have done to date on Northern Powerhouse Rail as a co-client with government and the way it integrates with the rest of the rail network, including with HS2,” he said.
A Department for Transport spokesperson said: “Work is continuing on the integrated rail plan. We will publish it shortly and do not comment on speculation.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/08/architecture-books-year-2013-review
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Books
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2013-12-08T09:30:00.000Z
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Rowan Moore
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Architecture books of the year – review
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Idon't know why, in these end times for communications made with dead trees and days of general impoverishment, but the market for sumptuous, fat, beautifully illustrated books of architecture and design seems as strong as ever. This year saw a Taschen tome on the great Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza, by Philip Jodidio, which is over-bright for its subject but still welcome, and an impressive volume on the Italian master Carlo Scarpa from Phaidon and Robert McCarter. Also from Phaidon is a delightful work, with text by Deyan Sudjic, on Shiro Kuramata, a furniture designer simultaneously fanatical, esoteric, postmodern and minimalist. Zeuler Lima's book on Lina Bo Bardi (Yale), the once overlooked, now hugely resurgent genius of mid-20th-century Brazil, is exceptionally fine.
Scarpa, Siza, Kuramata and Bo Bardi are all well known in the worlds of architecture and design, less so outside, and each book is a good way (at a price) of getting to know them. Also educational, and engagingly so, is the second volume of Makers of Modern Architecture (NYRB), in which the American critic Martin Filler deftly summarises the likes of Le Corbusier, Eero Saarinen and Rem Koolhaas.
The most compelling books of the year offer contrasting perspectives of cities. In The View from the Train (Verso), we are offered perceptive, educated, un-obvious musings on place and inhabitation by the film-maker Patrick Keiller. The Italian Townscape (Artifice) is a reprint of a 1963 book by Ivor de Wolfe, the pseudonym of the publisher of the Architectural Review Hubert de Cronin Hastings. It is rich in black-and-white photographs, made haunting by the passage of time, that show not only crumbling marble, but also advertising signs, road markings, the shine of a smart car. It is animated by de Wolfe/Hastings's text – pithy, witty, passionate, sometimes florid, sometimes eccentric.
Bradley L Garrett has academic credentials (Oxford, University of Californiacorrect) in geography and archaeology, with a parallel life as an urban explorer. This means that he and his associates break into places usually off-limits – tube tunnels, abandoned mental hospitals, the tops of skyscrapers – and photograph their experiences. Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City (Verso) documents their adventures, combining erudite references (Montesquieu, Walter Benjamin) with compelling photographs of men in hoodies in strange places.
If its appeal is its celebration of the unofficial, Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities (Lars Müller) goes much further. With photographs by the great Iwan Baan, it documents a skyscraper in Caracas, left as an incomplete concrete frame and then colonised by squatters, who improvised a multistorey city, complete with churches and brothels. The book, my book of the year, is a breathtaking document of human society and human ingenuity.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/may/16/boots-chemist-pessina-profits-alliance
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Business
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2011-05-16T18:12:52.000Z
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Zoe Wood
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We're not hiding our profits – we're reinvesting, says Boots owner Pessina
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The Italian who co-owns Alliance Boots with private equity firm KKR has angrily defended its tax affairs, arguing that they were not salting away millions "in Swiss bank accounts" but reinvesting profits in expanding the group.
The company behind the Boots the Chemist chain has been targeted by the protest group UK Uncut because its tax bill has fallen sharply after the debt-fuelled £11bn takeover in 2007. It made operating profits of £1bn in the year to March but paid only £59m tax.
"We don't distribute any dividends," said executive chairman Stefano Pessina. "It is not like hundreds of millions of pounds are going to KKR and myself... we are not taking money and putting it in Swiss bank accounts."
Pessina, who is based in Monaco and is estimated to have a personal fortune of $1.4bn (about £860m), said it had invested close to a £1bn in its stores and acquisitions that were creating jobs. The group has focused on chipping away at the £9bn of debt it used to fund what was Europe's biggest leveraged buyout.
Its finance director, George Fairweather, said it had paid back £546m during the year, reducing its borrowings to £7.8bn. He explained the low tax bill by pointing to borrowing costs of £381m, which are tax-deductible, as well as the tax relief received on the near £250m injected into its pension schemes. "I make no apology," he said. "We are doing the right thing for people like our pensioners."
Fairweather said it would be another four years until the group was under pressure to refinance and he did not expect difficulty finding backers as its creditworthiness was improving as debt is reduced.
Pessina also shed light on the surprise departure of group chief executive Andy Hornby, who quit the his £1m-a-year job in March. Hornby was chief executive of HBOS bank when it had to be rescued by Lloyds bank in 2008. "Andy was stressed and decided to come back to a company where the workload is quite substantial, too early," he said.
Pessina, who turned his family's ailing Naples drug wholesaler into the pharmacy giant Alliance UniChem, which merged with Boots in 2006, is said to be a workaholic. The 69-year-old still travels the world looking for deals.
The post had promised to rehabilitate Hornby's damaged career and Pessina insisted that the relationship between the men had not soured, adding: "Every day there are managers who are stressed and decide to take some time off." There is no rush to replace Hornby, he said, and a search would begin "in due course".
Group sales jumped 15% to £20bn as Alliance Boots targeted overseas growth with acquisitions in Turkey and Germany. Underlying sales were flat, however, as both retail and drug wholesaling divisions encountered tough trading conditions. Like-for-like sales at Boots the Chemist finished up 0.5% after strong growth in dispensing but a decline in make-up sales as women traded down to cheaper brands. The chain's film processing business continued to decline as the market shifts to digital photography, and sales of baby products slid following stiff competition from the supermarkets.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/sep/30/miliband-has-got-answers
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Opinion
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2012-09-30T20:30:00.000Z
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Jackie Ashley
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Ed Miliband has got answers, so stop asking the wrong questions | Jackie Ashley
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Those who ask the wrong questions are unlikely to get the right answers. People scurrying round Labour's Manchester conference are, too often, asking the wrong questions. One is "When is Ed going to be a charismatic, celebrity leader?" Another, "Why won't Labour show its true identity by laying out tax and spending policies now?" Luckily, what's really happening to the opposition is more interesting and, for the first time this autumn, beginning to come into focus – if only the commentators would allow it to.
Let's deal first with the Ed Miliband question. Are we really still so politically childish that we believe a Big Character, armed with all the meretricious tricks and lures of celebrity politics – the faux-working class diction, the camera-adoring glances, the fabricated backstory – is going to stride out and save the nation?
Ed's just Ed. He's a serious, politically brave and thoughtful north London intellectual. I once coined the term "Zen socialism" to describe his almost eerie sense of self and calm. Frankly, I'm still delighted to be watching a Labour leader sans bullying spin doctors, sans cheesy photocalls and, above all, sans a bloated, swaggering sense of personal destiny.
The far bigger question is the shape of the Labour politics emerging under this man. And again, to see it, you have to stop asking the wrong questions. Of course Labour can't set out a detailed shadow budget this far away from an election. But we do already know from Miliband that the top tax rate of 50p would be restored, that there would be a much greater focus on creating jobs, and that the banks would be reformed and the NHS changes reversed.
More than that, though, Labour is talking of a badly damaged economic system which requires not just a leader, and not even just an election, but a national transformation to put it right. It needs companies run more democratically, rather than by a tiny clique of bonus-addicted executives. It needs banks that go back to their main social function – protecting savers' money and lending to productive businesses. It needs public sector institutions such as hospitals to be more responsive to their users. As the shadow Treasury secretary, Rachel Reeves, suggested on Sunday, large amounts of money could be saved by hospitals working with local councils to get some elderly people out of hospital beds, to be looked after in their own homes.
It also needs a lively sense of the changing priorities and demographics of the country. That means shifting attention and resources to older people and those who care for them, which Labour is to make a top priority, starting with the new Older Women's Commission. One of the most inspiring, and perhaps surprising, facts about the conference so far has been the huge number and passion of female delegates: I can't remember a party ever feeling so feminised. (And, by the way, it's an atmosphere that makes Len McCluskey's language and menaces just sound a bit old-fashioned.)
Starting to shift Britain in the right direction isn't a matter of taking over ministries and nudging policy, or even just rewriting departmental budgets. Instead, it's about changing the institutions people work in and rely on in their daily lives. It's about radical banking reform of the kind shadow ministers laid out today, which needn't cost the taxpayer a penny. It's about linking up local authority services far more closely. It's about giving shareholders much more power over the remuneration and strategy of big companies.
It's about pushing and cajoling companies to pay their workers a decent wage, rather than depending on the state to make up the difference through tax credits – a corporate dependency culture allowed to flourish in the good years, when the tax receipts flowed in, but not affordable now. It's about helping consumers to band together to force energy prices down by buying in bulk. It's a vision of government as the reshaper and enabler of corporate responsibility, rather than as doler-out.
As one shadow minister put it to me yesterday, "Our model of capitalism has broken but, rather than abolish capitalism, we have to reform it, remake it, and democratise it." That's why so many of the lazier expectations of what a Labour opposition should be – laundry-lists of new spending pledges and detailed promises about tax – are simply beside the point.
Almost everywhere one looks at this conference, one sees new thinking about how to reform the economic system without radical new spending commitments. Don't get me wrong. It will be confrontational and sometimes scary. When the big corporate tycoons threaten to clear off, Miliband and the rest of the team cannot flinch. When executives on millions warn that they can't pay decent wages without harming profits, there will be arguments to be had.
The rise of female politicians and a more feminised agenda won't be greeted warmly by the traditionalist press. Look at the stick Harriet Harman has put up with over the years. But reflect on how she has become a major authority figure in Miliband's Labour party. Then look at Reeves, doing the hard lifting in the shadow Treasury, and Yvette Cooper as a serious future home secretary, and you see a party that feels a million miles away from New Labour and Blair's babes, or from the macho bullying culture that flourished under Brown.
Obviously, there is still a long, long way to go. But you can see the ground plan for a new centre-left politics taking shape, and a few lines of brick rising from the mud. We don't yet have the language to describe it properly – civic socialism?
It will require more reaching out of the kind we're already seeing in Manchester – to non-political groups, to radical thinkers in business and yes, in time, to other parties. And none of it will come to anything if millions of people cannot be persuaded that a better economy and society are possible. The quiet despair about anything ever really changing is the single most lethal threat to British democracy.
Ed Miliband's biggest task will be to shift that, to convince the disillusioned that Britain can develop a less short-term, less unequal economy, in which companies can again be admired. Simply voting Labour, and expecting Miliband to fix it for us, isn't grown up. He has got answers for those who will listen, but only for reasonable questions.
Twitter: @jackieashley
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/22/facebook-fined-mishandling-user-information-ireland-eu-meta
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Technology
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2023-05-22T18:39:40.000Z
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Dan Milmo
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Facebook owner Meta fined €1.2bn for mishandling user information
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Facebook’s owner, Meta, has been fined a record €1.2bn (£1bn) and ordered to suspend the transfer of user data from the EU to the US.
The fine – equivalent to $1.3bn – imposed by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), which regulates Meta across the EU, is a record for a breach of the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The suspension of Facebook data transfers is not immediate and Meta has been given five months to implement it.
It’s a tough time for Meta. Can AI help make the company relevant again?
Read more
The DPC punishment relates to a legal challenge brought by an Austrian privacy campaigner, Max Schrems, over concerns resulting from the Edward Snowden revelations that European users’ data is not sufficiently protected from US intelligence agencies when it is transferred across the Atlantic.
Meta has also been given six months to stop “the unlawful processing, including storage, in the US” of personal EU data already transferred across the Atlantic, meaning that user data will need to be removed from Facebook servers.
The ruling does not affect data transfers at Meta’s other main platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta said it would appeal against the decision and seek a stay on the data transfer order.
The DPC said Meta infringed GDPR by continuing to transfer EU user data to the US without proper safeguards in place, despite a ruling by the European court of justice in 2020 requiring robust protection of that information. The CJEU ruled that data leaving the EU must have the same level of protection as it would have under GDPR when it reaches its destination outside the EU.
The regulator said data transferred by Facebook under a legal instrument called standard contractual clauses (SCCs) “did not address the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms of data subjects that were identified by the [court of justice] in its judgment”.
Meta, whose EU base is in Ireland, said it had been “singled out” by the DPC despite thousands of other businesses using the same data transfer processes.
“We are … disappointed to have been singled out when using the same legal mechanism as thousands of other companies looking to provide services in Europe,” wrote Nick Clegg, the Meta president of global affairs, and Jennifer Newstead, the Meta chief legal officer, in a blog post on Monday.
Clegg and Newstead added: “This decision is flawed, unjustified and sets a dangerous precedent for the countless other companies transferring data between the EU and US.” They said the internet risked being carved up into national and regional silos as a result.
A spokesperson for the European Commission – the EU’s executive arm – said it hoped a new framework for transatlantic data transfers would be “fully functional by the summer” which would provide the “stability and legal certainty” sought by US tech companies. Facebook would be able to resume data transfers under the new data regime, which has been agreed between Washington and Brussels at a political level but still requires agreement on implementation.
The spokesperson said it was “very clear” that the EU had worked with the US on putting “safeguards” protecting consumer data in place and it hoped to restore legal certainty.
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The Meta blog said there would be “no immediate disruption” to Facebook’s service in the EU because of the grace period announced by the DPC. However, in Meta’s most recent quarterly results, the company said that without SCCs or “other alternative means of data transfers” it would “likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe”.
Meta reported net income, a US measure of profit, of $23.2bn last year. Shares in Meta were up 2.2% in midday trading on Monday, valuing the company at more than $640bn.
The DPC said it had disagreed with other EU regulators over Meta’s punishment, which resulted in the European Data Protection Board, comprised of EU data watchdogs, stepping in to decide whether a fine should be imposed. The previous record GDPR fine was €746m imposed on Amazon by Luxembourg in 2021.
Eddie Powell, a data protection partner at UK law firm Fladgate, said an appeal was unlikely to reverse all of the decision. “At the heart of the issue is the US government’s ability under US law to access EU personal data held by US corporations on the grounds of national security, without any effective safeguard or checks,’” he said.
Powell added that the fine reflected the fact that “Meta’s systems were structured so that all data collected on its social media platforms had to be sent to the US, without any kind of firebreak”.
Mark Deem, a partner at the UK law firm Wiggin, said the size of the fine would send a message to other businesses that transfer personal data outside the EU. “One of the purposes of the figure is to serve as a warning to other companies about how they handle international data transfers,” he said.
The UK data watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office, said: “We have noted the decision and will review the details in due course.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2015/feb/07/spiral-recap-season-five-episodes-nine-and-10-an-unusually-violent-week
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Television & radio
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2015-02-07T22:48:09.000Z
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James Donaghy
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Spiral recap: season five, episodes nine and 10 – an unusually violent week
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Hello everyone. I’m James and I’m your pretend Vicky for the evening. With a bit of luck, you’ll barely know the difference.
There’s solid progress for the good guys this week with the multiple pieces of the double-murder puzzle finally locking into place. Laure’s crew seem very close to apprehending the killer, particularly now Gilou is back in the game. It is nonetheless an unusually violent week, with a fatal beating, a rape and a rottweiler attack. It wouldn’t be Spiral if you didn’t despair for humanity at some point.
Have you been watching … Spiral series five. Is this the best season yet?
Read more
The double murder
As Roban passes the bad news about Lucie’s paternity to Jaulin, he learns about the parcel Sandrine received from prison on Lucie’s birthday at a time when Zac was not incarcerated. He and his crew were living it up in Casablanca at the time of the killings, which means Zac is in the clear for that at least.
Tintin meets Bensimon to organise the printer-cartridge deal. He’s not quite got Gilou’s scuzzy underworld air, but he comes through well enough. Zac calls for Karen and Laetitia to get the time and date of departure for the lorry carrying the cartridges. In the course of getting the info, Laetitia’s last-minute replacement, Kim, gets raped by Pascal, the warehouse creep. The scene felt gratuitous at the time, but if it’s foreshadowing Pascal as the killer then at least it serves some purpose. He went from zero to rapist in seconds – it’s safe to say he’s a danger to any woman.
The raid on the lorry is a bust as Zac is a no-show and Bensimon scarpers into the woods. Zac has a pretty good excuse – getting beaten to death by Topknot’s biker gang. There’s a lesson: always keep on top of your debts. When prints from Zac’s piece of paper match the print on Lucie’s slipper, it’s a huge break in the case. If Kim picked up the paper in the office, then it’s just about plausible Pascal could have got prints on it. That’s my theory anyway.
The plates on Kim’s car eventually lead them to the Étoile estate and Kim’s mother, Clara. As the cops question her, Kim lays low with Karen. But when Kim makes a break for it, Karen sets attack dogs on her; we finish on an unconscious and mauled Kim. At least the cops now have the familiar name and face of Karen Hoarau to look up. They’re closing in.
Gilou
It looked bad for Gilou, what with the police having him on tape persuading Serge, and with Servier, the union rep, unwilling to help. There’s a lesson: always keep on top of your union subs. The good news is that Joséphine fights his corner after Laure pays her the sweetest compliment, calling her a pitbull. Her advice to drag his bosses down with him is typically high risk. He might stay out of prison, but it’s career suicide.
So it’s left to Herville, that unlikeliest of heroes, to ride in on his charger and save the day. His meeting with Lenoir and Foucart seems a straightforward, mutual arse-covering, backscratching affair. They offer him the bait of the Armed Response Unit command yet he gallantly refuses to throw Gilou under the bus. “Getting promoted for shafting an officer ...” he says. “I need to be able to look at myself in the mirror in the mornings.”
Herville has a little smile to himself as he leaves. Who knew doing the right thing could feel good? The case against Gilou is thrown out.
Ziani
Plenty of machinations here this week, demonstrating why white-collar crime is always the hardest to prosecute. When Edelman has Joséphine go after an envelope seized in the search, Roban sees what she’s up to – but Carole won’t jeopardise her case by reading the contents. No such problem for Roban, who discovers a “bank transfer of staggering proportions” inside.
That’s just the beginning. Edelman tells Joséphine about a transaction due that week that will allow French corporations to set up in Libya. It’s worth hundreds of millions. Ziani is the middleman in deals between France and Libya, pocketing backhanders along the way. With his funds frozen, the transfer can’t go through. Ziani must miss the good old days of Gaddafi’s reign, when his family made their fortune embezzling public funds. Beating your staff silly with an iron is more problematic than he ever imagined.
He goes awol, missing the confrontation between him and his staff, and violating his judicial supervision in the process. Roban plans to smoke him out by making the bank transfer public. He goes to Regis, an old friend, another maverick who hates Machard. He happily adds the new indictment and it seems to do the trick. Joséphine shows up at Roban’s office offering a deal – Ziani comes in if they unfreeze the accounts. You can’t help feeling that money will do the talking as the endgame plays out in this one.
Thoughts and observations
It looks like Tintin’s marriage is over despite Laure’s best efforts. He needs this news like a hole in the head. (And this is a man who actually has had a hole shot in his head.)
“You scared me, you little bugger.” The placental abruption still plagues Laure’s pregnancy, but what’s clearer than ever is how emotionally attached she is to her unborn child. It’s equally clear that if she doesn’t slow down, she might lose it. Have you ever seen Laure slow down?
I loved Roban’s new assistant, Jean-Luc, hiding the scissors when Jaulin walked in. He’s heard the stories.
Edelman’s associates don’t seem to realise what they’ve got in Joséphine. They are ready to dump her the moment she drags Ziani out of the hole he’s been enthusiastically digging for himself.
Tintin creating a distraction while Laure hacked Servier’s computer was top-notch underhand policing, which they enjoyed far too much.
“Solidarity among widows.” Joséphine’s response to Gilou when he demands to know why she is representing him. The respect between Joséphine and Laure seems to be growing into affection. I never saw that coming.
“With all due respect you’re living in a dream world. If we did every case by the book, we’d close about five a year.” Gilou and Herville repeat the necessity of having to bend the rules to get things done. The bosses put pressure on the rank-and-file to cut corners and then run for the hills when one of them gets caught. How many professions does this apply to?
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/04/diana-meghan-and-the-tabloid-press-harry-finally-gets-his-day-in-court
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UK news
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2023-06-04T12:00:12.000Z
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Andrew Anthony
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Diana, Meghan and the tabloid press: Harry finally gets his day in court
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The Duke of Sussex is due to give evidence at the high court in London on Tuesday in a joint case he, and many other alleged victims of historic phone hacking, have brought against Mirror Group Newspapers.
It is believed to be the first appearance in the witness box of a senior royal since the 19th century, although in 2002 the Princess Royal pleaded guilty to a charge under the Dangerous Dogs Act, after two children were bitten in Windsor Great Park – by her dog, it should be made clear.
One of the problems is that the British legal system is run in the name of the crown, which is potentially awkward, at least in terms of maintaining the appearance of neutrality. For instance, the MGN trial is being held in the King’s Bench division of the high court, which to Prince Harry is a bit like saying “Pa’s bench”, and features a number of king’s counsels on both sides of the dispute.
So Harry will be making history as well as waves when he gives evidence. While there is much speculation about what exactly he might say, it’s a reasonably safe bet that the man who has described the British tabloid press as “the mothership of online trolling” won’t be celebrating the high journalistic standards of red-top editors and reporters.
One media personality who has been tipped to receive an unflattering mention is Piers Morgan, editor of the Daily Mirror from 1995 to 2004, already named by Harry’s lawyers as one of the senior executives who authorised obtaining private information unlawfully.
Last month Morgan responded to the suggestion that he should apologise to Harry rather like an arsonist who, when asked to put out a blaze at firework factory, reaches for his flamethrower. He wasn’t going to take lectures on privacy invasion, he explained, from “somebody who has spent the last three years ruthlessly and cynically invading the royal family’s privacy for vast commercial gain”.
The question was raised because MGN had opened the high court trial by apologising “unreservedly” to the duke for one instance of unlawful information gathering. Alas, it’s in regard to all the other alleged incidences of unlawful information gathering that Harry seeks justice. His team cited 148 articles as evidence, but only 33 are included in the trial.
The Mirror Group’s barrister, Andrew Green KC, says the publisher denies 28 of them, and has “not admitted” to the other five – that distinction may seem obscure to the layperson, but it’s on these subtly arcane points that front-rank lawyers earn their handsome remuneration. Similarly MGN’s legal team maintains that there is “no evidence, or no sufficient evidence, of voicemail interception” in any of the cases in the trial.
Harry is one of four representative claimants who have been selected from a large group of mostly celebrities with claims against MGN – the other three claimants in court are Coronation Street actors Nikki Sanderson and Michael Turner (known professionally as Michael Le Vell), and comedian Paul Whitehouse’s ex-wife, Fiona Wightman, none of whom have been the subject of an Oprah television special.
That the duke will be appearing in court is against the expressed preferences of MGN. At a pretrial hearing, MGN lawyers sought to persuade the judge that Ricky Tomlinson, part of the wider group of claimants, would be a more suitable representative at the trial. To the relief of all media, except MGN, the judge decided that the most outspoken member of the royal family would get the nod over the bearded bloke in The Royle Family.
The rogue prince is not only taking on MGN, but also has lawsuits against Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, and against News Group Newspapers (NGN), publishers of the Sun and the News of the World, the latter of which was closed in 2011 as a result of the phone-hacking scandal.
Royals, celebrities and indeed just about everyone else who has been offered a settlement tend to avoid trials. Court is expensive and unpredictable, and it’s estimated that NGN’s phone-hacking costs up until last year were running at more than £1.2bn, of which a significant chunk has gone on paying off claimants (and thus keeping them out of the witness box). That’s NGN, not MGN – just distinguishing between the various different, but very similar, sets of publishing initials is enough to sap your NRG.
With all due respect to Michael Turner and Fiona Wightman, their courtroom testaments are unlikely to travel around the globe. But Tuesday’s arrival of the prince-on-a-mission has all the makings of a gripping scene that could perhaps form the centrepiece of any future film dramatisation of this shadowy and rather sordid story. For the sake of acronymic consistency, such a film ought to be produced by MGM.
How will Harry perform under forensic cross-examination? Mr Green will certainly make for a much more challenging inquisitor than Oprah Winfrey or Tom Bradby. Yet in a sense, this is the moment that Harry, who says it’s his “life’s work to change the British media landscape”, has been waiting for – his day in court, his reckoning with the industry that he blames for the death of his mother and demonising of his wife.
One senses that his memoir, Netflix series and various TV interviews have not fully exorcised the demons from the duke’s tormented psyche. An excess of emotion, however, isn’t necessarily an advantage in a courtroom setting. But he also possesses vital information.
Depending on how he performs and what he says, he could do a good deal of damage to the press, the royal family or himself – or, conceivably, all three.
Verdict? Hold the front page.
Harry’s battles with the tabloids
v Mirror Group Newspapers
The group lawsuit, involving various celebrities, alleges that unlawful information was gathered by or on behalf of MGN journalists between 1996 and 2011. It is alleged that MGN used at least 25 different private investigators to spy on Prince Harry over many years. MGN contests these claims and also argues that some have been brought too late. MGN denies the allegations.
v Associated Newspapers
Harry is one of seven well-known individuals, including Elizabeth Hurley and David Furnish, who are bringing cases against the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. The plaintiffs’¬ lawyers argue that the newspaper group has conducted “abhorrent criminal activity and gross breaches of privacy” that involve the hiring of private investigators to place listening devices in people’s cars and homes, the obtaining of medical information through impersonation, and accessing of bank accounts through illicit means. Associated Newspapers denies the allegations.
v News Group Newspapers
Harry is suing the Sun over allegations that the newspaper illegally hacked his voicemails during the 2000s. He also claims the newspaper illegally obtained information, including medical records. As part of an application in April, Harry stated that his brother, William, the Prince of Wales, was paid a “huge sum of money” in 2020 by NGN as settlement that was part of a “secret agreement” between the publisher and the royal family. NGN denies the allegations and says there has been no such secret agreement.
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https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/oct/10/education-male-schools-policy-ideas
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Education
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2017-10-10T06:00:40.000Z
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Fiona Millar
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Let’s free education from the hands of the stale, pale male | Fiona Millar
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Why can’t we take politics out of education? It is a frequent refrain, asked by someone at nearly every headteacher conference I have spoken at in the last few years. And it’s understandable. The level of change foisted on schools has been wearisome, but today the waters seem oddly becalmed.
The conference season passed with no eye-catching announcements. Is it really only a year since the education secretary, Justine Greening, who this year hailed her own comprehensive education from the podium, was defending the expansion of grammar schools? Or less than a decade since the free school founder Katharine Birbalsingh shook up Tory delegates with her claim that the education system was “broken”?
Headteachers start fightback against government policy diktat
Read more
The words “free schools” or “grammars” barely crossed any lips in the entire conference season – a reminder of how many pointless initiatives there have been lately. The most arresting news story might even have been the appointment of a new education minister.
In case you missed it, Sir Theodore Agnew, a former Tory donor and academy trust chair, has been fast-tracked to the House of Lords to become under-secretary of state for the school system. He replaces Lord Nash, another former Conservative donor, who chaired an academy trust before spending four years running the school system, of which academy trusts are such an important part.
Agnew has already chaired the Department for Education’s Academies Board, during which time he oversaw the regional schools commissioner Tim Coulson, who in turn oversaw his own academy trust.
That same RSC is now chair of governors at the Great Yarmouth Charter Academy, coincidentally part of Agnew’s trust and notorious for ruling that malingering children should vomit in a bucket and always smile at teachers. There may be no new policies on offer, but those old Goveian revolving doors are still spinning.
Lord Nash, a Conservative donor, has handed over his schools job to Agnew. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian
Elsewhere, questions of funding aside, these humdrum times do provide respite for schools, still reeling from the introduction of new tests, exams, performance measures and curriculum. But education is political. The government funds public services, and how we educate our children goes to the heart of what sort of society we want to see. Both Greening and her opposite number, Angela Rayner, spoke sincerely about their goal of more equality of opportunity for all young people.
Yet we are so far from achieving it. According to the Education Policy Institute it will be 50 years before we reach an equitable education system where disadvantaged pupils don’t fall behind.
And it is by no means clear where the urgently needed refresh of the market-driven policies of the last 30 years will come from. As one headteacher told me last week: “We’re stuck.”
Where is Labour’s big thinking on education policy?
Fiona Millar
Read more
Rather than taking politics out of education, a solution might be to take education out of the political cycle. There is too much tinkering driven by electioneering or the demands of a 24/7 media.
It would take a bold politician to do it, but what if she or he committed to a cross-party group to look at the evidence and solutions on the most intractable issues, such as white British underachievement, and then implement the findings? It would be a churlish opponent who refused to take part.
The gene pool needs to be widened when it comes to ideas. The ministerial/academy revolving door extends to the policy world, where the same old, often wealthy, pale, male establishment figures with links to chains of schools seem to pop up again and again. The ubiquitous Lord Agnew has been a trustee of two prominent thinktanks.
Where are the professional, parent, even pupil voices – the people who are often experimented on? This month marks the fifth anniversary of the first meeting of the Headteachers’ Roundtable. At the time they constituted a powerful new voice in the education world by harnessing the views of professionals via social media.
When they meet at the Guardian this week, we will be able to hear how much influence they feel they have really had. One of their original ideas was for curriculum and assessment to be taken out of the hands of politicians and handed to an independent body on a 20-year licence.
Politicians rightly want to set the big aspiration goals but would it be such a bad idea if other experts were constitutionally obliged to contribute to the means? Parliament resumes this week but there is no education legislation on the horizon and no big ideas coming down the track. It might be time for something new.
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/15/christian-porter-says-governor-generals-power-to-dismiss-prime-minister-keeps-governments-on-their-toes
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Australia news
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2020-07-15T07:06:59.000Z
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Katharine Murphy
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Christian Porter says governor general’s power to dismiss prime minister keeps ‘governments on their toes’
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Australia’s attorney general Christian Porter has declared the governor general having reserve powers “keeps executive governments on their toes” and he says the palace letters don’t tell us “anything about the role of the governor general that we didn’t really already know”.
Porter, who on Wednesday characterised himself as a “sort of a constitutional conservative”, said Australia was probably the best-functioning democracy in the world, “and if you don’t like this system, it’s incumbent [on you] to suggest the next one”.
“I think that many people who argue that [the dismissal of the Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam in] 1975 … should be an event that pushes us towards a republic don’t like the fact that there’s any degree of unclarity or uncertainty in the system,” Porter told 6PR in Perth. “But I wouldn’t conceive of this as being unclear or uncertain.
'This monstrous attack': palace letters castigate Australian journalists
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“We know what the governor general can do, we’ve seen it done and it’s that power that keeps executive governments on their toes,” he said. “That is part of the separation of powers, part of the balance of powers that good functioning democracies have got, and we’re probably the best-functioning democracy in the world.”
Porter was responding to the release of a trove of letters between the Queen, her representatives and then governor general John Kerr in the lead-up to Whitlam’s dismissal after a four-year court battle launched by the historian Jenny Hocking to gain access to primary source material about the events of 1975 and the aftermath.
Porter joined the high court action against Hocking with the National Archives of Australia, an action they ultimately lost.
The correspondence confirms the extent to which the palace was drawn into Kerr’s plans in 1975 to remove the Labor leader from office. The correspondence – which proves the governor general of Australia flagged a “last resort” option to dismiss Whitlam with the Queen’s private secretary, Martin Charteris, and Charteris supported Kerr in his view that he could use his reserve powers – has renewed the debate over whether Australia should become a republic.
Hocking is continuing to examine the letters, but has pointed to a handwritten note added as a postscript to a letter from Charteris to Kerr, dated 24 September 1975. Charteris wrote to Kerr about the political crisis gripping the Whitlam government, saying “the governor general of Australia does not seem to lie on a bed of roses”.
“It is clear that you may be faced with some difficult constitutional decisions during the next month or so,” Charteris wrote. He added a handwritten note at the bottom of his letter, pointing out a book that postulates a governor general can dissolve parliament when supply is blocked.
The palace letters amount to an act of interference in Australian democracy
Katharine Murphy
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“I suppose you know Eugene Forsey’s book The Prerogative of the Dissolution?” he says. Charteris says Forsey’s book articulates the idea that “if supply is refused this always makes it constitutionally proper to grant a dissolution”.
As well as revealing the exhaustive conversations between Charteris and Kerr during the lead-up to the dismissal, the letters suggest the palace was nervous about the prospect of Kerr writing about the events of 1975. In January 1977, Kerr wrote to Charteris advising him that he’d been writing and had received “offers from publishing companies to publish my ‘memoirs’ or ‘autobiography’”.
He said he was aware he couldn’t write about his time as governor general but may be able to write about his earlier life. “I shall not make any decision about any of this until I have a chance to speak to you when you are in Australia,” Kerr wrote.
The reply from the palace left little room for ambiguity about its view of Kerr recounting of events from his time in office. “We will discuss the matter further when we meet in Australia. In the meanwhile I think all that I can usefully say is the obvious: that it would be clearly improper for you to publish anything about events which have taken place during your term of office whilst you remain governor general,” he said.
Charteris also warned there could be unforeseen consequences if Kerr was to write about his earlier years. “I cannot, personally see anything wrong in your publishing autobiographical material from a period before you assumed office, but I think one must recognize that almost anything you publish now will be scrutinised with November 1975 [the dismissal] in mind, if only to discover and discuss how your past life may have influenced your later actions.”
John Kerr complained to Buckingham Palace of Gough Whitlam's 'malice' after dismissal
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“I can visualize commentators avidly going back to your childhood and school days for ‘leads’!”
The attorney general said on Wednesday he was yet to read all the documents, but he said the letters did not support “a theory that somehow the Queen and the palace “gave a royal green light” to the use of the reserve powers. “I certainly don’t think that they show that.”
He said advocates for a republic in Australia had “tried fruitlessly to argue for a better system than the one we’ve got for 40-plus years without much success, so whether or not they want to be devoting their energies to that or more important matters is a matter for them”.
“I think our system works remarkably well, probably the best working system in the world,” Porter said. “The idea that when we’ve got actual problems around employment, around dealing with the health crisis that we’re in, ensuring that our economy can grow its way out of the most tumultuous period in at least 100 years – the idea that we would even entertain spending oxygen on a debate about a republic, to me, seems bizarre.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/16/booker-prize-judges-betray-readers
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Books
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2011-10-15T23:03:04.000Z
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Alex Clark
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Man Booker prize: this year's judges are betraying authors and their readers
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People weirder than me have chaired the Booker," declared Dame Stella Rimington in her recent interview with the Guardian. "A previous chair was Michael Portillo." Given that she had also set her face firmly against the "personal abuse" levelled at her and the Booker's other judges, I thought that was a bit rich. And Portillo isn't at all weird. I should know: three years ago, he was the chair of the Man Booker when I was a judge.
I do remember him wearing a particularly loud blazer to one meeting, but I think that was really because he was going on the telly straight afterwards, and my impression is that he quite enjoys cutting a dash. But otherwise, he was an impeccable chair: engaged, frank, serious in the serious bits, humorous in coffee breaks, determined to allow each judge – novelist Louise Doughty, broadcaster Hardeep Singh Kohli and bookseller James Heneage completed the panel – the space to have their say, but equally determined to keep the discussion on the rails.
I say this by way of illustrating that it is possible to recognise someone's abilities and respect their opinions even when you have lost the argument. In 2008 our shortlist consisted of the following six titles: Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture, Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, Linda Grant's The Clothes on Their Backs, Philip Hensher's The Northern Clemency and Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole.
I admire each of those novels greatly, and wouldn't argue against any of them being on the shortlist, but I was a passionate advocate for Barry's novel – in my view, one of the best works of fiction of the last decade. I had been advised by a former judge to read submissions in a random order and I had read The Secret Scripture early on; I lectured myself sternly about keeping an open mind and allowing it to be supplanted, but it never was.
I didn't get my way. But nor can I whinge about it: there was no stitch-up, no horse-trading, no ganging up, no underhand tactics of any kind. We had a lengthy discussion about all six books and, eventually, three separate votes, from which Adiga emerged as the clear winner. I remember being gutted beyond belief: primarily because I hadn't managed to persuade others to a view I held very deeply; partly, no doubt, because I'd just read 113 novels in the space of a few months and that's enough to diminish anyone's sense of perspective; but also because I'd been Booker-obsessed since my teenage years when, as a lit-nerd deluxe, I used to rush to the library as soon as the shortlist was announced and read my way solemnly through it.
When I was asked to judge it, I felt a bit like a competition winner, a football nut suddenly invited to referee the cup final; a psychotherapist might, therefore, suggest that I had slightly over-invested in the process. I don't think I would now, though.
But my disenchantment with this year's Booker doesn't have a whole lot to do with the books on the shortlist – I reviewed two of them, Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie and Stephen Kelman's Pigeon English, highly favourably for the Guardian – so much as the chatter that has sprung up around them, which has had very little to do with literature.
The judges can hardly complain if they feel nobody's taking the prize seriously enough; they've been the worst offenders. From Chris Mullin's call for stories that "zip along" (time is clearly of the essence when you've got so many books to read) to Rimington's disdain for "so-called literary critics" who are so insular that they "can't stand their domain being intruded upon" (not personal admittedly, but quite abusive), this year has been more about the judges sticking two fingers up to an imaginary critical establishment than any other I remember.
The panel's assertion that readability should be an important criterion seems uncontentious until, as the New Statesman's nimble critic, Leo Robson, put it, you try to come up with a list of all those unreadable books that writers love knocking out and critics love giving prizes to. Actually, another judge, the novelist Susan Hill, is on hand to help you out there – a few days ago, she posted a list of unreadable novels on Twitter (War and Peace, The Waves, Ulysses, rubbish books like that), although the charitable view might be that she was aiming for a rather sophisticated satire.
The readability debate is in fact another retread of various arguments that beset what has become known as literary fiction – a woolly genre that encompasses books that don't sell very well, books that aren't "genre" fiction and anything with a taint of modernism or experiment.
The arguments are various but connected: why don't the literary pages of newspapers review the books that people actually read, who the hell are the critics to tell readers what's good, and is the contemporary novel, once again, in its death throes. The judges' comments, and their general approach, have placed them firmly on the side of those who believe that wanting to be challenged rather than simply entertained by your reading matter veers dangerously close to cultural snobbery.
Obviously, not everyone agrees. Last week, with delightfully cheeky timing, a group fronted by the literary agent Andrew Kidd announced the foundation of a new award, the (presumably provisionally titled) Literature Prize, which aims to "establish a clear and uncompromising standard of excellence". Its point of difference is that nationality will not be a factor, thereby opening the way for the American writers that the Man Booker excludes.
Kidd has insisted that his new prize is not there to "do down" the Booker but to provide an alternative, but the Booker knockers have, of course, seen it differently. They have pointed to the Booker losing its way in recent years through diversification into subsidiary prizes – the Man Booker International and the one-off Lost Man Booker and Best of Beryl prizes (the last refers to Beryl Bainbridge, the late novelist who was shortlisted five times but never won. Curiously, her final novel, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, would have been eligible this year but for an inexplicable rule that the award can't be posthumously awarded).
Also noticeable is a ramped-up focus on how well shortlists and winners have sold, which I remember from my year as a judge; after the event, I often received bulletins from the Man Booker administration about how well The White Tiger was doing in the bookshops. Good news, of course, for Aravind Adiga and his publishers and, I think one was supposed to feel, for the beleaguered book trade as a whole; but not, surely, much of a concern for judges asked to select the best book of the year.
But let us be fair. It's hard to accuse a prize of dumbing down when recent winners have included novels such as John Banville's The Sea, The Gathering by Anne Enright, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question – none of which can be accurately described as a gobble-it-up beach read. The problem is not with the books; the problem is that this year's hoo-ha suggests that the Booker is happy to be seen as a marketing strategy than as an exercise – however flawed – in choosing and celebrating literary and artistic achievement.
Time will tell whether the literary landscape has room for another prize. But a challenge to the Booker's long-standing hegemony is no bad thing. I'm not sure anyone – even "so-called literary critics" such as me – wants a return to the wicked old days, when a literary judgment was passed down, de haut en bas, for the edification of the reading public. But the self-congratulatory philistinism of this year's panel has done a disservice to the writers they selected, the writers they didn't, and the readers who are thought to be so superficial that all you need to do is convince them that a book will "zip along" faster than an episode of Downton.
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/aug/18/second-chance-for-sandler-as-pixels-tops-uk-box-office
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Film
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2015-08-18T14:38:23.000Z
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Charles Gant
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Continue? Second chance for Sandler as Pixels tops UK box office
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The fake winner: Pixels
With £2.66m including previews, Adam Sandler sci-fi comedy Pixels storms to the top of the UK box office, dethroning Fantastic Four. However, the key words here are “including previews”, since the Pixels number is, in fact, based on seven days of play, including takings the previous Saturday and Sunday as well as Wednesday and Thursday last week. All of that added up to £1.33m, essentially doubling the Pixels opening tally. Without previews, Pixels opened in fourth place, behind Inside Out, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and newcomer The Man from UNCLE. Even so, the real weekend number represented the best opening for a Sandler film since Grown Ups 2 began with £1.65m plus £421,000 previews two years ago. That film was an ensemble. For a bigger Sandler star vehicle, you’d have to go back to February 2011 and romantic comedy Just Go With It, which began with £1.63m. On that occasion, co-star Jennifer Aniston provided another strong marketable name.
The real winner: Inside Out
Ignoring previews from the Pixels total, box-office honours at the weekend belong to Inside Out. The Pixar hit declined a very slim 3% from the previous frame, for fourth-weekend takings of £1.91m, and a total so far of £27.41m. Only three 2015 releases have earned more in their fourth weekend of play: Jurassic World, Minions and, surprisingly, Disney’s Big Hero 6. Inside Out has now overtaken DreamWorks Animation’s Home to be the second-biggest animated hit of 2015, behind Minions (£43.24m so far). Minions saw a 13% rise in box office at the weekend. Presumably families who went abroad at the start of the school holiday are now returning to the UK, and catching up on cinema visits. The past week saw Inside Out overtake Ratatouille (£24.80m) to rise another place in the Pixar all-time box office chart. Next in its sights: A Bug’s Life, with £29.45m.
The spy battle: M:I v UNCLE
Two films originating as 1960s TV spy shows are battling for audiences. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation held well in its third week of play, declining 34%. After 18 days, its total stands at £14.77m. A place below it in the chart is Guy Ritchie’s The Man from UNCLE, which begins with a so-so £1.45m. Rogue Nation, of course, is the latest sequel in a star franchise with proven box-office appeal. UNCLE represented a significantly riskier proposition – reviving a spy property that has been little seen in decades, and without the benefit of an A-list star (Henry Cavill is relatively unproven outside his Superman role). Ritchie also took the decision to retain UNCLE’s original 1960s cold war setting, which makes the film more distinctive, but also potentially more niche. For comparison, the first of Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films began with £3.08m in December 2009, earned from just two days of play (the Friday that weekend was Christmas Day, when cinemas are closed. That movie had the advantage of a more famous character, as well as major star Robert Downey Jr. The sequel opened with £3.83m two years later. As for Rogue Nation, franchise predecessor Ghost Protocol stood at £15.37m at the same stage of its run, although that film benefited from a more aggressive previews strategy. The film maxed out at £18.31m, which is a realistic target for Rogue Nation. It should soon overtake the lowest-grossing film in the series, Mission: Impossible 3 (lifetime of £15.45m).
The new comedies: Trainwreck and Absolutely Anything
Few consumers of UK entertainment media in the past month could have been unaware that a) Amy Schumer is a rising US comedy star earning comparisons with Lena Dunham, and b) she has a new film called Trainwreck. Universal’s well-orchestrated publicity campaign translated to a UK opening of £932,000, which is a nice number for an actress with zero box-office track record in the UK, although unremarkable for director Judd Apatow. His last effort as director, This Is 40, kicked off with £911,000 plus £319,000 in previews, in February 2013. Discounting previews, Apatow’s best opening as director came from Knocked Up in 2007, with £1.58m.
Simon Pegg comedy Absolutely Anything, from director Terry Jones, begins with a mediocre £487,000 from 314 venues. That’s slightly down on the first frame for Pegg’s last lead role, romcom Man Up (£529,000). But it’s a big improvement on the opening salvo for the one before that, Hector and the Search for Happiness (£240,000 from 279 cinemas). (Pegg’s 2014 hitman comedy Kill Me Three Times has yet to have a UK theatrical release.) Reviews for Absolutely Anything were discouraging, with a poor 14% Fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes. “Watch absolutely anything else,” advised the Observer’s Jonathan Romney. “One of the worst movies yet made,” cautioned Kevin Maher in the Times. “Lightly feeble,” advised a slightly more positive Robbie Collin in the Telegraph.
The arthouse scene
Following six straight weeks when Amy was the top attraction for indie cinema fans, the documentary yields to Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America, starring Greta Gerwig and Lola Kirke. The film’s debut of £165,000 from 78 cinemas doesn’t make an easy comparison with Baumbach’s previous feature While We’re Young, which opened more aggressively at 250 cinemas, delivering a £427,000 first frame. A more apt comparison is Frances Ha, which, like Mistress America, is co-written by and stars Gerwig. It began in July 2013 with £151,000 from 60 venues, on its way to a lifetime £743,000. Amy’s latest cume is £3.42m, taking it past both March of the Penguins (£3.31m) and Deep Sea 3D (£3.40m) to make it the second-biggest non-concert documentary in the UK, behind Fahrenheit 9/11 (£6.55m). Director Asif Kapadia now occupies both second and fifth place in this all-time chart, with Senna at £3.17m.
The future
Despite the lack of big new releases, takings are 18% up on the previous frame, and level with the equivalent weekend a year ago, when The Inbetweeners 2 retained the top spot and The Expendables 3 was the biggest newcomer. The coming session offers one film that is hard to call: The Bad Education Movie, co-written by and starring Jack Whitehall. It’s hard to imagine it having the same impact as The Inbetweeners Movie, but how many of the show’s viewers will convert to ticket buyers, and how widely it will appeal beyond the TV base, are anyone’s guess. In addition, Fox released Paper Towns, from The Fault in Our Stars author John Green, on Monday, giving the teen drama a whole week of play in its opening session. Franchise reboot Vacation offers National Lampoon road-trip laughs. Sinister 2 is the latest genre flick from prolific producer Jason Blum. Benicio Del Toro stars as the famed drug kingpin in Escobar: Paradise Lost, with Hunger Games’ Josh Hutcherson. Following Tamara Drewe, Gemma Bovery is the latest adaptation of a Posy Simmonds graphic novel playing on a literary classic (in this case Flaubert’s Madame Bovary) and starring Gemma Arterton. The Wolfpack won the documentary grand jury prize at Sundance. Good People is the latest to feature the ever busy James Franco.
Top 10 films August 14-16
1. Pixels, £2,660,772 from 511 sites (new)
2. Inside Out, £1,912,671 from 615 sites. Total: £27,414,119
3. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, £1,585,062 from 525 sites. Total: £14,773,294
4. The Man from UNCLE, £1,448,298 from 503 sites (new)
5. Trainwreck, £931,981 from 464 sites (new)
6. Fantastic Four, £701,406 from 524 sites. Total: £4,836,085
7. Southpaw, £625,828 from 377 sites. Total: £7,033,990
8. Minions, £581,573 from 524 sites. Total: £43,237,367
9. Absolutely Anything, £487,147 from 314 sites (new)
10. The Gift, £330,679 from 327 sites. Total: £1,449,135
Other openers
Mistress America, £164,691 from 78 sites
Brothers, £142,403 from 63 sites
Vasuvum Saravananum Onna Padichavanga, £31,383 from 14 sites
Precinct Seven Five, £21,441 from 31 sites
Theeb, £10,792 from 13 sites
Karachi to Lahore, £3,581 from 9 sites
Captain Webb, £3,108 from 2 sites
Vaalu, £1,612 from 5 sites
Pleasure Island, £1,470 from 1 site
Ramta Jogi, £1,168 from 5 sites
The Confessions of Thomas Quick, £713 from 2 sites
Thanks to Rentrak
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/jul/29/unthanks-brighouse-rastrick-review
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Music
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2012-07-28T23:05:21.000Z
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Kitty Empire
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The Unthanks With Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band: Diversions Vol 2 – review
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The Unthanks, a vocal duo from the north-east who've covered Antony and the Johnsons, now join forces with a colliery band for a suite that spans mining life and fatherhood. Recorded live on their recent tour, the voices of sisters Becky and Rachel Unthank take something of a back seat to Rachel's husband Adrian McNally's new-found ambition to arrange for brass. The emotional clout is undeniable. Trimdon Grange Explosion commemorates a mining disaster with restraint, while The Father's Suite finds McNally closing the circle between his father, his newborn and himself with only a little too much stateliness.
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/feb/06/families-stripped-tax-credits-concentrix-hmrc-cases-reviewed
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Society
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2017-02-06T00:01:12.000Z
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Patrick Butler
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Families stripped of tax credits by Concentrix to have cases reviewed
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Thousands of low-income families who were stripped of their tax credits by a controversial US contractor are to have their cases reviewed, the government has said.
Concentrix, which was originally brought in to cut fraud and error in the tax credit system, was sacked last year by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) after a barrage of complaints by MPs and in the media that claimants were wrongly having their benefits removed.
In a report to MPs, the government disclosed that of 36,000 claimants who lodged an appeal against a ruling by Concentrix, 87% saw their claim upheld and their benefits reinstated.
It said the remaining 23,000 claimants (from the 59,000 in total) whose benefits had been cut by the company but did not appeal would now have their cases reviewed. “HMRC will review those cases to establish that decisions made by Concentrix were properly made and communicated to claimants,” it said.
Families on tax-credit harassment: 'a massive headache and real worry'
Read more
The government also promised it would no longer outsource tax credit fraud investigation work to private companies. MPs warned that profit-making companies were financially incentivised to strip claimants of benefits. The work has since been taken back in-house at HMRC.
A scathing Commons work and pensions select committee report published in December castigated both Concentrix and HMRC for a series of disastrous errors that it said amounted to “a gross failure of customer service” and a “sorry episode for the welfare state”.
MPs said claimants suspected of tax credit fraud had been targeted on the flimsiest of pretexts and their entitlements withdrawn on a “cut first, think later” basis.
Many were left without benefits for months, in some cases forcing them to borrow from payday lenders and rely on food banks.
Concentrix’s chaotic handling of the contract was compounded by the virtual collapse of its understaffed call centre in August because of the volume of calls from claimants. One mother told MPs she had spent nearly 20 hours on the phone trying to resolve her claim.
HMRC hired Concentrix in 2014 to check if tax credit claimants had fraudulently misled officials about cohabiting partners, work status or childcare costs. Although officials expected the three-year contract to recapture £1bn, Concentrix saved just £193m, for which it was paid £32.5m.
Frank Field, the work and pensions committee chairman, said he was pleased that ministers had accepted the recommendations of last year’s report. “HMRC was right to fire its contractor, but many of the processes used by Concentrix were the same as those used by HMRC itself,” said the Labour MP. “For many claimants, particularly those who were unwell, lacked self-confidence or had caring responsibilities, the document-heavy process of challenging a wrong decision by Concentrix was surely prohibitively daunting.”
A HMRC spokesman said: “It is important to make checks on tax credits payments to ensure the right people are receiving them under the law, and this work will now be done by HMRC.
“We will not be entering into external contracts for this in future. We apologise to all those who did not receive the standard of service that they should have.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/games/2021/aug/03/the-ascent-review-neon-digital
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Games
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2021-08-03T12:00:04.000Z
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Tom Regan
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The Ascent review – a frenetic murderfest in a dystopian future
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When I was a kid, nothing beat our family’s weekly pilgrimage to the local video store Vidbiz. While my parents pondered which thriller to digest with their takeaway, I’d gawp at the colourful PlayStation games on the corner shelf. Game rentals let me embark on interactive adventures I could otherwise never have afforded – while consuming an entire share-size pack of Sour Skittles in the process. Xbox’s Game Pass subscription gives me a similar buzz, offering a library of games to choose from and giving players the chance to try out odd or middling games that they’d never actually buy.
Sci-fi shooter The Ascent is a good example, the equivalent of a high-octane but intellectually bereft action flick. It is flawed but fun and atmospheric, set in a predictably bleak urban dystopia full of indentured workers, shady mega-corporations and augmented outlaws. Developer Neon Giant has dressed up The Ascent’s loot-driven blasting as an anti-capitalist critique: the class divide is built into planet Veles’s sleazy cyberpunk architecture. Its most impoverished inhabitants are banished to the sewers while wealthy citizens dwell in the districts above. As you climb your way up this tower-like metropolis, your grizzled mercenary fights tooth and nail to slowly – and literally – ascend to the upper echelons of society.
It’s hardly a pleasant place to live, but this city of shadows, rain and reflected neon oozes atmosphere. From Veles’s red-tinted, Blade Runner-esque market hubs to its slums, it certainly looks the part. But frustratingly, The Ascent’s writing never does its striking world justice. By hour two I was already mashing the “skip dialogue” button, begging to bypass the chatter and get back to the blasting.
Thankfully, what The Ascent lacks in engrossing dialogue it makes up for in carnage. Playable either alone or with a friend (locally or online), it combines Diablo’s steady, tempting drip-feed of loot with a uniquely arcade-y recreation of Gears of War’s shooting; shootouts have you dodge-rolling away from laser fire and into cover while blasting your way through hordes of enemies. It’s a bird’s-eye-view murderfest that actually offers a challenge, where every shotgun blast or cybernetic ability translates into pleasingly frenetic and powerful on-screen action.
Everything reeks of death and corruption … The Ascent. Photograph: Curve Digital
Neon Giant’s debut feels like a playable Judge Dredd. There’s a serviceable story threading all the violence together, but mostly it’s about indiscriminately gunning down goons. Everything in Veles reeks of death and corruption – and much like in the Judge’s Mega City One, the only thing keeping Veles’s populace in check is a chamber full of bullets. When it leans into the carnage, and especially when you’ve got a co-op buddy, this sci-fi shooter is at its gory best. An influx of new weaponry and gorgeous scenery keeps the many, many battles compelling, and skills from an energy-powered punch to a deployable army of explosive spider-bots create some variety. Constantly schlepping back and forth to chat to various unmemorable characters is far less interesting, however, especially when there’s no reason to care about what they have to say.
The Ascent is an atmospheric power fantasy, a cinematic cyberpunk escape where you can disengage your brain and indulge in copious virtual violence. If you’re a Game Pass subscriber, it’s worth a try – at £25, it’s harder to recommend.
The Ascent is out now; £24.99 (or included in an Xbox Game Pass subscription).
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/15/apple-13in-macbook-pro-2017-review-battery-life
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Technology
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2017-11-15T07:00:01.000Z
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Samuel Gibbs
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Apple 13in MacBook Pro (2017) review: battery life to get through a working day
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Apple’s 13in MacBook Pro for 2017 now has battery life that matches the power of the hardware and the beauty of the design, even if it is still very expensive.
When the new, redesigned MacBook Pro was launched last year it came with relatively old chips – Intel’s sixth generation Core i5 or i7 processor and integrated graphics. While performance was arguably up to par with similar machines with the newer, improved seventh generation Core i5 and i7, one thing the 13in MacBook Pro fell short on was battery life.
A year on, a revised version of the 13in MacBook Pro is available and while nothing obvious has changed on the outside, it now comes with the seventh generation Intel chips and the new version of MacOS High Sierra – and will get you through almost an entire working day without charge.
The Apple MacBook Pro running High Sierra comes benefits from a new, faster file system. Photograph: Apple
The MacBook Pro is a svelte, beautiful machine, available in silver or “space grey” aluminium. At 1.37kg it’s about 80g heavier than Dell’s touch-screen XPS 13, but about 160g lighter than Microsoft’s Surface Book 2. It’s a similar thickness to Dell’s machine at its 15mm thickest point, but thinner than the Surface Book 2 at its 23mm thickest point.
The screen is one of the best fitted to a laptop, with good viewing angles, brightness and colour accuracy matching the P3 colour space, which is important if you’re trying to edit images or video. The keyboard is still pretty noisy at full tilt and has little give when you depress the keys, but is accurate, with a solid feel. I like it, but some will hate it.
The Touch Bar will still prove divisive, with some saying it slows them down, but app support for it has grown dramatically, with most high-profile apps benefiting from custom keys. The Touch ID fingerprint scanner also works as advertised, and is certainly a useful addition, although now that the iPhone X comes with with Face ID it perhaps feels a bit of a stopgap for facial recognition.
The big, pressure-sensitive touchpad is arguably the best in the business – you’ll swear it moves thanks to the haptic feedback, but try it with the power off and you realise it doesn’t.
Specifications
Screen: 13.3in LCD 2560x1600 (227 ppi)
Processor: Intel Core i5 or i7 (7th generation)
RAM: 8 or 16GB
Storage: 128, 256, 512GB or 1TB
Operating system: macOS High Sierra
Camera: 720p FaceTime HD camera
Connectivity: Intel Iris 650, Wi-Fiac, Bluetooth 4.2, USB-C, Thunderbolt 3, headphone
Dimensions: 212.4 x 304.1 x 14.9mm
Weight: 1.37kg
Longer battery life
The four USB-C ports on the MacBook Pro are spread two on each side. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The 2017 13in MacBook Pro has enough power for pretty much anything most people will want it too, while the new macOS High Sierra significantly speeds up some functions such as moving files. It’s at home editing video, photos and generally creating media. Even a light bit of editing video in 4K will be perfectly manageable, but anyone seriously attempting to use the 13in MacBook Pro to do heavy video or VR creation will probably find the integrated Intel Iris 650 graphics card a little anaemic.
Having said that, it was capable of a light bit of gaming, managing to run the graphically demanding XCOM 2 on low detail and resolution settings with acceptable frame rates.
Testing the new 13in TouchBar model with a Core i5 processor and 8GB or RAM, the biggest change for 2017 is longer battery life. The 2017 13in MacBook Pro gave me two hours more battery life than the 2016 MacBook Pro did while using both macOS Sierra and similar with the newer macOS High Sierra, lasting just under eight hours between charges when used for a full working day. That included using screen at around 70% brightness and having between five and 10 tabs open in two instances of Chrome, as well as Typora for text, Wire for chat, Mac Mail for email, Reeder for RSS feeds and Pixelmator open intermittently for image editing when required.
That’s a solid improvement over the older model and nipping at the coat tails of the competition, such as the seventh-generation Core i7 Dell XPS 13, which routinely managed just over eight hours under the same usage conditions.
What hasn’t changed is the lack of non-USB-C ports. A year on the situation isn’t much different. Having four USB-C ports is great, particularly as they all support Thunderbolt 3 and can charge the machine. Connecting displays and other non-USB peripherals using USB-C is fine, but it’s the odd USB-A flash drive, card reader or similar that becomes more difficult. It would be nice to just have just one USB-A port.
Price
The 13in MacBook Pro with Touch Bar starts at £1,749 (buy here). A non-Touch Bar version is available for £1,249 (buy here).
For comparison, Dell’s XPS 13 with a comparable screen and 8th generation Core i5 starts at £1,329 (buy here), Microsoft’s Surface Laptop starts at £979 (buy here), while the Surface Book 2 starts at £1,499 (buy here).
Verdict
The 13in MacBook Pro is one of the most refined powerful laptops available. There are certainly cheaper options that are also excellent, but none of them have quite the same combination of build quality, excellent keyboard, massive trackpad and extensive selection of USB-C ports.
The newer Intel chips mean one of the downfalls of the previous model has been significantly improved. Under eight hours of battery life is still quite far off the ideal of at least 10 hours, but is much closer to the competition and will just about do light work for a full day for most people.
It’s still very expensive, still lacking a USB-A port, there’s still a question of whether it’s “pro” enough for professionals and now there are more powerful eighth generation Intel chips available in rivals. But the 13in MacBook Pro is still one of the nicest computers you can buy. Using it is a genuine pleasure, and thankfully it now lasts long enough I can finish my work without reaching for a plug.
Pros: beautiful, great screen, Touch Bar, Touch ID, massive trackpad, thin and relatively light, USB-C, OK battery life
Cons: no USB-A ports, no ethernet, no native display ports, no upgrading after purchase, very expensive
The 13in MacBook Pro looks great open or closed. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Other reviews
Microsoft Surface Book review: the best Windows laptop, with detachable screen
Microsoft Surface Laptop review: a USB-C short of the best Windows 10 laptop
Microsoft Surface Pro review: very nearly almost the future of Windows PCs
Apple 13” MacBook Pro (2016) review: the best computer you shouldn’t buy
This article contains affiliate links to products. Our journalism is independent and is never written to promote these products although we may earn a small commission if a reader makes a purchase.
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/04/the-conjuring-review
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Film
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2013-08-03T23:01:02.000Z
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Philip French
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The Conjuring – review
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Another supposedly authentic case of demonic possession investigated by the same real-life ghostbusting duo, Ed and Lorraine Warren, who tackled the Amityville horror. It's scare-to-medium stuff with the usual ghoulies, ghosties, long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night.
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/oct/15/broadcasting.bbc
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Media
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2004-10-15T06:32:31.000Z
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Andy Beckett
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The making of the terror myth
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Since the attacks on the United States in September 2001, there have been more than a thousand references in British national newspapers, working out at almost one every single day, to the phrase "dirty bomb". There have been articles about how such a device can use ordinary explosives to spread lethal radiation; about how London would be evacuated in the event of such a detonation; about the Home Secretary David Blunkett's statement on terrorism in November 2002 that specifically raised the possibility of a dirty bomb being planted in Britain; and about the arrests of several groups of people, the latest only last month, for allegedly plotting exactly that.
Starting next Wednesday, BBC2 is to broadcast a three-part documentary series that will add further to what could be called the dirty bomb genre. But, as its title suggests, The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear takes a different view of the weapon's potential.
"I don't think it would kill anybody," says Dr Theodore Rockwell, an authority on radiation, in an interview for the series. "You'll have trouble finding a serious report that would claim otherwise." The American department of energy, Rockwell continues, has simulated a dirty bomb explosion, "and they calculated that the most exposed individual would get a fairly high dose [of radiation], not life-threatening." And even this minor threat is open to question. The test assumed that no one fled the explosion for one year.
During the three years in which the "war on terror" has been waged, high-profile challenges to its assumptions have been rare. The sheer number of incidents and warnings connected or attributed to the war has left little room, it seems, for heretical thoughts. In this context, the central theme of The Power of Nightmares is riskily counter-intuitive and provocative. Much of the currently perceived threat from international terrorism, the series argues, "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media." The series' explanation for this is even bolder: "In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power."
Adam Curtis, who wrote and produced the series, acknowledges the difficulty of saying such things now. "If a bomb goes off, the fear I have is that everyone will say, 'You're completely wrong,' even if the incident doesn't touch my argument. This shows the way we have all become trapped, the way even I have become trapped by a fear that is completely irrational."
So controversial is the tone of his series, that trailers for it were not broadcast last weekend because of the killing of Kenneth Bigley. At the BBC, Curtis freely admits, there are "anxieties". But there is also enthusiasm for the programmes, in part thanks to his reputation. Over the past dozen years, via similarly ambitious documentary series such as Pandora's Box, The Mayfair Set and The Century of the Self, Curtis has established himself as perhaps the most acclaimed maker of serious television programmes in Britain. His trademarks are long research, the revelatory use of archive footage, telling interviews, and smooth, insistent voiceovers concerned with the unnoticed deeper currents of recent history, narrated by Curtis himself in tones that combine traditional BBC authority with something more modern and sceptical: "I want to try to make people look at things they think they know about in a new way."
The Power of Nightmares seeks to overturn much of what is widely believed about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The latter, it argues, is not an organised international network. It does not have members or a leader. It does not have "sleeper cells". It does not have an overall strategy. In fact, it barely exists at all, except as an idea about cleansing a corrupt world through religious violence.
Curtis' evidence for these assertions is not easily dismissed. He tells the story of Islamism, or the desire to establish Islam as an unbreakable political framework, as half a century of mostly failed, short-lived revolutions and spectacular but politically ineffective terrorism. Curtis points out that al-Qaida did not even have a name until early 2001, when the American government decided to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence and had to use anti-Mafia laws that required the existence of a named criminal organisation.
Curtis also cites the Home Office's own statistics for arrests and convictions of suspected terrorists since September 11 2001. Of the 664 people detained up to the end of last month, only 17 have been found guilty. Of these, the majority were Irish Republicans, Sikh militants or members of other groups with no connection to Islamist terrorism. Nobody has been convicted who is a proven member of al-Qaida.
In fact, Curtis is not alone in wondering about all this. Quietly but increasingly, other observers of the war on terror have been having similar doubts. "The grand concept of the war has not succeeded," says Jonathan Eyal, director of the British military thinktank the Royal United Services Institute. "In purely military terms, it has been an inconclusive war ... a rather haphazard operation. Al-Qaida managed the most spectacular attack, but clearly it is also being sustained by the way that we rather cavalierly stick the name al-Qaida on Iraq, Indonesia, the Philippines. There is a long tradition that if you divert all your resources to a threat, then you exaggerate it."
Bill Durodie, director of the international centre for security analysis at King's College London, says: "The reality [of the al-Qaida threat to the west] has been essentially a one-off. There has been one incident in the developed world since 9/11 [the Madrid bombings]. There's no real evidence that all these groups are connected." Crispin Black, a senior government intelligence analyst until 2002, is more cautious but admits the terrorist threat presented by politicians and the media is "out of date and too one-dimensional. We think there is a bit of a gulf between the terrorists' ambition and their ability to pull it off."
Terrorism, by definition, depends on an element of bluff. Yet ever since terrorists in the modern sense of the term (the word terrorism was actually coined to describe the strategy of a government, the authoritarian French revolutionary regime of the 1790s) began to assassinate politicians and then members of the public during the 19th century, states have habitually overreacted. Adam Roberts, professor of international relations at Oxford, says that governments often believe struggles with terrorists "to be of absolute cosmic significance", and that therefore "anything goes" when it comes to winning. The historian Linda Colley adds: "States and their rulers expect to monopolise violence, and that is why they react so virulently to terrorism."
Britain may also be particularly sensitive to foreign infiltrators, fifth columnists and related menaces. In spite, or perhaps because of, the absence of an actual invasion for many centuries, British history is marked by frequent panics about the arrival of Spanish raiding parties, French revolutionary agitators, anarchists, bolsheviks and Irish terrorists. "These kind of panics rarely happen without some sort of cause," says Colley. "But politicians make the most of them."
They are not the only ones who find opportunities. "Almost no one questions this myth about al-Qaida because so many people have got an interest in keeping it alive," says Curtis. He cites the suspiciously circular relationship between the security services and much of the media since September 2001: the way in which official briefings about terrorism, often unverified or unverifiable by journalists, have become dramatic press stories which - in a jittery media-driven democracy - have prompted further briefings and further stories. Few of these ominous announcements are retracted if they turn out to be baseless: "There is no fact-checking about al-Qaida."
In one sense, of course, Curtis himself is part of the al-Qaida industry. The Power of Nightmares began as an investigation of something else, the rise of modern American conservatism. Curtis was interested in Leo Strauss, a political philosopher at the university of Chicago in the 50s who rejected the liberalism of postwar America as amoral and who thought that the country could be rescued by a revived belief in America's unique role to battle evil in the world. Strauss's certainty and his emphasis on the use of grand myths as a higher form of political propaganda created a group of influential disciples such as Paul Wolfowitz, now the US deputy defence secretary. They came to prominence by talking up the Russian threat during the cold war and have applied a similar strategy in the war on terror.
As Curtis traced the rise of the "Straussians", he came to a conclusion that would form the basis for The Power of Nightmares. Straussian conservatism had a previously unsuspected amount in common with Islamism: from origins in the 50s, to a formative belief that liberalism was the enemy, to an actual period of Islamist-Straussian collaboration against the Soviet Union during the war in Afghanistan in the 80s (both movements have proved adept at finding new foes to keep them going). Although the Islamists and the Straussians have fallen out since then, as the attacks on America in 2001 graphically demonstrated, they are in another way, Curtis concludes, collaborating still: in sustaining the "fantasy" of the war on terror.
Some may find all this difficult to swallow. But Curtis insists,"There is no way that I'm trying to be controversial just for the sake of it." Neither is he trying to be an anti-conservative polemicist like Michael Moore: "[Moore's] purpose is avowedly political. My hope is that you won't be able to tell what my politics are." For all the dizzying ideas and visual jolts and black jokes in his programmes, Curtis describes his intentions in sober, civic-minded terms. "If you go back into history and plod through it, the myth falls away. You see that these aren't terrifying new monsters. It's drawing the poison of the fear."
But whatever the reception of the series, this fear could be around for a while. It took the British government decades to dismantle the draconian laws it passed against French revolutionary infiltrators; the cold war was sustained for almost half a century without Russia invading the west, or even conclusive evidence that it ever intended to. "The archives have been opened," says the cold war historian David Caute, "but they don't bring evidence to bear on this." And the danger from Islamist terrorists, whatever its scale, is concrete. A sceptical observer of the war on terror in the British security services says: "All they need is a big bomb every 18 months to keep this going."
The war on terror already has a hold on western political culture. "After a 300-year debate between freedom of the individual and protection of society, the protection of society seems to be the only priority," says Eyal. Black agrees: "We are probably moving to a point in the UK where national security becomes the electoral question."
Some critics of this situation see our striking susceptibility during the 90s to other anxieties - the millennium bug, MMR, genetically modified food - as a sort of dress rehearsal for the war on terror. The press became accustomed to publishing scare stories and not retracting them; politicians became accustomed to responding to supposed threats rather than questioning them; the public became accustomed to the idea that some sort of apocalypse might be just around the corner. "Insecurity is the key driving concept of our times," says Durodie. "Politicians have packaged themselves as risk managers. There is also a demand from below for protection." The real reason for this insecurity, he argues, is the decay of the 20th century's political belief systems and social structures: people have been left "disconnected" and "fearful".
Yet the notion that "security politics" is the perfect instrument for every ambitious politician from Blunkett to Wolfowitz also has its weaknesses. The fears of the public, in Britain at least, are actually quite erratic: when the opinion pollsters Mori asked people what they felt was the most important political issue, the figure for "defence and foreign affairs" leapt from 2% to 60% after the attacks of September 2001, yet by January 2002 had fallen back almost to its earlier level. And then there are the twin risks that the terrors politicians warn of will either not materialise or will materialise all too brutally, and in both cases the politicians will be blamed. "This is a very rickety platform from which to build up a political career," says Eyal. He sees the war on terror as a hurried improvisation rather than some grand Straussian strategy: "In democracies, in order to galvanize the public for war, you have to make the enemy bigger, uglier and more menacing."
Afterwards, I look at a website for a well-connected American foreign policy lobbying group called the Committee on the Present Danger. The committee features in The Power of Nightmares as a vehicle for alarmist Straussian propaganda during the cold war. After the Soviet collapse, as the website puts it, "The mission of the committee was considered complete." But then the website goes on: "Today radical Islamists threaten the safety of the American people. Like the cold war, securing our freedom is a long-term struggle. The road to victory begins ... "
· The Power of Nightmares starts on BBC2 at 9pm on Wednesday October 20.
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/jun/03/american-pharoah-draws-no5-post-in-bid-for-triple-crown-at-belmont
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Sport
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2015-06-03T18:35:42.000Z
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Bryan Armen Graham
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American Pharoah draws No5 post in bid for Triple Crown at Belmont
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American Pharoah will run out of the No5 post in Saturday’s 147th running of the Belmont Stakes and is a better than even money favorite to become only the 12th horse to win thoroughbred racing’s Triple Crown.
The bay colt, owned by Zayat Stables and trained by Bob Baffert, was installed as the 3-5 morning-line favorite at Wednesday’s draw, held for the first time at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan instead of Belmont Park’s Garden Terrace room.
“We’re going in with no excuses,” owner Ahmed Zayat said. “It’s an incredible feeling to go in confident that you have the horse to beat.”
The Pioneerof the Nile colt will attempt to become the first three-year-old since Affirmed in 1978 to win America’s three most celebrated races. Since then, 13 horses have won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes but fallen short in the one-and-a-half-mile Belmont, the third and most difficult of the Triple Crown legs.
“I’ve always liked the five, it’s a number I always do well with,” said Baffert, the Hall of Fame trainer who has been thwarted in three previous Triple Crown tries, with Silver Charm (1997), Real Quiet (1998) and War Emblem (2002). “Right now we just want to stay focused, keep the horse happy, healthy. I’ve got a great team around me.”
The most likely potential spoilers in American Pharoah’s bid for history include Frosted (fourth in the Kentucky Derby) and Materiality (sixth), the second and third favorites at 5-1 and 6-1 respectively, who are superior closers capable of overtaking fading contenders down the stretch. Both are well-rested after skipping the Preakness – while American Pharoah will be running his fourth race in eight weeks – yet both drew outside posts generally considered unfavorable given the Belmont’s formidable length.
“This is going to be a racer’s race: it’s a small, quaint and talented field,” Zayat said. “I’m confident in American Pharoah because the horse is giving me that confidence. I’m not arrogant about it. I think he’s a special horse.”
This time last year Victor Espinoza, who rode American Pharoah to a one-length victory at the Derby and a seven-length win in the slop at Preakness, was in an identical position: one win away from a Triple Crown with California Chrome. It marks the first time in history a jockey has entered the Belmont with a chance at sport’s most elusive prize in consecutive years.
“They’re two different horses,” Espinoza said. “Both have tremendous talent, but they’re different. American Pharoah has always been special. Since the first time Baffert put me on him, he was special.”
The Mexican jockey also rode War Emblem in 2002, the Baffert-trained horse that won the Triple Crown’s first two legs but stumbled out of the gate at Belmont before rallying to finish eighth.
“I’ve come here twice and I’m feeling lucky this year,” Espinoza said. “Third time’s the charm.”
The full slate of post positions and morning-line odds was revealed shortly after noon: No1 Mubtaahij (10-1), No2 Tale of Verve (15-1), No3 Madefromlucky (12-1), No4 Frammento (30-1), No5 American Pharoah (3-5), No6 Frosted (5-1), No7 Keen Ice (20-1), No8 Materiality (6-1).
The post time for the 147th running of the Belmont Stakes is 6.50pm ET.
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/may/13/feel-free-to-nod-off-the-diy-directors-of-wild-screwball-comedy-diamantino
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Film
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2019-05-13T05:00:07.000Z
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Ryan Gilbey
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Feel free to nod off!' Meet the DIY directors of wild screwball comedy Diamantino
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As a low-budget, high-kitsch, torn-from-the-headlines pop-culture football fantasy, the new comedy Diamantino is a Premier League oddity. When I first watched it at the New York film festival, I was jet-lagged and couldn’t be certain whether I had dozed off and imagined entire sequences. Revisiting the picture six months later, it transpires that none of it was a dream – not the colossal Pekingese puppies gambolling around on the pitch in a dense pink mist, nor the secret service lesbians who spy on the eponymous dopey football star, nor the far-right organisation that plans to produce clones of the striker to promote Portugal’s campaign to leave the EU and construct a wall sealing the country off, somewhat pointlessly, from Spain.
Diamantino review – delightfully daft football fantasy
Read more
“It’s got an oneiric vibe, for sure, so falling asleep would’ve been totally fine,” says Connecticut-born Daniel Schmidt, when I meet him and his Portuguese-American co-director Gabriel Abrantes. Schmidt is anything but precious about how the movie is seen: “I was telling an audience recently, ‘Feel free to whip out your phones while it’s on, check your email, check the news, whatever.’ The film is porous and it has that overloaded element. People have said, ‘It barely holds together!’ But we wanted to test the boundaries of what one film could contain because that seems very expressive of the current moment. Why not add one more ingredient by looking at your phone?”
The pair, who are both 35, started writing Diamantino in 2011. Back then, their central character was a Kardashian-style reality TV star. The decision to make the film in Portugal – and the influence of two sports-related David Foster Wallace essays (How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart and Roger Federer As Religious Experience) – steered the subject toward football.
‘It’s going to need footnotes 20 years from now’ … Diamantino. Photograph: Modern Films
“South Park was a huge inspiration, too,” says Abrantes. “It was always full of events from the week before. That topicality was important to us. When we started, there was no Brexit, no Trump presidential bid, no plan for a border wall. We took the language for the Portugal leave campaign directly from the Leave ads in the UK.”
Schimdt chips in: “It’s satire, but I wouldn’t say it’s biting. It’s not Armando Iannucci. We tried to treat everything democratically, whether it was the refugee crisis or social media addiction. They’re all worth examining, and the audience is fast and smart enough to pick up on the briefest of our allusions. Though, in 20 years, the film’s going to need footnotes.”
That said, its queer sensibility at least makes it seem ahead of its time. One character crossdresses to get closer to Diamantino, while another blithely accepts an accidental change in gender, turning the film into something like a screwball comedy for the Instagram era. The goofy innocence of the title character, played by Carloto Cotta, is reflected in a homemade aesthetic reminiscent of Michel Gondry, though the film-makers laugh when I ask if the DIY visuals were intentional.
I don’t think Ronaldo sees puppies on the field when he’s playing
“We were trying our hardest!” Schmidt says. “We’d have made it look like Ratatouille if we could,” adds Abrantes. To save money, they followed special effects tutorials on YouTube. “There was one called How to Do Iron Man Holograms in After-Effects,” Abrantes says. “It’s some 13-year-old kid teaching you. I loved doing it. It was like Lego.”
Their inventiveness won them the 2018 Critics’ week grand prize at Cannes, and Abrantes is back at the festival this month with a semi-animated short film about a sculpture that abandons its plinth at the Louvre to go out into the streets and protest – a metaphor for art with a political purpose.
Those enormous frolicking Pekingese, which the hero hallucinates whenever he is about to go into goal-scoring mode, grabbed most of the attention on the festival circuit. Diamantino has quickly become the “giant puppies” movie in the same way that There’s Something About Mary is associated with “hair gel” or Fatal Attraction with bunny-boiling.
“We thought it would be the Nutella crepes that people latched on to,” says Abrantes, referring to Diamantino’s favourite meal. “Or that it would become known as ‘the Cristiano Ronaldo movie’.” They’re quick to point out, though, that the character isn’t based on the Real Madrid star. “I certainly don’t think Ronaldo sees puppies on the field when he’s playing,” Schmidt says. “He probably sees himself,” adds Abrantes.
Diamantino is out now.
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2008/may/24/heinekencup.rugbyunion1
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Sport
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2008-05-23T23:01:00.000Z
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Robert Kitson
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O'Leary back on the beat for the boys in blue
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A colour clash will see Toulouse wearing red and Munster blue in this afternoon's climax to a vibrant Heineken Cup campaign. Given the outcome of this week's "other" European Cup final in Moscow this may encourage a small degree of French optimism but the Irish province are not obviously suited to the role of tearful losers. In a season full of close encounters the Millennium Stadium could yet stage the most gripping of all.
Yesterday's team announcements merely increased the level of anticipation. Munster have again opted for the more physical Tomas O'Leary ahead of Peter Stringer at scrum-half, a reflection of their growing strength. Stringer has been a pivotal figure in both Munster's previous finals in Cardiff but starts on the bench against a Toulouse side who have opted, initially, not to reinstate Florian Fritz in midfield. Between them the two teams have featured in seven of the last nine finals and are as battle-hardened as they come.
For all their European pedigree, both sides have had to scramble their way through. In the semi-finals Munster could easily have been undone by Saracens and London Irish gave Toulouse a serious run for their euros. Only big-match experience and unstinting last-ditch defence saved the day and another staggeringly physical, close-fought contest seems inevitable. If Toulouse are the narrow favourites, Munster, whose kicker Ronan O'Gara will be vital, are the game's most ferocious underdogs.
While Fabien Pelous is seeking an unprecedented third triumph as Toulouse captain, Munster are hopeful their fitness will provide an edge and looked surprisingly fresh in training this week. Last time the French aristocrats secured the title, in Edinburgh, their coach Guy Noves was led away in handcuffs after a pitch-side altercation. He will find it even harder to escape Munster's vice-like grip.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/13/face-masks-shops-england-24-july-boris-johnson
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World news
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2020-07-13T21:30:10.000Z
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Jessica Elgot
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Coronavirus: shoppers in England must wear face masks from 24 July
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Face masks will become mandatory in shops across England, ministers are to announce on Tuesday, following mixed messages, a cabinet split and mounting pressure on Boris Johnson to change public advice.
New legislation will not come into force until Friday 24 July, however, raising concerns over the risk of coronavirus spreading over the next 10 days as lockdown is eased.
Enforcement, which will include a fine of up to £100 for non-compliance, will be down to police, though shop staff will be expected to encourage the policy, No 10 said.
The announcement is understood to have been rushed forward after Michael Gove, the cabinet minister, said on Sunday that masks should not be made mandatory, contradicting indications from the prime minister last week.
It comes more than a week after Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, announced face coverings would be compulsory in shops in Scotland, which came into force on Friday. In England, masks will be mandatory in supermarkets and all other shops, with other locations kept under review.
The government had come under increased public pressure to go further on face coverings amid mounting evidence that masks can effectively hinder transmission of the virus. They were made mandatory on public transport in England on 15 June.
Britons have been among the slowest to embrace mass mask-wearing. Many European countries, including Germany, Spain, Italy and Greece, have already made it compulsory to wear face coverings inside shops. A YouGov poll found that 36% of people in the UK wear a face mask in public places, compared with 86% in Spain, 83% in Italy, 78% in France and 65% in Germany.
Johnson himself wore a mask for the first time in public last week, and went further on Monday, urging the public in England to wear masks in shops as “extra insurance” against the coronavirus. On a visit to the London ambulance service, he said: “The scientific evidence of face coverings, and the importance of stopping aerosol droplets; that’s been growing. So I do think that in shops it is very important to wear a face covering.”
Just 24 hours before Johnson’s appearance in his distinctive blue mask on Friday, the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, sparked criticism from scientists as he posed serving diners in a Wagamama restaurant without wearing a face covering.
0:35
Face masks should not be mandatory, says Michael Gove – video
On Sunday, Gove said he did not favour masks becoming mandatory. Government sources suggested he had misspoken and had been contrite in private.
The health secretary, Matt Hancock, is expected to lay out the measures for mandatory face covering, which he is said to favour, when he addresses the House of Commons on Tuesday.
“There is growing evidence that wearing a face covering in an enclosed space helps protect individuals and those around them from Coronavirus,” a No 10 spokesman said. “The prime minister has been clear that people should be wearing face coverings in shops and we will make this mandatory from 24 July.”
Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth said the response had been “slow and muddled again” and said he would demand answers over why the delay to the change would be so lengthy.
The shadow health secretary said: “Given the government’s own guidance issued on 11 May advised in favour of face masks, many will ask why yet again have ministers been slow in making a decision in this pandemic, and why it’ll take another 11 days before these new guidelines come into force,” he said.
“The health secretary must account for this further delay.”
Government sources defended the lengthy delay to the change, saying it was necessary to allow shops time to prepare and to pass the relevant legislation.
Downing Street pointed to emerging evidence highlighted by the World Health Organization on airborne transmission of the virus as one of the key factors behind the changing advice.
The Independent Sage group, a committee of scientists set up to scrutinise the government’s advice and led by the government’s former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, said evidence had been growing for legislation to mandate mask-wearing.
However, the group said it was “essential that masks are not seen as a panacea and other measures such as rigorous hand washing and social distancing are still stringently followed”.
Wales has made three-layer face coverings mandatory on public transport from 27 July but the Welsh first minister, Mark Drakeford, stopped short of requiring masks in other public spaces, though he said their use was recommended.
Face masks became compulsory on public transport on Friday in Northern Ireland, with Stormont set to review their use in other spaces.
Downing Street is also poised to change the guidance about working from home as the prime minister sought to clear up confusion about whether the government is encouraging the public to return to the workplace.
Rishi Sunak was criticised for not wearing a face masks during a publicity trip to Wagamamas. Photograph: Simon Walker/HM Treasury
In his “people’s PMQs” session on Friday, Johnson had said people should be returning to work, but official government guidance continues to say, “stay at home as much as possible”. Johnson’s spokesman said that was “under review”.
Johnson said more people should be returning to work but only where changes have been made to ensure their workplace is safe. “People have gone to huge lengths to make their businesses Covid-secure: so they’re installing washing facilities, they’re installing screens, they’re installing social distancing measures – doing all sorts of things to make the workplace safe,” he said.
“And what I want to see is people now who have been working from home for a long time, talking to employers, talking to their place of work about the steps that have been taken, and looking to come back to work in a safe way – and that’s got to be the key thing.”
Police sources said officers would expect to follow the same approach taken to enforce coronavirus restrictions on movements, of educating and explaining the need for compliance before issuing fines. Three sources said police had not been formally consulted and forces were hoping for any law to be clear.
The British Chamber of Commerce said retailers would want to see the evidence between the change. Claire Walker, its co-executive director, said: “Businesses need clarity on the approach to the wearing of face coverings that is consistent and supported by public health evidence.”
Face masks around the world
After much to-ing and fro-ing, face coverings are finally becoming mandatory in shops in England. But in some countries it has been a requirement for months:
16 March Vietnam makes face masks compulsory in all public spaces including shops.
18 March Czech Republic becomes the first country in Europe to make masks mandatory in supermarkets, pharmacies and on public transport.
22 March Venezuela, all public spaces.
25 March Slovakia, all public spaces.
4 April Colombia, supermarkets and other places where social distancing of 1 metre is not possible.
6 April Austria, supermarkets.
7 April Turkey, shops or crowded public places.
13 April Cameroon, all public spaces.
27 April Most states in Germany, shops.
10 July Scotland, shops.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/aug/31/pwc-fined-over-auditing-of-subprime-lender-cattles
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Business
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2016-08-31T12:20:37.000Z
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Julia Kollewe
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PwC fined £2.3m over auditing of subprime lender Cattles
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PricewaterhouseCoopers has been fined £2.3m by the accountancy watchdog over its auditing of the subprime lender Cattles and its biggest division, Welcome Financial Services, in 2007.
The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) also issued the accountancy firm with a severe reprimand. The fine was reduced from £3.5m after mitigation and a settlement discount. In addition, PwC has to pay £750,000 towards the FRC’s costs.
The FRC said the £3.5m original fine would have been the largest ever. In early 2015, Deloitte was fined £3m over its dealings with the collapsed carmaker MG Rover after that was reduced from a £14m penalty following an appeal.
Simon Bradburn, PwC’s then audit engagement partner, was fined £75,600, reduced from £120,000 as part of the settlement, and also received a severe reprimand.
The penalties come nearly a year after Cattles settled a lawsuit with PwC that alleged the accountants acted negligently in its auditing of the Yorkshire firm during the financial crisis. Cattles, which almost went bankrupt over accounting irregularities, claimed that the loan book of Welcome was much weaker than stated in PwC’s audit. The lawsuit was brought on behalf of creditors to Cattles, which lent to people with poor credit histories and entered into a financial restructuring scheme in 2011.
The FRC said that PwC and Bradburn had admitted their “conduct fell significantly short of the standards reasonably to be expected of a member firm and a member” in respect of the 2007 financial statements.
The watchdog said: “PwC had insufficient audit evidence as to the adequacy of the loan loss provision and had failed to identify the fact that the impairment policy was not adequately disclosed and that the disclosures in those financial statements were not in compliance” with accountancy rules.
Gareth Rees QC, executive counsel to the FRC, said: “The substantial fines imposed in this case reflect the seriousness of the audit failings in relation to the critical area of impairment provisioning in a subprime lender and will send a strong signal to the audit community of the importance of upholding high standards of professional conduct in audit work.”
He welcomed PwC’s and Bradburn’s “constructive approach, which has enabled us to reach this settlement. The admissions of misconduct have resulted in a significant saving in time and costs and the fines ultimately imposed have been reduced accordingly.”
PwC said: “While the FRC has acknowledged that we had been deliberately misled by third parties, we recognise that certain aspects of this 2007 audit fell short of expected standards. Audit quality is of paramount importance to PwC and the FRC’s annual audit quality assessments have shown a trend of improvement in our work over several years.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2015/sep/09/share-pictures-britains-best-social-housing
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Housing Network
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2015-09-09T09:20:36.000Z
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Dawn Foster
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Happy homes: share your pictures of Britain's best social housing
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Over the past 100 years social housing has changed both the political and physical landscape of Britain. From “homes fit for heroes” to the mass housebuilding programmes following the Beveridge report, much of the reason Britain has changed so much since the Victorian era is down to the idea that everyone deserves decent shelter.
Social housing: your GuardianWitness contributions
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Some social housing projects have become critically acclaimed, such as Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower, Camden’s Branch Hill and the Brunswick Centre. Sheffield’s Park Hill and the Trellick Tower are shortly to be included in National Trust tours of Brutalist architecture. Others are facing demolition, or have fallen into disrepair.
But social housing is more than just shelter. We want to hear your personal stories of living in social housing: what it offers you and your community, memories of the community, and how it has altered the course of your life. We want to see photos of current and former social housing, and the homes you grew up in, or still live in and near.
We’ll feature the best in a gallery, and collate your memories and stories for publication throughout September, creating a readers’ history of social housing.
You can share your photographs or videos of your allotment by clicking on the blue ‘contribute’ button on this article or you can download the free GuardianWitness app if you have a smartphone. Please use the description field to tell us more about the photo or video.
GuardianWitness is the home of readers’ content on the Guardian. Contribute your video, pictures and stories, and browse news, reviews and creations submitted by others. Posts will be reviewed prior to publication on GuardianWitness, and the best pieces will feature on the Guardian site.
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/michaeltomasky/2011/apr/25/obama-administration-usdomesticpolicy-coming-war-on-gas-prices
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Opinion
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2011-04-25T15:13:45.000Z
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Michael Tomasky
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Gas prices and speculation | Michael Tomasky
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Gas prices continue to dominate in the Us and cast a serious pall over the administration. Last Thursday, Obama announced an inter-agency task force to investigate speculation. On television yesterday, freshman Democratic Senator Ralph Blumenthal pressed for empaneling a federal grand jury:
Blumenthal, Connecticut's former attorney general, said on CBS' "Face the Nation" that federal officials need to play hardball.
"I commend and applaud the president for focusing on this issue but I think there really needs to be an investigation involving, for example, subpoenas and compulsory process which I used as attorney general in similar investigations. There needs to be very possibly a grand jury to uncover the potential wrongdoing," said Blumenthal, who was elected to the Senate last year.
"The Justice Department should take the lead, seize this moment and send a message, a very strong deterrent message that this country will not tolerate the kind of illegal speculation and trading and hedge fund activity that may be driving prices up," he added.
To which Republicans have their ready-made answer. Hit F8 and out comes:
But House Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio) office on Friday called the Democratic focus on potential market abuses a distraction from the need to expand U.S. oil-and-gas drilling (although this would not affect prices in the short-term).
I think that parenthetical is the handiwork of the reporter, that is, Boehner probably didn't say it. If he did, good for him, but that's not the m.o. The m.o. is to chant "drill baby drill" even though that might lower gas prices in about four or five years.
On the issue of speculation, I have been reading some things, and it seems clear that the unrest in the Middle East has led to more speculation, which does help hike prices. Here's some info from a Senator Al Franken press release, touting legislation he's trying to advance:
The senators are pushing for tougher regulation because new data shows oil trades by speculators have jumped 35 percent since the latest round of civil unrest began in late January in North Africa and then the Middle East. During that same period, U.S. gas prices have soared by almost 40 percent.
And here's a little more information for you:
Speculators can currently buy $100 worth of oil futures with only $6 down, while investors in stocks put down 50%. The Commission has the authority to call for higher margin requirements from exchanges where oil futures and various other commodities are traded.
"New margin requirements could take effect as soon as July, but the CFTC must begin the rulemaking process now," the lawmakers wrote.
"The commission" is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees this. The House GOP wanted to cut its budget by around $90 million, or basically cut it in half. But under the deal that averted the government shutdown, it actually got a 20% increase, to $203 million.
Meanwhile, says Think Progress, citing the Wall Street Journal, Exxon's profits are expected to rise this year by 50%. Republicans are going to war on gas prices: drill drill drill. The Democrats have a populist response, and the benefit of talking about something (Franken's idea) that could have impact immediately. Will they seize on it? Don't answer that question.
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/mar/20/susie-wolff-mercedes-fia-formula-one
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Sport
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2024-03-20T22:32:55.000Z
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Giles Richards
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Susie Wolff files criminal complaint against Formula One governing body
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Susie Wolff, the managing director of the all-female series the F1 Academy, has filed a criminal complaint against Formula One’s governing body, the FIA, over allegations made last year against her and her husband, the Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff, which were found to be unsubstantiated.
Wolff and her husband were the subject of a conflict-of-interest investigation brought by the FIA in December 2023, after an allegation that confidential information was being passed between a team member and a member of the sport’s owner Formula One Management (FOM). It was centred on Toto Wolff and his wife, who is in charge of the F1 Academy, the series which is owned and run by FOM.
Red Bull tries to project harmony but Horner F1 saga will not go away
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Both parties strongly denied the allegation and within 48 hours of it beginning the investigation, the FIA concluded neither party had a case to answer.
Wolff was unequivocal at the time that she felt she and her husband had suffered huge reputational damage as a result of the FIA instigating the investigation and making it public. On Wednesday she made it clear she would be taking the matter further in a post on social media.
“I can confirm that I have personally filed a criminal complaint in the French courts on the 4 March in relation to the statements made about me by the FIA last December,” she wrote. “There has still not been any transparency or accountability in relation to the conduct of the FIA and its personnel in this matter.
“I feel more than ever it is important to stand up, call out improper behaviour and make sure people are held to account. Whilst some may think silence absolves them from responsibility – it does not.”
After the investigation was announced there was an almost immediate backlash from across F1. The following day, in what must be considered an almost unprecedented move, every one of the other nine F1 teams issued a near identical statement confirming they had made no complaints about information being passed and expressing unanimous support for the F1 Academy.
Quick Guide
FIA clears president
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The incident and the FIA’s subsequent climbdown was humiliating for the governing body, especially given it did not explain the rationale behind its actions.
The decision to investigate appears to have been prompted by one, unsubstantiated media report alleging Wolff had made a comment that could only have been informed by information from a member of FOM personnel. The FIA cited “media speculation” over the issue as part of its reasoning to investigate but there was little beyond that single source.
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The reaction to it was swift. Mercedes resolutely condemned the investigation as did Wolff, who called it “insulting” and rooted “in intimidatory and misogynistic behaviour”. FOM was similarly robust, warning caution against “making imprudent and serious allegations without substance”.
Since the incident the FIA has not issued any apology or any further explanation of its actions, citing its policy not to reveal the details of complaints or the assessment of them publicly.
With the case Wolff is bringing, the embattled body is set to face intense scrutiny of its policies and practices. Earlier on Wednesday it announced it had concluded its own investigation into allegations of complaints of interference into races by its president, Mohammed ben Sulayem, and cleared him entirely but once more without revealing any details of the process or the complaints.
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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/may/12/gordon-brown-exit-downing-street-shakespeare
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Politics
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2010-05-12T18:00:01.000Z
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Michael Billington
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Gordon Brown's exit was worthy of Shakespeare
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"N
othing in his life became him like the leaving it," said Shakespeare's Malcolm of the thane of Cawdor. And much the same is true of Gordon Brown's exit from the political arena. His speech in Downing Street on Monday night was all the more dramatic for coming straight from the heart: I even spied a touch of quiet irony when he said that he intended to tender his resignation to the Queen, and added "in the event of her accepting it". Was she ever likely to say, "Don't be so daft"? But the real theatrical masterstroke was the sight of Brown and his wife walking, hand in hand with their two children, to the waiting car.
Bringing children on to the political stage is always potentially dodgy. One shudders at the memory of disgraced, often adulterous Tory cabinet ministers posing with their kids at five-barred gates to stress their respect for the family. But, in Brown's case, it seemed entirely right to take his leave in the company of Sarah and their two sons. It was a reminder that, having come relatively late in life to marriage and fatherhood, for Brown these things are at the core of his existence. It also rounded off the New Labour era with a perfect circularity. Just as Tony Blair on a bright May morning in 1997 had arrived at No 10 to pose with his family, so Brown quit the stage on a chilly May evening in the consoling presence of those closest to him.
Of course, there was a touch of political calculation to it. It made for a great image. It was also, I suspect, a reminder to the media, who, in their hounding of Brown over the last two years, have more than justified Blair's epithet of "feral", that the ex-PM is still a human being. And, whether deliberately or not, the effect was to upstage Brown's successor. Shakespeare said it all in Richard II. "As in a theatre, the eyes of men/ After a well-grac'd actor leaves the stage/ Are idly bent on him that enters next/ Thinking his prattle to be tedious." After Brown's exit, Cameron's entrance seemed an anti-climax.
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https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/may/15/mum-review-bbc-two-lesley-manville-peter-mullan
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Television & radio
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2019-05-15T21:30:15.000Z
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Jack Seale
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Mum review – magnificent TV that will put sunshine in your heart
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Mum is a comedy that can be agony. When it first wiped its feet, hung up its anorak and shuffled politely on to BBC Two in 2016, at times it was perhaps too painfully funny. For a season and a half, Mum was very very good, and Lesley Manville was flawless as Cathy, a recent widow bedevilled in her nice Essex semi by her insensitive relatives. It was, however, tiptoeing awfully close to a couple of traps that can snare cringe-coms.
First, the “main character is nice, everyone else is a grotesque fool” format was a little too stark, as we wondered how the saintly Cathy could withstand a torrent of micro-aggressions from her unbelievably selfish son Jason, his incredibly stupid girlfriend Kelly (Lisa McGrillis), Cathy’s outrageously crass brother Derek (Ross Boatman) and his catastrophically snooty partner Pauline (Dorothy Atkinson). Meanwhile, the forbidden connection between Cathy and her late husband’s best pal Michael (Peter Mullan) progressed by nanometres per episode, as he repeatedly stared at her benignly instead of announcing that he’d always loved her. “Character has every opportunity to say The Thing, but never does” is another sadcom trope that risks turning sympathy into frustration: just bloody say it, we almost screamed.
Having taken us right to the limit, though, writer – and since season two, director – Stefan Golaszewski was able to bring us back. Just when the supporting characters’ infernal suburban prattle about cars, holidays and whether rice can be eaten with stew stopped distracting us and we reached breaking point, there was an emotional pay-off to make it all worthwhile. Near the end of season two, Cathy putting down her washing basket to hug Michael, or the pair slyly holding hands during a fireworks display, were tiny gestures made huge by the journey we had taken to get there – and by the craft of Golaszewski, Manville and Mullan, who have the chops to turn glances, silences and desultory chats about getting to the tip before it closes into epic romance.
In the new, third and final season – bingeable in full on iPlayer – Golaszewski shows he has known exactly what he has been doing all along. The whole clan decamps to a Kent mansion on holiday, with episodes covering consecutive days rather than taking place weeks apart as previously, to celebrate Derek’s birthday. Cathy and Michael have admitted their love to each other, but not to anyone else. In this pressured new environment, those moments of release arrive harder and faster. Before now, Mum probably made you cry once a year. Prepare for that to become three or four times an episode.
It’s hard to pick an outstanding member of the ensemble ... Mum. Photograph: Mark Johnson/BBC/Big Talk Productions
Mullan and Manville remain magnificent: he has a speech in the fifth episode to rank with the greatest romcom soliloquys, and just the way he looks at her with his happily creased eyes will put sunshine in your heart for a month. But the miracle Golaszewski performs here is in humanising his small army of monsters, giving characters who were once cartoons a heartbreaking inner life that previous seasons only hinted at. It is hard to pick an outstanding member of the ensemble: maybe it’s Boatman as simple-soul Derek, whose pathetic jokes and clumsily planned spontaneity hide an insecurity that makes him willing to accept humiliation from Pauline. Maybe it is Atkinson as Pauline, who reveals the vicious sadness that lies inside any sharp-elbowed snob; she has worked with both Mike Leigh and Victoria Wood, two poles of influence that visibly pull on Golaszewski’s scripts. At its best, Mum equals them both.
Lesley Manville: ‘I want to go dancing and drink too much – and I’m over 60’
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The hardest job is handed to Sam Swainsbury as Jason, who is so lazy, thick and unobservant that he has always been borderline problematic. In these new episodes, his fear of Michael usurping his late father manifests in the sort of hostility that Mum would usually have skirted around. It’s another fine line that the show barely walks back from, but – whether or not it’s plausible or redemptive – Jason is the core of what the show is really about. As well as its myriad observations about family members who didn’t choose each other; and who annoy and impede each other in a hundred unintended ways each day; and who have an inkling of what they should do to make things better but aren’t always brave or articulate enough to overcome their limitations; as well as all that, season three of Mum completes a portrait of a gang united by grief. They are terrible because they’re missing a son, a friend, a husband or, in Jason’s case, a dad.
It has been worth all the pain to work these people out. Mum might have looked like it was just a sitcom, but it had something beautiful to say about love and loss. It’s said it.
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2024/mar/28/everything-is-possible-kfum-kameratene-oslo-promoted-to-norway-top-flight-eliteserien-football
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Football
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2024-03-28T20:00:19.000Z
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Daniel Harris
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‘Everything is possible’: YMCA football team’s rise to Norwegian top flight
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Football’s ability to conjure ridiculous stories is legion, but even so the one about the YMCA club in Norway’s Eliteserien is ridiculous. Yet that is exactly where KFUM-Kameratene Oslo find themselves: on Tuesday, they make their top-flight debut with a home game against HamKam.
Though KFUM remain a local community club – their ground holds only 3,000 and is accessed via a zebra crossing – their rise has been meticulously planned. “We have learned year by year,” says Tor-Erik Stenberg, the general manager. “Small changes to be more and more and more professional.” So they began by giving players amateur contracts, then moved training from evening to daytime, then focused on better marketing, and so on; this season, fortified with the funds to improve more than one aspect, they have added a match analyst, expanded their medical department, and taken the team abroad for warm-weather training.
Sensible, patient growth may be unusual in football, but Stenberg attributes KFUM’s success not to its processes but to its culture. “We are a YMCA club,” he says. “We have a Christian-based foundation with Christian values: forgiveness, love, caring. That doesn’t mean that we don’t fight because on the field, football is football. It doesn’t mean that we don’t get angry, but it has to do with how we behave before and afterwards.”
This philosophy is embodied by Johs Moesgaard, the KFUM manager cleverly brought in as assistant when the club realised Jørgen Isnes, his predecessor, was doing so well he would soon be poached by a richer rival. “We are looking for people who understand human beings first, who understand that results are a product of how you treat people,” Stenberg says. “Johs understands how to mix a group, develop the people within the group – that’s his main skill. And if you can build a group with a common understanding of how to play, how to behave – a group like that will die for each other and you will get better results.”
Consequently, prospective signings know for sure that if they join KFUM, they will have a good time making good friends. “But you will never be rich,” Stenberg says, “so it attracts people who enjoy those things. And also of course, we have developed many players now so young players like and enjoy to come to us.”
Defender Momodou Lion Njie celebrates KFUM’s promotion to the Eliteserien in November. Photograph: Sipa US/Alamy
Moesgaard agrees that his main responsibility is creating the right environment for his players, noting that the Christian values KFUM represents are also universal values – there are not many Christians in his squad, but there are Muslims and atheists. “Everyone is important and everyone has equal opportunities,” he explains. “It’s ‘a club for life’ like the slogan says. It’s a place where you will feel respected, you will feel trust, you will feel that you mean something.”
But treating people with kindness doesn’t mean lowering standards. “In Norway we use a lot of excuses: ‘I don’t have money, I don’t have this, I don’t have that,’” Moesgaard says. “We are a small club, little resources, but everything is possible. Stop whining, just go to work and everything can be made.”
The drive to make the best of things is of central significance when scouting potential acquisitions, who must be the right kind of person as well as the right kind of player for the club’s non-negotiable 3-4-3 short-passing style. “I put emphasis on getting in players with X Factor,” Moesgaard says. “I love players who have that extra edge in their game. We find players from lower divisions – players who sit on the bench in other clubs or are told ‘you’re not making it here’ – but we see the extra thing. And we think that I can bring forward their skills by my leadership, and I’m very including, I’m not that harsh. I keep a close contact with my players because I believe that the interaction between us makes them more comfortable, more safe – that they’re brave to make mistakes in the game.”
By way of example, Moesgaard references 21-year-old Obilor Okeke, a winger of questionable decision-making but rich potential, which no previous manager had been able to extract. Moesgaard, though, was certain he could reach him and, excited by his ability to dribble at extreme pace, rescued him from Fredrikstad reserves then organised the team to accentuate his strengths. Similarly, Mo Lion Njie is a centre-back extremely good on the ball but who lacked a little defensive nous. “So,” says Moesgaard, “we worked on that weakness, put runners around him to protect him, and he controls the game.”
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Despite their new status, KFUM will stick to their method because, unusually for a team built on a limited budget, they believe their advantage over their opponents is a technical one. “We’re very good at moving the ball around, passing – having short distances between our players so we can regain possession when we lose the ball,” says Moesgaard. “But when the other team has greater physique, that’s when the challenge has started for us – handling what happens in the boxes and also around the set-plays. That is where I’m most curious on where we are.”
The players give a lift to head coach Johannes Moesgaard after promotion was clinched last season. Photograph: Sipa US/Alamy
Whatever happens from here, though, where they are means KFUM have already won, their story enshrined in the annals of the game for evermore. “The football life is quite cynical,” Moesgaard says. “So I’ve been thinking a lot about my father, who’s been watching me, who’s been sick for a while with cancer, and my daughter. All of those things go through your head – that you made the people closest to you proud.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2015/dec/11/punks-raves-and-rappers-music-industry-dizzee-rascal-style
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Membership
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2015-12-11T14:15:19.000Z
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Allan Hennessy
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Punks, raves and rappers: making it in the music industry, Dizzee style
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The year is 2003. A 19-year-old who goes by the stage name Dizzee Rascal has just won the Mercury music prize, becoming the first grime artist in history to pick up the prestigious award.
Five years later, London crashes and burns. And amid the political and economic turmoil, the cultural landscape changes for ever. Opportunities dry up, funding is harder to come by and finding a creative job gets tougher and tougher.
Make one track and you could go viral
Slix
A survey carried out earlier this year by arts organisation Create London, in conjunction with the Guardian, revealed that 88% of young artists have worked for free at some point in their career.
So can you make it without an expensive education, a wealthy family or a TV talent show? A Guardian Live/Create London panel discussion, chaired by the Guardian’s Kieran Yates, aimed to debate just that. Did DIY culture die with Northern Rock or is there a glimmer of hope for young artists who don’t want to “sell out”?
How hard is it to make it in the music industry? - Guardian Live event
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Although they come from different walks of life, every member of the panel said they had used the concept of DIY to make it:
Slix. Part of legendary crew Ruff Sqwad, whose hit Together, featuring Wiley, was pioneering on the grime scene.
Tim Brinkhurst. Manager of the group Young Fathers, who won the 2014 Mercury music prize.
Alex Boateng. Marketing specialist at Island Records who has featured on mix tapes with Estelle and Kano.
Femi Adeyemi. Founder of award-winning NTS Radio, an online radio station that brings together diverse voices from all over London.
Zillah Minx. Musician and film-maker whose documentary She’s a Punk Rocker offers an insightful female perspective on the DIY punk scene.
Is it harder today?
Much has changed since Minx was selling records from the back of her car in 1979. How does 2015 compare? “I think it’s much harder today,” she said. “Venues are closing down and young people today have nowhere to go. No more squats, no more raves.
“I’m a punk; I still have places to go. We’re all punks together there. I don’t know what it’s like for young people – they don’t have such a defined scene.”
Slix was less pessimistic, believing that although physical spaces were disappearing, the rise of social media gave young people unparalleled exposure. “To people who have been in the industry for years, they think it’s harder, but for 14-year-olds whose lives revolve around Facebook and Twitter, they have something different to say,” he said. “Make one track and you could go viral. Just look at Stormzy.”
Social media sites such as Facebook can give new artists unparalleled exposure. Photograph: keith morris / Alamy/Alamy
Boateng seemed to agree. “It’s easier and harder at the same time,” he said. “It’s easier to get yourself out there, but it’s harder because the audience has a million things to choose from. With more distractions, artists are now competing for the audience’s time.”
Yet the absence of physical spaces highlights a wider point about what Yates called “structural power” and “aggressive” government intervention. The Metropolitan police, for example, regularly ask promoters and licensees to fill out form 696. To the outsider, this appears to be a routine risk assessment. But the Met has used these bureaucratic hurdles to close down live events. Controversially, an earlier version of the form asked promoters to detail the ethnic groups expected to attend an event.
Being good and having money was never enough – PR is key
Tim Brinkhurst
Therein lies the paradox, said Boateng. “Creativity is born out of frustration, hurt and oppression. Anger makes people do some amazing things. When you listen to an MC on BBC 1Xtra, no one’s going to stop it. But on pirate radio, the police could shut you down any minute. The tension gives us angst and urgency. Anger breeds organic music.”
Slix agreed, drawing on his memories of growing up alongside Dizzee Rascal. “He walked in one day and said, ‘Eh, cuz, listen to this.’ By track five I was in tears. I didn’t understand how someone could take so many experiences and put it on one CD. Dizzee was so far ahead of the game.”
Adeyemi pointed out that Dizzee Rascal had inspired a generation. “Looking at the talent coming through now, I feel very optimistic about DIY culture,” he said.
How to make it in the arts?
Minx was cynical, saying: “If you haven’t got money, you’re not getting anywhere.” But Brinkhurst had some constructive advice. He believes young artists need to create a “strong aesthetic within the practicalities of their own existence”.
Of course money is important: funds, however limited, are available through bodies such as the Arts Council. But Brinkhurst cautioned young people: “Being good and having money was never enough – PR is key.”
On the eve of May’s general election, the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones argued that “five more years of the Conservatives will reduce the arts to a national joke”. But our panellists were more hopeful, although cautiously so. Can you make it on your own in the arts? Yes. Is there a magic formula? No.
As Brinkhurst put it, “DIY, but do it right.” The rest, I’m afraid, is down to you: the musician.
This Guardian Live event was run in conjunction with Create London. To find out what other events are coming up, sign up to become a Guardian Member
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/18/honduras-election-president-juan-orlando-hernandez-declared-winner-amid-unrest
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World news
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2017-12-18T05:44:21.000Z
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Sarah Kinosian
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Call for fresh Honduras election after President Juan Orlando Hernández wins
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The Organization of American States has called for fresh elections in Honduras, hours after President Juan Orlando Hernández was declared the winner.
Luis Almagro – the secretary general of the OAS, a regional forum that sent an election observer mission to monitor the Honduran poll – said the process was plagued by irregularities, had “very low technical quality” and lacked integrity.
The statement came after the electoral court president, David Matamoros, revealed the winner on Sunday, saying: “We have fulfilled our obligation [and] we wish for there to be peace in our country.” It follows three weeks of uncertainty and unrest following the 26 November poll. At least 17 people have died in protests amid opposition allegations of election fraud.
Opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla is in Washington DC and is meeting the US State Department, the OAS and non-governmental organisations to present what he called “numerous” pieces of evidence of alleged fraud.
According to the court’s official count, Hernández won with 42.95% to 41.42% for runner-up Nasralla who had challenged the result well before the announcement and said he would not recognise it.
Crisis of Honduras democracy has roots in US tacit support for 2009 coup
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There was no immediate public comment by Hernández, whose sister Hilda Hernández, a cabinet minister, died on Saturday in a helicopter crash.
Interviewed by UneTV during a layover at Miami airport, Nasralla said Hernández’s re-election was not legitimate. “The declaration by the court is a mockery because it tramples the will of the people,” Nasralla said. He added that “the people do not endorse fraud”.
An EU election observer mission has noted issues with the Honduran system that could have favoured Hernández, including disparity of resources and media time, selling of party credentials at voting tables to ensure greater presence of his National party and social programmes that “blurred the line between government and ruling party”. The mission noted that several of these problems were covered in its 2013 report, and that no changes had been made for these elections.
Almagro said via Twitter shortly before Matamoros’s announcement that election observers had concluded that “serious doubts persist about the results”. He asked that no “irresponsible pronouncements” be made before observers could deliver their definitive reports.
Q&A
How have you been affected by the events in Honduras?
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After the 26 November poll, the first results reported by the electoral court before dawn the next day showed Nasralla with a significant lead over Hernández with nearly 60% of the vote counted.
Public updates of the count then mysteriously stopped for more than a day and, when they resumed, Nasralla’s lead was steadily eroded and ultimately reversed in Hernández’s favour.
The electoral court recently conducted a recount of ballot boxes with irregularities and said there was virtually no change to its count. Since then, it has been considering challenges filed by candidates.
Despite widespread suspicions of electoral wrongdoing, Matamoros defended the court’s performance. He said it had presided over “the most transparent electoral process ever seen in Honduras”.
Hernández, a 49-year-old businessman and former lawmaker, took office in January 2014 and built support largely on a reduction in violence in the impoverished Central American country.
According to Honduras’s National Autonomous University, the nation’s homicide rate has fallen from 91.6 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2011 to 59 per 100,000 — though it remains among the deadliest places in the world.
Corruption and drug trafficking allegations have cast a shadow over his government, and his re-election bid fuelled charges that his National party was seeking to entrench itself in power by getting a court ruling to allow him to seek a second term.
Thousands protest in Honduras in chaos over contested presidential election
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Re-election has long been outlawed in the country, and in 2009 the then-president, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted in a coup ostensibly because he wanted to run again.
Zelaya, who founded the Alliance party that Nasralla was representing, was critical of the president on Sunday.
“The people say: ‘You are not our president’,” Zelaya tweeted. “We must mobilise immediately to all public places. They are violating the will of the PEOPLE.”
Hernández’s government recently accused Zelaya and Nasralla of ordering “gangs” to block streets and commit violent acts amid the protests, during which barricades have been burned and clashes taken place between rock-throwing demonstrators and police, with soldiers responding with teargas.
“The generalised crisis that Honduras is experiencing is primarily due to the disagreement there has been between the political parties which, in a democracy, must respect the majority will of the people expressed at the ballot box,” the national human rights commissioner, Roberto Herrera, said in a statement.
Zelaya has called for protests on Monday, and the Liberal party has called for protests on Tuesday, after conceding to Nasralla.
Rodolfo Pastor, an Alliance spokesman, told the Guardian: “We will continue to fight against this fraudulent election process.”
Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/apr/27/marvel-doctor-strange-tilda-swinton-whitewash-ancient-one
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Film
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2016-04-27T08:14:59.000Z
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Ben Child
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Marvel defends 'whitewashed' casting of Tilda Swinton in Doctor Strange
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Marvel has defended its upcoming film Doctor Strange against accusations that the casting of Tilda Swinton is “whitewashing” a traditionally Asian character, the Ancient One.
Tilda Swinton cast as Tibetan to placate China, says Doctor Strange writer
Read more
Benedict Cumberbatch will play the title role, while Swinton’s character, a mystic who helps Doctor Strange develop his powers, originates from Tibet in the original comics. Marvel pointed out that it has previously changed the racial makeup of iconic characters, and that Strange’s mentor was not required to be Tibetan.
“Marvel has a very strong record of diversity in its casting of films and regularly departs from stereotypes and source material to bring its MCU [Marvel cinematic universe] to life,” said the studio in a statement issued to Mashable. “The Ancient One is a title that is not exclusively held by any one character, but rather a moniker passed down through time, and in this particular film the embodiment is Celtic. We are very proud to have the enormously talented Tilda Swinton portray this unique and complex character alongside our richly diverse cast.”
The Disney-owned studio has come under fire after Doctor Strange screenwriter C Robert Cargill hinted that the casting of the role was an effort to avoid upsetting China.
What next for the Weinsteins and why The Huntsman bombed – the Dailies film podcast
Read more
Describing the Ancient One as “a racist stereotype who comes from a region of the world that is in [a] very weird political place”, Cargill told the Double Toasted podcast: “He originates from Tibet, so if you acknowledge that Tibet is a place and that he’s Tibetan, you risk alienating one billion people who think that that’s bullshit and risk the Chinese government going, ‘Hey, you know one of the biggest film-watching countries in the world? We’re not going to show your movie because you decided to get political.’”
In 2010, Marvel cast the black British actor Idris Elba as the Norse deity Heimdall in Kenneth Branagh’s Thor. The studio also shifted the character of Nick Fury from white to black on the big screen to accommodate the casting of Samuel L Jackson, following a similar shift in some versions of the comics.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/22/brazil-amazon-dam-project-suspended-indigenous-munduruku-sao-luiz-do-tapajos
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World news
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2016-04-22T16:21:12.000Z
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Bruce Douglas
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Brazil Amazon dam project suspended over concerns for indigenous people
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Plans to build a huge hydroelectric dam in the Amazon have been put on hold after Brazil’s environmental agency, Ibama, suspended the licensing process over concerns about its impact on the indigenous community in the region.
As one of the central elements of the government’s project to expand hydroelectric power generation across the Amazon, the 8,000-megawatt São Luiz do Tapajós dam is slated to be Brazil’s second largest, after the controversial Belo Monte power plant, which finally began operating this week.
But in a letter sent this week to the heads of Eletrobrás, the state energy company, and Funai, Brazil’s agency on indigenous affairs, the Ibama president, Marilene Ramos, stressed the “unviability of the project given the indigenous component”.
Amazonian tribes unite to demand Brazil stop hydroelectric dams
Read more
Around 10,000 Munduruku people live around the river Tapajós. The dam would flood a vast area, requiring the forced removal of at least some indigenous communities, an act that is strictly prohibited by the Brazilian constitution except in cases of disease epidemics or war.
The Munduruku’s attempts to preserve their land have been hamstrung by the government’s decade-long refusal to recognise their territory, prompting the community to carry out its own demarcation process. But in another success for the Munduruku this week, Funai has published an initial report that defines about 170,000 hectares as Sawré Muybu indigenous land.
“The publication of this report is highly significant,“ Brent Millikan, the Amazon programme director from the NGO International Rivers, said. “This throws a monkey wrench into the licensing process. It shows that there is a constitutional right that needs to be respected.”
According to Ramos, the future of the licence now depends on the “final report” produced by Funai. But if the indigenous affairs agency confirms the status of the land, campaigners believe it will be difficult for the government to circumvent the constitution.
“Brazil’s constitution is quite progressive in recognising indigenous peoples and their rights,” Millikan said. “Only in very unusual circumstances could their land be exploited and only after approval by congress.”
At present, however, the greatest obstacle to further development of the Amazon basin is economic. After the years of lawsuits that dogged the Belo Monte dam, energy and construction companies may be reluctant to risk large amounts of money on impact assessment studies for a project that may never be realised, particularly in the middle of an economic crisis.
“These dams were planned when the government expected a rise in energy demand based on growth of 4% a year,” Márcio Santilli, a founding partner of the not-for-profit Instituto Socioambiental (ISA). “But in 2015 GDP shrank by 3.8% and the projections for 2016 indicate a similar drop.”
But while the recession may have forced a pause in the development of the region, Brazil’s political crisis, which looks set to see President Dilma Rousseff removed from office next month, could change that dynamic.
“We are living in a moment of great instability,” Santilli said. “Potentially, a new Ibama president could reverse the decision.”
Earlier this week, Eduardo Braga, Brazil’s minister for mines and energy, left the government. He may not be replaced until after the senate votes on whether to impeach President Rousseff in mid-May
Added to this uncertainty, a strategic development law, known as PLS 654/2015, currently being debated in the senate, could significantly accelerate the licensing process, by reducing the environmental protections enshrined in Brazilian law, and eliminating the requirement for public consultation.
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/crossword-blog/2022/dec/05/crossword-blog-seeking-the-first-twerp
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Crosswords
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2022-12-05T11:36:24.000Z
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Alan Connor
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Crossword blog: seeking the first twerp
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In the sample clues below, the links take you to explainers from our beginners series. The setter’s name often links to an interview with him or her, in case you feel like getting to know these people better.
The news in clues
We have found a use for Rishi Sunak. That is, a word containing his first name. From proXimal in the Telegraph, a clue …
10a Freezing cold PM after exercise class no good (9)
[ wordplay: PM’s first name after abbrev. for ‘exercise class’. then abbrev. for ‘no good’ ]
[ RISHI after PE + NG ]
[ definition: freezing cold ]
… for PERISHING. Meanwhile, here at the Guardian, a timely reminder from Anto …
8d Bad team standard is hard to explain (7,4)
[ wordplay: synonyms for ‘bad’, ‘team’ & ‘standard’ ]
[ definition: ‘is hard to explain’ (or via the whole clue!?) ]
… of the OFFSIDE RULE.
News about crosswords
An exciting announcement for those of us who enjoy the different challenges offered by the American-style crossword …
Watch out for the @Telegraph’s new Cross Atlantic crossword series, launching in print and at https://t.co/MfsgohDrCx on Monday. You can read all about it in today’s magazine (complete with brilliant cover illustration) … pic.twitter.com/o7xIU5CWT5
— Chris Lancaster Telegraph (@SamuelTheSetter) November 19, 2022
… and they are (currently) free! On which topic, my calendar now has a reminder to find a newsagent stocking the New York Times on 18 December in the hope of a copy containing an enormous puzzle supplement …
Drum roll please... 🥁
Puzzle Mania will be out December 18th! Expect the biggest puzzle yet — but only in print. Sign up for The New York Times home delivery by next Friday to make sure it arrives! pic.twitter.com/P2fxZvWF33
— New York Times Games (@NYTGames) December 1, 2022
… because print remains superior. Doesn’t it?
Latter patter
Following on from the NINNY in our previous competition, here’s a clue from Hurley (AKA Raich and Gurney) in the Times quick cryptic:
22a Silly person, Oscar, leaving tower at first sign of panic (5)
[ wordplay: letter represented by Oscar removed from TOWER, then initial letter of (‘first sign of’) PANIC ]
[ definition: silly person ]
TWERP is also topical, albeit in a more niche way than the prime minister or the World Cup. For some time, it has seemed that the twerp was originally a single named individual. JRR Tolkien wrote a letter to his son recalling his days studying at Oxford …
… when we lived in Pusey Street (rooming with Walton the composer, and going about with T.W. Earp, the original twerp …)
Thomas Wade Earp, apparently, had an amusingly shrill voice, and irritated the sportier students with his poetic ways enough for him to earn the nickname Twerp.
It’s topical because three days before the puzzle was published, Oxford English Dictionary historian and lexicographer Peter Gilliver pondered whether the word “twerp” was created specifically for TW Earp:
As an OED lexicographer as well as a Tolkien fan, perhaps it was inevitable that at some point I would begin to wonder about TW Earp in two different ways.
The Oxford English Dictionary withholds judgment, noting only the dates of Earp’s time at Oxford. But that’s in an entry from 1986, when it was much, much harder to look for earlier twerps. Gilliver is understandably impatient for a revised entry and so, as we do sometimes around these parts, has begun the search himself.
The result: it looks very much like “twerp” was first used in America. And this is plausible: if the term had crossed the Atlantic by the time the heartier lads were looking for a nickname for Twerp, it’s easy to imagine one of them noticing, just as they would for a TW Azzock. So it may well just be one of those slangy, disrespectful terms that is based on nothing but its sound – like, I suspect, a synonym which is the subject of our next challenge. Reader, how would you clue GOOP?
Cluing competition
Many thanks for those clues for NINNY. The audacity award goes to Catarella for “Dingbat: Bing Apple”, a clue which comes with its own manual, though it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at Sheamlas’ “One’s artless, like the work of a French-American eroticist?”
The runners-up are Newlaplandes’s baroque “Annoying drunk has a go, unsteadily walking plank” and Porcia’s accurate “Silly seeing in New Year on the 3rd of January”; the winner is the witty “One foggy November in New York”.
Kludos to Ruderiguanas; please leave entries for the current competition – as well as your non-print finds and picks from the broadsheet cryptics – in the comments, below.
Clue of the fortnight
And back to football, or so it at first appears, though Carpathian is being deceptive …
7d Swine taking age to evacuate ground finally, having misdirected supporters (6-4)
[ wordplay: synonyms for ‘swine’ & ‘age’ + TO (‘to’) + last letters of (‘finally’) EVACUATE GROUND ]
[ PIG + EON + TO + ED ]
[ definition: having misdirected supporters ]
… in her clue for PIGEON-TOED. Olé olé!
Find a collection of explainers, interviews and other helpful bits and bobs at alanconnor.com.
The Shipping Forecast Puzzle Book by Alan Connor, which is partly but not predominantly cryptic, can be ordered from the Guardian Bookshop.
This article was amended on 6 December to correct a misattribution. The person who pondered the origins of the word “twerp” was Peter Gilliver not John Garth.
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/aug/06/trigger-unhappy-tv-how-only-fools-and-horses-got-rich-and-died-trying
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Television & radio
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2018-08-06T12:00:37.000Z
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Phil Harrison
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Trigger unhappy TV: how Only Fools and Horses got rich and died trying
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London was a very different place back in 1981. There were riots. There was mass unemployment. A barista was the fella who got you off your handling stolen goods charge. And Peckham, if TV was to be believed, was full of rough diamonds like brothers Derek and Rodney Trotter. David Jason’s Del was an incorrigible wideboy in tatty sheepskin. Rodney (Nicholas Lyndhurst) was a good-hearted stoner with a head full of thwarted dreams. Like all classic sitcom double acts, the pair were trapped in a loop of frustration, low-level antagonism and mutual interdependence. Still, Del’s faith was strong: “This time next year, we’ll be millionaires.” In the meantime, they subsisted on dubious scams, lived in a tower block called Nelson Mandela House and won the nation’s hearts.
First, a disclaimer: there are large chunks of Only Fools and Horses to which time has not been kind. Like most of the era’s comedies, the gender and racial politics of the show might be generously described as clumsy. And yet, if you’re prepared to look beyond these wince-worthy moments, Only Fools and Horses is overflowing with period character, gold-star comedy set-pieces and fraternal soul.
Much of the comedy came with a hint of tragedy. Del had raised Rodney and made sacrifices for him. Their circumstances were precarious and their income uncertain. In many ways, it’s the kind of portrayal of working-class life that is increasingly rare on British TV. And the show’s trajectory moved tellingly with the times; the episode that, Friends-style, we might retrospectively dub The One Where Del Falls Through the Bar was actually a surprisingly acute reflection on gentrification, the influx of city money and Thatcher’s right to buy scheme – which, typically, Del regarded as a nifty way of “making a bit of bunce”.
It was poignant, too. There’s a heartbreaking scene, at Rodney’s wedding to Cassandra, where Del stands alone, holding the wedding cake figurine of the bride and groom, wondering what might have been. Who would begrudge Derek Trotter a happy ending? Creator John Sullivan surely sensed this because in the 1996 Christmas Special, Del and Rodney’s ship comes in. Through sheer dumb luck, they’re finally millionaires.
That would have been a good moment to sell the van for scrap, slip Trigger a tenner to get a round in and call time at the Nag’s Head for good. But this episode was watched by an astonishing 24 million people – and it’s a brave writer who walks away from numbers like those. The Christmas Trilogy five years later – in which we learn Del and Rodney had lost their fortune in a stock market crash – confirmed two things. Firstly, that while Del without money was an endearing spiv, Del with money was simply a bit of a dick. And secondly, that just because you’ve got one good line (“this time last week, we were millionaires!”), you don’t necessarily have a good show. Still, it was cushty while it lasted. Bonjour Del Boy, bonjour.
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/jun/24/spain-sergio-busquets-fernando-hierro-morocco-world-cup-group-b
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Football
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2018-06-24T19:34:30.000Z
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Sid Lowe
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Spain can take nothing for granted against Morocco, says Busquets
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According to Sergio Busquets, football has not been fair to Morocco and they agree. Hervé Renard insisted that his team, out of the World Cup after being defeated twice in two games, were victims of an “injustice” at the hands of VAR, and Spain’s midfielder said they had deserved more. But that does not mean there will be pity when they meet here on Monday night. Spain cannot afford for there to be; the difference between first place and second in Group B is too significant. If, that is, Spain qualify at all – and their coach, Fernando Hierro, was swift to remind them they are not yet through to the last 16.
Sergio Ramos hits back at Diego Maradona, Carlos Queiroz and Iran
Read more
Spain and Portugal go into the final game of the group level on four points, with Portugal ahead by virtue of having collected one yellow card fewer. Portugal face Iran, who have three points and the chance to go through, while Spain face Morocco. The two Iberian neighbours know that they must each get a better result than the other to top the group. The reward comes with a possible path to a final that could read: Russia or Uruguay, then Croatia, followed by England or Belgium in a semi-final, rather than Uruguay or Russia, France and then Brazil or Germany.
By the time they take the field, they will know whether the first game awaiting the winners of this group is Uruguay or Russia; what they won’t know is what comes next and nor, Hierro said, should that concern them. It is rare that a manager expresses a preference – not least because of their habit of coming back to bite you – but he did say that Spain’s intention was to win the group. The first task, though, is to emerge from it, and he avoided suggesting that Spain would chase a big scoreline.
“Our obligation is to get the three points and if we are top of the group so much the better, perfect,” Hierro said. “We have to play well, win and forget what is happening in the other game. We have enough to worry about without worrying about other things. Mathematically we are not through, so we have to treat this match with the importance that it has on its own. This is our third game and right now there is nothing beyond that for us. Hopefully we can have a fourth, and a fifth, a sixth, a seventh.”
Hierro then added: “To win a World Cup you have to beat almost all the good teams and you can’t choose one place or another.”
That is not entirely true, of course, and Busquets admitted that he had looked at the way the draw is shaping up. “We know what the options are, but there’s only one option for this match: win, play well, finish first. Theoretically there may be fewer favourites [on their side of the draw if they win the group] but this is a World Cup in which we’ve seen a lot of equality. Being a favourite is something you have to prove on the pitch.”
Although securing a better result may appear likely for Spain given that Portugal face a team fighting to go through, the misfortune of Morocco served as a warning here. Renard added another. “We will prepare this game like any other,” he said. “We’re ready to fight like lions for the honour of Morocco.”
Within the Spain camp there is a feeling that Morocco are better side than their results suggest. Morocco cited VAR as the explanation for that. “It’s unjust that we are already out when you see all that went on against Portugal,” Renard said. The goalkeeper Munir El Kajoui added: “It was 100% unfair. [VAR] has been decisive and thrown us out – a couple of details in the match which hurt us a great deal.”
World Cup Fiver: sign up and get our daily football email.
Busquets did not focus on the decisions that had gone against Spain’s final group opponents but he did agree that they had deserved more. “Football is often unfair,” he said. “The level they have shown is higher than the zero points they have and that tells you how difficult it is to win a game at the World Cup.”
Hierro added: “We know they’re a very good team. When you look at it, they lost the first game to an own goal in the 93rd minute and they were very good against Portugal. Sometimes you relax when you play an eliminated team and we can’t do that.
“We have to have the lights switched on and our eyes wide open. No one is going to gift us anything. We have to play well. We can’t get inside their head, we don’t know what they are going to do, so we have to have total faith in our own ability, in our personality and our qualities; we’re a team that wants the ball, that has qualities we’re proud of. We have to stop their transitions.”
Asked whether that meant that Spain may opt for a muscular midfield, Hierro grinned. “If it’s muscles that decide …” he began. “We’re something else. We have our conditions, our physique, our way of understanding the game. Muscles are not our thing, I don’t think.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/07/emmanuel-macron-wins-french-presidency-marine-le-pen
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World news
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2017-05-08T10:48:35.000Z
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Angelique Chrisafis
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Emmanuel Macron vows unity after winning French presidential election
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The pro-EU centrist Emmanuel Macron has vowed to unite a divided and fractured France after winning a decisive victory over the far-right Front National candidate Marine Le Pen in the country’s presidential election.
Macron, 39, a former economy minister who ran as a “neither left nor right” independent promising to shake up the French political system, took 66% to Le Pen’s 34%.
His victory was hailed by his supporters as holding back a tide of populism after the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s victory in the US election.
Addressing thousands of supporters in the grand courtyard of the Louvre, the vast Paris palace-turned-museum, Macron said he would defend France and Europe. He said Europe and the world are “watching us” and “waiting for us to defend the spirit of the Enlightenment, threatened in so many places”.
He promised to unite a divided and fractured France, saying: “I will do everything to make sure you never have reason again to vote for extremes.”
Speaking of his meteoric rise and victory that was not forecast even a year ago, he said: “Everyone said it was impossible. But they didn’t know France!”
3:08
Who is the new French president, Emmanuel Macron? – video
Despite the wide margin of the final result, Le Pen’s score nonetheless marked a historic high for the French far right. Even after a lacklustre campaign that ended with a calamitous performance in the final TV debate, she was projected to have taken almost 11m votes, double that of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, when he reached the presidential run-off in 2002. The anti-immigration, anti-EU Front National’s supporters asserted that the party had a central place as an opposition force in France.
Turnout was the lowest in more than 40 years. Almost one-third of voters chose neither Macron nor Le Pen, with 12 million abstaining and 4.2 million spoiling ballot papers.
Macron, who has never held elected office and was unknown until three years ago, is France’s youngest president. Next Sunday, he will take over a country under a state of emergency, still facing a major terrorism threat and struggling with a stagnant economy after decades of mass unemployment. France is divided after an election campaign in which anti-establishment anger saw the traditional left and right ruling parties ejected from the race in the first round for the first time since the period after the second world war.
François Bayrou, an ex-minister and Macron’s centrist ally, said: “He is the youngest head of state on the planet [which] sends an incredible message of hope. Macron is giving hope to people who had no hope. Hope that maybe we can do something, go beyond the [left-right] divide that no longer makes sense.”
Le Pen swiftly conceded defeat. She said she had won a “historic and massive” score that made her leader of “the biggest opposition force” in France and vowed to radically overhaul her Front National party. Her promise to “transform” the far-right movement left open the possibility that the party could be expanded and renamed in an attempt to boost its electoral chances. It was a major step in the political normalisation of her movement.
Marine Le Pen calls for ‘profound transformation’ of Front National Guardian
The outgoing Socialist president, François Hollande, who was once Macron’s mentor and had appointed him economy minister, said: “His large victory confirms that a very great majority of our citizens wanted to unite around the values of the Republic and show their attachment to the European Union and show France is open to the world.”
On Monday Hollande embraced his successor as the two men attended a ceremony at Paris’s Arc de Triomphe to commemorate victory over the Nazis in the second world war. Hollande walked beside Macron to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the monument, where they laid a wreath.
Macron and Hollande attend a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on Monday. Photograph: Philippe Wojazer/Reuters
Macron’s victory came not only because voters supported his policy platform for free market, pro-business reform, and his promises to energise the EU, coupled with a leftwing approach to social issues. Some of his voters came from other parties across the political spectrum and turned out not in complete support of his programme but to stop the Front National.
In a political landscape with a strong hard left and far right, Macron faces the challenge of trying to win a parliamentary majority for his fledgling political movement En Marche! (On the Move!) in legislative elections next month. Without a majority, he will not be able to carry out his manifesto promises.
After the Brexit vote and the election of Trump as US president, the race for the Élysée was the latest election to shake up establishment politics by kicking out the figures that stood for the status quo, ejecting the mainstream parties that have dominated French politics for 50 years and leaving the political novice Macron to do battle with the far right.
Protests in Paris a day after Macron is elected French president – video Guardian
His victory comes after a bitter campaign with Le Pen in which she accused him of being part of an elite that did not understand ordinary people and he said Le Pen represented the “party of hatred” that wanted a “civil war” in France. The runoff pitted France’s most Europhile candidate against its most Europhobe.
In Brussels and Berlin, there was relief that Le Pen’s anti-EU, anti-globalisation programme was defeated.
A spokesman for the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said it was a “victory for a strong and united Europe” while the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, said French voters had chosen a “European future”.
The office of the British prime minister, Theresa May, said she “warmly congratulates” Macron on his victory and “we look forward to working with the new president on a wide range of shared priorities”.
Trump, who will meet Macron on 25 May at the Nato summit in Brussels, tweeted: “Congratulations to Emmanuel Macron on his big win today as the next president of France. I look very much forward to working with him!” Earlier in the campaign, he had declared Le Pen the strongest candidate.
In a congratulatory statement, the Kremlin, which was widely seen as backing Le Pen, urged Macron to overcome mutual distrust and join forces to ensure international stability and security.
Supporters of Macron celebrating in Paris on Sunday night. Photograph: Jean-Paul Pelissier/Reuters
Hours before the end of campaigning on Friday night, Macron’s campaign was hacked, which Paris prosecutors are investigating. Hundreds of thousands of emails and documents were dumped online and spread by WikiLeaks in what his campaign called an attempt at “democratic destabilisation”.
Macron, a former investment banker and senior civil servant who grew up in a bourgeois family in Amiens, served as deputy chief of staff to Hollande but was not part of the Socialist party.
What is in Macron's in-tray as president?
France’s youngest president takes over a country exhausted by years of unemployment and facing a constant terrorist threat. So what will his first moves be? First, Macron, who comes from no established political party, needs to appoint a prime minister and a cabinet, and win a parliamentary majority in next month’s election.
Next, he will need to swiftly fulfil some of his manifesto promises: including streamlining France’s strict labour laws in favour of businesses, overhauling the ethics rules for politicians, and strengthening ties with Germany's Angela Merkel and the rest of the EU.
In 2014, Hollande appointed him economy minister but he left government in 2016, complaining that pro-business reforms were not going far enough. A year ago he formed En Marche!, promising to shake up France’s “vacuous” and discredited political class.
Macron campaigned on pledges to ease labour laws, improve education in deprived areas and extend protections for self-employed people.
The election race was full of extraordinary twists and turns. Hollande became the first president since the war to decide not to run again for office after slumping to record unpopularity with a satisfaction rating of 4%.
His troubled five-year term left France still struggling with a sluggish economy and a mood of disillusionment with the political class. The country is more divided than ever before. More than 230 people have been killed in terrorist attacks in little more than two years, the political class is questioning Islam’s place in French society and more than three million people are unemployed.
The rightwing candidate, François Fillon, once seen as favourite, was badly damaged by a judicial investigation into a string of corruption allegations, including that he paid his wife and children generous salaries from public funds for fake parliamentary assistant jobs.
The Guardian view on the French election: Good luck, Mr Macron. You will need it
Read more
The ruling Socialist party, under its candidate Benoît Hamon, saw its score plunge to 6%, while the hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon finished fourth.
The final round marks a redrawing of the political landscape, away from the old left-right divide towards a contest between a liberal, pro-globalisation stance and “close the borders” nationalism. Le Pen has styled the election as being between her party’s “patriots” and the “globalists” whom she says Macron represents.
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https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jun/13/starfield-dominates-xbox-bethesda-showcase
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Games
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2022-06-13T09:50:13.000Z
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Keith Stuart
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Starfield dominates Xbox Bethesda showcase
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Microsoft saved the best ’til last at its big Xbox showcase on Sunday, closing the online event with an extended first look at Bethesda’s long-awaited sci-fi role-playing adventure Starfield.
The demo focused on a sequence early in the game where the player’s ship lands on a desolate volcanic moon, Kreet, and a mech is sent out to investigate. An abandoned search facility is quickly discovered, but a fight with pirate squatters ensues. It’s the first time fans have seen the game’s combat, with its mix of third- and first-person viewpoints, and fast-paced shoot-outs.
This is an epic RPG, so of course there’s a skill system: players unlock new abilities as they level up, then rank-up skills by completing tasks and missions. We also saw what looks to be incredibly in-depth character creation, with traits and starter skills including combat, medicine and diplomacy. Researching new weapons and crafting weapon mods will be possible, and players will be able to mine resources from planets, using a tool very similar to the laser drill used in No Man’s Sky – one of several similarities to the well-established space adventure title from Hello Games.
Starfield will also feature space exploration and space dogfighting, with players able to fully customise their craft with new weapons and shields, as well as recruiting their own crews. Bethesda’s Todd Howard promised that it will be possible to land on any of the 1,000 planets, spread across 100 star systems, and explore them fully – some will be dead rocks, but others are teeming with life. Setting up outposts for living accommodation and resource generation is another key feature.
Originally due out in November but delayed into the first half of 2023, Starfield is Bethesda’s first big new series in more than 20 years, and was a natural choice to end an otherwise rather restrained event.
Elsewhere, there was confirmation of a brand new Xbox-exclusive title from Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima, though no details were provided. Interesting trailers included a new dark action game, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, from cult studio Team Ninja, a historical hack-and-slasher set in an alternative Han dynasty swarming with demons. It’s due in early 2023. Coming in November from adventure game specialist Obsidian, Pentiment is a 2D role-playing adventure set in 16th-century Bavaria with visuals resembling an illuminated scroll.
Comedic first-person shooter High on Life, from Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland, is coming in October. There were also world premieres for turn-based strategy game Ara: History Untold, sci-fi thriller Ereban: Shadow Legacy and fantasy adventure Ravenlok, which boasted a gorgeous voxel art style. There was an interesting glimpse of Cocoon, the latest game from Jeppe Carlsen, lead gameplay designer on acclaimed platformers Limbo and Inside.
Cocoon. Photograph: Microsoft
As for Microsoft’s own studios, Mojang revealed a new Minecraft spinoff, Minecraft Legends, an action strategy game with a definite feel of indie hit Trove. A new Forza Motorsports title was revealed with astonishing ray-traced visuals and a new dynamic day-night cycle as well as intricate road surface and tyre physics, and realistic car damage. Forza Horizon 5 is getting Hot Wheels-based new content on 19 July, and a 40th Anniversary edition of Flight Simulator will add helicopters and gliders as well as other aircraft.
But in the absence of any news about Fable, a new Elder Scrolls or other rumoured appearances, the star of the show was definitely Bethesda’s big new sci-fi franchise. Comparisons to No Man’s Sky, Mass Effect and Bethesda’s own previous RPGs are rife, but the ambitious scope of the game felt cutting edge and as an Xbox and PC exclusive, it represents the next stage of the competition with Sony to dominate the coming mid-phase of this console generation.
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/aug/28/official-competition-review-penelope-cruz-is-a-deadpan-dream-in-wicked-film-world-satire-antonio-banderas-oscar-martinez
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Film
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2022-08-28T07:00:21.000Z
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Wendy Ide
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Official Competition review – Penélope Cruz is a deadpan dream in wicked film-world satire
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There’s a certain kind of film about film-making that fully buys into the magic and mystery; that devours the dream factory narrative and delivers a warm embrace of a movie, channelling a message about the transformative power of cinema. Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist is one example; so, in its lo-fi way, is Son of Rambow. And Singin’ in the Rain, for all the sprinkling of behind-the-camera cynicism, is a classic of the kind. Official Competition is none of these. Rather than a love letter to the cinematic arts, this very funny Spanish-language satire, starring Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas, is more of a poison pen jab to the jugular. It dismantles the lofty ambitions of cinema as great, important and significant, a monument on the cultural landscape. Instead, it shows us art for ego’s sake, and it has a lot of wickedly spiteful fun doing so.
The film opens with a slow-panning shot across the 80th birthday present haul of pharmaceuticals billionaire Don Humberto (José Luis Gómez). A lifesize ceramic collie, a painting of a sad clown, a gun, a massage chair: Humberto surveys it all with displeasure, his waxily well-preserved face creasing into a frown. “How do they see me?” he demands of the craven assistant dancing attendance a cautiously respectful distance away (the extravagant shifts in focus between the two during this exchange emphasise just how far removed Humberto is from the rest of the world). The billionaire decides that he needs to reframe his legacy. And how better to launder a tainted reputation than by bankrolling a piece of great cinema?
Lola suspends boulders over her actors to fine-tune the authenticity of their emotional response
To this end, a hot literary novel is bought (Humberto is more impressed by the massive price tag attached to the rights than he is by the content of a book he never actually bothers to read) and a team of top talent is assembled. Lola Cuevas (Cruz) is the Cannes Palme d’Or-winning director with an electrical storm of red curls and a highly unconventional way of working. Two stars are cast in the lead roles of brothers who are violently at odds but bound together by blood. Félix Rivero (Banderas) is a global superstar, draped in the trappings of celebrity and success. Iván Torres (Oscar Martínez) is a luminary of the theatre who prizes the craft above all else. Both, in their own way, are great actors. Both take an immediate and visceral dislike to each other.
Antonio Banderas and Oscar Martínez as Félix and Iván in Official Competition. Photograph: Manolo Pavon
The Argentinian directing duo Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn (who co-wrote the screenplay of Official Competition with Andrés Duprat) have a fascination with battling male egos: previous films include The Man Next Door (2009), a story of the spiralling conflict between two Buenos Aires neighbours triggered by a disagreement over a party wall. Territory is at stake here too, as Félix and Iván jostle for Lola’s approval during the increasingly wacky rehearsal process that makes up the main body of the film. Duprat and Cohn fill the set – the headquarters of Humberto’s empire, a grand but soulless modernist temple to wealth – with mirrors, the better for these preening, self-regarding egotists to admire themselves.
But for all the considerable, if at times slightly overstretched entertainment value of watching Félix and Iván trade petty micro-aggressions and status flexes, it is Cruz, fiercely deadpan and utterly bonkers, who steals the film. Autocratic, exacting and strung as tightly as a banjo, Lola suspends boulders over her actors to fine-tune the authenticity of their emotional response, and uses an industrial metal grinder for an exercise in “ego”.
With its blend of scabrous honesty and self-skewering silliness, this may be the most perceptive film about the movie-making business since Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion.
In cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema
Watch a trailer for Official Competition.
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https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2012/jun/15/ulysses-becomes-radio-4-marathon
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Television & radio
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2012-06-15T11:46:14.000Z
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Elisabeth Mahoney
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Will you be tuning in for Radio 4's Ulysses marathon?
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For anyone wondering quite how they're going to manage to listen to the whole of Radio 4's production of Ulysses tomorrow – five-and-a-half hours, in seven parts, in slots scattered across the station's schedule from 9.10am to midnight – it could be worse. In 1982, Irish radio station RTE broadcast every word of James Joyce's landmark and famously challenging modernist novel. It took 29-and-a-half hours.
The Radio 4 approach is a curious one. There's no doubt that this will be a classy adaptation given the track record of the team involved: co-producers Jeremy Mortimer (A Tale of Two Cities) and Jonquil Painting, writer Robin Brooks (I, Claudius), and a fine cast including Niamh Cusack, Stephen Rae, Andrew Scott and Henry Goodman. And to listen to the novel should prove easier than reading it on page, where the layers of narration, dialogue and interior monologue blur mischievously.
To broadcast over one day is certainly a ballsy decision. Fittingly it's on Bloomsday, 16 June, the same day as the book's 1904 setting, and will unfold in something close to real time, moving through the day from Leopold Bloom's breakfast of kidneys ("grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine") to Molly Bloom's late-night erotic monologue. But dotting the novel across 15 hours of the schedules on one day makes it even harder to imagine listeners sticking with it than if it were broadcast in one five-and-a-half hour stint.
It's not simply the ginormous time commitment, though that is a consideration; instead of clearing an evening or afternoon, you're on call all day. It's also the dipping in and out of other regular programmes. Bit of Ulysses followed by The Week in Westminster? Another segment after Any Answers and its reliably curious array of callers? Sandwiched around Loose Ends? That noise you can hear is Joyce turning in his grave and cursing.
Why not instead launch with all the Bloomsday fanfare, then broadcast in episodes over a longer period in a regular slot? Or, better still, have the conviction to broadcast the adaptation all in one, as Radio 4 did with eight-and-a-half uninterrupted hours dedicated to a reading of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on Boxing Day 2000?
I've been asking on Twitter this week about who intends to listen to the whole thing tomorrow as it goes out and, while not the most rigorous scientific research, a pattern clearly emerged: those connected or appearing in the adaptation will be doing so, as you'd expect. Everyone else said they'd be downloading to listen later. Many added that they hadn't got round to Life and Fate yet. Could Ulysses end up being the most unlistened to broadcast of the most unread novel?
These issues arise when radio embraces such immersive events, whether it's Radio 3 giving over a whole week to a composer or Radio 4 filling every drama slot in a week, apart from The Archers, with Life and Fate last September. Much of the value of these projects is in branding: networks showing how flexible they can be for ventures which bolster a sense of their core values and those of their audiences.
So, Radio 4 smartly connects the Ulysses adaptation with other popular programmes and presenters: In Our Time discussed the novel this week; the adaptation will be launched from a brief Saturday Live, and Mark Lawson will be in Dublin to link the segments and consider the novel with guests later in the day. It's a bold, ambitious day, for sure, and one that reminds us what Radio 4 stands for. But will you be listening?
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https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/jan/28/pope-francis-magazines
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Media
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2014-01-28T18:04:00.000Z
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Roy Greenslade
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Pope Francis graces the cover of Rolling Stone magazine
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Pope Francis has become the first pontiff to grace the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. It is a typical picture of the pope, smiling and waving, above the cover line, "The times they are a-changin.'"
This is one popular pope. Only last month he was smiling from the cover of Time magazine as its 2013 "person of the year." And that was his second Time cover appearance last year.
But Rolling Stone is a rock music magazine, so it is a landmark decision to feature him. (No jokes then about a Rolling Stone gathers no mass).
Inside the magazine is a 7,700-word profile by contributing editor Mark Binelli, who writes: "In less than a year since his papacy began, Pope Francis has done much to separate himself from past popes and establish himself as a people's pope."
Binelli's article contains many nuggets about Francis, such as telling jokes at his own expense when addressing the conclave of cardinals after being elected. ("May God forgive you for what you've done," he told them). Binelli writes:
"After the disastrous papacy of Benedict, a staunch traditionalist who looked like he should be wearing a striped shirt with knife-fingered gloves and menacing teenagers in their nightmares, Francis's basic mastery of skills like smiling in public seemed a small miracle to the average Catholic.
But he had far more radical changes in mind. By eschewing the papal palace for a modest two-room apartment, by publicly scolding church leaders for being 'obsessed' with divisive social issues like gay marriage, birth control and abortion ('Who am I to judge?' Francis famously replied when asked his views on homosexual priests) and – perhaps most astonishingly of all – by devoting much of his first major written teaching to a scathing critique of unchecked free-market capitalism, the pope revealed his own obsessions to be more in line with the boss's son."
Sources: Yahoo/Rolling Stone
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/21/democrats-republicans-agree-obama-immigration-actions-are-controversial
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US news
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2014-11-21T22:09:05.000Z
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Paul Lewis
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There is bipartisan agreement on one thing: Obama's immigration action is controversial
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Barack Obama characterised his move to reform the immigration system this week as a pragmatic decision: a “common-sense, middle-ground approach” consistent with the actions taken by presidents before him.
His decision is viewed somewhat differently among critics and supporters alike. Obama, they agree, has taken a monumental step, plunging the White House into a politically volatile controversy by acting at a stroke to shield from deportation almost five million people living in the country illegally.
Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill differ on the merits of that decision, but they mostly agree it has been the most controversial move of the president’s second-term – and there are ways in which it could backfire politically.
From the GOP’s perspective, Obama’s decision to plough ahead with executive action, ignoring the Democratic defeats at the midterm elections, smacks of arrogance.
“The president has chosen to deliberately sabotage any chance of enacting bipartisan reforms that he claims to seek,” the Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner said Friday. “And as I told the president yesterday, he’s damaging the presidency itself.”
And as I told the president yesterday, he’s damaging the presidency itself.
John Boehner
Both Boehner and the soon-to-be-installed Republican majority leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, have pledged to use their control over both houses of Congress in January to retaliate.
John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have pledged to use their control over both houses of Congress in January to retaliate. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
Relations between the White House and congressional Republicans were already strained before this week. All of the indications are that both sides are now determined to double down on an approach that puts conflict before compromise.
White House officials are preparing for battle, conceding that Obama’s move has angered many of his critics and, privately at least, accepting that the president can expect intensified opposition on a whole raft of unrelated measures, from his long-stalled nominees to any nuclear agreement forged with Iran.
It is unclear, however, precisely how a Republican-controlled legislature can curtail a president’s decree to focus on deporting “felons, not families” and give millions of undocumented migrants temporary access to work permits.
The most likely lever Republicans will pull is financial. No decisions have yet been taken, but GOP aides are exploring possible provisions that can be attached to spending authorisations that would somehow “defund” aspects of Obama’s action.
“We do need to figure out a way - and there are different options - to push back,” said Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, the incoming chairman of the powerful budget committee. “We do have legitimate congressional powers - power of the purse. Congress could use its power that way.”
Sessions was speaking on Friday to an audience of the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank that pushed for last year’s government shutdown in protest at Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
Chela Praeli cheers with her daughter Lorella, left, and friends Ligia Jimenez Moreta and daughter Cristina as Barack Obama delivers remarks on immigration at Del Sol High School in Las Vegas on Friday. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
There is little appetite among GOP leaders for a repeat of such a confrontational approach, but the party’s rank-and-file is less restrained, urging a fierce response on all fronts, from lawsuits challenging the president’s authority to moves towards impeachment.
Democrats, on the whole, are supportive of Obama’s decision, and believe that any over-reaction from the GOP will damage the party’s standing, particularly among Latino voters.
The president’s supporters argue that while his decision may infuriate Republicans, he was acting within the bounds of his power, and only after it became clear that bipartisan legislative reform was off the table.
Under pressure from conservatives, Boehner spent 18 months refusing to hold a vote on a bipartisan bill passed in the Senate. A blueprint for border security and comprehensive immigration reform, that bill would have gone much further than Obama’s executive order, providing stepping stones towards full citizenship for almost all 11 million people living in the US illegally.
Our immigration system is broken ... No one questions that.
Angus King
“Had the House of Representatives allowed that kind of bill a simple yes-or-no vote, it would have passed with support from both parties, and today it would be the law,” Obama said in Thursday’s televised address.
The question is whether by opting for a controversial stop-gap measure, via executive order, Obama has ruined the chances of a return to the kind of comprehensive immigration reform that the White House hoped was within reach in 2013.
One of the strongest supporters of immigration reform, Angus King, an independent senator from Maine who caucuses with Democrats, said he was “concerned about the impact of the president acting alone”.
The presidential order, he said, “could actually make the reform we need more difficult by causing a backlash in public opinion and solidifying Republican opposition” to reform.
An anti-immigration demonstrator gathered to rally across from the White House on Friday. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Similar concerns were raised in the lead-up to the announcement by three other moderate Democrats: West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Jon Tester of Montana.
Obama’s supporters insist that comprehensive immigration reform was never going to be passed in the conservative House, regardless of executive action, before the end of his presidency.
But concern that Obama may have opted for the short-term option at the expense of a longer-term solution has been compounded by the morning-after realisation among immigration rights activists that Obama’s sweeping, historic announcement has considerable limits.
Just over half of undocumented migrants in the US do not qualify under either of the “deferred action” programs announced by the president. Those who do will only receive relief from deportation for two years, a protection that could be rescinded by the next president.
Even if they come out of the shadows, the millions who do benefit from Obama’s executive action will still be denied some of the basic rights afforded to citizens.
“Our immigration system is broken,” King said. “No one questions that. But, in order to achieve a long-term solution that brings people together, the Congress, including the House of Representatives – not the executive – must take the lead.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/05/geoffrey-rush-calls-for-more-women-behind-the-camera-in-australian-film
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Film
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2015-06-05T06:23:32.000Z
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Alexandra Spring
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Geoffrey Rush calls for more women behind the camera in Australian film
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Geoffrey Rush has joined calls for more women behind the camera in Australian film. Speaking on the Sydney film festival red carpet, the Oscar-winner said: “I’d love to see a hell of a lot more to bring it up to an equal balance.”
The Daughter first look review – Simon Stone's striking bloodline squabble
Read more
Rush is currently starring in Simon Stone’s feature debut The Daughter, which premiered at the festival. The film has two female producers, Jan Chapman, producer of The Piano, Lantana and Somersault and emerging talent Nicole O’Donohue, who produced Griff the Invisible and The Last Impresario.
“It’s an ancient statistic that men have always pushed themselves rather annoyingly to the front of the queue,” said Rush, who is president of Aacta (the Australian Academy of Cinematic and Television Arts). “But when I think of working with female directors of photography, female directors, [there’s] a very interesting quality that is not a male mind that goes into the creative process.”
The 2015 Sydney film festival features a number of stage plays adapted into screenplays, including The Daughter, based on Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck; Brendan Cowell’s Ruben Guthrie, an original Belvoir theatre commission; Neil Armfield’s Holding the Man, first produced for Sydney’s Griffin theatre; and Last Cab to Darwin, written by Australian playwright Reg Cribbs.
Geoffrey Rush on the Sydney film festival red carpet
Photo via Instagram @gdnausculture Photograph: Guardian
One of Australia’s most established theatre actors, Rush said he had no “zeitgeist theories” about the run of plays-turned-films, but said it “reflects something about the fertility of what’s around”.
He added: “It takes a very seasoned producer like Jan Chapman to look at Simon Stone’s growing body of theatrical work and for them to have a meeting and [say]: ‘I think this could go further.”’
Rush will play King Lear in a Sydney Theatre Company production in November, directed by Neil Armfield. He is also due to star in Final Portrait, written and set to be directed by Stanley Tucci. The film looks at the friendship between American art critic James Lord and Swiss painter Alberto Giacometti (Rush). The actor said filming was currently in “a state of flux” due to cast and crew availability but that he was looking forward to the start of shooting.
“Stanley Tucci’s screenplay is really a gem,” he said. “As an actor, it’s a role that I connected with the moment I read it.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/09/julia-roberts-met-gala-daniel-radcliffe-charlie-brooker
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Opinion
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2020-05-09T15:00:03.000Z
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Rebecca Nicholson
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Julia Roberts: No Met ball bubbly? There's always the bath
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The annual Met Gala would have taken place in New York last week, had it not been postponed indefinitely in March owing to the pandemic. The theme would have been About Time: Fashion and Duration, or “time itself”, according to Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s partner exhibition, which is ironic now that a morning can feel like a month, and a week can feel like a minute.
Ordinarily, it is one of my favourite celebrity bashes, sitting happily in the middle of a ridiculous/gorgeous Venn diagram, showing off high fashion so high that the people who point at Picassos and say “my five-year-old could have done that” will inevitably comment that “you couldn’t wear that down the shops”, as if the point of a ballgown in the shape of a chandelier were to make the trip to Tesco a bit more lively. (Having said that, you could definitely have used it to carry a few extra bags home.)
‘Here’s me...not going to the Met Ball tonight. #stayhome #yesyoustillhavetostayhome’: Julia Roberts. Photograph: Instagram/ @juliaroberts
In the run-up to this year’s postponed non-event, Billy Porter, the man responsible for every key red-carpet talking point from the past two years, challenged Vogue readers to recreate the most famous Met Gala looks at home. “It can be Rihanna, it can be Gaga, it can be... me,” he said. Given that Porter entered the 2019 Met Gala on a bed carried by six shirtless men, before showing off a pair of enormous golden wings, you could be him, but it would take a bit more than a creative way with some sticky back plastic and a few loo roll tubes.
Still, it is a testament to the imagination that lockdown seems to have unleashed that people tried it, and essentially succeeded. They certainly did far better than me on a “dress like a Simpsons character” round during a Zoom pub quiz recently. All I can say is that a swimming cap was ruined.
On the night the Met Gala was supposed to happen, Anna Wintour hosted a YouTube livestream. Florence Welch performed in front of some frankly covetable wallpaper. Potential guests posted their looks on Instagram. Katy Perry, of the chandelier dress fame, showed a Gaultier baby bump, in the style of the Madonna cone bra, with the caption “what would have been”. Amanda Seyfried posted her look while posing with a chicken, next to a chicken coop. My favourite was Julia Roberts, who posed precariously in a black and white gown over a full bubble bath, holding what appears to be a cup of tea, which is surely a night in barely bothering to masquerade as the desire for a night out. It felt perfectly appropriate.
Daniel Radcliffe, just as much a wizard as he always was
Daniel Radcliffe: kicked off the Harry Potter reading. Photograph: Isabel Infantes/PA
On Tuesday, Harry Potter fans were surprised at the news that “amazing friends of the Wizarding World” would be taking it in turns to read a chapter of the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Stephen Fry, Eddie Redmayne and Noma Dumezweni all appeared in the announcement, but there was only one candidate to read the opening chapter, and it had to be Daniel Radcliffe, although this did offer the slightly unsettling spectacle of Harry Potter at 30, reading a book about Harry Potter at 11, as if he didn’t know anything about it. Perhaps it was best not to overthink it.
In another wonderful moment for fans of children’s literature, Andy Serkis conducted a live reading of The Hobbit on Friday from start to finish, to raise money for the charities NHS Charities Together and Best Beginnings.
I had been sceptical of audiobooks as an adult. I saw them as the stern-faced old-fashioned ancestor of that bright young upstart the podcast. But in lockdown I’ve been devouring them. I stare out of the window with my headphones on, marvelling at how experts can consider the increase in road usage to be “slightly worrying” when the road I look out on to has been back to pre-lockdown traffic levels for two weeks now.
Still, the stories can be soothing. Fiction read aloud has an effect that podcasts can’t always muster. It encourages a necessary depth of escapism, whether that’s Harry Potter or, in my case, The Testaments. And you know things are bad when that’s what you choose to listen to in order to switch off.
Charlie Brooker, please carry on predicting the future
Charlie Brooker: apocalypse no. Photograph: Matt Holyoak/BBC/Netflix
‘At the moment, I don’t know what stomach there would be for stories about societies falling apart, so I’m not working away on one of those,” Charlie Brooker told the Radio Times last week, when asked about the possibility of a sixth season of Black Mirror.
Brooker may not have the appetite for apocalypse writing, but I’m not sure he’s right about viewers. As much as I can pass an evening at home crying along to Paul O’Grady’s For the Love of Dogs, there has been a huge appetite for watching or rewatching films such as Outbreak and Contagion, which are either funhouse mirrors or opportunities for the ultimate immersive viewing experience. BYO hazmat suit, although maybe mute the sound during the “don’t talk to anyone, don’t touch anyone, stay away from other people” bit.
Given that Black Mirror appears to have got ahead of several global events before they came to fruition, from the pig’s head political scandal to the election of a racist cartoon character, then perhaps Brooker could write an episode where hardworking scientists quickly and efficiently come up with an immediate vaccine for a deadly virus. Granted, it lacks drama, but he’d be doing us all a favour.
Rebecca Nicholson is an Observer columnist
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https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/mar/28/amateur-theatre-playwrights-david-eldridge-simon-stephens-alecky-blythe
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Stage
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2018-03-28T13:29:19.000Z
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Matt Trueman
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A bunch of amateurs? Playwrights' astonishing am-dram experiences
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David Eldridge’s romcom Beginning has just finished its West End run but is about to take on a whole new life. As its amateur rights become available, anyone in Britain will be able to mount their own production. Eldridge might have held some sway over the world premiere – a say in the casting, a voice in the room – but the play is now out of his hands. It is with the amateurs now.
Amateur theatre still gets stick. The prevailing image remains that of The Play That Goes Wrong: crap actors carrying on as everything collapses around them. If that’s embarrassing for audiences, imagine how it feels for writers as their dialogue is mangled, characters hammed up. Alan Ayckbourn has sat through his fair share. “It’s like a mother watching her newborn being strangled,” he says.
It’s a curious thing about theatre. When amateur bands cover their favourite songs, the original recordings remain unaffected. Plays, however, are their productions. Often, an audience’s only experience of a script will be by a local am-dram society or student company. On a tiny budget in a chilly village hall, Beginning’s West End success won’t matter at all.
‘Anyone that sneers at amateur theatre probably doesn’t see that much of it’ … David Eldridge. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
“Part of the fun of being a playwright is watching your play go out into the world,” says Eldridge. “You turn up to a village hall or a pub and this group of people have put on your play. That’s always a real delight.”
There are more than 2,000 drama groups affiliated with the National Operatic and Dramatic Association. Its last survey estimated that about 30,000 amateur productions are staged every year. For every church hall enthusiast, there’s a questing graduate company or committed ensemble such as Tower Theatre or Strathclyde Theatre Group. “Anyone that sneers at amateur theatre probably doesn’t see that much of it,” says Eldridge.
Simon Stephens’ plays are particularly popular with students and he tries to see as many as he can. “The assumption is that amateur means not good enough to make money.” But, he says, that’s a misnomer. “The word actually comes from the Latin for love. That’s where amateur productions sit for me: a culture of people doing a show because they absolutely love it – and that’s immensely moving. It’s really astonishing to me.”
Tamara von Werthern, performing rights manager at Nick Hern Books, thinks amateur theatre has become much more adventurous over the years. Of the titles she handles most often, Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem is up there, as is Jessica Swale’s swaggering, large-scale comedy Nell Gwynn. Nicholas Wright’s adaptation of His Dark Materials, originally seen in the Olivier theatre, is particularly popular with schools.“We’re in a really rich playwriting culture and pretty much any halfway decent new play gets published,” says Eldridge. That’s expanded the repertoire beyond am-dram’s big guns such as Ayckbourn and Michael Frayn. Next month, for instance, you’ll find Lucy Kirkwood’s NSFW performed in Wandsworth and Terry Johnson’s Insignificance in Altrincham.
Even so, one title takes me aback: London Road. Alecky Blythe’s challenging verbatim musical about serial killings in Ipswich, set to a devilish Adam Cork score, is regularly staged by amateur groups. No one was more surprised than the playwright. “God no,” Blythe shrieks when I ask if she expected the interest. “It’s very complicated. We thought the National would be the only theatre capable of pulling it off.”
Mark Rylance in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem at the Royal Court. It is a popular choice for amateur theatre. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
She is also much moved by amateurs choosing her work – “of all the plays and all the pieces” – but Blythe marvels at how much care companies take. London Road isn’t easy – as music, as mimicry or even to memorise – and being amateurs, actors have to make their own time. “They don’t have six weeks of rehearsal,” says Blythe. “They’re meeting two evenings a week while holding down jobs, and they deliver it so faithfully. Honestly, it’s just … it’s extraordinary.”
With amateurs being short of time, the danger is that performances lack the specificity of professional work. Stephens likens it to an image coming into focus: “In week six of rehearsals, you go, ‘Ah, a person.’” Amateurs, almost inevitably, work in broader brushstrokes. Subtleties can fall by the wayside.
‘They’re meeting two evenings a week while holding down jobs, and they deliver it so faithfully’ … Alecky Blythe. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian
“The acting can be incredibly variable,” says Eldridge, “from the absolutely awful to ‘Why is this person in an office job, when they should be at Rada?’” Either way, he says, the play tends to shine through. “They get the spirit of it. They’re true to that.” He says: “We all know what we’ve turned up to. We know they’re not professionals.” And we watch accordingly, with generosity – part of the event, not separate from it. It changes the tone: “There’s always a slightly giddy, alcohol-fuelled, mates-in-the-audience energy going on.”
Eldridge once saw his play In Basildon performed in Beckenham. When one of his characters tipped a tub of jellied eels over another, they used a substitute to minimise mess. “It was just these polystyrene balls bouncing off her head,” he chuckles. “The actors corpsed a bit, so did we, and there was a minute or more of total anarchy.”
It’s not all mishaps, though. “There are loads of really good ones,” says Stephens, “especially the student ones.” One of his favourite productions of Punk Rock, which involves sixth-formers and a school shooting, was done by drama students at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. The actors were the right age, but they had a rawness that tends to get ironed out of professional productions. His advice to amateurs is pretty straightforward: “Just go and attack it.”
For Stephens, amateur theatre does something professional theatre never can. “Amateur actors bring real life with them. You can tell that they’re bankers or builders or whatever. You’re watching the actor in the room with you, whoever they are. You’re watching the real person and looking each other in the eye.” It’s honest, he reckons. “If the acting’s not astonishing, the love is unarguable.”
You're watching the real person, looking each other in the eye. If the acting's not astonishing, the love is unarguable
Simon Stephens
While professional premieres still hold sway, some playwrights are starting to write for amateur actors. It’s part of a cultural shift towards participation, where the distinctions start to blur. Chris Bush and James Philips have written for Sheffield People’s Theatre, while Ned Glasier’s Company Three enlists professional playwrights to work with its teenage participants. Others are simply handing scripts over. Tonic Theatre’s Platform programme, for example, commissioned new plays for schools and young theatres, tasking writers such as Joel Horwood and Somalia Seaton to write new work for large, largely female casts.“The amateur actor at the Stockport Garrick is doing exactly the same thing as an actor in the Olivier,” says Stephens. He’s quick to stress that he started out an amateur, writing plays as a student to be staged by his mates. “We’re all part of the same theatre ecology. One isn’t more important or better just because it makes a bit more money.”
It’s why Eldridge makes such an effort to support amateur productions. “You’re absolutely saying there’s no difference between us – or at least, not as much as it might seem. I’m here, and you’re doing my play, and we’re all sitting together, having a drink – and they’re ringing last orders at the bar.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/29/government-set-to-cap-university-admissions-amid-covid-19-chaos
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World news
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2020-03-29T22:12:31.000Z
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Richard Adams
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Government set to cap university admissions amid Covid-19 chaos
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Strict limits on the number of students that each university in England can recruit are set to be imposed by the government in an effort to avoid a free-for-all on admissions, with institutions plunged into financial turmoil as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the Guardian has learned.
A government source said each university would face limits on the number of UK and EU undergraduates it could admit for the academic year starting in September, in a move backed by higher education leaders. It will be the first such limit since the university admission cap was lifted in 2015.
This month, the Guardian reported that British universities faced a black hole of hundreds of millions of pounds in tuition fees as international students from China and other countries severely affected by coronavirus are forced to cancel or postpone enrolments.
UK university campuses are closed and teaching has moved online. To avoid certain universities hoovering up domestic students to fill their courses, leaving other, less prestigious institutions with empty lecture theatres, the pain will be spread through the introduction of a cap, it is understood.
“Unless there are significant developments, this will happen,” said one policymaker involved in the discussions between the government and universities.
The imposition of a cap means that students currently going through the application process are set to have their choices restricted. It also means some students will not be able to attend universities at which they have been offered place.
The policy was backed by the board of Universities UK at a virtual meeting held on Friday, although it was strongly opposed by some leading universities, including several members of the Russell Group of research-intensive institutions.
The decision is likely to be announced within the next few days, although some well-known institutions are fighting a rearguard battle in Whitehall over worries that they will also face financial difficulty if they cannot recruit additional student numbers from the UK to replace the international tuition fees they expect to lose.
Alistair Jarvis, chief executive of Universities UK (UUK), the group that includes most mainstream English universities, said: “The UUK board discussed a range of measures needed to promote financial stability of the sector in these tough times. Foremost was the need for government financial support for universities. Student number controls were discussed and it was agreed that further consideration of the pros and cons were needed, with further input from members.”
The University of Essex is believed to be among those aggressively offering unconditional offers to keep their numbers up. Photograph: Justin Kase/Alamy Stock Photo
Many university vice-chancellors back the temporary reimposition of intake controls, a policy abandoned by the government in 2015. They see it as a way of avoiding a brutal recruitment season after a group of universities, including Essex, began aggressively offering unconditional offers, which award places without regard for a student’s exam results, to sixth-formers as the scale of the coronavirus epidemic emerged.
“There is huge panic among universities at the moment. In the short term at least, a cap on student numbers would be welcomed,” said a senior figure at one English university.
Vice-chancellors were already nervous about their international student recruitment for this year and 2021, especially those relying on students from China, who now account for 120,000 full-time students in the UK.
Competition for domestic students was already fierce because the number of school leavers in the population hits a demographic trough in the UK this year. But after UK schools were shut down and A-level exams scrapped this month, there was a rush by universities to begin converting conditional offers to unconditional ones, as fears emerged that they would lose out to more prestigious rivals.
“Some universities behaved very badly,” said one participant, who argued that the university application service Ucas should have been frozen by the government as soon as the announcement about schools and A-levels was made to avoid a scramble for students.
Older, more prestigious universities had hoped to be able to replace lost international students with more home students
Nick Hillman, Hepi
The government and the Office for Students, the higher education regulator for England, called for a moratorium on unconditional offers, but that is set to expire, with signs that what one official dubbed a free-for-all would be reignited unless a cap was imposed.
Nick Hillman, the head of the Higher Education Policy Institute(Hepi), who was previously a special adviser to the government, said: “There has to be a policy response to this severe crisis, and we have to protect our university sector at a time of such profound change.
“But there are people who have long wanted to restrict access to higher education who might see this as the chance to do it. Yet when there are fewer jobs to go around, education becomes more important, not less.”
Hillman said the coronavirus pandemic was “fast becoming the catalyst for the return of student number caps”, in opposition to “every ministerial utterance since at least 2010” on the subject.
“Reintroducing number caps would protect those universities that have grown the most in recent years by locking down the number of home students that they educate and stopping others from growing at their expense. Older, more prestigious universities would be the biggest losers, as they had hoped to be able to replace lost international students with more home students,” Hillman said.
Those university leaders opposed to the cap argue that there is no rush to impose the policy, given the uncertainties over how the coronavirus crisis will play out, and that decisions on admissions could wait until July at the latest.
Chris Husbands, vice-chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University, is to argue in an article to be published by Hepi on Monday that “radical action is needed on university admissions”, including the reintroduction of student number controls for more than one year.
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We are committed to supporting our world-class higher education institutions, and will continue working closely with the sector to manage the impact of coronavirus.
“We recognise the challenges universities are facing, but are impressed by their resilience and efforts to tackle the virus, through the use of labs, accommodation and community support.”
This article was amended on 30 March 2020. An earlier version incorrectly included Liverpool University among those making unconditional offers. The article had also said that UK universities were closed; this was later clarified to say UK university campuses were closed and teaching had moved online and the article amended accordingly.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/02/autistic-people-often-kept-out-workplace-that-should-end
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Opinion
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2023-04-02T07:15:14.000Z
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Robert Buckland
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Autistic people are too often kept out of the workplace. That should end | Tom Pursglove and Robert Buckland
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We know autistic people have one of the lowest employment rates of any disabled group in the UK, with fewer than three in 10 in work. Yet we continually hear of too many enthusiastic minds being locked out of the workplace because of a neurodiverse label. It is clear: change is needed.
This is a situation that is not only hugely detrimental to those autistic people being kept of out of work but is also depriving employers of the known benefits of a neurodiverse workforce. Our autism employment review will take an in-depth look at how we can improve the employment prospects of autistic people.
We want more autistic people to reach their full potential and live the rewarding and fulfilling lives they deserve. In particular, employers need to stop seeing autism as a drawback and recognise it as an asset.
Having more autistic and neurodiverse people in work would make our employment market an even richer and better one
Working with the fantastic charity Autistica, over the coming months we will ask employers, employer groups, groups working with autistic people and autistic people themselves to identify the barriers to job searches and career progression. We will then work together to develop solutions that work both for autistic people and for employers and public services.
At the heart of Transforming Future Support, the recently published health and disability white paper, is this recognition that many disabled people and people with health conditions are being disincentivised to work by the current system. This is why new employment programmes – Universal Support and WorkWell – will be introduced, building on locally trialled schemes to help thousands more disabled and neurodiverse people into work.
From our combined experiences as the father of an autistic adult and as the minister for disabled people, we know that having more autistic and neurodiverse people in work would make our employment market an even richer and better one.
This is a cause close to both our hearts, with a deep personal connection, but it is about more than just family experiences. This is about what we can do, alongside employers, to make a real and positive change for autistic people and a more welcoming and inclusive society.
Tom Pursglove is the minister for disabled people, health and work. Robert Buckland KC is the Conservative MP for South Swindon
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/dec/01/matt-lucas-i-wished-i-had-told-my-dad-i-was-gay
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Life and style
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2017-12-01T12:59:43.000Z
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Donna Ferguson
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Matt Lucas: ‘I wished I had told my dad I was gay’
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All my hair fell out when I was six, which was a bit alarming. My parents were very supportive, so my childhood was as happy as it could be, in those circumstances. I always felt loved, and there was a lot of laughter in the house. I have memories of going to bed and being woken up because everyone downstairs was laughing. My parents had a very vibrant social life.
I was closest to my mum when I was growing up. My parents split up when I was 10 and, three years after that, my brother moved in with my dad. So, for a time, it was just me and my mum in the house. Later, when I told her I was gay, she looked for a reason. She asked me: “Did I smother you? Did I make you gay?” This was nearly 20 years ago, when people believed an event could turn you gay. I said no, no, no and not to worry about it. She didn’t smother me at all – she was lovely.
I looked up to my brother. He was very protective of me. Sometimes, people at school would tease me for being gay. If he found out about it, he would go and have a word, and then it would stop. He looked out for me. We did squabble and bicker – if it was physical, he would win, and if it was verbal, I would win – but it would be over in a minute, and forgotten. He and I share a love of football. As kids, we would go to matches together. Now, I live in Los Angeles but I’ll WhatsApp or call him and we can spend many hours conducting a postmortem of a football match over the phone.
My mum is as proud of me now as she was when I was 10 and played a milkman in our synagogue revue
I was 12 when my dad went to prison for six months, for fraud. It was a shock. It was unusual for a middle-class Jewish child to have a parent in that situation, but I just got on with it. It made me realise that not everyone who goes to prison is a bad person. I knew six months wasn’t for ever and I got to visit him every three or four weeks. The strangest thing was to see him in there looking so different. Dad wore a wig, but he wasn’t allowed it in prison. When I went to see him in prison, it was the first time I’d seen him without it.
I was too scared to tell my dad I was gay. He died when I was 22 and he was 52. His death came out of the blue and I wished I had told him while he was still alive. Then, four years after he died, I found out from my aunt that he had figured it out for himself – and he was OK with it. Even all that time later, that was a very heartening thing to learn. It resolved a lot of things.
My mum is as proud of me now as she was when I was 10 and played a milkman in our synagogue revue. But she wasn’t convinced I was doing well until I did a Cadbury’s Creme Egg advert. Until then, she was nervous that I might not be able to make a living from acting. That commercial allowed me to put a down-payment on a flat, so she relaxed then. However, my success goes back to that synagogue revue in 1985. As far as she is concerned, that is when my career began.
My grandmother was a refugee from Berlin who came to England during the second world war. She was a real intellectual, a very intelligent woman. Eventually, she was given British citizenship. Under Hitler, she had been banned from studying to become a doctor, so she became a nurse and married one of her patients – my grandfather, who had had polio and was in a wheelchair. My mum was their only child. I spoke to my grandmother every night for an hour on the phone in the last few years of her life. I was very fond of her. My childhood was spent with her going to classical music concerts and exhibitions. When I was young, I was a little bit scared of her – she was very strict. But as she got older, she mellowed a bit and we were just a great a pair. I miss those conversations to this day.
Little Me: My Life from A-Z by Matt Lucas is published by Canongate, £20. To order a copy for £17, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p on orders of more than £10, online only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/apr/29/paramore-review-o2-arena-london-this-is-why-hayley-williams
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Music
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2023-04-29T13:00:36.000Z
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Kitty Empire
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Paramore review – pop-punk survivors feel the love
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On the final night of their UK tour, Paramore singer Hayley Williams playfully asks for a show of hands: those who have never been to a Paramore show before. Half the venue, it seems, raise theirs. Even Williams looks taken aback.
She shouldn’t be surprised. The US band’s last appearance here was five years ago; against the odds, a new generation of Paramore fans has come on stream. This has been the much-maligned 00s pop-punk pioneers’ fastest-selling tour ever. Their most recent album, the serrated, punk-funk-tinged This Is Why, went to No 1 in the UK in February,Paramore’s first top spot in a decade.
It was good, too, channelling grownup concerns and Talking Heads rather than the more formulaic emo bounce of their earlier work. Running Out of Time, in which Williams castigates herself for her good intentions and bad timekeeping, finds her mock-running across the stage, wondering “what if I’m just a selfish prick, no regard?”
All sorts of younger artists have been namechecking Paramore – and Hayley Williams – as inspirations
Paramore end the show with a new tune, rather than an old hit – the new album’s title track, which deals with post-pandemic overwhelm (“This is why I don’t leave the house!”). The Pop Group, whose frontman Mark Stewart died earlier this month, subtly echo across the song’s curt guitar work and borderline paranoia. Paramore’s influences have a way of surprising. Bloc Party are the support – a band, Williams says, without which there would have been no Paramore. Williams brings Kele Okereke on stage for a stripped-down duet of Bloc Party’s Blue Light. “I used to cry to that song all the time in my car,” she blurts.
Throughout a set that draws from all corners of the band’s near-two decades together, and features Williams repeatedly gushing about how everyone in the room is “family”, it’s clear that Paramore are currently in the throes of a resurgence. There’s a wider wave of ongoing nostalgia for the 00s, particularly among thirtysomething fans presumably fed up of adulting like crazy. My Chemical Romance also reunited and toured recently. A slew of new artists are harking back to the millennial sound. Major new star Olivia Rodrigo’s 2021 hit Good 4 U sounded so similar to a foundational Paramore hit called Misery Business that Rodrigo eventually gave the band a writing credit, after numerous TikTok mashups made the similarities plain.
All sorts of younger artists have been namechecking Paramore – and Williams in particular – as inspirations. The fanclub runs the gamut from Steve Lacy to Billie Eilish – who duetted with Williams at 2022’s Coachella festival – via PinkPantheress and Phoebe Bridgers. Last month, Paramore supported Taylor Swift on her US tour. Swift and Williams go back a long way: roughly the same age, the two songwriters came up alongside one another in Tennessee.
Like Swift, Paramore also grew up in public. They were squeaky-clean practising Christians, which did not sit well in the punk world. As a female-fronted band in a testosterone-fuelled environment, all sorts of unpleasantness was thrown at Williams. Despite label pressure to write with professional songwriters, she was a teenage girl writing about being a teenage girl. Williams took to wearing T-shirts that said “Paramore is a band”, quoting Blondie’s assertion a couple of generations before. (Paramore’s Hard Times interpolates Blondie’s Heart of Glass tonight.)
Watch the video for Running Out of Time by Paramore.
Despite that, Paramore nearly split, often. In 2010, founding members Josh and Zac Farro left; an online post by Josh Farro made the acrimony very public. Williams regrouped with touring guitarist Taylor York; in 2016, drummer Zac Farro rejoined. After 2017’s successful After Laughter album began a new era, Paramore went on hiatus in 2018 so that everyone could focus on their other lives. Williams was going through a difficult divorce; she was eventually diagnosed with PTSD. Her two very good solo albums, which processed her own history of trauma, came out during the pandemic. Zac Farro worked with his other band, HalfNoise. Both solo ventures get one track on the set list tonight. On hiatus, Paramore’s streaming numbers went up, not down.
While Williams’s star power remains constant, the band’s defining old songs really haven’t aged wildly well. The tracks that resonate most tonight are actually from the latter, funkier half of their career, with the pop-funk of Hard Times from After Laughter making a snarky earworm out of her turmoil. For Rose-Colored Boy, Williams dons shades and ponders the gap between optimism and toxic positivity as the band pump out more persuasive light funk.
They retired their biggest hit, Misery Business, some time ago, citing discomfort at the song’s internalised misogyny – the song pits girl against girl over a boy. (“Once a whore, you’re nothing more,” it sneers; hilariously, Paramore also got stick from Christians for taking the Lord’s name in vain in the chorus.)
But recently they’ve been playing it again, largely due to all this new interest, recognising its role in their story. Tonight they choose three young women from the audience of placard-waving fans to sing it on stage, a frenzy of wish-fulfilment that echoes the wider revivalist mood. Ironically, though, Paramore aren’t that band any more, and they are the better for it.
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/oct/21/sir-bobby-charlton-obituary
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Football
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2023-10-21T17:04:19.000Z
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Gavin McOwan
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Sir Bobby Charlton obituary
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Sir Bobby Charlton, who has died aged 86, was one of the greatest footballers England has ever produced. He was certainly the most successful, the only English player to win all of football’s major honours – the FA Cup, Football League and European Cup with Manchester United, and the World Cup with England, accumulating a record number of international caps and goals.
As captain of United in 1968, when they were the first English team to win the European Cup, and a key player in the 1966 World Cup-winning team, he was the embodiment of a golden age of English football. But he was also involved in one of the game’s darkest moments, the 1958 Munich air disaster, in which eight of his team-mates, three United staff and a further 12 passengers were killed.
Charlton was renowned for his raking passes and explosive long-range shots, with either foot, and was blessed with speed, athleticism and perfect balance.
Some commentators say he was a scorer of great goals rather than a great goalscorer, but the statistics undermine that claim. For England, he scored 49 in 106 appearances, and he was United’s highest all-time scorer, with 249 in 758 games, until 2017, when his record was beaten by Wayne Rooney.
A montage of Bobby Charlton goals and moments of skill
But it was his modesty and gentlemanly demeanour, as much as his outstanding ability, that won him admiration far beyond Manchester and England. At the height of his fame in the mid to late 60s, when London and the counterculture were in full swing, one of the world’s most famous Englishmen was an old-fashioned sporting hero. Across the world, the first or only two words of English many people could speak were “Bobby Charlton”.
He was born in the Northumberland mining village of Ashington, the second of four sons of Robert Charlton, a miner, and his wife, Elizabeth, known as Cissie, who came from the famous Milburn football family. Four of her brothers were professional footballers and her cousin was the Newcastle United and England centre-forward Jackie Milburn. Bobby’s elder brother, Jack, also became a footballer, and, although not as gifted as his younger brother, he enjoyed a distinguished career as a centre-half for Leeds United, and later as a successful manager. Jack and Bobby were England team-mates in 1966.
Most Ashington boys went down the pit on leaving school (as Jack did briefly before joining Leeds), but from a young age it was apparent that Bobby would become a footballer. He passed the 11-plus but attending the local grammar was unthinkable because it was a rugby-playing school. However, he was such a prodigy that his headteacher – with encouragement from Cissie – arranged a place at another nearby school, the football-playing Bedlington grammar.
In his last year at school, he played four times for England schoolboys, scoring five goals, and football scouts from across Britain were soon knocking at the family’s door. He received offers from 18 clubs in all, but was charmed by Manchester United’s chief scout, Joe Armstrong, and signed for them in 1953.
Bobby Charlton as a 22-year-old in 1959, three years after his Manchester United debut and a year after the Munich disaster. Photograph: Don Morley/Getty Images
Apart from a brief swansong with Preston North End and then Waterford, in Ireland, it was to be his only club, and an inspired choice. Not only were United a club on the rise, but their inspirational manager, Matt Busby, was prepared to give youth its head, assembling a precociously talented young team that played with swagger and flair, capturing the nation’s imagination and earning them the nickname the Busby Babes. They swept all before them to win the First Division (the equivalent of today’s Premier League) in 1955-56, and retained the title the following season, in which Charlton scored twice on his debut, against Charlton Athletic, on 6 October 1956.
As champions, United entered the European Cup, the first English side to do so, and reached the semi-finals in 1957. A year later they beat Red Star Belgrade in the quarter-finals, with Charlton, now an established first-teamer, scoring three goals over the two legs. On the flight back from Belgrade the following day, the team’s plane stopped to refuel in Munich. In freezing conditions, it crashed and burst into flames while attempting to take off from the snowy runway.
Charlton was catapulted 40 yards from the plane, still strapped into his seat, and clear of the burning wreck. He woke minutes later, suffering only from shock and minor cuts. He later described his escape as a miracle, but it would haunt him for the rest of his life. The grief of witnessing friends perish left its mark, turning an already shy young man into an introspective one. Many close to him, including Busby and his brother Jack, said that Bobby changed for ever after Munich. “He never got over Munich,” said Busby. “He felt responsible. Those were his kids that died that day.”
Characteristically, Jack was more blunt. In his 1996 autobiography, he wrote: “I saw a big change in our kid from that day on. He stopped smiling, a trait which continues to this day.” The book lifted the lid on the brothers’ strained relationship – they barely spoke for many years, partly due to the cooling of relations between Norma (nee Ball), Bobby’s wife, whom he married in 1961, and his wider family, in particular Cissie, to whom he did not pay a visit in the final four years of her life. Fortunately Bobby and Jack were reconciled before Jack’s death in 2020.
Despite all the success and veneration that would come Charlton’s way, he always carried a slight air of melancholy. He was not withdrawn, however, on the football field, where he exuded the freedom, desire and commanding presence characteristic of great athletes.
Sir Bobby Charlton (1937-2023) – his life in pictures
Read more
Just 23 days after Munich, Charlton was back playing for United, and for the remainder of that traumatic season, and indeed the next decade, he was the foundation stone on which Manchester United were rebuilt. Showing remarkable spirit, United reached the FA Cup final within three months of the disaster, with a patched-up team of youth players, stop-gap signings and four players who had survived the crash. There was a tide of public sympathy behind them, but they lost the game 2-0 to Bolton Wanderers.
On 19 April, shortly before the Cup final, Charlton made his England debut, scoring in a 4-0 win against Scotland at Hampden Park. He scored twice more in his second game, against Portugal at Wembley, and this earned him a place in the squad for the World Cup in Sweden that summer. It was the first of his four World Cup squads (another record for an Englishman), though he did not get off the bench in Sweden. By the 1962 World Cup in Chile, he was a first-choice player and scored against Argentina as England reached the quarter-finals before losing to the eventual champions, Brazil.
As hosts of the 1966 World Cup, England made a disappointing start, with a 0-0 draw against Uruguay. It was in the second game, against Mexico, that Charlton lit up England’s hopes with a magnificent goal, running from his own half with the ball before unleashing a trademark thunderbolt shot. In the semi-final against Portugal, he had the international game of his life, scoring both goals in the 2-1 win that put England into the final.
Bobby Charlton talks about his memories of the 1966 World Cup final.
He had a relatively quiet game in the 4-2 final victory against West Germany, given the task by the England manager, Alf Ramsey, of marking the brilliant young Franz Beckenbauer, who had been told to mark Charlton, so that they largely cancelled each other out. But the battle between the two best players on the pitch was pivotal to the game’s outcome, as Beckenbauer acknowledged years later: “England beat us in 1966 because Bobby Charlton was just a bit better than me.” Ramsey declared that Charlton was “very much the linchpin of the 1966 team”, and he was voted player of the tournament. He ended the season not only as a world champion but as Footballer of the Year and European Footballer of the Year, too.
There was to be one last World Cup hurrah, in Mexico in 1970. He was 32 by then and, although he was still perhaps England’s best player, in the quarter-final, again against West Germany, with England winning 2-1, Ramsey controversially substituted Charlton to conserve his energy for what seemed like a certain semi-final. But the Germans came back to win 3-2 and England were out. It was Charlton’s record 106th cap – the game in which he passed Billy Wright’s tally, and a record that stood until passed by Rooney in 2015 – and his last, an unsatisfactory end to a glittering international career.
His halcyon days with England coincided with Manchester United’s post-Munich renaissance. By the mid-1960s Busby had built his second great team, Charlton now at the heart of it, playing as an attacking midfielder. The line-up included the Northern Irishman George Best and the Scot Denis Law, who together with Charlton formed a dazzling forward line that reignited the legend of the Busby Babes. They were brilliant individuals (in the space of five years, all three were named European Player of the Year) and together helped United win the FA Cup in 1963 and the league title in 1964-65 and 1966-67.
Charlton with George Best in a Manchester United league match against Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park in 1969. Photograph: Mirrorpix/Getty Images
Ten years after the Munich disaster, United finally realised Busby’s dream of playing in a European Cup final, against the Portuguese club Benfica. United won 4-1 at Wembley, with Charlton scoring twice and lifting the cup as captain. For him and Bill Foulkes, the only two crash survivors in the team, and for Busby, it was an overwhelming evening. After the match, while the rest of the team celebrated, Charlton was so exhausted that he could not get off his hotel bed to go downstairs and join the party. Busby retired as manager a year later, and United went into slow decline, though Charlton played on until 1973.
With his playing career over, he felt uncertain about what to do next, and simply waited for the phone to ring. It was three weeks before it did, and he accepted the first offer that came his way, to manage Second Division Preston North End. The club were relegated in his first season in charge, and he resigned the next. It was a chastening experience after so many illustrious years as a player, and he never returned to full-time management.
He had more success in the media, working as a BBC football pundit, and in 1978 he also set up the innovative Bobby Charlton Soccer Schools, which provided top-level coaching to young players. In 1984 he returned to Manchester United as a director. He developed a close bond with the United manager Alex Ferguson, and his diplomacy and peerless standing in the game made him the perfect ambassador for the club as it developed into a global sporting brand in the 90s. Such qualities were not lost on other sporting bodies, and Charlton, who was knighted in 1994, was an automatic choice for the teams bidding to win the 1996 and 2000 Olympic Games and the 2002 Commonwealth Games for Manchester, the 2006 and 2018 World Cups for England, and London’s successful pitch for the 2012 Olympic Games.
He is survived by Norma and their daughters, Suzanne, a former BBC weather presenter, and Andrea.
Robert Charlton, footballer, born 11 October 1937; died 21 October 2023
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/29/biden-auto-strike-uaw-climate-crisis
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Opinion
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2023-09-29T10:02:40.000Z
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Kate Aronoff
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Biden is right to praise the auto strike. His climate agenda depends on it | Kate Aronoff
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Joe Biden had to choose a side in the United Auto Workers’ contract fight with the “big three” American automakers, and he did. This week, he became the first US president to walk a picket line while in office when he joined strikers in Belleville, Michigan, offering enthusiastic support for their demands. Biden should be thanking the UAW for handing him a golden opportunity: to prove that the green jobs his administration is creating will be good, union jobs, too, and that climate policy will bear dividends for the working class.
Republicans cosplaying solidarity have tried to exploit the strike to score cheap political points. As Republican presidential hopefuls debated this week, Donald Trump told a rally at a non-union plant in Michigan that the strike wouldn’t “make a damn bit of difference” because the car industry was “being assassinated” by “EV mandates”. (Whether there were any union members or even autoworkers in the room isn’t clear.) Ohio senator JD Vance has similarly blamed autoworkers’ plight on “the premature transition to electric vehicles” and “Biden’s war on American cars”.
These are cynical, false talking points from politicians who couldn’t care less about autoworkers – but they aren’t going away. (Although similar lines are old hat in the US, they’re finding new purchase in places like 10 Downing Street: Rishi Sunak, the British prime minister, has recently taken a “U-turn” on climate goals, citing “unacceptable costs” for “hard-working British people”.) Optimistically, the UAW strike could be a chance to dismantle the rightwing myth that reducing emissions hurts working people – not by pointing to the jobs that will trickle down from the bosses of the energy transition, but by standing with the unions fighting to make those jobs better.
Being willing to go on offense against automakers’ bad behavior is a great start and a big shift. The Biden administration has routinely praised car manufacturers as climate heroes poised to decarbonize the country and create millions of middle-class jobs along the way, turning the industry into a sort of mascot for its climate agenda. “You changed the whole story, Mary,” Biden told General Motors’ chief executive, Mary Barra, a frequent White House guest, in 2021. “You electrified the entire automobile industry. I’m serious.”
White House climate policy will be good for Barra and her colleagues at the top. The business-side tax credits and government-backed loans furnished by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are already helping the big three retool factories to produce EVs and their component parts. The IRA’s consumer-side subsidies for American-made electric cars – worth up to $7,500 – will boost demand.
GM and Ford knew for decades that their products fueled climate change, and proceeded to double down
Yet no one should confuse companies taking advantage of tax breaks with a commitment to the climate fight. The big three lag well behind their competition in the US and abroad; federal incentives are helping them play catch-up. They’ve lobbied to undermine fuel efficiency and clean car standards. Like oil and gas companies, GM and Ford knew for decades that their products fueled climate change, and proceeded to double down on gas-guzzling models and political attacks on laws and regulations that might hem in their emissions. They still bankroll the campaigns of Republicans dead-set on stopping climate policy.
Neither is it a given that EV subsidies benefiting companies will benefit workers there, too. Automakers are already using electrification as an excuse to supercharge attempts to ship jobs to less union-friendly states, and split workers off from their master agreement with the big three.
Biden’s decision to join the strike would be remarkable on its own. Beyond the obvious symbolism, his presence there lends tangible material support to workers’ demands, handing the union leverage over companies that might otherwise reasonably assume he’d have their backs.
It could also usher in a broader shift in the way he and other Democrats talk about climate policy. Impressive as the IRA is, its most direct benefits accrue largely to companies and consumers with enough cash on hand to afford up-front payments for big-ticket items like solar panels and heat pumps. Like Bidenomics more generally, its goal isn’t to reduce emissions so much as to build out domestic supply chains for clean energy goods, making US companies less reliant on and more competitive against Chinese firms in sectors that will be increasingly important over the coming decades.
Targeting climate policy at corporations and affluent consumers doesn’t make a great counterargument to Republicans eager to frame it all as elitist virtue signaling, and win elections accordingly. What the Republican party can be reliably expected to do, though, is side with the bosses. That’s where even self-professed “car guy” Joe Biden might be able to set himself apart – by being willing to offend the automakers so that the rewards of America’s green industrial policy aren’t hoarded at the top.
Standing alongside Biden in Belleville this week, the UAW president, Shawn Fain, offered as good a framing for that approach as any. “This industry is of our making,” he said. “When we withhold our labor, we can unmake it. And as we’re going to continue to show: when we win this fight with the big three, we’re going to remake it.”
Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at the New Republic and the author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet – And How We Fight Back
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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/jul/05/world-cup-fiver-brazil-neymar-quarter-final
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Football
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2018-07-05T11:45:31.000Z
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Paul Doyle
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Working out how long Neymar has spent on the grass | World Cup Fiver
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GOING CUCKOO, AND CLOCKS
It’s still happening, reader. Even on a rest day, the Ethics World Cup is still messing with our minds! Neymar is behaving like a git – that much seemed certain. And you’d think the findings just released by a Swiss TV company would confirm that. But no, suddenly The Fiver is struck by sympathy for the Brazilian dramatist, struck so hard, in fact, that we’ve thrown ourselves to the floor and started screaming like inmates at an audience with Piers Morgan.
Free time and a surplus of watches in Switzerland led one of the local TV companies, RTS, to work out how long Neymar has spent lying and rolling on the grass so far in this tournament. And the answer is an impressive 13 minutes and 50 seconds, which, by The Fiver’s calculations, is a whopping nine seconds more than Jordan Henderson and Harry Maguire combined.
Who will win the World Cup quarter-finals? Eight fans have their say
Read more
The instinctive response is to will some sharp-studded opponent to give Neymar an actual hoofing to justify his lengthy contortions on the turf. But now we’re thinking of factoring in a few other figures, such as the 90 minutes that Neymar spent watching his team get ridiculed 7-1 by Germany four years ago, while he sat impotent with a back that had been banjaxed by a brutal foul suffered in the previous match against dear old Colombia. Exaggerating contact is his way of ensuring he doesn’t get properly clobbered again. Admittedly, that may prove to be counter-productive, but what’s a poor, bullied boy to do?
At least Neymar will have an admirer in the opposing team when he faces Belgium in one of Friday’s quarter-finals. Thomas Meunier, the Belgian wing-back whom Neymar may recognise as one of his waiters at PSG, has been keen to emphasise the 26-year-old’s exceptional footballing talent rather than his prodigious stunt work. Unfortunately for Belgium, Meunier does not think his familiarity with Neymar will be any help whatsoever. “I don’t know how to stop him,” Meunier confessed. “He’s very unpredictable.” Except when it comes to his reaction to contact, of course. You can set your watch by that.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Fifa strongly rebukes the criticism of the performance of the match officials which it considers to have been positive in a tough and highly-emotional match. Furthermore, it also considers the additional comments and insinuations made as being entirely inappropriate and completely unfounded” – suits give Diego Maradona a tongue-lashing for claiming England’s win over Colombia was a “monumental robbery” and criticising ref Mark Geiger.
A not-in-anyway-rash critique there. Photograph: Matthew Childs/Reuters
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Here’s the latest World Cup Football Daily podcast, with Max Rushden and co, and you can find it in this general area every matchday evening.
SUPPORT THE GUARDIAN
Producing the Guardian’s thoughtful, in-depth journalism [the stuff not normally found in this email, obviously – Fiver Ed] is expensive, but supporting us isn’t. If you value our journalism, please support us. In return we can hopefully arm you with the kind of knowledge that makes you sound slightly less uninformed during those hot reactive gegenpress chats you so enjoy. And if you think what we do is enjoyable [again, etc and so on – Fiver Ed], please help us keep coming back here to give you more of the same.
FIVEЯ LETTERS
“What on earth is happening? England won a penalty shootout, The FiveЯ called a score exactly right, and I laughed out loud at yesterday’s edition of said email. The world’s gone mad” – Peter Moore.
“While yesterday’s FiveЯ mentioned Radamel Falcao’s complaints about refereeing, his complaining during the match forced thousands of us to find a fly in the ointment of England’s victory in the form of hearing people say ‘egg-chasing referees wouldn’t stand for that abuse’ all effing day. Plenty of footballers thought nothing about screaming into the face of Howard Webb, a former police officer standing 6ft 2in and carved out of granite; what makes people think a jumped-up PE teacher in love with the sound of his own voice will fare any differently?” – Ed Taylor.
“Floundering at the idea of a second football-less night, I’m becoming increasingly keen for the idea of a plate tournament for the World Cup, a la the World Sevens Egg-chasing. The bottom two teams from each group go into a straight knockout and the winner gets the Plate. Fulfils the Fifa need for more games without making the tournament overly bloated. Would also give an opportunity for a smaller country to actually win something internationally. Imagine what it would do for a country like Senegal to win the Plate this year (as they would have a decent shout at doing). It’s still not as impressive as getting out of the group, so there shouldn’t be teams deliberately losing to get in the Plate, but would keep the competition going on for longer. It’s better than 48 teams, at any rate” – Tom Barneby.
Send your letters to [email protected]. And if you’ve nothing better to do you can also tweet The Fiver. Today’s winner of our letter o’the day and, with it, a copy of World Cup Nuggets by Richard Foster is … Tom Barneby.
BITS AND BOBS
Sweden are readying themselves for their quarter-final showdown with England. “I read something about people in England suggesting Sweden were a dream opponent,” glowered Andreas Granqvist. “Someone said something about 99 times out of 100 they would beat us? Well, it’s fun for England to have that sort of confidence. Let’s play the game and see how things go. Sweden usually play well against England.”
Sweden players get their training on. Photograph: Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP/Getty Images
Weird Uncle Fiver is apparently on the plane after residents in Samara were urged to take showers in pairs because the influx of fans is straining water supplies.
Japanese FA suits won’t ask Akira Nishino to continue as coach after the World Cup. “I coached the team with the notion that I will only do this until the end of the World Cup,” he cheered. “I feel like I’ve fulfilled my duties.”
Costa Rican football suits will do likewise with Óscar Ramírez. “The decision not to renew [his contract] was taken by the executive committee,” tooted Rodolfo Villalobos.”
And non-World Cup dept: West Ham hope to beat Fenerbahce to the signing of Jack Wilshere on a three-year deal.
STILL WANT MORE?
The cheapening of an otherwise brilliant World Cup. AKA, Stuart James on $hithousery.
$hithousery, earlier. Photograph: Franck Fife/AFP/Getty Images
How England overcame their penalty hoodoo, by the man who wrote the book on it, literally.
Gareth Southgate’s England shed old baggage and offer reason to believe, writes Daniel Taylor.
Jordan Pickford’s rise from non-league novice to the Ethics World Cup quarter-finals.
Quiz: identify the World Cup managers from their previous jobs.
Thomas Hitzlsperger on Benjamin Pavard.
Alex Clapham explains how the Anderlecht academy helped build Belgium’s squad.
Come get some quarter-final predictions.
Oh, and if it’s your thing … you can follow Big Website on Big Social FaceSpace. And INSTACHAT, TOO!
THERE IS NO SPOON
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/28/palmyra-temple-bel-arch-survived-isis-syria-london-new-york
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World news
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2015-12-28T12:15:25.000Z
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Damien Gayle
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Palmyra arch that survived Isis to be replicated in London and New York
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Replicas of an ancient monument in Palmyra that has apparently survived attempts by Islamic State to demolish it are to be erected in London and New York.
The 15-metre structure is one of the few remaining parts of the 2,000-year-old Temple of Bel in the Syrian city. Isis fighters all but razed the temple as they systematically destroyed Palmyra over the past year.
The construction of the replicas will be the centrepiece of events for world heritage week, planned for April with a theme of replication and reconstruction. It has also been characterised as a gesture of defiance against religious extremists’ attempts to erase evidence of the Middle East’s pre-Islamic history.
Tolerant and multicultural, Palmyra stood for everything Isis hates
Tim Whitmarsh
Read more
Founded in AD32, the temple was consecrated to the Mesopotamian god Bel and formed the centre of religious life in Palmyra. In keeping with many ancient temples, it was converted into a Christian church during the Byzantine era, and then into a mosque when Islam arrived in the area.
Known as the Pearl of the Desert, Palmyra – which means city of Palms – lies 130 miles (210km) north-east of Damascus. Before the Syrian conflict erupted in 2011, more than 150,000 tourists visited the city every year.
The Temple of Bel was considered among the best preserved ruins at Palmyra, until confirmation of the destruction in August. Isis also beheaded Khaled al-Asaad, the 82-year-old Syrian archaeologist who had looked after Palmyra’s ruins for four decades, and hung his body in public.
Building a copy of the temple entrance has been proposed by the Institute for Digital Archaeology (IDA), a joint venture between Harvard University, the University of Oxford and Dubai’s Museum of the Future that promotes the use of digital imaging and 3D printing in archaeology and conservation.
In collaboration with Unesco, the institute began distributing 3D cameras to volunteer photographers earlier this year to capture images of threatened objects in conflict zones throughout the Middle East and north Africa.
Model of how the arch will look in Trafalgar Square. Photograph: Institute for Digital Archaeology
The images are to be uploaded to a “million-image database” that it is hoped can be used for research, heritage appreciation, educational programmes and eventually 3D replication – including full-scale projects.
The destruction of the Temple of Bel came too soon for the site to be included on the IDA’s database, but researchers have been able to create 3D approximations using thousands of two-dimensional photographs.
Alexy Karenowska, the IDA’s director of technology, said the renderings would be used to recreate the arch through a combination of 3D printing computer-controlled machining techniques. The pieces will be made off-site then assembled in place in Trafalgar Square and Times Square.
Karenowska said the scheme would hopefully help to highlight the international importance of cultural heritage. The Temple of Bel influenced classical styles of architecture that spread throughout Europe during the Roman Empire, which once extended to the banks of the Euphrates, she said.
“We tend to think about cultural heritage in a somewhat parochial way,” Karenowska said. “We also think of other people’s cultural heritage as being something that’s particular to them.
Tourists at Palmyra in 2009. Photograph: Alamy
“We see that very much with the Middle East. People in the west find it very easy to say that the Middle East has this great cultural heritage and this problem [of its destruction] is something that’s happening to them.
“The idea is to underline that cultural heritage is something that’s shared between people. It’s about people’s roots and it’s important to recognise also that this is something that as humans we do all understand on some deep level.”
Roger Michel, the IDA’s executive director, told the Times: “It is really a political statement, a call to action, to draw attention to what is happening in Syria and Iraq and now Libya. We are saying to them ‘if you destroy something we can rebuild it again’. The symbolic value of these sites is enormous. We are restoring dignity to people.”
Given that the temple has already been targeted in Syria, Karenowska accepted that building the arches could pose a security risk, although she downplayed its impact. “A building like the National Gallery or Trafalgar Square, these are major targets by virtue of what they are,” she said.
“Simply by placing a thought-provoking piece of art in one of those spaces, the level of heightened risk is very limited. This is something we are thinking about very carefully and that people involved are thinking about on a day-to-day basis.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jul/24/bluedot-festival-review-jodrell-bank-observatory-underworld-jean-michel-jarre
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Music
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2016-07-24T13:59:28.000Z
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Daniel Martin
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Bluedot festival review – cosmic vibes permeate rave revival
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Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the inaugural Bluedot festival is that nobody thought to stage it sooner. The iconic Jodrell Bank observatory has long played host to live music. Flaming Lips, Sigur Rós and Elbow have all put in memorable performances in the shadow of the handsome 76-metre-in-diameter Lovell radio telescope. But this bespoke, immersive, science-themed weekender offers something unique and (with apologies for the pun) out of this world.
The Pale Blue Dot [video] | @GrrlScientist
Read more
Boutique, cerebral festivals might be all the rage, but few events could lay claim to chime quite so well with their surroundings as the package offered at Bluedot. As well as the music, Professor Brian Cox (plus a cavalcade of less rave-ready physicists) are on hand to reveal the secrets of the great beyond in a comprehensive series of panels and lectures; cute pink aliens the Clangers are out in live-action force for kids of all ages; Michelin-starred chef Aiden Byrne offers foodies a cosmos-themed tasting menu at “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”; Brian Eno projects interactive artworks on to the telescope and, as night falls, opportunities for real-life stargazing offer respite from the plentiful rave options.
Here’s the unique charm of what Bluedot achieves: while minds are expanded in wholesome ways everywhere you look, it’s also stomping ground for both discerning new music fans and a certain breed of ageing Manc raver who will never entirely give up as long as Underworld are still in business.
Let’s Eat Grandma on the Nebula stage at Bluedot festival 2016. Photograph: Andrew Benge/Redferns
Of the crop of new talent, teen synthy sisters Let’s Eat Grandma have crowds spilling out of their small tent, but as a live proposition aren’t quite there yet. Leeds psychobilly punks Cowtown have the opposite problem, but number among the most promising newbies of the weekend.
Jean-Michel Jarre: ‘All the people on my new album are geeks’
Read more
But Bluedot proves as much in thrall to heritage as it does to the wonders of the universe. Air run out their vintage Moon Safari material, which might be achingly familiar by now, but is no less hypnotic for that. But, taking the Franco-disco stylings of Saturday night to their logical conclusion, the evening somewhat inevitably belongs to Jean-Michel Jarre. The pioneer’s latest Electronica series might boast collaborators ranging from Gary Numan to Little Boots, but here he’s a noble lone warrior, taking the whole crowd as willing disciples as he fires off righteous synth classicism in broad strokes; one man taking on the universe with a laser harp.
To an outsider, Jarre might still have something of a cheesy reputation, but here is a stargazer once again living up to legend status. Like the most profound headline sets, Jarre makes the field feel like it is his universe for us to simply live in. Retro-futurism can feel naff in the wrong hands, but Jarre knows that looking to the future from firmly in the past is the vantage point from which the finest science-fiction comes.
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/11/bitcoin-price-70000-in-record-high-cryptocurrency-crypto-fca
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Technology
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2024-03-11T19:22:21.000Z
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Dan Milmo
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Bitcoin price nears $73,000 in fresh record high
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Bitcoin has reached a new record price of almost $73,000 (£57,000), as the UK financial regulator said it would allow the trading of cryptocurrency-backed securities.
The cryptocurrency hit a fresh high of $72,720 as of Monday evening having last week overtaken its previous November 2021 high of nearly $69,000.
The latest price move came as the UK financial regulator said on Monday it would “not object” to investment exchanges creating a UK-listed market segment for cryptoasset-backed exchange traded notes [cETNs], a financial product that can be traded like a stock.
Reddit aims for $6bn stock float; bitcoin at new record high – as it happened
Read more
However, the Financial Conduct Authority said it would not permit the sale of the cETNs to retail investors, or members of the public.
“The FCA continues to remind people that cryptoassets are high risk and largely unregulated. Those who invest should be prepared to lose all their money,” it said in a statement.
Bitcoin has been helped this year by the US financial regulator approving exchange-traded funds [ETFs] – a basket of assets that can be bought and sold like shares on an exchange – that track the price of the cryptocurrency.
The chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, also expressed scepticism about bitcoin despite the approval, referring to it in January as a “speculative, volatile asset” used for illicit activities including ransomware and terrorist financing.
An upcoming “halving” of bitcoin, in which the amount of new bitcoin being generated is reduced, is also expected to support the currency by causing a reduction in supply – and therefore bolstering the price.
Neil Wilson, the chief analyst at the brokerage Finalto, said the FCA move was a “positive” sign for the cryptocurrency market. He added that “parabolic” market moves – referring to sharp price increases – tended to end in a big pullback but “we cannot be sure with bitcoin any more”.
“There is a question of the amount of spare cash sitting around that can be allocated to it,” he added.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/26/new-bathing-sites-considered-england-campaigners-highlight-sewage-dangers
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Environment
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2024-02-26T14:01:09.000Z
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Helena Horton
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27 new bathing sites considered for England as activists highlight sewage dangers
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Twenty seven new bathing sites are being considered for England, but campaigners have said that swimming remains dangerous in many areas because of the pathogens caused by sewage dumping.
If all of these sites are granted, it will be the largest ever number of bathing sites in rivers, lakes and coastal areas approved in one year. Activists campaign for bathing water status because it means the government is obliged to test the quality of the water throughout the summer months.
Almost all of the new bathing sites – 22 out of the 27 – are in Tory constituencies. Conservatives have recently suffered in the polls because of a perceived failure to act on sewage pollution. The government is consulting on these new sites in a process that ends on 10 March.
Only three rivers in England have sections designated for swimming, and all of them received a “poor” water quality rating from the Environment Agency last year. Sewage spills and agricultural runoff mean that swimming sites can carry E coli and intestinal enterococci, which would make swimmers ill. Analysis has also found that most applications for bathing status are rejected, and last year just four were designated.
Bathing water status rarely granted in England, analysis finds
Read more
James Wallace, CEO of River Action UK, said: “Last year, Defra refused to give reasons for turning down most applications and have failed to punish polluters. We expect the government to approve most or all new applications, and to ensure water companies honour the new status with appropriate investment in their leaky infrastructure, and penalise those that continue to pollute.”
The Liberal Democrats’ environment spokesperson, Tim Farron MP, said: “This is yet another half-baked announcement, which does not ban water firms from dumping sewage into bathing water areas. This can’t be another PR trick by the Conservative party on water quality. Right now, swimmers are getting sick from sewage being piled into bathing water sites.”
The water minister Robbie Moore said: “Many people enjoy spending time in our rivers, lakes, and coastal beaches, and I am very aware of the value they bring in terms of social, health and wellbeing benefits. I want to continue to improve the quality of our bathing waters, which is why we are taking action across the board to drive up standards and hold water companies to account. I encourage all local communities and organisations with an interest to take part in this consultation and have their say.”
The proposed new sites
Church Cliff beach, Lyme Regis, Dorset
Coastguards beach, River Erme, Devon
Coniston boating centre, Coniston Water, Cumbria
Coniston Brown Howe, Coniston Water, Cumbria
Littlehaven beach, Tyne and Wear
Manningtree beach, Essex
Monk Coniston, Coniston Water, Cumbria
River Avon at Fordingbridge, Hampshire
River Cam at Sheep’s Green, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire
River Dart estuary at Dittisham, Devon
River Dart estuary at Steamer Quay, Totnes, Devon
River Dart estuary at Stoke Gabriel, Devon
River Dart estuary at Warfleet, Dartmouth, Devon
River Frome at Farleigh Hungerford, Somerset
River Nidd at the Lido leisure park in Knaresborough, North Yorkshire
River Ribble at Edisford Bridge, Lancashire
River Severn at Ironbridge, Shropshire
River Severn at Shrewsbury, Shropshire
River Stour at Sudbury, Suffolk
River Teme at Ludlow, Shropshire
River Tone in French Weir Park, Taunton, Somerset
Wallingford beach, River Thames, Berkshire
Derwent Water, Crow Park, Keswick, Cumbria
River Wharfe at Wetherby Riverside, West Yorkshire
Goring beach, Worthing, West Sussex
Worthing Beach House, Worthing, West Sussex
Rottingdean beach, Rottingdean, East Sussex
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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/dec/09/voters-north-shropshire-no-10-christmas-party-byelection
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Politics
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2021-12-09T14:53:09.000Z
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Jessica Murray
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‘I’m considering switching’: Voters in Shropshire weigh up No 10 scandal
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With one week to go before voters head to the polls in the North Shropshire byelection, the Downing Street Christmas party scandal has prompted some last-minute doubts.
“Boris has let us down, hasn’t he,” said Wendy Young, 72, who along with her husband has long voted Conservative in general elections. “I’m not sure who I’ll vote for now, but I am considering switching.”
On the other hand, her husband, 75-year-old Dian Young, was unmoved by the issue and said it hadn’t affected how we would vote at all. “My opinion is it happened 12 months ago; forget it. There’s a lot of things we need to sort out now with regards to Covid and that should be the priority,” he said, as he drank coffee in Oswestry’s Festival Square on Thursday morning. “I don’t believe the prime minister knew anything about it. It was going on behind the scenes.”
Dian and Wendy Young have a coffee in Festival Square. Photograph: Andrew Fox/The Guardian
The couple were typical of the split opinion across the town as voters weighed up the significance of the scandal engulfing the Conservative party. Reports of a string of staff parties over the festive period last year have prompted an investigation by the cabinet secretary, and Boris Johnson is facing calls to resign if he is found to have misled MPs about the gatherings.
Last week the prime minister joined the campaign trail in North Shropshire in the run-up to the byelection, which has been prompted by Owen Paterson resigning in the wake of Johnson’s disastrous attempt to save him from punishment over a serious breach of lobbying rules.
One Oswestry local who asked to remain anonymous said she and her husband had voted Conservative for the first time at the last general election, but were considering switching back to Labour after reading the news this week. “We didn’t see our family last Christmas because we weren’t allowed, were we?” she said.
‘It feels like one rule for them,’ says Julie Owen. Photograph: Andrew Fox/The Guardian
There were still many holding back anger as they talked of the sacrifices they and their family members had made to follow the rules. “I spent Christmas alone last year. It feels like one rule for them,” said 49-year-old Julie Owen. “I think people are losing confidence in the Conservatives. And any new Covid rules that are brought in, I think people will just ignore them.”
“I’m not surprised, and not really that shocked either, we’ve come to expect this kind of thing. I can totally understand why people are angry though,” said 35-year-old Alex Dempster, adding that he probably will not vote in the upcoming election as he doesn’t feel it will make any difference in a historically safe Tory seat.
North Shropshire past election results
“People are just appalled because of what they had to go through at the time. I know somebody who had to watch his father’s funeral over video. It seems like they were ignoring the rules and enjoying themselves while everyone was going through hell,” said Mike Coppock, 60, a former independent town councillor who runs a local gift shop.
He plans to vote for the Green party, which he anticipates will be the surprise success of the election, but doubts whether anything will be enough to stop a Conservative win in a constituency that has returned a Tory MP ever since it was created.
‘They’re all at it’: North Shropshire shrugs off sleaze before byelection
Read more
“I think that many people who usually vote Conservative will not bother going out to vote,” he said. “But it’s a shame we don’t have a single opposition candidate, because the vote will be so split.”
The Liberal Democrats are predicted to be the main contenders in the byelection, with some bookmakers placing them as the favourite to win following the Christmas party backlash, and the Lib Dems are feeling more confident with each passing day.
“There’s no doubt the past 48 hours have really depressed the Conservative vote,” said Jack Haines, a Lib Dem campaigner. “It’s definitely too close to call. What will be key is Conservative voters getting very angry, and those true blue voters who probably would never switch their vote, but they definitely might stay at home and not vote.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/07/hydrogen-clean-fuel-climate-crisis-explainer
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Environment
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2023-03-07T08:30:31.000Z
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Nina Lakhani
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Is hydrogen really a clean enough fuel to tackle the climate crisis?
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How ocean wind power could help the US fossil fuel industry
Read more
Hydrogen is the smallest, lightest and most abundant molecule in the universe. On Earth, it does not occur by itself naturally, but can be separated from water (H2O) or hydrocarbon compounds (fossil fuels) like gas, coal and petroleum to be used as an energy source. It’s already used for rocket fuel, but it is now being pushed as a clean and safe alternative to oil and gas for heating and earthly modes of transport. Political support is mounting with almost $26bn of US taxpayer money available for hydrogen projects thanks to three recent laws – the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Chips Act. Hydrogen is politically hot, but is it the climate solution that its cheerleaders are claiming?
Why all the hype about hydrogen?
The short answer is that the fossil fuel industry sees hydrogen as a way to keep on drilling and building new infrastructure. Friends of the Earth has tracked how the industry has successfully deployed its PR and lobbying machines over recent years to get policymakers thinking that hydrogen is a catch-all climate solution. Research by climate scientists (without fossil fuel links) has debunked industry claims that hydrogen should be a major player in our decarbonised future, though hydrogen extracted from water (using renewable energy sources) could – and should – play an important role in replacing the dirtiest hydrogen currently extracted from fossil fuels. It may also have a role in fuelling some transportation like long-haul flights and vintage cars, but the evidence is far from clear. However, with billions of climate action dollars up for grabs in the US alone, expect to see more lobbying, more industry-funded evidence and more hype.
What’s the difference between blue, grey, brown, pink and green hydrogen?
A green hydrogen production facility project in Africa at Namaqua Engineering in Vredendal with the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Photograph: Esa Alexander/Reuters
Extracting hydrogen is energy intensive, so the source and how it’s done both matter. Currently, about 96% of the world’s hydrogen comes from coal (brown) and gas (grey), with the rest created from nuclear (pink) and renewable sources like hydro, wind and solar. Production of both grey and brown hydrogen release carbon dioxide (CO2) and unburnt fugitive methane into the atmosphere. This super-polluting hydrogen is what’s currently used as the chemical base for synthetic nitrogen fertilisers, plastics and steel among other industries.
Blue hydrogen is what the fossil fuel industry is most invested in, as it still comes from gas but ostensibly the CO2 would be captured and stored underground. The industry claims to have the technology to capture 80-90% of CO2, but in reality, it’s closer to 12% when every stage of the energy-intensive process is evaluated, according to a peer-reviewed study by scientists at Cornell University published in 2021. For sure better than nothing, but methane emissions, which warm the planet faster than CO2, would actually be higher than for grey hydrogen because of the additional gas needed to power the carbon capture, and likely upstream leakage. Notably, the term clean hydrogen was coined by the fossil fuel industry a few months after the seminal Cornell study found that blue hydrogen has a substantially larger greenhouse gas footprint than burning gas, coal or diesel oil for heating.
Green hydrogen is extracted from water by electrolysis – using electricity generated by renewable energy sources (wind, solar, hydro). Climate experts (without links to fossil fuels) say green hydrogen can only be green if new renewable sources are constructed to power hydrogen production – rather than drawing on the current grid and questionable carbon accounting schemes. The industry disagrees: “Strict additionality rules requiring electrolytic hydrogen to be powered by new renewable energy is not practical, especially in the early years, and will severely limit the development of hydrogen projects,” said BP America.
“There may be some small role in truly green hydrogen in a decarbonised future, but this is largely a marketing creation by the oil and gas industry that has been hugely overhyped,” said Robert Howarth, professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, a co-author of the paper on blue hydrogen.
What’s at stake?
In addition to $26bn in direct financing for so-called hydrogen hubs and demo projects, another $100bn or so in uncapped tax credits could be paid out over the next few decades, so lots and lots of taxpayers’ money. Fossil fuel companies are also using hydrogen to justify building more pipelines, claiming that this infrastructure can be used for “clean hydrogen” in the future. But hydrogen is a highly flammable and corrosive element, and it would be costly to repurpose oil and gas infrastructure to make it safe for hydrogen. And while hydrogen is not a greenhouse gas, it is not harmless. It aggravates some greenhouse gases, for instance causing methane to stay in the atmosphere for longer.
The first offshore wind farm in the US began operations in late 2016 off Block Island in Rhode Island. Photograph: Michael Dwyer/AP
“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in actual zero-emission solutions, but could be a disaster if the federal government pours scarce resources into infrastructure and technologies that could make the climate crisis worse and cause further public health harms,” said Sara Gersen, clean energy attorney at Earthjustice. “Sowing confusion about hydrogen is a delay tactic, and delay is the new denialism.”
Is there any role for hydrogen in a decarbonised future?
Yes, but a limited one – given that it takes more energy to produce, store and transport hydrogen than it provides when converted into useful energy, so using anything but new renewable sources (true green hydrogen) will require burning more fossil fuels.
According to the hydrogen merit ladder devised by Michael Liebreich, host of the Cleaning Up podcast, swapping clean hydrogen for the fossil fuel-based grey and brown stuff currently used for synthetic fertilisers, petrochemicals and steel is a no-brainer. The carbon footprint of global hydrogen production today is equivalent to Germany’s annual greenhouse gas emissions, so the sooner we swap to green hydrogen (created from new renewables) the better. This could also be useful for some transportation, such as long-haul flights and heavy machinery, and maybe to store surplus wind and solar energy – though none are slam dunks for hydrogen as there are alternative technologies vying for these markets, said Liebreich.
But for most forms of transport (cars, bikes, buses and trains) and heating there are already safer, cleaner and cheaper technologies such as battery-run electric vehicles and heat pumps, so there’s little or no merit in investing time or money with hydrogen. Howarth said: “Renewable electricity is a scarce resource. Direct electrification and batteries offer so much more, and much more quickly. It’s a huge distraction and waste of resources to even be talking about heating homes and passenger vehicles with hydrogen.”
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/14/can-foie-gras-ever-be-ethical
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Food
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2015-01-14T12:50:10.000Z
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Trevor Baker
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Can foie gras ever be ethical?
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There has been jubilation in many of California’s swankiest restaurants this week as, for the first time in more than two years, customers have been legally allowed to enjoy the controversial delicacy foie gras. Indeed, some chefs have revelled in their role as the “baddies” of the animal rights world, boasting on social media that they’d been stocking it all along, planning celebratory feasts on the rich, creamy duck liver and all but laughing in the faces of birds choking on their food pipes.
However, the US district court has struck down the Californian ban on selling foie gras, which came into effect in 2012, not because they have a view on whether the product is cruel, but because they decided it was unconstitutional. Individual states aren’t allowed to impose rulings on “labelling, packaging or ingredient requirements”. Strictly speaking, it is not foie gras that California banned. They banned products produced by the “force-feeding of a bird for the purpose of enlarging its liver beyond normal size”.
This may seem like a semantic point, but it could be crucial in the next legal challenge. Food law expert Baylen Linnekin, himself a defender of foie gras, quotes the Humane Society campaigner Paul Shapiro’s claim that: “Force-feeding is not an ‘ingredient’ of foie gras, since foie gras can be produced without resorting to such cruel methods.” This might cause some surprise on both sides of the debate. In France, the country where foie gras is most deeply embedded in the culture, the product is defined by law as the liver of a goose or duck fattened by a feeding tube, a process known as “gavage”. Overfeeding causes a chemical change within the liver as it stores fat cells, creating the smooth texture beloved by sybarites from the ancient Egyptians to the present day.
Chef David Bazirgan holding foie gras: some chefs have revelled in the overturning of the ban. Photograph: bazsf/twitter
However, there is at least one producer who doesn’t create his foie gras by force. Spanish farmer Eduardo Sousa came to prominence when food writer Dan Barber featured him in a TED talk called The Surprising Parable of Foie Gras. Sousa produces what his fans call “ethical foie”, but which he prefers to call “natural”.
If a Disney film about a farm came to life, it might look a bit like Sousa’s. Standing in the middle of his flock of geese, holding out a bag of maize, ruddy-cheeked and with slicked-back dark hair, he’s every bit the kindly farmer. Around him there are fig and olive trees, and Spanish oaks heavy with acorns. Just down the hill is a white-washed farmhouse, and stretching into the distance are the green hills of Spain’s western hinterland, Extremadura.
At Patería de Sousa, there is no force-feeding, no cages; the fences on the 500-hectare farm are only there to keep predators out. There is such an abundance of food that the geese gorge themselves until the chemical change within their livers occurs naturally. Wild geese on their way from Africa to Scandinavia come down and mate with the domestic geese before flying on, passing on the genetic instinct for migration. The secret is that if geese think they’re about to begin a 3,000km trip north, they’ll store as much fat as they can. No gavage is necessary.
“A goose in its natural environment generates its own reserves of fat,” Sousa explains. “The foie gras industry has learned to take advantage of that, but they’ve gone too far. There are videos on the internet that are horrifying. And, what’s worse, they’re maltreating an animal that is very sensitive. These are animals that have a family, that fall in love, that are intelligent. When you see this animal in a cage with all these machines, you know it is suffering.”
Sousa & Labourdette foie gras. Photograph: PR
Since Barber made him famous, Sousa has had dinner with Barack Obama and met the king of Spain. However, his foie gras has yet to make much of a profit. Patería de Sousa produces in a year what French farmers can produce every three months in 100-square-metre warehouses. His geese, by the time they’re slaughtered, have livers that weigh around 450g, compared with 600-1,000g with a force-fed goose. “The industry thinks, ‘Well, if it weighs a kilo, even better. More money!’” he says. But Sousa’s approach comes at a cost: at the time of writing, there is only one jar of Sousa & Labourdette foie gras in the whole of the UK, at the Goya 23 delicatessen in Edinburgh. It costs £160. “It is expensive,” admits the deli’s co-owner Amaya Berroya. “We only bought seven of them in September and we’ve sold six already. But it tastes incredible. It’s something that people might try once in a lifetime.”
London butcher’s Jack O’Shea, which has experienced protests over its own foie sales, isn’t convinced by the Sousa parable. “I think it’s great,” says sales manager Gavin Strickland. “But it’s not realistic for the industry to go in that direction. You can’t have a farm that size producing just a few hundred livers.” Jack O’Shea buys its foie gras from a free-range farm in France. This means the birds aren’t kept in cages, but they are force-fed. As far as Sousa is aware, there is nobody else in the world making “natural” foie gras. Even free-range farms are a tiny proportion of the industry. Strickland, however, argues that birds at free-range farms have better lives than, for example, the vast majority of chickens. “Production of foie gras is not on the same level as factory farming, which is much more damaging to animal welfare,” he says.
Sousa slaughters about 800 geese each year, using a traditional technique which he says causes them minimal pain and distress. The way he describes the geese’s final moments is rather heartbreaking, precisely because of his empathy with the birds. “We slaughter them by group,” he explains. “If you leave some of them they become very sad, they’re widows. But I’m confident that with the way we do it, the animal doesn’t suffer at all.” At Patería de Sousa, life for a farm goose is about as good as it gets. How much we’re prepared to pay for that good life is still one of the biggest questions in modern farming. In California, meanwhile, foie gras fans should enjoy their delicacy while they can – this battle is not over yet.
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/16/farage-poster-enoch-powell-rivers-of-blood-racism-ukip-european-union
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Opinion
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2016-06-16T15:11:21.000Z
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Jonathan Jones
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Farage’s poster is the visual equivalent of Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech | Jonathan Jones
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If you are thinking of voting to leave the EU, if you want Britain to take back control, if you believe the Brussels oligarchs are throttling our democracy, and, yes, if you think immigration has to be regulated and that can best be done if we have proper national borders again, look at this poster, for it is very informative.
Nigel Farage's anti-migrant poster reported to police
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A crowd is flowing towards us. Face after face, an apparently unending human tide. The nearest faces are in sharp focus, the furthest a blur of strangers. They are not just strangers but they are, perhaps, alien. For this poster makes plain what is commonly fudged in all the heated talk about free movement within the EU. The long snaking line seems to deliberately quote the queue of unemployed people in the famous Labour Isn’t Working poster in 1979.
Nigel Farage has been photographed in front of this new poster from Ukip, released a week before the referendum, and he’s not messing around. His party’s poster tells it like it is. This vote is not just about Polish foods having their own shelves at Tesco or Italians working in Caffè Nero. Farage’s poster boldly draws attention to the collision of two things: the principle of free movement within the EU, and the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean.
The photograph shows refugees in Slovenia in 2015, many fleeing a murderous civil war in Syria. Well, that’s the story behind it, but this poster is not telling a complicated backstory. It is graphically emotional, as only visual images can be. It portrays an oncoming tide of outsiders at our gate – and they are not European faces. To put it more bluntly they are not white faces.
Your new poster resembles outright Nazi propaganda, @Nigel_Farage. Thanks to @brendanjharkin for pointing it out. pic.twitter.com/Rd89XZSvfD
— Connor Beaton (@zcbeaton) June 16, 2016
Offended? You should be, because with this picture and its huge caption –“BREAKING POINT” – Farage gives the lie to the claim that his concerns about immigration are in no way connected to racism. That’s not to say that it’s racist to worry about immigration, but rather that Ukip’s poster is in effect saying it is. This truly nasty image claims Brexit on behalf of racists and it reveals what they will be boasting the morning after a leave vote.
If you are indeed concerned about our ability to control our borders and yet are horrified by racism, please keep looking at those faces. The way they are being used shows that some of the people you will be siding with next week really do think the immigration issue is a race issue. And they want it to be just that.
This poster is the visual equivalent of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech, which ended his mainstream political career in 1968. In the speech Powell sided with a constituent who told him excessive immigration was destroying Britain:
“What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre …”
I don’t think this Ukip poster creators would be insulted by the Enoch Powell comparison
Powell foresaw an unchecked inflow of black immigrants creating civil war; this poster tells us absolutely the same thing about the people headed our way, it claims, across borderless Europe. This tide of faces summons up exactly the same swarms and rivers and hordes of otherness and racial difference that Powell spoke against in 1968 and that so many have tried to evoke since – the National Front and the BNP among them. I don’t think this Ukip poster creators would be insulted by the Enoch Powell comparison.
But look behind these faces, into the minds of the people who created the poster, and you will find those who assume we all share their unease with racial diversity. Do the great and generous British people that fought against the Nazi creed of race hate really want to give such types their day of triumph?
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/18/donald-trump-threatens-to-sue-new-york-times-over-irresponsible-intent
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US news
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2016-09-18T00:34:19.000Z
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Ben Jacobs
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Donald Trump threatens to sue New York Times over 'irresponsible intent'
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Donald Trump has threatened to sue the New York Times.
In a tweet on Saturday night, the Republican nominee for president wrote: “My lawyers want to sue the failing @nytimes so badly for irresponsible intent. I said no (for now), but they are watching. Really disgusting.”
The tweet marks Trump’s latest attack on the press although litigation is unlikely to succeed. Under the precedent set by the Supreme Court in the landmark case of New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964, any public figure suing for libel must prove a defamatory statement was made with actual malice, “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not”.
Donald Trump: Clinton's bodyguards should disarm and 'see what happens'
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“Irresponsible intent” does not exist under any standard or doctrine found in US law.
It is unclear what prompted Trump’s statement. However, the Times published a detailed investigation earlier on Saturday describing how the real estate developer had relied on nearly $900 million in taxpayer subsidies over the past four decades to build his fortune.
The Republican nominee’s wife Melania is currently suing the Daily Mail over allegations that she was an escort in the 1990s and Trump long maintained a blacklist that banned outlets such as the Washington Post and Politico from being credentialed to report on his campaign.
Trump also pledged to “open up our libel laws” in a campaign rally in February. His goal then was that “so when [newspapers] write purposely negative stories … we can sue them and make lots of money”.
Trump had previously attacked the Times earlier in the day on Twitter “as a laughingstock rag” and called Maureen Dowd, a columnist for the Times, “wacky” and “a neurotic dope”. He has long bashed the publication’s reporters although he has never placed the newspaper on his campaign’s now defunct blacklist.
Trump has previously lambasted one top reporter there, Maggie Haberman, because she didn’t “write good” and called on the Times to fire another top reporter, Jonathan Martin, on Friday.
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/14/wendy-harmer-i-ran-away-from-the-oscars-as-fast-as-i-possibly-could-and-fled-into-the-night
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Life and style
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2024-01-13T19:00:07.000Z
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Wendy Harmer
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Wendy Harmer: ‘I ran away from the Oscars as fast as I possibly could and fled into the night’
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Ilike to bore everyone relentlessly with this story over and over because I can’t quite believe it happened to me. There I am in 1998, standing in the bathroom of a suite in the Beverly Hilton hotel, Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, California. It’s about an hour before I have to be in a car to go to the Oscars, the real live Oscars at the Shrine Auditorium.
And I was thinking to myself as I was looking into a mirror about Kate Winslet, who was nominated for an Academy Award that night for Titanic. “I think she’s not looking into a mirror right now with wet hair, in a maternity bra, and having a quiet weep.” As I was looking in the mirror I thought: “You know what? My fringe could do with a bit of a trim. I might just have a hack at it with these baby nail scissors.” And of course, whoops! That was a bit short. So there was my fringe, sticking out like a cushion.
A bit of background. In 1998, I was working on the Today FM morning crew with Paul Holmes and Peter Moon, and we were top of the ratings in Sydney. No 1 FM, just braining it. So management decided that we should go and cover the Oscars. We had done it the year before but that time we weren’t invited to the live Oscars. We just broadcast back to Sydney from Kiss FM in the San Fernando Valley out of a broom cupboard. We just watched the Oscars go to air with everyone else.
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But in 1998, they got us real live tickets to the real live Oscars at the Shrine Auditorium. We were broadcasting from the Beverly Hilton in a conference room. And one of the incredibly exciting things was that Merv Griffin – you know, Mr Griffin, who invented Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, and who was the host of The Merv Griffin Show and had 25,000 guests over the whole run of that show – he came to visit us downstairs. He was a sleek silver fox and he told us stories about how he used to hang out with Marilyn Monroe. I was absolutely transfixed.
One of the other great guests we had was Dyan Cannon who played Whipper Cone in Ally McBeal. She even baked us a tray of her very famous muffins. I remember sitting next to her and coveting her yellow ostrich leather vintage handbag, the most divine handbag I’d ever seen in my life. I had to ask about it. She said: “Oh, this bag, Cary gave it to me.” That would be her ex-husband, Cary Grant. All I wanted to do was snatch that bag and sprint down Wilshire Boulevard. And that would be enough for the whole trip.
Anyway, we had to get up fairly early in the morning to send the show back to Sydney. By the time we finished we only had an hour before taking a limo to the Shrine Auditorium. At the time, I was breastfeeding a four-month-old baby, and I’d had an emergency caesarean and I was not a well woman. I shouldn’t have been on a train to Dubbo, let alone attending the Oscars. I was breastfeeding and hormonal and I’d hardly slept. But my husband had come with me so he was taking care of business with the baby.
The night before, I opened my suitcase to find that the frock I had packed to wear to the Oscars was covered in tiny moth holes. There was no time to get another dress, I just had to hope that no one would see the holes. That made me cry even more. We finally got into the limo and off we went. Me with me moth-hole dress and my too short-fringe.
That ‘terrible, terrible dress’ and two enormous wet patches … Wendy Harmer at the Oscars in LA
When you go to the Oscars, when one goes to the Oscars, you drive around and around and around for hours – past all the homeless people begging for work and all the ad work actors saying “Hire me!” and you finally get to the Shrine Auditorium. You step out of the limo and there’s this almighty roar. It’s not for you, of course. No. No one knows who you are. But you can hear this roar from all the people in the bleachers, and there’s helicopters flying overhead and lights everywhere. It’s really hot. It’s like being at the centre of the universe, you know?
We walk down the red carpet and one side’s for the nobodies – people like us and the PR agents and the backstage people and all that sort of business. And the other side is for the stars.
Anyway, then the lights were switched off and on and we made our way into the Oscars. Bit of a tip here: if you are going to the Oscars, don’t head upstairs to where you think the drinks will be because you can’t get back down into the foyer where all the stars are because they all mill around on the lower floor. The hoi polloi go upstairs to have a glass of champagne or whatever, and you can’t get back down again.
All I could do was clamp my handbag over one breast and clamp my souvenir program over the other breast
We take our places. We’re sort of in the nosebleed section, but we’re at the Oscars. That’s pretty cool. About halfway through the show I started to get thirsty – breastfeeding mother thirsty, incredibly thirsty. So I thought, “I’m going to duck out into the corridor and see who I can find and get a glass of water.” So I ducked out of my seat and went into the corridor and I ran into Shirley Jones, the mum on The Partridge Family. That Shirley Jones, a big music star. But for me, I was thinking: “Widowed mother of five on The Partridge Family. If she can’t find me a drink of water, no one can.”
We got chatting and she found a glass of water. She was absolutely as adorable as I always thought she would be. She said: “What are you doing here? How old is your baby? He must be so little and how cute.”
And at that moment I could almost hear the sound of silk Georgette shrivelling around my two nipples because I had forgotten to put any nursing pads in. So there I am. I burst into tears and I was standing there and Shirley Jones is trying to patch me up. And I’ve got moth holes and I’ve got this bad fringe and I’ve got these two enormous wet patches on the front of my terrible, terrible dress.
All I could do was clamp my handbag over one breast and clamp my souvenir program over the other breast. And I went back in and took my seat. And I sobbed the rest of the way through the show.
I came out and of course I couldn’t pick up a drink or a little snacky canapé thing because I had no free hands. So I ran away. I just ran away from the Shrine Auditorium as fast as I possibly could and fled into the night. And that was my story of going to the Oscars.
Management got tickets for us to go back to the Oscars in 2000. But by that time, I’d had a second baby and I was so honestly traumatised I thought: “I cannot possibly go to the Oscars and risk this again.” So I didn’t go.
A year later, we did go back for the Emmys. It was just after 9/11 and the event had been delayed and delayed and delayed. It was extraordinary because we had these US Marines checking over and underneath our car for bombs and everything. And then we had to go through this whole labyrinth of corridors to get to the Emmys. And I got lost. I popped out of a door and I saw a set of steps that were topped with a sparkly curtain. “Oh, that must be the entrance that you go through.” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I ended up gatecrashing a live interview between an E! news reporter and Kelsey Grammer. I don’t think I’m destined for awards night. I might just leave it at that.
This is an edited version of a Full Story podcast episode from The Tale I Dine Out On series.
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2019/aug/09/machu-picchu-airport-unesco-demands-answers-from-peru-government
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Travel
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2019-08-09T09:46:53.000Z
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Dan Collyns
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Unesco demands answers from Peru over impact of new Machu Picchu airport
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Unesco has sent a letter to the Peruvian government demanding information about the construction of a new airport near Machu Picchu and what impact it could have on the Inca citadel, the country’s biggest tourist attraction and a world heritage site.
The letter, which has not been made public, reminds Peru of its obligation to protect its world heritage sites and directly refers to Chinchero, the historic village in the Sacred Valley, near the town of Cusco, where the controversial new airport is being built – to the horror of archeologists.
The missive insists that Peru must coordinate with Unesco, the United Nations’ cultural agency, on any construction that could affect Machu Picchu and Cusco’s historic centre, also a world heritage site. A spokesperson for Peru’s ministry of culture said it would reply by 25 August, the date set by Unesco to receive an official response.
It is not the first time Unesco has sent Peru a warning about Machu Picchu. It threatened to place the famous ruins on a list of world heritage sites in danger in 2017 over fears overcrowding could damage the structure.
As a result Peruvian authorities put controls on the flow of tourists – an average of 5,000 a day in summer, more than double the Unesco-recommended limit – by dividing visits to the site into morning and afternoon shifts. Around 1.5m tourists visited Machu Picchu in 2017 and visitor numbers continue to increase. The Peruvian government hopes a second airport for Cusco, with direct flights from Miami and Buenos Aires, could nearly double the number of tourists.
Ollantaytambo, Cusco, Peru. Photograph: Alamy
The Peruvian president, Martín Vizcarra, has vowed that the airport, set for completion in 2023, must go ahead. He used his recent Peruvian independence day speech to allay fears that the construction would affect the “archaeological, natural, historical and cultural legacy of Cusco”. On a visit to the site this week, Peru’s transport minister, María Jara, said “nothing would stop” the airport’s construction.
While tour operators and hoteliers mostly agree that Cusco, Peru’s principal tourist destination, needs a second airport, there is debate about whether the 600-year-old Inca site of Chinchero is the best location for it. Juan Stoessel, general manager of the Casa Andina hotel chain, argues the chosen location would allow planes to land and take off from both sides of the runway – unlike the alternative sites in the mountain region – making it a hub for flights from the main cities in the region.
“Cusco receives around 3.5m tourists a year, which is a very low number compared with other world-class tourist destinations,” said Stoessel, adding that nearby archeological sites such as Ollantaytambo, Choquequirao and Vilcabamba needed better management.
But Marisol Mosquera, founder and CEO of Aracari Travel, said: “It breaks my heart to see one of the most monumental and gorgeous landscapes in the Andes being defaced in the name of ‘progress’. Our goal was to promote sustainable, low-impact, high-quality tourism. Now the destination is being destroyed.”
A spokesperson for Unesco Peru said it could not comment as matters relating to world heritage sites were dealt with by the body’s Paris headquarters.
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Full
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https://www.theguardian.com/law/2024/mar/11/labor-doxing-laws-explained-details-invasion-of-privacy
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Law
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2024-03-11T04:42:17.000Z
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Paul Karp
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Labor wants to make ‘doxing’ a crime but how would the proposed laws work?
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The Albanese government’s proposal to ban doxing could include penalties for “de-anonymising”, “targeting” and “delegitimising” people in public debate.
On Monday the attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, announced that his department has begun consultation for new laws that will include a right to sue for serious invasion of privacy and a criminal offence of doxing.
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What is doxing?
Doxing, an abbreviation of dropping documents, refers to the intentional online exposure of an individual’s identity, private information or personal details without their consent.
According to the attorney general’s department and the e-Safety Commissioner this can include:
De-anonymising – revealing the identity of someone who was previously anonymous (for example, someone who uses a pseudonym).
Targeting doxing – revealing specific information about someone that allows them to be contacted or located, or their online security to be breached (for example, their phone number or home address, or their account username and password).
De-legitimising doxing – revealing sensitive or intimate information about someone that can damage their credibility or reputation (for example, their private medical, legal or financial records, or personal messages and photos usually kept out of public view).
Dreyfus has defined doxing as “the malicious publication of personal or private details, without the consent of the person concerned”.
“It may be that some of the information is publicly available, but the combination of that information with private and personal information and assembling in a single set of information published for what appear to be malicious reasons,” Dreyfus told ABC 730 in February.
Why is it harmful?
The department says it wants to prevent harms including: public embarrassment, humiliation or shaming; discrimination, if personal characteristics are disclosed; cyberstalking and physical stalking; identity theft and financial fraud; damage to personal and professional reputation, leading to social and financial disadvantage such as loss of employment; increased anxiety; reduced confidence and self-esteem.
Where did the crackdown come from?
In February 2023 the attorney general’s department recommended a series of changes to privacy law, including a right to sue for serious invasions of privacy.
In September the government agreed to legislate a right to sue, which would allow people to seek compensation for serious misuse of private information or intrusion on seclusion, such as being filmed in circumstances where they would have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Albanese government to propose legislation to crack down on doxing
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In February 2023, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry called for further changes after it condemned the publication of the log of a group chat of more than 600 Jewish writers and artists.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, revealed that in response he had “asked the attorney general to bring forward legislation in response to the Privacy Act review, including laws that deal with so-called doxing, which is basically the malicious publication of private information online”.
In addition to the right to sue, this will include a new criminal offence of doxing. The government is also planning separate provisions banning hate speech on the basis of a person’s religion.
Which attributes will be protected?
In February, Dreyfus told the ABC “this legislation is going to protect all Australians”. “We want to protect everybody in Australia from being targeted just because of who they are or what they believe.”
The attorney general declined to say which attributes would be protected, and whether these would include gender and sexuality.
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“[Doxing] takes different forms, it’s clearly got different malicious purposes, depending on the context,” he said. “But that’s something that we’re going to have to deal with when we prepare this legislation.””
Who will be liable?
Dreyfus has said that “the person who has compiled the information that amounts to doxing – they should be liable, but so should there be controls on republishers, controls on the social media platforms”.
But without a consultation paper or draft legislation on what the new offence would look like, it is not possible to say if the leak to Nine newspapers of WhatsApp correspondence of Jewish Australians which spurred the government to action would be captured.
Dreyfus said that “with massive changes in digital technology that is throughout our society the opportunities for invasions of privacy … for the use of people’s personal information without consent [and] for really malicious actions to take place affecting hundreds or thousands of people very, very quickly has been made possible”.
“Legislation has struggled to keep up … And clearly though all of those things that needing to be looked at.”
Are there concerns?
Dr Jennifer Beckett, a senior lecturer in media and communications at the University of Melbourne, said that she is “concerned” by the reach of a ban on “de-legitimising doxing”.
“Sometimes that reveals criminal behaviour, or people behaving hypocritically.
“Sometimes, that is a form of activism,” she said, citing identifying members of the far-right Proud Boys group or people who participated in the January 6 storming of the US Capitol building.
Beckett noted the existing offence of using a carriage service to threaten or harass, questioning “why have we been so slow to use remedies that already exist, given the seriousness of the issue [of doxing]”.
Beckett also warned a right to sue, like defamation, would be “a rich person’s game”, advantaging those who can afford litigation.
Dreyfus has said: “We’ll be looking to make sure there is a proper protection of press freedom.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/12/football-jamie-carragher-spat
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Opinion
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2018-03-12T17:57:21.000Z
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Anthony Clavane
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Football as the beautiful game is dead. Jamie Carragher spat on its grave | Anthony Clavane
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Spitting is now the scourge of football, the sport’s most offensive act. Worse even than elbowing, foul language, butting, brawling, kung-fu kicking and using your hand to deny England’s brave boys their World Cup destiny. It is the beautiful game’s deadliest of sins. Did I say beautiful game? Rarely a week goes by when football’s big-money age fails to parade its ugliness to a horrified world.
Jamie Carragher suspended as Sky Sports pundit over spitting incident
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Depositing a trail of saliva on an opponent is hardly a new development – the image of the German player Rudi Völler’s mullet harbouring phlegm from Dutchman Frank Rijkaard during a 1990 World Cup clash lives in the memory. But this week’s uncouth act by Jamie Carragher – who spat through the window of a car carrying a teenager on Sunday after Manchester United’s win against Liverpool – symbolises football’s deterioration into a soulless enterprise.
Spitting is bad enough when directed at a rival player. Directed at football fans, it is far worse. The former Liverpool defender might be a well-paid pundit – although not for much longer if Sky’s suspension turns into a sacking, despite his frantic apologies – but his spitting shame must be seen as the latest symptom of the contempt displayed by the superstars of the modern game for the men, women and children who pay preposterous amounts of money to watch them kick a ball around for an hour and a half each week.
Further evidence of the disappearance of football’s original, Corinthian values was provided by the ugly scenes at West Ham’s new London Stadium on Saturday, when fans stormed the pitch and menaced their directors after losing to Burnley. It was fitting, in its way, that these antics diverted attention from a tribute to the great West Ham captain Bobby Moore, as he more than anyone else epitomised those values and would not recognise today’s game.
West Ham United’s Mark Noble clashes with a fan who invaded the pitch during a match with Burnley. Photograph: Peter Cziborra/Action Images via Reuters
In more innocent times, punk rock fans gobbed at their heroes on stage. I remember a spoof “Gob of the month” competition on the 1980s satirical TV show Not the Nine O’Clock News. But much has changed since then, and spitting today gets under so many people’s skin not only because it might transmit infection, but also because it carries a degree of psychological insult and is seen as the ultimate gesture of contempt. While Carragher’s man-of-the-people persona was carefully cultivated, his disgrace is just another reminder of the chasm between Premier League clubs and their fans.
Since there is a mandatory suspension for any player found to have spat at someone during a match, Carragher should, at the very least, be banned from TV for the rest of the season. His actions tell us more than his punditry has to date. It’s a sorry reminder that the game of Moore, Bobby Charlton and Bobby Robson has been hijacked by an arrogant elite.
Anthony Clavane is a sportswriter and the author of Moving the Goalposts: A Yorkshire Tragedy
Jamie Carragher suspended as Sky Sports pundit over spitting incident
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/19/meryl-streep-emmeline-pankhurst-suffragette
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Film
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2014-02-19T18:17:00.000Z
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Catherine Shoard
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Meryl Streep to play Emmeline Pankhurst in Suffragette
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Last month Meryl Steep won applause for decrying Walt Disney a "gender bigot". Her crusading continues with the news that she's set to play Emmeline Pankhurst in a new film, reports Screen.
Suffragette, which stars Carey Mulligan as Maude, a "foot soldier of the early feminist movement", is to be directed by Brick Lane's Sarah Gavron from a script by Abi Morgan. Morgan wrote The Iron Lady, the Margaret Thatcher biopic for which Steep won an Oscar two years ago. Streep will apparently feature in a keynote rally scene in which Pankhurst makes a speech.
Starring alongside Mulligan and Streep, are Helena Bonham Carter, Romola Garai , Anne-Marie Duff and Samuel West. The film apparently charts the early activists for womens' lib and their run-ins with the government.
Streep received her 18th Academy Award nomination in January for her performance as a boozy matriarch in August: Osage County.
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/feb/23/i-love-my-partner-but-our-relationship-started-in-an-awful-way-what-should-i-do-if-i-cant-trust-him
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Life and style
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2024-02-22T14:00:21.000Z
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Eleanor Gordon-Smith
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I love my partner but our relationship started in an awful way. What should I do if I can’t trust him? | Leading questions
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I have a strong relationship with my partner; we work together, we love each other and we were friends for a long time before we fell in love. The problem I have is that the way our relationship started was awful. He was in a long-term but flawed relationship with a friend of mine. He couldn’t tell her for a long time and I was not able to force him to do so. I did ask but not enough. So I witnessed him lying to her for so long and I can’t forget this.
Now I realise I just can’t trust him. I love him deeply and I want this relationship to last but I’m so afraid he’ll do the same to me. I think this in the long run will affect our relationship. I don’t know how to change this and I’m constantly thinking that I should run away and give him no chance of betraying me as he did with her. Talking to him is not easy: he’s the overly successful and very busy character, the kind of man who finds talking about emotions difficult (like many others I’ve met). What should I do?
Eleanor says: Starting a relationship with deceit means that lies get woven into the story from the outset. You lose the ability to say “I’d never do that” because the whole electric origin of the relationship was the preparedness to lie for it. We can try to take comfort in the second-best option of hearing “I’d never do that to you” but that’s not exactly balm. What’s so special about us that we’re the exception? What happens when it stops being true?
I’m attracted to women of a different type than my partner. What should I do?
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You expressed a lot of uncertainty about whether he’s going to do the same thing to you. It’s natural to want evidence that he won’t. But I want to suggest that this fear might not be wholly sated by evidence.
Once it sets in, scepticism can transform faith from a bucket to a sieve. No amount of evidence flowing in feels like enough to fill you with certainty, because we can always ask just one more “What if?”
On the other hand, no fact is going to give you certainty that he can’t be trusted, either. You knew when the relationship started that he was capable of big deceit. Whatever it was that made it worth continuing then will still be true. It’ll keep the scales hovering, instead of coming down firmly on “don’t trust him”.
So waiting for the facts to solve this for you might leave you waiting a long time.
I think that if this fear is going to go away, it probably won’t be because you can get enough factual reassurance. It’ll be because you decided to banish it, and – importantly – because he was able to make you feel safe enough to do so.
You mentioned that he finds talking about emotions difficult. But you’ll need his help addressing this if you do decide to stay. Vigilance needs a certain amount of soothing to go away. Because your brain can’t ever totally know it’s safe, it needs to feel it’s safe, and he has to be your teammate in that.
It might help to position reassurance as a feeling you want, not a proof you require.
Think of it like this: nobody thinks that after you say “I love you” once, there’s no point in saying it again. We say it again because it feels nice to hear it, not because we’re imparting new information. Similarly, when you want reassurance, it’s not that you haven’t believed him the last six times he’s said “of course I won’t”. You want the feeling, not the information. So the fact that he might need to provide it more than once shouldn’t be read as accusation.
This is a hard dynamic shift to pull off by yourself. If you stay, I think professional counselling could be really valuable to you as a couple. It is a lot easier to trust someone when you can communicate well, and you can’t just will yourselves into knowing how to do that.
It could be that he showed you his true colours once before. Or it could be that good people sometimes start good relationships in bad ways. This may be a situation where the facts won’t decide things; instead, you have to decide what you want to believe.
Ask us a question
Do you have a conflict, crossroads or dilemma you need help with? Eleanor Gordon-Smith will help you think through life’s questions and puzzles, big and small. Your questions will be kept anonymous.
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https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/oct/16/star-trek-discovery-season-three-review-its-most-thoughtful-series-yet
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Television & radio
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2020-10-16T12:00:10.000Z
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Sam Thielman
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Star Trek: Discovery season three review – its most thoughtful series yet
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After three seasons, Star Trek: Discovery has got around to boldly going where no one had gone before – namely 900 years into the future, far beyond the time periods charted out with extensive lore by other Trek shows.
This decision, and the accompanying hypnotic space worms, disreputable space bazaars and alluring space rogues, comes as a great relief. Discovery has been hemmed in since its inception by everything else bearing the Star Trek name. The show was originally set 10 years before the original series, in a parallel universe populated by the characters of the current Trek movie franchise, also named Kirk and Spock, rather than the versions played by William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy – though not played by the actors in the recent films, either – and if that all sounds confusing, and possibly not worth spelunking through Wikipedia to work out, then good.
Season two had some behind-the-scenes drama: the showrunners left the series after complaints by staff that they were mistreated; now the show is run by Alex Kurtzman and Discovery writers’ room veteran Michelle Paradise, who both wrote this first episode with Jenny Lumet, the author of, among other things, the screenplay to Jonathan Demme’s masterly Rachel Getting Married. So there are reasons to hope, which, incidentally, is also now the theme of the series.
Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) crash-lands on an unfamiliar world after leaping through a temporal wormhole at the end of Discovery’s second season, to defeat an evil artificial intelligence. The friction of the planet’s atmosphere seems to have burned away all the optimism that has always been the most basic atomic unit of Star Trek – when Michael arrives, she immediately stumbles across a piratical “courier” of contraband goods named Book (David Ajala in an enjoyable Han Solo mode) and learns that a huge cataclysm has essentially ended the peace enforced for so many centuries by the omnipresent Federation.
It is a more eccentric show than Discovery has ever been – one character has a digital alarm parrot
Somehow, this isn’t gloomy. Martin-Green is very funny, and she is, finally, our guide to the secrets of an unknown world. Her boring love interest is gone, her crewmates are awol (though some of them will turn up), and the future is filled with the sort of double-crosses, shootouts and ramshackle spaceships you associate with a Star War, rather than a Trek. The possibility of the network high-fiving itself over references to shows that have been over for decades seems blessedly remote. The result is a far weirder and more eccentric show than Discovery has ever been – one character has a digital alarm parrot in lieu of a clock. There are even signs that it may begin affording its characters the kind of quiet everyday business that will allow the audience to know them as people, rather than as entries in branching wikis of lore.
I reviewed the programme when it began in 2017; I wasn’t a fan of the elongated story arcs or the heavy-handed politics. The sadder-but-wiser show it has become mirrors the toll the past three years have taken on so many of us. It’s a Star Trek that takes place, for the first time, in a broken world where there is no benign bureaucracy that must be saved from space invaders, brightly coloured disasters or a few bad apples. Now, Discovery promises to explore the idea of salvage – how to make the most of what we have, especially when we don’t have enough. In this, as in a few other ways, it seems to take its cues not from the voyages of Captain Cook (who inspired Gene Roddenberry to create the original Trek), but from modern sci-fi writers such as NK Jemisin, who are concerned with how societies can – or can’t – be built to survive hostile worlds.
That requires vigilance, something this opening episode shows us in moving closeup. At the outset, we see a man who is waiting to fulfil his duties as an officer of an institution so thoroughly destroyed that it has been reduced to a mere idea. At the end of the episode, he finally gets to do so, giving meaning to his years of waiting. In our own world, so many public institutions seem to have become only slightly less fictional than Starfleet, and this humble resurrection seems a bit miraculous. Discovery is a show given to histrionics, but stripped of its familiar setting, it now reaches for profundity with a little more assurance.
“Hope is a powerful thing,” muses one character. “Sometimes it’s the only thing,” Michael replies.
Star Trek: Discovery is available on Netflix in the UK and CBS in the US
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/15/mans-guide-marriage-stag-do
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Life and style
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2010-06-15T11:28:00.000Z
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Steve Busfield
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A man's guide to marriage: the stag do
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There was a time when the groom-to-be had a night out with his friends the night before he got hitched and it was called a stag night. Times have changed. Sensibly, the stag is nowadays rarely insensibly drunk the night before he gets married. He's also much less likely to spend just an evening with his mates.
I've been on a lot of stag dos, but only the first was of the traditional variety. Since then it's been a roll call from Amsterdam to Alicante, Ibiza to Ljubljana, and more British towns and cities than I can remember, never for less than 36 hours, and sometimes much longer. The stag night has become the stag weekend, and occasionally the stag holiday.
As NickBown said last week about celebrating overseas (weddings rather than stag dos, but the theory holds true): "The people who care about you the most will come and those which aren't so bothered have an excuse not to." Although there is a rider to that: it is also possible that some would like to come but can't afford to go abroad. The cheaper it is, the more inclusive. Personally, I'm more than happy to stump up the cash for a tip-top weekend.
You want something memorable. Overseas can often be so, but so can stag dos at home. You just need to show some imagination to make it "yours". As a cricket-lover, the 99 World Cup was perfectly timed and offered trips to sports stadiums where I had spent much of my youth.
Plenty of other sports and activities are great for a stag weekend: without stag dos I would probably never have been clay pigeon shooting, go-karting, surfing or paintballing. These are good for team bonding too, given that stag dos throw together friends from different parts of life who often don't know each other. And then there are impromptu sporting events, such as glove puppet rugby, beach cricket and imaginary grand nationals. And walking, because there is always a long, unplanned walk on a stag weekend: either someone thinks that walking back to the hotel at 7am is a good idea, or you are lost, or that cathedral on top of a mountain seems like a good place to visit.
While on the subject of getting about, my advice would be that public transport, or professional transport, is the best. Certainly not one of the stag team. And absolutely not a mate of a mate who offers to drive. On one stag weekend, a friend of a friend had access to a minibus and offered to drive for a small consideration. He said it was all right because he didn't drink. He did, however, find other ways to be unfit to drive …
Thankfully the days of the stag being stripped and left naked, tied to a lamppost, seem to have ended (or maybe it's just the stag dos I've attended). I do, however, remember one stag throwing up out of the taxi window, minutes before he was given a shotgun to discharge.
Shared rooms are another stag do issue (remember how even England footballers used to share rooms?). As I've got older I've noticed that stag weekenders tend to sleep more/eat more/behave more sensibly than when we were younger - probably something to do with kids and lack of sleep at home. We stay in nicer hotels too. Thrown into a young men's stag weekend a couple of years ago, I found myself sharing a hostel room full of bunk beds with half a dozen others bouncing around at 5am.
But that's enough from me, what are your stories/tips/advice? Of course, some of you may wish to debate whether there should even be a stag event. Or if there should be one, whether it should be a joint affair with the hens.
And feel free to use the internet's cloak of anonymity to post your more outrageous stag stories below.
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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/sep/01/helen-hunt-interview-eureka-day
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Film
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2022-09-01T13:00:20.000Z
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Terri White
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Helen Hunt: ‘There were a couple of years I was spooked – I just became very boring’
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In the eyes of some, As Good As It Gets was as good as it got for Helen Hunt. Despite starring in a hit NBC sitcom, Mad About You, and a cult disaster movie, Twister, it was the release of the acerbic romcom in 1997 – in which Hunt’s waitress and single mother forms a love-hate relationship with Jack Nicholson’s misanthropic author – that saw her career truly go supernova. As Good As It Gets brought overnight fame and a best actress Oscar. And yet, the decades since have seen if not a disappearance of that fame, at least an erosion, with few of her films bothering the box office or the Academy (although she did land a best supporting actress nomination for 2012 indie film The Sessions).
Helen Hunt isn’t of that mindset, though, because As Good As It Gets gave her exactly what she didn’t want: fame. “There were a couple of years when I was a little spooked,” she admits when asked about paparazzi outside her house. “I was afraid that I could never unring that bell.” So how did she cope with the media assault? “I just became very boring,” she says matter-of-factly.
Hunt is far from boring company, but she does seem incredibly normal; hardly the sort of person you could imagine hovering around some renowned celebrity hotspot. As we chat on Zoom, she sits on her bed in glasses, clutching a bowl and apologising for eating dinner while we talk. “There are some people,” she says, “who will live more exciting lives and keep going at that level – and it’s their whole life, wherever they go, for ever.” She looks stricken at this, as if it’s her worst nightmare, but then laughs. “I think by the 130th picture of me in my khaki pants with my yoga mat, that picture’s worth nothing!”
The 59-year-old actor and film-maker is in London, where she is rehearsing for her star turn in Eureka Day at the Old Vic. Despite first being performed in Berkeley, California, in 2018, it’s a play you’d struggle to believe was written before the pandemic, dealing with misinformation and the entrenched positions that arise in a school community when a mumps outbreak prompts calls for mandatory vaccines. Ringing any bells?
Hunt stars alongside Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets. Photograph: Tristar Pictures/Allstar
“It’s daring to put its finger on a tricky topic,” Hunt says. “It’s a play about coming apart. [About] what’s happening in so many places, certainly in my country, and I guess your country. And the wish to come together, and the increasing difficulty [in doing so], especially when things get very real.”
Hunt’s love for theatre began when she was around five years old, attending productions with her dad – an acting coach and theatre director. She remembers seeing the original production of Godspell in a church basement. “And that was it,” she says. “I didn’t even know if I wanted to be acting or singing or directing. I just wanted to be in the building.”
Hunt’s father died in 2016. “Every time I see a play I think of him, because he was always so excited when the lights began to go down,” she says. “And I am, too.”
While theatre may be her first love, and film is what she’ll be remembered for – her many credits include What Women Want, Cast Away and Pay It Forward – Hunt has a TV show to thank for giving her a first career bump. Mad About You, in which she and Paul Reiser starred as a pair of newlyweds living in New York City, premiered in 1992, back when TV was still sniffed at – but that would soon change.
I wrote and directed two movies, starred in them and had a baby. I don’t know what to say when people say: What happened?
“I remember when it was like: ‘You’re on TV, you’re not going to get cast in a movie,’” she says. And while The Sopranos is most often cited as the beginning of TV’s golden age, the moment the medium was elevated, there was undoubtedly something happening in the preceding years on network television, with Seinfeld, Frasier and Friends finding huge success, critically and commercially. Could Hunt feel the ground shifting beneath her on the set of Mad About You? “Yeah,” she says. “Suddenly I got a call to be in this giant action movie! [Twister]. And then when As Good As It Gets came along, rather than being the person the director wanted but the studio wouldn’t back, I was suddenly the person the studio wanted him to see.”
As Good As It Gets brought her not just the Oscar, but into the orbit of Jack. While Nicholson’s magnetism on and off screen is legendary, there were surprises in store when it came to his process and work ethic. The wild man of the film world is actually (whisper it) a detail-oriented grafter.
“My expectation about Jack was that he would be unpredictable and not bother with the mundane things that I bothered with,” she says. “And the truth is he’s an acting-class guy. You know, he came from New York, sitting in those theatres, working on scenes, learning from the best. And so he and I had all the same questions: how many days has it been since they’ve seen each other? Has he ever said anything like this to her before? I felt as if I was with a friend and in acting class rather than an iconic movie star.”
Hunt’s decision to reject Jack Nicholson levels of movie star fame and instead pour equal energy into her private life was – though not without sacrifice – clearly worth it.
Hunt with the cast of sitcom Mad About You. Photograph: NBC/Getty Images
“It’s not great for continuing to get every great part but it has allowed me to have a life that I am really in as a parent or a friend. You know, that’s a big priority for me,” she says.
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After Hunt had a storming run in 2000 with four films – Dr T & the Women, Pay It Forward, Cast Away and What Women Want – the years that followed were noticeably quieter. Press speculation was rife, as were cries of “What happened to Helen Hunt!” She laughs now: “I wrote and directed two movies and starred in them and had a baby [Makena Lei in 2004]. So yeah, I don’t know what to say when people say: ‘What happened?’ That’s a lot. You know, for me, that’s plenty.”
I ask whether it suggests a lack of perceived value in the work women do raising kids, but she’s not convinced. “I’ve been so in deep, deep love and care of this human being that I’ve gotten to mother that I really haven’t been paying attention to what people think about that.”
Hunt’s two films to date as director were huge undertakings, particularly the first, 2007’s Then She Found Me, which took 10 years to make. Hunt remembers the response when she asked: who does get their movie made? “They said: ‘Whoever doesn’t give up.’ That’s me. So I just hung in there and kept trying.” But even when the film was finished, the offscreen drama rolled on. The day before the film was released (on Mother’s Day), the distributor went bankrupt. It had premiered at Toronto film festival and landed “a good sale”, but there was still no line of producers eager to finance her next film. “I just went back to the drawing board, and started to raise money again” for her follow up, the 2014 surfing drama Ride.
And while there have certainly been highs, there is also this honesty from Hunt in the disappointments and struggles of trying to live a life and have a career she wants, not the one others expect.
She speaks openly about an idea for a Twister sequel that she, Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal (with whom she worked on the 2021 StarzPlay comedy-drama Blindspotting) came up with. All Black and brown storm chasers. The three of them writing; Hunt directing. Not only could they not get it greenlit, they couldn’t even get in the room. “It was literally July 2020,” she says, still seemingly shocked. “The United States was on fire with the beginning of a 400-year overdue racial reckoning; and #MeToo hadn’t been that long ago. There were three of us, each representing a minority of our own, one of us having starred in the [original] movie and we couldn’t get a meeting. It was sobering.”
Clive James: ‘Helen Hunt! Holy smoke, what an artist!’
Read more
How much Hollywood is prepared to change is up for debate, though when it comes to #MeToo, Hunt says she has seen improvements of a sort. “I find it funny that people are out of patience with it and it’s only been two to three years … Still, there’s a little wind at the back of people raising their hand and saying this happened or that made me uncomfortable. That’s significant, I think.”
Helen Hunt: quietly getting things done, on her own time, in her own way, a flashing camera nowhere on her block. That really is as good as it gets.
Eureka Day is at the Old Vic, London, from 6 September to 31 October.
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https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/may/03/kit-harington-the-acting-never-feels-like-work-baftas-2015-television
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Film
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2015-05-03T08:00:01.000Z
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Ed Cumming
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Kit Harington: ‘The acting never feels like work’
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Two weeks before I meet Kit Harington I am waiting to be let into the premiere of the fifth season of Game of Thrones and get talking to a middle-aged man. The programme is HBO and Sky Atlantic’s golden trumpet, so they have rented the Tower of London for the night and erected a 1,000-seat cinema in its moat. Dragons are projected on to the outer walls; flaming torches line the approach. The queue is long and intractable. The man next to me, it turns out, is David Harington, or “Jon Snow’s father”, as he introduces himself, but even this is not enough to help him skip to the front. We stand in the drizzle and chat about his son.
“The thing Kit always says is that he’d do the acting for free,” says Harington Sr. “It’s all this other stuff that he gets paid for – the fame, the attention, the loss of privacy.” As if on cue, from somewhere beyond the wall comes a barrage of teenage shrieks. Kit has arrived on the red carpet. His voice booms incomprehensibly from a speaker. More screams, distant camera flashes. David sighs, but pride beams out of him. “He’s so busy that sometimes the easiest way to find out what’s happening to him is to search online. Google Analytics thinks I’m a 17-year-old girl from South America.”
What’s happening to Kit Harington is that he is becoming a film star. Thanks to his brooding turn as Jon Snow, the 28-year-old is one of the most recognisable men on television. Earlier this year he gave a well-received performance in Testament of Youth, James Kent’s adaptation of Vera Brittain’s First World War memoir. Now he’s taken on a modern spy thriller, starring as Will Holloway in Spooks: The Greater Good, a big-screen, big-budget version of the BBC MI5 series. But Harington seems uncomfortable being cast as the matinée idol.
‘I knew what I was doing with Jon Snow from the start’: in Game of Thrones, with Rose Leslie as Ygritte, his lover. Photograph: HBO courtesy Everett Collection
When Kit and I sit down for lunch in a London restaurant he confirms his father’s words. “Whatever the project, whether I believe in it creatively or not, whether I am getting up at 5am for a 17-hour shoot, the acting never feels like work,” he says. “It’s all this…” he gestures at my risotto… “This is the work. The selling of it. People taking pictures of you in the street as if you were a rare bird of prey.” Earlier we were together in the open air for perhaps a minute and Harington was stopped twice for photos. “I understand when you’re in a big show and you look like you do, people want to show their mate on Instagram or whatever. But sometimes it feels like I’m a beautiful sunrise…” he says, before adding quickly “or a dying dog.”
Game of Thrones was never meant to be a hit. The pilot was a disaster and the series nearly didn’t get made. Harington was already enjoying a starburst career in the theatre. After graduating from Central School of Speech and Drama in 2008 he won a part in War Horse at the National and when the Game of Thrones pilot was shot, he was preparing for Posh – Laura Wade’s vicious satire on the Bullingdon Club – at the Royal Court. Remembering this earlier time, Harington’s face lights up.“My big tick list was the National, the Royal Court and the Donmar, and I’d just done the National. Lyndsey Turner, who directed Posh, is scarily intelligent. I remember we had six weeks’ rehearsal time, and for four and a half of them she just sat us round a table, really nailing each character. It was really Stanislavskian method, really intense.”
The blueish tinge to Harington’s blood is often placed high up in his biography: he’s a direct descendant of Charles II, his great-grandfather was a baronet, and he’s named after Christopher Marlowe. I wonder if the toxic Hooray Henrys portrayed resonated with his own childhood. “I think I was one of only two in the cast who didn’t go to private school. My dad went to Westminster, so I was vaguely aware of that kind of thing, but I hadn’t experienced it myself. We weren’t a particularly low-income family, but at the same time I’m not sure my parents would have been able to support me trying to make it as an actor.”
Spy capers: with Peter Firth in Spooks
David had a company that ran trade shows. Kit’s mother, Deborah, taught creative writing at Birmingham University and wrote plays on the side. “I remember going to see some of her plays when we were young. It caused her a lot of stress. On the night of the premiere she would grip my hand so hard it hurt. Afterwards she would rush out of the theatre with her hands over her ears before she could hear anyone say anything about it. It’s the same for me. We spoke about it recently and bonded over it. It was terrifying for her, and I have the same thing now when I go to a premiere of one of my performances.”
He’d like to go to the theatre more often, but he’s out of touch, he says, and “everything gets sold out so far in advance, I can’t book tickets because I never know where I’ll be.”
We meet with the general election looming. Harington says he was “fiercely socialist” as a teenager, but which way will he cast his vote? “My father was traditionally very Conservative and my mother very Labour, so previously I went Lib Dem, but I don’t know how I’ll vote this time. I feel somewhere between Labour, Green and Lib Dems. But I was sympathetic to the way Lib Dems behaved in government; they had to show the country that a coalition could work and stand up to the Tories. Although they did fuck people on tuition fees.”
With Sophie Turner, his sister in Game of Thrones. Photograph: Rex
He gives a wry grin, one of not many that he allows. His parts have tended to be intense young men with a violent streak – Will Holloway in Spooks is not a departure. Can he do funny? “In my private life I like to think so. I’m not humourless,” he says, slightly defensively. “But perhaps it’s not a side that people see very often.” To rectify the situation he has made a comedy with Andy Samberg, which had its premiere at South by Southwest. “I play a very stupid English tennis player with an overcontrolling mother,” he says. “I haven’t been in much comedy for a while. You find out very quickly if you can do it or not.”
His special quality, as far as I can tell, is stillness. The man does not fidget. While he “snaffles a quick fag” before we eat, his smoking arm folds at the elbow and straightens unwaveringly back to his side. He twirls the props he is given during the photo shoot with a practised economy of movement, perhaps from five years of handling a sword. He has a melancholic resting face on to which it is hard not to project deep and sensitive feelings. An early director called him the next Brando. Female fans of Game of Thrones have called him all sorts of things, mainly complimentary. It has stood him in good stead as Jon Snow, a character who has grown from a moody adolescent into a troubled but increasingly confident leader. “I feel like I knew what I was doing with Jon Snow from the start. I love those characters in The Wire or The Sopranos who reveal themselves over several seasons. I have tried to take it slowly; some might say too slowly.” Another grin.
For the foreseeable future the role dictates which other jobs he can take, where in the world he’ll be, and his haircut – “about shoulder length”. One of the reasons he took the Spooks movie is because it fitted with the filming schedule, although he also relished the opportunity to “run around with a gun”. Four years since Game of Thrones first aired, Harington is still coming to terms with its implications. He has an older brother, Jack, who lives in Dubai and serves as a point of comparison. “He used to beat me at go-karting, video games, ping pong, everything,” Kit says. I suggest that it must have been annoying for Jack when the little brother came up on the inside and became an international celebrity.
As Albert Narracott with Howard Ward (playing Sergeant Thunder) in War Horse at the National Theatre. Photograph: Simon Annand
“See, if I may be so bold, a comment like that is what’s wrong with the world. People think that this, being a famous actor or whatever, is the only achieveable goal in life. Jack doesn’t give a shit about any of the Thrones stuff. There’s no amount of money you could pay him to do this.” I haven’t the heart to tell him that it was his father who, in all good humour, suggested the “snuck up on the inside” line.
“But it does no good to wonder about what might have been,” Kit adds. “This is the path that was given me. Plus, I have a flat – the Flat That Thrones Bought. I’m incredibly lucky.” He’s in the process of upgrading this to the House That Thrones Bought. Still, he must worry about the Jean-Luc Picard effect, where the first three rows of every Patrick Stewart play are filled with people doing Vulcan salutes. “As long as they’re coming to see the play, I’m happy. And it’s only the first three rows. Anyway, I accepted that I’ll most likely be remembered for Jon Snow a long time ago.”
Watch a video review of the film Guardian
Spooks: The Greater Good is out on 8 May
Watch the British Academy Television Awards, Sunday 10 May, 8pm, BBC One and BBC One HD
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/04/birmingham-elected-mayor-manchester-local-government
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Opinion
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2014-11-04T12:27:41.000Z
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Julia Higginbottom
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Birmingham needs an elected mayor just as much as Manchester | Julia Higginbottom
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In 2012 there was a referendum on whether to have a city mayor for Birmingham. I worked on the yes campaign, but sadly we were unsuccessful. On Monday it was announced that Greater Manchester is to get a metropolitan mayor, and I am glad. Manchester voted no to an elected mayor in 2012 too, and yet without the need for another referendum, it is getting a stronger, more visible, elected leader. The £1bn will help Manchester be more neighbourly with better transport links, new housing initiatives that can be region-wide and a joined-up social care programme that doesn’t fall down because you live in Salford but there’s better provision in Manchester.
When we were working on the yes campaign for Birmingham, a city mayor was the only option on offer, but there was always a bubbling notion, at a grassroots level, that a metropolitan mayor would make more sense – serving the region more broadly, instead of just the city. In Brum, I would like us to get on with this. I would love there to be a metro mayor in this great region – an elected leader to represent the bostin Black Country lot and our genteel Solihull brethren too. Someone who would bring with them the billions of pounds of investment needed to ensure we don’t just build city baubles such as the new Library of Birmingham or New Street Station but rather grow more cleverly connected places that extend out of the Big City Plan and into the most deprived areas of our region. Perhaps we could even have the money and vision from a metro mayor to bring us the joys of an Oystercard system or a bus route that doesn’t turn a seven-minute car ride into an hour-long journey and finally breaks our terrible car addiction.
I love this region for all its grittiness, down-to-earth qualities and even the passionate sibling rivalries between areas. I want more of this. I’m proud of the beauty of the Ironbridge Gorge, of the brilliant curry houses on offer – I revel when someone posts an article from the New York Times, talking about how great Birmingham is. Or when we fall about laughing because Cillian Murphy and the rest of the Peaky Blinders aren’t quite nailing the accent that most disparage so quickly. When I see the beauty of the countryside from the Lickey hills overlooking our city, I’m struck by how amazing this place is. So why do we need to be more joined up here? We have real problems that need local solutions that seem harder to solve as budgets are squeezed in Westminster.
For us all to be able to feel more engaged and to love where we live even more, we need to be free to travel well, quickly and cheaply. A metro mayor could bring a success like that of London’s mayor in improving transport across the region. We need to know that when life does get harder and we need to depend on social services, that we won’t fall through the cracks of the postcode roulette. I want to trust that the education on offer will impart the right skills to my future employees. I want to feel cherished and valued by my neighbours next door, and for us to lobby together on the matters that mean most to us here, which are different from those in London or even Manchester. We have a particularly challenging time ahead with one of the lowest skills bases in the UK and a burgeoning young population with an unacceptable level of a third of these children living in poverty, according to HMRC data.
In spite of these challenges, the passion displayed during the Scottish independence referendum is never far from my mind when I imagine a region that would be stronger together, and yet capable of celebrating the unique, individual charms of each area. 2012 was the first time I felt I could make a difference in this great city, in spite of the final result. We need vision; visible, accountable leadership; co-ordination in skills and transport. A metro mayor could be a gamechanger for any region, and Birmingham cannot afford to be left behind. We cannot afford to be stifled by the greater machinations of Westminster or the narrow self-interest of dinosaurs in local government.
We have something unique to offer the world besides our geography. We have a great, innovative, world-class manufacturing base, a fantastic diversity of culture and food, as well as citizens who could be inspired to reach their potential, and we should work harder to improve how we benefit from that unique offer together, rather than apart. Bring it on!
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/aug/19/my-ex-and-i-want-to-be-together-should-we-both-break-up-with-our-partners
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Life and style
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2022-08-19T13:00:11.000Z
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Annalisa Barbieri
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My ex and I want to be together. Should we both break up with our partners? | Ask Annalisa Barbieri
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I was married to a wonderful man for 30 years. We had a great relationship, and shared many interests and a sense of humour. I had been sterilised before we met, so he understood we would never have children, which was not a problem.
In the last six years of our marriage we were no longer having sex as I had lost interest, but he assured me it really wasn’t a problem at all. However, an opportunity arose with a woman he met through work, and they ended up having sex. They met when he was helping with some personal issues while working on her house. She became pregnant. He felt he had to do the honourable thing, and left me to live with her and the baby.
They had two children. Before long he realised she was mentally unstable, so he moved out. Meanwhile, after he left, I met a man 16 years younger than me and we have been living together for three years. He is kind and loving, and we don’t argue, but we don’t do anything together – we don’t eat together, watch TV together, share interests, and English is his second language so banter isn’t easy.
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My ex-husband and I always kept in touch, and recently have been speaking every day. He’s made it clear he wants to be back with me. We still love each other very much. I’m in such a quandary about what to do. My current partner has done nothing wrong, but I can’t say I really enjoy our relationship.
I would love to be back with my ex and I think he’s really learned his lesson, but I’m worried about how it would work with his two children. They still live with their unstable mother, and even though he has access, she could make it very difficult for him. I also feel very guilty about asking my current partner to move out of my house, because he’s done nothing wrong.
My initial, and main, concern is for the two children, left with a woman who your ex found so mentally unstable he had to leave. What’s happening with them? Are they safe? Does he see them? They should be his priority and I hope they are.
I took your problem to psychotherapist Jane Hetherington. We both felt you sounded rather detached. As Hetherington explained, sometimes people do this “when it’s more comfortable to detach yourself [from exploring difficult feelings]”.
I wonder if you ever allowed yourself to explore how you really felt after the end of your marriage? As Hetherington says: “You state that you and your husband didn’t mind about not having children together or the lack of sex in the last six years. I wonder if there was any real examination of these two important issues in the light of your husband’s subsequent behaviour. There appears to have been an absence of discussion or emotional exploration [from] both of you.”
What lesson do you think your husband has learned, and do you think you need to learn one, too? As Hetherington says: “You’ve idealised your relationship with your ex-husband and as you are now both unhappy you’re seeking one another, but how realistic is this for future happiness?”
Then there’s your current partner, someone with whom you seem to share very little. “The big plus point here seems to be that you don’t argue,” says Hetherington. “Yet you don’t seem to do anything together. I do wonder if you are frightened of being alone.”
Sometimes going back is the answer, and maybe it will be the right thing for you eventually
It’s completely understandable to be afraid of being on your own, but as a justification for being with the wrong person it’s a short road to a long stretch of unhappiness. “It would be helpful,” says Hetherington, “for you to develop more of a sense of self.” I think you’re right to be worried – if your marriage foundered the first time without these challenges, I do wonder how it would cope second time round.
A friend recently attempted to kill herself. What can I do to stop her trying again?
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Hetherington also points out: “If you were sterilised because you didn’t want children, how will you feel having two [what sound like fairly young] children come to stay with you when they spend time with their father?” You would also play a part in these children’s lives. Is that something you’re ready for?
Sometimes going back is the answer, and maybe it will be the right thing for you eventually – but first, it’s only fair that you finish with the man you’re living with, spend some time on your own and go to couples counselling with your ex-husband to really work out if you could make a go of it again. Only then should you consider getting back together.
And remember: there are five other people in this scenario and, as I said, really the priority should be the children.
Every week Annalisa Barbieri addresses a family-related problem sent in by a reader. If you would like advice from Annalisa on a family matter, please send your problem to [email protected]. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions.
Comments on this piece are premoderated to ensure the discussion remains on the topics raised by the article. Please be aware that there may be a short delay in comments appearing on the site.
The latest series of Annalisa’s podcast is available here.
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/feb/05/britain-rail-franchise-model-unfit-for-purpose-say-mps
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UK news
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2017-02-05T10:07:02.000Z
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Gwyn Topham
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Britain’s rail franchise model unfit for purpose, say MPs
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Britain’s rail franchising model is no longer fit for purpose, not providing competition and letting passengers down, MPs have warned.
A report from the House of Commons transport select committee said the government was failing to hold train operators to account, while “serious deficiencies” in the Department for Transport (DfT) meant the government should consider transferring some of its franchising powers.
The report found that private operators were restricted in how much they could improve services and efficiency, and their relationship with Network Rail was “not as coordinated as it should be”, leading to higher fares and poor performance.
MPs urged the DfT to commission an independent review of rail franchising, to consider the possibility of handing over enforcement powers to the regulator, the Office of Rail and Road. The report said it was unlikely the department would be able to let all the franchises up for renewal in the next two years, as planned.
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Since the West Coast franchising fiasco of 2012, when Virgin successfully challenged the award of the intercity train services it ran to a rival group, most franchise awards have been delayed, and contracts have been extended or awarded to allow the same companies to continue to run trains.
Louise Ellman, the transport select committee chair, said the current franchising model was no longer fit for purpose and that the current crisis on Southern underlined the failings of the DfT. She said: “They should hold the train operating companies to account. Unless that happens the taxpayer will be footing the bill and passengers will suffer.“While franchising enabled passenger growth and service improvements when it was first rolled out, passenger satisfaction with the railways is falling. Its core objectives are no longer being met, potential benefits are being lost and the passenger is suffering through higher fares and continued underperformance.”
Ellman added that the government had “serious lessons to learn” from the management of Govia Thameslink Railway’s contract to run Southern. She said there were “serious deficiencies in the department’s monitoring and enforcement of this franchise”.
The report added that although there can be no single template for franchises, longer agreements for smaller areas could tempt new companies into the market. The committee concluded: “The core policy objective of promoting competition is not being met.”
Fewer companies have bid for franchises, while major players such as National Express have withdrawn from the market, meaning ever less competition.
According to the national passenger survey run by watchdog Transport Focus, satisfaction with services has suffered a significant decline over the past year, with commuters in the south-east particularly unhappy.
Meanwhile, fares rises have far outstripped wage inflation in the last decade. Fares rose by another 2.3% on average across Britain on 2 January, sparking protests by campaigners and trade unions and further calls for renationalisation.
The transport secretary, Chris Grayling, speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, said he agreed with much of the report. However, he said the main challenge for the railways was the huge rise in passenger numbers the government was investing to address.
He said GTR’s contract to run Southern was an “exceptional circumstance” due to the level of financial risk during major upgrades to the network, especially at London Bridge.
The DfT said £40bn was being spent on upgrading the railways and the franchising system has brought major investment to help create one of the safest and fastest-growing networks in Europe.
Rail franchise mandarin's board gave Southern contract to client of his company
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A spokesperson said: “We can make improvements and the transport secretary has been clear that it will take new ways of working, more investment and better collaboration across the industry to tackle the challenges ahead.”
The shadow transport secretary, Andy McDonald MP, said: “A railway works best as an integrated network, but privatisation and franchising have meant breaking it up to create opportunities for companies to extract a profit, resulting in costly inefficiencies. For example, hundreds of people are employed full time on the railway to argue about which company is responsible for delays.
“The current system is broken. It is time for our railways to be run under public ownership, in the public interest as an integrated national asset with affordable fares for all and long-term investment in the railway network.”
Paul Plummer, the chief executive of the Rail Delivery Group, which represents rail operators and Network Rail, said passengers and taxpayers had benefited from the franchising system. He said: “Under franchising, the railway has gone from costing taxpayers £2bn a year in terms of day-to-day costs to now contributing £200m, money which helps to fund the major rail upgrades making journeys more comfortable and reliable.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/22/pm-urged-to-overhaul-flood-defence-funding-or-risk-catastrophe
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Environment
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2019-12-23T07:26:55.000Z
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Josh Halliday
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Boris Johnson urged to overhaul flood defence funding or risk ‘catastrophe’
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Boris Johnson must overhaul the system for deciding where flood-defence funding is spent and launch an emergency response unit to prevent a repeat of the “catastrophic” damage caused by the November floods, leading politicians have said.
Nearly 100 flood warnings were in place across much of England on Sunday, hampering the Christmas getaway, with towns and villages deluged in Kent and East Sussex.
Dan Jarvis, the elected mayor of the Sheffield city region, called on the government to establish a “Cobra for the north” that would be chaired by a cabinet minister and kick into action as soon as floods hit the region.
He said the prime minister had privately agreed to help convene a dedicated emergency response group to react more quickly to widespread flooding after he was criticised for his slow response to the devastation.
Jarvis said the emergency unit should be chaired by Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary, and bring together local and national government agencies for a detailed postmortem of the floods that affected more than 4,200 homes across South Yorkshire and hundreds more in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire.
Simon Greaves, the Labour leader of Bassetlaw council, where nearly 200 homes were badly damaged, said: “It would be a scandal if the government response to this crisis is simply devoted to a mopping-up exercise and a grant here and a grant there when actually there are people’s homes that need to be saved from flooding in the future.
“There will be a need for multimillion-pound investment for flood defences without any doubt if we’re going to avoid a catastrophe of the same scale.”
The Environment Agency put 88 flood warnings in place stretching from Middlesbrough down to the south coast on Sunday. There are a further 227 flooding alerts in place, meaning there is a risk of flash flooding and standing water.
About 90 properties have been flooded: about 60 in the south-east and about 30 in Devon and Cornwall, the agency said.
In interviews with the Guardian nearly two months on from the floods, political leaders and officials in many of the worst-affected areas said they were dismayed at the government’s slow response to the crisis and that there had been no high-level discussion about how it could be prevented in future.
Council officials are calculating the cost of the damage but the final bill is expected to run into millions of pounds, with vital infrastructure including roads, bridges and power plants affected when a month’s worth of rain fell in 24 hours in large parts of northern England.
Jarvis suggested there were problems with Flood Re, the government-backed scheme set up in the aftermath of 2015’s Storm Desmond to provide insurance for domestic properties deemed at significant risk of flooding. “I don’t think this scheme has worked,” he said, suggesting that central government had a “moral duty” to help those unable to get insurance.
Jarvis also said he wanted the Environment Agency to carry out a review of what happened in the Don valley, to work out “whether upgrades to flood defences in Sheffield had a knock-on effect downstream. People have suggested that was the case but no one knows for certain.”
He added: “What I want to know is where do we need to strengthen these defences? Otherwise it will happen again. It will require significant investment, but it is a vital piece of work.”
The agency has said an average of £1bn a year will need to be invested in flood defences as well as a wider programme making all infrastructure flood resilient by 2050.
The Conservative party pledged in its manifesto to spend £4bn over the next five years on a new flood defence programme, a commitment repeated in the Queen’s speech on 19 December.
Greaves called for an overhaul of the system for allocating taxpayers’ money to flood defence schemes, which experts have said favour wealthier areas at the expense of the less well-off.
To secure funding, a flood prevention scheme has to demonstrate that it delivers more in benefits than it costs to implement and maintain. It does this by calculating the economic losses that would be avoided by protecting property and infrastructure – tilting the system in favour of more expensive property and wealthier areas.
Greaves said the system was “rigged against” places such as Worksop in Nottinghamshire, whose entire high street and surrounding homes were deluged when the River Ryton burst its banks last month. He added: “If the status quo is allowed to remain and no intervention is made this will happen again. This crisis cannot be forgotten.”
Sir Stephen Houghton, the Labour leader of Barnsley council, said ministers needed to draw up an action plan that would provide long-term support to flood-threatened regions before the next deluge.
He said there needed to be a review of whether agricultural practices upstream, such as the burning of heather moorland and removal of peat, were causing rainwater to rush downstream and rivers to burst their banks in residential areas.
Nearly 200 properties were affected by flooding in Barnsley last month, 164 of which were residential. It was the third time in 12 years that flood water has swept through the borough.
He said: “We’ve had three serious floods in the last 12 years – it’s not a one-off. It’s going to happen again.”
A spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “Recent flooding in Yorkshire had terrible consequences for people and businesses. This is why we are investing record amounts to help protect communities across the nation from the threat of flooding, using both natural flood management techniques and traditional defences.
“We spend money where it is needed most – with similar funding heading to high-risk areas across both the north and south of England.”
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