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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/26/teenagers-have-taken-up-smoking-in-droves-and-forgotten-the-lessons-of-the-past | Opinion | 2021-08-26T09:28:41.000Z | Zoe Williams | Teenagers have taken up smoking in droves – and forgotten the lessons of the past | Zoe Williams | We are as far away from 1980 now as we were then from 1939. I know that because I read it on the internet. I didn’t check it, because why would they put it there if it wasn’t true? Yet at the same time, it is patently absurd; more than ridiculous, mad. In 1980, the late 30s were pure history, and all we could remember about the humans in them was the way they crowded around radios and drank cocktails containing tiny pickled onions. The early 80s, by contrast, were effectively yesterday, and we can all remember them with pin-sharp clarity.
At least, I can: the evidence keeps reminding me that young people can’t remember the era at all.
Item one: over half a million 18- to 34-year-olds took up smoking over the past year, as a way to “combat stress”. Any person of experience could tell them that there is nothing more stressful than an old-fashioned nicotine habit. It bends dimensions, the amount of sheer hassle a love of cigarettes will bring; and it will be love: nobody who ever smoked liked fags a modest amount. Minute to minute, you’re wondering when you can next have one, and where you left them. Day to day, they cost a thousand pounds each and you feel like a fool. Week to week, your still small voice of calm is reminding you of all the times you’ve had a choice between a cigarette and a meaningful interaction, and haven’t even had to think about it. Month to month, you’re stifled under the weight of knowledge that you have to give up, because what kind of an idiot does it for ever? But I can say all that to Generation Z, and then Pinterest can show them a picture of Madonna circa 1984, in black lace gloves as though she’s accessorising as an act of homage to the cigarette she’s always holding, and it’s pretty open and shut who comes across as the least stressed.
Item two: it has come to my attention that the young – well, my kids – think this washout summer is like the kind I remember from an age before festivals, when a seasonal wardrobe meant more cheerfully coloured wellies, and if you had a tan it meant you were Spanish. Our rain was nothing like today’s. It was the kind of drizzle you wouldn’t even bother sheltering from: you’d just keep sitting outside wondering whether the quiche would survive. It was cloud cover that just nudged its way across the sky whenever you tried to take a photograph, which was once every three months. We had a lucky dip in June, when we might get three days of sun but they had to be Tuesdays. We didn’t have monsoon season.
Item three: some people – on this occasion, definitely not my kids – seem to think that we were all much more profound when we didn’t have the internet. They will acknowledge that we didn’t know anything, because you had to go to a library to look things up, which is the same as knowing nothing; but they’re under the impression that, without trivial distraction, we were on a constant journey of discovery through complex thought or the natural world. That’s not how I remember it at all. Early childhood was all baking crisp packets to see if they would shrink so you could turn them into a badge; adolescence was all inhaling everyday household sprays to see if they would make you high. It was, in many ways, like a live-action version of the internet – plough a large amount of time into an activity that, even if it works, is still dumb – and no more meaningful for that.
This is how it must have felt trying to persuade kids that world wars aren’t cool. Adults could say what they liked about bloodshed and terror; all we could see was a load of sailors kissing nurses in Times Square, who looked as if they were really enjoying themselves. What could be cooler than that? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/14/uber-taxi-service-banned-berlin-safety-grounds | Technology | 2014-08-14T13:58:37.000Z | Philip Oltermann | Uber taxi service banned in Berlin on safety grounds | Berlin has voted to ban Uber on safety grounds as the app-enabled taxi service continues to run up against resistance in Germany.
Officials said the Californian company, which operates in 110 cities around the world, did not do enough to protect its passengers from unlicensed drivers. A senate statement said Uber – already banned in Hamburg – also failed to provide adequate insurance for its drivers or their passengers in accidents.
The Berlin ruling states: "Uber is from now on no longer allowed to use a smartphone app or similar application, or offer services via this app which are in breach of the Public Transport Act."
Uber said it would appeal against the ban, saying the senate's decision was "anything but progressive", and it was "seeking to limit consumer choice for all the wrong reasons".
Uber claims that it does not operate a taxi service, but merely offers a platform that mediates between drivers and customers.
Uber could be fined up to €25,000 (£20,000) if it ignores the ban. A Hamburg court last month lifted the ban pending a final decision. Uber's general manager, Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, told Handelsblatt newspaper on Thursday that he expected a similar decision in Berlin.
The Berlin ban follows Europe-wide protests by taxi drivers in June. In its statement, the Berlin senate said the "protection of the taxi industry" was one of the factors it had taken into consideration.
The Association of Berlin Taxi Drivers welcomed the decision in a statement on its website. "As taxi drivers, we have to meet a series of rules and commitments," said its chairman, Richard Leipold. "With its decision the senate has clarified that these apply to every player on the market, even digital competitors." Leipold said he hoped other cities would follow Berlin's lead. An interim injunction against Uber has been in place in Berlin since April, after a small taxi provider took legal action against the US company. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/may/22/league-one-fans-24-clubs-review-season | Football | 2017-05-22T10:42:37.000Z | Guardian readers | League One: fans from all 24 clubs review their season | (C) Sheffield United, 1st
After several years in the League One doldrums and a dismal finish under Nigel Adkins last season hopes weren’t too high when Chris Wilder was appointed as the new manager last May. The start of the season led us to believe that we would be in a relegation battle, as we sat at the bottom of the table after four games.
Well, we were wrong. Very wrong. The Blades started winning and they won a lot. Up the table we climbed, playing attractive football. Wilder changed to a 3-5-2 formation long before Antonio Conte did at Chelsea. Buoyed by excellent support home and away, we roared to the title. Wilder has rejuvenated Sheffield United in style. Here’s to next season in the Championship. Don’t be surprised to see the Blades in the top half of the table. Shorehamview
Sheffield United manager Chris Wilder and his players with the League One trophy. Photograph: Craig Brough/Reuters
(P) Bolton Wanderers, 2nd
In light of having a transfer embargo, having to integrate loan signings and free transfer players, and not having a proven goalscorer in the squad, we exceeded expectations. Manager Phil Parkinson has had a calming influence on the team, but now needs to prove he’s capable of managing at Championship level. The financial situation needs to be further stabilised and the club sold to wealthy but credible owners. Martin
Bolton manager Phil Parkinson celebrates winning promotion with club mascot Lofty. Photograph: Barrington Coombs/PA
Scunthorpe United, 3rd
Adam le Fondre seals Bolton’s win over Peterborough to secure promotion
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This went as well as can be expected realistically. I don’t begrudge Millwall their victory in the play-off semi-finals. We looked all tuckered out during the two legs and didn’t deserve it after our disappointing second half to the season. But our front three of Paddy Madden, Josh Morris and Ivan Toney were outstanding and scored some goals that were worthy of the Premier League.
Local legend Graham Alexander brought with him plenty of positivity and the ability to get the most out of a small squad. Josh Morris’s goals early in the season were vital in putting us top for several weeks, as was an unexpected solidity in our often shaky defence. I’m guessing we’ll struggle to hold onto Morris, and perhaps Madden, during the window. But we’re a small club with a tiny squad from an unglamorous and struggling town. If you offered me anything in the top half of League One I’d be happy. BB
Scunthorpe’s Craig Davies looks dejected after play-off semi final defeat, but there were plenty of positive for the club this season. Photograph: John Clifton/Reuters
Fleetwood, 4th
There were some terrific wins for Fleetwood this season, but unfortunately they couldn’t find one when it mattered against Bradford in the play-off semi-finals, despite running them close. To finish fourth on a shoestring budget shows how much of a miracle Uwe Rosler worked this term. He definitely had a point to prove after poor managerial experiences at both Wigan and Leeds. He must surely be offered an improved contract for next season. We’ve come so close to getting to the Championship, it would be such a shame to have to tear it all up again now. Ben
Bradford City, 5th
Finishing the job at Wembley against Millwall would have been the perfect end to the season, but alas we fell just short on the day. The season overall has to go down as one of the best for a long long time though. Stuart McCall, arguably the club’s greatest ever player, returned and revolutionised our style of play.
While he has been successful in moving on from the soporific style of Phil Parkinson, we still have an underlying issue of not converting the abundance of chances we create. That was the case on Saturday too. McCall has kept faith with the foundations of the team, while another Bantam legend, Greg Abbot, has recruited astutely. I’m confident we’re on the right track and will be in a good position to give it another go in August. Michael Brett
Bradford City fans enjoying the Fleetwood sun after their play-off final against Millwall is confirmed. Photograph: David Blunsden/Action Plus via Getty Images
(P) Millwall, 6th
Steve Morison fires Millwall past Bradford and into the Championship
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A good campaign turned into a fantastic one for us when we beat Bradford in our second consecutive play-off final. I was there to watch Steve Morison smash home our late winner. The hurt of last year’s 3-1 defeat to Barnsley is finally a thing of the past. We also had a great FA Cup run where we eliminated three Premier League sides at the Den, including Leicester, the champions of England. The FA Cup hindered our league form. If we’d been knocked out earlier on, I think we’d have been in contention for the second automatic position place. We have quite a small, tight-knit group and only managed to sneak into the play-offs on the final day. But by beating Scunthorpe over two legs and standing firm against Bradford at Wembley, we deserve to take our place in the Championship next season.
Neil Harris has done a cracking job since taking over in 2015. He’s a club legend and the supporters will always be behind him. He’s one of us. The board need to back him now for a tough Championship campaign. We’ve been successful this season due to a very strong defence, going over 14 hours without conceding at one stage this season. Lee Gregory and Morison have a great partnership offensively and will always score goals at this level with the right service. We were desperate to be back in the second tier and I’m delighted we did it on Saturday! Dan Clarke
Southend United, 7th
The season overall was a success, despite the final-day heartbreak of Millwall nabbing the last play-off spot. Phil Brown has us playing attractive football while keeping us more defensively sound than last season. A common problem this season was the conceding of silly late goals, notably against Sheffield United. Had that goal not gone in, we would have been in the play-offs.
This team is willing but would not survive the brutal slog of a Championship season. Signings along the spine of the team are vital. We need to bring in an able and willing centre-back to partner Anton Ferdinand and another striker to make another promotion push. Alexander Gowing
Southend United manager Phil Brown came close to securing a play-off place for his side this season. Photograph: Tony O'Brien/Reuters
Oxford United, 8th
Having been newly promoted at the start of the season, the club has learned a lot from their first year in back in League One and have ultimately held their own. The cup runs were decent again but, had we taken more points against the teams we went up with from League Two last year, we could have finished even higher than eighth. We have a chairman and manager who appear to trust each other and are taking the club forwards. Hopefully we will buy the stadium in the near future too. Jon
Oxford United are on the way up under Michael Appleton. Photograph: Felix Clay/The Guardian
Rochdale (9th)
The Football League play-offs at 30: a quick fix that survived and thrived
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With just one defeat in April, we were seriously pushing for a play-off place, but ultimately we left ourselves with too much to do. It could have been different had we not drawn three of those last seven games, but I’m still happy with the progress made this season. Keith Hill is still doing a great job for us. Consistency has been the key and Hill has been given time to gradually get us better and better. A play-off place was so near yet still so far after this season and, although we’re making steady League One progress, dreams of Championship football are still of the pipe variety. Scott
Bristol Rovers, 10th
This was a good solid season after two back-to-back promotions. We consolidated a League One position comfortably. There was even a possibility of a play-off place, but it fell away towards the end of the season. Tenth is a good base for a promotion push next season. The owners have a coherent vision for the club and back an ambitious manager who is unwilling to let the club stand still. We have to kick on next season. Colin Favour
Peterborough United, 11th
We went into the season with high expectations, mostly from our ambitious chairman, but insipid performances, bemusing managerial decisions and overall poor consistency meant that we finished the season with little improvement from the season prior. I believe most of our players seem to use Peterborough as a stepping stone for their career. There was a huge lack of cohesion and camaraderie within the squad for the predominance of the season. This was clear to see from the terraces as many performances, especially at London Road, were uninspiring affairs with us more often than not either losing, playing out a cagey draw, or recording an unconvincing and scrappy victory.
We need to invest in experienced players who have the drive and passion to succeed and bring the passion back to London Road that we have lacked in the last few seasons. Attendances are dropping and people are starting to lose interest. One more mediocre season and I feel that we will be considered a fully established League One club which, for a club who still has reasonably recent Championship pedigree, is not a good thing. Jack Toulson
MK Dons, 12th
Woeful until Christmas, considerably less woeful after Christmas. In fact a good enough second half of the season to leave me quietly optimistic for 2017/18. With all due respect to Rotherham, Wigan and Blackburn there is no temporarily embarrassed big club coming down who will go on to waltz the division.
Calling time on Karl Robinson’s time made the difference. The abject collapse in the Championship was disappointing but maybe understandable, but to do the same in the first dozen games in League One meant it was time for him to go. Robbie Nielsen has got a much better set of results and performances from basically the same players. Pikeman
Charlton Athletic, 13th
We were supposed to get promoted according to the board, but with our “top six budget” we finished 13th. And it could have been far worse. We lost to such footballing titans (no disrespect intended) as Shrewsbury, Bury, Oldham, Northampton and Oxford. We averaged crowds of 6,000 in a 27,000-seater stadium. All the while being run into the ground by Roland Duchâtelet. Negative, boring football under Russell Slade followed by tactically inept performances under Karl Robinson. The protests were good though. Tom
Charlton fans protest. Photograph: TGSPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock
Walsall, 14th
At the start of the season, with the squad that only missed out on automatic promotion on the final day of last season decimated, we would have taken mid-table safety. It feels anti-climatic though. If the season were 38 games long, like in the Premier League, we’d have just missed out on the play-offs. That’s how badly we faded at the end and it cast a shadow over an otherwise stable season.
Jon Witney’s first full season as manager can’t be regarded as a failure, but he struggled to keep the players motivated at key times, particularly at the end of the season. Erhun Oztumer, the Turkish Messi, was a revelatory free transfer with spectacular goals galore. But more goals should have been delivered by Cypriot international Andreas Makris, the first player we paid a fee for in a decade. Daniel Jones
AFC Wimbledon, 15th
I’d have taken finishing 15th at the start of the season, especially after such a poor start. We looked like we could compete with the best teams in the league in some games, but were also completely outclassed in others. Highlights obviously include beating the franchise 2-0 and coming from 3-0 down to beat Curzon Ashton in the FA Cup. But crashing out of the FA Cup to Sutton, finishing below Milton Keynes and only scoring once in our last nine games leaves mixed emotions going into next year.
Manager Neal Ardley has given us stability, having kept the majority of the squad from last season and added some astute signings. The end of the season felt quite flat but there were some very good patches of form. Tom Elliott has had a brilliant season and Jake Reeves could easily be a Championship player. We need to hold on to players with that type of ability. Callum
Dom Poleon looks dejected after missing a chance to score for AFC Wimbledon. Photograph: Henry Browne/Reuters
Northampton Town, 16th
Losing League Two-winning manager Chris Wilder and key players over the summer was a big blow. New manager Rob Page was unable to replicate the team spirit and winning mentality of the side. We were in the top five after a positive start but results began to unravel in October and November, and they never really picked up, which culminated in Page being dismissed in early January.
This is a pivotal time in Justin Edinburgh’s managerial career. Recruitment is absolutely key. If he gets it right, he could take himself and the team to the next level. If not, he’ll be gone around Christmas with his reputation damaged, irrevocably perhaps, and we’ll be fighting against relegation again. Party Horse
Oldham Athletic, 17th
Thanks to the resurgence under John Sheridan in the last few months of the season, we’ve kept our heads above water yet again. He brought stability to the club, galvanising the players. Losing just two games of our last 10 was a success. But overall it’s the same old story of lack of funds, players who never seem to have a desire to play unless they are almost past the point of rescue, and generally an atmosphere-free stadium. No doubt John Sheridan will be let go in October only to come back in early April to save us from the drop once more. I predict 20th next season, if we’re lucky. Patrick McKiernan
Boundary Park, home of Oldham Athletic. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for The Guar/Christopher Thomond
Shrewsbury, 18th
Having flirted with relegation in the 2015-16 season, it was really disappointing to have another backs-to-the-wall campaign this year. It started very badly with Micky Mellon, who jumped ship to managed in the National League with Tranmere when we were rock bottom, and it was up to Paul Hurst and Chris Doig to pick up the pieces. Which they did to an extent. My only hope for next season is not to suffer another nail biting relegation threatened campaign. Mid-table mediocrity would do just fine. Daniel
Bury, 19th
Survival was achieved despite defeat on the final day, but it was a depressing season; three permanent managers, over 30 players, the usual rolling cast of goalkeepers and wages wasted on players who have had their day (bye bye, Jermaine Pennant!) Any club that loses 12 consecutive league games can count itself lucky to stay up, and we certainly do.
Last summer’s recruitment was disastrous. Painfully short at the back, and overpaid striker Ishmael Miller only managed three league appearances. Call me Ishmael? No thanks. Lee Clark arrived in February and immediately went to five at the back. We defended infinitely better, while continuing to rely on James Vaughan at the other end. 24 league goals is a serious return for a team finishing 19th in the league. Without him we would clearly have been relegated with room to spare. Darrien
Gillingham, 20th
After last season, when we missed the play-offs on the last day, I was fairly optimistic. Instead we’ve gone back to square one. Our appalling away form, managerial changes and our star player going off the boil resulted in a season that started badly and ended with us staying in League One because other teams were even worse than us.
Our big summer transfer was Paul Konchesky. After 34 appearances for QPR last season, it was considered he’d be a marked improvement in defence. The fact that he dropped four levels to Billericay Town says everything about our summer recruitment. If 17th place was bad enough for Justin Edinburgh to be sacked, then 20th place should be curtains for Ady Pennock. David
(R) Port Vale, 21st
It looked bad in pre-season when the chairman forced out Rob Page and a progressively good team of professionals was pushed aside for Bruno Ribeiro and a group of unproven European players seemingly picked at random from an agent catalogue. Even when early signs seemed promising to outsiders, when we were in the play-offs until November, nobody watching Port Vale week in week out was surprised when the wheels fell off. The quality on display was well below expectations.
Chairman Norman Smurfwaite decided to gamble stability on his foreign legion plan, and it has backfired. Players like Paolo Tavares are on big money two year contracts despite performances suggesting that even League Two will be too much for him. Smurfwaite needs to sell the club. Vale will only make money if someone can bankroll us back to the second tier. The stadium and infrastructure are big enough to sustain such football, with a profitable reward for such an investor. League 2 football will just see us accumulate ever more debt from dwindling crowds. Tom Hughes
(R) Swindon Town, 22nd
Hello League Two, it’s not been long enough! But the writing was on the wall from mid-November and, despite a raft of loan signings in the window, the inevitable happened in the penultimate game of the season. We have a chairman more concerned with finances than results. There’s a strained relationship between the club and local media. We have a manager who is actually no more than a coach. And then there’s Tim Sherwood... Shaun Crowe
(R) Coventry City, 23rd
Aside from one day in the sun at Wembley, it has been horrendous. We didn’t win a league game until 1 October, which turned out to be our first and last away league victory. We were on our second manager of the season by then. We broke many club records, but the most depressing is that none of our four managers managed to get their side to score three in a league match.
Tony Mowbray had a pathetic transfer window last summer. Russell Slade didn’t know which players to pick and in which system to play them and ended up using the January transfer window as badly as Mowbray used the summer one. Our inept owners are preventing many from focusing on the football. When I first got a season ticket, Coventry were a Premier League club. Now I support a fourth-tier club, mainly because of 20 years of horrific mismanagement. Paul Knowles
Anger in Coventry. Photograph: TGSPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock
(R) Chesterfield, 24th
This has been a total shambles of a season. Rock bottom of the table, courted controversy by signing Ched Evans, and even he could not save an underperforming squad of zero quality. Boss Danny Wilson had no funds to improve and was sacked prematurely. He was replaced by Gary Caldwell, who had no new ideas and no budget.
Owner Dave Allen has pulled the plug after slowly selling off the superb players Paul Cook built into a quality side. Despite the sales, the club is still in massive debt. On top of that, our director of football, Chris Turner, had the PR skills of David Brent and the directors don’t seem overly bothered. This season we’ve seen a fake raffle winner announced and local pie suppliers Jacksons having their contract terminated to save cash. James | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/31/the-hand-is-left-to-do-the-heavy-lifting-while-maybot-reboots | Politics | 2017-05-31T20:42:10.000Z | John Crace | The Hand is left to do the heavy lifting while Maybot reboots | John Crace | Speak to the Hand. AKA the home secretary. The Maybot was clear that there was a reason she wasn’t taking part in the BBC leaders’ debate.
She was above it all and was choosing to take part in her own Supreme Leaders’ debate instead. Just her and her very own echo chamber reverberating with deathless soundbites.
It was an explanation that hadn’t gone down particularly well at the Bath engineering factory she had visited before settling down to put her feet up to watch Amber Rudd do the heavy lifting.
Having stood through several minutes of the Supreme Leader trying to think of arguments why anyone should vote for her in an alienated stupor, the staff only started applauding when the media asked if the real reason she was ducking the debate was because she was afraid voters would get to see how truly mediocre and uninspiring she really was.
Party leaders clash in TV election debate – video highlights Guardian
The Supreme Leader tried laughing as her minders had programmed her to do, but the only noise that came out was a rusty croak.
“I’m interested that Corbyn is interested in the number of TV appearances he is making,” she said, a reply that left everyone confused.
The Maybot usually deals either in tautology or non-sequitur, but this time her system had crashed completely and she had managed both at the same time. To no obvious advantage.
When pressed to clarify what she meant by this, the Supreme Leader did a quick reboot. The Labour leader ought to be spending less of his time concentrating on his telly appearances and more on the upcoming Brexit negotiations.
“That’s what I’m doing,” she insisted to a wall of TV cameras, momentarily forgetting that it was she who had called the general election 11 days before the Brexit negotiations began. Easily done.
The BBC’s Mishal Husain got the debate under way by inviting the five party leaders, along with the SNP’s deputy leader, Angus Robertson, and the Hand, to make their opening remarks.
“Who do you want to lead this country on 8 June?” asked the Hand, clearly expecting the answer to be someone who couldn’t even be bothered to turn up.
Tim Farron was worried the Supreme Leader might be spending the evening peeking through people’s windows. He needn’t have been. She was safely tucked up at home working on the Brexit plan that someone had inconveniently interrupted.
Thereafter the debate largely became open pack warfare on the Hand, with every other leader, apart from Ukip’s Paul Nuttall from time to time – with friends like these etc – stepping in to point out that the Tories actually had a piss-poor record on everything from living standards to immigration and social care.
Even the audience was against her, cheering on Corbyn, Farron, Robertson and Caroline Lucas as they ripped into her. The BBC said the audience had been selected to be representative. If so, expect a Labour landslide next week.
At which point, the Hand morphed into the Handbot. A hand stuck on repeat.
“Jeremy thinks he has a magic money tree,” she said three times, hoping that at least one of the barbs would stick. It didn’t. In desperation she again appealed to everyone to vote for the Supreme Leader who wasn’t there.
Even so, the Handbot was probably making a better case for the Supreme Leader than the Supreme Leader could have made for herself.
The Handbot’s trickiest moment came with the last question on leadership, as all the other participants predictably chose to point out that one of the things that most defines a leader is the willingness to show up in person and defend your policies.
“Part of being a strong leader is having a good team around you,” the Handbot said gamely before giving up the unequal battle. Hell, if she was going to stand in for the Supreme Leader, why shouldn’t she get the credit?
“Have you not read my manifesto?” the Handbot announced imperiously. It sounded very much as if a palace coup had just been declared.
The Supreme Leader is dead. Long live the Supreme Leader. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/sep/15/movies-about-movies-ranked | Film | 2022-09-15T12:05:01.000Z | Anne Billson | Movies about movies – ranked! | 20. Shadow of the Vampire (2000)
What if Max Schreck, star of FW Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu, really had been a vampire? It’s an irresistible premise, and Willem Dafoe is poignant, repulsive and hilarious as the actor who works only at night – but the film-makers blot their copybook by depicting Murnau, film-making genius, as a talentless hack.
John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe as FW Murnau and Max Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire. Photograph: Saturn Films/BBC Films/Allstar
19. The Stunt Man (1980)
A fugitive Vietnam war veteran blunders on to a film set, accidentally kills a stuntman and is blackmailed by the megalomaniac director (Peter O’Toole) into taking the dead man’s place. Richard Rush’s clever dramedy pioneers the sort of reality-bending scenario that would become all the rage 20 years later.
18. Two Weeks in Another Town (1962)
A washed-up American star (Kirk Douglas) gets a shot at redemption on a movie being shot at Cinecittà studios outside Rome in Vincente Minnelli’s splendidly overripe melodrama. Highlights include Douglas behaving badly in nightclubs and an intense drunk-driving scene with Cyd Charisse screaming in the passenger seat of his Maserati.
17. Through the Olive Trees (1994)
Abbas Kiarostami’s account of a film crew shooting a movie in an earthquake-torn Iranian village is a low-key charmer. There’s plenty of gentle humour as a stonemason turned actor fails to woo his leading lady, while the non-professional performers keep objecting to dialogue that doesn’t tally with their own life experiences.
16. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (2019)
When it’s not riffing on the Manson murders, Quentin Tarantino’s love letter to 1960s Hollywood hangs out with has-been action star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double (Brad Pitt), or watches Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) watching herself on screen. Loses points for its disrespectful portrayal of Bruce Lee.
15. Bowfinger (1999)
Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy in Bowfinger. Photograph: Universal/Allstar
Steve Martin plays a grade-z film-maker shooting a science fiction movie around a paranoid action star (Eddie Murphy) who doesn’t know he is being filmed, and assumes the bizarre events around him are an alien conspiracy. Murphy also plays a goofy lookalike tricked into running across a busy freeway. Comedy gold!
14. The Player (1992)
After years out of the mainstream, Robert Altman made a comeback with Michael Tolkin’s adaptation of his own novel about a studio executive (Tim Robbins) who murders a screenwriter. But forget the plot, and get a load of the star cameos and in-jokes in a lively deconstruction of Hollywood cliches.
13. The Big Picture (1989)
Jennifer Jason Leigh and Kevin Bacon in The Big Picture. Photograph: Aspen Film Society/Allstar
Christopher Guest’s directing debut was this delightful satire about an idealistic film graduate (Kevin Bacon) whose cherished Bergman-esque project is transformed by Hollywood into a crass teen pic. With super support from Jennifer Jason Leigh as a fellow graduate, and Martin Short in a tour de force cameo as Bacon’s agent.
12. Dolemite Is My Name (2019)
Eddie Murphy skilfully underplays his portrayal of 70s standup comedian, proto-rapper and blaxploitation star Rudy Ray Moore, whose talent for self-promotion trumps his acting and kung fu abilities. It’s like a reworking of Ed Wood, if only Wood’s films had been box-office smashes. Wesley Snipes provides unexpectedly hilarious support.
11. Millennium Actress (2001)
A documentarian interviews a reclusive film star (loosely based on Setsuko Hara) in Satoshi Kon’s exquisite anime. As her memories weave in and out of reality, we revisit the history of 20th-century Japan through its film sets, amid homages to directors such as Yasujirō Ozu and Akira Kurosawa.
10. Hail, Caesar! (2016)
“Would that it were so simple!” The Coen brothers parlay their love for classic cinema into a day in the life of a studio “fixer” (Josh Brolin) who must deal with missing or miscast actors and inconvenient pregnancies to keep the 50s Hollywood dream factory running smoothly. It’s send-up and tribute, and Channing Tatum’s musical number is a knockout.
9. Contempt (1963)
A playwright (Michel Piccoli in a Dean Martin hat) travels to Capri to rewrite the Odyssey for the director Fritz Lang (playing himself), but his self-esteem is undermined when his wife (Brigitte Bardot) takes up with the producer (Jack Palance). Jean-Luc Godard’s iciest, most beautiful film is structured around a credibly disintegrating relationship, with a haunting score by Georges Delerue.
Steve Buscemi and James LeGros in Living in Oblivion. Photograph: Columbia/Allstar
8. Living in Oblivion (1995)
Steve Buscemi plays a director for whom everything goes wrong on the set of his arty-farty New York film in Tom DiCillo’s delicious ode to indie film-making: intrusive microphones, exploding lamps, rebellious actors of small stature. James LeGros is priceless as the self-obsessed leading man, whom DiCillo denies was modelled on the star of his directing debut – Brad Pitt.
7. One Cut of the Dead (2017)
Shin’ichirô Ueda’s comedy, which took 1,000 times its microbudget at the box office, begins with cast and crew of a zombie pic attacked by real zombies, all shot in a single take. A flashback to the project’s origins is only mildly interesting, but stick with it for a third act that unfurls into a glorious celebration of bargain-basement film-making.
6. Ed Wood (1994)
Tim Burton’s heartfelt biopic stars Johnny Depp as the man once dubbed the “worst director of all time” – unfairly so, since Wood’s low-budget monster movies are still entertaining audiences 60 years later. It’s a funny, bittersweet study of film-making turning a bunch of misfits into an alternative family, with an Oscar-winning performance from Martin Landau as washed-up horror star Bela Lugosi.
5. Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
Joel McCrea plays a director of slapstick comedies who gets more than he bargained for when he poses as a hobo to research human suffering for a serious drama. Preston Sturges dips into some very dark places as he asks: “Why make social realism when you can make people laugh?” but his own film is a masterclass in fusing comedy and tragedy.
Lana Turner and Kirk Douglas in The Bad and the Beautiful. Photograph: MGM/Allstar
4. The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
Kirk Douglas plays an Oscar-winning producer whose planned comeback hits the skids when former collaborators refuse to work with him. Vincente Minnelli’s irresistible slice of Hollywood-on-Hollywood shows us the reasons why in flashbacks, featuring Dick Powell as The Writer, Barry Sullivan as The Director, and Lana Turner as The Actress who has a world-class hysterical fit in ballgown and furs.
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3. Day for Night (1973)
François Truffaut plays the beleaguered director of a ropey romantic drama being filmed in the south of France in his own semi-autobiographical billet doux to the cinema and the people who make it. Recalcitrant kittens, luvvie tantrums and forgetful divas are just some of the problems brought to episodic life by a star-studded cast led by Jacqueline Bisset and Jean-Pierre Léaud.
2. Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Donald O’Connor and Gene Kelly as Cosmo Brown and Don Lockwood in Singin’ in the Rain. Photograph: MGM/Allstar
Stanley Donen’s evergreen Hollywood musical is set during the switchover from silents to talking pictures. Gene Kelly (who co-directed) plays a film star smitten by the ingenue (Debbie Reynolds) hired to dub his co-star’s annoying voice. Donald O’Connor runs up the wall in Make ’em Laugh, Cyd Charisse shows her endless legs, and Kelly performs the splashiest dance in cinema history.
1. 8½ (1963)
Marcello Mastroianni plays a director who doesn’t have a clue what his next film is about, though his producers have already built him a giant rocket ship set. Federico Fellini stirs dreams, memories and European cinema’s most fabulous women into the ultimate blueprint for auteurs itching to put their own lives up on screen. Many have copied, but no one has done it quite as beautifully. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/feb/04/william-gaskill-former-artistic-director-of-the-royal-court-dies-aged-85 | Stage | 2016-02-04T15:22:14.000Z | Chris Wiegand | William Gaskill, former artistic director of the Royal Court, dies aged 85 | William Gaskill, the theatre director and former artistic director of the Royal Court in London, has died at the age of 85. A leading force in theatre from the late 1950s onwards, greatly acclaimed for his stagings of Brecht, Gaskill was perhaps best known for directing Edward Bond’s Saved at the Royal Court in 1965.
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The play, with its controversial scene in which a baby is stoned to death, fell foul of the Lord Chamberlain’s office so was presented as a private performance by the Royal Court, which led to a prosecution. The episode played a key part in the eventual abolition of censorship in the theatre in 1968.
Among the new writers that Gaskill worked with at the Royal Court were John Arden, Arnold Wesker and Ann Jellicoe. He described them as “all in some way experimenting with language or dramatic form or staging”.
Born in Shipley, West Yorkshire, Gaskill began directing while he was a student at Hertford College, Oxford. He arrived at the Royal Court as a director in 1957, a year after the theatre had become the home of the English Stage Company. He made his debut there directing NF Simpson’s offbeat comedy A Resounding Tinkle. Gaskill’s 1958 Court production of Epitaph for George Dillon, written by John Osborne and Anthony Creighton, transferred to Broadway.
In 1963 he directed Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith and Derek Jacobi in George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, one of the first plays in the opening season of Olivier’s new National Theatre company based at the Old Vic. The production shook up contemporary attitudes towards restoration comedy.
William Gaskill during Rehearsals for Saved at the Royal Court. Photograph: ANL/Rex/Shutterstock
Gaskill succeeded George Devine as artistic director at the Royal Court in 1965. The following year he staged Christopher Hampton’s debut play, When Did You Last See My Mother? – which transferred to the West End – and directed Alec Guinness and Simone Signoret in Macbeth. As well as Saved, he staged Bond’s The Sea, Lear and Early Morning at the Royal Court.
Gaskill left the Royal Court in 1972 and two years later co-founded Joint Stock theatre company with Max Stafford-Clark. The pair of them co-directed Fanshen by David Hare – derived from William Hinton’s classic book about the Chinese revolution – and The Speakers, based on Heathcote Williams’s documentary novel about Hyde Park orators. Gaskill’s later productions included an adaptation of several Raymond Carver short stories at the Arcola theatre in London.
Bruce Alexander, Rosemary McHale, Melisande Cook and Mark Carroll in Carver at the Arcola, directed by William Gaskill in 2005. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
The Guardian’s Michael Billington called Gaskill “a fighter who always stayed loyal to the writers in whom he passionately believed”. The playwright and director Peter Gill spoke of his “iconoclastic quality” and said that Gaskill “really did think that the writer was the teacher”. Gill said that Gaskill was one of the four key directors working under the management of the English Stage Company’s artistic director George Devine, who “altered the British theatre”. “There was Tony Richardson, John Dexter, Lindsay Anderson and Bill. They were a very curious mob and very different. Tony was this astonishingly gifted entrepreneur whose energy started it all off. Dexter was a consummate theatrical craftsman and Lindsay was, in one form, a sort of poetic director. Bill was more intellectually adventurous perhaps.”
Gill highlighted the “amazing” Epitaph for George Dillon, which starred Robert Stephens who was understudied by Harold Pinter when the play transferred to the West End. “He also did the most wonderful Three Sisters with Marianne Faithfull as Irina and Glenda Jackson as Masha. He did a production of Cymbeline with Vanessa Redgrave at Stratford that was sort of voluptuous in its lucidity … And his Richard III [with Christopher Plummer and Edith Evans] was very striking.”
Vicky Featherstone, the Royal Court’s current artistic director, described Gaskill as a “brilliant, uncompromising theatre director, and a legendary figure as artistic director of the Royal Court in the 1960s. He championed the work of Edward Bond and he won the battle against theatre censorship. He will be sorely missed.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/30/sundance-2018-film-festival-what-did-we-learn | Film | 2018-01-30T19:50:43.000Z | Amy Nicholson | Sundance 2018: what did we learn from this year's festival? | Every January, the Sundance film festival feels like fresh start to the year. It’s Hollywood’s resolution to find and celebrate the stories it hopes will define the next 12 months. After a rough stretch for the industry, Sundance attendees went hunting for optimism. They found it.
Sundance 2018: 'gay conversion' drama wins grand jury prize
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Here are the five big themes, and talents, that will shape the cinema landscape in 2018 – and beyond.
Consciousness matters
Garrett Hedlund and Usher, who star in Burden. Photograph: Tibrina Hobson/Getty Images
Since the first Sundance audience award was presented to sex, lies and videotape in 1989, the trophy has tended to go to fictional crowd-pleasers like Hustle & Flow, Spanking the Monkey and Love Jones. But for three straight years, audiences have been most moved by a film’s message. Like 2016’s Nat Turner slave rebellion drama The Birth of a Nation, and 2017’s Crown Heights, the true story of an unjustly incarcerated inmate, this year’s winner, Burden, is a real-life reenactment of racial struggle in America, here the retelling of an uneducated North Carolina man (Garrett Hedlund) trying to leave the Ku Klux Klan. A “Sundance film” used to mean a quirky dramedy. Clearly, audiences in Park City now think it should mean more.
The future is female
Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Kindergarten Teacher. Photograph: PR
In the same week Greta Gerwig became the fifth woman nominated for a best director Oscar, four female film-makers – The Kindergarten Teacher’s Sara Colangelo, On Her Shoulders’ Alexandria Bombach, And Breathe Normally’s Ísold Uggadóttir and Shirkers’ Sandi Tan – swept the Sundance jury’s four directing prizes. (And Nancy writer-director Christina Choe scooped up the Waldo Salt screenwriting award while the grand jury prize went to Desiree Akhavan’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post.)
The indie festival winners of today become the major voices of tomorrow. Expect to see this year’s victors, and the artists inspired by their success, to use their award-winning clout to reshape the future. Meanwhile, other films in the line-up from Laura Dern’s wrenching performance in The Tale to the teen-girls-with-guns midnight smash Assassination Nation, which sold for a staggering $10m, show that film-makers are redefining what it means to create a strong female character – plus Ophelia, new spin on Hamlet starring The Last Jedi’s Daisy Ridley, and Lizzie, a reframing of the axe murderess as an abused daughter who literally slays the patriarchy, insist there’s also more to tell about female characters we already know.
No one dominates indie’s next wave
Assassination Nation, one of the biggest purchases of the festival. Photograph: Sundance Film Festival
For the first time in three decades, Harvey Weinstein wasn’t at Sundance. His Miramax used to steer the Sundance brand before studio wings like Fox Searchlight decided to follow his model and outbid him, snatching up indie hits and potential Oscar winners. More recently, streaming services like Netflix and Amazon have been the biggest buyers at the fest, last year purchasing a combined 14 films. This year, Netflix bought one, and Amazon zero. All the former titans left their checkbooks at home – or in Weinstein’s case, didn’t dare show up at all. There’s a sudden power vacuum at the center of indie cinema, which means there’s room for a punchy, eccentric personality like 21-month-old Neon Films to acquire four flicks – thrillers Assassination Nation and Revenge, the police brutality drama Monsters and Men, and the quirky doc Three Identical Strangers – and a chance to steer this year’s conversation.
It’s time to take horror seriously
Last year, Jordan Peele’s $5m horror flick Get Out was simply the fun ticket Sundance-goers wanted to score. This year, it’s a quadruple Oscar nominee. Sundance’s midnight movie section has been building its reputation as the festival’s buzziest programming for the last several years, launching hits like The Babadook and It Follows, and accelerating the careers of future Marvel directors Taika Waititi and Jon Watts. The big ticket in 2018 was Ari Aster’s Hereditary, which stars Toni Collette as a grieving mother haunted in her own home. Collette gives an unhinged, terrifying performance that critics are calling one of her best – she literally climbs the walls. Before Get Out’s success, floating a low-budget horror performance as a major awards contender would have been a stretch. But Daniel Kaluuya is now a best actor nominee. And Collette, who’s yet to win a statuette herself, could chase after him.
Behold the next generation of superstars
Kiersey Clemons, whose performance in Hearts Beat Loud won her plaudits. Photograph: Taylor Jewell/Invision/AP
Another best actor Oscar nominee no one knew last year: Timothée Chalamet. In 12 months, the 22-year-old actor went from unknown kid in Call Me By Your Name to Gary Oldman’s biggest competition. Sundance is where film lovers get introduced to the next major stars. Besides Chalamet, last year the favorite face was Lakeith Stanfield, who acted in three features and one short while performing his own music at parties on Main Street. Yet, Stanfield’s lead role in Crown Heights didn’t make an impact outside the festival, and his supporting part in Get Out got overlooked amidst the film’s other acclaim.
This year, the prince-in-waiting of Sundance scored a wacky star part people can’t miss as a telemarketer who sells his soul in Boots Riley’s outstanding satire, Sorry to Bother You. It’s finally Stanfield’s opportunity to shine outside the confines of Park City. Other rising names to watch include Kiersey Clemons, who co-stars with Nick Offerman in the musical-comedy Hearts Beat Loud, Hamilton performer Daveed Diggs, whose buddy comedy Blindspotting opened the fest to glowing reviews, trans model Hari Nef, gifted the best zingers in Assassination Nation, and barn-storming Arkansas guitarist Benjamin Dickey, hand-picked by Ethan Hawke to play the lead in his country-rock biopic Blaze. Trust Hawke’s taste: he’s the king of Sundance, who’s been coming to the festival for 27 years – and he knows the future when he sees it. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/mar/04/animal-protein-diets-smoking-meat-eggs-dairy | Science | 2014-03-05T16:05:00.000Z | Ian Sample | Diets high in meat, eggs and dairy could be as harmful to health as smoking | A diet rich in meat, eggs, milk and cheese could be as harmful to health as smoking, according to a controversial study into the impact of protein consumption on longevity.
High levels of dietary animal protein in people under 65 years of age was linked to a fourfold increase in their risk of death from cancer or diabetes, and almost double the risk of dying from any cause over an 18-year period, researchers found. However, nutrition experts have cautioned that it's too early to draw firm conclusions from the research.
The overall harmful effects seen in the study were almost completely wiped out when the protein came from plant sources, such as beans and legumes, though cancer risk was still three times as high in middle-aged people who ate a protein-rich diet, compared with those on a low-protein diet.
But whereas middle-aged people who consumed a lot of animal protein tended to die younger from cancer, diabetes and other diseases, the same diet seemed to protect people's health in old age.
The findings emerged from a study of 6,381 people aged 50 and over who took part in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) which tracks a representative group of adults and children in the US.
The study throws doubt on the long-term health effects of the popular Atkins and Paleo diets that are rich in protein. Instead, it suggests people should eat a low-protein diet until old age when they start to lose weight and become frail, and then boost the body's protein intake to stay healthy. In the over-65s, a high-protein diet cut the risk of death from any cause by 28%, and reduced cancer deaths by 60%, according to details of the study published in the journal Cell Metabolism.
Valter Longo, director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, said that on the basis of the study and previous work, people should restrict themselves to no more than 0.8g of protein a day for every kilogram of body weight, equivalent to 48g for a 60kg person, and 64g for an 80kg person.
"People need to switch to a diet where only around nine or ten percent of their calories come from protein, and the ideal sources are plant-based," Longo told the Guardian. "We are not saying go and do some crazy diet we came up with. If we are wrong, there is no harm done, but if we are right you are looking at an incredible effect that in general is about as bad as smoking."
"Spend a couple of months looking at the labels on your food. There is a little bit of protein everywhere. If you eat breakfast, you might get 4g protein, but a piece of chicken for lunch may have 50g protein," said Longo, who skips lunch to control his calorie and protein intake.
People who took part in the study consumed an average of 1,823 calories a day, with 51% coming from carbohydrates, 33% from fat, and 16% from protein, of which two thirds was animal protein. Longo divided them into three groups. The high-protein group got 20% or more of their calories from protein, the moderate group got 10 to 19% of their calories from protein, and the low group got less than 10% of calories from protein.
Teasing out the health effects of individual nutrients is notoriously difficult. The apparently harmful effects of a high-protein diet might be down to one or more other substances in meat, or driven by lifestyle factors that are more common in regular red meat eaters versus vegetarians. Other factors can skew results too: a person on the study who got ill might have gone off their food, and seen a proportional rise in the amount of calories they get from protein. In that case, it would be the illness driving the diet, not the other way round.
"I would urge general caution over observational studies, and particularly when looking at diet, given the difficulties of disentangling one nutrient or dietary component from another. You can get an association that might have some causal linkage or might not," said Peter Emery, head of nutrition and dietetics at King's College London.
Gunter Kuhnle, a food nutrition scientist at Reading University, said it was wrong "and potentially even dangerous" to compare the effects of smoking with the effect of meat and cheese as the study does.
"Sending out [press] statements such as this can damage the effectiveness of important public health messages. They can help to prevent sound health advice from getting through to the general public. The smoker thinks: 'why bother quitting smoking if my cheese and ham sandwich is just as bad for me?'"
Heather Ohly at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health in Exeter said: "Smoking has been proven to be entirely bad for us, whereas meat and cheese can be consumed in moderation as part of a healthy diet, contributing to recommended intakes of many important nutrients."
Most people in Britain eat more protein than they need. The British Dietetic Association recommends a daily intake of 45g and 55g of protein for the average woman and man respectively. But according to the British Nutrition Foundation the average protein intake per day is 88g and 64g for men and women.
In a series of follow-up experiments, Longo looked at what might lie behind the apparently damaging effects of a high-protein diet on health in middle age. Blood tests on people in the study showed that levels of a growth hormone called IGF-1 rose and fell in line with protein intake. For those on a high protein diet, rises in IGF-1 steadily increased their cancer risk. Further tests on mice found that a high-protein diet led to more cancer and larger tumours than a low-protein diet. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/feb/01/beyonce-pregnant-twins-instagram-announcement-escapism | Music | 2017-02-02T08:32:22.000Z | Hadley Freeman | Beyoncé's pregnancy: a distraction from the dumpster fire that is reality | Now THAT’S what I’m talking about. Sure, I appreciate your Meryl Streeps, your Madonnas, even your Shia LaBeoufs railing against Donald Trump. But I’ll be honest with you, that is not what I come to celebrities for. I have never denied being as shallow as a puddle, so what I want from celebrities is escapism – escape from the dumpster fire that is reality. And, given that 2017 is a full-on sewage works explosion of reality, any celebrity escapism needed to be supersized: enter, stage right, Beyoncé, announcing on Instagram that she is pregnant. With twins. In her underwear. Thank you, Queen Bey. Thank you for coming to save us from ourselves.
Beyoncé announces she's pregnant with twins
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Some people will be mean about this photo. That is because some people have no soul. OK, sure, it answers the question of what a David LaChapelle filter on Instagram would look like (“Rizzoli meets Snapchat” is how my friend Jess put it). But have you looked outside? It’s basically an apocalyptic wasteland out there. Naturalism is not helpful right now – we need extreme fabulousness, and Beyoncé kneeling in front of a floral wreath in a veil and her lingerie is pretty much the minimum requirement to get through the next five minutes. Look, I’m just grateful she didn’t do what every Z-lister has done at this point, which is roll out the homage to the famous 1991 Demi Moore pose, with a soulful cradle of her belly. And let’s be even more grateful she didn’t just post an ultrasound image. As if Bey would ever be so basic.
But the real issue here is the twins – ah, the twins! Double the Knowles-Carter legacy! Now, it’s rather sweet that so many people seem to be so excited about this because, the truth is, half of the entertainment world has twins. J-Lo, Mariah, Celine, Angelina, SJP, Julia Roberts, Zoe Saldana: twins are the new adopted African child, the offspring that suggests alpha motherhood. And I heartily endorse this trend, given that I have twins, meaning I am now officially EXACTLY like Beyoncé, which has always been obvious to me, if not to anyone who has ever met me, looked at me, heard me sing or seen me dance. But it’s rather comforting to think that, while I cannot imagine a single second of what Beyoncé’s real life is like, I do now have something of a glimpse into her current state of mind, which goes a little something like this: “Oh god, oh god, will I be able to even walk in six months? Should I get a side by side double buggy or back to front one? How the hell do you breastfeed twins? How many bottles will we need? Oh god, oh god, oh god.”
Beyoncé, sweetheart. Allow me to strike a superior tone with you for the only time in my life: you’ll be fine. Twins are great. I mean, you won’t sleep for a year, but maybe you don’t sleep anyway? Congratulations, and thank you for bringing this one ray of joy into 2017. And finally, get a front to back double buggy – it’s a right bugger getting those side by side ones on the bus. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/sep/15/story-of-our-fight-port-talbot-locals-play-steelworks-were-still-here | Stage | 2017-09-15T09:42:39.000Z | Steven Morris | The story of our fight': Port Talbot steel workers star in play about shutdown | The last acting part for Sam Coombes, a steelworker, was Robin Hood in the annual rugby club pantomime.
Over the next two weeks he has a rather weightier role in a professional production telling the story of how he and his comrades at the Port Talbot plant in south Wales successfully battled a closure that threatened their livelihoods, their community and a whole way of life.
“It’s a burden but a huge privilege,” said Coombes, who has been given unpaid leave to take part in the National Theatre Wales (NTW) play We’re Still Here. “This is a chance to tell the story from our point of view. It’s the story of our fight. It’s not gloom and doom. There’s a long way to go, but I do feel the fight is being won.”
At the start of last year there was a distinct possibility that the Tata steelworks, which supports an estimated 18,000 jobs, would close.
A rehearsal for We’re Still Here. Photograph: Dimitris Legakis/The Guardian
The people of Port Talbot did not roll over. A campaign called Save Our Steel was launched and after months of protests and talks a deal was reached that kept the plant alive, though at the cost of cuts to pension benefits.
Journalists, industry analysts and academics continue to pore over the saga and its ramifications but this production, staged in a disused dockside factory, the Byass Works, is meant to tell the story through the voices of those directly involved.
Writers and researchers from the NTW and the theatre company Common Wealth spent months interviewing Port Talbot people about the steel crisis and turned their stories into an energetic, vibrant, sometimes loud, punky and sweary production.
“They have got the dialogue and banter bang on. It’s just like being in work,” said Coombes, a 29-year-old metallurgist, who followed his father and grandfather into the steelworks and will be back there at the start of October “unless Steven Spielberg comes calling”.
Coombes said the stories of working-class heroes were not told often enough. “What happened last year is that we all got together and said: ‘No, we’re fighting for what is ours. Not just the steelworks but the whole community.’”
While Coombes is part of the professional cast, the show also features members of the community appearing as themselves, among them Sian James, a college worker and the wife of Chris James, a steelworker, union rep and Labour councillor.
Sian and Chris James. Photograph: Dimitris Legakis/The Guardian
She said the title of the piece summed up the mood of the town. “The community came together and is still together. There is still uncertainty – what happens in five years, what will happen if Tata sell. But whatever happens next, the community will be ready to fight.”
Four teenagers also take starring roles. Dylan John, 15, said the last 18 months in the town had been intense. “The crisis made us picture a future without the steelworks. That was frightening,” he said. Dylan doesn’t see himself taking a job at the works – he would rather be an actor. “But it is crucial for the future of our town.”
Evie Manning, a co-director of the play, said Common Wealth had been thinking about creating a piece about working-class leaders when the Port Talbot crisis blew up.
Evie Manning, left, with artistic director Kully Thiarai, writer Rachel Trezise and co-director Rhiannon White. Photograph: Dimitris Legakis/The Guardian
“Media, politics and art are all being colonised by the middle and upper classes. It feels like the working class is being represented terribly,” she said. We’re Still Here is an attempt to begin to redress the balance.
Up the road from the Byass Works, at the St Paul’s community centre, regulars have been fascinated to watch rehearsals in the function room.
The centre’s administrator, Carol Powrie, said there was much more music and movement than she expected. “You don’t expect steelworkers dancing. That was a lot of fun. It’s a powerful story but I think people are still worried, still waiting for bad news. I don’t think people are confident.”
Canon Nigel Cahill, rector of the Aberavon parish in Port Talbot, said he hoped We’re Still Here would boost the area in the same way as the NTW’s much-lauded production of The Passion, in which the Hollywood actor Michael Sheen, who grew up in Port Talbot, acted alongside local amateurs, did six years ago.
Canon Nigel Cahill and Carol Powrie. Photograph: Dimitris Legakis/The Guardian
“After the last production here in 2011 there was a marked improvement in people’s cheerfulness, hopefulness and general attitude. Partly I think it was confidence that people were taking an interest in their town.”
Of course, it is true that there are those in the area who do not share the optimism and idealism of those directly involved. At the Aberafan shopping centre by a raised section of the M4, many were unaware of the production and gloomy for the long-term prospects for Port Talbot.
Michael Cosker. Photograph: Gareth Phillips/The Guardian
Michael Cosker, who used to be a crane driver at the plant and now runs the Rolls Choice cafe, said he felt the workers sacrificed too much in the pension deal that kept the plant alive.
“I think the men have given away more than they should have done,” he said. “Pensions like that are hard to come by. I understand it but it’s a large price to pay.
“The town is surviving. Business is not too bad. The thing about Port Talbot is that they are fighters. They will fight forever for what they feel is right.”
We’re Still Here runs from 15-30 September at the Byass Works, Port Talbot. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/jun/10/humans-robot-drama-series | Television & radio | 2015-06-10T08:00:02.000Z | Gabriel Tate | Humans: welcome to electric cleaning-lady land | Xbox co-funds first UK TV drama
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Think of sci-fi habitats and you might think of spaceships – of Ash going berserk on the Nostromo in Alien. You might think of dystopias – of Blade Runner’s rain-drenched, neon-soaked Los Angeles. You might even think of the pristine New Jersey futurescape of AI, and that bit where Haley Joel Osment’s face melts on to a dinner table. One place you probably don’t think of is Gerrards Cross. Yet London’s commuter belt now doubles as the set of Humans, a new eight-part drama series from Channel 4 and AMC. On the day the Guide comes to visit, the very first thing we see is a body bundled from a car boot into a detached family house. And that body is oozing blue-green goo...
Based on a hit Swedish series, Humans is set in a parallel present where, for better or worse, fully developed artificial intelligence has come to pass. Like the vampires in True Blood, artificial humans (or “synths”) are a shakily integrated, partially accepted element of society. Used as factory workers, carers and ticket inspectors, they’re marketed to the public like a second family car: luxury items costing around 20 grand, payable in instalments and fully customisable. Joe (owner of the aforementioned family home, played by Tom Goodman-Hill), has bought Anita (Gemma Chan) to take on the household chores. She’s supposed to allow the family to spend more time together, but as Anita begins to form bonds with the children, their mother Laura (Katherine Parkinson) is left threatened and fretful; and that’s before this synth starts displaying behavioural tics that definitely aren’t fitted as standard.
With the crew starting to film some spoiler-heavy scenes, I am shut in the bedroom of Joe and Laura’s teenage daughter, Mattie (Lucy Carless). On the floor, there’s a copy of console classic The Sims and a DVD of the Will Smith clunker I, Robot. On the wall, meanwhile, there’s a portrait of René Descartes. This odd collection of artefacts gives a pointer to the nature of this series: Humans is part domestic melodrama, part thriller and part philosophical headscratcher.
Perhaps the series’ greatest strength, though, is the way it deals with genre. There’s little that’s less impressive than the future done on the cheap, as anyone who’s idled away the early hours watching SyFy knows, but this series plays its hand carefully, giving a lot less away than the Swedish original, which made the human-robot interface instantly adversarial. Here, the relationships are nuanced and cautiously symbiotic. The soundtrack, by Cristobal Tapia de Veer, proves as crucial an adornment as his work on Utopia, applying shards of colour, clarity and mystery to housebound sequences that might otherwise feel weighed down by the carefully maintained suburban drabness. And, frankly, “synth” is a way cooler soubriquet for android than “replicant”.
Frankly, ‘synth’ is a way cooler soubriquet for android than ‘replicant’
Sam Vincent and Jon Brackley, the writers behind Humans, are perching awkwardly on Mattie’s bed, explaining how they pushed the original story into “slightly darker corners”. “It’s easy to get bogged down in mythology in a sci-fi show,” says Brackley. “A domestic setting gives us scope to explore the ideas from a lot of different viewpoints.”
“Thirty years ago,” continues Vincent, who met Brackley when the pair worked on Spooks, “computers were in the workplace, then in our homes, and now in our pockets. There’s only one way this technology is moving, and that’s into us.”
Another person joins us in our bedroom: Colin Morgan, who plays Leo, a mysterious freedom fighter on the hunt for a missing synth. The android might be on the black market or, worse, in the hands of “human rights” campaigners who object to robots putting people out of work, making mothers feel inadequate, and causing kids to wonder whether education is worth the bother. Leo is the main source of action in the drama and, Morgan says, “He doesn’t have a lot of fun. I don’t know if you ever see him smile and he spends a lot of time out in cold, dingy places. He’s got a complicated past, he’s on a very personal and public mission but, if he succeeds, it could change the world.”
Friends are electric: Joe Hawkins (Tom Goodman-Hill) goes shopping for a cyber-bargain. Photograph: Des Willie/Kudos
As for the philosophical stuff, that’s unquestionably the domain of Humans’ resident Hollywood star, William Hurt. Hurt plays George Millican, a widower who clings on to his ancient, malfunctioning synth Odi (Will Tudor, Olyvar from Game Of Thrones) for companionship but also for the memories he retains of life with his late wife. Today, the Oscar winner is in an almost unquotably cerebral mood. He talks about Isaac Asimov (an inspiration explicitly acknowledged within the show) and the transition from humaneness to human-ness, from consciousness to conscience. It’s sometimes hard to tell whether he’s on the road to enlightenment or in Pseuds Corner.
“No matter how colloquial the trappings may be,” Hurt says, “this [technology] is about the essentials, about who we want to be. It’s a function of the group consensus of humanity to create this thing. We have to aspire to it because it’s our causeway to the future. You can’t exaggerate its importance. It’s as essential to the future as surviving global warming or anything else. But you can really screw it up.”
It’s this preoccupation that has ensured the themes of Humans are seldom out of the news these days. Mainstream cinema laid the groundwork with Her and Ex Machina, while Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk have been firing off bulletins from the tech frontline, warning darkly of the risks of computer sentience, while machines apparently pass the Turing Test (which gauges artificial intelligence) and a Japanese hotel staffed exclusively by robots opens. The technology isn’t around the corner: it’s here.
Of course, conceptual acuity and clever writing count for little in a TV drama without performance, and much rests on the shoulders of the 32-year-old Chan. Not for nothing does Goodman-Hill describe the process of acting opposite her as “mindfuckingly strange”. Chan’s performance is truly unsettling, evoking the automated sensitivity and pre-programmed empathy of Jeremy Hunt. Her dedication to the part even infected her fellow cast members, as they began to unconsciously mimic the perfect posture and smooth movements of her synth. All 70 actors playing synths took classes with physical-theatre expert and choreographer Dan O’Neill. “Synth school” eschewed more traditional, herky-jerky C3PO-isms in search of grace and sleekness. Peter Crouch would likely not have graduated.
Robo soul: William Hurt as George Millican in Humans. Photograph: Colin Hutton
“I’ve never done anything that’s taken this much work,” says Chan, looking relieved to be out of Anita’s blue tunic and into her civilian clothes. “The idea was to come up with a universal physical language: because synths are machines using up battery power, they would need an economy of movement. There were huge physical challenges: if your eyes moistened, it was a retake, and you couldn’t use many of the things you can rely on as an actor, like using your breath to convey emotion. And Anita is ambidextrous while I’m really right-handed, so I had to learn how to do everything with both hands. Dan would give me homework appropriate to Anita. Jack [Whitehall, Chan’s boyfriend] did come home a bit baffled a couple of times, when I was ironing or cooking meals left-handed. And I’m very clumsy usually; there are loads of outtakes of me bumping into things or falling down stairs, which a synth would never do.”
Chan may be demonstrative and fidgety in person, but she’s eerily unreadable in character. If nothing else, Synth School has produced a group of dangerously good poker players. The series itself is aiming higher, though. If the story of Humans turns out to be the story of humans, then manufacturing intelligent, benevolent technology halfway between Metal Mickey and Skynet will be fraught with danger.
“I think they’ll be our superiors,” concludes Colin Morgan. “The future’s looking both worrying and exciting.”
Humans starts 14 Jun, 9pm, Channel 4 | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/16/the-guardian-view-on-more-tory-byelection-misery-civil-war-looms-on-the-right | Opinion | 2024-02-16T18:25:40.000Z | Editorial | The Guardian view on more Tory byelection misery: civil war looms on the right | Editorial | As the Conservative party has charted an increasingly chaotic course towards the end of the current parliament, byelection sorrows have come not as single spies but in battalions. Thursday’s twin defeats to Labour in Kingswood and Wellingborough – comprehensive in the former, utterly humiliating in the latter – were the ninth and 10th Tory losses since 2019, a postwar record. The 28.5% blue-red swing to Labour in Wellingborough was the biggest since 1994, and the second-largest since 1945. Repeatedly across the country, and in different kinds of seats, the depth of the desire for change and a new political settlement is being made crystal clear.
In the aftermath of yet another torrid night for Rishi Sunak, Tory spinners pleaded mitigating circumstances, such as a low turnout and a protest dimension to the vote that will diminish at a general election. In Wellingborough, the choice of the partner of the disgraced Conservative MP Peter Bone as the party’s candidate to succeed him clearly added insult to injury as far as many constituents were concerned. But local factors aside, the sense of a party running out of time, options and ideas to turn things around is palpable.
For Mr Sunak, by far the most ominous takeout of the evening was the performance of the Brexit party’s successor organisation, Reform UK. In Wellingborough, a record election vote share of 13% confirmed the party as a potent threat to the Conservatives from the right, and places Mr Sunak in a strategic bind that appears all but insoluble. The rebellious right of his own party has been handed crucial ammunition as it calls for ever more extreme moves on immigration, including withdrawal from the European court of human rights. Yet such an approach risks haemorrhaging votes to Labour and the Lib Dems in “blue wall” seats Mr Sunak must hold in order to avoid a historic wipeout. If Nigel Farage, Reform’s honorary president, decides to enter the election fray as a candidate, the coming election will double as a vehicle for a bloody existential battle over the long-term future of British Conservatism.
Such a civil war scenario will, of course, be hugely to Labour’s benefit. After enduring a difficult month, Sir Keir Starmer can feel relieved that his party’s U-turn on its green deal and recent events in Rochdale did not deliver visible damage at Thursday’s polls. Translated nationally, the swings in Kingswood and Wellingborough would deliver respectively either a comfortable majority or a landslide.
Nevertheless, both byelections offered another sign of the times that should be viewed by Labour as less reassuring. Notably poor voter turnouts of less than 40% do not suggest a groundswell of enthusiasm for Sir Keir and his party’s hyper-cautious approach to winning power. This should give Labour’s strategists pause for thought as they seek a durable and progressive mandate. More broadly, widespread electoral apathy testifies to a disturbing crisis of faith in the ability of governments to address the challenges of the age – from the climate emergency to prolonged economic stagnation and broken public services.
After 14 years that have left Britain feeling poorer, angrier and more divided, the desire to see the back of the Tories is widespread and apparently immovable. For Labour, though, the challenge remains one of demonstrating its credentials as something more than a mere repository for antipathy towards a failed, exhausted government.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/24/uk-dairy-alternatives-names-new-rules-trading-standards | Business | 2024-02-24T05:00:17.000Z | Zoe Wood | No cheeze please: UK proposals could force dairy alternatives to change names | Dairy alternatives such as I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and Alpro’s This Is Not M*lk may have to change their names if “draconian” new rules to prevent shoppers confusing plant-based with real dairy products are imposed.
With trading standards officials thought to be on the brink of issuing new guidance, including a ban on the use of words and phrases like “m*lk”, “cheeze” and “not milk” on labels, the Plant-based Food Alliance UK (PbFA) will next week make a last-ditch appeal to the environment secretary to intervene.
Marisa Heath, the PbFA’s chief executive, said it would set out its concerns, which include the risk that the resulting upheaval could push up prices, in a letter to Steve Barclay. It will request that the guidance be dropped and the regulations reviewed.
“At the time when we should be encouraging consumers to make more sustainable choices … this is a bad move,” said Heath, who suggested an enforcement drive would harm the wider food industry.
“Major retailers will have to rename their own-brand plant-based products,” she said. “This will cause unnecessary time and financial costs in an industry that is already doing its best during the cost of living crisis. This could then have an impact on consumer prices too.”
Ian Hepburn, the marketing director of Upfield UK and Ireland, which makes I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, said the spread had been in millions of fridges across Britain for nearly 35 years. “It’s implausible that anyone would be confused,” he said.
“In 2023 we didn’t receive a single complaint of consumer confusion. We are baffled by these proposed restrictions which do nothing but add bureaucracy to an outdated EU law.”
The latest version of the guidance, dated January 2024 and seen by the Guardian, has not been watered down despite the concerns raised by the plant-based food industry. Last year Greenpeace claimed the dairy industry had lobbied for the rules to be enforced, citing government and dairy sector documents.
The so-called “draft opinion” is written by the Food Standards and Information Focus Group (FSIFG), a leading group of trading standards officers, though enforcement of the law on dairy labelling and marketing standards lies with local authorities and the trading standards officers acting on their behalf.
The FSIFG explains: “Technological innovation is leading to the construction of products offered as alternatives to conventional foods of animal origin. It is important that products are clearly distinguished, understood and nutritional differences are not confused.”
The document says plant-based brands should not use homophones, asterisked characters or other wordplay. Words like “whole” are also outlawed. Analysts said using fun names like m!lk or m*ilk has historically been a way to encourage people to try plant-based products.
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While custard creams, salad cream and cream crackers are among the foods that are exempt from the rules, the experts said terms like “soya yoghurt” and “vegan mozzarella” should not be used. Instead, they propose “soya dessert fermented with live cultures” and the literal “vegan soft-white balls with a light cheese flavour”.
If the guidance is rubber-stamped when the FSIFG’s business expert group next meets, it will be shared with trading standards officers across the country. Without a change of heart, companies fear the restrictions could be in place by Easter. If they are the subject of complaint, they could face enforcement action such as having to change a brand name or packaging.
Bryan Carroll, the general manager of Oatly UK and Ireland, said it was “frankly insulting” to assume people could not tell the difference. Did the UK really want to be a country with some of the “most draconian rules about how we describe our food and drink?” he added.
A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “This is a draft opinion from a group who are independent of government. There are no plans to change existing legislation in this area.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2022/nov/05/vegan-hot-and-sour-squash-thai-curry-recipe-meera-sodha | Food | 2022-11-05T12:00:09.000Z | Meera Sodha | Meera Sodha’s vegan recipe for hot-and-sour squash Thai curry | The new vegan | One of my favourite earthly pleasures is a Thai curry. For years, my favourite was the type of green curry you can find only in Thai kitchens situated in English pubs (a wonderful phenomenon), but after a recent trip to Phuket, that has been trumped by gaeng som, or hot-and-sour curry. It’s hugely enlivening, and rescued from being eye-wateringly tart by a touch of sweetness and some heat. The original dish is clear and soupy, which works in the searing Thai sun, but I’ve added some cashews to give it a silky and rich sauce that’s more suited to autumnal British weather.
Hot-and-sour squash Thai curry
Beware vegan fish sauces: some will ruin this dish, because they taste nothing like fish sauce. The only one I’ve found that works well is Thai Taste’s vegetarian “fish” sauce.
Prep 15 min
Cook 45 min
Serves 4
100g cashew nuts
1 butternut squash (1kg)
Rapeseed oil
Fine sea salt
4 banana shallots, peeled and roughly chopped (170g)
8 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
4 Thai red chillies (8g), chopped
40g piece fresh ginger, skin on, chopped
1½ tsp ground turmeric
2 tbsp lime juice (from 1-2 limes)
1 tbsp caster sugar
60g tamarind paste
3 tbsp vegetarian fish sauce (see intro; check the label if you need it to be gluten-free)
½ savoy cabbage (200g), cut into 1½cm- thick ribbons
Jasmine rice, to serve
Heat the oven to 220C (200C fan)/425F/gas 7 and line an oven tray with baking paper (reusable, ideally).
Put the cashews in a small, heatproof bowl, cover with boiling water and set aside to soak.
Top and tail the squash, then cut first across the belly and then into quarters. Scoop out and discard (or repurpose) the seeds, then cut each quarter into 4cm-wide wedges. Rub two tablespoons of oil over the wedges, sprinkle with salt and lay the wedges on the lined tray. Bake for 15 minutes, flip on to the other sides, bake for another 15 minutes, then remove from the oven.
Now for the curry paste. Drain the cashews and put them in a blender with the shallots, garlic, chillies, ginger, turmeric, lime juice, sugar, six tablespoons of water, three tablespoons of oil and a teaspoon and a half of salt. Blitz to a paste.
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Put four tablespoons of oil in a large pan on a medium heat and, once the oil is hot, scrape in the paste from the blender. Cook, stirring often, for five minutes, then add the tamarind paste, “fish” sauce and a litre of water. Stir, then add the cabbage and the roast squash, and bring the mixture up to a bubble. Turn down the heat to a simmer for 10 minutes, or until the cabbage is tender, then taste and adjust the seasoning, adding more fish sauce for saltiness or lime, if you wish.
Ladle the curry into bowls and serve with jasmine rice. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/02/helen-hunt-an-oscars-not-a-big-game-changer-its-not-like-your-worries-are-over | Film | 2019-09-02T05:00:47.000Z | Martha Hayes | Helen Hunt: ‘An Oscar's not a big game-changer. It's not like your worries are over’ | Helen Hunt was 34 when she won the best actress Oscar for As Good As It Gets, and the attention made her anxious. “It was a very famous time. I felt quite nervous because I was being followed,” she says. “I remember thinking: ‘What if I can’t turn this off? Am I always going to be walking to my car and there are people with cameras there? Does this last for ever?’”
The answer was no. Hunt is 56 now, and the intervening decades have brought her a more interesting, but intrinsically more private life. After starting her career as a television actor at the age of nine, she has forged a successful life behind the camera, as well as in front of it.
“I don’t think I have that kind of fame now,” she says. “I haven’t been, in my personal life, so intriguing that I’ll always be that famous. I haven’t tried to make that happen. I’d like to be well known so I can get more jobs, but it has quietened down.”
Does she remember the turning point? She traces it back to 2004, when she had her daughter, Makena Lei. “I spent much less time working and doing interviews and more time in private, so it just naturally quietened down and that was nice. I don’t get followed any more, and it doesn’t disturb my life. I get good theatre tickets, and that’s worth all of it.”
Hunt with Jack Nicholson in the 1997 film As Good As It Gets. Photograph: Tristar Pictures/Allstar
Much has been made of the idea that Hunt stepped away from the public eye after the release of four high-profile films in 2000: What Women Want, Cast Away, Pay It Forward and Dr T & the Women. But she sees it very differently. “It’s so funny when people ask: ‘What happened to you?’ Well, I had a baby – I made a whole person – and I co-wrote, directed and produced two entire films so it didn’t seem so quiet to me. There’s a difference between working hard and being famous.”
The films she is referring to are Then She Found Me (2007) and Ride (2014). The former centres on the complicated relationship between a 39-year-old woman (Hunt), who is estranged from her husband and longs for a child, and her biological mother (Bette Midler), who reappears in her life after the death of her adoptive mother. The film is loosely based on a novel by Elinor Lipman, but Hunt included a fertility struggle because, at the time, she was trying to get pregnant and it was all she could think about. “Having a biological clock pounding in my ears, I thought: ‘Well, if I’m going to play this part, she’s got to either have a baby or want to have a baby.”
Hunt spent 10 years getting the film off the ground, only for the distributor, Think Film, to go bankrupt before the film’s release, meaning there was no promotion and no advertising.
“That was the most crushing …” she breaks off. “It doesn’t take away from the experience of making it, but then you want people to see what you did. So that was hard; that was very hard.” In interviews from that time, she comes across as defensive and prickly. In hindsight, she was probably heartbroken. “I would like to blink and have everybody in the world have seen it,” she says now.
When we meet in Los Angeles, she has come straight from the writers’ room for the forthcoming reboot of Mad About You. The US comedy, about a newly married New York couple, ran from 1992 to 1999. Hunt won three Golden Globes for her razor-sharp portrayal of PR Jamie Buchman. She and her co-star, Paul Reiser (who played Jamie’s husband), will executive produce and star in 12 new episodes. Hunt will also direct the first episode, having recently served as a director on episodes of the major US hits This Is Us and Feud, as well as The Politician, Ryan Murphy’s latest big project for Netflix.
Hunt with (left) Paul Reiser as her husband and Kevin Bacon as himself in Mad About You. Photograph: NBC/NBC via Getty Images
“I’m concerned that we’ll wreck it,” she says of Mad About You. “But you never know. I don’t know if I’m going to be good in something, that’s what makes it exciting; the risk that it might not go well. I’m pretty practised at putting the worry aside.”
She and her daughter, who is now 15, are both politically engaged. They have attended marches together, including the Women’s March held the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Hunt has been active in fighting for equality on the Mad About You reboot. Most of the 11 directors are women, including women of colour. “I’ve tried very hard to fight for pay parity,” she says. “It’s much harder than you think. People who pay the money say: ‘Well, I want pay parity, but this man has more experience.’ To which we’re replying: ‘Yes, but what was the context? Was this woman given the same opportunities as this man?’ It’s entirely possible he had more options than she did, so we fight for pay parity in order to take that context into account.”
It is not something she thought about when starring opposite, say, Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets or Tom Hanks in Cast Away. “At that point in my career, I didn’t know to fight for it. It never occurred to me I should be paid the same amount. Quite frankly, they could have argued people were buying tickets because of Jack or Tom, and that would have been correct.”
Has she noticed any other changes in the industry since the advent of the Time’s Up movement? “I think it has made movie sets somewhat safer; there’s some amount of recourse if you feel in danger or objectified,” she says. “It does feel like now you could get in trouble, and thank God.”
Over the years, she has worked with Mel Gibson, Kevin Spacey and Woody Allen. Should we be boycotting their work? “Here’s the only thing I can really contribute,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “I think a big part of the problem is that if a woman is assaulted, by the time they feel they can get the words out of their mouth, there are statute of limitation laws that say ‘too late’. So, while I understand the backlash of, ‘you just point a finger at me and my career’s over’, until those laws are revised, it’s going to be a giant, painful mess and it shouldn’t be only up to the women who have been victimised to metabolise that. That issue is bigger than anybody sees. My understanding is that it has much more to do with a backlog in court. That’s a real problem.”
Hunt with (from left) Salman Rushdie, Colin Firth and Matthew Broderick in Then She Found Me. Photograph: Allstar/ThinkFilm/Sportsphoto
She has been exploring issues around sexual violence in her latest role, in the new BBC One drama World on Fire. Hunt plays Nancy Campbell, a war correspondent who is a victim of sexual violence, loosely based on the trailblazing British journalist Clare Hollingworth, who broke the news of the outbreak of the second world war.
Hunt did meticulous research, for better or worse. “On that set, I began to know things that some people don’t, unless you do a deep dive in that particular area. Of course, there’s sexual violence everywhere – it’s one of the great atrocities of our age – but I didn’t understand it was as institutionalised and organised. That fuelled a lot of what I did. And with all the sexual violence being illuminated at home in the last few years, I certainly didn’t have to reach very far to have a lot of feelings about that.
“I remember feeling that Campbell was contemporary. She’s ahead of everybody in the story and knows what’s coming before other people do. It all seemed very immediate to me, and relevant.”
Helen Hunt (as Nancy Campbell) in World on Fire. Photograph: Dusan Martincek/Mammoth Screen 2019
The call to be in World on Fire came out of the blue. “Would you like to go to Prague and act in something?” She doesn’t leave her daughter very often, she says, “but everything lined up. I remember thinking: ‘The material’s good, the part is good, the city is good.’ I mean, I don’t have a complaint.”
Parts like that get given to her only once in a blue moon, she says. “Most of your life as an actor is trying to persuade people you can do a part.” Surely, there’s less persuasion involved once you have an Oscar? “Often with women, there’s a big dry spell afterwards,” she says. “I heard an actress say that, for about a year you’ve got some wind at your back, but after that, you just go back to finding a good job. I don’t think it’s a big game-changer. It can be, but it’s not like your worries are over in terms of getting good parts. I’ve had ups and downs. It was a dream come true, which is a great thing to be able to say; then you go back to work, trying to forge a career that’s fulfilling.”
Hunt was born and brought up in Culver City, California, the home of many major movie studios over the years, and was inspired to get into the industry by her father, a director and acting coach. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hunt’s daughter is keen to follow her mother into the family business. “I can hardly say I don’t understand,” she says. “There’s no point in me saying anything other than: ‘I hope it’s wonderful,’ because she already loves it. I can’t cure the endless, ‘Will I work again?’ thing that every actor has, including Meryl Streep. I’m always sure it’s the last job.”
World on Fire starts on BBC One later this year | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/feb/27/skibadee-jungle-and-drumnbass-mc-dies-aged-54 | Music | 2022-02-27T20:05:47.000Z | Nadeem Badshah | Skibadee, jungle and drum’n’bass MC, dies aged 47 | Skibadee, the award-winning jungle and drum’n’bass MC, has died aged 47, his family have announced. The cause of death has not been disclosed.
Skibadee, whose real name was Alfonso Bondzie, began his career in 1993 on City Sound Radio and in recent years was a member of renowned drum’n’bass group SASASAS.
His family said in a statement on Sunday: “Hello everyone, as Alphonso’s first-born, I unfortunately come with some with sad news to say that Skibadee has passed away. As a family we ask for some privacy, but may he rest in peace.”
Skibadee, born in Waterloo, south London, performed across the UK. He was renowned for his collaborations with fellow jungle and drum’n’bass MC Shabba D from 2000 onwards. Skibadee won multiple MC awards as well as the Stevie Hyper D lifetime achievement award.
Among the musicians to pay tribute was the former So Solid Crew singer Lisa Maffia. Sharing a pic of MC Skibadee, she tweeted: “Not to sure what to say! Another pioneer gone! My heart goes out to your beautiful daughters, family and friends. DnB finest @therealskibagram I’m sorry to hear this news. Rest well sir #skiba #RIP.”
The drum’n’bass DJ and producer Fresh wrote on Twitter: “I cannot believe I’m writing this. RIP @TheRealSkibz MC Skibadee. His contribution to drum’n’bass can never be equalled.
“He was first and foremost a great guy I always really enjoyed spending time with. Goodbye old friend – we will keep your memory alive for ever.”
Friction, a drum’n’bass producer and DJ, wrote on Twitter: “RIP Skibadee. Can’t believe I’m writing this right now. Had some amazing times with him on stage over the years. An absolute legend of our scene and will be remembered for ever.”
DJ Flight wrote: “RIP Skibadee, an icon of jungle D&B who inspired countless MCs in many genres. Really awful news, love & condolences to his family & close friends.”
This article was amended on 28 February 2022 because Skibadee died at the age of 47, not 54 as previously stated. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/may/11/masterchef-still-the-finest-cooking-show | Television & radio | 2015-05-11T04:13:37.000Z | Jazz Twemlow | MasterChef: still the finest of Australia's 'stuff on plates' shows | Isometimes wonder what would happen in the absurdly unthinkable scenario that we’re left without a cooking show on our TV screens. Probably the end of known existence. There’s always been one. Even in the background of Da Vinci’s Last Supper, you can just about make out a team of aspiring chefs talking about how hard it was to put a unique twist on “bread for 13”.
There are so many culinary shows, jumping between channels makes me feel like a rather mundane superpower whose only skill is switching the identity of the chef that’s currently waxing lyrical about local produce. I now refer to my remote as The Chef Changer.
Sating our need for pornographic close-ups of soufflé – and unnervingly clear audio of critics wetly chewing their food – is MasterChef (Channel Ten), returning for its seventh season in Australia. Of all the shows that take “stuff on plates” as their premise, it’s probably my favourite. There’s less focus on building up unnecessary, and false, character rivalries to generate drama, leaving more time to focus on the cooking.
Thankfully, we don’t have to sit through footage of the contestants going shopping either (something which often made My Kitchen Rules seem like little more than choppy CCTV footage of Coles). MasterChef has its own supermarket in the studio, which the cooks hurtle towards in a high quality grabbing-frenzy. A note here: chefs make particularly fussy looters, so don’t pal up with them in a zombie apocalypse; there’s no time to look for shards of saffron, just grab the nearest tin of mushy peas!
Sunday’s episode featured the Mystery Box round, a feature made mysterious by the box rather than its contents, unless you consider a crab and a coconut mysterious (I suppose they would be if you found them on adjacent seats on a bus). As far as cooking shows go, it’s a good segment, allowing us to see the generation of 20 different dishes, most of them pretty impressive and none particularly predictable. I could only think of putting the crab in the coconut, thereby creating the world’s most horrifying Kinder Surprise.
After the Mystery Box was the Invention Test, which is sort of the same thing, to be honest, except that the key ingredient is revealed from under a cloche instead of a wooden box. Again, the end results were fascinating, but by this time I think I’d had enough of the TV competition tropes of ticking clock, mid-cook interviews with the chefs sure they weren’t going to make it, and the three judges pottering around muttering: “You’re not making that are you? Ooh, I wouldn’t do that.”
Okay, so the moments of judgement can be slightly grating. First, there’s that moist, masticating soundscape as the three critics gurn, grunt and slaver their way through the dish, accompanied by the metallic chimes of cutlery repeatedly clinking against plates. It sounds like a wildlife documentary of some starved lions gorging on the cast of Stomp.
There’s also George Calombaris’ slightly intense handshakes, reminiscent of the sort of fatalistic bonding sessions that occur between two soldiers before they go over the top. I’m convinced there’s something else going on as he grips the contestant’s hand: a mind meld perhaps, or the communication of his entire life story through his fiercely staring eyes. Bits of fat to be trimmed, then, but MasterChef is still far more rewarding than most of the alternatives.
And the award for worst promo goes to ...
What were the marketing team behind Struggle Street (SBS) thinking? Having seen the first episode, I’m reassured this show might actually be a sympathetic and eye-opening glimpse into the lives of the disadvantaged (yes, even worse off than those on the rather low income of $185,000 a year, Mr Abbott). Why then set the show up as if it were meant to appeal to viewers who want to do nothing more than have a good scoff at those less fortunate?
Ashley, for example, comes across as a loving father in the first episode, albeit one who struggles due to his various health concerns. But sure, plop him in the promo having a good fart. Guess what: everyone farts. On this basis, you could promote every single show that’s ever existed by showing someone having a good guff out the bum. “Tonight on Bondi Vet, Dr Chris Brown deals with an injured puppy ... [Prrrrrp] ... ooh, whoopsie!” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/25/somerset-hospital-weston-general-hospital-closed-new-patients-halt-spread-coronavirus | World news | 2020-05-25T11:23:36.000Z | Ben Quinn | Somerset hospital closed to new patients to halt spread of coronavirus | A general hospital in Somerset has temporarily stopped accepting new patients in an attempt to stop the spread of Covid-19 on site.
Weston general hospital in Weston-super-Mare stopped taking admissions, including into its A&E department, from 8am on Monday “to maintain patient and staff safety”.
The decision was a “clinically led” one that had been taken at a time when the hospital had a high number of patients with coronavirus, according to a statement.
The hospital provides clinical services to residents in north Somerset – a population of about 212,000 people.
The hospital had experienced a “spike” in infections and was being closed to new patients so a deep clean could take place, according to John Penrose, the MP for Weston-super-Mare, who tweeted that he had spoken to local health chiefs.
While the cause of the increase was unclear, doctors have been concerned about a mini-resurgence in localised areas. Social media users who replied to Penrose suggested an influx of visitors to the area since the easing of lockdown rules was to blame, mentioning queues outside chip shops and day-trippers on Weston-super-Mare’s promenade.
The town’s mayor, Mark Canniford, last week criticised the “total disregard” for the town’s residents from day-trippers who packed on to the beach.
The general hospital is not the first to be overwhelmed during the coronavirus crisis. In March, Northwick Park in north-west London was forced to declare a “critical incident” after running out of critical care beds. It asked nearby hospitals to look after patients as it could not cope with the Covid-19 patients it was receiving.
University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS foundation trust said the measure at Weston general was precautionary and the situation would be kept under review.
The trust said there were arrangements in place for new patients to access treatment and care “in other appropriate healthcare settings in the area should they need it”.
Dr William Oldfield, a medical director at the trust, said: “As with any hospital, the number of patients with Covid-19 will frequently change as people are admitted and discharged. We currently have a high number of patients with Covid-19 in Weston general hospital.
“While the vast majority will have come into the hospital with Covid-19, as an extra precaution we have taken the proactive step to temporarily stop accepting new patients to maintain patient and staff safety.
“This is a clinically led decision and we are being supported by our system partners to ensure that new patients receive the care and treatment they need in the appropriate setting, and we are continuing to provide high-quality care to existing patients who are being treated in the hospital.
“We have a robust coronavirus testing programme in place for patients and staff to identify cases quickly, with appropriate measures taken by clinical teams as required. We will keep the situation under constant review.”
The public are being directed to alternatives including out-of-hours GP services, pharmacies, NHS 111 and smaller NHS units dealing with minor injuries. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/science/life-and-physics/2017/sep/24/uk-invests-65m-in-deep-underground-neutrino-experiment-in-us | Science | 2017-09-24T11:37:58.000Z | Jon Butterworth | UK invests £65m in Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment in US | DUNE is one of the better particle physics acronyms. The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment involves a large, sensitive detector which will indeed be deep underground - in the Sanford Lab at the Homestake goldmine in South Dakota – and will study neutrinos produced from a high-intensity beam of protons at Fermilab in Illinois. UK scientists from several universities are already deeply involved in the experiment, and Cambridge’s Prof. Mark Thomson is one of the two spokespeople who lead the experiment internationally.
The science of neutrinos is fascinating, with wide implications for our understanding of the universe and how it operates. Neutrinos are produced copiously in the Sun, and are the second most abundant particle in the universe. In the original conception of the “Standard Model” of particle physics, they were taken to be massless. The discovery that they actually have a - very tiny but non-zero - mass remains the only major modification forced upon the Standard Model since it was established. Fittingly, the first measurement leading to that discovery took place in the Homestake mine, which will now be reoccupied by one of the DUNE detectors. A goldmine in more than one sense.
The fact that neutrinos have mass has important implications. It affects their role in how large scale structures – galaxy clusters – formed in the universe after the Big Bang, for example. It may also have a profound impact upon why the universe is made of matter not anti-matter.
Most of the laws of physics are unbiased between matter and anti-matter. This means that equal amounts of the two should have been produced in the Big Bang, so where all the antimatter has gone is a bit of a mystery . Non-zero neutrino masses allow a quantum mixing between different types of neutrino, and this mixing could allow differences between their matter and anti-matter interactions. That in turn may go some way toward explaining the mystery of the missing antimatter. Seeing whether that is the case is one of the major goals of DUNE, as well as of other neutrino experiments around the world, including the proposed HyperKamiokande experiment in Japan.
Neutrinos rarely interact, but watch them hit the Nova detector here!
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The UK has a long-standing particle-physics partnership with the US, including the current Noνa neutrino experiment and precision muon experiments. There is significant support for the programme via CERN as well, something established in response to the European Strategy for Particle Physics. Prof. Christos Touramanis at the University of Liverpool is co-leader of the large-scale DUNE prototype activities at CERN.
Particle physics is a complex international endeavour; not only do the experiments address deep questions, the international pooling of expertise enables big leaps forward in technology.
On signing, the UK Science Minister, Jo Johnson said
Agreements like this also send a clear signal that UK researchers are outward looking and ready to work with the best talent wherever that may be
Perhaps a predictable emphasis given the current political situation, but it is true, important and worth saying. I for one am keen to see the results.
Jon Butterworth’s book “A Map of the Invisible: Journeys into Particle Physics” is released on 5 Oct 2017. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/nov/06/midway-review-roland-emmerich-ed-skrein-aaron-eckhart | Film | 2019-11-06T14:00:25.000Z | Cath Clarke | Midway review – a long, loud and tedious history lesson | Never in the history of war movies have so few thrills been delivered by so much mayhem and destruction. The attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the battle of Midway six months later have been brought to the screen with boredom-inspiring spectacle by Roland Emmerich. The film is a passion project and comes with a guarantee that its events are historically accurate.
This is the director who sent aliens to invade Earth in Independence Day and armed the president with a rocket launcher in White House Down. But now Emmerich is getting serious, carving a great monument of a movie, a cinematic statue to the bravery of the young men who sacrificed their lives in the Pacific. And like watching a statue for two and a half hours, there’s nothing to do but sit back and yawn.
The film begins with Pearl Harbor, a battle scene that, like the set pieces that follow, hurls a barrage of CGI with some mild 12A-rated carnage that never offers a real sense of jeopardy. Ed Skrein, the British actor from Deadpool, is Lieutenant Dick Best, a showoff pilot whose “cowboy bullshit” in the cockpit is thwarting his promotion chances to squadron commander. Skrein does his best, but a couple of tics – gum chewing and a thick New Jersey accent – do not a character make.
Enemy encounter … Aaron Eckhart in Midway. Photograph: Alan Markfield/Allstar/Centropolis Entertainment
The most interesting strand of the movie involves Patrick Wilson as intelligence officer Edwin Layton, whose warnings about a Japanese attack were repeatedly ignored by top brass. Woody Harrelson (looking distractingly like Ted Danson with bleached white hair) is the newly appointed commander of the Pacific fleet, Admiral Nimitz, a man who overcomes his instinctive mistrust of the geeks in the codebreaking unit to take heed of their intelligence about a new Japanese assault.
The Americans go into the battle of Midway as underdogs, outmanned and outgunned, but with the element of surprise on their side this time: the Japanese are unaware that their naval messages are being intercepted. The clash of firepower when it comes is a colossal thundering snore of a battle. But the heroism of dive bombers like Dick is something to behold as they fly their planes nose down to get as close as possible to the enemy target. Today, the whole thing would be executed by unmanned drones operated thousands of miles from the war zone.
Emmerich goes mercifully easy on the flag-waving patriotism, and he’s pretty even-handed, too, in his portrayal of the Japanese enemy. But his film never really grapples with the human cost of war, and the death of so many young men. A big, long, loud, boring history lesson, it’s a movie that opens a distance between yesterday’s fights and today’s. Emmerich and his scriptwriter Wes Tooke seem to be saying: “Look at these feisty brave boys, who strapped into planes on doomed missions – they did it for our freedom.” The best thing to do with this movie would be to take cover and wait for it to pass.
Midway is released in the UK and the US on 8 November and in Australia on 28 November. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/25/boris-johnsons-tax-cut-would-benefit-richest-10-most-say-experts | Politics | 2019-06-24T23:01:26.000Z | Richard Partington | Boris Johnson’s tax cut would benefit richest 10% most, say experts | Britain’s foremost tax and spending thinktank has said that Boris Johnson’s promise to cut taxes for millions of higher earners would cost £9bn and benefit the richest 10% of households in Britain most.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said the proposal by the frontrunner in the Conservative leadership race was expensive and potentially incompatible with the Tories’ promise to end austerity and safely manage the public finances.
Johnson has said he would increase the higher-rate income tax threshold, at which earnings are taxed at 40%, from its current level of £50,000 to £80,000 should Tory members vote him in as leader.
Tom Waters, a research economist at the IFS, said: “It is not clear that spending such sums on tax cuts is compatible with both ending austerity in public spending and prudent management of the public finances.”
Drawing intense criticism from across the political spectrum, the proposal has been roundly attacked as a giveaway for the rich that would drive up inequality and harm the public finances. No-deal Brexit could damage Treasury revenues, while tax cuts would subtract from funding needed to boost public services.
The chancellor, Philip Hammond, has warned Tory leadership hopefuls against any reckless tax cuts and spending increases.
According to the IFS, about 4 million income tax payers with the highest incomes would benefit from Johnson’s tax promise, standing to gain almost £2,500 each on average. There are 32.75 million British workers, while the average salary is about £26,400 a year.
About three-quarters of the reduction in tax liabilities would go to those in the top 10% of the income distribution, while 97% of the gains would go to the top 30% highest earners.
Johnson has argued that more people are paying tax at the higher rate, while the study showed their numbers have increased by 170% since 1990. Johnson’s policy would slash the number of higher-rate taxpayers by a third to the lowest level since 1990.
Undermining a defence that the cut would encourage aspirational workers, serving as a reward for rising up the earnings pyramid, the IFS said that only a quarter of workers in Britain would benefit from the change at any point in their life or live in a household where someone had. It said just 8% of workers would gain from the change in the short term.
Wealthy pensioners would stand to benefit in particular. Johnson has said the cuts would be funded partly by raising the national insurance contributions of workers who benefit from the income tax cut. However, retirees do not pay national insurance.
The IFS said those over 65 would receive a tax cut about 60% larger than those under 65, entrenching generational inequality.
According to a separate report by the IFS, 60- to 74-year-olds on middle incomes already benefit from substantially higher pension payouts and wages.
Carl Emmerson, the thinktank’s deputy director, said the report, The Future of Income in Retirement, showed that a combination of generous occupational pension schemes and more people working into old age meant those in the 60-74 age bracket on middle incomes were 60% better off than those in a similar position in the mid-1990s.
The current crop of retirees was likely to be a bubble, with the prospect of less generous pension schemes for younger workers acting to depress retirement incomes in decades to come.
“Future generations may actually end up with lower private pensions,” he said. “But there is much capacity for employment rates of older individuals to rise further: for example employment rates of men aged 60 to 64, which have been increasing since the mid-1990s, are still well below the rates seen in the 1970s when life expectancy was much lower and health less good.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/30/could-nearly-half-of-those-with-covid-19-have-no-idea-they-are-infected | World news | 2020-05-30T14:00:45.000Z | David Cox | Could nearly half of those with Covid-19 have no idea they are infected? | When Noopur Raje’s husband fell critically ill with Covid-19 in mid-March, she did not suspect that she too was infected with the virus.
Raje, an oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, had been caring for her sick husband for a week before driving him to an emergency centre with a persistently high fever. But after she herself had a diagnostic PCR test – which looks for traces of the Sars-CoV-2 virus DNA in saliva – she was astounded to find that the result was positive.
“My husband ended up very sick,” she says. “He was in intensive care for a day, and in hospital for 10 days. But while I was also infected, I had no symptoms at all. I have no idea why we responded so differently.”
It took two months for Raje’s husband to recover. Repeated tests, done every five days, showed that Raje remained infected for the same length of time, all while remaining completely asymptomatic. In some ways it is unsurprising that the virus persisted in her body for so long, given that it appears her body did not even mount a detectable immune response against the infection.
When they both took an antibody test earlier this month, Raje’s husband showed a high level of antibodies to the virus, while Raje appeared to have no response at all, something she found hard to comprehend.
Beachgoers in Brighton last weekend – if many of us are carrying the virus, mask-wearing in public may become mandatory. Photograph: Guy Bell/Rex/Shutterstock
“It’s mind-blowing,” she says. “Some people are able to be colonised with the virus and not be symptomatic, while others end up with pretty severe illness. I think it’s something to do with differences in immune regulation, but we still haven’t figured out exactly how this is happening.”
Epidemiological studies are now revealing that the number of individuals who carry and can pass on the infection, yet remain completely asymptomatic, is larger than originally thought. Scientists believe these people have contributed to the spread of the virus in care homes, and they are central in the debate regarding face mask policies, as health officials attempt to avoid new waves of infections while societies reopen.
You don’t need to be coughing to transmit a respiratory infection: talking, singing, even blowing a vuvuzela…
Rein Houben
But the realisation that asymptomatic people can spread an infection is not completely surprising. For starters, there is the famous early 20th century case of “Typhoid Mary”, a cook who infected 53 people in various households in the US with typhoid fever despite displaying no symptoms herself. In fact, all bacterial, viral and parasitic infections – ranging from malaria to HIV – have a certain proportion of asymptomatic carriers. Research has even shown that at any one time, all of us are infected with between eight and 12 viruses, without showing any symptoms.
From the microbe’s perspective, this makes perfect evolutionary sense. “For any virus or bacteria, making people infectious but not ill is an excellent way to spread and persist in populations,” says Rein Houben, an infectious diseases researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine.
However, when Covid-19 was identified at the start of the year, many public health officials both in the UK and around the world failed to account for the threat posed by asymptomatic transmission. This is largely because they were working on models based on influenza, where some estimates suggest that only 5% of people infected are asymptomatic. As a result, the large scale diagnostic testing regimes required to pick up asymptomatic Covid-19 cases were not in place until too late.
“I warned on 24 January to consider asymptomatic cases as a transmission vehicle for Covid-19, but this was ignored at the time,” says Bill Keevil, professor of environmental healthcare at the University of Southampton. “Since then, many countries have reported asymptomatic cases, never showing obvious symptoms, but shedding virus.”
Finding the real number of asymptomatic patients
The first identified case of asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19 occurred in early January, when a traveller from Wuhan passed on the virus to five family members in different parts of the city of Anyang. After testing positive, she then remained asymptomatic for the entire 21-day follow-up period.
While scientists still don’t know whether asymptomatic people are as contagious as those who display symptoms, there are still many ways in which they can pass on Covid-19. “We know that you don’t need to be coughing to transmit a respiratory infection like Sars-CoV-2,” says Houben. “Talking, singing, even blowing instruments like a vuvuzela – in the past all of those have been shown to transmit respiratory viruses in some way.”
Since January, the race has been on to try and identify just how many asymptomatic cases are out there, with varying findings. One study in the Italian town of Vo reported that 43% of the town’s cases of Covid-19 were asymptomatic, while initial reports from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigation into the spread of Covid-19 on the Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier in March, suggest that as many as 58% of cases were asymptomatic. Some 48% of the 1,046 cases of Covid-19 on the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier proved to be asymptomatic while, of the 712 people who tested positive for Covid-19 on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, 46% had no symptoms.
Two thirds of the nearly 2,000 sailors on this French aircraft carrier tested positive, but 48% of those were asymptomatic. Photograph: Christophe Simon/AFP via Getty Images
“Almost all evidence seems to point to a proportion of asymptomatic infections of around 40%, with a wide range,” says Houben. “The proportion is also highly variable with age. Nearly all infected children seem to remain asymptomatic, whereas the reverse seems to hold for the elderly.”
Houben points out that, because most asymptomatic people have no idea they are infected, they are unlikely to be self-isolating, and studies have shown this has contributed to the rampant spread of the virus in facilities such as homeless shelters and care homes. He says this means there is a need for regular diagnostic testing of almost all people in such closed environments, including prisons and psychiatric facilities.
“When it comes to controlling Covid-19, this really shows that we cannot rely on self-isolation of symptomatic cases only,” he says. “Going forwards we need trace and test approaches to account for individuals who are not reporting any symptoms.”
Following Korea’s example
Since February, the country that has arguably had the greatest success in suppressing asymptomatic spread of Covid-19 is South Korea. Armed with a rigorous contact tracing and diagnostic testing regime, which involved dozens of drive-through testing centres across major cities enabling tests to be carried out at a rate of one every 10 minutes, they put specific policies in place to offset the threat of asymptomatic carriers from the moment the virus began to spread out of control in Daegu.
“Once identified, all asymptomatic people are asked to self quarantine in their house until they test negative, with health service officials checking on them twice daily, and monitoring their symptoms,” says Eunha Shim, an epidemiologist at Soongsil University in Seoul.
As Korea attempts to prevent a second wave of infections while reopening schools and allowing people to return to offices, preventing asymptomatic spread is one of their main priorities. This is being done by a mass public health campaign advocating the wearing of masks at all times outside the home. In Seoul, it is not possible to access the subway without a mask.
People queue at an outdoor clinic testing clinic in Bucheon, South Korea. Photograph: Yonhap/EPA
Many scientists are increasingly calling for this policy to be officially introduced in the UK, especially as more and more people resume commuting in the coming months. Keevil says: “There is a strong case to be made for the public wearing appropriate face covers in confined areas such as stations, trains, metro carriages and buses, where it is extremely difficult to maintain the two-metre gap, considered essential to allow respiratory droplets from infected people to fall down before making contact with other people.
“The argument is that face covers may not protect the wearer, but might significantly reduce transmission of virus particles to adjacent people in the closed environment. If there is any benefit to be gained, then everyone should wear a mask, which is why some countries are fining people who do not wear a mask and preventing them travelling.”
Some have argued that masks may pose a risk of harm to the wearer because of their potential to become an infectious surface, but Keevil says this can be avoided through proper cleaning.
“There would need to be policies such as, when arriving at work, place the mask immediately in a plastic bag and wash your hands,” he says. “And then, when returning home, carefully take off the mask and place it immediately in a washing machine for a 60C wash and wash your hands.”
It remains to be seen whether the UK government endorses this as an official recommendation, but a recent study across Barts NHS Trust hospitals in London has illustrated how regular testing and social distancing combined with use of facial protection – in this case PPE – can prevent asymptomatic spread of the virus. Researchers James Moon and Charlotte Manisty said they found that the rate of asymptomatic infection among hospital staff fell from 7% to 1% between the end of March and early May.
For Raje, understanding why asymptomatic patients like her respond the way they do to the virus, will have some critical implications for all of us over the coming months, for example in determining whether vaccines turn out to be effective.
“The big question I have after my experience, is whether a vaccine will really work in all people,” she says. “The vaccination approach is to create an immune response, which then protects you. But if asymptomatic people are not producing a normal antibody response to the virus, what does that mean? Because it’s these people who are the vectors and the carriers of this virus, I think we can’t get away from social distancing until we have some of these answers out there.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/dec/11/flights-were-expensive-so-i-took-the-overnight-sydney-to-melbourne-train-it-was-cheap-and-cheerful-at-first | Australia news | 2022-12-10T19:00:11.000Z | Elias Visontay | Flights were expensive so I took the overnight Sydney to Melbourne train – it was cheap and cheerful (at first) | Elias Visontay | The sky is purple as I walk up and down platform one at Sydney’s Central station on Thursday night. It’s 8.15pm and I have about 20 minutes to get in some last-minute steps before my 11-hour train to Melbourne. I’ve done the trip before and know to stretch beforehand. But tonight the scene in front of the XPT is different.
It is much busier than normal and the type of passengers boarding are different. There are young professionals, many in suits, and fashionably dressed trendy types. There is even a group of students who look like they’ve just walked out of a high-end vape shop. They’re all “first-timers”, as the train staff call them, and it looks like they think they’re about to board the Hogwarts Express.
Time warps and Thai curry: taking the 11-hour train trip from Melbourne to Sydney
Brigid Delaney
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They approach the XPT with a sense of wide-eyed excitement they will soon lose when they hear the service is fully booked (meaning it will be crowded). It will turn into disappointment when they learn there are no charging outlets or wifi – and then anger when they discover there is no mobile reception on board.
Let me explain how we got here.
Australian air travel is in chaos. Airlines are still reeling from Covid inactivity, fuel prices are high and there is soaring demand from travellers, which has meant Australians are facing record prices to fly this Christmas.
The consumer watchdog is wary of carriers deliberately running fewer services so they can keep air fares high.
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I wrote in late November that Australians were opting for cheaper overnight trains and coaches to travel between Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Patronage on these routes has more than doubled in recent months and services are selling out. Then it dawned on me – I was about to become part of this trend.
I had a friend’s 30th birthday in Melbourne just days away and hadn’t booked flights yet. Faced with a fare of $500, I turned to the only sane option – the train. There are two services each day between Sydney and Melbourne and I opted for the overnighter and an economy-saver seat (not a sleeper) for $78.
Initially, the experience is pleasant, especially compared with flying. Photograph: Elias Visontay/The Guardian
As we entered the carriage and took our seats on Thursday night, an announcer warned first-time passengers to sit in their assigned seats. While some may look empty in Sydney, passengers will board at each of the 15 stops, in towns and cities such as Goulburn, Wagga Wagga and Albury.
Train officers, wearing Transport for NSW embroidered shirts, patrol the carriages throughout the night with small torches, flashing them in the faces of passengers who need to be woken up before their regional stops. So swapping seats is a big no-no.
The warning is repeated three times before our first stop – a measure staff have adopted to cope with the wave of first-timers taking the XPT in recent months due to unaffordable domestic air fares.
Carriages have rows of two seats on each side of a central aisle in economy and first class – the latter has seats that recline further with slightly more legroom. There is a limited number of sleeper cabins, which have sold out on our trip.
After warning against swapping seats for the fourth time, the announcer ends his welcome: “We’ll all be friends and we’ll get you to where you’re going.” I turn to the man in the seat next to me and smile. He grunts and turns to face the window.
Initially, the experience is pleasant, especially compared with flying. I’m tall – I stopped counting once I grew past 188cm – and as someone who ponders surgically shortening their legs every time a reclining plane seat crunches my kneecaps, the XPT legroom feels luxurious.
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More legroom: a tall person’s dream. Photograph: Elias Visontay/The Guardian
The aisle is also roomy – passengers can walk through the carriages without swiping those in aisle seats.
And where are they walking? In addition to the two bathrooms per carriage – which are roughly 50% bigger than an economy toilet on a plane – the buffet car is a big drawcard.
The hot meal menu is read out at the beginning of the trip and, heeding the advice of my former colleague Brigid Delaney, who took the XPT, I dodge the mango chicken curry option. Instead, I go for the roast turkey with vegetables. Main meals cost between $9.50 and $12.50.
When meals are ready for collection about 10pm, I walk to the buffet car to collect mine. Pies, sausage rolls, chocolates and salads are also on sale, as are cups of red and white wine – the train is a licensed venue and those smuggling their own grog will be warned. However, there is a bottleneck at the checkout, as the Eftpos machine processes slowly.
Why? Because it relies on a patchy internet connection and, as the clerk serving me explains, the metallic-tinted windows block out mobile reception. The effect is the equivalent of wearing a tinfoil hat to block mind-controlling waves.
My iPhone on Telstra goes between “SOS only” and one bar of 3G all trip, but can rarely load a simple webpage except for when the doors open at stops. “These trains weren’t built for Apple Pay,” the mulleted buffet worker says as he hands me my food in a box.
To be fair, when I take my roast back to my seat, it is hot, tasty and satisfying. However, many passengers either didn’t know about the buffet car or couldn’t wait for it to open. As soon as we pulled out of Central, passengers around me took out dinners they brought with them. The scent of a supermarket roast chook wafted past me and clashed with steam rising from a large tupperware container of garlic prawns being consumed to my right.
Ahead, a 20-something is quizzed for at least 10 minutes by the retiree sitting next to him about the difference between Oporto and Ogalo, after he unwrapped his burger from the former.
Glad I went for the turkey roast. Photograph: Elias Visontay/The Guardian
This enthusiasm in the cabin wears off fairly quickly and, when the carriage lights are turned off at 11pm, most passengers fall asleep.
Within 20 minutes, about three men in my surrounds are snoring violently. In a way, this is a testament to how comfortable the XPT service is, even in economy, and I’m glad for them. But in another way, at about 1am, I want to get violent with them. I try to think how they are all good samaritans, having opted for a travel mode with a responsible carbon footprint. But I still hate them.
At one point I go to the bathroom and return to see the loudest snorer sitting awake. I immediately try to race him to fall asleep first, but I’ve lost within a minute.
By the time we pull into Southern Cross station at about 7.40am, I’ve managed to get about seven hours of sleep. Unfortunately, these came in seven one-hour blocks, as I was woken by bright lights at most stops.
Overall, these issues can be addressed with an eye mask and earplugs. And a pillow will help soften your arm rest. Once you’ve embraced the cost savings, lower carbon footprint and longer trip tradeoff, the XPT makes for a pleasant service. It would be great for the tracks to be upgraded so trains could run faster – at times it feels painfully slow. Phone reception would also be a bonus, though it is nice to be forced to switch off. You’ll also save on airport transfers on both ends.
And Mother Earth will be smiling at you – even if you’re ready to punch your fellow passengers in the face. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2008/feb/25/awardsandprizes.oscars20081 | Culture | 2008-02-25T11:30:47.000Z | Dan Glaister | Coens alone as No Country dominates Oscars | The Coen brothers' taut and unflinchingly brutal thriller No Country For Old Men dominated the 80th Academy Awards on Sunday, winning best director and best film.
The picture also picked up the best supporting actor Oscar for the menacing performance by Javier Bardem as the folically challenged hitman Anton Chigurh. Rounding things out on a triumphant night for the film, directors Ethan and Joel Coen also won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay for their work bringing the vision of novelist Cormac McCarthy to the screen.
In a night short on surprises the heavily-tipped favourite Daniel Day-Lewis won the best actor Oscar for his portrayal of a driven oil prospector in There Will Be Blood. He accepted his award, on his knees, from Helen Mirren, remarking that, "that's the closest I'll ever come to getting a knighthood."
There was a British flavour to much of the evening, with six Oscars going to British nominees. The most notable was to Tilda Swinton for her supporting performance in the legal thriller Michael Clayton. Swinton also produced the most noteworthy acceptance speech of the night, noteworthy for its inclusion of the words "nipple" and "buttock" in the allotted 45 seconds.
Speaking backstage after her win, Swinton admitted to being surprised at her win. "I'm so stoked, as they say, I think it's fantastic. It's completely astonishing, and I'm amazed I'm still standing, but I'm not complaining. It's good."
The 80th annual Academy Awards took place against the backdrop of inclement weather and the aftermath of the writers' strike. The strike took its toll on Hollywood's other major celebration, the Golden Globes, causing that ceremony to be cancelled. But its resolution less than two weeks before the Academy Awards left the show's writers little time to prepare, an uncertainty that showed in much of the broadcast. Host Jon Stewart, making his second appearance at the helm of the second most-watched television programme in the US, opened proceedings by remarking, "You're here! I can't believe it! You're actually here!"
That sense of relief and disbelief percolated through to the rest of the show. While the Oscars are always keen on sentiment, much of this year's broadcast was given over to nostalgic reruns of previous wins and interviews with stars of bygone years.
"Had the writers' strike continued they would have had to pad out the ceremony with even more montages," Stewart said at one point, before introducing yet another montage of old clips. After it finished, he said, "Thank god we didn't have to show that."
One of the evening's surprises came with Marion Cotillard winning the best actress award for her portrayal of Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. Julie Christie and Juno star Ellen Page had been considered strong contenders for the award, but Cotillard built on her victory at the Baftas to scoop the Oscar.
British winners included Alexandra Byrne for her costume designs for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Jan Archibald, along with Didier Lavergne for La Vie en Rose, and Suzie Templeton and Hugh Welchman for the animated short Peter and the Wolf.
Daniel Day-Lewis was the only winner to attempt to scale the heights of Oscar hyperbole, when he noted from the stage that There Will be Blood had, "sprung like a golden sapling out of the mad, beautiful head of [director] Paul Thomas Anderson."
But best actress winner Cotillard probably came up with the most touching sentiment of the night when she remarked from the stage that, "It is true, there are some angels in this city." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/31/gorbachev-and-reagan-the-capitalist-and-communist-who-helped-end-the-cold-war | World news | 2022-08-31T06:00:22.000Z | David Smith | Gorbachev and Reagan: the capitalist and communist who helped end the cold war | When Michael Reagan attended the 2004 funeral of his father, former US president Ronald Reagan, the man sitting behind him, he recalls, was the last leader of the Soviet Union: Mikhail Gorbachev.
“Mikhail Gorbachev and my wife and I became friends over the years,” Reagan said from Los Angeles on Tuesday after learning of the Russian’s death aged 91. “What I most remember is him telling me that every time my father and him met, my father would always end every meeting with, ‘If it’s God’s will’, and Mikhail Gorbachev would say to me, ‘I would look around the room to see if God was there’.”
Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev, capitalist and communist, were an unlikely pairing but their series of high profile summits have been praised for helping to end the cold war. Together they negotiated a landmark deal in 1987 to scrap intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
Mikhail Gorbachev obituary
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Former Reagan administration officials spoke on Tuesday of the leaders’ chemistry and shared a determination to pull the world back from the brink of a superpower war. They lauded Gorbachev as a Soviet leader who, unlike his implacable predecessors, was willing to constructively engage with Washington.
A new kind of Soviet leader
Reagan had branded the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” but his political soulmate, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, declared in 1984: “I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together.” The following years, Reagan and Gorbachev held their first summit in Geneva.
Ken Adelman, who as Reagan’s director of arms control and attended the summit, recalled: “I was at lunch with him and he walks in and says, ‘This is a new kind of Soviet leader’. I was kind of amused because he had never met an old kind of Soviet leader but he was absolutely right.”
He added: “Reagan saw himself as a great negotiator and considered his life as one of great negotiations. He was very sad that, as he said, he couldn’t talk to all the Soviet leaders before Gorbachev ‘because they keep dying on me. What am I supposed to do?’”
Adelman, 76, author of Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours that Ended the cold war, would not describe the men as friends but said they were always civil to each other. “What did it was that Ronald Reagan showed great backbone at the Reykjavik summit in 1986 when he walked out without destroying SDI - the Strategic Defense Initiative - when Gorbachev’s top priority was to destroy SDI.
“So I think Gorbachev admired Reagan. Reagan certainly liked Gorbachev because he was a new type of Soviet leader, one that he could deal with, and they saw their futures were intertwined and their greatness was intertwined. That was certainly true when they came up with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was the first treaty that eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons.”
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev don cowboy hats while enjoying a moment at Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo north of Santa Barbara in 1992 Photograph: Bob Galbraith/AP
Another witness to the impossibly high stakes negotiations was Jim Kuhn, then assistant to the president. Now 70 and based in Alexandria, Virginia, remembers that Thatcher came to Camp David to discuss her meeting with Gorbachev and convinced Reagan that he was different and willing to listen.
Kuhn said: “The thing that made the difference most to Reagan was when Thatcher told him he never cut me off, he never interrupted me whenever I was making my point. That opened up Reagan’s mind about Gorbachev so he went in there with an open mind. He knew that that one summit could lead to another and maybe another and maybe there was some way to begin to scale down the nuclear arms race.”
‘There’s a chemistry between us’
The first one-on-one meeting in Geneva was supposed to run for 20 minutes but lasted an hour and a half, Kuhn continued, and Reagan’s first impression was positive. “His words were, ‘There’s a chemistry between the two of us, we listen to one another, we don’t agree but maybe there’s a way to continue. We’ve got a long way to go here and hopefully we can find some kind of a common ground.’
“We had worked it out that Reagan would, in the second session, take Gorbachev for a walk in Geneva down along the lake there. There was a small lake house and it was just the two of them meeting with interpreters and that’s when Reagan told Gorbachev, ‘Mr General Secretary, you can never win an all out arms race with the United States because we will always have the ability to outspend you’.
“That set the tone for the summits going forward. Gorbachev was very highly intelligent and prepared himself. He understood that things had to change and that Reagan was the kind of guy that he might be able to work with and one summit led to another and then another.”
But Kuhn noted that the leaders, whose wives “didn’t hit it off so well”, also had major disagreements, especially over human rights. “Reagan would give Gorbachev a list of people that were being held against their will, being mistreated in the Soviet Union. It just used to make Gorbachev’s blood boil: like, why do they hit me with this?
“So he would come back and attack Reagan, saying, don’t lecture me on how to run my country or how we treat our people; you’ve got people living on sidewalks and on grates and you’ve got crime out of control.”
In 1987 Reagan famously urged in West Berlin: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Two years later popular revolutions swept away communist governments in East Germany and the rest of eastern Europe. Gorbachev and Reagan’s successor, President George HW Bush, met at a summit in Malta and hailed the end of the cold war.
Gorbachev and Reagan sign the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement in 1987 Photograph: Historical/Corbis/Getty Images
Ed Rogers, who was a special assistant to Reagan and deputy assistant to Bush, attended the Malta summit and believes Gorbachev deserves more credit. He said on Tuesday: “Gorbachev was intellectually honest about what aspirations he had for the Soviet Union. He wanted a healthy, prosperous society.
“He was intellectually honest about what the economic system had produced in Russia, in the satellite states that comprised the Soviet Union, and he knew that more of the same was undesirable.
“He was intellectually honest about human aspiration. He didn’t turn the guns on people in Berlin. He didn’t turn the guns on people that came to the embassy in Hungary. He decided the answer to the Soviet Union’s problems isn’t to shoot a bunch of innocent people.”
Rogers added: “Gorbachev did not crash the Soviet Union, he brought it in for a smooth landing. It was a huge geo political nonevent thanks to his honesty and decency.”
Bill Kristol, who also served in the Reagan administration and is now a political commentator, tweeted: “We Reaganites bristled when some gave Gorbachev credit (more than Reagan!) for the end of the cold war and Soviet Union. But he mattered a lot. He may not have intended the outcomes, but was unwilling to use force to prevent them. And that was key.”
At a White House meeting in 1987, Reagan remarked: “We have listened to the wisdom in an old Russian maxim. And I’m sure you’re familiar with it though my pronunciation may give you difficulty. The maxim is: Dovorey no provorey—trust, but verify.”
Gorbachev said: “You repeat that at every meeting.”
Reagan replied: “I like it.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/08/samsung-smartthings-hub-review-internet-of-things | Technology | 2016-02-08T07:00:10.000Z | Samuel Gibbs | Samsung SmartThings Hub review: an Internet of Things to rule them all? | The Internet of Things – where seemingly ordinary devices connect to each other and the internet to make them more than the sum of their parts (think fridges that know when you’re out of milk and then order more for you) – is still more a concept than a reality for many.
That is steadily changing as more and more devices arrive on the market but, like the spokes on a bicycle wheel need a hub to connect them, those devices need to be linked up to be useful. Samsung’s SmartThings hub hopes to be that central pin that connects them all.
The majority of IoT devices – from smart plugs to thermostats, door sensors to security cameras – come with their own apps, their own systems and connections, and many of them do not speak to each other. That’s where Samsung’s SmartThings hub attempts to step in, as the grand unifying box – one IoT command and control centre to rule them all.
The SmartThings Hub is a small white box that is meant to be hidden out of sight somewhere. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
It supports home-network based devices, plugging into your router to control them through fixed or Wi-Fi networks, as well as two of the most broadly used wireless home-automation standards, ZigBee and Z-Wave. It means that the Hub can talk to almost every product currently available on the market that doesn’t use an isolated proprietary system.
Not all products support the Hub, however, even if they can talk to it. But SmartThings has something many other devices vying for a similar spot in people’s homes doesn’t have – a viable, productive home hacker and developer community.
The result is that even if a product doesn’t officially support Samsung’s open system, such as Google’s Nest smart thermostat for instance, someone will probably have developed a workaround. Those workarounds are often relatively complex to put into practice, but tutorials are available and there are enough support tools to guide most people with a moderate understanding of computers and basic code to make it work.
The Hub
Power, ethernet and a couple of USB ports add to the wireless connections in the back of the SmartThings Hub. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The Hub is a small white plastic box with a power cord and an ethernet socket. It can be placed almost anywhere as long as it can connect to your router via ethernet. It’s best placed in the centre of your home somewhere, but I found Samsung’s sensors could connect anywhere in my home and even at the end of the garden without issue.
The box also has a battery backup system, should the power go out, which is useful for making sure any battery-powered locks still work if there’s a power cut, for instance.
The app
The SmartThings app is one of the best bits about the system, providing step-by-step guides, examples and ‘smart apps’ and an easy-to-use control system once everything is set up. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The Hub is only half the story. You interact with and control your Hub and connected devices through the SmartThings app. It’s available for Android, iOS and Windows Phone, but you will need one of those devices to make it work.
The Android app is relatively intuitive. You add supported devices or “Things” to the app using an automatic discovery system. The Hub scans for stuff it can connect to and allows you to select which ones you want to set up. A couple of taps and that’s all that’s required for most devices.
You can then group devices into rooms, such as the lounge or kitchen, and assign tasks and events to them. An event can be triggered by almost anything, from other devices to your presence or the time of day. There’s a step-by-step guide that walks you through the process and some pre-formed ideas of what might be useful.
More advanced configurations can create an alarm system, using sensors, cameras and other bits. For instance, you can “arm” your house so that the lights come on, the camera starts recording and it sends you alerts to your smartphone if the locked door is opened.
The SmartThings motion sensor, here set up in a hall to monitor movement. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Again, that’s not a new thing – traditional alarm systems can do that. But when they’re not being used for an alarm the sensors and devices can do other things, like turn off the lights when shut or lock a door.
It all works seamlessly with compatible devices, of which there are over 50, and will even control devices like the Sonos wireless speakers. It gets a bit more complicated when you’re trying to work with a device that isn’t officially supported, such as the Lightwave RF lighting control system, but it is possible, using community-generated tools and work arounds.
In fact, what you can do with it is only limited to your imagination and the number of devices you own. Want to announce your arrival to the house as soon as you step through the door with a fanfare and flashing lights? No problem. Fancy getting your coffee brewed the moment your alarm – which is tracking your sleep to wake you up at the best moment possible – goes off? Simple.
You can even unlock and open all the doors in your property in case of a fire, if you have the right devices.
Everything that happens in your home stays under your control through the SmartThings app, which means others wanting access to the system need your username and password. Samsung assures that all the account details and devices are encrypted to protect intrusion, including its smart cameras.
The Kit
The multi-purpose sensor included in the kit, here set up to monitor the closed state of a door. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The Hub can be bought as part of a starter kit costing £200 with a motion sensor, a multi-sensor that does temperature, vibration and door and window open and close states, a smart plug, and a presence sensor for your keys.
Each is very easy to set up, and self explanatory. The motion and door sensors are similar to non-IoT versions and work in a similar manner. The smart plug turns the power on or off to something plugged into it when commanded. The presence sensor tells the Hub when you get home. Your smartphone can also be configured as a presence indicator, which saves carrying the relatively bulky sensor around on a keychain.
The sensors are powered by coin cells and last for around two years, according to Samsung. There’s also a moisture sensor available for £30.
The presence sensor that attaches to a keychain but can be replicated using a smartphone. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Price
The SmartThings Hub is available on its own for £99 or as part of a kit with a £30 motion sensor, £30 multi-sensor, £45 smart power plug and a £30 presence sensor for £200.
Verdict
The Internet of Things is still a bit of a mess of standards and protocols, with loads of devices unable to talk to each other. The SmartThings Hub is the closest thing I’ve come across to unifying your existing and new kit.
Setting up officially compatible products is a doddle, as you would hope. But it is the open and community-driven hacks and workarounds to support other in-compatible bits that is the strength. That bit isn’t for novices, but anyone who has an existing system that likely took a bit of work to set up will probably be able to do it.
The SmartThings sensors work well, but are quite pricey, the kit is worth buying, the system is adaptable and the cross-platform app support is a huge bonus compared to other closed systems.
This is about as good as an integrated IoT system that connects to devices from a plethora of vendors gets right now.
Pros: simple setup, cross-platform, decent app, developer community, multiple standards in one box, unites your existing kit, adaptable
Cons: not compatible with everything, workarounds for non-natively supported devices will be difficult for some, Internet of Things still very early in its lifecycle
The plug can control the power to any device plugged into it, typically lamps or coffee machines, with a button on the side to manually power it on if required. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/11/no-democratic-consent-british-drones-africa | Opinion | 2014-03-11T14:10:55.000Z | Chris Cole | Where's the democratic consent for using British drones in Africa? | Chris Cole | The UN's special rapporteur on counter-terrorism, Ben Emmerson QC, has revealed that the Ministry of Defence is planning to deploy British Reaper drones to Africa and the Middle East after British forces are withdrawn from Afghanistan at the end of the year. He told the Guardian: "My understanding is that the plan is to deploy them to parts of Africa and the Middle East where they can be used for surveillance … over a wide range of territory [in conflicts] where one party is a jihadist group."
This will no doubt come as shock to many. There has been no discussion or debate about a new military intervention, either in parliament or among the public. Indeed, after last summer's vote against possible military intervention in Syria it has been forecast that the withdrawal from Afghanistan would bring to an end more than a century of warfare by British forces around the globe.
It is no doubt just a coincidence that last week the incoming head of Africom (the US Africa Command), General David Rodriguez, lobbied the Senate armed services committee for more drones and resources.
This development highlights a key issue with the growing use of military unmanned systems: they make military intervention much easier for politicians. Political leaders know intervention comes at a cost. The public do not like to see young men and women who have been sent overseas by politicians come back seriously injured or in body bags. While there has been increasing support among the public for British forces, reflected in the enormous support for the Help for Heroes charities, there is a matching disdain for the politicians who have sent them overseas. Increasingly, as the MoD itself admits, there is a war-weariness among the public.
Unmanned drones help enormously with this problem as they can be operated via satellite from thousands of miles away and dramatically lower the risk to British forces.
Drones are also leading to much more secrecy. Despite more than five years of UK drone operations in Afghanistan there is very little public information about the impact of their use. While the MoD shows selected journalists around RAF Waddington, parliamentary questions and Freedom of Information requests aimed at informing public debate on the matter are simply refused. Perhaps acknowledging this lack of public debate, the defence select committee is holding an inquiry into the use of drones by British forces. However, I was informed recently that there are to be no public hearings on the issue.
Last summer, following a large public demonstration against drones, I was one of five campaigners who entered RAF Waddington to disrupt the ongoing drone operations and try to break the secrecy surrounding the use of British drones. While we were in the base we pasted up heartbreaking reports detailing the civilian casualties resulting from the air strikes taking place in Afghanistan. Although we were found guilty of criminal damage at our trial, the judge praised us as dutiful and conscientious people.
If this drone deployment goes ahead, no doubt dutiful and conscientious people will again try to disrupt the drones before they are sent over Africa. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2012/jun/29/local-newspapers-newspapers | Media | 2012-06-29T09:00:00.000Z | Roy Greenslade | Local news crisis: what crisis? Audiences are bigger than ever | Today's extract from What do we mean by local?* is by the Newspaper Society's communications and marketing director, Lynne Anderson, who argues that "life is local" and that more people than ever are reading local and regional news...
In today's hyper-connected world of 24-hour global news, instant messaging and the blogosphere, while high streets spiral into decline and post offices and pubs close down, we could be forgiven for thinking that localness is all but dead.
But being part of a community is a basic human need that remains hugely important to British people. Its significance in our lives has if anything increased as a result of the economic downturn, fuelled by local pride and a growing need for a sense of place and belonging.
The adage "life is local" has never been more true. Most of us continue to live our lives locally – working, relaxing with family and friends, eating, shopping, and playing sport.
Research has found that 80% of us spend at least half our time and money within just five miles of home and we have a growing appetite for local news and information to help us navigate our lives locally.
People are taking more pride in their community and recognising its importance to their lives. Local newspapers support this increasing sense of local pride because they help people to feel part of their community and spur them to act for its benefit. No other medium can deliver a sense of community and belonging like the local press.
Local newspapers continue to evolve into local media businesses delivering local news and information across print, online, mobile and broadcast platforms.
Britain's local media comprises 1,100 core newspapers – ranging from large metropolitan dailies to small weekly titles – as well as 1,600 companion websites, hundreds of niche and ultra local publications and a range of other digital and broadcast channels.
But the regional and local media sector, with local newspapers at its heart, has been experiencing one of the most severe and prolonged advertising downturns in living memory.
The picture remains challenging, but publishers believe they are well placed to come through the downturn provided they are given the freedom to continue to innovate and develop their print and multimedia businesses.
It is important to remember that local newspapers are essentially profitable: the sector currently takes around £1.5bn a year in print advertising revenue, accounting for 9.3% of all UK advertising revenue.
Online recruitment advertising in the regional press accounts for another £55.2m. Total print advertising spend in the regional press is three and a half times the ad spend on radio, and equivalent to the combined total for radio, outdoor and cinema.
There has been much comment about local newspapers closing down and towns being left "without a collective voice". The reality is that no part of the UK is bereft of any local newspaper coverage.
The worst year for closures was 2009, which saw a net reduction of 60 titles. Most of those closures were marginal free titles occupying second or third position in the local market, and should be considered in the context of the significant expansion of free titles in 1980s.
Over the past 10 years, the number of paid-for titles within the sector has dropped by 1.1% while the number of free titles has dropped by 24.6%.
Ironically, at a time when its primary revenue source – advertising – has been under such challenge, the local media is reaching bigger audiences than ever before across its print, online and broadcast platforms. It delivers local news and information to 33m print readers a week and 42m web users a month.
The importance of the local press
The industry is finding new ways to cover council meetings and open up public bodies to scrutiny using, for example, live webcams, blogging and Twitter.
Despite massive growth in local media's digital audiences, print remains at the heart of the industry. Independent studies confirm the relevance and power of the printed newspaper as an editorial and advertising medium and go some way to explaining the resilience local media has shown in the face of the economic downturn.
People live most of their lives within a relatively small geographic location. They are increasingly interested in local news and information from that area and the local paper is the first place they turn to.
The vast majority of people value local news and believe local newspaper content to be as relevant as ever. Local papers are acknowledged to be the most effective of all media channels, including social media, for generating word-of-mouth conversations.
The local press has more journalists on the ground than any other medium: some 10,000 professionals focused on local news.
A study by TNS-RI (2010) found that 85% of people in the UK believe it is important that their local newspaper keeps them informed about local council issues, while 81% said they would be less informed about council budgets, plans and elections if there wasn't a local newspaper in the area.
Local papers are also the first port of call for anyone who wants to raise awareness of a local issue or problem.
The importance of the local press in disseminating vital local information is always highlighted at times of emergency and loss of essential services, such as during flooding or heavy snowfalls. The need to support this pivotal public information work has been repeatedly recognised by the government.
While the traditional pillars of community have changed, it is clear that community remains a highly valued concept. It is also clear that people feel far more positively about issues closer to home than they do about similar issues at a national level.
Five essential beliefs about local papers
Local media is clearly hugely important to all aspects of community life, helping people keep up to date with local news and issues. Research has identified what people regard as the five core reasons for engaging with their local paper:
It helps them get the best out of where they live; helps them feel part of the community; is honest and believable; is more accurate and reliable than other media; and they can rely on it for news they cannot get elsewhere.
The content of local papers is relevant to people's engagement with their local community and reflects the real issues that affect people's day-to-day lives.
So just how important is local news and the role of the local paper to the concept of localness and community? Media commentator and former Guardian editor Peter Preston summed it up perfectly in his recent article for Local Newspaper Week:
"Journalism isn't about sitting in some lofty office thinking great thoughts. It is about knowing the people you're writing for, understanding their concerns, their hopes and fears. And you can only do that if you're out there amongst them, being part of the community you aim to serve."
Peter learned his trade on Liverpool's big regional daily newspapers:
"I did funerals, Rotary Club speeches, dog shows, council rows and rugby matches. And at the end of that stint, when I moved on to cover local politics for the Guardian, I think I'd learned something precious.
That politics doesn't exist in some rarefied world at Westminster. That democracy lives, breathes and reacts in the minds and the lives of the people you catch a bus to work with every morning. That the local dimension isn't some remote stepladder on the route to the top. It's where everything begins. It's the foundation stone of society.
And that's as true today as it ever was. Your local paper, in villages, towns and cities up and down the land, is there to reflect you, yourself – your own running commentary on life...
There's been a local press in Britain for as long as there have been newspapers. There will be newspapers – in one form or another – for as long as people care about what happens around them. News is a necessity, your link to your neighbours. Prize it, relish it, support it."
Next - the final extract: A call for innovation and radical thinking by Neil Fowler, a former editor and publisher
*What do we mean by local? is edited by John Mair, Neil Fowler & Ian Reeves and published by Abramis. Available at a special Media Guardian price of £12 from [email protected] | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/nov/21/wales-wants-shorten-summer-school-holidays-really-too-long | Education | 2023-11-21T16:53:37.000Z | Richard Adams | Wales wants to shorten summer school holidays – but are they really too long? | Wales is making the latest attempt to detach school holidays from the agricultural needs and religious events that have influenced dates for 150 years, arguing it helps parents and disadvantaged children to have fixed breaks spread out more evenly through the year.
Citing research that parents struggle to find childcare over the long summer holiday, Wales’s minority Labour administration wants to shrink the summer holidays from six weeks to five and eventually four, and use the time to double half-term breaks in October and May to two weeks.
The proposals would also equalise the length of terms and break the connection with Easter by fixing the timing of spring holidays regardless of the religious calendar, to give parents and schools greater certainty.
‘Cost of children crisis’: UK parents on coping with half-term on a shoestring
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Research by the Welsh government found that organising and paying for childcare over the summer was a common complaint among parents, particularly for women running smaller businesses whose childcare costs outweighed their potential earnings.
Siân Gwenllian, the designated member for Plaid Cymru, which supports the proposals, said: “The current school calendar was designed a long time ago, under very different circumstances and we are suggesting changes that could work better for everyone, but most importantly for pupils of all ages.
“Many children and young people, especially those with additional learning needs and those from lower-income families find the break very long, impacting negatively on their wellbeing and education.”
Lee Elliot Major, a professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, said: “Reforms to the current school calendar created during Victorian times are long overdue – and would be good for children, parents and teachers alike.
“Terms of almost equal length would make for better educational planning. After summer exams, teachers could dedicate time to extracurricular activities – the sports, music and art work that often fall by the wayside in a test-obsessed world.”
But the evidence on whether long school holidays harm learning among children is unclear, according to experts. Much of the evidence for the “summer slide” comes from the US, where summer holidays are far longer, up to 12 weeks compared with the existing six or seven in England and Wales.
John Hattie, a professor of education at the University of Melbourne and an influential researcher and author, said: “The effects from school holiday are very small on students, and there is little reason to believe that the length of the school year has much effect at all.”
Research in UK schools tends to support Hattie’s comment. A study from 2019 that looked at pupils from primary schools in an area of high deprivation in Scotland and England found no effect on reading skills and only “stagnation” in spelling ability. Meanwhile, schools in Northern Ireland typically have eight weeks off over summer yet generally have better exam results than schools in England or Wales.
And research published last year, testing a wider group of UK children and age groups before and after the summer, found “no evidence that inequalities in verbal cognitive ability widened over the school summer holidays”.
But the 2022 study did find evidence of “worsening mental health and mental health inequalities” in some age groups. That concern was echoed in focus groups conducted on behalf of the Welsh government.
According to one teacher in Wales: “The six weeks can be a really long time if they’ve got issues at home, and they’ve got no support staff to talk to. They’re out on a limb in that respect. Some of the kids dread having the six weeks off.”
Surveys done in Wales found 60% of parents said they were “quite happy with the school year as it is”. But when asked about the potential changes, most also agreed the current summer was too long and would support a shorter summer break and equal terms.
Should school summer holidays be shorter? We ask an expert
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“When we think about it, these holidays are archaic, they were set up with a sort of long summer harvest, which doesn’t suit the needs of children or adults today,” one parent said.
So why have a longer summer holiday at all? According to Hattie, students and teachers do need time to “recharge their batteries doing other activities”, while school leaders remain firmly in favour of an extended summer break.
Patrick Roach, the general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, says there is no evidence that changing holidays would address any of the fundamental problems facing schools in Wales such as teacher recruitment. “The Welsh government are flogging a dead horse,” Roach said.
In England, the former education secretary Michael Gove was among those who have tried to reshape the school year. In 2013 Gove complained that “the structure of the school term and the school day was designed at a time when we had an agricultural economy”, and gave schools in England the power to choose the timing of their holidays.
One school that took up Gove’s offer was the Boulevard academy in Hull, which attempted to cut its summer holiday to four weeks. But it proved unpopular while other schools maintained the traditional dates, and the school now has a six-week summer holiday. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/05/google-pixel-fold-review-the-slick-phone-tablet-hybrid-with-killer-camera | Technology | 2023-07-05T06:00:25.000Z | Samuel Gibbs | Google Pixel Fold review: the slick phone-tablet hybrid with killer camera | Google’s first folding phone-tablet hybrid is finally here to give Samsung’s leading Z Fold a run for its money, with different ideas of how such a cutting-edge device should work and a serious camera upgrade.
The Pixel Fold costs a colossal £1,749 ($1,799), which is £100 more than the already eye-wateringly expensive rival from Samsung, and more than twice the price of Google’s top regular phone, the £849 Pixel 7 Pro. That puts the Pixel Fold in the rarefied company of ultra-premium gadgets, best thought of as the Ferraris or Bentleys of the phone world.
Four years on from Samsung’s launch of the first phone that unfolded like a book to become a tablet, the form of these cutting-edge devices is still evolving at a rapid pace.
The Pixel Fold works like a regular smartphone when closed, with a great fingerprint scanner in the power button for unlocking the phone. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Google’s first try is wider and shorter when closed compared with Samsung’s version, which means apps fit properly and the keyboard is full size on the excellent outside screen. It works so well, you might spend most of your time with the phone closed except for specific tasks – such as viewing media or working on a spreadsheet – that need the large inner screen.
The phone is significantly thinner than rivals, closing fully with no gap between the screens when shut. Its aluminium, glass and stainless steel body looks and feels as premium as the high price dictates, but it weighs about 70g more than a regular large phone.
The Pixel’s fantastic inner 7.6in screen opens like a book into landscape orientation – wider than it is tall. The crease down the middle where it folds isn’t generally noticeable when the screen is on, but is still visible when the display is off or in reflections, as with all folders.
The Pixel Fold can be used in various different modes and shapes held securely by the hinge. Open portrait (top left), open landscape (top right), table top (bottom left) or tent mode using the outer screen (bottom right). Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The hinge opens smoothly, holding the screen open at a wide variety of angles, and is rated for at least 200,000 folds. The screen has a shallow bezel around the outside, which makes for a good handle. A small gap between the outer layer of the screen and the edge collects dust like a gutter, which proved to be problematic for another reviewer, causing the screen to break. I haven’t had that particular issue, but folding devices are simply not as durable as traditional phones as the screen has to be made from softer materials so it can bend.
Specifications
Main screen: 7.6in 120Hz OLED (380ppi)
Cover screen: 5.8in FHD+ 120Hz OLED (408ppi)
Processor: Google Tensor G2
RAM: 12GB
Storage: 256 or 512GB
Operating system: Android 13
Camera: 48MP wide, 10.8MP ultrawide, 10.8MP 5x telephoto; 9.5MP and 8MP selfie cameras
Connectivity: 5G, dual sim, esim, USB-C, wifi 6E, NFC, Bluetooth 5.2, UWB
Water resistance: IPX8 (1.5 metres for 30 minutes)
Dimensions folded: 139.7 x 79.5 x 12.1mm
Dimensions unfolded: 139.7 x 158.7 x 5.8mm
Weight: 283g
Tensor G2 chip with 32-hour battery life
It takes a good 90 minutes to fully charge the Pixel Fold with a suitable 30W power adaptor (not included). It also supports Qi wireless charging. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The Pixel Fold has Google’s Tensor G2 chip from its Pixel 7 series with 12GB of RAM, which is plenty for running multiple apps at a time. It feels snappy and responsive, but does get noticeably warmer in operation than rivals with more efficient Qualcomm chips.
After almost two weeks of testing, the battery life averaged about 32 hours between charges, which is enough for a day’s use but lags Samsung’s Z Fold 4, and is short of Google’s Pixel 7 Pro. It is more heavily affected by use of 5G than rivals running Qualcomm chips, and depends on how much you use the larger internal screen.
Sustainability
The Pixel Fold fully closes without a gap between the two halves of the phone. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
Google does not provide an expected lifespan for the battery, but it should last in excess of 500 full-charge cycles with at least 80% of its original capacity. The phone is repairable by Google and third-party shops. The outer screen costs £135 to replace, the inner screen costs £544, and the inner screen protective film costs £72. Genuine replacement parts will be made available from iFixit for DIY repair.
The device is made with recycled aluminium, glass, plastic and other materials accounting for 17% of the device by weight. The company publishes environmental impact reports for some of its products. Google will recycle old devices free of charge.
Android 13 is half phone, half tablet
Drag an app off the dock to one side to trigger split-screen view, with two essentially smartphone-sized apps usable at once. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The Pixel Fold runs Android 13 and behaves the same as a Pixel phone when closed and a Pixel Tablet when open, which suits both forms well.
Google’s approach to the software complexities of the folding form are much simpler than Samsung’s. You can only run two apps on the internal tablet screen at once, not the three-plus that Samsung allows. The app dock is revealed with a short swipe up from the bottom of the screen, not fixed as a permanent taskbar like a desktop computer.
The first two pages of the phone-sized home screen are stitched together to form one page of the tablet-sized home screen. That means you can’t have separate layouts for the outside and inside screens, as you can on a Samsung, which feels like a step backwards.
All of Google’s apps are well-optimised for the landscape tablet screen and look great, as do a growing number of third-party apps, including WhatsApp, Evernote and Spotify. However, others are just stretched-out phone apps, while some, such as Ring and Instagram, refuse to resize, appearing as smaller apps in the centre with big black bars either side, just as with the Pixel Tablet. Google still has its work cut out to get all these third-party developers to play ball.
Overall, Google’s software is simple and nice to use, but lacks the power-user approach of Samsung’s One UI, which can turn its foldables into multitasking monsters, with all the added complexity that entails. Google will provide at least five years of software and security updates, including at least three major Android versions.
Class-leading camera
The camera can be used with the Pixel Fold fully open, in an L-shape (as pictured) or fully closed like a regular phone, which is the easiest to hold. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The camera on the Pixel Fold soundly beats the competition. On the back, you have a triple-camera system shooting 12-megapixel photos from a main, ultrawide and 5x optical zoom camera, which is a first for a folding phone.
It isn’t an exact match for the brilliant camera system on the Pixel 7 Pro, but it gets similar results. The main camera captures a great amount of detail, producing excellent shots across a range of lighting conditions. The ultrawide camera is solid but gets noticeably noisier in lower light conditions.
The 5x optical zoom camera is the standout, offering meaningfully more reach to distant objects than the standard 2 or 3x, with digital zoom producing pretty good results on top, up to 10x and beyond.
The aluminium bar on the back protects the ultrawide, main and telephoto cameras (left to right) of the Pixel Fold. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian
The Pixel Fold has two decent selfie cameras, one in each screen, which are most useful for video calls. The outside screen can be used as a view finder for shooting selfies with the main cameras when unfolded, which produces much better results.
Google’s low-light photography mode is best-in-class, while the folding modes are useful for propping up the phone to take pictures of the stars, group selfies and other interesting photos. It has no full manual mode, but has enough adjustments for most, and solid video capture, too.
Price
The Google Pixel Fold costs £1,749 ($1,799) with 256GB of storage or £1,869 ($1,919) with 512GB.
For comparison, folding competitors include Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 4 costing £1,649 and the Honor Magic v costing £1,399.99. Google’s Pixel 7 Pro costs £849 and Pixel Tablet costs £599, while an Apple iPad mini costs £569.
Verdict
The Google Pixel Fold looks and feels like a mashup of all the folding tablets that have come before. Part Microsoft Surface Duo, part Galaxy Z Fold, with a pinch of the Oppo Find N2.
The wider, shorter outside screen makes for a better phone, while the inside tablet screen is very similar to rivals, with a slightly less obvious crease down the middle but a little more glare. The thinner body, gapless fold and flatter bezels around the tablet display are more attractive but may prove less functional at protecting the screen. Only time will tell. Four years since the first folding tablet, it still feels like the future every time you unfold the Pixel.
The camera is unrivalled on a foldable, with a 5x optical zoom similar to a regular Pixel 7 Pro, making it feel less like you are trading camera quality for the folding form than with rivals.
The software is simple and works well, but lacks the raw power of rival Samsung’s Z Fold, which just gives you more of everything. For a high-priced power gadget like this, it feels like a backward step in a few areas.
The Pixel Fold is the best-looking foldable to date and finally provides Samsung with some much-needed competition. But the crease, the screen fragility, the heavy weight and high price are all big downsides compared with a regular phone.
Folders get better with every iteration but it will be some time before the folding tablet has any chance of going mainstream.
Pros: a phone and tablet in one, water resistance, simple, great outside screen, great tablet screen, good performance, class-leading cameras, gap-free when closed, attractive design.
Cons: extremely expensive, much more fragile than a regular device, costly to repair, no dust resistance, heavy, software not as power-user as top rival, battery life could be longer. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/oct/16/less-than-2-of-humanitarian-funds-go-directly-to-local-ngos | Working in development | 2015-10-16T15:04:15.000Z | Bibi van der Zee | Less than 2% of humanitarian funds 'go directly to local NGOs' | Less than 2% of all humanitarian funding goes directly to local NGOs, despite them taking the lion’s share of the risk and often being better placed to deliver, according to aid insiders.
Stephen O’Brien, the head of United Nations humanitarian affairs, told a conference in Switzerland that aid delivered by local agencies was often faster, cheaper and more “culturally appropriate”.
“In Syria, the Arab Red Crescent risked their lives every day to help,” O’Brien said. “In west Africa during the Ebola outbreak, community leaders succeeded where international actors had failed to persuade local communities to change traditional burial practices and help to end the transmission of the disease.”
This exposure meant that about 90% of humanitarian workers who died in 2014 were local staff, he said.
But despite years of discussion about the issue, almost all aid funding continues to flow to the large international agencies; a situation that is increasingly embarrassing for the sector.
“It’s been going on for decades,” said one insider. “They talk and talk but nothing ever changes.”
Figures for how much funding goes directly to local NGOs are hard to find, but the World Disasters report puts it at 1.6%.
Degan Ali, the head of Adeso Africa, argued for a target of 20% by 2020.
“Local NGOs are taking the risks, are the first responders, are the innovators. But we are persistently sidelined – in Nepal, in Philippines and in a grotesque way in Haiti,” Ali told the Guardian, referring to the locations of natural disasters in recent years.
Most accounts of international intervention in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010 acknowledge that the big organisations marginalised local NGOs and even stole their staff.
“Without money, without funding, we are so constricted,” Ali said. “We are told persistently that the main issue is risk aversion, accountability, corruption. But you can’t do risk management without funding.”
She said one large UN agency would only pay overheads to international NGOs. “How can we build and grow without proper financial support?”
Another campaigner from the global south said: “Please don’t keep telling us that we need to build capacity; it’s insulting and patronising. It’s an old-fashioned, colonial viewpoint. These organisations are run by people with two PhDs, they are not stupid. Just assume that the capacity is there and fund us properly.”
International NGOs point out, however, that they already fund local NGOs, and worry that Ali’s proposal marks an artificial line between north and south.
“What we need now is a global approach,” said Sean Lowrie, of the Start Network, which brings together international and national NGOs for humanitarian response. Its members include Save the Children, Oxfam and Christian Aid.
He said the current model was not working. “We’re still working in an old-fashioned, centralised, top-down system, which believes in the fallacy of control. We’re stuck and we’re not talking about the real issue, which are incentives, behaviour and governance. What we need is a whole new eco-system of smart humanitarianism, which responds to what is needed, which is flexible and diversified, and which is financed in new, smart ways.”
The humanitarian sector took a hard look at itself in Geneva this week, and the picture was not quite the heroic, saintly image it would prefer to see. After unprecedented levels of demand, with the number of people needing humanitarian assistance doubling in the last decade, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, called last year for a review of the entire sector and led a large consultation with more than 23,000 people around the world. Next spring at the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, they will agree, everyone hopes, concrete and long-lasting improvements for a system at full stretch.
Money, as usual, is the biggest problem. Humanitarian aid depends on regular appeals to donors rather than a steady funding stream, but the intense and demanding conflict work of the last five years has meant the gap between appeals and actual funding has widened.
O’Brien’s predecessor, Jan Eliasson, told the conference that when he was in the job a few years ago they usually managed a 60-70% fulfilment rate. “That would be pretty fantastic for you, Stephen,” he said to his successor, whose rate is closer to 30-40%.
There are also growing demands for accountability and transparency from both ends of the system. Faced with ever greater requests for money, donors want to know exactly where their money is going. At the same time there is a growing movement to give more accountability and discretion to the people at the receiving end of aid.
“At the moment it’s very template driven,” said Manu Gupta, co-founder of the National Alliance for Disaster Risk Reduction in India. “International agents go in and don’t take into consideration the context, the culture. There’s no space for communities to express what they actually need and want. The mindset around this really has to change.” The need to give “dignity” and control back to beneficiaries was one of the critical goals for the summit.
The bombing of a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, this month, in which 10 patients and at least 12 staff died, has thrown light on another issue for the sector: with 75% of humanitarian work now occurring in conflict zones, “how do we protect people in those environments, how do we give them aid?” asked John Mitchell, head of ALNAP, an international network around humanitarian work. “We’re not doing that very well.”
Migration and forced displacement is another challenge. “It’s absurd that people have to put themselves into a boat that can sink and pay $1,000 to cross a three-mile channel,” the UNHCR head, Antonio Guterres, said to energetic applause. “What we need are many more legal methods to come to Europe.”
The summit chief, Jemilah Mahmood, welcomed Ali’s proposal for 20% of funding to go to local NGOs. “It’s ambitious and I like it. We have to set ourselves ambitious targets, that is what this whole process has been about from the beginning.”
All proposals at the Geneva conference will have to be made into coherent proposals for the Istanbul summit.
“It’s been an extraordinary and unique process,” said Mahmood, who is stepping down and handing over to the UN veteran Antoine Gerard. “From the beginning Ban Ki-moon wanted a very inclusive process that would bring together these people, particularly those affected by crises, and the local actors who are rarely in the room when decisions are made.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/01/britons-were-the-lockdown-bingers-of-europe-finds-study | Society | 2020-12-01T06:00:18.000Z | Rebecca Smithers | Britons were the lockdown bingers of Europe, finds study | Comfort-seeking Britons have eaten and drunk their way through more unhealthy snacks and alcohol during lockdown than their peers elsewhere in Europe, a study suggests.
Overall, the survey of 5,000 consumers in 10 European countries found that lockdown restrictions may have caused lasting positive change in relation to food consumption, with significant shifts in shopping patterns, meal preparation and eating habits.
In line with the rest of Europe, people in the UK increased their consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables during the pandemic – up 33% and 31% respectively compared with before the outbreak, the research found. However, the British are snacking and boozing more than people in other European countries, reporting the largest rises in consumption of convenience foods (29%), alcohol (29%) and ominous-sounding “tasty treats” (34%).
Similar contradictory trends were seen in consumers’ cooking behaviour. While confined to their homes and their kitchens, Britons rediscovered a pleasure in cooking, with 42% saying they were spending more time experimenting with new recipes. Yet they also snacked more during this time (a 27% increase) rather than eating set meals. This was the largest increase in this category across the 10 countries surveyed – Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden and the UK.
The research, which was carried out by a consortium of leading universities in Europe led by Aarhus University in Denmark, found that almost half (49%) of respondents said protecting their health had become more important as a result of the pandemic.
More than a third (34%) of consumers had lost part or all of their income during the pandemic, making food affordability a key priority after lockdown. Just over half of British consumers (51%) said they faced financial struggles during Covid-19, slightly below the European average of 54%.
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Saskia Nuijten, the director of public engagement at EIT Food, which helped fund the study, said: “The fragility of our food system was brought into stark relief during the pandemic. European consumers changed how they shopped and consumed food almost overnight, and there are no signs of going back to business as usual after lockdown measures lift.”
Of the most positive findings, more than a third (35%) said buying locally produced food had become more important to them during the pandemic. And the trend for shopping locally is set to continue, with almost nine in 10 (87%) reporting that they were very likely to continue to support local shops. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/11/thomas-keneally-death-is-not-the-fly-in-the-cosmic-ointment-it-is-the-cosmic-ointment | Books | 2017-11-10T21:52:44.000Z | Thomas Keneally | Thomas Keneally: death is not the fly in the cosmic ointment. It is the cosmic ointment | When I was 16, I was given a wonderful anthology, Poetry of the English-Speaking World, as an English prize. I recommend it to this day, since I have returned to it often between 1952 and now. And early in it occurs a poem which brought me up short then, at demented 16, and speaks still, at a somewhat differently demented 81.
When I say “demented” I do not yet mean the aphasia which has disassembled the splendid cerebral mechanisms of some of my contemporaries. I mean just “demented” in the plain old sense of an animal whose end is not far off and who knows it.
But let the poem speak! It is the work of William Dunbar, a Scot, a scholar of St Andrews, a diplomat for King James and a noted reciter of humorous verse for the same monarch. But he also wrote Lament for the Makaris (old Scots for “poets”), and its poignancy arises from the fact he’s been dead nearly 600 years.
Our pleasance here is all vain glory,
This fals world is but transitory,
The flesh is bruckle, the Feynd is slee;
Timor mortis conturbat me.
“The fear of death perturbs me” is a lame translation of this last sentence. The “turb” bit of “conturbat” come from the same root as the word “turbine”. Even when I was a kid, I wondered how Dunbar’s “conturbat” stacked up against young John Keats’s being famously “half in love with easeful death”, his boast of having “called it sweet names in many a mused rhyme”.
“Now more than ever seems it rich to die,” he claimed.
“To cease upon the midnight with no pain.”
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I believe he thought death easeful because the poor, magnificent kid, barely out of his adolescence, was stricken with tuberculosis, and being a trained apothecary, was able to dose himself or instruct his friends to dose him competently with laudanum, tincture of opium. He had administered it to his brother Tom, when the latter was dying of TB, which also killed Keats’s mother. But having attended an average number of deathbeds for a man my age, I have never seen one death that was “easeful” or that quite managed “to cease upon the hour with no pain”.
The closest to easeful I have seen was that of my clever young brother, Dr John Keneally, dying of cancer and treated with excellent palliative care in a Sydney hospital. It was a just compensation given that he was himself a revered and much published expert on palliative care of children. At other deathbeds I have been more aware of the phase of dying called Cheyne-Stokes breathing, when what looks like agonised breathing stops and promises an end, and then resumes rapidly and then unevenly, and another stop, and then revives again, and again.
Life is strong in people. We didn’t get to be the masters, singers, explainers, manipulators, understanders and wreckers of the planet without a mighty life force in us. Many of us take a fair amount of killing, and the process isn’t designed to be easefully achieved.
And at periods throughout life, even while we are healthy and apparently calm, death’s prospect sooner or later does not seem either heroic or “easeful”. Mortal fear takes us in its great churning, spins us about and throws us panting and under an altered light. We fear reasonably enough the process of dying itself. “I’m not afraid of death,” said Woody Allen. “I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
Death is one of the three things in life I have found you can’t hire a proxy or stand-in for
Thomas Keneally
Death moves in despite our bravest quips and deprives us of personhood and the world. Even those of us under-impressed with our personhood and the world can be afraid of the removal of both. Allen, again, considers the damage irreparable and beyond consolation. “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”
In mid-to-old age I, like many others, wanted to live on at home and was conturbat-ed to considerably about death. That is not uncommon. But now, suddenly, I have to say I’m not as fussed anymore. It is a dangerous boast to make of course. The gods wait upon declarations of this kind and then move to vengeful cries of “we’ll see if the bugger’s fussed or not!”
So let me say that when the day comes – what I can’t help think is the biggest day of my life – I will, if granted any consciousness, go unwillingly and lamenting. Death is one of the three thing in life I have found you can’t hire a proxy or stand-in for – childbirth, writing your own novel, and death. I don’t like the idea. I know I will be, for at least seconds if not days, mortally scared and that the pain may be acute. But I have come to see it as a gate I must go through. It is part of the terms of trade of being human, of dancing in your passing light, of being – as Dylan Thomas wrote – held by time “green and dying”, and of singing in my chains like the sea.
Though I won’t like it, and want to see it over as soon as science can manage it, I accept it now in a way I once could not. I used to describe death as “the fly in the cosmic ointment”. Now I know it is the cosmic ointment.
This acceptance of all this, at least for now, is one of the great contentments of age. When young, I used to watch the jovial elderly discuss what a great day it was, and wonder why they were so positive given the limitation on their days. I argue now that it is due to the new relationship they have made with death. They accept the light as thoroughly as they have come to accept the dark. They know as intimately as Dunbar that the flesh is highly bruckle (brittle) and the fiend is certainly slee (sly), but it does not suck the juice from their days.
*
In his bestseller Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari wonders what will become of human sensibility, and poetry, and theology when we become as close to immortal as all-get-out. For the medical sciences are already engaged in defeating death itself, claims Harari, and will confer not immortality so much, in fact, as amortality, a freedom from organic and genetic decline and attack. “Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system, composed of millions of nanorobots, who will inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancer and even reverse ageing processes.”
But will anything ever save us from the jealous lover? Maybe, if someone with a suitable printed up heart turns up in time. What about the impulse to suicide because of the weight of life or betrayal, or the mechanism – self-driving helicopter, for example – that fails? Yet when we see how much we knew of the human body in 1900, and how much we know now, there are grounds for optimism, according to Harari.
We have now reached a stage in the western world that would have seemed fantastic to our forebears; a world in which the death of children can be considered an occasional and exceptional obscenity. It was not always such. Look at the family of Captain James Cook less than two-and-a-half centuries ago. They were the children of a Yorkshire girl Elizabeth Batts Cook, innkeeper’s daughter and Cook’s wife, who often bore her children in her husband’s absence. Her six children all predeceased her, two dying in infancy, her only daughter at the age of four. A further son Nathaniel died at sea at the age of 15, then Hugh died as a Cambridge undergraduate, and James, drowned at sea as a naval officer aged 31. She was depressed by these deaths, as by her husband’s, but she lived into her 90s. Elizabeth Batts no doubt had a conventional and customary belief in a heavenly reunion to fortify her.
Now, in the developed world, no parent could be expected to survive the deaths of so many children, though there are plenty of contemporary women in Africa who could suffer comparable losses to those of Mrs Cook. I think of one young east African woman who had three children, two hiding in her skirts, one on her lap, all shot dead in a military raid on her village. The infant was killed by the same bullet that smashed the mother’s leg. She lives on in the highlands above the Rift Valley. I know I could not have dealt with such extreme loss.
What will a world be like where the privileged live for centuries and the poor still live for less than one?
Thomas Keneally
And so consider how we will bear accidental deaths when we are amortal, and how the nanorobots will effectively deal with our own dare-devilism and self-destructiveness. And when there may be no early death penalty hanging over the use of drugs or alcoholism, what will that do to our moral sense?
As for the Earth’s population, how will we feed its amortal population? Will the promised nano-technology be defeated by famines? And what will religion be like when the gods are in our own bodies, making ageless demigods of us? And what will a world be like where the privileged live for centuries and the poor still live for less than one? What sort of marriage party will couples hold for their 150th? Will their robot lovers be invited? What will be the worldview and politics of people who live half a millennium?
All that’s not our problem yet. Death still has dominion and still churns the imagination. We do not need to work out how deep or how rancid love might become over centuries, because death won’t let us find out. It can be said for love, and by happy accident some of us can say, that it lasts decades longer than would once have been survived. Will it last centuries? Are the great love stories yet to be told?
Thomas Keneally: ‘We behave as if we cannot only initiate alterations to the world but will live into the future to savour them.’ Photograph: Jonny Weeks/The Guardian
*
The most interesting thing about life is that we are not overburdened by a disabling, and indeed, even a realistic expectation of death at all. We have not here a lasting city, we are told, and reason tells us that. But we pave our cities as if we will promenade their streets forever. Why? Even the Italian Doges and Elizabethans did it, as if they could escape the miserable life statistics of their era.
We behave as if we cannot only initiate alterations to the world but will live into the future to savour them. Why? Isn’t there enough evidence of mortality? But humans have always been such a short-term proposition. If we believed the statistics, we might give up and emerge only for bacchanalia and orgies. We would not study anything at great length, or emerge at midlife as experts. I have become convinced that we are able to function despite the facts, because we are subject to a number of chemically-induced delusions in our lives.
One is the grand delusion of love. A second is our capacity to live with death, and, indeed, to disbelieve at an emotional level in our own inescapable and unarguable deaths. And then there is a chemically and morally induced fascination with grandchildren, our final tribute to our species before we die.
Our species, which is so big on writing and thus recording its own experience, is also the most lethal that has even existed. In terms of the universe, we deserve all of our death sentences, even if we’re pleased if they come late. The problem is that we are so self-aware that our end is going to hurt. The world of literature, the world of our souls, is full of our great cosmic “ouch!” Indeed, no species in the extended history of the world had spent such ink and so many words pre-figuring its own demise.
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The belief in the afterlife that comforted Elizabeth Batts Cook and the Coptic woman in the east African highlands has grown shaky. Even modern believers are uncertain about its form. The rest of us take grim satisfaction from the belief that there’s nothing there. I sometimes surmise that we have never recovered from the loss of the innocent belief that Earth was the centre of the universe. While we were at the centre of the universe, it was easier to believe in visions and voices, miracles and signs in the heavens, and that as the chief wonders of creation, we were not an accidental life form. God was large and closer and had a passionate, personal interest in our behaviour, benign and vile.
Now that we know that we are chains of DNA inhabiting a mortal little rock in the outer suburbs of an ever-enlarging universe, that diminishes our sense of being central by the hour. The gods have grown remote.
*
My awareness of coming to some fragile terms with death arose from a call I got one Monday two years back that told me cancer had been found in my oesophagus. The doctor who told me recommended I go to a specialist in that cancer. She said that her endoscopy could show it was there but not how precisely serious it was. I needed further enlightenment on treatment.
To someone of my generation, the word “cancer” tends to be synonymous with “death” – Jack the Dancer and the Grim Reaper are avatars of the same entity. I accepted that I was from now on dealing with the Big One, that Jack would waltz me down into the grave. And believing that, I felt two things I shouldn’t have. I felt a curiosity about the process I was in, and I felt relief. I now knew the face of death. It was cancer. Of all the ways one can go, all the possibilities one had thought of, from cerebral aneurism to stroke to cardiac infarction to pneumonia (“the old person’s friend”) – to a car crash, it was Jack. I was under the illusion I now knew what had been unknowable: the details of my coming death.
I looked up websites in which sufferers, or else the loved ones of sufferers, talked about the decline brought on by the adenocarcinomas of the oesophagus. Jack is well-named in vulgar parlance in that his cancers dance lissomely to other organs. Death from oesophageal cancer seemed a piteous business, a gagging, starving process.
I thought with obscene calm that day about pursuing the plot of a novel idea my mind had played with. According to the rough plot, a man gets cancer and wants to find a gun as the most efficient way to end his decline and save his family from attendance on an obscene death. He makes inquiries around Lakemba, and meets new people, saves lives, has love affairs, and discovers in the process the difference between the working-class suburbs of Sydney as they are now, complex with diversity, and as they were in his childhood. And the friends he makes in the process make him reconsider taking his exit. I know the idea could be seen as sentimental and even pro-life argument, which it is not meant to be. And I’ll never write it now anyway.
What had changed was, during that period I believed I knew what would befall me, my death-obsession began to ease. And every procedure gave me a glimpse into how many cancerous tumours will be treated by a string of procedures involving mirrors and lasers and radio-frequency treatment of the oesophagus, all of which did not exist 10 years ago. For me, cancer was a series of day surgeries whose discomfort was almost and gratefully minor. My surgeon was someone Gilgamesh would have loved to meet. She was an angel of amortality.
What is your biggest regret? Here are people's devastatingly honest answers
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A few years before, I would have needed my oesophagus to be taken out in a huge procedure which would have involved a year’s recuperation even if I recovered and the cancer had not spread. Instead of the deathbed I had too readily preconsigned for myself, I was that banal personage called a Day Patient. I had been lucky on a number of grounds: early detection, the fact that the tumours had not penetrated the walls of the oesophagus or spread to the lymph nodes. Alleluia! And newly calm for now about the certainty my day would come soon enough, and that when it did I would not like it but had no right to be amazed. For my father used to sing, “Always remember the longer you live, the sooner you bloody-well die!” He lived to be 92 and when congratulated on that being a good innings, cogently replied, “It isn’t a good bloody innings if you are 92 and about to be caught out in slips.”
I’ve had three young tumours taken out and will need investigations into the future. The death foretold in the blogs befell not me but the husband of a friend, more than a quarter of a century younger than me. He went to a doctor with discomfort, was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer, comforted himself with the reflection that I had it, but because his tumours were more mature than me, died – very bravely – within two months. Why this beloved father of a family, a man abounding in friends, with statistical decades to live? There is no answer, and poetry still sings, even in a generation that believes poetry has lost its voice, of the lack of an answer.
So while I was lucky, I know I will not be lucky forever. And I have been given a minor but useful education in being composed about it, at least for the moment.
4:01
Thomas Keneally reads William Dunbar's Lament for the Makaris – video
Further reading: books about death
The Spare Room, by Helen Garner
Death of a River Guide, by Richard Flanagan
Burial Rites, by Hannah Kent
April Fool’s Day, by Bryce Courtenay
Bliss, by Peter Carey’s Bliss
Dying, a Memoir, by Cory Taylor
The Museum of Words, by Georgia Blain
Thirty Days: A Journey to the End of Love, by Mark Raphael Baker | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jan/26/cameraperson-review-kirsten-johnson | Film | 2017-01-26T22:15:08.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | Cameraperson review – film and maker entwine in arresting cinematic collage | Cinematographer Kirsten Johnson has shot movies including Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Kirby Dick’s The Invisible War (2012) and Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour (2014); now she has created an audacious, bracingly experimental collage-film of her own, putting together a mosaic of film-fragments from the 20 years that she has shot for other people, and also personal material about her own family. The resulting film is a fascinating and unique meta-documentary or quasi-professional memoir; it challenges the question of personality and authorship in the act of seeing, filming and editing (and Johnson was not responsible for the editing here). The images we see may have been created by her – or they may have, in a sense, created her. And the title contains an implied question about gender to go with the implied or submerged issue of autobiography.
It is an arresting experience, though it occasionally edges towards narcissism in ways Johnson might not have entirely realised. It can be disconcerting to see passages about Bosnia or Yemen or Guantánamo Bay, juxtaposed so they appear to lead hintingly back to the person behind the camera. But this is only to restate what should be obvious but often isn’t: the camera is being directed by a flesh-and-blood human being with conscious and unconscious biases.
Film-maker Kirsten Johnson: how I betrayed my mother
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Johnson has brought together difficult, often painful and shocking material shot in Bosnia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere in which there is an emphasis on abuse, sexual assault as a weapon of war and the experience of survival. She also includes footage relating to the James Byrd Jr trial, concerning the racist murder of a black man in Texas in the late 1990s. Running alongside are less obviously disturbing subjects, such as a midwife in a maternity hospital in Nigeria and a young boxer in New York who is furious when a points decision goes against him and rages his way out front to find his mother. At approximately the same time, Johnson was becoming a mother herself and also dealing with her own mother’s heart-rending decline into dementia. She asks the midwife about the delivery of twins; later we see her own twins. Of course, these implied parallels are neat, maybe too neat, and yet it is part of being a gifted film-maker to bring yourself to your work.
Despite making a film that appears to do without narrative, there is a narrative of sort involved; the piecing together of moments in a certain order tells a mysterious story. Watching this, I found myself wondering if, as a thought experiment, we might imagine that Cameraperson was a fiction: as if what we hear spoken was scripted dialogue and as if actors were playing the parts. Thinking of the film as fiction, as an overtly and avowedly fabricated piece of work, supercharges every moment with intention and significance, which is perhaps how we should be looking at it. Maybe the factual status of documentary encourages us to take the images too easily at face value.
At any rate, there is real passion in Cameraperson; sometimes it has the engrossing quality of a top-rank professional portfolio or elegant career retrospective, but sometimes it is like a lucid dream that Johnson is having. There is a moment when she is interviewing film-maker Kathy Leichter, who is explosive with emotion about her mother’s suicide. There is a crash as snow falls from the roof onto the ground outside. Has Johnson cut to something else? No – it has actually happened in the same interview. Cameraperson is an absorbing, challenging creation. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jul/09/cask-scotch-whisky-world-record-sale-ardbeg-distillery | UK news | 2022-07-09T12:59:45.000Z | Tom Ambrose | Cask of scotch whisky bought for record £16m in private sale | A cask of rare scotch whisky has set a new world record after selling for £16m to a private collector in Asia.
The single malt dates to November 1975 and smashed the previous record of £1m set in April this year, the Financial Times reports.
Known as Cask No 3, the whisky was produced at the 207-year-old Ardbeg distillery, on the Scottish island of Islay. It sold for more than twice the amount the distillery and its entire stock was bought for in 1997.
Thomas Moradpour, the president and chief executive of Ardbeg’s owner, Glenmorangie, a subsidiary of the LVMH luxury goods group, said the record-breaking cask was a source of pride for the local community.
He said the people of Islay had seen the distillery come back from the brink of extinction to become “one of the most sought-after whiskies in the world”.
The distillery will draw around 88 bottles of whisky from the cask in each of the next five years and deliver them to the buyer. That’s about £36,000 per bottle.
The whisky writer and expert Charles MacLean described the £16m cask as “a remarkable piece of liquid history”, adding: “The factors which make a particular whisky investable are threefold: rarity, flavour and variety.
“And collectors do love scotch, because of the provenance and history.”
Bill Lumsden, the head of distilling and whisky creation at Ardbeg, said: “I’ve really only tasted a whisky like this two or three times in my career.
“It has an emotional, comforting quality to it I find hard to put into words.”
He said 1970s casks left in the distillery’s warehouses could be counted “on just a few hands”, adding that most whisky from that era was put into blends, meaning single malts are rare.
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The record sale comes after the supermarket Morrisons accidentally priced bottles of a scotch whisky at just £2.50, a 93% discount from its usual price of £36, last month.
The Glenlivet Caribbean Reserve is described by the distillery as a new rum-barrel-finished single malt scotch that “combines the heritage of scotch whisky with the flavour and soul of the Caribbean”.
Whisky lovers piled in, posting their delight on social media, only to discover their big orders had been thwarted at the last minute.
The pricing error was identified by Morrisons, and because of minimum unit pricing legislation making the charge for each bottle illegal, the retailer cancelled all orders.
This article was amended on 10 July 2022 to clarify that the £16m Ardbeg cask will provide about 88 bottles per year for five years, so 440 bottles in total. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jul/17/clemency-alfre-woodard-death-row-drama-capital-punishment | Film | 2020-07-17T06:00:08.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | Clemency – superb, heartbreaking death-row drama | Peter Bradshaw's film of the week | Bernadine Williams is an American prison warden who has presided over 12 executions. But, as the 13th looms, like someone in a grim superstitious parable, she finds her mind starting to bend and crack. It is as if she has been accidentally absorbing the poison of lethal injection herself, drop by insidious drop; her workplace hazard has been corruption of the soul.
Now Bernadine has become traumatised and hollowed out in her judicial kingdom of death, teetering on the verge of alcoholism, with a borderline-inappropriate relationship with her deputy, and a failing marriage. The 12th state-sanctioned killing on her watch was grotesquely botched, with the medical orderly unable to find a vein, the needle snapping off and the prisoner dying in agony. America’s criminal-justice medicide ritual is now revealed to Bernadine as cruel and unusual in the highest degree. With the 13th procedure imminent, her own ordeal has begun.
Alfre Woodard gives a stunning performance in this devastatingly powerful movie from writer-director Chinonye Chukwu. She is the woman in charge who has to be extra tough, extra competent. She has no power to commute or reverse a life sentence. This is a matter for the courts or the state governor, though she has the burdensome prerogative of making positive recommendations to the parole board. Fundamentally, Bernadine has the dirty job of seeing through the execution to the very end.
Woodard’s face is a mask of wary professionalism and a distant, queenly beauty that finally, in a laceratingly emotional sequence, seems to melt under spiritual pressure like something made of wax, her lips and eyelids fluttering with pain. She wears a series of elegant business suits to signal her modernity and expertise to both staff and media. But the movie shows how she has been ground down by the awful routine and its queasy traditions, which Chukwu reveals to be horribly unvarying.
It is Bernadine, as governor, who must signal for the curtain to be drawn back so the official observers behind glass – including relatives and victims of the prisoner – can see him strapped to the gurney getting the final dose in this theatre of cruelty. It is Bernadine who must ask the prisoner if he has any final words, and it is she who must take the microphone away from his lips when she considers he has said enough. And as a woman, it has become her unofficial duty, before any of this happens, to console and hug the prisoner’s distraught mother when it becomes grimly clear that the governor is not going to call.
Wendell Pierce is excellent as her husband, Jonathan, who begs her to retire and resume with him a normal human existence; and Aldis Hodge has a tragic dignity as the condemned prisoner, Anthony Woods, whose anguish goes on and on. He is the young man whose murder conviction has looked increasingly unsafe over the 15 years he has been on death row as more evidence has come in, but all to no avail. In one scene, Chukwu allows us to notice after half a minute that there are the tracks of dried tears on his face from some previous emotional outburst. Danielle Brooks (from TV’s Orange Is the New Black) is tremendous as Anthony’s ex-partner who reveals something heartrending in a visit. Richard Schiff is excellent as his careworn lawyer.
What the film does superbly is suggest the nauseating airless atmosphere of the prison: a smell of thwarted hope and rancid despair. All the time, there is noise from the air-con in the background, a faint rushing, groaning like a faulty life-support system whose function now is to suck all the oxygen away, and this pulses and throbs alongside Kathryn Bostic’s compelling musical score.
We also see how the death penalty creates a bizarre quasi-saintly heroism around any condemned man – a status he neither wants nor needs. Hodge is quietly magnificent as he dramatises his unsought parodic-Christlike passivity as Anthony waits for death, surrounded by all the anti-disciples and non-centurions and faux Pontius Pilates of the prison’s secular world. His pain has been seeping into Bernadine’s heart. It’s a towering performance from Woodard, her career masterpiece, and she is first among equals in an outstanding cast.
Clemency is available on digital platforms and in cinemas. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2015/nov/24/can-middle-east-tourism-ever-recover-terrorist-attacks-egypt-tunisia | Travel | 2015-11-24T18:31:48.000Z | Kevin Rushby | Can Middle East tourism ever recover? | It was a wild night in the Yemeni port of Aden. At the first nightclub, we met a group of musicians who had finished their set and were drinking local beer – made in Arabia’s only brewery. They said we should all go to the Mövenpick hotel club. They promised a sensational evening.
When we arrived, a full Egyptian orchestra in tuxedos was already whipping up a storm of wailing and crashing for a Syrian bellydancer who was gyrating across the tables. The songs were all classics from the 1930s and 40s by singers such as Umm Kulthum, Sayed Darwish and Mohamed Fawzy, an urgent storm of melancholy and longing. I felt we had entered an orientalist’s paradise: the world of classic Egyptian cinema and Flaubert’s Cairo. No one mentioned the explosion in the car park a few weeks before. None of us noticed that we were witnessing the end of an era in the Arab world.
That was early 1993 and the bomb in the Mövenpick car park had been put there on 29 December 1992 by an obscure Afghan war veteran called Osama bin Laden. It was his first terror operation.
He had wanted to murder some US marines, targeting the Mövenpick and the nearby Gold Mohur hotel, but the two bombs instead killed one Austrian tourist and one local. At the time, the incident barely made the press and Bin Laden’s role was not known until much later, but you could say that, right from the start, western tourism and jihadist terrorism were fatally linked.
With Yemen in the midst of war, there are no tourists in Aden now, nor in Sana’a, the mountain city to the north whose ancient centre used to be on many people’s wishlists, along with other currently inaccessible World Heritage sites such as Libya’s Leptis Magna, Syria’s Palmyra (or what’s left of it) and the Afghan buddhas of Bamiyan. And if Sana’a, supposedly founded by Noah’s son Shem, is still largely intact, in terms of visitors it is dead. The hotels of the Old City, grand merchants’ tower houses converted in the 1990s, lie empty as do the astonishing samasir, the vast labyrinthine caravanserai, some of which had been converted to tourist-oriented craft workshops and markets. There are no visitors, not even the sort of occasional intrepid adventurer that used to come in the 18th century. Anyone who once depended on tourists for a living has moved on. There are stories of younger men heading off on the long road to Europe. No doubt others are feeling the lure of jihadist causes, particularly as that path brings weaponry, money and respect. The country is in the grip of a civil war that offers little likelihood of ending soon. An entire generation of travellers may never experience Yemen, missing out on a unique civilisation. Nor will the country gain what it deserves, and needs: friends and admirers in the outside world.
Bab Yemen Square in Sana’a, the ancient jewel of Yemen. Photograph: Alamy
In Syria and Libya, the story is similar: an optimistic, and brief, surge in tourism brought to a rapid demise by conflict. These were relatively small markets but, with 2015 proving to be an annus horribilis for terrorist attacks, there are serious concerns that the downward plunge is about to be repeated across the entire Middle East, dragging down mass tourist destinations such as Egypt, Morocco and Turkey. A multi-billion-dollar industry is teetering on the brink of collapse, a disaster that could leave millions jobless and faced with the grim choices of a hopeless existence, perilous emigration or violence. In Egypt alone, 1.3 million people directly depend on the tourism. Yeganeh Morakabati, who researches the subject of tourism and terrorism at Bournemouth University, puts it like this: “The tourist industry in the Middle East may have reached a tipping point. It doesn’t look good at all, certainly in the short term.”
Those gloomy words are backed up by eyewitness evidence. All across the region, even in areas untouched by violence, you can see empty hotels, lines of concrete boxes standing close to beaches, beauty spots and ancient cities. One recent visitor to Petra in Jordan told me he had the place to himself. Another returnee from Sinai, post-Russian Airbus bomb, mentions driving past the shells of unfinished hotels on the road between resorts. When asked why they weren’t open, the taxi driver’s reply was simple: “No tourists.” In Luxor one recent visitor asked about the hundreds of river boats all tied up and disused. “Tourism,” her guide declared gloomily, “Is the oxygen of Egypt.”
Most investors will never see anything back from those stalled ventures. Yassar al-Majali, head of the Jordan’s Hotel Association, admits to me that 10 hotels has closed in Petra, despite the government slashing electricity prices by half. “We need to work hard to attract new clients,” he says. “Maybe the Russians who used to go to Sharm el-Sheikh, the Chinese or Indians. If we don’t, there will be 10 more closing.”
In Tunisia, scene of two terrible tourist massacres this year, hotels have scraped through the season on local holidaymakers, but the foreigners are staying away and no one knows what the future holds. Even in Turkey, people are already experiencing a serious downturn. Alkan Sisli, a guide who I have travelled with around Şanliurfa in the east of the country, tells me most tours there have been cancelled. One of his favourite spots, the sixth-century monastery of Darul Zafaran near Mardin, has seen visitor numbers drop by 90% this year. Another young guide, Ossama Mahmoud, in Jordan, bemoans that his country is seen as unsafe, tainted by association with violent neighbours. “Thousands have already lost their jobs,” he says. “I used to do a tour every week; now I’d be lucky to get half that.”
Divers in the waters off Sharm el-Sheikh: Egypt has been particularly badly hit by terrorism. Photograph: Getty Images
The problem doesn’t stop with tours and hotels. In Egypt, tourism was only about 6% of GDP in 2014, but its influence on other sectors is immense, particularly in agriculture, the country’s biggest employer. Jobs that indirectly depend on tourism amounted to around 1.5m in 2014. As a foreign exchange earner and attractor for investment, it is also hugely important. In 2013, about 6,000 businesses invested $26.4bn in the Egyptian tourism industry. It does not bode well for these optimists that the British Foreign Office advice on Egypt begins with the words “There is a high threat from terrorism” and goes on to advise against anything except “essential travel” in all the country outside the Nile valley. The response from potential tourists has been to stay away. Travel deals company Travelzoo reports advance bookings as “extremely low” and, for the moment, has abandoned publishing any Egypt deals.
In Tunisia, the picture is even worse: every seventh worker is dependent on tourism. Morakabati makes the point that everyone knows, and fears: “More unemployment and poverty will create the circumstances that the terrorist groups want. Recruitment for them will increase. It’s a vicious circle.”
There have been many low points on the road to this situation. After Bin Laden’s first foray into terror, he mainly attacked US military or diplomatic targets, but in November 1997 he ordered an attack on Egypt’s Deir al-Bahri archaeological site at Luxor. Six assailants entered the site and murdered 58 tourists and four Egyptians. The effect on Luxor was disastrous, devastating an economy that was heavily reliant on tourism. Any hopes of sustained recovery were repeatedly dashed by further attacks in Egypt.
This year has seen the worst carnage yet: a list of terrorist attacks so far makes for shocking reading, with fatal incidents happening almost daily. Most of these kill local people, not tourists, but there have been several large-scale atrocities. The attack on the Bardo museum in Tunis on 18 March left 19 tourists dead; that was followed by a further 38 murders at Sousse in June, then the loss of 224 passengers aboard the Metrojet flight to St Petersburg from Sharm el-Sheikh in October. After that attack, all flights to Sharm were cancelled for a week, with easyJet announcing on Tuesday that there would be no further flights until early January.
The beach at Sousse, Tunisia, before the terrorist attack in June that killed 38. Photograph: Alamy
In the past, tourism has proven to be remarkably resilient. One highly placed insider in the British travel industry told me he expects 2016 will reveal a round of price cuts that will attract some people to book again. And not all the Middle East is badly affected. Jonny Bealby, the founder of adventure tour operator Wild Frontiers, points to areas where visitors have been snapping up tours. “In 2013, we took two groups to Iran, but next year we are planning 15 or 16 groups and the same number of tailor-made tours.” Countries such as Algeria and Georgia are also proving popular, as is the whole Central Asia region. Jordan, on the other hand, which ramped up security after the 2005 Amman bombings and has widespread public support for anti-terrorist measures, has remained unpopular.
The rapid, and sometimes quixotic, ways in which travel and tourism adapt to circumstances in regions afflicted by violence can throw up some strange anomalies. Back in 1877, when the US cavalry was still fighting its war against indigenous tribes, bands of fugitive Nez Perce Indians and the soldiers encountered vanguard groups of tourists visiting sites such as Yellowstone Park. In March 2011, when I reported on the return of tourism to northern Sri Lanka, I received a stern rebuke from John Mann MP complaining that encouraging tourism to areas that still suffered from death squads was “ignorant propaganda”. But the urge to explore and experience cannot be held back and the local people were delighted to welcome visitors after their long and agonising period of isolation.
It is this that makes me hopeful, at least in the long term. Tourists and travellers build up loyalties and friendships that can trump any amount of media negativity, even Foreign Office advice. These small human contacts help diminish the power of xenophobia and hatred. Bealby says: “What is important is that tourists and travellers gather the sort of knowledge that only comes from first-hand experience, not through the media.”
Nicholas Kirk, travel consultant at tour operators Tunisia First and Great Little Escapes, is clear about it: “The British don’t like restrictions. They are unwilling to be scared off. We have clients who will go for the entire winter to Tunisia, whatever the official advice. Others are just waiting for the restrictions to be lifted, purely to get travel insurance. They are regulars and feel an allegiance to the people and the place.”
Maat Barlow, a regular traveller from London who I met in Kyrgyzstan in 2014, has visited the Middle East, but would not now. “I’ve changed my destinations because of terrorism,” she says. “I’ll do Tibet or New Zealand, but not Morocco or Iran.”
Sightseers visiting Palmyra, before Isis embarked on its targeted destruction of the ancient city’s ruins. Photograph: Alamy
For most people, however, a little adventure is welcome as long as risks are carefully considered. Linda and Mark Grenyer, both lawyers from Yorkshire, have travelled a lot and were in Egypt in late October. “We felt perfectly safe all the time,” says Linda. “But it was very quiet - even at the Pyramids.” They would not, however, consider Jerusalem at the moment. “The violence just seems too random. We always organise trips through a good travel agent and we would never go against FCO advice.”
My own experience of Syria was in calmer times, late 2009, just over a year before government troops opened fire on protesters in Damascus, triggering the civil war. I was in Aleppo one chilly Sunday morning, wondering what to do with my day. I decided I would celebrate the city’s diversity by visiting every available house of worship. I walked through the souk first, skipping past the barrow boy who called out: “Antelope-skin scarf for the woman you love? Or silk for the mistress?” And finally, as I hurried away: “Make it polyester for the wife! I’ll throw in free divorce papers!”
The banter and good humour lasted all day. I sat through services at the Armenian, Syriac, Maronite and Latin churches alongside my Muslim guide. “Why not? Jesus is our prophet too.” Then we joined pilgrims at the Shi’ite shrine of Mashhad al-Hussain. An Iranian woman showed me how to tap my head on the baked tablet of earth from Kerbala in Iraq. A severe-looking old whitebeard wanted to discuss football. In the distance, we could hear the sound of church bells mingling with the cry of the muezzin at the Great Mosque, our next stop.
Later, I ambled back through the newer parts of town, marvelling at the juxtaposition of frou-frou lingerie shops, spice emporiums and sellers of holy books. It seemed to me that there was nowhere quite like Syria for breadth and depth of cultural experience in such a short space of time.
Memories such as these make me optimistic that one day these wonderful places will be sufficiently peaceful for normal human interaction between strangers from different cultures to happen again.
Visiting the Middle East and North Africa: destinations for intrepid travellers
The oasis township of Taghit in Algeria. Photograph: Alamy
1. Algeria
Violence and tragedy are no strangers to Algeria, but things have quietened down considerably in recent years, and travellers and tour groups are visiting. Highlights are the Casbah in Algiers, the oases of Taghit and Béni Abbès, and Unesco sites such as Djémila and Tipasa.
2. Iran
A diverse and fascinating country, filled with many treasures for the visitor. Persepolis is the big must-see draw: the ancient capital of Darius and Xerxes is incredibly well-preserved. Isfahan is likewise unmissable, but it is the less well-known and obscure sites that can really bring a sense of adventure. Try Takht-e Soleyman and Hamedan in the east, or explore the Elburz mountains on the southern shores of the Caspian Sea. Some analysts believe that, with political stability, Iran could rival, even replace, Egypt as the Islamic world’s most visited country.
The gilded domes of Samarkand in Uzbekistan – one of the great sights of Central Asia. Photograph: Alamy
3. Central Asia
This vast area of the Islamic world also contains some of its greatest highlights: Samarkand’s blue domes, Bukhara’s maze-like old town and Khiva’s fortress walls – and that is just in Uzbekistan. Further east, Kyrgyzstan is gathering a reputation for wilderness experiences, with the highest percentage of mountainous terrain of any country on earth. It also has a rather wonderful and well-organised system of homestays.
4. Oman
The south-east corner of Arabia has long stood apart from the trials and tribulations of its neighbours. Oman is about the same size as Poland and has some breathtaking scenery: Jebel Shams is the most frequently visited, but there are many other mountain areas that only occasionally see a foreign tourist, especially down in remote Dhofar province.
Water taxis ply their trade on Dubai Creek. Photograph: Alamy
5. Dubai
The Disneyland of Arabia may be its reputation, but Dubai does possess a real underbelly for the traveller who is not interested in buying another diamond-encrusted watch in another shopping mall. Get down to the waterfront and explore the markets, criss-crossing the Creek by simple water taxis. Great fun, especially at night.
6. Jordan
There is plenty of truth in the Jordanian complaint that it is a quiet country surrounded by noisy neighbours. The per capita income is high and it has somehow managed to absorb massive populations of refugees without drama. Highlights are the incomparable rose-red city of Petra, the Dead Sea, the fortress-cum-caravanserai of Qusayr Amra and various desert adventure activities.
To check the latest Foreign & Commonwealth Office advice for these and any other countries, go to gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/17/daunte-wright-george-floyd-americas-recurring-tragedy | US news | 2021-04-18T06:00:00.000Z | Oliver Laughland | Daunte Wright and George Floyd: another chapter in America’s recurring tragedy | It was shortly after midday on Thursday at the New Salem Missionary Baptist church in Minneapolis. In front of a towering stone facade, Katie Wright stood at the pulpit, almost dwarfed by the plexiglass lectern and mass of microphones in front of her. She shuddered with grief, held by members of her family.
Five days earlier, her son, Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old father of one, had been shot and killed by a single bullet fired by a white police officer in the city suburb of Brooklyn Center. Four nights of unrest had followed with hundreds of protesters clashing with police dressed in riot gear, pelting crowds with teargas and rubber bullets.
The police shooting had occurred at a pivotal moment in the city’s history as another white officer, Derek Chauvin, stood trial over the death of another Black man, George Floyd, in a courthouse just a few miles down the road.
One city. Two fatalities. And another chapter in a recurring American tragedy.
This much is clear: Derek Chauvin’s trial won’t change policing in America
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As Katie Wright spoke before the assembled press, she said that her family and George Floyd’s were not just tied together by mourning and trauma. In an astounding revelation, she said that Daunte had been taught at Edison high school by George Floyd’s girlfriend, Courteney Ross, who just two weeks ago had testified for the prosecution in Chauvin’s murder trial.
“It was very emotional,” she said of meeting Floyd’s family for the first time. “She [Ross] remembered him [Wright] playing basketball. And she remembered him just being that smiley, goofy kid. It was so sad that we had to meet that way, and that our families connected in that way.”
Katie Wright, center right, the mother of Daunte Wright, is embraced by George Floyd’s girlfriend, Courteney Ross, center left, in Minneapolis on 13 April. Photograph: Leila Navidi/AP
The city of Minneapolis had been on edge before the shooting of Daunte Wright, with National Guard troops lining the downtown area and the county courthouse encased in a mesh of concrete barriers and barbed wire, but Wright’s death tipped tensions over the edge.
“This just added gasoline to the fire,” said Quinn Redeemed, a 46-year-old protester, stood outside the Brooklyn Center police department on Monday after the first night of unrest. Her Black Lives Matter flag swayed in the wind, pounded by icy rain. “We are tired and fired up.”
Now, with closing arguments in the Chauvin murder trial set for Monday, perhaps the most significant murder trial in the history of American policing seems set to conclude within days as the prosecution of another officer merely begins. The fate of Derek Chauvin will soon lie in the hands of 12 jurors, and their decision will have ramifications not just in this American midwestern city, but around the world.
‘Murder, it was murder’
It was 12.15 on Monday afternoon when police in Brooklyn Center released body camera footage showing the moment Daunte Wright was killed. Officer Kim Potter, a 26-year veteran of the force, took part in a traffic stop, which police say started because Wright’s car had an expired license plate.
The blurry footage shows a brief scuffle between Wright and two officers. She pulls out her Glock handgun and shouts “Taser!” three times, before firing a bullet. “Oh shit, I shot him,” she says as the car speeds away.
At a media briefing in the police department headquarters to mark release of the footage, police chief Tim Gannon argued the shooting was “an accidental discharge” with officer Potter mistaking her gun for a Taser. But in a waiting area next door, where a small group of activists had assembled and watched on their phones with the Guardian present, the reaction was more visceral.
“Murder, it was murder,” Jonathan Mason, a community organizer, shouted over and over again after watching the fatal shot, disbelieving it was possible for a seasoned officer to mistake a bright yellow Taser electroshock weapon for a black pistol.
Demonstrators gather in front of the Brooklyn Center police department on 16 April to protest Daunte Wright’s death by former police officer Kim Potter. Photograph: Octavio Jones/Reuters
Two hours later, and nine miles down the road at the Hennepin county courthouse, George Floyd’s younger brother Philonise was among the last of 38 witnesses to testify for the prosecution against Derek Chauvin.
Through tears he told the jury how his brother had led their household as a child, how much he had loved his mother, and how much he was missed.
“He just was like a person everybody loved around the community. He just knew how to make people feel better,” Floyd said in the sterile courtroom, broadcast live across the world. That afternoon the prosecution concluded, with many observers describing it as the most overwhelming case against a former police officer they had ever seen.
A number of senior Minneapolis police officers, including the chief of police, had testified against their former colleague, numerous medical experts attested that Chauvin’s use of a nine-minute and 29-second knee-to-neck restraint had been the primary cause of Floyd’s death, and many eyewitnesses spoke powerfully about their ongoing trauma having watched George Floyd die.
But as the prosecution in the Chauvin case rested on Monday, the fate of officer Potter remained distinctly unclear.
‘Police officers don’t have to fight fair’
Police in the United States kill roughly 1,100 people a year with only a tiny proportion of those cases resulting in criminal prosecution for the officers involved. Between 2005 and 2019, according to research at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, 104 police officers were arrested for murder or manslaughter with just 35 convicted of a crime.
The statistics reflect the difficulty that prosecutors face in convicting American police officers, who often benefit from significant union protection, different legal standards over the use of fatal force and implicit bias borne of conflicts of interest within the US criminal justice system.
The concern around securing a conviction in the Chauvin case was evident when Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison announced charges against the four officers involved in Floyd’s death, who cautioned it would take months to bring the case to court.
“The reason thoroughness is important is because every single link in the prosecutorial chain needs to be strong. Trying this case will not be an easy thing. Winning a conviction will be hard,” he said in June last year.
Chauvin’s defence began after another night of unrest on the streets of Minneapolis. A phalanx of officers beat their riot shields and fired volleys of teargas into the crowds who chanted Daunte Wright’s name. Keith Ellison himself appeared on the streets as police cleared most demonstrators shortly before midnight.
He spoke directly to those who remained. “This thing [Wright’s death] is not going to be swept under the rug. We’re going to deal with it in a real way,” he assured them.
On Tuesday morning, shortly after 9am, the defence began calling its first witnesses. Their argument throughout has essentially been to blame Floyd’s death on his own heart problems and drug use, and suggest that Chauvin’s use of a prolonged restraint was a justifiable use of force. They need only one juror to side with them to force a mistrial, as any conviction must be a unanimous decision.
A memorial to George Floyd has a new addition commemorating Daunte Wright in Minneapolis. Photograph: John Minchillo/AP
The defence called a use of force expert, Barry Brodd, a former California officer with a notorious past. Brodd previously testified in defence of the white officer, Jason Van Dyke, who shot and killed black teenager Laquan McDonald in 2014. Van Dyke opened fire 16 times and Brodd told the jury in that case that each shot was a justified use of force. Many were fired while McDonald lay dying on the floor.
Throughout his testimony on Tuesday, Brodd argued that Chauvin’s use of restraint had been proportionate to the threat that the unarmed man, unconscious for more than four minutes, posed to officers.
“I felt that Derek Chauvin was justified, and was acting with objective reasonableness,” he told jurors. “Police officers don’t have to fight fair. They’re allowed to overcome your resistance by going up a level.”
During a break in Brodd’s testimony, as a snow storm pounded the grounds of the courthouse, the Floyd and Wright family met for the first time, embracing in tears. Naisha Wright, Daunte’s aunt, chanted her nephew’s name as she wore a T-shirt with George Floyd’s image.
“My nephew’s blood is on your hands …,” she said, her body shaking. “Hold her [Potter] accountable. Hold her higher than accountable.”
As she was speaking, news came that both Kim Potter and police chief Tim Gannon had resigned from the force.
‘Can we get a conviction?’
The death of George Floyd prompted significant police reform efforts in the city of Minneapolis. The city council voted for police budget cuts and to redirect significant funds, $8m, to create new mental health teams that will be able to respond to certain 911 calls. The city also approved a landmark settlement with the Floyd family of $27m.
Asked if Daunte Wright’s death had set these reform efforts back, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey was frank: “It’s impossible to course-correct 400 years of systemic oppression in one single policy, or in any one single effort,” he said in a statement to the Guardian.
It was the middle of Wednesday morning when prosecutors announced that Kim Potter would face manslaughter charges over the death of Daunte Wright, less than four days after he was killed.
The defence in the Chauvin case had called their final witness: forensic pathologist David Fowler. He told the jury that it was George Floyd’s heart conditions, his drug use and potentially carbon monoxide poisoning from the exhaust of a patrol car that had killed him.
Fowler, who trained in apartheid South Africa, is being sued by the family of a Black teenager, Anton Black, in Maryland, who died after three police officers held him face down in 2018. Fowler ruled that Black had died from “natural causes” prompting the American Civil Liberties Union to accuse him of being “complicit in creating false narratives about what kills Black people in police encounters”.
A demonstrator protests the fatal shooting of Daunte Wright outside the Brooklyn Center police department on 16 April. Photograph: John Minchillo/AP
On the stand, the pathologist cast doubt on Floyd’s official autopsy, which ruled his death a homicide, stating he had, in fact, determined it was “undetermined”.
Chauvin’s defence announced they intended to call no further witnesses on Thursday, bringing the trial into its closing stages.
Hours after the court went into recess, Daunte Wright’s family emerged into the public once more, the beginning of their legal journey just starting.
The family’s attorney, Benjamin Crump, who also represents the Floyd family, expressed frustration that prosecutors had not charged Potter with third degree murder. But he reeled off a list of other unarmed Black men and boys, killed by police in recent years with the officers never criminally charged.
Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Eric Garner in New York City. Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio.
“It’s a long journey to justice,” Crump said. “We have to remember, not so long ago they weren’t charging any police officer for killing a Black person. So we’re making progress in America. Are we at a point where we can say it’s equality? Oh, we’re a long way from that.”
Naisha Wright could not contain her anger.
“Justice? What is justice? Will we get to see Daunte’s smile? We don’t get to see that,” she said. “The highest accountability? I know the highest is going to be judged by God. But can we get a conviction?”
Both families will still have to wait and see. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/feb/15/chuck-close-art-sexual-harassment-pafa | Art and design | 2018-02-15T16:22:47.000Z | Nadja Sayej | Chuck Close: how to deal with an artist accused of sexual harassment | Chuck Close, an artist known for his photorealist portraits, has recently found himself at the centre of sexual misconduct and harassment allegations. Since December, several women have come forward with misconduct allegations, and as a result, his artwork was removed from a university library while a national museum has indefinitely postponed his forthcoming exhibition. Other places, like the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, is leaving up its exhibition Chuck Close Photographs.
The museum has added a new a group show of acclaimed female artists – including Barbara Kruger and Kara Walker – called The Art World We Want. It invites museum-goers to share their opinions by writing on Post-it notes and adding them to a timeline of art history, one with an undetermined future.
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“Some people say the show should come down, others say it should stay up; there is a whole range of opinions of what to do,” said Brooke Davis Anderson, director of Pafa. “We want to create a space that encourages a full dialogue.”
It began in December, when three women came forward with claims of Close’s sexual misconduct. The artist allegedly invited them individually to his studio, where they were asked to strip nude and “audition” to be a candidate for a portrait. Close allegedly asked invasive questions about the women’s genitals. The New York Times reported the allegations of two women with the headline: “Chuck Close is Accused of Harassment. Should His Artwork Carry an Asterisk?”
In response, Close said in a statement to the New York Times: “I never reduced anyone to tears, no one ever ran out of the place. If I embarrassed anyone or made them feel uncomfortable, I am truly sorry, I didn’t mean to. I acknowledge having a dirty mouth, but we’re all adults.”
Four more women came forward with sexual harassment allegations, including one story of a woman who claims Close asked her to masturbate in front of him. Shortly after, performance artist Emma Sulkowicz staged a protest in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she posed in front of Close’s paintings with asterisks drawn all over her body.
In the wake of the allegations, Davis Anderson met the local community in Philadelphia – meetings with local faculty members, students, artists and curators – who talked about how to approach the new counterpart exhibition. “We wanted to respond to these allegations, despite hosting a Close exhibition on our walls,” she said.
“One priority was to ask people visiting the museum what needs to happen to have the art world be more equitable and share more power,” said Davis Anderson. “An example could be to show more women artists, or have more museum directors who are female or people of color.”
The World We Want at Pafa. Photograph: Barbara Katus/Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Alongside the artworks, the exhibition’s workshop component involves Post-it notes and an art history timeline, where guests can share their own thoughts of what needs to change in the future. The public’s responses will be archived by the museum’s education department and put to use for future programming. It’s an attempt to contribute to lasting change.
“We wanted to make sure we didn’t just close the show. We wanted to deal with it,” said Davis Anderson. “We are collecting everyone’s responses in a report that will impact the decisions we make.”
The exhibition has questions, which are painted on the walls above the artworks, which say: “Who has had the power to speak about women’s bodies?” and “Who do we need to hear more from?”
It’s a different approach from the one taken by Seattle University. The school had one of Close’s paintings in their Lemieux library, which was removed swiftly after the sexual assault allegations surfaced in December. The decision to remove the painting was made by librarian Sarah Watstein, who replaced it with a painting by Linda Stojak. In Washington DC, the National Gallery of Art indefinitely postponed a Close exhibition scheduled to open in May. .
Chuck Close in 2016. Photograph: Monica Schipper/Getty Images for Pamm
Cancelling an exhibition before it opens is different from leaving one up that’s already open. “I applaud the museum’s team to take the controversy surrounding Chuck Close as a prompt for open dialogue about women’s experiences with harassment and abusive power,” said Erin Pauwels, an art history professor at Temple University.
“Removing the exhibition would have been an easy answer, but it also would have quickly silenced public debate over one of the most pressing questions facing art institutions today – how do we separate creative output from personal conduct, especially for artists whose work has long been honored, exhibited, and collected?”
Pauwels says it’s time to change the long lineage of male artists mistreating women. “Art museums must take greater responsibility for contextualizing the artists and artwork they make visible,” she said, “which is what I believe Pafa is now attempting to do.”
But not everyone agrees with the museum’s decision to keep Close’s show up alongside this new exhibition at Pafa.
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“In the era of #MeToo, when other institutions have cancelled Chuck Close exhibitions, Pafa should have also,” said Nina Ahmad, a congressional candidate in Philadelphia, and former president of the National Organization for Women’s local chapter. “They could have showcased the works of women artists without placing them next to a serial sexual harasser. If we’re going to get serious about gender equity in this country, everyone – including cultural institutions – must do their part and I’m sad that Pafa has made this decision.”
Whether it is the works of Italian painter Agostino Tassi, who repeatedly raped his colleague Artemisia Gentileschi, and Paul Gauguin’s sexual abuse of pre-teen Tahitian girls in the late 19th century, the art world is no stranger to sexual violence, says Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, an art professor at Penn.
“It is terrible and horrifying museums [that] have rarely taken the initiative to engage these issues in their wall labels, catalogue essays, or public programming,” said DuBois Shaw. “While I would not advocate for the blanket censorship of the work of artists who are proven or accused sexual predators, murderers, or otherwise grotesquely anti-social, the Pafa museum is making a much-needed space for public dialogue, rather than shying away from such an important and difficult issue.”
The museum may have not responded as swiftly as others, but some feel it could be breaking new ground. “Isn’t exploring new ways to engage in inclusive conversations what we want from our cultural institutions?” asks Ginger Rudolph, the editor of Haha magazine in Philadelphia.
“Taking down the exhibition mid-show will not stop Chuck Close from being an important figure in contemporary art, but his art weight can be turned on its head – it can be used as a catalyst for constructive discussions exploring issues of gender and power.”
Chuck Close Photographs and The Art World We Want will both run at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts until 8 April
This article was amended on 22 February 2018 to clarify that Close’s artwork was removed from a university library and a national museum has indefinitely postponed his forthcoming exhibition | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/11/robert-clive-statue-whitehall-british-imperial | Opinion | 2020-06-11T10:34:46.000Z | William Dalrymple | Robert Clive was a vicious asset-stripper. His statue has no place on Whitehall | William Dalrymple | When Robert Clive, who established British rule in India, died by his own hand in 1774, he was widely reviled as one of the most hated men in England.
His body was buried in a secret night-time ceremony, in an unmarked grave, without a plaque. Clive left no suicide note, but Samuel Johnson reflected the widespread view as to his motives: Clive “had acquired his fortune by such crimes that his consciousness of them impelled him to cut his own throat”.
Clive’s death followed soon after two whistleblowers had revealed the scale of the devastation and asset-stripping of Bengal under his rule. “We have murdered, deposed, plundered and usurped,” wrote Horace Walpole. “Say what think you of the famine in Bengal, in which three millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of the provisions by the East India Company?” That summer, a satire was published in London lampooning Clive as Lord Vulture, an unstable imperial harpy, “utterly deaf to every sentiment of justice and humanity… whose avarice knows no bounds”.
Clive was hauled before parliament with calls to strip him of both his peerage and his wealth. The select committee found, in addition to lucrative insider dealing, that “presents” worth over £2m had been distributed in Bengal, and recommended that the “very great sums of money … appropriated” by Clive and his henchmen be reimbursed. Despite escaping formal censure, Clive came to be seen as the monstrous embodiment of the East India Company’s violence and corruption.
But just as statues of defeated Confederate generals rose in the southern United States, long after their deaths, as totems to a white supremacy that was felt to be under threat during the civil rights movement, so, in due course, Clive was subject to an equally remarkable metamorphosis: in the early 20th century, as resistance was beginning to threaten the foundations of the Raj, Lord Vulture was miraculously transformed into the heroic Clive of India. Like the erection of the Confederate statues, even at the time it was a deeply controversial matter.
Until we reckon with our imperial history, Britain's toxic culture war will burn
Daniel Trilling
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In 1907 the former viceroy, Lord Curzon, recently returned from India, threw his weight behind a campaign to erect a memorial to “the Victor of [the battle of] Plassey”. His successor, Lord Minto, already dealing with the serious unrest caused by Curzon’s partition of Bengal, was horrified at the proposal, and called it “needlessly provocative”. The secretary of state for India, outside whose office the statue was to be raised, wearily agreed with Minto and wrote that he was beginning to wish that Clive had been defeated at Plassey.
Today Clive’s statue stands outside the Foreign Office at the very centre of British government, just behind Downing Street. Yet clearly this is not a man we should be honouring today. If at the time many thought the statue should never have been erected, now, as we stand at this crucial crossroads after the toppling of Edward Colston, the moment has definitely come for it to be sent to a museum. There it can be used to instruct future generations about the darkest chapters of the British past.
It is not just that this statue stands as a daily challenge to every British person whose grandparents came from the former colonies. Perhaps more damagingly still, its presence outside the Foreign Office encourages dangerous neo-imperial fantasies among the descendants of the colonisers.
In Britain, study of the empire is still largely absent from the history curriculum. This still tends to go from the Tudors to the Nazis, Henry to Hitler, with a brief visit to William Wilberforce and Florence Nightingale along the way. We are thus given the impression that the British were always on the side of the angels. We remain almost entirely ignorant about the long history of atrocities and exploitation that accompanied the building of our colonial system. Now, more than ever, we badly need to understand what is common knowledge elsewhere: that for much of history we were an aggressively racist and expansionist force responsible for violence, injustice and war crimes on every continent.
We also need to know how far the British, every bit as much as the Germans, helped codify a system of scientific racism, creating a hierarchy of race that put white Caucasians at the top and blacks, “wandering Jews” and Indian Muslims at the bottom. Yet while the Germans have faced up to the darkest periods of their past, and are taught about it unvarnished in their schools, we have not even made a start to this process. Instead, while we understand that the Belgian and German empires were deeply sinister, the Raj, we like to believe, was like some enormous rose-tinted Merchant Ivory film writ large over the plains of Hindustan, all parasols and Simla tea parties, friendly elephants and handsome, croquet-playing maharajahs.
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This has become a real problem. Our vast ignorance of everything that is most uncomfortable about our imperial past is damaging, every day, our relations with the rest of the world. In particular our misplaced nostalgia for our imperial past is encouraging us to overplay our Brexit hand. Contrary to fantasies of Brexiters, our former colonies are not about to warmly embrace us. Nor can we kickstart the empire, as if it were some sort of old motorbike that has been left in a garage for 70 years. The strategy of trying to strike trade deals with Commonwealth countries - dubbed Empire 2.0 by some in the Civil Service – has been a total failure.
Indians, in particular, have bitter memories of British rule. In their eyes we came as looters, and subjected them to centuries of humiliation. The economic figures speak for themselves. In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8% of the world’s GDP, while India was producing 22.5%. By the peak of the Raj, those figures had more or less been reversed: India was reduced from the world’s leading manufacturing nation to a symbol of famine and deprivation.
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Is this the end for colonial-era statues? – video
Removing the statue of Clive from the back of Downing Street would give us an opportunity finally to begin the long overdue process of education and atonement. In 1947, at the end of the Raj, Indians removed all their imperial statues to suburban parks where explanatory texts gave them proper historical context. We could do the same. Alternately, by placing Clive and others of his ilk in a museum, perhaps one modelled on the brilliantly nuanced and hugely moving National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington DC, we can finally begin to face up to what we have done and so begin the process of apologising for the many things we need to apologise for. Only then will we properly be able to move on, free from the heavy baggage of our imperial past.
William Dalrymple is the author of The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/feb/01/mattel-movies-take-over-hollywood | Film | 2022-02-01T07:06:12.000Z | Stuart Heritage | Playing to win: are Mattel movies about to take over Hollywood? | Deep down, everyone wishes they were Marvel. Armed with nothing but B-grade IP and heroic levels of pluck, a lowly comic book company slowly went about wrestling the film industry into an inescapable stranglehold. But a decade and a half on, Marvel has become the established order. It is time for a new plucky upstart to stage another revolution. That upstart?
Mattel. You know, Mattel. The toy people. No, really.
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This weekend, Mattel Films’ Robbie Brenner gave an interview to Variety, during which she laid out her ambitious plans for cinematic domination. Brenner, who in 2013 produced Dallas Buyers Club, unveiled a slate of films that is staggering in its ambition and amassed talent.
Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling have signed on to star in a Barbie movie directed by Greta Gerwig, working from a script she co-wrote with Noah Baumbach. Lena Dunham is writing and directing a Polly Pocket movie starring Lily Collins. Akiva Goldsman is writing a Major Matt Mason film that will star Tom Hanks. Now, unless I am mistaken, the people named in this paragraph have between them won three Oscars (and been nominated for another 14) and seven Emmys (and been nominated for a further 15). And they’re making films about toys.
There’s also going to be a He-Man film, a Hot Wheels film, a Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots film, a Big Jim film, a horror franchise based on Magic 8 Ball and films based on Chatty Cathy and Betsy Wetsy. Three years from now we will all find ourselves drowning in Mattel films.
Isn’t this incredible? Thanks in part to Marvel packing out the multiplexes with endless superhero blockbusters, there is no longer a commercial market for theatrically released mid-budget fare. And the people who made those films – the Oscar fare, the romcoms, the beloved indie classics – have found themselves without a home. Until now, these people ultimately had two options: either lash themselves to the deep pockets of the streamers, or bite the bullet and enter the world of television. Both choices, in one way or another, represent a compromising of ideals.
But now Mattel, glorious Mattel, has ridden to the rescue with a beautiful third way. “Hey Gerwig! Hey Dunham! Hey Baumbach and Hanks!” it has said. “Here’s a budget you never thought imaginable, and free rein to make exactly the sort of film you have always dreamed of making!” True, they’re working under a contract stipulating that whatever they produce has to be a transparently cynical attempt to synergise the world’s greatest art form into toy sales, but beggars can’t exactly be choosers.
It’s easy to sneer, of course. But then again, people sneered at Marvel 15 years ago. Who would watch a film about a no-mark superhero like Iron Man, they thought. Who would possibly watch something as grotesquely jingoistic as a post-Iraq Captain America movie? Or Ant-Man, or a film about a talking tree monster? The same could be said for Mattel. Watching a Polly Pocket film genuinely sounds like the worst afternoon of anyone’s life. But it could end up being Star Wars for all we know. It could end up being Citizen Kane. Mattel might just be ushering in a whole new epoch of cinema.
This is just the start. Once these Mattel films become enormous blockbusters, who knows what will be next. Mattel has an impressively deep well of properties to draw from, so the sky’s the limit. We might soon see a Street Sharks movie. A Princess Mommy movie. A Merry Cherry Muffin movie. Perhaps, if we all close our eyes and wish, we’re only a few years from hearing the words “the Oscar for best picture goes to Pooparoos” spoken out loud in an auditorium of glamorous A-listers.
Of course, any idiot can simply license their intellectual property to Hollywood. If Mattel is really serious about becoming the next Marvel, it needs to step up a notch. It needs to create a whole extended universe. Imagine how incredible it would be if Mattel could persuade an auteur like, say, Paul Thomas Anderson to make He-Man: When Barbie Comes to Town. Or Alejandro G Iñárritu to make Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots v Thomas the Tank Engine. At this rate it can only be a matter of time before the ghost of Stanley Kubrick is hired to make Chatty Cathy in Flushin’ Frenzy: Diarrhoea Smackdown. This is the future of cinema, and the quicker we all accept this the better. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/sep/10/private-school-system-morally-rotten-moment-for-downfall-melissa-benn | Education | 2019-09-10T06:15:39.000Z | Melissa Benn | The private school system is ‘morally rotten’. This could be the moment for its downfall | Melissa Benn | Could we be nearing what the social historian David Kynaston calls “a long overdue historic moment”? Kynaston, a private school critic, says: “The temper of the times is anti-elitist. We have yet another old-Etonian prime minister as well as a cabinet two-thirds privately educated, and the resources gap between the highly funded private sector and the starved state sector has become grotesque … the current dispensation is morally rotten.”
This sense of having reached a tipping point is echoed in far less likely places. Patrick Derham, head of Westminster, one of the country’s leading private schools, wrote recently that the tragedy of Grenfell Tower highlighted “the chasm between the haves and the have-nots. It made me feel even more uncomfortable about the job I do.”
Angry or discomfited rumblings on the state-private divide are hardly new. It is the stuff of our endlessly discursive yet oddly static political culture. But what marks out 2019, shaping up as one of the most remarkable political years of my lifetime, is the establishment of two new groups committed to serious reform of the private sector.
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Next week the Private School Policy Reform (PSPR), a thinktank and platform for comment and debate, will launch in Manchester, the idea of education journalist Jess Staufenberg. Privately schooled herself, Staufenberg has long been uncomfortably aware of the discrepancy in resources between state and private sectors. But there was a more pragmatic reason for this project. “As a journalist, writing about private schools, or trying to test findings from the Independent Schools Council, I realised that there was no organisation or thinktank to go to that would talk about the sector from the other side.”
Sensing a gap, Staufenberg approached a number of writers, including Kynaston and Francis Green, authors of the recently published Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem, and Robert Verkaik, who published his book Posh Boys in 2018. All three agreed to co-found the group. They were joined by myself and Mike Trace, a former government adviser on social exclusion.
Staufenberg is keen to emphasise that PSPR, while clearly pro-reform, is not a campaigning organisation but is “in for the long haul” to inform opinion. One of the most important functions of the site will be to research, assess and discuss options for reform, beginning with a detailed policy paper, to be released next week, listing six possible routes to change and calling on the main political parties to declare their support for one or other option.
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Should we abolish private schools? – video
With election fever in the air, the response will be interesting. It is possible the government could opt for something radical from the PSPR menu or, more likely, create its own mad, faux reformist dish: every private school to be made a free school, perhaps? Stripping the sector of business rate relief is plausible, given Michael Gove’s declaration in 2017 that private schools are “welfare junkies”.
Meanwhile, Labour looks ready to end an uneasy silence of four decades, thanks to the recent formation of another group, Labour Against Private Schools (Laps). Backed by the Corbyn-supporting Momentum group, Laps has adopted a strong populist tone with calls for radical reform and the in-your-face hashtag #AbolishEton. (#EtonMess pops up from time to time too.)
The group emerged out of a public event in June organised by the Trafford Labour councillor Steven Longden, who described it as “the first meeting on phasing out private schools ever to be held in the House of Commons”. A few weeks later he was joined by the teacher and activist Holly Rigby, the activist Rob Poole and the Durham academic Sol Gamsu, to set up Laps. The organisation has won support from MPs across the party, including the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, its former leader Ed Miliband, and the business select committee chair Rachel Reeves.
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In July, Laps organised a letter of support from hundreds of Labour councillors, and will now set up meetings around the country to examine the interrelation of the state and private sectors in local areas. It also plans to bring a motion to this year’s Labour conference calling for the full integration of state and private schools, including nationalising the endowments of the hugely wealthy public schools.
Labour’s leadership is sympathetic. McDonnell has backed the Laps campaign and tells them he believes an “integrated education system” could well be a popular policy with the public as the country heads into an election.
This would represent a dramatic break from the New Labour/Adonis years, when Labour took the view that private schools were not a problem to solve but a model to emulate, and that they should be encouraged to shore up their ailing state counterparts through sponsorship or extending public benefit as a result of charitable status.
For Gamsu, too, that approach belongs to the past. His research has explored the way education fits into the broader structures of class and capitalism and he is keen, he says, to “push the Labour party into a position where they have seriously to take on elite culture and power in Britain”. This would involve integrating private and state sectors along Finnish lines, and also reforming further and higher education as part of the creation of a more democratic and accessible National Education Service.
Labour must be bold, and finally abolish private schools
Steven Longden
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Interestingly, the most strident opposition to reform of private schools might come from within the state sector. Influential Conservative-supporting free school founders, such as Katharine Birbalsingh and Toby Young, boast that their meritocratic approach, modelled on a traditional curriculum and strong discipline, is giving the private sector a run for its money. They see no need to lay a glove on the private schools.
But this argument could be turned on its head. If everyone across the political spectrum now accepts that most children, particularly those from less well-off backgrounds, can do equally well academically what, bar snobbery and entrenched habits of segregation, is stopping our children being educated together? And shouldn’t state schools have the benefit of the broad curriculum and creative pursuits that are fast becoming the province of private schools alone?
Ultimately it’s a question of modernity: the need for this troubled country finally to tackle harmful, outmoded social hierarchies through a common system of genuinely public education. Private school reform is decades, if not centuries, overdue. The moment might finally have arrived. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/28/from-social-care-to-homelessness-what-are-the-cost-pressures-facing-english-councils | UK news | 2024-01-28T15:00:09.000Z | Patrick Butler | From social care to homelessness, what are the cost pressures facing English councils? | Once vanishingly rare, the prospect English local authorities might go bust now offers no surprise: four councils have in effect gone bankrupt in the past year; others have declared a state of “financial emergency”; a further one in five believe it is “fairly or very likely” they will become insolvent in the next 18 months.
Local government is no stranger to budget cuts – austerity has shrunk town hall spending by approximately 40% over the past 12 years. But there are fears inflationary costs and a decade of funding cuts has hollowed out the capacity of authorities to deal with four long-term existential pressures, from child protection to an ageing society.
Children’s services
Described by an independent national inquiry in 2021 as a “tower of Jenga held together by Sellotape”, England’s council-run children’s departments have for years strained to cope with rising demand for child protection services.
Over the past decade, the number of looked after children in England has risen from 68,000 to 83,800. More recently, Covid, the cost of living crisis, and rising poverty have fuelled increases in referrals for child protection, mental health help and family support.
An explosion in numbers of high-cost privately run children’s home placements has pushed many local authority children’s services to the brink. In 2018, there were just 120 placements costing at least £10,000 a week. By 2023, this had risen to more than 1,500.
The rise of the extreme £500,000 a year care placement pushed up spending on children’s services this year by nearly 14%, with councils becoming increasingly outspoken at what they see as “profiteering” by the care industry.
Years of focusing available resources on child protection interventions has meant the decline of early intervention programmes such as parenting classes and Sure Start, that help steer struggling families away from expensive and traumatic crisis.
A County Councils Network survey in November found children’s services was the biggest area of council overspending. Experts have warned failure to reform the system will result in 100,000 children in care by 2032, with spending up by 50%.
Adult social care
While for years national politicians have dodged tough decisions on how to fund the care costs of growing numbers of vulnerable older people and adults with complex disabilities, councils’ resources have failed to keep pace with rising needs.
Underlying demographic pressure – an increase in the number of people with social care needs living longer and with more complex conditions – continues to hoover up a large slice of council spending, despite high levels of unmet needs.
While demand for social care services has risen in recent years, the costs of delivering care in residential settings and at home have soared, forcing councils to tighten eligibility and create lengthy “waiting lists” for care needs assessments.
Councils also face a workforce crisis, with about 150,000 unfilled social care posts in England, while the failure of local authorities to meet the rising costs of care has led many care providers to quit the market.
Homelessness
Three years ago, England’s housing crisis was only a distant concern for many local authorities outside big cities. Now, the costs of dealing with spiralling homelessness are threatening to push smaller district councils to the wall.
A combination of high house prices, off the scale rents, housing benefit cuts, shortages of social housing, a volatile private rented sector, and the closure of Home Office-run hotels for Afghan refugees has created a perfect storm.
The impact has been rapid and profound. Four years ago, Hastings borough council spent £730,000 supporting 170 people. This year, it expects to spend £5.6m – a third of its total budget – providing emergency housing for 1,000 homeless families, a bill it has warned could force it into insolvency.
Last week, at a Westminster meeting to discuss the crisis, Gloucester City council said its temporary accommodation bill had tripled to more than £1.2m in a year; Crawley said spending had gone up from £260,000 to more than £5m in five years; while Eastbourne said 49p in every pound it spent went on tackling homelessness.
A Guardian analysis in October found 10 councils where more than £1 in every £10 of core spending went on temporary accommodation in 2022-23. “If the crisis in homelessness is not addressed, it could bankrupt very many district and unitary councils within two years, with those in south-east England at particular risk,” said the leader of Chelmsford City council, Stephen Robinson.
Budget pressures remain strong in areas with traditionally high homelessness such as London. Nationally, English councils are spending £1.7bn a year funding emergency accommodation in flats and bed and breakfasts for 104,000 households, including 139,000 children – more than any point in the last 25 years.
Special Educational Needs and home to school transport
The explosion in the number of children receiving Education, Health and Care plans as a result of Special Educational Needs and Disability (Send) reforms introduced nearly a decade ago has pushed many council budgets to breaking point.
The 2014 changes resulted in the number of children eligible for Send more than doubling, from 105,000 to 230,000. Councils are often legally obliged to transport thousands of children to school each day, often over long distances.
Local authorities have warned Send costs are outstripping resources, and while the government has allowed councils to build up ring-fenced deficits in this spending area, the accumulated deficits – estimated at £3.6bn in England – will have to be repaid in 2026.
In the short term, many councils say the costs of providing school transport services are triggering a financial crisis. In November, the County Councils Network said its 37 members were spending £720m a year on transporting 85,000 Send children to school or college, up from £400m five years ago.
Councils say parents are increasingly using individual taxis – rather than minibuses – to transport their children to and from school. A shortage of Send school places meant pupils were having to travel further afield, while fuel prices and lack of competition among transport providers has led costs to rocket in recent months. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2023/dec/13/rocknroll-review-tom-stoppard-hampstead-theatre-london | Stage | 2023-12-13T16:12:04.000Z | Arifa Akbar | Rock’n’Roll review – Tom Stoppard’s blast from the past | Tom Stoppard has spoken of this 2006 play as an alternative biography, of sorts, straddling his Czech heritage with his British identity. So we shuttle between Czechoslovakia and Cambridge, moving from the Prague Spring to its suppression by the Soviet Union and ending with the Velvet Revolution.
The central drama presents a teacher-student clash as Jan (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), a Czech postgrad at Cambridge University, travelling home in 1968, criticises the communist dream to the consternation of his diehard Marxist tutor Max (Nathaniel Parker).
Tucked in between is the tale of apolitical Czech rock group the Plastic People of the Universe, flashes of family drama, a love story and close readings of Sappho’s poetry. All the while there is rock music – a lairy, long-haired soundtrack of the ages that here seems too polite and not quite rock’n’roll enough.
It is a play of ideas asking important ideological questions: how can you remain a committed Marxist at a time of communist repression? And how is Stalinist repression any different from Nazi fascism? (“Stalin killed more Russians than Hitler,” says Jan).
Under the direction of Nina Raine, these questions still resound but they land differently – more nostalgic and perhaps lacking a necessary urgency. There are prescient glimmers of what we contend with today: media censorship, restrictions on liberty and the death of the communist dream. Heated exchanges on freedom, consciousness and Marxism sound as if they are from 1970s debating circles while glittering with a typically Stoppardian intelligence.
Diehard politics … Nathaniel Parker as Max and Colin Tierney as Milan in Rock’n’Roll. Photograph: Manuel Harlan
But there is too much talk and not enough drama. The pacing becomes ever slower over the course of two and a half hours. The cast excel but the characters are not given enough space to gain an emotional hold.
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The music, originally blasted out in blackouts in between scenes, is here concertinaed in dimly lit choreographed interludes when we are given atmospheric snatches of Pink Floyd, the Velvet Underground, the Beach Boys, Syd Barrett, John Lennon and others. A stereo and rows of LPs are centre stage and this music should serve as the emotional driver but is not loud or rebellious enough. There is timidity to the choreography, too, with the intermittent appearance of a barefooted musician, dressed like a 1970s flower child, who verges on caricature.
What is still here, in abundance, is exuberance of language and characteristically fizzing wordplay as well as dangerous and exciting comedy. A searing description of breast cancer and mastectomy by Max’s wife, Eleanor (Nancy Carroll, who also plays his daughter Esme), segues into sudden, irreverent humour. “Just don’t lose half your bum,” Max tells Eleanor warmly.
Anna Krippa as Lenka in Rock’n’Roll. Photograph: Manuel Harlan
A briefly glimpsed love story returns in the second act when the play seems to switch to a middle-class family drama with an extended dinner party scene, although its erudite “debate play” dialogue keeps its through line. The final Rolling Stones song plays as the cast dance on tables. Finally, you feel the growling, feral energy of the music. It is an effective – and affecting – moment, rather late in the day.
At Hampstead theatre, London, until 27 January | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2024/apr/01/andrew-giles-faces-years-of-litigation-as-he-fights-to-prevent-another-disastrous-defeat-on-immigration | Australia news | 2024-03-31T14:00:42.000Z | Paul Karp | Andrew Giles faces years of litigation as he fights to prevent another disastrous defeat on immigration | Paul Karp | Andrew Giles has a reputation as the most sued person in Australia.
A conscientious man in a controversial portfolio, for the immigration minister being the respondent to literally hundreds of cases a year just comes with the territory.
When the high court ruled in the NZYQ decision that indefinite detention is unlawful if it is not possible to deport the person, overturning a two-decade-old precedent, the legal terrain got even rockier.
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The Albanese government concedes it is facing three years of litigation to determine the bounds of when a person has “no real prospect” of their removal from Australia “becoming practicable in the reasonably foreseeable future”.
The rushed legislation imposing ankle bracelets and curfews, and criminal penalties for breach of visa conditions, is also under challenge.
This is the pipeline of cases the government is facing and, in some cases, aggressively managing, to prevent another disastrous defeat.
‘Uncooperative’ detainees
On 17 April the high court will hear the case of ASF17, an Iranian man detained for more than a decade who refuses to meet Iranian authorities because he fears for his life if he is removed to Iran because he is bisexual.
The case will test whether people in immigration detention must be released if their refusal to cooperate has prevented them being deported.
Leaked internal documents reveal the government believes more than 170 people might have to be released if it loses the case.
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In public and in private the government is confident of victory. Nevertheless it is attempting to legislate powers to require people to cooperate in their deportation, a tool it can use to remove people from Australia if it loses.
Ned Kelly Emeralds, a former detainee freed by the federal court known by the pseudonym AZC20, has applied to intervene in the case. He is represented by barristers led by Craig Lenehan SC, who won the NZYQ case – a dream team that could become a nightmare for the government.
People owed protection
Lawyer Zia Zarifi told Guardian Australia that NZYQ meant that if the government was going to keep people in immigration detention “the sole reason must be deportation” or their application for a protection visa was still being considered.
But the government has kept some people who have already been found by the administrative appeals tribunal to be owed protection in detention.
One such person is JPPS, a man who faces the death penalty in Lebanon over terrorism accusations, which he denies. The government has kept him in detention while it appeals against the finding he is owed protection.
Some plaintiffs in this category have been granted protection visas and released from detention but Zarifi said the claim for a declaration that their detention was unlawful could continue.
Compensation claims inevitable
In November the solicitor general, Stephen Donaghue, told the high court claims for compensation would be “inevitable” if it ruled indefinite detention was unlawful and “undefendable” in cases where it conceded the people had been detained while it was impossible to deport them.
In January a stateless Kurdish man, known as DVU18, released from immigration detention filed in the high court seeking “aggravated” and “compensatory” damages for alleged false imprisonment. The claim has been remitted to the federal court.
Guardian Australia is aware of similar cases in the federal court seeking compensation, even though the government thought indefinite detention was lawful due to 2004’s Al-Kateb high court decision.
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Ankle bracelets and curfews
In addition to compensation for detention, DVU18 was also challenging the legality of the ankle bracelet and curfew conditions – but the conditions were lifted off him, resulting in him withdrawing this part of the claim.
Guardian Australia revealed in December that Giles was quietly removing the ankle bracelets and curfew conditions from people challenging them in court. This resulted in cases being withdrawn – five in total by February, according to home affairs officials in Senate estimates.
Legal practitioners believe the government is aggressively managing the caseload to delay a ruling striking down the visa conditions, or at least to pick its preferred plaintiff and legal team to face off against.
When questioned, Giles has said conditions are determined on the advice of the community protection board. On Wednesday officials revealed that 73 of the 152 people released as a result of NZYQ no longer need ankle bracelets – so it is not just those bringing legal challenges who are having them removed.
A stateless refugee born in Eritrea known as YBFZ is also challenging the ankle bracelets and curfews. The case is going ahead with negotiations to agree facts.
In December and January YBFZ was charged with offences related to failing to observe curfew and charge his ankle monitor but these have been dropped.
Invalid bridging visas
In March the Albanese government admitted that the bridging visas granted to those released from detention after NZYQ were invalid due to a technicality. Some 10 people had already been charged with breaching visa conditions and these charges were dropped.
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Guardian Australia understands that the Human Rights Law Centre believes that a case for compensation for imposition of unlawful visa conditions before the technicality was corrected is “readily available” if and when former detainees want to bring a case.
A class action is being considered and is anticipated by the government, although it is unlikely to be launched until after the high court rules on validity of ankle bracelets and curfews generally.
Hannah Dickinson, principal solicitor at the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, said it is “appropriate that people have redress for the unlawful imposition of invasive” conditions.
Aggregate sentences bill
In December 2022 the commonwealth lost the Pearson case in the full federal court. The court ruled aggregate sentences do not trigger automatic visa cancellation, prompting the release of more than 100 people who had previously served aggregate sentences of 12 months or more in prison.
Labor and the Coalition teamed up to pass laws retrospectively authorising the cancellation of visas of people who had been released.
The legality of these laws has been upheld twice in the case of JZQQ, a man who was sentenced to 15 months in prison for offences of intentionally causing injury and threats to kill; and Kingston Tapiki, a New Zealander sentenced to an aggregate term of 12 months’ imprisonment for offences of affray and assault.
Both are now appealing to the high court, which has agreed to hear the cases. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jun/03/ratko-mladic-trial-war-crimes-tribunal | Opinion | 2011-06-03T11:41:15.000Z | Zrinka Bralo | Ratko Mladic's trial won't heal our scars but it will show what a monster he is | Zrinka Bralo | Istill remember clearly the day I learned who Ratko Mladic was. It was 29 May 1992. The night before, my home town of Sarajevo had come under the heaviest artillery fire we had seen in the 52 days since the war began. We spent our nights hiding with our neighbours in the inner corridors of our apartment building, trying to decipher where the shells were landing. We all knew the sound of thunder in the distance meant it was only a matter of minutes before it was our turn. The distant sound of a shell hitting a different target provided no relief, because every shell that landed could have killed someone I knew and loved. Although it was still relatively early in the siege of Sarajevo, we already knew how and when to run for the shelter and across sniper alleys, and we also knew that it did not mean a thing that we lived just five minutes from the United Nations protection force's headquarters.
The next day on the news, those of us who still had electricity heard a recording of the intercepted radio communications of Ratko Mladic, a Yugoslav army officer, barking orders. His men were on the Olympic mountains surrounding Sarajevo, their weapons pointed at the city. Mladic listed targets he wanted to be shelled, because "there were no Serbs living there". He concluded: "Do not let them sleep! Let them lose their minds."
Some of us still cannot sleep as a result. But we did not lose our minds. And we remember every shell and every sniper bullet that claimed 10,000 lives in Sarajevo. We had to endure the humiliation of not being able to defend ourselves, starvation, hopelessness. The peace agreement ended the war, but the humiliation and the desperation continued. A 16-year wait for war criminals to be apprehended is just a small part of that post-war humiliation.
Along with nearly half of my fellow countrymen and women, I found sanctuary in a foreign country, settling in London. Even after the war ended, the trauma of what happened continues to haunt most of us. Our wounds are merely invisible to casual observers. Every time someone asks me where I'm from, I'm reminded of a life that the man on the mountain took away from me. It is hard to put into words the pain of lost souls, raped women, destroyed cities and damaged generations.
As with Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, the arrest of Mladic left me emotionally stunned. There is nothing to celebrate or be happy about. I do not seek revenge. I need justice. For a minute or so, I felt a strange kind of relief – perhaps there is justice, no matter how slow. I wish that one day I can forgive. But no one has yet asked for forgiveness. The deluge of old images of the destruction of Sarajevo, the videos of Mladic talking to the soon-to-be-dead men and boys of Srebrenica, the scores of commentators discussing the legal technicalities of his extradition and indictment, the statements of politicians congratulating Serbia for arresting the war criminal who lived freely for 16 years, some people of Serbia and some Serbs in Bosnia demonstrating in support of Mladic – it all brings a new kind of pain, one that adds insult to injury. The pain of a wounded future, as well as a destroyed past. I call it our ongoing traumatic stress syndrome.
On Friday, as he stood before the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, facing up to his past, unsurprisingly there were no fireworks. Sitting in his civilian clothes on his first day in court, he looked like a broken man, rumoured to be seriously ill. But then he spoke and the defiant butcher came out: "I am General Ratko Mladic," he said with pride.
The judge informed him of his fundamental right to remain silent. He nodded in agreement. I wonder if there should be a fundamental right for the victims not to remain silent?
From the rest of the proceedings it became clear that Mladic's approach will be that of defiance and obstructionism. "I do not want to hear a single word or the sentence of that indictment," he said. At one point he appeared to have a smirk on his face, shaking his head disapprovingly every time Srebrenica was mentioned.
He called the charges "obnoxious" and asked for more than 30 days to consider the "monstrous words" against him that he has never heard before. In the end the judge cut off his ranting and grandstanding, and set 4 July as the date for the hearing.
I am angry, disturbed and relieved at the same time. Relieved because today I have hope. I hope Mladic lives long enough to stand trial. I hope his trial gives all survivors a fair hearing and acknowledges at least some of our pain and loss. I hope he is not allowed to use the insanity or ill health defence. He is ruthless, cruel and a coward, but he is not crazy or ignorant. He knew exactly what he was doing when he was shelling unarmed civilians and committing genocide. I hope he gets the best lawyer possible, and I hope his lawyer cross-examines every witness for the prosecution, so Mladic is forced to hear every detail of his cruel and inhumane conduct, and that it is all recorded in court transcripts for eternity. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jan/13/arts.artsnews | World news | 2003-01-13T10:26:00.000Z | Tania Branigan | Maurice Gibb, talented but tormented Bee Gee, dies | Maurice Gibb, the linchpin of the hugely successful but critically underrated Bee Gees, died yesterday in hospital after collapsing at his home in Miami, Florida, last week.
The 53-year-old star, who played and sang on hits including Tragedy and Jive Talkin', had appeared to show signs of recovery this weekend after suffering a heart attack during an operation to remove an intestinal blockage.
On Saturday, he opened his eyes and squeezed his daughter's hand, but his condition rapidly deteriorated again. His second wife Yvonne, 51, and their children Adam, 25, and Samantha, 26, were with him when he passed away at 1am.
They had been by his bedside at the Mount Sinai medical centre since his emergency surgery on Thursday night and were joined by the other Bee Gees: Gibb's elder brother Barry and twin brother Robin, who had flown in from London.
"It is with great sadness and sorrow that we regretfully announce the passing of Maurice Gibb this morning," his family said in a statement.
"His love and enthusiasm and energy for life remain an inspiration to all of us. We will all deeply miss him."
Gibb - described by his twin as the "outgoing, gregarious" member who held the group together - spent the last weeks of his life working on an album with Barry and Michael Jackson.
Like Jackson, the Bee Gees are one of the top five acts of all time. They sold 110m records worldwide, notched up number one hits in four consecutive decades and last year received CBEs.
Among the hits they penned were Massachusetts, How Deep Is Your Love, Islands In The Stream and the soul classic How Do You Mend A Broken Heart. Their songs were covered by stars such as Frank Sinatra, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding and Al Green as well pop acts including Steps and Take That.
But their huge popularity and knack for unforgettable hooks never won them credibility.
They were derided as 70s medallion men and cruelly, if accurately, parodied by spoof group The Hebegeebees in the hit Meaningless Songs In Very High Voices.
Paul Trynka, editorial director of the music magazine Mojo, said yesterday that people had begun to reassess the Bee Gees in the last few years: "They were as inventive as many other bands who are better regarded. Their songwriting was pretty original; they had a unique sound. But we tend to resent people who are too successful and I think they suffered from that.
"They were great songwriters - appreciated by people like Lennon and McCartney - and albums like Odessa are regarded as lost classics. Their catalogue isn't without its turkeys, but they experimented and kept trying and that's quite rare."
The trio, who were born in the Isle of Man but grew up in Manchester, began singing in clubs near their home as chil dren. By 1967 they were topping the charts.
Gibb loved the high life, partying with the Beatles, Michael Caine and David Bowie, and marrying Lulu in 1969. Their marriage soon fell apart as his drinking got out of hand. He would later go into rehabilitation, relapsing briefly when his younger brother Andy died in the late 80s.
Yesterday Chris Hutchins, the group's former press agent, said Gibb's alcoholism had affected his health.
"His drinking did upset his system; he was greatly weakened by what he put himself through," he told BBC Radio 5 Live, adding that Gibb was a "tormented soul" who longed to be the group's front man.
But the brothers rode out their troubles, proving remarkably resilient. Their career seemed to be over when their record label refused to release an album in the early 70s. But by the end of the decade they had rebounded with the multimillion-selling soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. The resulting string of hits, including Stayin' Alive, Night Fever and More Than A Woman, pigeonholed them as a disco act. In fact, as they acknowledged, their sound was "blue-eyed soul".
"Maurice was the talented multi-instrumentalist. I mean here's a guy who played keyboards, guitar, bass and percussion," the DJ and writer Paul Gambaccini told BBC London 94.9 yesterday.
"He was the high part of the three-part harmony. Maurice himself said 'One of us is OK, two of us is pretty good, but three of us together is magic.'" | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2023/sep/20/brian-cox-bach-theatre-the-score | Stage | 2023-09-20T07:06:57.000Z | Michael Billington | After Amadeus: Brian Cox as Bach is theatre’s latest orchestral manoeuvre | You wait decades for a play about Johann Sebastian Bach and two come along. Oliver Cotton’s The Score, dealing with Bach’s confrontation with Frederick II at Potsdam in 1747, opens at the Theatre Royal Bath in October and stars Brian Cox. You could argue that Nina Raine’s Bach & Sons, which played at London’s Bridge theatre in 2021 and starred Simon Russell Beale, might actually have been called Succession since much of the action hinged on which of his offspring the testy patriarch would finally favour.
What is surprising is how many plays there are about great composers. You could say that is down to the success of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, but even before that dramatists were drawn to musical divinities: Sacha Guitry’s Mozart, with Yvonne Printemps as the hero, played in London in 1926. I would put the current popularity of musical biodramas down to a number of things. The fact that many composers have led lives streaked with violence; that there is often a disjunction between the musical genius and the man (and, sadly, in drama, it is rarely a woman); and there is a never-ending debate about the composer’s obligation to society as well as the creative impulse.
One reason why Amadeus became a popular hit is that it managed to pack in all those ideas. Shaffer picks up on Salieri’s deathbed confession that he had poisoned his detested rival, Mozart, and examines its credibility. To those who wanted to preserve the image of Mozart as a Dresden figurine – notoriously including Margaret Thatcher who made known her dislike of the play – Shaffer reminds us that the composer was both a conduit for divine music and a potty-mouthed libertine. Shaffer also underscores the point that, in 18th-century Vienna, power, prestige and economic survival depended on the approval of the Austrian Emperor, Joseph II.
Rupert Everett as Salieri and Joshua McGuire as Mozart in Amadeus by Peter Shaffer at Chichester festival theatre, directed by Jonathan Church, in 2014. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
Brilliant and beguiling as Shaffer’s work is, many of its ideas had been explored by Alexander Pushkin in his 1830 play Mozart and Salieri. When it was staged at the Almeida in 1989 with Tilda Swinton and Lore Brunner in the title roles it was a revelation. Salieri’s realisation that dedication is very different from genius, his detestation of Mozart as a “gormless skylarker” and his thrill of remorse when he hears the Requiem all proved that Pushkin’s “little tragedy” anticipated Shaffer’s mighty spectacle by a century-and-a-half.
Yet there is another British playwright, the unsung David Pownall who died in 2022, who had an even greater capacity than Shaffer to make drama out of composition. In the stunning Music to Murder By (1976) he provocatively argues that Carlo Gesualdo’s killing of his wife and her lover in 1590 liberated his creative talent. Less sensationally in Elgar’s Rondo (1993) he shows the supposed imperial jingoist dogged by private despair.
But Pownall was at his peak in Master Class (1983): one of the best plays about music ever written that shows Prokofiev and Shostakovich summoned by Stalin to the Kremlin in 1948. Not only does Pownall show the three men attempting to create a folk-cantata based on a Georgian story, but also gives real urgency to the question of whether the composer is the servant of his own compulsion or has a wider duty to communicate with ordinary people and express national longings. We naturally favour the former but Pownall asks whether, in a country suffering the trauma of 20 million wartime deaths, the artist has an equal duty to bring hope and joy.
Isla Blair as Pauline Strauss and Michael Pennington as Richard Strauss in Collaboration at the Minerva, Chichester, in 2008. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
This ultimately is what plays about musicians can do: raise big moral issues. Ronald Harwood successfully did it twice in interlinked plays. In Taking Sides (1995) he offered a surprisingly sympathetic view of Wilhelm Furtwangler, who remained as conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic during the Third Reich. In the even better Collaboration (2008), Harwood showed how Richard Strauss, while working on Die Schweigsame Frau with Stefan Zweig, was forced into an accommodation with the Nazis to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law and her children.
This is the very stuff of drama and a million miles away from the kind of ludicrous composer biopic that Hollywood used to churn out: a genre epitomised by Song Without End in which a wild-eyed Lyndon Brook advanced down a corridor exultantly crying: “I am Richard Wagner and this is the score of Lohengrin.”
The Score is at Theatre Royal Bath, 12-28 October | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/apr/08/derry-girls-put-us-on-map-pride-home-city-end-series-nears | UK news | 2022-04-08T11:34:20.000Z | Rory Carroll | ‘Derry Girls put us on the map’: pride in home city as end of series nears | After four years of jokes, memes, acclaim, and debate about whether Protestants really do keep toasters in cupboards, the imminent final season of Derry Girls is prompting bittersweet valediction in Derry.
The Channel 4 TV sitcom that became an unexpected global hit after airing in 2018 cast a warm haze over Northern Ireland’s second city that inhabitants hope will linger beyond the third season, which starts next week.
The show’s wry depiction of working-class teenage girls coming of age in the 1990s reshaped perceptions of a city previously associated with the turmoil of the Troubles. It was not just outsiders who saw a different Derry – inhabitants viewed themselves differently. They hope the afterglow endures.
“It’s the light that it brings. It’s Derry in colour, not in black and white,” said Greta McTague, a drama teacher at St Cecilia’s college who taught two of the show’s stars, Saoirse-Monica Jackson, who plays Erin, and Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, who plays Michelle.
Saoirse-Monica Jackson poses with a young fan after the launch of Derry Girls series three at the Omniplex cinema in Derry on Thursday. Photograph: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
A city previously best known for Bloody Sunday, and often overshadowed by Belfast, was able to show a vibrant, joyous side, said McTague. “Derry Girls has put us right up there on the map. It has made this massive impact. It will leave a lasting legacy.”
The sitcom found a global audience after Netflix acquired the rights. It was referenced on The Simpsons, which featured an ice-cream parlour named Dairy Girls. Some fans this week half-jokingly urged the Stormont executive to buy Channel 4, which faces being privatised, for its services to Northern Ireland.
The show’s gentle mockery of sectarianism included a blackboard that characters used to list differences between Catholics and Protestants, with the former deemed to love statues and store coal in the bath and the latter deemed to love flutes and keep toasters in cupboards. The Ulster Museum in Belfast included the prop in an exhibition on cultural stereotypes.
Tourists visit Derry to walk the same streets as the characters, devour Derry Girls-themed afternoon teas and take selfies at a mural on the side of Badgers Bar on Orchard Street. “Netflix has given us a global platform. It has given us a new market and a new audience,” said Odhran Dunne, the chief executive of the tourism agency Visit Derry. “The new series will open another opportunity for sites and locations.”
Jamie-Lee O’Donnell (right) poses for a selfie with a fan at the launch of the new season. Photograph: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
Gleann Doherty, a guide who does a Derry Girls tour, said in 2018 he had initially expected the show to be a bleak take on the Troubles. “I thought here we go, another one. Then I sat down and watched it and it was hilarious. It shows you that there was a sense of normality. It wasn’t a normal society that we lived in but it felt normal to us.”
Karl Porter, one of the artists who painted the mural, said the show captured inhabitants’ resilience and humour. “When you laugh about something it takes on a whole different context. Bad stuff happened … but we built these very strong communities.” Porter lamented the end of Derry Girls but said it was going out on a high. “They’re not dragging it out. We’ve all seen certain shows that went on and on and became repetitive.”
The mural was tweaked this week so that Michelle, who originally held up two fingers in the peace sign, held up three to signify the third series. The show’s writer and creator, Lisa McGee, and cast and crew returned to Derry on Thursday night for a red carpet premiere of the new season’s first two episodes followed by a reception at the Guildhall.
Derry Girls had demystified her home town to outsiders, McGee told the Guardian. “Something about comedy makes things accessible to people. It’s shown a side of the place that has not been shown an awful lot, for instance the more ridiculous elements of day to day life. It’s maybe changed the city a wee bit. It’s incredible really because it’s just a comedy.” McGee wants fresh stories to emerge. “I hope that will be the legacy of Derry Girls, that other people will write about here.”
Juliette Barber, a teacher at St Cecilia’s college, said seeing two former pupils find fame and success as actors on the show had galvanised her students. “It puts their aspirations within reach. It’s no longer something that happens to ‘other people’, it has happened to someone who wore their uniform, walked their streets, and talks the way they do.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/mar/19/uyghur-court-hong-kong-road-tower-hamlets-plans-name-changes-in-solidarity | UK news | 2021-03-19T12:07:50.000Z | Haroon Siddique | Tiananmen Square, Uyghur Court: Tower Hamlets plans name changes in solidarity | At the handing-over ceremony for the site in the East End of London where the Chinese embassy is to be relocated, the ambassador boldly proclaimed that it would “write a new chapter for a China-UK golden era”.
Three years later, before the redevelopment has begun, those hopes appear in tatters after councillors in Tower Hamlets voted to consider naming roads and buildings in the surrounding area of the site Tiananmen Square, Uyghur Court, Hong Kong Road and Tibet Hill, to assert “support for the freedom and diversity of our borough”.
In a move that is likely to infuriate the Chinese government, the councillors said they welcomed the relocation of the embassy from the West End but “we must continue to make clear where our own standards and principles apply”.
China has detained my young children. I don't know if I'll ever see them again
Mihriban Kader
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The motion was passed after months of campaigning by opposition councillors for the local authority to issue a statement about human rights abuses by China, in light of Beijing’s purchase of the Royal Mint site in the borough for its embassy. The repression of Uighur Muslims is particularly sensitive for Tower Hamlets, which has the highest proportion of Muslim residents (38%) of any borough, according to the latest census.
The motion states: “This council resolves that Tower Hamlets council investigates whether roads or possibly new buildings near the location of the proposed Chinese embassy could be renamed appropriately as acts of solidarity with historic symbols or placenames of Chinese significance; for example Tiananmen Square, Tibet Hill, Uyghur Court, Hong Kong Road and/or Xiaobo Road (in memory of Liu Xiaobo).”
Liu, a Nobel laureate and democracy campaigner, died in Chinese custody aged 61 in 2017, having been sentenced to an 11-year jail term for demanding an end to one-party rule.
The motion also notes that the Chinese embassy in the UK has written to a number of schools in the area to explore opportunities for potential collaboration, and calls for the nature of this to be ascertained to ensure it reflects the borough’s “proud history of standing up for each other as one community and celebrating our differences”.
It extends a welcome in the borough to Hong Kong residents taking up British citizenship under a new visa scheme and says the council will investigate what other actions it can take to show solidarity.
It is a far cry from the March 2018 handing-over ceremony for the historic Royal Mint site facing the Tower of London, when China’s ambassador Liu Xiaoming said the embassy would become “a new landmark in London” and the Tower Hamlets mayor, John Biggs, said the move showed the borough was “an open and dynamic place to live and work”.
Since then China has faced international condemnation of its repression of the predominantly Muslim Uighur people and clampdown on dissent in Hong Kong.
There have been heightened tensions between China and the west of late. Last year the UK foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, condemned what he called “gross and egregious” human rights abuses in China’s western Xinjiang region, and last week he accused China of breaching the legal deal over the governance of Hong Kong.
The Liberal Democrat councillor Rabina Khan, who proposed the council motion, said: “Tower Hamlets has a unique history of welcoming people and at Wednesday’s full council meeting politicians unanimously came together on the amended motion that whilst we welcome the proposed relocation of the Chinese embassy, we also stand up against the CCP’s [Chinese Communist party’s] human rights violations.”
The motion assures the borough’s constituents that there will be no financial cost to them associated with the naming of the roads or buildings.
Last month council officers raised concerns about a separate issue in relation to the embassy: the impact on views of the Tower of London.
In a previous statement to the Guardian, the Chinese embassy in the UK said the new building would be a symbol of a “robust relationship” between the countries and that people should “stop using human rights as an excuse to interfere in China’s internal affairs”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/27/moon-landing-poem-launches-simon-armitage-as-poet-laureate | Books | 2019-07-27T05:45:36.000Z | Alison Flood | Moon landing poem launches Simon Armitage as poet laureate | Two months after his appointment, Simon Armitage has penned his first poem as the UK’s poet laureate: a commemoration of the 1969 moon landing, which compares the US astronauts to the Spanish explorers who conquered the Americas in the 16th century.
Conquistadors by Simon Armitage
In this afterthought
he’s just turned six,
the astronaut in him
doing his damnedest to coincide
the moon landing
with his first kiss,
hoping to plant his lips
on ------ ---------’s
distant face
as Simon Armstrong
steps from the module
onto Tranquillity Base.
But as Tricky Dicky clears his throat
to claim God’s estate
as man’s backyard
from the Oval Office,
and the gap narrows
to feet then inches,
suddenly stars recoil
to the next dimension
and heaven flinches.
Armitage admitted to some nerves over whether the laureateship would bring on a case of writer’s block – former incumbent Andrew Motion said, while laureate, that he “dried up completely about five years ago and can’t write anything except to commission”. But this was not the case for the 21st poet laureate.
“I had been a little bit nervous, since I’d been approached, about whether it might affect my writing,” said Armitage, a former probation officer who will hold the role for 10 years. “But I found myself daydreaming about the moon landing, and before I knew it a few lines appeared and an idea formed … when it came down to it, [the writing] was pretty much exactly the same as always.”
His poem, Conquistadors, imagines a six-year-old Armitage trying to “coincide / the moon landing / with his first kiss”. Meanwhile Richard Nixon – “Tricky Dicky” – “clears his throat / to claim God’s estate / as man’s backyard // from the Oval Office”.
Armitage said it came to him while he was “dwelling on the memories of when I was a kid, and the moon landings, drawing parallels between something being both captivating and intoxicating, almost in a romantic way”. Philip Larkin’s description of the moon as “High and preposterous and separate – / Lozenge of love!” was another inspiration, he said, as was Robert Graves and “how he was absolutely horrified that we defiled this maternal feminist goddess with our muddy footprints”. Graves called walking on the moon “the greatest crime against humanity in 2,000 years”.
“Looking back now it seemed to be quite a macho endeavour. I had forgotten about Nixon’s speech, his telephone call,” said Armitage. (Nixon told Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong: “Because of what you have done, the heavens have become part of man’s world.”)
“It is such an arrogant assumption, the idea that something so ephemeral could ever be captured and conquered,” said Armitage.
The unnamed love, meanwhile – the poet at six is “hoping to plant his lips / on ------ ---------’s / distant face” – is “anonymised to the point of generalisation”.
“It’s more a point of, ‘your name here’,” he added. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/jan/17/golden-globes-ricky-gervais-colin-firth-social-network | Film | 2011-01-17T07:24:35.000Z | Xan Brooks | Golden Globes: Colin Firth crowned while The Social Network wins lion's share | Excerpts from winning actors including Colin Firth, Robert De Niro, Natalie Portman and Christian Bale and a standing ovation for Michael Douglas, who has been battling cancer Reuters
The nerd ruled supreme at last night's Golden Globes, where The Social Network picked up four awards. David Fincher's acclaimed tale of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg won prizes for best dramatic film, best director, best screenplay and best score.
But the awards also boost the Oscar hopes of Britain's Colin Firth, who was named best dramatic actor for his role as stuttering George VI in The King's Speech. In his acceptance speech, the 50-year-old actor gave thanks to Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood mogul who is running the film's award campaign. So far, the Weinstein touch seems to be working. Firth is now the heavy bookies' favourite to take the Academy Award on February 27.
The 68th annual Golden Globes, voted for by journalists for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, spread the prizes liberally across a wide range of pictures. The Kids Are All Right took the award for best comedy/musical, with its star Annette Bening also picking up an acting award. Natalie Portman was named best dramatic actress for her turn as a tortured ballerina in Black Swan, while Paul Giamatti won the best comedy/musical actor for Barney's Version. Christian Bale and Melissa Leo scooped the supporting actor prizes for their roles in David O Russell's true-life boxing drama The Fighter.
Elsewhere Toy Story 3 won the prize for best animated feature, while the Danish drama In a Better World was named best foreign language film. Robert De Niro was presented with the The Cecil B DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in motion pictures.
The night's big loser appeared to be Inception. Christopher Nolan's fiendish summer blockbuster rolled into the ceremony with four nominations and duly rolled out again, empty-handed.
Inside the Beverly Hilton hotel, the mood was boisterous, verging on the corrosive. In the immediate aftermath, many guests appeared to suggest that host Ricky Gervais had occasionally overstepped the mark. The British comedian introduced Bruce Willis as "Ashton Kutcher's dad", heaped scorn on the nominated film The Tourist and jokingly accused the awards voters of accepting bribes. Robert Downey Jr, he added, was better known for "his stays at the Betty Ford clinic and the LA County jail" than for his movie roles.
Taking the stage, Downey Jr felt moved to comment on the tone of the night. "Aside from the fact that it's been hugely mean-spirited with mildly sinister overtones, I'd say the vibe of the show is pretty good, wouldn't you?" he said. Backstage, following the event, the actor went further. "I think it's great to be funny," he said. "But it's better if you can do it without hurting people."
For good measure, Gervais also appeared to bite the hand that fed him by targeting venerable Phillip Berk, president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. "I just had to help the HFPA president off the toilet and pop his teeth back in," he confided to the audience.
In interviews last week, Gervais vowed to ensure that he would never be asked back to host the Globes again. Early evidence suggests he may have succeeded. Asked afterwards if he would ever consider booking Gervais again, Phillip Berk fired back a terse "No comment." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/mar/23/this-weeks-new-tracks | Music | 2018-03-23T11:00:02.000Z | Kate Solomon | This week’s tracks reviewed: Halsey, 2 Chainz and Seinabo Sey | Seinabo Sey
I Owe You Nothing
You know what they say about Seinabo Sey songs: you wait two years for one and two come along at once. She owes us nothing but she gives us loads with a double A-side, the most enjoyable of which is this track: a languorous but hearty screw-you to any passersby telling her to “cheer up, love”. Definitely check out the Aristotle-quoting video; Seinabo basking in the glow of a burning cop car is Quite Something.
Louisa ft 2 Chainz
Yes
The artist formerly known as Louisa Johnson has dropped the power ballads and the Johnson (ooh-er), and now she’s all about having a dance in the club. But then there are also a lot of sex sounds going on, so maybe she’s actually about banging in the club. Pop songs are only cool when they have rappers on them, and thankfully 2 Chainz had space in his schedule. Most famous for randomly going “2 Chainz!!” at any opportunity, he doesn’t disappoint by randomly going “2 Chainz!!” and delivering a nonsensical verse that definitely wasn’t written for Yes.
Halsey ft Stefflon Don and Big Sean
Alone
File under “Being Famous Is So Hard” and cross reference with “These Diamond Shoes Are Too Tight”. This Halsey rework is fairly forgettable until Stefflon Don comes along and completely blows the staid hip-pop out of the water with a verse that sounds as if it was flown in from another time and place and song to be wedged, thunder-stealingly, into Halsey’s. Oh, and Big Sean is there too, I guess.
Calpurnia
City Boy
The kid from Stranger Things is in a band and that band is absolutely fine if you like wobbly guitar psych made by kids who have probably never even seen a psychedelic toad let alone licked one. “I am a city boy,” the kid from Stranger Things sings. “You are a city girl.” Can he make it any more obvious?
Junglepussy
Showers
Musicians letting their infant relatives feature on songs: should this be allowed? It’s like when you’re in a cafe and a toddler starts playing peek-a-boo with you, and you have to leave because you don’t know how to get out of the situation. Sure, we all thrill when Beyoncé lets Blue Ivy on the mic but it’s a bit more annoying when Junglepussy invites her three-year-old nephew to gabble away on this otherwise enjoyable song. Dogs, on the other hand, are always welcome, both in cafes and on tracks. More dog features, please. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/05/north-atlantic-right-whale-extinction-cape-cod-philip-hoare | Opinion | 2018-05-05T05:00:43.000Z | Philip Hoare | Facing extinction, the North Atlantic right whale cannot adapt. Can we? | Philip Hoare | As if to confound everyone, this past week Dr Charles “Stormy” Mayo and his team from the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies reported seeing up to 150 right whales in Cape Cod Bay. Dr Mayo – who has been studying these animals for 40 years and has a scientist’s aversion to exaggeration – is stunned.
North Atlantic right whales may face extinction after no new births recorded
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“It is amazing for such a rare and utterly odd creature,” he tells me. All the more amazing since he knows this great gathering could be a final flourish. By 2040, the North Atlantic right whale may be gone. He hesitates, then uses the e-word: extinction.
How can such a huge mammal simply disappear within reach of the richest and most powerful nation on earth? Shifting food sources – due to climate change – are leading whales to areas where maritime industries are unused to them. In the past 12 months, 18 rights have died after ship strikes or entanglement in fishing gear. With as few as 430 animals left, 100 of them breeding females in a reduced gene pool, the species is unsustainable.
The right whale may be the strangest beast in the ocean. Vast and rotund, its gigantic mouth is fringed with two-metre strips of baleen, once “harvested” by humans to furnish Venetian blinds and corset stays but used by the whale to strain its diet of rice-sized zooplankton from the sea.
These bizarre animals are not easily known or imagined. They live far longer than us – like its Arctic cousin, the bowhead, the right whale may reach 200, perhaps more. Individuals could be older than constitutional America. They exist beyond us in time, dimension and experience. If we lose the right whale, we lose part of our planet’s biological history.
The lucky ones, I suppose, drown. Others go for months or even years, dying an excruciating death
Dennis Minsky
If any whale were to be so foolish as to claim nationality, the North Atlantic right whale would be American, spending all its life in US or Canadian waters. Its modern nickname, the urban whale, evokes its habit of foraging close to shore. Its historic name speaks to its fate. Being a surface-feeder, so near to land, made it vulnerable to humans. And when it was killed, its belt of blubber ensured that it floated conveniently. The right whale was in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
By 1935, with as few as 60 breeding individuals left, the situation was so dire that the right whale became the first cetacean to be protected by law. But by the start of this century, the numbers seemed to recover. Shipping lanes were shifted and fishing industries took on board the whale’s protected status. It even got its own air exclusion zone. “Like a Hollywood star,” as John Waters quipped to me.
For 18 years I’ve followed that tentative recovery in the waters off Cape Cod. I’ve stumbled on to the winter beach to witness their fins and flukes tumbling so near the tide line I might have waded out to them. I’ve even watched them from my bed overlooking the bay. And on research cruises with the Center for Coastal Studies, special licence allowed us to approach close enough to see the whale lice (cyamids) crawling round their heads.
On one memorable trip in April 2015, scientist Christy Hudak and her team spotted 80 animals – almost 20% of the population. It was like watching dinosaurs, but such is the sensitivity of the center’s work that I cannot show you the dozens of photographs I took that day.
A North Atlantic right whale at the surface. Photograph: Brian J. Skerry/NG/Getty Images
That sense of a huge animal being and not being there speaks to a paradoxical fragility. Veteran whalewatch naturalist Dennis Minsky, based in Provincetown, takes this story personally: “An ancient and noble beast is constitutionally unable to adapt to an array of anthropogenic threats – speeding water craft, the myriad vertical lines of fishing gear, an increasingly noisy ocean and poorly understood changes in water quality.” Federal and state efforts to help seem little more than “mere tinkering”. And with 80% of right whales showing scars from entanglement, what about their individual suffering?
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“The lucky ones, I suppose, drown,” Minsky says. “Others go for months or even years, dying an excruciating death.” Minsky shrugs, summing up the situation in five pithy words: “They cannot adapt: can we?”
Like Minsky and Mayo, I feel an intimate connection to the whales of the Cape, a place I hymn in my new book. This is the edge of our world, where we meet the other. As I swim in its waters, winter and summer, I find it hard to see this as a site of mortality rather than life. What could save its most enigmatic, sensate and sentient animal? New fishing gear technology, tighter regulations? Maybe. But out there, swimming under the blue expanse that Melville called “the ocean’s skin”, Eubalaena glacialis needs one thing more than anything else. Our empathy. Just for a moment, can we stop thinking human, and start thinking whale?
Philip Hoare’s RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR is published in the US by University of Chicago Press. An exhibition based on the themes of the book opens at the Merola Gallery, Provincetown, on 25 May | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/apr/25/poverty-and-ageing-were-swept-under-the-carpet-and-pushed-aside | Australia news | 2019-04-24T18:00:37.000Z | Susan Chenery | Poverty and ageing: 'we're swept under the carpet and pushed aside' | For Susan Mathewson, it was a confluence of events. First her mother got cancer and she visited her in hospital every day. Her successful freelance ad writing career stalled, then suffered. Soon after, her partner left, and she became estranged from other family members.
“I fell into a heap, and I couldn’t get back up again,” she now says. This was the turning point for the 64-year-old woman with bipolar disorder now in assisted housing, on Newstart and living below the poverty line. She had been a creative director in advertising once, earning “lots and lots of money”.
“Now I can’t get a job for love or money. I don’t fit into the normal departments or categories of things, I am unmarried, no family, no super, no existing career path now because where do you go?”
Until she qualified for assisted housing supplied by a private enterprise, Mathewson was “two seconds away” from joining the ranks of the fastest growing demographic of people experiencing homelessness in Australia today. Older single women.
These women don’t always fit the stereotype of the poor old woman at the bus stop and very often you can’t see them – they might be sleeping in their car or moving from couch to couch. Says Dr Susan Feldman, who has been working in the area of women and ageing for 30 years: “Older women hide very well.”
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In Vital Conversations, a report for the Melbourne Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation, Feldman found that “between 2012 and 2017 the number of older women couch surfing increased by 83% and there was a 75% increase in older women sleeping in their cars and presenting at homelessness services”. In 2017–18 more than 13,800 older women accessed specialist homeless services, a 63% increase in five years.
Feldman has found that “more than half a million older Australian women live in long-term income poverty. These women have given so much to the Australian economy during their younger lives as workers and carers.”
The Mercy Foundation’s 2018 Retiring into Poverty report, found that “homeless women generally move from place to place often in a downhill trajectory in terms of mental and physical health as their situation becomes untenable”.
While homeless men are more visible and make up 59% of those on the streets, older single women are more likely to be in insecure housing, says Emma Dawson, the executive director of progressive think tank Per Capita.
And while one in four older Australians live in poverty, according to the Australian human rights commission, Corinne Dobson of the St Vincent de Paul Society says a larger proportion of women live in poverty – because of the hidden nature of it women are more likely to be undercounted in the census.
Disabled and unable to work after an “horrific” accident, Marilyn J, 70, lived in her car with her dog and cat for about three months. Like many older women she was out “on the road”. To escape the summer heat she would park in the underground car park at Coles “until they told me I couldn’t stay. Every evening I would drive to the park over the road. Everywhere I went, there was nowhere to live,” she told Guardian Australia.
The pathways to poverty have been linked to a number of compounding and systemic factors as well as gender and economic inequalities that have built up over the years; a lifetime of discrimination that will make its full affects known later in life. “Ageism, sexism and poverty collide,” says Feldman, “and it is not pretty.”
Ageism in the workforce, Dawson says, means that “once you are over 55 it is virtually impossible to get a job at a similar level of income” if you have been out of the workforce for any reason.
Women’s work lives are far more likely to have been interrupted by caring for children or family members; to be the primary carers they have often worked casual or part time. “It not only affects their earning capacity, it affects their capacity to build up superannuation,” says Dobson. “Our research last year showed that for the average women it was about 47% less super than for men over their lifetime.” For some women it has been a lifetime of unpaid caring for others, for others there was no compulsory super when they joined the workforce. Almost 35% of women approaching retirement (aged 60 to 64) have no superannuation at all.
In a high rental market, a Newstart allowance of $489.70 a fortnight for a single adult puts most rental accommodation out of reach. With the rising costs of utilities, paying for your phone and running a car it is impossible. Keeping a car on the road is a priority – you might need to live in it. And food is almost an afterthought.
The tipping point into homelessness can be swift and brutal. “The moment they are unable to work and pay their rent, they are likely to be homeless,” says the age discrimination commissioner, Dr Kay Patterson.
Suzanne Hopman of the homeless charity Dignity says “probably the biggest challenge we see at the moment is when the male partner dies and the wife, who has been a traditional homemaker, goes from two pensions to one. Then you will find women homeless for the first time.”
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By the age of retirement, says Patterson in a just released human rights report, “a third of women are not in a relationship”.
The Retiring into Poverty report found housing “must be at the centre of aging, and health policy”. It recommended a comprehensive federal government strategy to address the current financial insecurity of older women, and inequities in superannuation policy and legislation, and said that “special measures are required to assist women who have not had the opportunity to acquire superannuation”.
Says Dawson: “We need to massively increase commonwealth rent assistance, now. We need to recognise that there are older people who are living in poverty and who need to be better supported by our government. We need to make a significant society shift to address the fact that we still live as if it was 100 years ago and men were the breadwinners. All our employment and social structures are completely out of date.”
As the baby boomer generation heads into old age, charities like St Vincent de Paul see the plight of older women every day, desperate women who have come for help as an absolute last resort. Says Dobson: “A recurrent phrase I hear is ‘I never thought I would be in this situation. I never thought I would be coming to Vinnies to get food.’ We can see where the demographics are headed, it is not going to go away, there needs to be action now to address it and prevent it getting worse.”
Reporting in this series is supported by VivCourt through the Guardian Civic Journalism Trust | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/25/paris-exhibition-aims-to-dispel-myth-of-primitive-england-in-middle-ages | World news | 2023-06-25T06:00:29.000Z | Kim Willsher | Paris exhibition aims to dispel myth of ‘primitive’ England in middle ages | A new exhibition in Paris aims to show how England in the middle ages was very much part of Europe’s dynamic art, architectural, trade and culture scene between AD1000 and AD1500.
Organisers said the event would discredit the “popular perception” – mainly across the Channel – that medieval England was “primitive and barbaric” while France and parts of Europe enjoyed a gothic zenith.
James Robinson, the exhibition curator who is keeper of decorative art and sculpture at London’s V&A, said there had been a “reassessment” of England’s contribution to European art in the middle ages over the past half a century.
“I’d like to blow apart the popular perception that the middle ages were all about pestilence, the Black Death and religious repression, and demonstrate the artistic and technical excellence that was evident. When you look at the art works in this exhibition you will see some of the true masterpieces of the age,” Robinson said.
Leaf from the Eadwine Psalter, 1155–60. Photograph: Al Thani collection
Unfortunately, while France and other European countries largely preserved their medieval treasures, England’s artistic heritage was “systematically and ruthlessly decimated” by the 16th-century Reformation and the revolution led by Oliver Cromwell in the 1640s, he said.
“This misunderstanding about the supremacy of French culture is because so much of the evidence was destroyed by us … nowhere [in England] was left untouched by the Reformation. While continental Europe tended to retain its church treasuries, ours were dismantled and destroyed.”
Gothic style, most spectacularly expressed in architecture, was the predominant art form in 13th-15th century Europe and saw the creation of breathtaking cathedrals. As well as religious furniture and reliquaries, the period saw a boom in paintings, illuminated manuscripts, sculptures, tapestries and intricate embroideries.
The English Reformation, after Henry VIII wrested the Church of England away from the authority of the pope and Catholic church in Rome, saw the king’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, close down the country’s monasteries, confiscating their riches and in many cases dismantling the buildings.
The Luck of Edenhall glass beaker. Photograph: Al Thani collection
“All things of value were spoiled, plucked away or utterly defaced … and it seemed every person was intent upon filching and spoiling what he could,” wrote Michael Sherbrook, the 16th-century rector of Wickersley near Roche Abbey, in South Yorkshire, whose father had witnessed the spoliation when the local monks surrendered the abbey to the king’s commissioners in 1538.
“As a result, France became the canon of gothic arts and architecture, but what is often overlooked is that the English were equally competent. If you look at Lincoln or Salisbury cathedrals, they are up there with the best gothic architecture anywhere,” Robinson said.
Among the exhibits at the Paris exhibition that opens on Friday at the Hôtel de la Marine are rare treasures that escaped the 16th and 17th century pillage and destruction, including the Gloucester Candlestick, the Becket Casket, the Clare Chasuble, the Luck of Edenhall and the Syon Cope.
Marie Lavandier, the president of France’s National Monuments Centre, said: “The exhibition is astonishing as it highlights the extraordinary richness of the artistic exchanges that united England with continental Europe in medieval times.
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The Clare Chasuble, woven in Iran and embroidered in England. Photograph: Al Thani collection
“Despite its insularity, England was far from an isolated kingdom. This period of art, somewhat neglected on this side of the Channel, must no longer be overlooked. In addition to its intrinsic qualities, it testifies to the rich and complex relationship that our two countries have maintained for centuries.”
Robinson says language – highlighted in the title of the exhibition – was part of the international exchange with Europe in the middle ages.
“We know from textual sources and from the material culture there was a fluency in French at the highest levels of English society that percolated down to a degree but not of course to the lower orders of society that spoke English.”
He added: “At this moment when we are interrogating ourselves about our relationship with Europe, what the exhibition is also demonstrating is that we have always been closely tied to it in terms of commerce and diplomatic relationships.”
Medieval Treasures from the Victoria and Albert Museum: When the English Spoke French runs from 30 June to 22 October at The Al Thani Collection at the Hôtel de la Marine, 2 Place de la Concorde, 75008, Paris | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/feb/06/blue-mountains-review-brilliant-georgian-shaggy-dog-satire-on-the-soviet-mindset | Film | 2023-02-06T13:00:00.000Z | Peter Bradshaw | Blue Mountains review – brilliant Georgian shaggy-dog satire on the Soviet mindset | Here is a revival of a 1983 film from the Georgian director Eldar Shengelaia (still alive at 90) and it is revealed as an intriguing, and perhaps even remarkable creation: a dapper, droll satire on Soviet bureaucracy, a shaggy dog story of absurd humour that creeps up on you, culminating in a truly bizarre apocalypse. The satire was arguably lenient enough to get the film made and lenient enough to win it the USSR State prize, but we can see from our 2023 vantage point that it is a deadpan prophecy of the Soviet Union’s imminent collapse. If we could go back in time to this film’s first release and tell Shengelaia that just six years later the Berlin Wall would come down and with it the entire Soviet system, would he have been surprised? Perhaps only about the fact that it was going to take so long.
The scene is a state publishing company that also supervises printing and takes delivery of noisome chemicals in its basement courtyard. A would-be writer called Soso (Ramaz Giorgobiani) is scurrying about the building, desperately trying to interest its harassed or indolent functionaries in his novel, entitled Tian Shan, or The Blue Mountains – and therefore, we must assume, literally or metaphorically about the central Asian mountain ranges, although no one ever asks him about it or discusses literary matters in any way. No one definitively rejects him or accepts him. He is always referred to someone else.
A sad, lonely man called Markscheider (Ivane Sakvarelidze), wearing a belted mac and hat like Peter Cook’s EL Wisty, is also hanging about, trying to interest people in his allegorical fables. Markscheider manages to fix the office’s broken lift – it is only when they are stranded in the frequently immobile lift that executives read manuscripts – and someone comes close to offering him a job through sheer gratitude. But not to publishing him. Another grumpy official rages at the fact that a painting of Greenland’s frozen landscape, insecurely tacked up over his desk, may come crashing down at any moment and kill him, but he cannot get the bureaucratic authority to remove it.
This painting is, in fact, all he cares about; he certainly doesn’t care about literature, but then no one else does either. Another apparatchik is obsessed with the games of motorbike polo happening outside the building, and many employees spend their time gazing poignantly out of the window at the city in all its purposeful busy-ness, so different from their own near-coma of inactivity. And all the time the cracks in the walls are getting worse. It leads to an uproarious climax, delivered in the same elegantly inscrutable style as the rest of the comedy. What an intriguing and brilliant insight into the late Soviet mindset.
Blue Mountains is available on 9 February on Klassiki. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/24/fat-white-family-songs-for-our-mothers-review | Music | 2016-01-24T08:00:02.000Z | Paul Mardles | Fat White Family: Songs for Our Mothers review – the modern Throbbing Gristle | As the song titles (Goodbye Goebbels, When Shipman Decides) on Fat White Family’s second album show, the south London squat-rockers love to provoke. Songs for Our Mothers, then, is nothing of the sort, its grimy fusion of Germanic disco (Whitest Boy on the Beach), demonic swamp rock (Duce) and drug-addled noise (We Must Learn to Rise) positing the band as a modern Throbbing Gristle. What they’re trying to say isn’t always clear – are they sixth-form shock merchants or more profound? – but the five-piece most impress at their least confrontational. Hits Hits Hits, inspired by abusive relationships, is loose-limbed psych-funk with a shot of creepiness. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/apr/13/streaming-the-taste-of-things-and-the-best-films-about-food | Film | 2024-04-13T07:00:15.000Z | Guy Lodge | Streaming: The Taste of Things and the best films about food | The term “gastroporn” got thrown around a lot when The Taste of Things was in cinemas recently, but I’m not sure it’s quite right for Tran Anh Hung’s sumptuous culinary romance, seductive as all the cookery on display is. Though it has many a languid, exquisitely lit pan over the finished dishes created by Benoît Magimel’s 19th-century gourmet – including a giant, glistening vol-au-vent that I’ve been thinking about for months – it’s less about money shots than it is about foodie foreplay. The film’s greatest pleasures are in its extended sequences of preparation and process; the silently, adoringly intuitive collaboration between Magimel and Juliette Binoche’s fellow cook; the thrill of watching experts at work. OK, and there’s a near-seamless match-cut from a perfectly poached pear to Binoche reclining in the nude: not so much gastroporn as gastroerotica.
The two brothers in Big Night finally make peace over a simple omelette
Either way, Tran’s film joins the pantheon of cinema’s great films about food, its craft and consumption, and the human relationships it helps along. The club includes Babette’s Feast, Gabriel Axel’s lovely, 1987 Oscar-winning Isak Dinesen adaptation about a French cook bringing, after years of bland compliance with the local diet, her most sensuous culinary skills to the austere-living 19th-century Protestant residents of a remote Danish island. And Like Water for Chocolate (Apple TV+), the Mexican magical-realist 90s favourite that makes most literal connections between its lovelorn protagonist’s emotions and the meals she prepares. The film seems a touch twee these days, but the food still hits. Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman (currently hard to stream, but available for those with access to Kanopy) stands as one of the great portrayals of mealtimes as a family-binding force – it’s moving and funny, but its Sunday banquets are pure sensory spectacle.
Outdoing even Lee’s film on the noodle front is Juzo Itami’s utterly wild Tampopo (Internet Archive), the so-called “ramen western” that builds a manic, genre-fusing farce in thrall to the Japanese dining staple, complete with an egg yolk-assisted sex scene that really has to be seen to be believed. Japanese food artistry gets a more disciplined celebration in the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a portrait of an octogenarian sushi master that captures the almost religious rigour of his work.
Koji Yakusho and Fukumi Kuroda in the ‘utterly wild’ Tampopo. Photograph: Allstar
It’s a welcome, humane exception in the gastro-doc genre, recently dominated either by superficial, magazine-style grazing or hectoring food-industry exposés. Others include Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy, a wonderful, spiky encounter with a British-born doyenne of Mexican cuisine that smartly nods to the tension between cultural appropriation and appreciation in the kitchen, and Les Blank’s superbly titled 80s gem Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers, a good-humoured paean to the whiffy allium that even includes Werner Herzog among its talking heads. Agnès Varda’s beloved The Gleaners and I may not be a food doc, exactly, but its nourishing study of those who forage what others throw away invites us to reconsider our own relationship to what we buy and what we eat.
‘A wonderful, spiky encounter’: Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy. Photograph: Dogwoof
Garlic’s most famous film moment, however, came in Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas, sliced paper-thin with a razor blade by a discerning gangster while in prison – all the better to melt into the sauce – and doubtless an ingredient in the hearty pasta prepared by an elderly mob mama, played by Scorsese’s own mother. The Godfather, too, includes some useful tips for making the perfect Sunday spaghetti sauce, though Italian-American cuisine got its most dedicated valentine in Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci’s Big Night, an intimately observed comedy of two squabbling fraternal restaurateurs that at one point feasts on the preparation of the baked pasta dish timpano, but finally sees the two brothers making peace over a simple omelette.
The Lunchbox (2013), starring Irrfan Khan: ‘irresistible’. Photograph: Allstar
A table laden with north African comfort food is often the centre of the drama and dialogue in Abdellatif Kechiche’s wry, rambling family drama Couscous (BFI Player), which UK distributors wisely and more appetisingly renamed from its international title, The Secret of the Grain. In the little-seen but likably sentimental South African film Barakat, a fast-breaking curry-and-rice banquet is about the only hold a widow has over her tetchy, disparate adult sons. And in irresistible Indian crowdpleaser The Lunchbox, an accidental long-distance romance is conducted via the delivery of mouthwatering packed lunches – a more protracted means of culinary courtship than the sex-on-a-plate prawn dish with which a chef seduces Tilda Swinton in Luca Guadagnino’s lush I Am Love (BFI Player), but just as effective.
All titles widely available to rent or buy unless specified.
Also new on streaming
Fallen Leaves
Typically doleful Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki is on his most disarming form in this autumnal oddball romance between two dejected souls – one a sandblaster, the other a supermarket stacker – who meet at a karaoke bar in a modern-day Helsinki that nonetheless feels like Kaurismäki’s own twilight world.
‘Oddball romance’: Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen in Fallen Leaves. Photograph: Sputnik
Memory
In a performance far richer and more affecting than the Tammy Faye Bakker impersonation that won her an Oscar, Jessica Chastain plays a brittle, trauma-burdened single mother befriending and ultimately falling for Peter Sarsgaard’s dementia-stricken loner, in a surprisingly gentle relationship drama from Mexican provocateur Michel Franco.
Priscilla
Long a fine observer of characters at once enabled and stymied by privilege, Sofia Coppola proves a perfect fit for the story of Priscilla Presley, deftly portrayed by Cailee Spaeny all the way from queasily groomed teen arm-candy to a woman reaching towards independence, with Jacob Elordi’s Elvis casting a long, unnerving shadow at all stages. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/nov/27/shooting-without-bullets-cleveland-young-black-artists-shape-culture | Cities | 2019-11-27T10:30:57.000Z | Lauren Aratani | I go to sleep to gunshots, it doesn’t stop me': the art collective backing young black artists | A black-and-white photograph shows two young men in the door frame of an abandoned storefront. “PRIVATE CLUB” is written on the boarded-up door. “NO Weapons, Drugs, Purses” it says.
The photograph, taken by Lai Lai Bonner, 19, spread quickly. It was featured in the local paper, The Plain Dealer, sold at a gallery in the Cleveland Print Room, a local art studio, and currently sits in an exhibition at the Grasselli Library at John Carroll University in University Heights, Ohio.
Black youth have historically shaped culture and art, they just haven’t gotten the credit for it
Amanda King
The exhibit is close to East Cleveland where the photo was taken, but it is a world apart. The university sits on the edge of wealthy neighborhoods such as Shaker Heights, which are teeming with mansions.
Meanwhile, East Cleveland has abandoned houses, empty lots, potholes and higher crime rates. The life expectancy is as much as 10 years lower compared with the life expectancy of their wealthier neighbors.
The photographs in the exhibition, like Bonner’s, provide a contrast to the world right outside the library’s walls. The pictures were all taken by members of Shooting Without Bullets, a not-for-profit organization that coordinated the exhibit and that gives young black and brown teens the artistic tools they need to express themselves.
Amber Ford adjust her camera and Amanda King talks to her students as they pose on the steps of the Cleveland Art Museum. Photograph: Shooting Without Bullets/The Guardian
Shooting Without Bullets is one of 25 inspirational people and organizations that the Guardian is highlighting as part of a week-long City Champions project in Cleveland. The project is designed to showcase the upsides in a city such as Cleveland, where grassroots activists faced with endemic problems – like lead poisoning, infant mortality and gun violence – and little or no state support, are taking the initiative and helping to change lives in some of the city’s most marginalised communities.
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Amanda King, Shooting Without Bullets’ founder and creative director, is no stranger to the exclusive art world. She worked in New York City in fashion photography for big-name magazines right out of college but was quickly disillusioned by the industry. The killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012 rocked King, who was 23 at the time, to her core
“I just started to see that black lives were so devalued for this to have happened to this boy,” King said. “I was like, you know, I don’t want to use my talent to sell rich girls on the Upper East Side clothes. I want to use my talent to get justice for Trayvon.”
It made me realize I had a bigger purpose; that I was fighting for a bigger purpose that was bigger than me
Los P
She quit the fashion industry and enrolled in Case Western Reserve University School of Law in 2014, originally to study intellectual property (her thing at the time was “art and law”), but then switched over to constitutional law after the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2015 to learn about civil rights.
King developed an interest in police reform and joined the Cleveland Police Commission, a community board created under an order from the US justice department that required Cleveland to address problems within its police department. As the appointed “youth advocate” on the commission, King was frustrated that young black and brown people were dismissed in conversations around police reform.
Lai Lai Bonner, 19, poses for a selfie in front of a Shooting Without Bullets exhibit. Photograph: Shooting Without Bullets/The Guardian
Wanting to give young people the tools to express themselves about social issues, King came up with the idea of an exhibit that displayed the work of black and brown teenagers photography and other visual art. She recruited a group of young teens and taught them to shoot a camera in the summer of 2016. When the exhibit was up in September 2016, more than 300 people came to see it.
Since then, Shooting Without Bullets has grown into a network of young creatives who act, sing, rap and dance, along with shooting pictures as a form of activism. Run by King and Kelsi Carter, Shooting Without Bullets’ impact director, the organization has hosted exhibits, performances and art classes for local communities.
“Black youth have historically shaped culture and art, they just haven’t gotten the credit for it. They’re just not a part of the institutions that own it, but they are the ones who are influencing it,” King said.
For King, Shooting Without Bullets is all about being able to “teach black and brown youth that you are influences, you are shaping culture. That’s something that can boost their self esteem. It can root them in their history.”
This desire to boost black and brown teens through art has manifested into Shooting Without Bullets’ artist collective, a group of five artists ages 18 to 21 who work closely with King and Carter with the goal of turning their dreams into careers, even in industries that have systemic barriers that make it difficult for young people, especially black youth, to navigate.
Before Shooting Wthout Bullets, Amanda King, left, worked in fashion, but the killing of Trayvon Martin made her change path. Photograph: Shooting Without Bullets/The Guardian
For Bonner, a member of the collective, the exhibit at John Carroll is another showcase in her growing career as a professional photographer. She credits Shooting Without Bullets for helping her turn a love of photography into a business. Her schedule is booked with gigs, and she runs her own photo booth rental company, Melting Magnets, all while working toward a degree at the local community college.
Bonner was raised in East Cleveland, known to be a tough area outside the city, and her parents did not graduate from high school.
“I go to sleep to gunshots … But that doesn’t stop me from being successful. There are cycles of poverty, cycles of abuse and drugs and all of that that goes around, but you have to break the cycle.”
You gotta create your own magic, you know?
Shatara Jordan
King and Carter spend a bulk of their time running Shooting Without Bullets providing wrap-around services to their artists, making sure their young artists have everything they need to pursue their goals. Most come from low-income backgrounds. Few own cars. If someone needs a last-minute ride to get to an audition, Carter will pick them up in her gray Jeep. They try to provide food whenever possible and, most importantly, they pay their artists.
“There’s a real wealth barrier that institutions aren’t really thinking about because it’s run by people who are of the upper echelon,” Carter said. The role of not-for-profit is to adjust to the needs of the communities it serves, Carter added, rather than the other way around.
Hip-hop artist Los P said that Shooting Without Bullets has taught him to address the social issues he cares about in his music. Photograph: Shooting Without Bullets/The Guardian
Los P, 19, a hip-hop artist, said that Shooting Without Bullets has taught him to address the social issues that he cares the most about in his music. Poverty and police brutality are two of the themes that he often comes back to.
He lost two of his best friends when he was 17. One killed herself, a second died unexpectedly in his sleep (his death was traced to respiratory problems, a common ailment in neighborhoods with run-down houses). Shooting Without Bullets helped him hone his music to address the grief and anger while also giving him a platform to share his message.
After joining the collective, “Everything was different because it made me realize I had a bigger purpose; that I was fighting for a bigger purpose that was bigger than me,” Los said.
For Shatara Jordan, 18, the organization has given her opportunities to pursue her music as a hip-hop artist while getting to show off her dancing skills – all of which has fed into her desire to act on-screen. She joined the collective in 2017 when her music production class at a local community center was abruptly cut.
Jordan has big dreams to pursue acting as a career and is building her résumé: She has been casted in local productions and was recently an extra for a major studio movie filming in Cleveland.
“You’re just surrounded by so much awfulness, it’s hard to really stay motivated at what you’re doing sometimes,” she said, adding that she tries not to let the negativity get to her. “You gotta create your own magic, you know?”
These photographs were made by McKinley Wiley, Amanda D King and Shooting Without Bullets.
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/sep/19/the-10-best-afl-grand-finals-of-the-last-50-years-sorted | Sport | 2022-09-18T17:30:21.000Z | Jonathan Horn | The 10 best AFL grand finals of the last 50 years – sorted | Yes, I’ve left out 1972, 2005 and 2016. But these things are subjective and this column is an indulgence. Here, in grand final week, are the best grand finals of the last 50 years, incorporating what was once the Victorian Football League (before 1990) and now better known as the Australian Football League (present day).
10. 1979 Carlton defeated Collingwood by five points
Alex Jesaulenko of Carlton competes in the 1979 VFL grand final between the Blues and Collingwood Magpies at the MCG in 1979. Photograph: Getty Images
My earliest memory is from this game, which is a worry. Carlton‘s captain-coach was writhing in the MCG mud, his ankle shattered. A very drunk uncle rose from the couch at home – “BURY HIM!” he boomed. Wayne Harmes won the first Norm Smith Medal, but it could just as easily have been Wayne Johnston, who’d been at a night club 12 hours earlier. More so than any other grand final, it’s like watching a completely different sport, mainly because of the state of the ground. We don’t see quagmires like that any more. “Players dived into it like seals and pirouetted out of it like parrots,” Barry Dickens wrote in his ode to mud-caked grounds.
9. 2011 Geelong defeated Collingwood by 38 points
Geelong’s Paul Chapman celebrates after defeating Collingwood at the MCG in the 2011 grand final. Photograph: Joe Castro/AAP
This game often gets relegated in these type of lists, partly because of the Meat Loaf debacle, but mainly because it blew out in the final term. But up until three quarter time, it was the highest standard grand final I’ve seen. It was certainly the coldest. In driving rain, two crack sides at the peak of their powers went goal for goal. Tom Hawkins had played well in the Qualifying Final, but with the game in the balance and his opponent hobbled, he ripped the grand final to shreds. If he’d kicked straight, he would have romped in the Norm Smith Medal. He probably should have won it anyway.
8. 1984 Essendon defeated Hawthorn by 24 points
“This Premiership is SHEEDY’S Premiership!” Lou Richards cried. And it was. Football had never seen anyone like Kevin Sheedy. Rat-cunning, he scoured the country for rough-hewn types who would play in his image. He would turn up to Hawthorn training, sit on the fence, and eyeball them.
The Hawks blew them away early but were dead on their feet at three quarter time. “Don’t panic!” the late Ken Judge screamed at his teammates. “Don’t panic!” But that brilliant bastard Sheedy threw the magnets around and the final quarter was torrential. “I’ve always felt the loudest noise I’ve ever heard in football was when Leon Baker kicked that first goal in the last quarter,” Terry Wallace said years later. “It was the awakening of this sleeping giant.”
7. 1977 Collingwood drew with North Melbourne
Embracing the chaos, Collingwood prove they’re more than black and white contenders
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Collingwood was 27 points up, and the footy writer Rohan Connolly remembers a Magpie fan in the outer popping the cork on a bottle of champagne (there was a one slab, two bottle limit in those days). But they were a goal down with seconds to go. In a sea of sideburns, Ross “Twiggy” Dunne marked a long bomb. You’re six points down, 20 metres out, directly in front and you have a set shot to tie the grand final – what’s your plan of attack? Barrel a torpedo into the second tier of the Ponsford Stand of course.
Later, North coach Ron Barassi gathered his players and their partners in the rooms. His powder blue suits, Polaroid sunglasses and quarter time outbursts would be grounds for arrest in some jurisdictions. “Girls,” he said. “I know how great you are, and the sacrifices you make, but can you give me your men for another seven days?” They did – quite happily in many cases – and North won the replay.
6. 2009 Geelong defeated St Kilda by 12 points
Peter Dickson’s short documentary on the 2009 AFL grand final, Life is Too Slow For Those Who Wait.
A personal favourite, though it’s exhausting to even think about it. It was raw, pitiless, attritional football. It was brilliantly captured in Peter Dickson’s short documentary. If you ever want an example of what football can do to people and how much it means, look at the footage of the old Saints fans in the stands afterwards. Look at Darrel Baldock in the rooms. It was that sort of day.
5. 2010 Collingwood drew with St Kilda
St Kilda and Collingwood players after the 2010 AFL grand final ended in a draw. Collingwood won the replay the following week. Photograph: Joe Castro/AAP
Having berated senator Stephen Conroy for going the early crow, Eddie McGuire could no longer watch. He went into an AFL function room, where he found a woman sitting alone, crying. It was Elsie Rose, the widow of Bob Rose, the Collingwood coach who knew a thing or two about grand final curses. Now, like pretty much everyone else at the MCG, Elsie had her head in her hands. Afterwards, the streets of Melbourne were full of bewildered, chalk-white, grown adults shaking their heads, not knowing how to process it. The following week’s replay (Collingwood won) never stood a chance.
4. 2006 West Coast defeated Sydney by one point
West Coast Eagles’ Ben Cousin (left) and captain Chris Judd celebrate winning the 2006 grand final in 2006. Photograph: Julian Smith/AAP
Over an 18-month period, these two teams met six times, with a cumulative margin of 13 points. The 2005 grand final is the more famous and replayed game, but this was a better one. Five goals were kicked in the last 10 minutes, which was unusual for this rivalry. During that flurry, Chris Judd injured his shoulder. “Are you OK?” his direct opponent Adam Goodes asked. “In that intense, maniacally competitive environment of a grand final, his values did not change,” Judd later wrote. “To him, we were human beings, first of all.”
3. 2018 West Coast defeated Collingwood by 5 points
In the end, despite their best attempts to botch it, the Eagles were a bit bolder, and worthy premiers. They won it without Andrew Gaff, Nic Naitanui and Brad Sheppard. They beat Collingwood three times. They finally worked the locks at the MCG. And in one of the most clutch moments in the history of the game, Dom Sheed executed the perfect football kick. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen more crestfallen supporters as the Collingwood fans that day. “As I wrapped my arm around one distraught son,” Greg Baum wrote in the Age, “I felt his tears run down my sleeve. Resilience, stoicism, staunchness, a little gallows humour, phlegmatism, but also inextinguishable hope: this is how our club has shaped us.”
2. 2012 Sydney defeated Hawthorn by 10 points
A very credible case could be made that this was the best grand final of all. Hawthorn arguably played better football throughout 2012 than in their four premiership years. But the Swans fought and harassed their way to an upset win. This game had the lot – momentum shifts, unlikely cameos and a last-minute sealer. A few days earlier, Jill Meagher had been murdered. That was a tragedy, Alastair Clarkson said; losing a grand final was simply a missed opportunity. “It’s gone,” he said. “We can’t do anything about it. We just dig deep, use it as motivation and go again.” They did, and won the next three flags.
1. 1989 Hawthorn defeated Geelong by 6 points
The younger generation of football fans are inclined to question the reverence for this game. “But the result was never really in doubt” they’ll say. “You old-timers just love it for the punch-ons.” If you’re still a sceptic, Tony Wilson’s book 1989: The Great Grand Final should sway you. No grand final had richer storylines – from Dipper’s audibly hissing lungs, to Dermott Brereton’s ruptured kidney, to Gary Ablett thanking his saviour. No grand final gets in your marrow quite like 1989. We all took different things from it. I was 11, and caught in the spell of Ablett and Brereton. Ablett, author Andrew Mueller wrote, “was like an escaper from the yarns of Henry Lawson – the sort of peculiar, irascible warlock you hear of in fairytales and ballads, not see on a football field, or anywhere in real life.”
This article was amended on 19 September 2022. The first photo shows Greg Dear, not Greg Dean as an earlier version said. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jul/27/sinead-o-connor-10-best-songs-nothing-compares-2-u | Music | 2023-07-27T02:21:18.000Z | Annie Zaleski | ‘Nothing Compares 2 U is perfect’: Sinéad O’Connor’s 10 greatest songs | TroyThe first single from Sinéad O’Connor’s debut album is intensely personal. Its lyrics weave together depictions of private traumas and the struggle between resilience and self-destruction, anchored by pointed references to Helen of Troy (“Being what I am/There is no other Troy/For me to burn”) via a WB Yeats poem. Panoramic orchestral washes and then prickly keyboards buoy O’Connor’s magnificent voice, leading to a dynamic and measured performance pierced with desire, regret, anger and ferocity, where sharp-edged strings storm forth at pivotal moments to amplify her intensity.
Mandinka
In 1989, O’Connor performed her electrifying, rock-oriented second single, Mandinka, at the Grammy awards. It was a stunning appearance: alone on the spacious stage in front of an industry audience, she exuded fiery confidence. That same thrilling fearlessness permeates the studio version of the song, which was inspired by Alex Haley’s seminal book Roots. O’Connor said in her book Rememberings that Mandinka marked “the first time I had the courage to play guitar properly” – a leap forward matched by strident vocals full of acrobatic howls and coos.
Sinead O’Connor: the angelic skinhead for whom love, intelligence and madness were inseparable
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I Want Your (Hands On Me)
O’Connor’s lighter lyrical moments can sometimes be overlooked because so much of her catalog is so serious. But I Want Your (Hands on Me), which appeared in both the TV show Miami Vice and the horror movie A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, was revolutionary in its own way. Musically, it was a sensual funk seduction with a liquid bass groove and percolating hip-hop beats; the aural equivalent of O’Connor’s forthright lyrics, which are frank on sexual desire, and her unapologetic come-hither vocals. A remix with rapper MC Lyte reaffirms O’Connor’s sex-positive stance.
Kingdom of Rain by The The
O’Connor’s expressive vocal range made her an excellent collaborator, as she inhabited other styles (and nuanced characters) with ease. As the duet partner of Matt Johnson on The The’s track Kingdom of Rain – a simmering, funereal chronicle of a disintegrating relationship – she’s a heartbroken partner who is equal parts stunned and bereft by a romantic betrayal. In contrast to Johnson’s menacing whispers and growls, O’Connor doesn’t shy away from her big feelings, leaning into anguish (“And you were the boy who turned into the man/Broke my heart and let go off my hand”) and desperation (“I just wanted somebody to possess”).
Nothing Compares 2 U
It’s almost an understatement to say Nothing Compares 2 U is the most stunning performance of O’Connor’s career. But her interpretation of Prince’s song is a singular moment of emotional catharsis, a performance drawn from deep wells of sorrow, heartbreak and pain that brings listeners to their knees with its vulnerability. Although she keeps a stiff upper lip, noting she has the freedom to take meals at fancy restaurants and go where she pleases, a piece of her heart is still missing. O’Connor never overdoes the pathos or understates her sorrow. Nothing Compares 2 U is a perfect song.
The Emperor’s New Clothes
Controversy never drowned out the astonishing songcraft of Sinéad O’Connor
Alexis Petridis
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Backed by an all-star band – guitarist Marco Pirroni (Adam and the Ants), bassist Andy Rourke (the Smiths) and drummer John Reynolds (her first husband) – O’Connor succinctly detonates oppressive power imbalances (“They laugh ‘cause they know they’re untouchable/Not because what I said was wrong”) and defiantly states she’ll continue to live life on her own terms. Accordingly, The Emperor’s New Clothes is matter-of-fact about taboos in pop music (“But you know how it is/And how a pregnancy can change you”) and makes it quite clear that the unvarnished truth is what sets O’Connor free. Public Enemy producer Hank Shocklee also remixed the song, a nod to her forward-thinking sonic excursions.
I Am Stretched On Your Grave
Grief was never far from the surface of many O’Connor songs. That’s particularly true on I Am Stretched On Your Grave, a translation of a 17th-century Irish poem featuring a protagonist who finds it impossible to move on after a loved one has died. Rather than being a mournful benediction, however, the song employs languid hip-hop beats to mirror the dull metallic ache of all-consuming grief. O’Connor is an empathetic voice throughout, a steady narrator affirming the eternal love conveyed in the song – before the Waterboys’ Steve Wickham chimes in to end the song with grim fiddle.
Last Day of Our Acquaintance
Initially a sparse, wrenching song driven by fluttering acoustic guitar, Last Day of Our Acquaintance describes the agonising countdown to what’s ostensibly a divorce, given references to a changed relationship and a meeting “later in somebody’s office”. As the song progresses, O’Connor uses her voice to channel an emotional transformation. At first, she sings in a fragile whisper that’s broken and resigned – a mirror of the narrator’s sadness and confusion – before gradually gaining strength and boldness, in tandem with the music becoming more forceful and the protagonist realising their life is now just beginning. A self-empowered triumph.
Black Boys on Mopeds
Never one to shy away from standing up for her convictions, O’Connor wrote in her memoir Rememberings that she used a real-life incident involving two young teenagers for the tender-but-resigned Black Boys on Mopeds. The pair borrowed bikes from a family member without permission, were chased by police and later died after a crash. O’Connor used this story as a basis to call out political hypocrisy, racism and police brutality, singing in a lullaby-like tone that underscores her sadness: “England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses/It’s the home of police who kill Black boys on mopeds.”
You Made Me the Thief of Your Heart
Co-written by Bono, Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer for the 1993 film In the Name of the Father, this foreboding Celtic folk-rocker has one of O’Connor’s most searing vocal performances. As glassy piano, stern strings and gently syncopated rhythms purr along in the background, she puts a former lover in his place: “You made me cold and you made me hard/And you made me the thief of your heart.” At times, O’Connor doubles her voice, creating a haunted atmosphere; at other times, she belts out the lyrics in an agonised tone that transcends despair. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/dec/01/rupert-murdochs-news-uk-tv-channel-given-approval-to-launch | Media | 2020-12-01T16:39:52.000Z | Jim Waterson | Rupert Murdoch's News UK TV channel given approval to launch | Rupert Murdoch’s forthcoming opinionated television news channel will be called News UK TV, with media regulator Ofcom giving the go-ahead for the outlet to start broadcasting as soon as it is ready.
News UK TV is racing against the rival Andrew Neil-backed channel GB News to be first on air, with both groups aiming to launch next spring. Despite concerns about the impact of Fox News-style broadcasting, both outlets believe there is a gap in the market for right-leaning television news channels aimed at Britons who dislike the BBC’s output.
Although News UK TV’s presenting lineup has yet to be announced, staff have been told to expect big-name hires. Previous names linked to the project include The Apprentice host Lord Sugar and Good Morning Britain’s Piers Morgan, who has been seen in News UK’s London Bridge headquarters, where a studio is being built.
The current plan, according to individuals involved in the station, is for News UK TV to be an evening-only service, which will be on air for around four or five hours a night. The proposed lineup will start with an early-evening politics show, a daily political debate programme and an evening news bulletin.
The focus of the output will be a flagship resource-heavy evening programme with a big-name host, which sources said until recently had the working title of Gotcha!, echoing an infamous Sun front page from the Falklands War. However, this has now been renamed as The Smart Cast.
News UK TV, overseen by former Fox News and CBS News boss David Rhodes, is likely to be free-to-air and the company wants it to be primarily delivered online as a streaming service. However, it applied for a full Ofcom broadcast licence, meaning it is likely to also be available as a traditional television channel in some form.
The approach is markedly different from GB News, which is understood to have already secured slots on major distribution platforms such as Freeview. The channel is backed by US media giant Discovery and is looking to create a much more ambitious 24-hour news channel with its own team of reporters across the country. It is due to launch early next year under the leadership of former Sky News Australia boss Angelos Frangopoulos, having lured Andrew Neil from the BBC.
Despite industry speculation that GB News could be struggling to raise the roughly £50m it needs to get the project off the ground, the company is understood to be confident of raising the money and will advertise around 100 journalism roles across the UK before the end of the year.
Rather than focus on rolling news it says it will provide news for the “vast number of British people who feel under-served and unheard”. In a bid to differentiate itself, the channel is expected to report politics stories from around the country rather than rely on a Westminster base.
Both channels, which declined to comment on their plans, will be bound by the Ofcom rules on due impartiality as result of their broadcast licences. Contrary to common belief this does not mean they have to give equal airtime to both sides of a political debate, merely that they have to ensure audiences are exposed to different views.
One individual with knowledge of News UK’s inner-workings said management would be acutely aware of how the new channel’s output would impact on Murdoch’s wider global media empire, saying: “You can have as many crap left-of-centre media outlets as you like but if you go centre-right then you get bad publicity because most journalists are lefties.”
Murdoch’s media empire – now much reduced in size following his sale of Sky to Comcast and 21st Century Fox to Disney – recently failed in its bid to buy the book publisher Simon & Schuster, meaning it is likely to be on the look-out for alternative investments and acquisitions. The 89-year-old has spent most of the year in Oxfordshire with his wife, Jerry Hall, during which time he has dealt with the formal departure of his son James from the family business.
According to a Westminster source, this summer the Brexit party leader, Nigel Farage, was overheard in a central London restaurant discussing conversations with Murdoch about the future of journalism, with the media mogul said to be increasingly excited about the prospect of opinionated video output rather than radio, despite his company’s recent investment in Times Radio.
Farage, who has recently started publishing his own video news commentary on Twitter, did not respond to a request for comment. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/apr/13/thundercat-on-new-album-drunk-laughing-at-racism-and-his-sexy-cat-tron | Music | 2017-04-13T12:43:01.000Z | Hannah Ellis-Petersen | Thundercat on breakout album Drunk, laughing at racism – and his 'sexy cat', Tron | Thundercat sits crosslegged and barefoot on a round leather chair, his white Birkenstocks thrown casually to one side. With his zen posture, ornate gold jewellery hanging from his septum and air of insouciance, he brings to mind a buddha. Or at least a buddha with dreadlocks and diamanté-rimmed sunglasses.
The bass player and jazz extraordinaire otherwise known as Stephen Bruner is only 32, yet he already has an impressive musical contacts book, his collaborators ranging from Snoop Dogg and Erykah Badu to Pharrell Williams, Wiz Khalifa and the sultan of yacht-rock, Kenny Loggins. Bruner’s childhood was spent playing in bands with Kamasi Washington, his best friend is Flying Lotus and his time in the studio with Kendrick Lamar, where the pair dived through old jazz records, ended up indelibly shaping the sound of To Pimp A Butterfly.
But it is his third and most successful solo album to date, Drunk, which has brought him to London and the windowless back room of London’s Heaven nightclub, where we meet. Drunk is a wild odyssey of 23 tracks – each less than three minutes long – that fuses Bruner’s untouchable jazz credentials with punk, hip-hop, stoner psychedelia, funk and 80s soft rock, his soulful falsetto voice pondering subjects as varied as anime, losing your wallet and police brutality.
There are many questions I want to ask about the album but what Bruner really wants to talk about is his cat. Tron – or more specifically Turbo Tron Over 9000 Baby Jesus Sally – has long been an inspiration for the bass maestro (Tron Song, which features on his second album, is a loving ode to her) and the time away from her on tour is taking its toll.
“The thing about Tron is she’s a very humanised cat, and is a sweetheart but also very weird, which I enjoy because I’m pretty weird,” he says, reaching for his phone to show me an endless photo stream of Tron in various outfits, including a cat sailor suit. “I treat my cat like she’s my therapist or something, because I talk to her all the time and as she’s gotten older she talks back. It’s pretty funny.”
“Is that a personalised Chanel cat sweater?” I ask, as he pauses over a picture of him and Tron in matching designer sportswear. He nods and laughs, a warm gravelly giggle, like a parent cooing over a newborn.
“She’s a little model cat. I always tell her she’s sexy. I know it’s really awkward because everyone tells me: ‘Stop calling your cat sexy.’ But I’m like: ‘Why would I stop calling Tron sexy? She’s a sexy cat!’”
It’s this endearing weirdness, a lifelong commitment to what he calls the “tradition of not giving a fuck”, that has always fed into Bruner’s music. His dedication to the bass has been obsessive since he was four (his father and brother are also both acclaimed jazz musicians) but is absent of any uptight jazz puritanism, and he has happily lent his talent to every genre under the sun. There was the decade playing bass for legendary thrash band Suicidal Tendencies and then, in the mid-2000s, the time spent on tour in Snoop Dogg’s band. As a session musician at LA’s Silver Lake Studios, he crossed paths with artists from Ty Dolla $ign to Bilal and finally Erykah Badu, who picked him out to join her live band and play on the New Amerykah studio sessions.
But it wasn’t until he met LA rapper and producer Flying Lotus a decade ago that he considered singing, let alone making his own solo records. “From when I was a kid I was always very quiet within myself, I was never attention-hungry,” he says, recalling how he was bullied at school for looking like a girl. “I wouldn’t even tell you I’d play bass, my friends only knew I did because I spent all my time playing. And in the beginning of me becoming a songwriter, I’d get freaked out because it meant talking about things I’d usually keep internal, you know. But that changed the moment that Lotus told me that I should start singing.”
Bruner released his first solo project The Golden Age of Apocalypse in 2011, which positioned him as an artist who could flit between improvised jazz, leftfield electronica and smooth soul within the space of a single song. It was followed by Apocalypse in 2013, and then his more sombre 16-minute long EP, The Beyond/Where the Giants Roam, which was rooted in his grief over the sudden death of his close friend, the piano prodigy Austin Peralta.
Bruner finds it impossible to pinpoint the moment he started creating music for Drunk, though much of it came through working on both Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly and Washington’s The Epic. For a long time it was a “weird, twisty-turny selection of songs” that seemed impossible to shape into a single record, until Flying Lotus came up with an idea.
“I remember the day we decided on the name,” he says. “It was funny as hell because the things told in jest are usually the truth, you know, and Lotus was like: ‘This album’s insane, you should just call it drunk.’ And we realised that was exactly the name of the album. The funny thing is the title is what holds it together.”
The record does stumble drunkenly between the laughably silly falsetto of Captain Stupido (“I feel weird/ comb your hair/ brush your teeth”) to serious themes such as heartbreak, sinking into an emotional black hole and the narcissistic perils of social media. Drink Dat, his track with Wiz Khalifa, was simply lifted from a conversation between the pair when they were both going through a tough time in love (Khalifa was about to divorce Amber Rose) and they took to weed and Bombay Sapphire to forget their troubles.
Working with Lamar was a game-changer for Bruner, not only because it landed him his first Grammy, and he speaks about him with almost reverence. “Kendrick helped me to understand how to be very driven and stay focused,” he says. “To this day I wish I was just in the studio with him because the dude is just insane. He’s pretty serious in the studio. You can be joking around but you’ll miss it, because he moves so quick.”
Drunk is not merely lighthearted fare and songs such as The Turn Down grapple with the US’s race problem. Did the highly politicised nature of To Pimp A Butterfly feed into his songwriting?
Bruner fiddles with his wallet and admits, a little dejectedly, that while Black Lives Matter has brought an important conversation to the fore, it has also ensured that every black musician’s output is now discussed in the context of race.
“It’s already too much for me,” he says and shrugs: “Look, the political message of To Pimp A Butterfly didn’t have to filter in. I’m black, so I experience that on a consistent basis. I grew up in LA where these things were always happening, but it’s almost as if people didn’t believe us before. Cops shooting black guys in the back of the head for no reason? That’s not new to me, I grew up knowing that, but it’s not something that I want to guide my path. So I laugh to keep from crying because it’s pretty depressing watching everybody act like a bunch of blithering idiots.
“It doesn’t even feel like racism is real, it just feels like the weirdest ploy, like we’re just being had on so many levels,” he says, laughing loudly again. “It’s even kind of funny when you think about it. A reason not to like someone is ‘because you’re black’. C’mon, man. How dumb is that?”
We conclude that laughter should be utilised more to undermine racism.
“I don’t need to tell myself that I’m black, or that I’m proud of being black, I just am and it just doesn’t matter”, shrugs Bruner, slipping his feet back into his Birkenstocks. “How about that for once?”
Drunk is out on Brainfeeder | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/14/country-diary-long-tailed-tits-swirl-high-like-leaves | Environment | 2020-03-14T05:30:19.000Z | Jim Perrin | Country diary: long-tailed tits swirl high like leaves | Heading down through fields towards oak, ash and hazel copses along the Afon Artro, past impenetrable ramparts of gorse, I heard a familiar, delicate song. “A prolonged trill, low and aërial” is how WH Hudson, the most scrupulously observant of all avian writers, describes it. I scarcely needed to look around before an eccentrically scattering quiver of exquisite small birds hurled past me to settle momentarily and search for insects among bare, dark-budded twigs of the ash trees. A moment later, and as though at a signal, the acrobatic throng swirled high like leaves on an eddying wind and was gone.
Long-tailed tits (Aegithalos caudatus). “Bum-barrels” as John Clare knew them. I’m never sure whether that term applied to the birds themselves or more properly to the artistic masterpieces that are their nests. They are utterly endearing little creatures. Along with the goldcrest, they rank by weight as the tiniest of British birds (though that disproportionate tail gives a slightly false impression of their real size, as does the fluffiness of their pastel-tinged plumage). Their relationship to other tits is not close (larks, warblers and swallows also belong to the same large family). But their behaviour – the communal groups, the incessant activity – is distinctly tit-like.
Country diary: tits with tales to tell
Read more
Those fist-sized, barrel-shaped nests are marvellous creations. It speaks volumes for Clare’s attentiveness to the natural world that he was well acquainted with them. Occasionally you see them high in the fork of a tree, but more often they’re concealed well within the densest thickets of gorse or blackthorn. They are constructed from moss, wool and feathers, decorated with scales of lichen, and bound together with gossamer.
A long-tailed tit peeking out from its nest. Photograph: Alamy
To see one with eight or 10 gaping maws clamouring for food at the entrance is one of the most pleasing and intimate sights in nature, and one of the hardest to locate. You need to study their comings and goings in May or June, then find a good angle to train your glass on the thicket to which they’re bound. Keep well away and watch as the whole family group assists in the feeding. All this as outcome of that sweet music in the cold of early spring. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/16/iran-arrests-models-crackdown-unlicensed-industry-hijab | World news | 2016-05-16T18:17:02.000Z | Saeed Kamali Dehghan | Iran arrests models in renewed crackdown on unlicensed industry | Judicial authorities in Iran have launched another crackdown on modelling, arresting at least eight people – most of them women – for activities deemed “un-Islamic”.
Female models with more than 100,000 followers on Instagram are among those who have been detained for violating rules on wearing the hijab and for posting pictures of themselves online with their hair showing.
Legal proceedings have also been initiated against others involved in the country’s modelling industry, including hair stylists and photographers.
After years of operating underground, Iran’s fashion industry has been booming for the past two years following a religious edict by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that modelling is permissible under Islam, a move which prompted fashion weeks and catwalks to pop up across the country.
New model army: Iranian fashion revolution moves above ground
Read more
But the revival has also led to a spike in the number of independent models working outside the auspices of licensed agencies, relying largely on their following on social networks such as Instagram and Telegram, an online messaging app used by one in four Iranians.
Iran’s hardliners view online social networks with deep suspicion, and its judiciary has tasked a special unit with policing them. Abbas Jafari-Dolatabadi, Tehran’s prosecutor general, said at the weekend that the recent crackdowns were part of two operations, Spider I and Spider II, aimed at identifying illicit modelling activities online.
“In the past two years, we have launched two operations during which 50 stylists, 50 fashion houses and 50 ateliers were identified by the intelligence and judicial authorities and some arrests have been made and some [Instagram and Facebook] accounts have been closed down,” he said, according to the state-run Irna news agency.
“The enemy is trying to invest in [our] cultural and social domains in order to infiltrate the minds of our youth. They are investing online through sexual attractions and [promise] of financial gains.”
Elham Arab, a female model, accompanied Jafari-Dolatabadi as he met with reporters to discuss the recent arrests. In an exchange with the prosecutor presented as an interview, she expressed remorse about her past modelling and pictures of herself unveiled posted online.
It was not clear if her appearance was voluntary, as was said, or if it amounted to the kind of forced confession often used by the Iranian judiciary.
“I wanted to be seen,” Arab said, when asked why she had been a model. “There is also good money in modelling in Iran,” she added, before clarifying she earned about £2,000 each month as a model, according to news website Alef.
Telegram: the instant messaging app freeing up Iranians' conversations
Read more
Javad Babaei, the head of the judiciary’s computer crimes department, told state television that 20% of Instagram users in Iran were involved in modelling as models, photographers and stylists. Such activities had been initiated by “imperialists” to “change our lifestyle”, he said.
Jafari-Dolatabadi did not reveal the identities of those detained. Some of the models have apparently been released on bail and at least a couple have since fled the country.
The authorities in Iran have been trying to regulate the fashion industry, issuing ID cards to approved models and giving licenses to modelling agencies previously operating in the shadows such as Behpooshi that two years ago became one of the first to obtain official permission. The agency has now more than 50 male and 30 female models.
The new atmosphere, though controlled, has helped independent designers such as Salar Bil and Farnaz Abdoli to flourish. The latter’s firm Pooshema is particularly famous for its often colourful and modern womenswear.
Khamenei is worried about online activities of Iranians. “This [virtual space] is a real field of war and our clerics and religious students should arm and prepare themselves to tackle wrong and deviant beliefs,” the 76-year-old said on Saturday.
In 2012, he ordered officials to set up the supreme council of virtual space, the body that sits at the top of a complex web of organisations that monitor and filter communications in the country.
In recent years, the Iranian authorities have introduced more subtle filtering algorithms to hide content they do not approve of, rather than merely blocking an app or a website entirely. But that has not always worked. After particular Instagram accounts and types of photos were blocked the company retaliated by using an encryption method which enabled all content to be viewed, including the controversial Rich Kids of Tehran account. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Instagram is not blocked in Iran. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2023/nov/04/bag-a-window-seat-10-of-the-uks-most-scenic-bus-routes | Travel | 2023-11-04T07:00:32.000Z | Phoebe Taplin | Great bus routes in UK | In the gloom caused by the loss of many rural bus services and Rishi Sunak’s shameful rollback of environmental pledges, there has been one gleam of (green) light. The bus fare cap, now set at £2.50 across England, will run until 30 November 2024. The cap doesn’t apply to buses in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but there are still some reasonable fares, so here are 10 great sightseeing routes across the UK.
Bus 555 from Kendal to Keswick
This 90-minute journey through the Lake District is one of the UK’s most spectacular bus routes, running alongside four famous lakes with views of the surrounding fells. The number of waterbirds on Windermere doubles around this time of year as wintering ducks and grebes fly in from Scandinavia. Some of the trees around misty Rydal Water turn fiery orange as winter approaches and the slopes of Helvellyn are cloaked in autumn copper or dusted with snow.
The cafe at Wordsworth Grasmere offers tea and fruit scones with locally made jam. Visitors who arrive by bus at the poet’s former home, Dove Cottage, with its half-wild garden-orchard and the new museum next door, get 20% off. YHA Ambleside and YHA Keswick (private rooms from £50) are both open during the winter and very close to bus stops along the route.
stagecoachbus.com
Busway A from Cambridge to St Ives, Cambridgeshire
Photograph: Julian Eales/Alamy
The world’s longest guided busway leaves Cambridge railway station every 20 minutes (hourly on Sundays) and rattles through the sights of Cambridge with glimpses of the Round Church and River Cam; an unlimited day ticket costs £4.40. The journey’s appeal is partly in the novelty of running along concrete tracks, where the driver doesn’t need to steer. Flat fields and fens, with the odd church or windmill, are sandwiched between the city’s medieval colleges and pretty St Ives an hour later, with cafes such as the River Terrace for tea.
There’s a stop at Fen Drayton nature reserve, just before St Ives, for walks around lakes and russet reedbeds and, on winter evenings, murmurations of starlings swirling through the sunset sky. Elegant Duke House B&B (doubles from £160 B&B), close to Cambridge bus station, has individually furnished bedrooms and locally sourced breakfasts.thebusway.info
Bus 37 from Aviemore to Grantown-on-Spey
Loch Garten in the Cairngorms national park. Photograph: munro1/Getty Images
This 45-minute bus ride from Aviemore railway station through the Cairngorms offers mountains views, evergreen forests and village cafes. There are Highland cattle grazing around the ruined walls of Castle Roy and even the odd red squirrel darting through roadside treetops. It’s a useful bus route for linear hikes along the Speyside Way with a stop at the Osprey Centre Road End for a birdsong-filled walk through the woods around Loch Garten and the chance to spot crested tits among ancient Caledonian pine trees. Grantown-on-Spey has plenty of places to warm up, including the little museum and nearby Garth hotel (doubles from about £105 B&B). Buses run hourly Mondays to Saturdays, four a day on Sundays; return tickets £6.50.
stagecoachbus.com
Bus 402 from Coleraine to Ballycastle
Photograph: Art Ward/Tourism Ireland
This route from Coleraine station offers a dramatic hour-long tour of windswept moors and romantic clifftop castles along Northern Ireland’s green Causeway Coast. It stops in Bushmills, famous for its distillery (tours from £15), and near the Giant’s Causeway itself, with its public footpaths and a visitor centre full of legends, geology and natural history.
Ballycastle Backpackers has double/twin rooms (from £70 B&B) and the Marine Hotel next door has doubles (from £80 room-only). Ballycastle’s Ursa Minor bakehouse does outstanding coffee and croissants. Buses run every 30 minutes (hourly on Sundays), single £7.60.
translink.co.uk
X93/X94 from Scarborough to Whitby
Whitby Harbour. Photograph: George W Johnson/Getty Images
Rolling through the North York Moors, these buses pass bracken-carpeted woods and bronze age burial mounds. They leave Scarborough station every 30 minutes and take an hour to reach Whitby, offering views across moorland to the wild North Sea. They stop at Robin Hood’s Bay, with its steep winding lanes and Cove cafe for tea and handmade cake. Towards the end of the bus ride, there’s a great view down the River Esk to Whitby harbour.
Dramatic Whitby Abbey, full of celebrated myths and histories from Abbess Hild to Dracula, is offering 20% off entry for visitors arriving by bus, bike or train. Tudor Bagdale Hall, with tiled fireplaces and four-poster beds, is two minutes’ walk from Whitby bus station and has a midweek two-nights-for-one offer most weeks until March 2024 (doubles from £200 B&B).
arrivabus.co.uk/north-east
CH1 from Cromer to Wells-next-the-Sea
The marshes at Blakeney. Photograph: Helen Hotson/Alamy
With huge views over tidal marshes to the sea, the Coasthopper bus is perfect for accessing the wild Norfolk Coast Path. The salty expanses around Blakeney are a crucial site for migrating birds in autumn, and home to the biggest grey seal colony in England. Thousands of pups are born here each winter and there are boat trips to see the seals most days from Morston Quay (£20/£10 adult/child).
The Coasthopper leaves every half an hour (hourly on Sundays) from Cromer’s bus interchange and takes roughly an hour to reach Wells-next-the-Sea, where the Globe Inn serves Norfolk seafood and wine from the excellent Flint vineyard (doubles from £120 B&B).
sanderscoaches.com
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Bus 5 from Bangor to Llandudno, Conwy
Aber Falls. Photograph: Philip Moore/Alamy
Along the coast of north Wales, beside the tidal Afon Menai, the views from bus 5 encompass mountains, moors and sandy beaches. A day ticket for the area, covering bus journeys from Chester to Pwllheli, costs £5.90. From the village of Abergwyngregyn there is a lovely late-autumn walk up the wooded valley to Aber Falls, two miles upstream.
Ten minutes’ stroll the other way is the Aber Falls distillery, which recently launched its first single malt whisky (tours £12.50). In Llandudno, the fabulous Dylan’s restaurant and upmarket St George’s Hotel (doubles from £99 B&B) are both less than five minutes’ walk from bus stops.
arrivabus.co.uk
Bus X18 from Newcastle to Berwick-upon-Tweed
Photograph: Arriva Bus
This is another epic route that is extraordinary value for £2.50. It leaves hourly from Newcastle’s Haymarket bus station and two buses a day go all the way to Berwick, an almost four-hour journey. North of Amble, the bus runs beside the River Coquet and stops near craggy medieval Warkworth Castle, which has new interactive trails for 2023 and 20% off for visitors arriving by bus.
The X18 winds slowly on past towering Bamburgh Castle and views of beaches and islands, including castle-topped Lindisfarne. There are flocks of waders at Budle Bay, curlews in stubbled fields, and cows roaming through marram-grassed sand dunes. The Walls in Berwick (doubles from £105 B&B) is a welcoming B&B in a Georgian townhouse overlooking the Tweed with the option of Craster kippers for breakfast.
arrivabus.co.uk
Bus 218 from Sheffield to Bakewell
Bakewell. Photograph: Matthew Taylor/Alamy
Miles of moor and tor, rocky edges and patchwork fields make this a classic Peak District route, but it has other attractions too. Leaving the city, through vibrant Sharrow Vale, the bus stops at Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet museum with its massive waterwheels and steel furnace. Until early evening, it also stops outside the gates of stately Chatsworth House, where a Christmas market, a light trail, and 24 rooms full of sparkle open on today4 November.
Crossing an old stone bridge into Bakewell, the biggest town in the Peak District, the bus ends in The Square, almost outside the Bakewell Pudding Shop. The imposing Rutland Arms (doubles from £120 B&B ), a few steps away, has 32 refurbished bedrooms and the famous puddings on its menu.
tmtravel.co.uk
Land’s End Coaster
Photograph: First Bus
This open-top circular bus ride from Penzance via St Ives (May to September) around the western tip of Cornwall is incredibly good value for £2.50 for a single fare (a day pass costs £7). The whole journey takes a couple of hours and runs through downland dotted with tin mines and stone circles, passing rugged cliffs and fairytale St Michael’s Mount. Daffodils start flowering from December in the west Cornish fields, along with palms and camellias in subtropical gardens.
In winter the service only runs between Penzance and Land’s End and the Tin Coaster (Tinc) bus serves villages between Penzance and Pendeen Boscaswell via St Just.
There are cafes and seaside art in St Ives, where the Tate offers Ben Nicholson’s abstracts, Barbara Hepworth’s bronzes and £1 off for car-free visitors (£10.50 adults, free for kids). Penzance is packed with great places to stay and eat, including the characterful Artist Residence (doubles from about £140 room-only), serving fresh Newlyn fish. For lunch on the go, it’s hard to beat picnic-ready slices of socca from the Cornish Hen deli.
firstbus.co.uk, bustimes.org
This article was amended on 10 November 2023 to clarify that the Land’s End Coaster’s full route, via St Ives, only runs from May to September. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2012/jan/25/newspapers-the-titanic | Media | 2012-01-25T12:36:31.000Z | Roy Greenslade | Historian sinks famous Titanic headline | I mentioned one famous, and genuine, American headline earlier today (see below). Now I read that one of Scotland's most famous headlines turns out to be a myth.
Evidently, the reporting of a certain sea disaster was not headlined, as we had been led to believe: "North-east man lost at sea. 1,500 perish in Titanic disaster."
It was supposed to have been published by the Aberdeen Journal (precursor to the current Press & Journal) following the sinking in April 1912.
But historian Chris Holme reveals that the paper's 16 April report was "a sober and informative account" with headlines such as "Mid-Atlantic Disaster – Titanic sunk by Iceberg – 1,683 Lives Lost, 675 Saved – Increasing Race to Rescue."
There was no mention of "North-east man". Holme also pondered whether it might have been on a contents bill. But he doubted it because the preferred description of the period was "North Country".
So I guess this headline takes its place next to other mythical examples of the genre, such as "Nut screws washer and bolts". Then again, I seem to think "French push bottles up German rear" was published somewhere. But I could never find proof of "Fuchs off to the Antarctic".
Source: Scottish Review See also Holme's historycompany.co.uk | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/may/25/one-man-two-guvnors-review | Stage | 2011-05-24T23:25:23.000Z | Michael Billington | One Man, Two Guvnors - review | In 1746, Carlo Goldoni wrote a classic comedy normally translated as The Servant of Two Masters. Richard Bean has used it for a riotous farce combining the original's structure with a particularly Anglo-Saxon verbal and physical humour. The result, a kind of Carry On Carlo, is one of the funniest productions in the National's history.
The plot almost defies description. But Bean has set the action in 1963 in Brighton, and the key point is that Francis Henshall, a failed skiffle player, finds himself working for two guvnors. One, Rachel Crabbe, is disguised as her dead gangland twin, and, in her brutal mop-like wig, bears an uncanny resemblance to Ringo Starr.
Francis's other employer is a snooty toff, Stanley Stubbers, who not only killed Rachel's brother but is also her secret lover. Neither boss is aware the other is in Brighton, as Francis bounces between them like a shuttlecock and, in the play's most famous scene, serves them dinner simultaneously.
As Francis, James Corden makes the transition from Gavin and Stacey to revved-up Goldoni with consummate ease. As in the original, the character is driven by omnivorous hunger, and it is wonderful to see Corden chewing a letter in desperation. Even better is the moment when he is asked by his pneumatic doxy whether he prefers eating or making love: Corden's broad features become a study in concentration before he replies, "Tough one that, innit."
But Corden's gift is for combining a porpoise-like physicality with a profound geniality that even incorporates the front row into the show.
But what makes the show a triumph is its combination of visual and verbal comedy. Bean and his director, Nicholas Hytner, have managed to make the dinner scene funnier than ever by adding a character: an octogenarian waiter, magnificently played by Tom Edden, whose hand alarmingly quivers as he serves a tureen of soup and who has an amazing capacity to fall backwards down stairs and return like a rubber ball. In a peculiarly English way, the physical jokes are accompanied by an endless stream of verbal gags: a cynical hood announces, for instance, that "love passes through marriage quicker than shit through a small dog".
While Corden is central, there is a rich host of performances. Oliver Chris as Stanley is a walking monument to public school arrogance. Daniel Rigby as a would-be actor is a brilliant compendium of old-school theatrical mannerisms. Jemima Rooper as the male-attired Rachel has a wonderful macho swagger, and Suzi Toase gives full value to Francis's well-upholstered Brighton belle. For good measure there is even a prefatory skiffle session and musical interludes by Grant Olding.
Maybe the second half can't match the unbounded hilarity of the first, but the National, in taking on an old Italian play, has not only improved Goldoni but also struck gold. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/apr/13/scottish-students-short-film-to-compete-for-cannes-festival-prize | Film | 2017-04-13T13:00:05.000Z | Dalya Alberge | Scottish student's short film to compete for Cannes festival prize | A Scottish student will walk the red carpet at this year’s Cannes film festival after his short graduation film was chosen from thousands of entries to compete for a prize.
Rory Alexander Stewart said he was amazed to discover that his 26-minute film, Wild Horses, was one of 16 films picked from 2,600 entries for the festival’s Cinéfondation category, which is devoted to emerging talent.
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“I’m pretty amazed … Cannes is Cannes … You think there must have been a mistake,” he said after receiving the news this week.
Stewart, 27, from Leith, left the National Film and Television School a few weeks ago, having completed a two-year master’s degree in directing fiction.
Wild Horses, which he wrote and directed, is about a teenage girl who has myalgic encephalopathy (ME), or chronic fatigue syndrome. Housebound by the condition, and struggling with her over-protective mother, she runs away from home, searching for a horse and trying to establish her independence.
Describing the inspiration for his film, Stewart said: “I have a very close friend who has ME, an illness that can be very destructive both physically and mentally, so that was the seed.
“At first, what interested me was the experience of going outside after years of being housebound. The idea that you become almost awed by simple things like riding the bus is both funny and heartbreaking.
“However the heart of the film is the somewhat strained relationship between [the teenager] and her mother, which is something I think many people experience.”
Rory Alexander Stewart, left, filming a scene for short film Wild Horses, which has been selected to compete for a Cannes film festival prize. Photograph: Laura Radford
Wild Horses was made by a group of graduating NFTS students and stars professional actors Emma Curtis and Emma Cater.
Stewart, whose mother is a neonatal nurse and father was a fireman, said he has wanted to be a film-maker for as long as he can remember.
“When I was about 10, I stole some VHS copies of Metropolis [Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic] and Reservoir Dogs [Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 thriller] from my uncle and then fell in love with cinema indiscriminately,” he said.
“As a teenager, I was in a film group for young people that was run out of the base of Edinburgh’s Filmhouse cinema, and that was where I made my first film, a western.”
Asked about his influences, he spoke of a particular love of “off-beat films” such as The Lobster, the 2015 surreal satire. “Anything that’s got its own personality,” he said.
He is now developing a feature script based on his previous short film, “about a murder detective who is extremely ineffective”.
Some of Britain’s foremost film-makers have found Oscar-winning success after being trained at the NFTS, based in Buckinghamshire. They include the animator Nick Park, who created Wallace and Gromit, and Il Postino director Michael Radford.
The NFTS is headed by Nik Powell, whose own films include the Oscar-winning The Crying Game.
“It’s an emotional film,” Powell said of Wild Horses. “It’s quite a difficult subject, very internalised and hard to externalise in the cinema. He’s done terrific job doing that.”
Cinéfondation, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary, accepts submissions from film schools around the world. Three prizes will be awarded at a ceremony preceding the screening of the winning films in Cannes’ Buñuel theatre on 26 May. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jun/22/johnaglionby | World news | 1999-06-22T00:32:26.000Z | John Aglionby | Spice islands hit by new religious violence | Indonesia's eastern spice islands are again teetering on the brink of social collapse, after a fresh outbreak of inter-religious violence on Sunday left nine people dead.
Cak Saimima, a spokesman for the Maluku provincial government, was quoted by the state Antara news agency yesterday as saying that the deaths occurred when hundreds of Muslims rampaged through a Christian village on the remote island of Kai Kecil, 2,000 miles east of the capital Jakarta.
"They came in speedboats from a neighbouring island," said Andi Tamher, who lives in the nearby town of Tual. "The villagers were told it was revenge for an attack last month. Dozens of people are in hospital now."
He said soldiers fired shots into the air to disperse the crowd and arrested more than 430 of the attackers. They confiscated 14 motorboats and dozens of homemade guns, spears and machetes.
Hundreds of Muslims demonstrated at the Tual police station yesterday to demand their friends' release. "No one was freed and so the demonstrators said they would return every day until they are," Mr Tamher said. "It looks like we are heading for another violent period."
More than 150 people have died in communal violence in the Kai islands this year, and 500 throughout the province. Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes, and dozens of villages have been burned to the ground.
Most areas of the mini-archipelago of 1,000 islands have become divided into Muslim and Christian enclaves, with the factions kept apart by thousands of soldiers patrolling around the clock.
The terror was so bad in one area, the Banda islands, that all the Christians there fled.
Aid organisations have had to hire two sets of employees. "None of the Muslim staff will go into Christian areas and no Christian will even travel through Muslim neighbourhoods," the leader of a charity helping refugees in the provincial capital, Ambon, said.
"Everyone is gripped by fear," the regional military commander, Brigadier-General Max Tamaela, said. "They believe they could be attacked at any time."
The disruption is such that not one of the province's six districts has compiled its results from the general election held on June 7.
Reconciliation is barely discussed. "Village heads from all over Kai met government officials and the military a few weeks ago, but no one was willing to sign a peace agreement because they want compensation and revenge first," Mr Tamher said.
Maluku's governor, Saleh Latuconsina, believes the central government will have to contribute more to the province. "We have been promised 10 billion rupiah [£900,000] from Jakarta, but it will cost much more than that to rebuild people's lives." | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jul/14/jeremy-clarkson-tv-amazon-grand-tour-richard-hammond | Media | 2017-07-14T15:13:59.000Z | Mark Sweney | Jeremy Clarkson TV firm made £8m profit after Amazon's Grand Tour | The TV company set up by Jeremy Clarkson and his fellow former Top Gear hosts has made more than £8m in profits following the first season of their big budget Amazon show The Grand Tour.
In 2015, Clarkson, Richard Hammond, James May and Andy Wilman, the former Top Gear executive producer, signed a three-series deal to create a rival to the hit BBC2 motoring show for a reported £160m.
The team then set up W Chump & Sons – a combination of their names – which has filed accounts providing the first insight into the lucrative deal.
The first series of the Grand Tour, which smashed Amazon video viewing and TV subscriber sign-up records, ran for 13 episodes from November to February.
The accounts show that W Chump & Sons made £8.39m in pre-tax profits from the point of incorporation in November 2015 to the end of last year.
The post-tax profit – effectively the funds in the pockets of the shareholders – came to £6.7m. The company paid £1.67m in UK corporation tax.
“The profit was driven by television programming produced during the period ended 31 December 2016,” said the company in its accounts. “The directors are keen to continue focusing on producing quality programming whilst ensuring that the company’s overheads are kept stable. The directors are satisfied with the results for the year end and will continue to pursue business opportunities as they arise in the future.”
The company employed 20 staff, excluding the four directors, with a total wage bill of £3m and reported £35.33m in turnover with nearly all of that referred to as related to the “terms of a commissioning agreement”.
This would indicate that it is the funds paid by Amazon for at least the first series to be made, which means that the overall value of the three-series deal appears to be significantly lower than the £160m reported.
Amazon, which has just launched the trailer for the second series, declined to comment on the commercial terms of the deal with Clarkson and his partners.
The Grand Tour hit the headlines when Hammond suffered two accidents during filming. The first was a minor motorbike crash in a remote part of Mozambique. The second was much more serious when Hammond wrote-off a Rimac supercar in a crash that resulted in the £2m vehicle bursting into flames.
Clarkson tweeted that the crash, after which Hammond was airlifted to hospital in Switzerland where the episode was being filmed, was the “biggest and most frightening” he had ever seen.
It was the biggest crash I've ever seen and the most frightening but incredibly, and thankfully, Richard seems to be mostly OK.
— Jeremy Clarkson (@JeremyClarkson) June 10, 2017
Last year, Clarkson and his co-presenters launched DriveTribe, a social network for motoring fans, financed by their own investments and backing of almost £10m from investors including 21st Century Fox and early Facebook backer Jim Breyer. The business lost its launch chief executive, Ernesto Schmidt, the former senior EMI executive, just six months after launch.
Clarkson, who writes a column for the Sun and the Sunday Times, was dropped as co-host of Top Gear in 2015 after he punched producer Oisin Tymon in a row over hot food after a day’s filming. Hammond and May also quit the BBC following the departure of Clarkson. At the BBC, he made tens of millions of pounds from Top Gear’s huge international success from Bedder 6, a company he set up with the corporation’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide.
As the global popularity of Top Gear grew – it is the BBC’s biggest global brand with sales of the TV show, DVDs, books, live shows and other merchandise worth more than £50m annually – Clarkson pocketed increasingly large sums of money revealed each year in the company’s accounts.
After five years of increasingly embarrassing payouts being made public, BBC Worldwide, which originally set up Bedder 6 to keep Clarkson and Wilman loyal to the hugely successful programme, and reduce the amount of money paid out by licence fee-payers, took full control of the company in 2012.
Hammond and May were not shareholders in Bedder 6, but did begin to take a share of Top Gear’s commercial revenue in return for promoting the show globally, as part of a new deal they signed to carry on co-presenting Top Gear in 2012. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/14/homegrown-book-review-jeffrey-toobin-timothy-mcveigh-oklahoma-city-trump-republicans | Books | 2023-05-14T06:00:48.000Z | Charles Kaiser | Homegrown review: Timothy McVeigh and the rise of the Trumpist threat | Jeffrey Toobin has combined two great books in one. The first is an edge-of-your-seat thriller, describing Timothy McVeigh’s every movement on his way to committing one of the most horrific crimes in American history. The second traces how a huge part of the Republican establishment has come to embrace many of McVeigh’s most dangerous convictions.
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Toobin is a lawyer who became a full-time writer and TV pundit 30 years ago. This is his ninth book and his most important, because it gives the clear and present danger of rightwing extremism the attention it deserves.
McVeigh was a brilliant marksman who fought in the first Iraq war but failed a tryout for the Green Berets after only two days. This, Toobin writes, was “a shattering defeat … he had no plan B”.
McVeigh’s biggest ideological influence was a novel, The Turner Diaries, which envisaged a world in which the government had the power to confiscate private arms, Black people were allowed to attack whites with impunity and whites were punished for defending themselves. It also imagined the blowing up of the FBI building in Washington with a truck filled with thousands of pounds of fertilizer, blasting gelatin and sticks of dynamite.
That became McVeigh’s template for blowing up the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, on 19 April 1995, with a rental truck. The death toll was 168, including 19 children. More than 500 were injured.
Toobin covered McVeigh’s trial for the New Yorker and ABC News. His interest was rekindled when he realized the conspirators arrested in a plot to kidnap the current Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, were much like McVeigh.
“I know these people,” he writes.
Then he discovered McVeigh’s lead lawyer had donated 635 boxes of documents to the University of Texas.
“I knew that an archive of this extent … had never before been publicly available in a major case.”
In Homegrown, Toobin combines the fruits of those documents with interviews with more than 100 participants, among them Bill Clinton, president at the time, and Merrick Garland, now attorney general, then lead prosecutor of McVeigh. The result is one of the most detailed and exciting true crime stories I have ever read.
But in many ways the other book Toobin has written is even more important. It is the book that looks at the birth of the extreme language that now dominates Republican politics. McVeigh embraced white supremacy and violent action just as a Republican House speaker, Newt Gingrich, and a talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, were engaging in “rhetorical violence at a pitch the country had rarely heard before on national broadcasts”.
An exhibit in the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum shows a clock stopped at 9am, one minute before the bombing. Photograph: Jeff Mitchell/Reuters
Gingrich instructed Republicans to describe Democrats as sick, pathetic, traitors, radical and corrupt, while describing himself as standing “between us and Auschwitz”. Limbaugh said the “second violent American revolution” was a quarter of an inch away. Toobin draws a straight line to the titles of books written by extremists today, from Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism (Sean Hannity) to Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (Ann Coulter).
To Toobin, the mistake Garland made was the same one he himself made when he covered McVeigh’s trial: both focused on the acts of a loner, instead of connecting the atrocity to the beginnings of the mainstreaming of rightwing extremism.
One of the most interesting parts of the book lies in Clinton’s prescience. Because the Oklahoma bombing came barely two years after the first bombing of the World Trade Center by Islamic fundamentalists, the media and many others assumed foreigners were the culprits again. Clinton was certain that wasn’t the case.
“This was domestic, homegrown, the militias,” he told his staff. “I know these people. I’ve been fighting them all my life.”
Clinton’s earliest political memory was of the Arkansas governor Orval Faubus refusing to allow Black students into Little Rock Central high school. Clinton remembered those opposed to integration, “the faces twisted with rage”. He also believed hatred was especially virulent in the early 1990s, because of “Gingrich’s sneering contempt and Limbaugh’s roiling bombast”.
McVeigh’s own linear connection to old hatreds was confirmed by his membership of the Ku Klux Klan.
McVeigh saw himself as the leader of an army of extremists but Toobin is convinced, by the evidence, there were only two significant co-conspirators. The disastrous change in our own time lies in the way the internet has enabled millions of such people to connect. One study for the Department of Homeland Security found social media was used in 90% of US extremist plots.
Toobin writes: “More than any other reason the internet accounts for the difference between McVeigh’s lonely crusade and the thousands who stormed the Capitol on January 6.”
The terrorism expert Juliette Kayyem said the internet gave “white-supremacist terrorism … what amounts to a dating app online”. In Toobin’s words, when Donald Trump became president, “the wolf pack had a new leader”.
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This is one of the most important markers of the decline of the Republican party. “After Oklahoma City, no politicians defended … the attack.” But after January 6, many Republicans did just that. Andrew Clyde, a Georgia congressman, said the riot resembled “a normal tourist visit”. Since leaving the White House, Trump has “turned to a new level of feral zealotry”, embracing QAnon, the antisemitic conspiracy theory he reposts on his social media platform, and regularly expressing eagerness to pardon rioters as soon as he enters the White House again.
This week provided the most dramatic evidence yet of how completely the political-media establishment has been corrupted by organized hatred. CNN, a formerly respectable organization, decided the best thing it could do was to give a national forum to the hero of millions of white supremacists. That decision alone drove home the urgency of the message of Toobin’s brilliant book.
Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism is published in the US by Simon & Schuster | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/dec/13/peaky-blinders-recap-series-4-episode-4-the-duel | Television & radio | 2017-12-13T22:00:14.000Z | Sarah Hughes | Peaky Blinders recap – series 4, episode 5: The Duel | If I have one complaint about Peaky Blinders it’s that it could do with one more episode each season, in order to allow certain stories the time they need to breathe. Tonight’s penultimate episode was a taut and tense hour featuring a number of intriguing and enjoyable head-to-heads: not just the titular duel. Yet it’s hard to see how all those storylines are going to be wrapped up in an hour next week and hard too to escape the feeling that this series is ending just as it was kicking into full gear.
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Our heroes
It’s an established law of Peaky Blinders that when the going gets tough, Tommy Shelby truly gets going, and thus it proved this week as our hero made swift work of Luca’s ambush thanks to his superior knowledge of the terrain and a tip-off from Polly (as correctly called by most people below the line, well done). Unfortunately for the ever-busy Shelby he failed to eliminate his main target – even if he did make him dispense with his matchstick in fury – which means next week seems certain to be a bloodbath.
Still, among Tommy’s many excellent qualities is the ability to think a few steps ahead, and I’m pretty sure that he intends to somehow use the arrival of the military into Birmingham and the looming General Strike as a way of neutralising all his enemies once and for all. No, I don’t know exactly how he intends it all to shake down but, as with most of Tommy’s schemes, this will be multi-layered.
Tommy wouldn’t be Tommy if he didn’t also have a couple of romantic entanglements to sort out amid all the bloodshed and dodgy deals. Poor Lizzie was promised a nice house and financial support, when what she craves is emotional connection (oh Lizzie, cut your losses and find a man who appreciates that kind heart and sharp brain). Meanwhile, Jessie was treated to a candlelit dinner complete with dancing and a quick kiss.
That said, if I were Tommy I’d tread carefully where Jessie is concerned: their date was in its own way as menacing as the earlier confrontation between Luca Changretta and Alfie Solomons. In both cases we saw two people probing each other for intention and power and in both cases there was a considerable amount of acting going on behind the charm and fine words. As to whether it will be Tommy or Jessie who ends the series victorious having converted the other to their cause – I’d say a stalemate appears the most likely outcome while noting that the truest words Tommy spoke all evening were “Let’s call her dangerous … she’s no fool.”
Punch drunk: Alfie Solomons (Tom Hardy). Photograph: Robert Viglasky/BBC/Caryn Mandabach
The bad guys
In an evening stuffed full of confrontations, the night’s most enjoyable head-to-head was between an apparently chastened Changretta and the ever-bombastic Solomons. Their meeting was a delicate dance for power peppered with great comebacks, which settled once and for all who would win the much-anticipated Ham-Off (Tom Hardy, of course. Any doubts were settled the moment he delivered the line: “I already know what you want. I just want you to tell me out loud so I can check how ridiculous it is.”)
Here the true extent of Luca’s ambition was revealed: his visit to Birmingham was power grab as much as vendetta. Tommy recognised it and Alfie astutely confirmed it, which is why I don’t believe for one moment that Solomons has set the Peaky Blinders up, rum deal or no rum deal. Alfie has always had a head for business and there was a reason Tommy showed him the gin distillery. I expect that the finale will see the united firm of Shelby and Solomons make their bid for Prohibition glory – the question remains, is Luca aware of that or has his “natural Italian fucking arrogance” blinded him to Alfie’s “Jewish air of absolute certainty”?
And what role will Aberama Gold play in all this mayhem? I continue to have bad feelings about him (and not simply because he’s played by Aidan Gillen, a man who has built a career out of playing untrustworthy characters). He’s the most uneasy and unpredictable of allies because, unlike Alfie, he is not driven by the desire to make a profit.
Polly, herself increasingly untethered to society, recognised that (and astutely played on Aberama’s belief in ghosts and witches), but what is the true price of their fragile alliance? I can’t help wondering if when the blood and dust settles next week we may find out that this alliance is the real betrayal and she has “freed” herself from Tommy to join forces with her “very unsuitable man”.
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Additional notes
Poor old Arthur, back on the Tokyo and falling apart at the seams. Linda will have her work cut out saving his soul this time.
I wish Ada had more time on this show. Her confrontations with both the suave Colonel Younger and Tommy were hugely entertaining.
Bonnie Gold has the cold-eyes of a killer and I don’t think he’s prepared to obey anyone’s rules.
Never has a man looked more unsuited to life on the road than Michael. Will he make it to the end of the series? I’m genuinely unsure.
Someone needs to tell Luca that a code of honour is the last thing you need on the mean streets of Small Heath.
“Tell the people who live in these houses that they are free to go about their lawful business. Tell them that the rule of law has been restored.” Why, Inspector Moss, is that a spine you’ve regrown?
Anachronistic yet strangely right song of the week
Laura Marling’s haunting Saved These Words was smartly used during the aftermath of Tommy’s shoot-out, but this week’s award goes to Iggy Pop and Jarvis Cocker’s atmospheric slowed-down take on Red Right Hand.
Quote of the week
“Of course, I’m sorry, Tommy Shelby is going to stop the revolution with his cock ...” The ever-astute Ada says what we were all thinking.
So what did you think? Will Alfie betray Tommy or is this part of a double-bluff to take out Luca? What mischief will come of Aberama and Polly’s relationship? And if you were going to stop a revolution what appendage would you use? As ever all speculation and no spoilers welcome below …
Quick Guide
Peaky Blinders: all our episode-by-episode recaps
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https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/dec/11/the-best-50-tv-shows-of-2017-no-7-the-deuce | Television & radio | 2017-12-11T06:00:13.000Z | Sarah Hughes | The 50 best TV shows of 2017: No 7 The Deuce | When David Simon announces he’s making a new TV series, even the most jaded of critics tend to take notice. Sure, not everything Simon touches turns to gold, but the creator of The Wire has more than earned the widespread goodwill he enjoys: few writers are as comfortable turning difficult, complicated subjects into intricate, heartbreaking TV.
The birth of the porn industry in 1970s New York does not make for the most promising of subject matters. Not only have we been here before in everything from Boogie Nights to the 2004 documentary Inside Deep Throat, but also the last time HBO visited the 70s it was for the big-budget excesses of Vinyl, a show whose multiple failings remain an all-too-vivid memory.
However, if we’ve learnt anything from Simon’s previous work, it’s that he excels at making the unpromising very promising indeed. The Deuce is a cleverly told tale of sex, commerce and the price of power, which works because it looks at the sex industry as a job, with the same problems and complaints as any other.
Thus the street workers trade war stories in a dimly lit Times Square cafe (“Daddies, husbands and pimps – they’re all the same. They love you for who you are until you try to be someone else,” states the tired-before-her-time Ashley), while their pimps sardonically shoot the breeze about “product” while noting that President Nixon is the biggest pimp of all. Everyone here is on the make, from James Franco’s sad-sack Vincent (even his moustache seems to droop despairingly in contrast to that of twin brother Frankie, also played by Franco) to Maggie Gyllenhaal’s entrepreneurial Eileen, AKA Candy, who sees sex movies as her shot at financial freedom.
James Franco as twin brothers Frankie and Vincent, with Margarita Levieva as Abigail Parker. Photograph: Paul Schiraldi/HBO
Such dark subject matter could have made for an extremely depressing series, but The Deuce is vibrant, visceral viewing which frequently takes the most well-worn scenarios – a wide-eyed young girl arrives in the big bad city from the midwest; a young mother visits her child, who has no idea about her real job – and upends them: the girl is not so wide-eyed and has her own ideas about how to survive in New York; the young mother feels no guilt about leaving her son with her own mother – she too has a vision of how to survive.
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It helps that Simon has a terrific writing team, including crime novelists George Pelecanos, Richard Price, Lisa Lutz and Megan Abbott. It was Abbott who wrote the series’ best episode, Au Reservoir, which showed us with compassion and honesty that even the most hard-edged characters, such as Gary Carr’s violent CC, were simply scrabbling to survive.
This generosity of spirit is the show’s greatest gift. Where other series use sex as titillation, The Deuce prefers to examine the nature of desire, both fantasy and reality. The sweet-natured Darlene (a wonderful Dominique Fishback) might find her escape in old movies, but she is capable of sharp-eyed savviness when on the job: her silent side-eye to Eileen during the shooting of a porn scene says more than any number of sharply scripted words.
Natalie Paul as Sandra and Dominique Fishback as Darlene. Photograph: Sky Atlantic
Similarly the show’s bleak finale, My Name is Ruby, highlighted the difference between Eileen – who uses her understanding of fantasy to move behind the camera (uttering the memorable line: “His dick takes us in, if we start on the pussy there’s no story”) – and her friend Ruby (Pernell Walker), AKA Thunder Thighs, who talks a good game but can’t protect herself from the brutal reality of picking a bad john.
The series’ closing scenes, in which street worker Lori looks wide-eyed at a seemingly on-top-of-the-world Linda Lovelace at the premiere for Deep Throat, further highlights that disconnect between starry fantasy and bitter reality. The same goes for a small but telling moment when police officer Chris Alston (Lawrence Gillard Jnr), one of the few people on the show with anything approaching a conscience, realises that any relationship with reporter Sandra (Natalie Paul) will come at the price of his job.
It is its melancholy streak that makes this series so worthwhile. The Deuce might be hard to watch at times but it is also a truly adult drama about the adult film industry: thoughtful, candid, complex and surprisingly warm underneath all that grime.
(Buy here)
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. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2015/apr/02/experts-step-by-step-guide-cyber-security | Guardian Small Business Network | 2015-04-02T11:00:05.000Z | Kitty Dann | The experts' step-by-step guide to cyber security | Where does cyber security fall on your to-do list? If it’s not a priority, it should be because 60% of small businesses suffered a breach in the year leading up to October 2014. The worst of these breaches disrupted operations for an average of seven to 10 days.
We recently held a live Q&A on the topic, with a panel of experts on hand to answer your questions. From risk assessment to keeping your business safe on a budget, here are some of their suggestions:
Where can I educate myself about cyber security?
Not all small firms will have the budget to outsource their online security. The panelists pointed out that it is possible to get advice for free:
The IASME website has a list of sites offering free help
The government recently published a free guide on cyber security
A free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) developed by FutureLearn, which is owned by The Open University, offers an introduction to cyber security
It just takes one person clicking on a dodgy link to put an entire enterprise at risk
What risk assessments should I carry out?
The most important thing is to make sure you understand what data and information you hold. “What are the crown jewels within the business?” asks Del Heppenstall, who leads KPMG’s cyber security teams across the southern and midlands regions. “These could be IP, financial, customer details, employee records – once you have a handle on what it is that is important to your business and where you store this data, then you can begin to assess the threats and risks that these information assets will be open to.”
Business owners should also take a look at their digital assets, such as domain names and trademarks, and ensure they have “secured all of your brand names with more common domain suffixes”, says Stuart Fuller, director of commercial operations and communications at NetNames. “You can also see if any third parties have registered domain names using your business trademark or brands that could be taking away website visitors (and potential revenue).”
You can do a simple domain name search using www.who.is, to see if domain names are registered.
Mobile security poses huge risk for small firms
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How can SMEs instil a culture of information security in the workplace?
It just takes one person clicking on a dodgy link to put an entire enterprise at risk. Training staff to follow cyber security procedures could save you a lot of time and money in the long run. Emma Philpott, CEO of the IASME Consortium Ltd, suggests the following:
Include cyber security elements in staff contracts
Implement training for staff about the basic controls and why they need them
Hold regular discussions about what the threats and risks might be and how these change over time
Other suggestions included launching a safe phishing campaign to track improvements following training and developing an acceptable use policy.
Should small businesses dissuade staff from bringing in their own devices to work (BYOD)?
Allowing staff to bring their own devices to work is often more affordable than buying company equipment, but businesses need to have a BYOD policy. As a minimum, devices should have anti-malware on them and be regularly patched, says Philpott. “Ideally they would also be encrypted, capable of being tracked and remotely wiped but then there may be issues about who owns the data.”
You should plan ahead for if a device goes missing. Stephen Hind, who provides cloud solutions consultation and implementation for DrPete, says: “All the big cloud providers offer mobile device management so if a device does go missing the company can wipe the account from the device. If you cannot do this you need to ask yourself the question of how you would cope in that scenario.”
There are other ways that risks can be mitigated. Dr Stephen Moody, solutions director for EMEA at ThreatMatrix, says: “If, for example, users are connecting to business assets through a web portal then services can be run when users connect to check for malware on the machine and also provide additional frictionless authentication protection (if, for example, a fraudster has gained access to a staff username and password). This doesn’t require anything to be installed on the user’s device.”
Celebrity nude cyber attacks can teach small businesses a lesson
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What’s the best way to make sure that remote workers do what they can to avoid a breach?
With more businesses offering staff the option of home and remote working, avoiding a breach can seem out of your control. Panelists suggested activating a two-step verification process to sign in so users do not rely on a “static password”.
Remote workers should also be aware of who is working around them in a public space. Privacy screens can help shield your computer from prying eyes. Users should also be aware of the public spaces they use to operate online, specifically using open Wi-Fi connections.
Sign up to become a member of the Guardian Small Business Network here for more advice, insight and best practice direct to your inbox. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/12/george-osborne-driverless-car-trials-budget | UK news | 2016-03-12T00:00:01.000Z | Heather Stewart | George Osborne to back driverless car trials on UK motorways | Driverless cars will be tested on Britain’s motorways as soon as next year, George Osborne will announce in next week’s budget, as he claims that Britain can “lead the world in new technologies and infrastructure”.
The chancellor will deliver his budget on Wednesday and is expected to warn that the deteriorating global outlook will make it harder to reach his target of delivering a surplus on the public finances by the end of the parliament in 2020.
But Osborne is still keen to demonstrate that he has an appetite for measures which could boost growth and kickstart the productivity of Britain’s economy.
He said: “At a time of great uncertainty in the global economy, Britain must take bold decisions now to ensure it leads the world when it comes to new technologies and infrastructure. That’s what my budget next week will seek to do.
Driverless cars are the future. We're living in the motorised middle ages
Martin Belam
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“Driverless cars could represent the most fundamental change to transport since the invention of the internal combustion engine. Naturally, we need to ensure safety, and that’s what the trials we are introducing will test.”
He is also expected to spell out how the government can make progress towards its manifesto pledges to raise the threshold for the higher rate of income tax to £50,000 and to increase the tax-free personal allowance to £12,500.
However, the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, said in a speech on Friday that Labour would use next week’s statement to press Osborne on his economic record, accusing him of putting his aspirations to lead the Conservative party before the economy.
“We have a huge potential in this country. But we have a chancellor that is failing us. He is sacrificing the bold, necessary action we need for the sake of his political career,” he said, as he announced a new set of tax and spending rules aimed at regaining Labour’s reputation for economic competence.
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The driverless car trials will be the latest project to be funded by the government’s £100m Intelligent Mobility Fund, a pot of money set up to back innovations in transport technology.
The Treasury conceded that some lanes might need to be closed in order to allow the trials to take place.
The transport secretary, Patrick McLoughlin, suggested that the new technologies being tested in the trials could “benefit our society and the wider economy by opening up new routes for global investment”.
Work is already being carried out to prepare for trials on roads in Bristol, Coventry, Milton Keynes and Greenwich; and the government is also backing plans for a “connected corridor” on the key freight route from London to Dover, which would allow vehicles travelling along it to tap into communications networks.
The Japanese carmaker Nissan plans to make its first mass-market driverless car in the UK at its plant in Sunderland, while Jaguar Land Rover plans to test its autonomous and connected vehicle technologies on the roads of the West Midlands by the end of the year. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/19/observer-profile-paul-dacre-daily-mail-man-leading-brexit-charge | Media | 2017-02-19T00:04:15.000Z | Tim Lewis | Paul Dacre: the Mail man leading the Brexit charge | the observer profile | Articles about Paul Dacre, the irascible editor of the Daily Mail, without fail note that he likes to keep a low profile. It’s true: he rarely gives interviews, a 2004 appearance on Desert Island Discs being a notable exception, and he invariably sends underlings to speak for the Mail on television. But if it is the 68-year-old Dacre’s intention to stay out of the spotlight then, right now, he is failing spectacularly.
Last week, Lord Neuberger, the president of the supreme court, claimed that some sections of the press were guilty of “undermining the rule of law”, following the scathing criticism of the high court’s decision that MPs should have a vote on triggering article 50. He didn’t mention specific titles, but the Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn returned fire, writing that Lord Neuberger spoke with “menace and grievance”.
Tony Blair, likewise, didn’t single out the Mail in his open Britain speech last Friday, but bemoaned the “effective cartel of media on the right, which built the ramp for pro-Brexit propaganda during the campaign”. The coverage continued to be skewed, Blair thought. It “is now equally savage in its efforts to say it is all going to be ‘great’ and anyone who says otherwise is a traitor or moaner”.
“Cuprinol man,” responded Quentin Letts in yesterday’s Mail. “Bonkers, self-delusional egomania.”
Blair and Dacre have long had frosty dealings. Dacre once described his government as “manipulative, dictatorial and slightly corrupt”. The pair’s disagreements were said to be derived, at least in part, from Blair’s socially liberal views on gay rights and Dacre’s disdain towards Cherie Blair for insisting on breastfeeding in public.
Yet no one could accuse Dacre of being in the pocket of the Tories either, certainly not since Margaret Thatcher. David Cameron is reported to have called Dacre a “fuckwit” in private, while this month BBC’s Newsnight revealed that, pre-referendum, the then prime minister had lobbied the Mail’s owner, Lord Rothermere, to fire his pro-Brexit editor. Dacre found out soon afterwards, from a Westminster source, and the news is sure to have added a personal spice to the campaign.
So yes, so much for the “shy” Paul Dacre. He might aspire to remain behind the scenes – certainly do not expect a Twitter account now or in the future; he doesn’t even have a computer in his office. But word of Dacre’s deeply divisive influence is spreading and is impossible to ignore. A petition from the campaign group, Avaaz, to have Dacre fired, raised shortly before the EU referendum, called him “the Nigel Farage of newspapers” and attracted more than 50,000 signatures.
Alastair Campbell, who has also long had a fractious relationship with Dacre, has called him “evil” and the Mail “total scum”. Nevertheless, he had to concede in last October’s issue of GQ magazine that Dacre now oversaw the country’s pre-eminent newspaper brand. “The Daily Mail is the most penetrating mass-market newspaper product,” he wrote, with clear reluctance, “and Dacre is probably second only to Rupert Murdoch as British print journalism’s most influential figure.”
At a time when Donald Trump communicates to people almost entirely through Twitter and TV appearances, the idea that any print editor is meaningfully influential might seem arcane. It should be all about social media now.
But Cameron’s appeal to Lord Rothermere proves that Dacre still has formidable clout. The Sun might still sell the most copies – 1.66m daily, compared to the Mail’s 1.51m – but the gap is ever narrowing. Taking online into account, it has more daily readers from the top three social classes (the A, B, C1s beloved of demographers) than the Times, Guardian and Financial Times put together. Moreover, the Mail is, perhaps surprisingly, the only British national read by more women (around 52%) than men.
Much of this influence is down to one man. “Politicians no longer fear Murdoch as they once did,” Peter Wilby, former editor of the Independent on Sunday and the New Statesman, has written. “They still fear Dacre.”
Because of his reluctance to appear in public, legends are rife about Dacre. Tall and imposing, with the hair of an old-school football manager, it’s said he doesn’t laugh, but might comment, stony faced: “That was funny.” In his early years as editor, his language was so blue that morning conference was nicknamed “the vagina monologues”. He works relentlessly – 15 hours a day, reportedly, for more than 40 years – and he expects his staff to do the same.
Dacre was born the eldest of five boys in 1948 in Arnos Grove, north London; his mother, Joan, was a teacher and his father, Peter, a lifer at the Sunday Express, mostly as showbiz editor. The newspaper sold 5m copies a week in the 1950s and 1960s and Dacre became obsessed with its “warm, aspirational, unashamedly traditional, dedicated to decency, middlebrow” tone. “From virtually the moment I was born, I wanted to be an editor,” he told the Society of Editors in 2008. “Not just wanted, if I’m being honest. Hungered. Lusted with a passion that while unfulfilled, would gnaw at my entrails.”
After studying English at Leeds University, he joined the Daily Express. He had a seminal period working in America, covering the 1976 presidential election, which imparted a life-long belief in self-reliance and the power of the free market. He started working for the Mail, later became its news editor and then went to edit the London Evening Standard. When Murdoch tried to poach him in 1992, aged 43, to edit the Times, he was handed the editor’s job at the Mail.
The Daily Mail front page that caused such controversy. Photograph: Handout
Dacre set about instilling the values of his father’s Sunday Express into the Mail and it has, for the most part, proved a popular recipe. On the 10th anniversary of his editorship in 2002, he gave an interview to the British Journalism Review. “I don’t think you can have a newspaper editor who’s not married with children,” he said, in the spirit of Andrea Leadsom. “They wouldn’t understand the human condition.” Family is a recurring fixation in Dacre’s rare public pronouncements. He met his wife, Kathleen, at university, they have two grown-up boys and live a quiet, but far from abstemious life. Dacre is Britain’s highest-paid newspaper editor, taking home £1.5m in 2016. Both sons went to Eton and the family has three houses, including the 17,000-acre Langwell estate, near Ullapool in the Highlands, which has seven bedrooms and can be hired for deer stalking, grouse shooting and salmon fishing.
Such opulence might seem out of place for a newspaper editor whose title prides itself on mass-market, middle England appeal – and especially one well-known for adding ostensibly irrelevant house prices to stories. There’s also the somewhat embarrassing footnote that Dacre’s properties have benefited from EU subsidies of at least £460,000 since 2011. But then Dacre proves to be fairly resistant to pigeonholing. While the Mail will furiously berate ministers for their ineffective policies on illegal immigrants, it is difficult to dismiss Dacre and his team as racists. Perhaps his finest hour as editor was the fearless campaign to bring the killers of Stephen Lawrence to justice. “Murderers,” ran a headline in 1997, next to the photographs of five men. “The Mail accuses these men of killing,” it continued. “If we are wrong, let them sue us.”
Then there is the incongruous fact that a newspaper frequently accused of pointing out women’s physical flaws, criticising their clothes and promoting stay-at-home mothering is disproportionately popular with women. Dacre, who immediately employed a female deputy when he started at the Mail, thinks that “empathising with women is much of the secret of the Mail’s success.”
Speculating on when Dacre, by some distance the longest-serving British newspaper editor, might stand down has been going on for years. It was posed in 2013 after the Mail called Ralph Miliband, David and Ed’s father, “the man who hated Britain” and statistics came out about the stacks of complaints that had been filed to the Press Complaints Commission against the paper: almost 700, compared to 394 for the Sun and 115 for the Guardian.
But Dacre has survived the sniping, outlasted Cameron and seems to be in rude health. While there are still bureaucrats in Brussels attempting to reduce the power of our vacuum cleaners, make us use eco-friendly fluorescent light bulbs and ban curvy bananas and crooked cucumbers, then he still has work to do.
The Dacre Files
Born 14 November 1948 in north London. He won a scholarship to University College School in Hampstead and did work experience in the holidays at the Daily Express and Sunday Express.
Best of times The Daily Mail has won newspaper of the year six times at the British Press awards, twice as many times as any other paper. His paper’s pursuit of the Stephen Lawrence case.
Worst of times Articles heavily critical of Ralph Miliband, after his death, drew widespread criticism from all political quarters. Tory grandee Michael Heseltine condemned the Mail for demeaning political debate.
What he says “I think they [his colleagues] would say, ‘He’s a hard bastard, but he leads from the front.’ Shouting creates energy, energy creates great headlines.”
What they say “The Daily Mail is run by a bully and a coward and like most cowards he is a hypocrite as well.” Alastair Campbell
Comments will be opened later | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/nov/06/boris-ukcrime | Opinion | 2008-11-06T13:03:16.000Z | Josh Freedman Berthoud | Josh Freedman Berthoud: Bob-a-job Boris is out of touch | There might be, as Richard Garside complains, "little in [Boris Johnson's youth action plan] that is genuinely new or innovative", but there are elements of surprisingly progressive thinking, which belie his toffy-Tory boy persona.
Progress from the reactionary, conservative view of incarceration as a punitive measure against evil little oiks is encouraging. Project Daedalus promises a shift towards the somewhat obvious, but widely ignored, idea that locking up young, first-time offenders with career criminals is probably not the best way to achieve their rehabilitation into society.
By promising to educate, guide and support these vulnerable sections of society, as they stand at the crossroads between the underworld and the straight and narrow, Boris has shown that he can listen and act accordingly.
However, the Eton old boy rears his scruffy head when he considers ways to "harness and redirect the energies that lead to youth violence", asserting that "Scout troops and army cadets squads are the kind of gangs we like. It's time to expand their turf".
Boris claims to have consulted "literally hundreds of people" on the subject of youth disenfranchisement and crime and yet one of those I spoke to, Sharon Singh, organiser of The People's March against knife crime, wonders "if he was listening to any of them at all".
"The Scouts are a white, middle-class organisation," she states, flatly dismissing Boris's plans to use the uniformed youth organisations to instil poor, inner-city kids with a sense of self-worth and respect. "Who's going to go to them? How are they going to help?"
Another London-based youth worker I consulted agreed with Singh's attitude, claiming that it would take a "major culture shift" to persuade unmotivated, disillusioned youth to attend these "mainstream" organisations. Inner-city youth are generally mistrustful of groups such as the army or police cadets, he told me, while the Scouts are quite simply not cool. "They might work for some people," he agreed, but not the kind of children who are teetering on the edge of criminality and social severance.
To get around this detail, Boris raises the possibility of compelling young people to attend such organisations, should they fall foul of the law, with the aim of improving their "character"; helping them to help themselves. In this case, however, not only does enforced attendance increase the sense of mistrust of such organisations and make young people even less willing to attend, but it also raises the absurd prospect of punishing kids for bunking off their Scout meet.
However, youth workers generally agree that organised, structured youth organisations are a good thing. Boris is right that they can inject young people with a sense of empowerment and involvement, making them a part of something and valued as such.
In inner-city areas, where crime is a viable way out of poverty, the breakdown of the nuclear family, along with a dearth of successful adult role models and a fragmented, under-funded infrastructure of social care means that kids can often find it hard to resist the peer pressure to join others like them in small acts of criminality, which can swiftly escalate.
The gang – which is often little more than a group of alienated children – can provide a sense of belonging, of ideals, purpose and identity, as well as the feeling that the child is doing something constructive for himself, when no one else will bother.
Structured, official organisations can lure children away from such gangs. "The discipline and routine they offer are important," says Sharon, while the attention and supervision they offer young people outside of school hours help to keep them occupied and engaged, instead of bored and alone.
But Scouts? Really? Many of the young people in question are disillusioned and stubborn enough, without forcing them to enter yet another system that they feel has nothing to do with them. Such a battle would be a waste of time and resources and ultimately counterproductive. Instead, Boris should be seeking out the organisations and groups formed and administered by people with whom troubled teens can identify. Groups that have an understanding of the problems faced by inner-city youth, rather than those faced by Topsy and Tim.
Deprived and wayward children need to be brought back into society before they become deprived and way-gone adults, but they need to be brought into a society that they can recognise; social organisations that offer positive and familiar role models, an image and purpose with which they can identify and interact, and the sense of being a part of something again.
Organisations that offer the opportunity to rise through the ranks and eventually give something back to the group, and to society more generally. That is the only way to truly "harness and redirect" young people's energies. Imposing organisations such as the Scouts and cadets on rebellious, isolated and disenfranchised teens will only suppress and inflame such energies, with the risk of pushing these young people even further away.
Boris has shown a willingness to listen on this subject and to adopt progressive solutions. Will he be persuaded to abandon the golden vision of a bygone era of long shorts, knobbly knees and dib dibs and "harness and redirect" his own well-intended energies, towards offering these young people the kind of help and support that's relevant to them? | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/oct/02/tamal-ray-easy-tuna-melt-recipe-comfort-food | Food | 2023-10-02T10:00:11.000Z | Tamal Ray | Comfort classic: Tamal Ray’s recipe for an easy tuna melt | This is a hangover from my student days; the wholesome, filling snack to which I’d treat myself on those rare occasions when I’d been diligent enough to go to the gym. The recipe stuck around long after the gym-going fell by the wayside, and it’s now my lunchtime treat if I ever have a random day off to myself during the week. Best enjoyed with a side helping of trashy daytime telly.
Tuna melt, my way
Prep 2 min
Cook 5 min
Serves 1
1 tsp olive oil
2-3 spring onions, trimmed and thinly sliced (50g)
1 x 145g tin tuna in brine, drained
50g mature cheddar, grated
1 thick slice of sourdough, lightly toasted
1-2 tbsp crisp fried onions (shop-bought or homemade)
Warm the oil in a small frying pan on a medium-high heat, then add the spring onions and fry, stirring, for two to three minutes, until nicely softened. Stir in the tuna, turn up the heat to high and fry for 30 seconds. Scatter in the cheese, stir to combine until it melts, then tip the lot over the toasted sourdough, top with crisp onions and tuck in.
The Guardian aims to publish recipes for sustainable fish. Check ratings in your region: UK; Australia; US. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/13/john-hinckley-ronald-reagan-assassination-attempt | Music | 2024-03-13T11:00:05.000Z | Ramon Antonio Vargas | Man who tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan says ‘I stand for peace now’ | After he says a number of his concerts have been canceled at the last minute by the venues that planned to host them, the man who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981 is telling the public: “I stand for peace now.”
“I want people to know that I’m coming in peace,” John Hinckley said, according to the Connecticut news station WTNH.
The comments from Hinckley, 68, come as his effort at a second act as a folk musician and painter has apparently run into hitches. Shows he was scheduled to perform in New York, in Chicago, in Virginia and in Hamden, Connecticut, had all reportedly been canceled late in their planning, with organizers citing security concerns and in one instance a threat.
A promoter, who says he was willing to give Hinckley a second chance despite his attempt to assassinate a US president, had booked him to play Hotel Huxley in Naugatuck, Connecticut, on 30 March – the 43rd anniversary of Reagan’s shooting.
If the show went ahead as scheduled, it would have marked Hinckley’s first ever live performance. And tickets were being sold as of Monday.
Hinckley is escorted by US marshals in August 1981. Photograph: Barry Thumma/AP
But on Tuesday, Hinckley posted on X that the 30 March concert had been postponed.
He didn’t say when – or if – it would be rescheduled, though in a follow-up post he wrote: “I’m looking for a place to open my own music venue.”
Despite the timing of the Hotel Huxley show, Hinckley reportedly said he no longer wants to be associated with shooting Reagan, who died in 2004.
“I stand for peace now,” Hinckley said, according to WTNH. “I know I’m known for an act of violence, but I’m a completely different person than in 1981.”
Hinckley was 25, suffering from acute psychosis and hoping to catch the attention of the actor Jodie Foster when he used a revolver to shoot Reagan and three others outside a Washington DC hotel. In addition to wounding Reagan, the attack paralyzed the then president’s press secretary, James Brady, who died in 2014.
A police officer and a Secret Service agent were also injured.
Hinckley was found not guilty of the shooting by reason of insanity in 1982 and ordered to live at a psychiatrist hospital.
In the 2000s, Hinckley began visiting his parents’ home in a gated community in Williamsburg, Virginia. He obtained legal permission in 2016 to move in with his mother after experts determined his mental illness had long been in remission.
Yet Hinckley had to abide by certain restrictions, including being unable to own a gun or use drugs or alcohol. He also was forbidden from contacting Foster, his victims or their families.
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His mother died in July 2021, and he moved into an apartment with his cat, according to court filings reviewed by the Associated Press. In June 2022, he gained his freedom from oversight of court officials and mental health professionals.
“I have true remorse for what I did,” Hinckley said to CBS Mornings after his release from supervision. “I just want them to know that I am sorry for what I did.”
Hinckley plays his guitar. Photograph: Ryan M Kelly/AFP/Getty Images
Hinckley also said then that he did not “want to remember” the emotions that he experienced when he shot Reagan, Brady and the others.
Historian Barbara Perry spoke with the AP when Hinckley’s restrictions were fully lifted and said history had mostly forgotten him as a “misguided soul” who unwittingly helped boost Reagan’s legend in some political quarters and prompted a congressional push to require background checks for people buying guns from federally licensed arms dealers.
However, Hinckley has since managed to accumulate more than 90,000 followers on X and YouTube. His YouTube account has videos of his songs, which have titles such as Finally Living Free, I Won’t Go Back Again and She’s My One and Only.
And his X account contains pictures of his cat, Theo; some paintings he has created; and a T-shirt touting the “John Hinckley Redemption Tour”. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/29/killer-fungi-detectives-inside-the-lab-that-may-be-fighting-the-next-pandemic | Science | 2024-02-28T14:00:19.000Z | Tory Shepherd | Killer fungi detectives: inside the lab that may be fighting the next pandemic | The first tray of yellow-lidded specimen jars holds chunks of flesh – lung, perhaps, or muscle – some cerebrospinal fluid and another liquid, possibly from a brain abscess. The second holds a rainbow of colourful fungi, cultivated from those specimens.
One growth is green and fluffy, like something you would find in a sharehouse fridge – penicillium, maybe. Another is a dark grey or brown, like animal fur. There are bright white fuzzballs and blackish blobs. One growth leaches red into the medium it sits in.
Fungal pathogens come from all over Australia to this Adelaide laboratory, the National Mycological Reference Centre, for identification. Mycologists are on the lookout for new pathogens, which are starting to spread more because of climate change, and which can be deadly in the absence of effective antifungal drugs.
They work under biohazard signs, sorting specimens and growing colonies on petri dishes, to slice off and put under the microscope. There’s a weird, wonderful library of mycology books, a DNA sequencer and a reference collection with boxes and boxes full of vials, from azole-resistant Aspergillus to Zygomycetes.
Dr Sarah Kidd is the centre’s head. She was interested in Cryptococcus gattii, which live in eucalyptus trees and infect koalas, before she moved to Canada in 2006. And, serendipitously, there was a C gatti outbreak in Vancouver while she was there. It was a mystery how that fungus associated with Australia cropped up over there, but the theories are that it was something to do with changing global temperatures, perhaps some mutations.
Asked if those mutations scare her, Kidd says it’s “certainly not a good thing … but it keeps things interesting”.
Dr Sarah Kidd says ‘very few people really appreciate that fungi cause life-threatening infections’. Photograph: University of Adelaide
The fascination with fungal pathogens has recently been piqued by the HBO series The Last of Us, which stars Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey and a host of humans turned into zombies by a parasitic fungal infection.
“The fungus in The Last of Us, Cordyceps, it certainly does cause infection and sort of zombifies, if you will, insects,” Kidd says.
“But insects have a much cooler body temperature than humans … The vast majority of fungi cannot grow at 37C. So it’s unlikely we’ll see a human brain fungus zombification.
“Shows like The Last of Us have been really fantastic for drawing attention to mycology … Before that, I think people considered mycology to be about mushrooms, and foraging … or they knew that fungi can cause infections on skin, on toenails.
If they find themselves in a host who is susceptible, then they can kill
Dr Megan Lenardon
“But I think very few people, even now, really appreciate that fungi cause life-threatening infections.”
There are hundreds of fungi that can affect humans.
Almost 4m global deaths a year are associated with fungal infections, according to research published earlier this year in the Lancet – and it’s likely that this figure is massively underreported.
A pathogen of much more concern than Cordyceps at the moment is Candida auris.
It affects immunocompromised patients, people in intensive care and people with cancer or HIV/Aids.
Kidd says it can live on people, happily coexisting, until it finds its way into the bloodstream. It is resistant to many of the existing therapies and can spread easily from person to person – not unlike superbugs, bacterial infections that have grown resistant to antibiotics.
“They’re calling this the first fungal superbug,” Kidd says, “because it behaves like any of those resistant bacteria.”
‘A growing threat to human health’: we are ill-equipped for the dangers of fungal infections
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Another pathogen starting to crop up in Australia is Trichophyton indotineae. It’s a superficial rash, but it never goes away. People try to self-treat it with ointments, but they don’t work and its resistance grows.
“You can have whole families affected by these essentially incurable rashes,” Kidd says. “We’re starting to see those come into Australia as well.”
Kidd returned to Australia from Canada to take over at the centre from emeritus mycologist David Ellis, a legend in the field. Ellis is quick to point to Kidd’s impressive achievements, including a paper on fungal name changes that was listed in the Infectious Diseases Society of America’s top 10 papers for the year, and the book Descriptions of Medical Fungi, on which she was the first author.
A lack of treatments
In 2022 the World Health Organization identified four fungal pathogens as “critical” among 19 fungi that pose the biggest threat to public health: Cryptococcus neoformans, Candida auris, Aspergillus fumigatus and Candida albicans.
The WHO emphasised the danger of having only a few antifungal medicines, the expansion of fungal diseases due to global warming and international travel and trade, and their increasing resistance to treatment.
Dr Megan Lenardon, a microbiologist at the University of New South Wales, warned just a few weeks ago that fungi had historically been overlooked in infectious disease research. She has been studying the Candida species, which cause thrush infections in tens of millions of people each year. While thrush itself – an overgrowth of Candida often in the mouth or genital area – is generally not dangerous, Candida can become invasive and spread through the organs and bloodstream.
Vials of fungus specimens at the National Mycological Reference Centre. Photograph: University of Adelaide
“We call them ‘opportunistic invasive’ fungal pathogens because they don’t kill healthy people,” Lenardon says.
“But if they find themselves in a host who is susceptible, then they can kill.”
Lenardon warns that fungi may evolve to resist higher temperatures, meaning they can survive in human bodies but says the likelihood of a pandemic is “probably still relatively low”.
Still, she says, there are no vaccines imminent and few preventive treatments in the pipeline.
At the centre in Adelaide they can screen for infections and implement extra precautions with infected patients. They are working on specialised tests and treatments, and hope they will have enough to tackle what comes.
Kidd says we “don’t have a huge problem” with Candida auris in Australia – “yet”.
This article was amended on 29 February 2024. A previous version incorrectly said The Last of Us was on Netflix. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/05/sales-new-cars-uk-slump-march | Business | 2018-04-05T09:20:08.000Z | Angela Monaghan | Sales of new cars in UK slumped in March | Sales of new cars in the UK plunged in March as economic uncertainty weighed on demand and consumers turned their backs on diesel, extending the run of falling sales to 12 months.
A total of 474,069 new cars were driven off the forecourts of car showrooms last month, down 15.7% compared with March 2017 and the sharpest monthly fall since April last year.
The drop reflects a broader trend over the past year, as cash-strapped consumers have been less willing to commit to big spending decisions since the Brexit vote, which triggered a sharp fall in the pound and pushed up prices.
New car sales have also been hit by a slump in demand for diesel cars, sales of which dropped 37.2% in March, according to the figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).
The last time car sales fell for a longer period was between July 2010 and July 2011, after the government’s scrappage scheme had ended.
“Consumer and business confidence has taken a knock in recent months and a thriving new car market is essential to the overall health of our economy,” said Mike Hawes, chief executive of the trade body. “This means creating the right economic conditions for all types of consumers to have the confidence to buy new vehicles.”
March is a plate-change month, which typically drives a spike in demand, but the SMMT pointed out that it was always going to be tough to beat last March, when new car registrations hit a record high as consumers brought forward purchases to beat a tax rise which came into force in April 2017.
The industry’s weak performance last month meant car sales were down 12.4% in the first quarter overall, compared with the same period last year, with 720,000 driven off UK forecourts.
Howard Archer, chief economic adviser to the forecasting group EY Item Club, said the sector would be hoping car sales in March were partly hampered by the snow, which might have prevented some buyers from reaching showrooms. “If this is the case, there could be some catch-up in April, with car purchases delayed rather than lost,” he said.
The most popular car in 2018 so far is the Ford Fiesta, followed by the Volkswagen Golf and the Nissan Qashqai.
While demand for diesel has fallen sharply since the emissions scandal and amid uncertainty about future environmental levies on diesel cars, sales of new petrol cars rose 0.5% in March, and plug-in and hybrid sales were up 5.7%.
“All technologies, regardless of fuel type, have a role to play in helping improve air quality while meeting our climate change targets, so government must do more to encourage consumers to buy new vehicles rather than hang on to their older, more polluting vehicles,” Hawes said.
Ian Gilmartin, head of retail at Barclays corporate banking, said the UK industry still had some reasons to be cheerful. “Car sellers shouldn’t be too disheartened – the industry is still producing very high quality products, with most cars, including diesel models, more environmentally friendly than ever.
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“If manufacturers and the motor supply chain can retain their focus on the future, they will be able to help retailers attract drivers back to the showrooms.”
Sales of new vans also fell in March, down 5.6% to just under 60,000, according to the SMMT. Hawes said a drop in a plate-change month was concerning. “The new van market is a key barometer of business confidence and while uncertainty remains, a degree of fluctuation in demand is to be expected this year.”
Britain’s automotive industry was a vocal supporter of the remain camp in the run-up to the Brexit vote, and has since urged the government to secure a tariff-free deal with the EU to keep the sector competitive in the UK.
There was some good news for the UK industry on Wednesday, when the French owner of Vauxhall said it would invest about £100m in its Luton plant, despite Brexit uncertainty.
However, PSA, the manufacturer of Peugeot and Citroën, also said a decision on the future of its Vauxhall plant at Ellesmere Port would not be made before 2020, when there would be more clarity on Brexit. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/25/david-miliband-labours-move-to-the-left-is-a-mistake | Politics | 2017-02-25T13:14:37.000Z | Damien Gayle | David Miliband: Labour's move to the left is a mistake | David Miliband has said the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is further from power than at any time in the last 50 years and has refused to rule out a return to British politics.
As Corbyn made clear he did not believe his leadership contributed to Labour’s byelection defeat in Copeland, Miliband said he was “deeply concerned that Labour is further from power than at any stage in my lifetime”.
Copeland shows Corbyn must go. But only Labour’s left can remove him
Jonathan Freedland
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In an interview with the Times on Saturday, the 51-year-old former foreign secretary said Labour’s shift to the left was a mistake.
“The tempting thing to say is that it’s a mistake because it won’t get us elected,” he said. “But for people like me it’s a mistake because it won’t address the challenges of the country. This isn’t just an electability question, it’s a question of substance. I think one can achieve more radical and substantive change through a different set of positions.”
Elsewhere in the interview, he said: “I don’t think this is just a repeat of the 1980s. We have to really understand the historic nature of the challenge that we have to face.”
The former MP for South Shields, who was foreign secretary under Gordon Brown, has been the president and chief executive of the US-based International Rescue Committee, one of the world’s largest aid agencies, since 2013.
Spinwatch, which campaigns for greater transparency in public and corporate life, notes that the IRC has long been accused of being an instrument of US foreign policy, has documented links to the CIA, and has been an advocate of military intervention - claims the organisation denies.
In the interview, Miliband focused on the IRC’s work with refugees and criticised the populist anti-immigration policies of Donald Trump. “The last few years have seen the reaction against the refugee crisis where the sense is that the only solution is partition, separation – to keep them out,” he said. “I think that is a threat.”
Miliband made a play for the Labour leadership in 2010, but was narrowly beaten by his younger, more leftwing brother, Ed.
Despite a leftwing surge in Labour membership, Miliband said he believed there was still the chance of a revival in Blairite-style politics in the UK, pointing to the rise of Emmanuel Macron in France as evidence.
Asked if he would ever make a return to Westminster politics, Miliband said he felt he was having a greater impact working with the IRC than he would doing something else.
“I’m conscious that [Arsenal manager] Arsène Wenger says never resign an old player, so that’s in my head,” he said. “I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do. It’s hard to see – but what’s the point of saying never?”
Labour’s loss in Copeland on Thursday prompted a new round of infighting in the party. That byelection, and another in Stoke, which Labour held, came as a result of the resignations of two Labour MPs, Tristram Hunt and Jamie Reed, who were both strong critics of Corbyn.
‘After Copeland byelection defeat, are you Labour’s problem?’ No, says Corbyn Guardian
Reports suggest Labour MPs are despondent about the Copeland result, but most are choosing to remain quiet after an attempt to oust Corbyn last summer saw him secure a second resounding leadership election victory.
Even allies have argued that Corbyn must take some responsibility for the Copeland result. The general secretary of the Unison union, Dave Prentis, said no one could objectively argue the byelection results were good for Labour.
“While it was pleasing to see Ukip put in its place, Stoke should never have been in doubt and the result in Copeland was disastrous,” he said. “The blame for these results does not lie solely with Jeremy Corbyn, but he must take responsibility for what happens next.”
Corbyn received support, however, from Mick Whelan, the Aslef general secretary and chair of the Trade Union and Labour Party Liaison Organisation. He said the “uncertainty” caused by last year’s leadership challenge and “misinformation” about Labour’s stance on nuclear power were to blame for the Copeland defeat.
Whelan told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I do wonder, shall we ask ourselves the question: ‘How bad would it have been if we didn’t have Jeremy?’ That’s the question we should be asking ourselves.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2010/may/28/damages-review | Television & radio | 2010-05-28T07:00:04.000Z | Kathy Sweeney | Damages | Your next box set | Nobody plays sociopaths half as well as Glenn Close, and as the mercurial Patty Hewes, she takes command of the screen. Powerful and manipulative, Patty is a cut-throat litigator, always thinking two steps ahead.
"If you were a man, I'd kick the living shit out of you," says one adversary. "If you were a man, I'd be worried," she snaps back with a withering smile. There is nothing so chilling as a smiling Patty Hewes.
Time and again, Close brings her character to the brink of being unsympathetic, then pulls her back. She manages at once to be ruthless and vulnerable, icy and amiable, backstabber and benefactor, to keep us on our toes.
In the first of Damages' three series, Ted Danson is a revelation as her nemesis, Arthur Frobisher, a narcissistic, delusional billionaire who convinces himself – and sometimes us – that he's a good guy, despite his Enron-style ethics. He has offloaded stock in his company just before it tanked, and his employees have lost everything. Patty will stop at nothing to get back what money she can for her clients: she'll lie, steal or have a flunkey chop a dog's head off. (No pet is safe around Glenn Close.)
Such venal characters need a naif for balance: enter Rose Byrne as Ellen Parsons, fresh out of law school, as Patty's assistant. She has no idea how little she understands her new boss. Episode one opens with Ellen staggering out of an apartment in Manhattan (where the show is artfully shot – fork out for the Blu-ray version), bloody and dazed after her fiance's brutal murder. The series then backtracks six months, to explain how she got there.
Never afraid of killing off key characters, Damages has so many twists and switcheroos, as paths cross and corners are turned, that you may feel travel-sick. It requires attention, but it's worth it. If you're a fan of legal battles fought to the death, you should take this case. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/05/india-yoga-guru-corruption-protest | World news | 2011-06-05T16:01:33.000Z | Jason Burke | Indian police break up yoga guru's anti-corruption protest | Indian police have used teargas and batons to break up a mass anti-corruption protest led by India's most famous yoga guru, in the latest high-profile clash between authorities and campaigners.
At least 30 people were injured, several seriously, in chaotic scenes in the capital, Delhi, after talks between the government and the saffron-robed guru Swami Ramdev to end the protest broke down.
Just as senior government figures appeared on TV threatening "firm action", police appeared and started to disperse tens of thousands of demonstrators, many from rural areas or small towns, who had gathered under tents in the centre of the capital. Some of Ramdev's supporters threw stones at police.
Ramdev, who rose from a humble background to run a £20m empire of ashrams and alternative medicine, was arrested while trying to disguise himself in women's clothing, and was flown to the northern city of Haridwar, where he has his headquarters.
"You could not imagine a government handling it more clumsily," said Professor Jayati Ghosh, a respected Indian analyst and economist.
Ramdev, whose television channel draws audiences of up to 30 million and whose international network of ashrams includes one on a Scottish island, had begun fasting "unto death" on Saturday morning.
The incident is likely to further embarrass the ailing government of the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and fuel broad public anger over a series of corruption scandals.
Corruption has long been a problem in India. Paying small bribes is a part of everyday life and senior ministers, bureaucrats, military officers and other officials are repeatedly found to have made vast sums illicitly.
The issue has become a focus of frustration with the current government, a coalition led by the Congress party. One recent scam may have cost the country as much as £25bn.
Leaders of India's main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata, (BJP), attacked the Congress party and said the police action had been "a shameful chapter in the democracy of this country".
Ramdev criticised the Congress president, Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, saying she did not appear to love Indians, a charge frequently made by the rightwing in India.
Congress party figures alleged that Ramdev was linked to opposition parties including extremist Hindu nationalist groups.
Digvijay Singh, a senior Congress leader who had earlier questioned Ramdev's luxurious lifestyle and called his campaign a "five-star" protest, accused the guru of inciting people.
"You can't allow people like Ramdev to run riot in a capital like Delhi. Some laws, some rules have to be followed," Singh said. "And whereas he has taken permission for yogic shivir [camp], what was he doing there? He was trying to agitate people."
Political analysts claim the recent campaigns against corruption have in part gathered public support because they exist outside established politics. However, both Ramdev and Anna Hazare, a veteran social activist who launched a similar anti-corruption protest in April, hold deeply conservative views on a broad range of issues.
Ramdev dislikes Coca-Cola and western clothes, believes the World Health Organisation is a western conspiracy and is openly homophobic. Hazare is a strict teetotaller, believes in flogging and has banned tobacco, meat and cable TV in the village where he lives near the central city of Pune. Both men favour capital punishment for corruption crimes.
"Ramdev and Hazare are fundamentally very populist," said Ghosh. "They are authoritarian, with have a simplistic message and are extremely socially and politically conservative. They are presented as moral figures but are not."
Both men also contest the same political ground; one possible reason for the increasing intensity of their activism.
On Sunday Hazare pledged to fast again. So too did Ramdev, who plans to launch a political party to contest the 2014 general election.
"My hunger strike has not ended. I will continue fasting," Ramdev told a news conference.
The guru, who has made a fortune through alternative medicine, has called on the government to pursue billions of dollars in illegal funds abroad. Huge amounts of money have disappeared from India, one of the world's fastest-growing economies, in recent decades.
Ramdev has also called for a ban on notes of large denomination – 500 and 1,000 Indian rupees (£7 and £14) – which represent a huge amount of money for the hundreds of millions of people in India who survive on less than £1 a day.
Corruption is said to be present on such a vast scale in India that it threatens the continued economic success of the country, depressing the stock market and worrying investors.
Analysts are concerned that the latest examples of corruption will again stall key reforms aimed at boosting overseas investment and improving India's parlous infrastructure, many projects of which have repeatedly been postponed, in part due to opposition protests over corruption causing parliamentary deadlock.
Corruption in India
Recent high-profile Indian corruption scandals have included the 2G scam – named after the mobile telephone technology for which licences in India were allegedly sold off at cut-price rates in return for kickbacks – and allegations of fraud in preparations for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi. The 2G scam is thought to have cost the country up to £25bn. An investigation has resulted in the jailing of a former minister and the daughter of a southern Indian political leader. An inquiry into the 2010 Games is ongoing but has already led to the arrests of senior figures in the ruling Congress party.
Other scandals have included a luxury housing development built for widows of war heroes that was appropriated by politicians, senior officers and bureaucrats in the commercial capital of Mumbai, and revelations of corruption in state programmes to distribute subsidised food to the poor. In the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where 200 million mainly poor people live, the extent of the corruption and the extent of the programme make it potentially the biggest single example of corruption in the world, with tens of thousands of officials, thousands of politicians and more than £30bn worth of aid implicated.
Few sectors are untouched. One recent scandal was less about cash than influence. A series of phone taps released to the media revealed corporate lobbyists apparently discussing cabinet appointments with ministers and journalists. There are regular scandals over "paid news" by which newspapers accept cash to run particular stories. Top bank officials have been accused of taking bribes to grant corporate loans. Many senior judges are alleged to be corrupt. An ex-chief justice is currently under investigation. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/05/facebook-ai-tag-pictures-blind-people-machine-learning | Technology | 2016-04-05T11:27:24.000Z | Alex Hern | Facebook is using AI to tag your pictures to help blind people | Facebook is using an artificial intelligence system to automatically caption photos in an effort to increase the accessibility of its website and apps.
The feature, called “automatic alternative text”, uses image recognition technology developed through machine-learning to identify the objects pictured.
It’s not perfect yet, with sample captions from Facebook, shared by The Verge, reading more like a laundry list than a descriptive overview: “Image may contain: two people, smiling, sunglasses, sky, outdoor, water” reads the caption on one picture of a couple taking a photograph on a beach, while “image may contain: pizza, food” is the caption for a picture of a tasty-looking pepperoni and olive pizza.
AI is already making inroads into journalism but could it win a Pulitzer?
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But the technology, which is launching first on iOS, will do a great deal towards making the Facebook app more usable for blind and visually impaired visitors. On iOS, the most popular accessibility feature for such users is called Voiceover, which reads screen elements out loud. But without some sort of caption, images can’t have any more description than “a picture”, or the filename being read out, which leaves Facebook’s content – heavily dominated by images – largely inaccessible.
In March, Twitter announced its own attempt to solve the problem, rolling out a feature for its apps that lets users manually add captions to images they upload. Because people are better than machines at describing images (for now), the captions are likely to be more accurate and descriptive, but the burden of entering a caption for every image means that few actually have a description appended.
That’s not helped by the fact that Twitter’s feature is off by default, buried in the accessibility settings menu, alongside other settings aimed at people who need accessibility help, not those who want to provide the help.
Facebook’s approach could overcome those hurdles, but the company faces problems of its own. Inaccuracy is the big one: not only do machines still get things wrong, sometimes they get them horribly wrong. A similar system rolled out by Flickr last year managed to tag an image of Auschwitz with “sport” and a picture of a black man with “ape”.
Facebook hopes to dodge those bullets by only applying captions when the system is “80% sure”, and applying no caption at all in sensitive situations. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2009/mar/17/voluntary-sector-recession | Society | 2009-03-17T10:05:56.000Z | Patrick Butler | Success of Comic Relief a rare bright spot as many charities report increasing demand for their services alongside income fall | The financial climate for charities is worsening, with more than half hit by the economic downturn, a survey reveals today.
Over half of those affected report a decline in income triggered by the recession, at a time when one fifth of charities are seeing an increase in demand for their services.
Despite the success of Comic Relief, which raised £60m for anti-poverty charity projects last weekend, the overall financial picture for the voluntary sector is gloomier than it was six months ago, says the Charity Commission report.
Dame Suzi Leather, the chairwoman of the Charity Commission, said: "Clearly the impact of the financial downturn on charities is widening and deepening. Some charities still face that double whammy of a drop in income as well as an increased demand for services.
"The research tells us that the number of charities taking steps to mitigate the risks that the financial downturn brings has risen since we conducted our first research.
"However, not all charities are putting measures in place to protect their work and their funds. It is very surprising that more charities are not considering collaboration with others, as this can help them share expertise and costs."
In September the commission found that 38% of charities had been affected by the downturn, with 16% describing the impact had been "very significant" or "significant". The latest report shows those proportions have increased, to 58% and 25% respectively. Bigger charities - those with an annual income of more than £1m - were less likely to have been hit by income reductions. But almost two-thirds of that group were concerned that the downturn would affect their work in future.
The commission surveyed a random sample of 1,000 charities of varying sizes in England and Wales during January and February.
It found the collapse in the value of stocks and shares - for many charities the single most important source of income - has impacted hard on the sector, which is also hurting from a fall-off in corporate donations and private legacies.
Charities that delivered services overseas reported they had been badly affected by the fall in the value of sterling.
The survey suggests there is little sign that charities overall are preparing to make big cutbacks in jobs or capital investments. Only a tiny proportion of those surveyed said they were facing problems meeting pensions commitments. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/dec/06/talent-trail-other-voices-2012 | Culture | 2012-12-06T10:54:00.000Z | Kate Mossman | On the talent trail at Other Voices 2012 | Aidan Gillen, who plays Lord Baelish in Game of Thrones and mayor Carcetti in The Wire, is telling Rachel and Becky Unthank about the benefits of a turf-driven cinema. The 150-seater Phoenix on Dykegate Lane, Dingle, is one of the only family-run picture houses left in Ireland; "it used to run off a patch of grass at the back," says Gillen, who lived in the fishing town for four years and has somehow got himself caught up presenting numerous broadcasts from the Other Voices festival. The Unthanks have just performed the West Indian sea shanty John Dead, against footage of the bay in winter. They've just arrived from one of their Northumberland singing schools and have never been to this part of Ireland before.
Walk down Dingle's Main Street and you'd never know there was a festival on, though photos of previous guests Daniel Lanois, Spiritualized and Jarvis Cocker stare out surreally from the windows of wool shops and ironmongers. Behind the doors, in pubs, backrooms and pop-up literary "salons", things are swarming, and keeping track of all the events is impossible. Other Voices, now in its 11th year, takes a festival's most powerful ammunition – the secret gig – and sends you barrelling round town on a kind of musical Bloomsday trail, chasing after rumours, fortified by vast quantities of stout. It's like waking up in a friendly, Celtic version of The Truman Show, or Later … with Jools Holland, without the inane chat.
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The festival's organiser, musician and film director Philip King, talks about "tradition, translation and transmission", but Other Voices isn't all pipes and penny whistles, and only half the acts are Irish. The main "arena" is the tiny protestant church of St James, which seats 80 people, packed into the pews and choir loft. It's more about the thrill of seeing famous people in tiny spaces, and catching bands before they get huge. Florence Welch played here in December 2009, along with the xx; Amy Winehouse came to Dingle in 2006 after the release of Back to Black and performed with just bass and guitar. Director and editor Maurice Linnane recalls a girl "at the height of her powers, even though she wasn't supposed to be there for another four or five years".
To call it a festival is a bit of a misnomer. You can't get in to the church as a member of the public, unless you're a competition winner or one of the hopefuls who queue outside night after night in the rain for a handful of places. That's why the town doesn't get overrun, despite the potentially huge draws on stage – instead, bands come here to hear themselves think (after her 2010 performance Ellie Goulding returned for a two-week holiday). The principal performances are shown live on screens in pubs and hotels throughout the town, footage also carried by the Guardian and RTE in Ireland.
In 2012, the Other Voices lineup displays an alarming number of talented adolescents. Derry-born Soak, AKA Bridie Monds-Watson is a mesmerising 16-year-old with the untrained voice of a little boy, whose mature, diaphanous songs of alienation and heartache make her sound rather more tortured than she actually is (she grew up on Abba and Pink Floyd, her mum drives the nine-hour journey from the north). Across the town in O'Sullivan's Court House, 17-year-old Riona O'Madagain performs her take on Gillian Welch's Everything Is Free – often interpreted as an anti-piracy song – which sounds particularly defiant coming from someone her age.
Of all the mini-pops on display, the Strypes take the cake. Four Irish boys modelled on Cavern-era Beatles and early Stones with outsize feet and perfect small-man suits, it's a bit like watching a mod-era Bugsy Malone. The confidence is startling – what other 14-year-old would dare wear his bass guitar so high up his chest? It may be pastiche, but it's real for them. Apparently they got The Call from Elton John the other day, at school.
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Watching the acts from the church is strange. Because it's a broadcast, there's a certain amount of stopping and starting, and ample opportunity for musicians to execute their perennial right to be picky. Dingle's favourite son, Conor O'Brien of Villagers (he's from Dublin but he's played here four times) adjusts the balance after every song – "two decibels less on the acoustic, please". O'Brien has a particular sense of song structure and a poet's knack for surprise: on the forthcoming album (which they play tonight), a newborn baby is "heavy and viciously free" (New Found Land); elsewhere, his glowing imagery and owl-eyed portrayal of emotions recall the visions of film director Neil Jordan. There's even a new song called Earthly Pleasures that sounds like Jacques Brel doing Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West). In short – Villagers' set is so good, O'Brien can be as fussy as he wants.
Less overwhelming on Sunday is Paul Buchanan (of the Blue Nile), who performs to a polite but slightly baffled crowd. The voice and piano ballads from his recent solo album Mid Air are so luxuriantly sad – dramatic ruminations like spectral showtunes, about dashed hopes, and his concerns over being a good dad and husband – that someone tweets, "if you have been affected by any of the issues raised in Paul Buchanan's Other Voices set please call the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90." It's only later, in the pub, that someone points out Buchanan doesn't actually have any children, and his work is cast in a different light.
On the Monday night, the Staves bring their Watford harmonies to Dingle – after a live broadcast in the home of taxi driver Dolores Begley. They've been here before, first as children – the main Stave recalls learning to drive on the beach – and then two years ago, when they performed to a coachload of pensioners. But every night seems to have a golden moment, and though they resonate longer than buzz-band Palma Violets, it's the Unthanks who best address Other Voices' dual concerns of history and innovation. Their impressionistic scenes of pig iron and coal – in particular, a singalong version of Elvis Costello's Shipbuilding – add a modern complexity to a festival staged in non-industrial Ireland.
Just up the street is Foxy Browns, Dingle's now legendary hardware-store-cum-pub where pints of Guinness are served across the counter from flange nuts and Endomice "premium mouse killer". In the packed back room, in front of a huge stone fireplace, Dermot McLaughlin, director of Derry's 2013 City of Culture celebrations, reflects on north-south and east-west relations with occasional recourse to his fiddle for light relief.
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In February, Other Voices will go north to Derry for the first time. In April, it will come to London, for a series of shows at the Wilton Music Hall co-hosted with the Barbican. Though the difficult past won't go away – the proverbial "fart in the spacesuit", McLaughlan says – the festival will soon represent a cultural trade route, a golden triangle, between different parts of the island's history (there is already an Other Voices New York).
For the rest of us, it's the only festival where you can watch pioneering music from a warm, seated, lubricated position. A local man, who's already been at the mahogany for a few hours, reflects on the closure of Dingle's pubs. There used to be 53, he says mournfully – now there are only about 30. The town has a population of 1,200. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/13/into-brain-and-the-heart-how-china-is-using-apps-to-woo-taiwans-teenagers | World news | 2023-08-13T08:00:41.000Z | Emma Graham-Harrison | ‘Into brain and the heart’: how China is using apps to woo Taiwan’s teenagers | Ariel Lo spends a couple of hours most weeks sharing anime art and memes on Chinese apps, often chatting with friends in China in a Mandarin slightly different from the one she uses at home in Taiwan.
“People use English on Instagram, and for Chinese apps they use Chinese phrases. If I am talking to friends in China, I would use them,” Lo said as she picked up a bubble tea at a street market in central Taichung city.
The 18-year-old Earth sciences student, who creates art in her spare time, is part of a generation whose online life is increasingly influenced by content from China. That is worrying politicians and experts who fear young Taiwanese drawn to shop and entertain themselves on apps ultimately controlled by Beijing may be getting more than style tips, and sharing more than memes.
Social media companies can harvest valuable data and shape perspectives through the algorithms that control what posts viewers see. The FBI last year warned that TikTok and its Chinese counterpart, Douyin. were a threat to national security.
In Taiwan, those worries are particularly acute. China has made clear that it wants to take control of Taiwan, by force if necessary; and the two share a common language. That makes Chinese apps, music and drama particularly attractive and accessible to the Taiwanese and Taiwanese users a particularly important audience for Beijing.
“The similarities in language make the risk higher,” said Josh Wang of the Taiwan Pang-phuann Association of Education, which is building an education programme to make Taiwanese students more aware of online risks and how to protect themselves. “Students in Taiwan don’t necessarily care much about politics, so when it comes to finding entertainment, it’s convenient and easy to [use Chinese apps].”
He sees the influence of those shows, songs and memes spreading in Taiwan in the way that young people speak. Lo may restrict her use of phrases from China to chats on the apps, but others are sounding more like teenagers across the Taiwan Strait. “For example, my own students start using language in daily life like niubi [a popular Chinese slang word equating to ‘super cool’],” said Wang.
The two Chinese apps that are most popular in Taiwan are Douyin – the Chinese version of TikTok, run by the same parent company, ByteDance – and Xiaohongshu, or “little red book”, a lifestyle and social shopping site dubbed the “Chinese Instagram”.
In December last year, the Taiwanese government barred public sector employees from using TikTok and Xiaohongshu on official phones and other devices.
“Taiwan is the frontline of China’s information war,” said Chui Chih-Wei, a lawmaker from Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive party, who wants to see the government ban matched by the private sector to protect Taiwan’s economy.
“It is impossible to ban these apps entirely as we are a democratic country, but today we already see the first small success. Now we should encourage big companies in Taiwan to ban it – ones linked to national security, to energy,” he said. “It takes time to get big firms behind something like this.”
Cultural influence is a relatively new concern for Taiwan. Decades ago, it was a style and culture beacon for China as the country struggled out of Maoist drabness and conformity, looking to icons like the Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng and the director Ang Lee. Now, older Taiwanese watch Chinese historical dramas and soap operas, and the younger generation is hooked on apps.
The Taiwanese government is worried about teenagers using TikTok and its Chinese version, Douyin. Photograph: Social Media
Scarlett Ling is a firm supporter of Taiwanese independence, and a heavy user of Douyin. “I am so bored, I use it every day for over two hours,” the 16-year-old admitted as she browsed a market in central Taichung city with a friend.
She worries about her data being siphoned off to servers controlled by Beijing, and refuses requests for her ID number. But the Chinese app has “better filters”, and she insists she steers clear of politics anyway. “I am just using it for lifestyle inspiration ... I certainly can’t be influenced [about politics].”
Rochelle Hsieh, a 21-year-old business logistics student snapping pictures of possible outfits in a Taipei clothes shop, said she gets much of her inspiration from Xiaohongshu, and spends two or three hours a day on there and Instagram.
In one of the many ironies of an autocratic Chinese state built on an official ideology of communism but funded by unbridled capitalism, Xiaohongshu shares the same name as the book of Mao Zedong’s writings that became a symbol of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s.
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The “red” of that title referred to leftist ideology, but the modern-day “red” is a reference to hot fashions and trends. Perhaps the only things the two red books share are their wild popularity at home and fears about their impact beyond China’s border.
Young social media users said they rarely see overt Chinese propaganda, and that occasional clumsy attempts to promote their neighbour at Taiwan’s expense are more likely to make them laugh than change their politics. “You just have to be aware, and it will be OK [using Chinese apps],” said Lo, the student artist who mostly uses two obscure apps, Bilibili and Lofter.
“We saw one Taiwanese celebrity interviewed on Chinese state media, saying: ‘The seafood in China is so good – we don’t have that in Taiwan.’ We just thought it was funny,” she added. Taiwan, surrounded by rich fishing grounds, is famous for its cuisine, including seafood.
Politicians and experts say this kind of heavy-handed messaging is not their main concern. They fear content on the apps carries subtle messages about language and culture which attempt to deny or even erase the existence of a Taiwanese national and cultural identity.
“The Chinese Communist party wants Taiwanese people to love Chinese culture,” said Wang, the educator. “They hope that by convincing the students or young people to agree on the culture, it can help them agree on Chinese politics and government … maybe convince the Taiwanese students that we are all Chinese.”
Beijing has described its propaganda strategy for Taiwan as “into the island, into the household, into the brain, into the heart”, an approach that clearly aims to exploit popular culture, sociologist Wang Horng-Luen wrote in a recent article about China’s soft-power influence.
Thinking that China is the root of culture will loosen the foundation of Taiwan’s sense of community
Wang Horng-Luen
A professor at the sociology department of the National Taiwan University, he said that Chinese content can reinforce colonial narratives that erase or minimise Taiwanese identity and culture. “Thinking that China is the root of culture ... will indeed loosen the foundation of Taiwan’s sense of community,” he wrote. It may also lead to “blind worship and dependence on China”.
Students spend on average five hours a day online, outside of class, and more than two-thirds say they get most of their news and information from the internet, Wang’s team working on social media education found. Media literacy classes are compulsory, but schools have not kept pace with student lives. Nearly nine out of 10 students think they have seen false information online, but two-thirds never or rarely used fact checking.
“The education system requires media literacy classes, but teachers have no idea how to teach it,” Wang said. “They teach how to read a newspaper with a critical perspective. But the students don’t read newspapers.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/13/ruth-bader-ginsburg-donald-trump | Opinion | 2016-07-13T19:45:06.000Z | Matt Laslo | Ruth Bader Ginsburg told the truth about Donald Trump – just as she should | Matt Laslo | Was Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrong to weigh in on Donald Trump?
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The political class is pretending to be shocked that supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is openly criticizing Donald Trump, but she has something to teach Republicans about their candidate-in-chief.
Ginsburg, affectionately known as The Notorious RBG, is garnering headlines for calling Trump a “faker”, before adding, “He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego.”
Republicans pounced on the notion of a supreme court justice wading into a presidential campaign.
“I find it very peculiar and I think it’s out of place for an appointed branch of government,” House speaker Paul Ryan told a live town hall audience on Tuesday evening. “For someone on the supreme court who is going to be calling balls and strikes in the future based upon whatever the next president and Congress does, that strikes me as inherently biased and out of the realm.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg wades deeper into Trump row: 'He really has an ego'
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In the same session with voters, Ryan twisted himself in knots trying to both embrace Trump and distance himself from his inflammatory comments that have stung every group from women to Latinos, saying: “We don’t have people who run for office who 100% reflect all of our views.”
The Republican establishment is deceiving voters with calls to treat Trump as if he’s a traditional candidate. Trump would be the first to admit he’s turned political tradition on its head.
In a normal political era, justices would be wise to stay above the political fray. But we left normalcy when Trump clinched the nomination.
It must be noted that RBG never endorsed or promoted Hillary Clinton, she merely predicted her victory in November and revealed that she’s a member of the growing Never Trump movement.
Let’s stop feigning surprise already and actually listen to what the black-robed sage has to teach us about the likely Republican nominee.
First, let’s examine RBG’s carefully chosen word “faker”. Many who have had professional dealings with him have alleged wrongdoing during those interactions. He’s been involved in some 3,500 lawsuits, a dubious record for a presidential candidate.
Besides most recently being sued for defrauding students at his now defunct Trump University, he has been ploughing some $6m of campaign cash into various Trump enterprises and into the hands of family members.
Then there’s the charge from RBG that Trump lacks consistency. Even he would admit as much. Years ago he was proud to be a godless pro-abortion Democrat who even donated to Clinton, while now, as a Republican candidate, he claims to be a baby Christian who opposes abortions. What changed? Trump changed, because he’s malleable according to the expediency of what is convenient in the moment.
Justice Ginsburg also highlighted Trump’s seemingly untamable tongue. Speaker Ryan himself, along with Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, has also noted this in the past when they’ve been forced to scold their party’s standard-bearer for racist remarks he made about a judge with Mexican heritage and for calling for an outright ban on the world’s 1.6 billion strong Muslim population.
Lastly, RBG highlighted Trump’s ego. Trump himself is proud of his ego. “You think I’m going to change?” he told reporters last month. “I’m not going to change.”
Sure, Justice Ginsburg seems to have weighed in on the presidential contest in an unprecedented manner. But Republicans and independents would be wise to dig beneath the headlines and wrestle with the weight of her stinging critique. They may find they actually agree with her assessment. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/oct/03/ed-sheerans-x-named-best-selling-album-of-2014-so-far | Music | 2014-10-02T23:01:01.000Z | Jenny Stevens | Ed Sheeran's X named highest selling album of 2014 so far | Ed Sheeran’s latest album X has been named the biggest selling artist album of 2014 so far, in a year where British artists have dominated the album charts.
The singer’s second album spent eight weeks at the top of the UK album chart after its release in June and has so far sold more than 634,000 copies. It is also the fastest selling album of the year, with fans purchasing more than 182,000 copies during its first week of sale.
Sam Smith is behind Sheeran on the list of the 10 bestselling artist albums of the year so far, with 487,000 copies of his debut In the Lonely Hour bought since its release in May. Coldplay are in third place, having sold 470,000 copies of their sixth album Ghost Stories.
Sheeran’s sales bring a glimmer of positive news in what was a poor year for album sales in 2013. Last year’s biggest seller overall was One Direction’s Midnight Memories – even though it was only released in November. The album, which sold over 685,000 copies by the year’s end, was both the fastest and the biggest selling album of 2013. The figures, however, trailed behind 2012’s blockbuster album, Emeli Sande’s Our Version of Events, which shifted 1.39m copies, and 2011’s bestseller, Adele’s 21, which sold 3.7m copies.
“Sales of the biggest albums haven’t been as high over the last couple of years,” says Martin Talbot, managing director of the Official Charts Company . “The numbers are better at this stage in the year than they were last year in terms of those top titles. And we’ve got the biggest quarter of the year to come. There is some optimism going into the last part of the year.”
“I don’t agree with claims that the album is dead by a long chalk,” he adds.
British artists account for nine out of 10 of the biggest selling artist albums on the current top 10 list, which also features Paolo Nutini in fourth place, Paloma Faith at five and also albums from Arctic Monkeys and Bastille. Pharrell Williams is the only artist not from the UK on the list. The US producer’s second solo album GIRL is currently the seventh biggest seller in the UK so far. The list does not factor in sales of compilation albums.
“It’s been a good year for British talent,” says Talbot. “To get the kind of numbers that Ed Sheeran has is pretty impressive - it’s more than the biggest selling album in the whole of last year did. Sam Smith breaking through as well has been fantastic for the market.”
Top 10 artist albums of 2014 so far
1 X - Ed Sheeran
2 In The Lonely Hour - Sam Smith
3 Ghost Stories - Coldplay
4 Caustic Love - Paolo Nutini
5 A Perfect Contradiction - Paloma Faith
6 Halcyon - Ellie Goulding
7 GIRL - Pharrell Williams
8 If You Wait - London Grammar
9 AM - Arctic Monkeys
10 Bad Blood - Bastille | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/jul/14/can-daphne-and-the-pin-save-radio-4-comedy | Stage | 2017-07-14T14:06:13.000Z | Brian Logan | Can Daphne and The Pin save Radio 4 comedy? | The Pin and Daphne were part of a wave of creative, self-reflexive new sketch comedy that peaked at the Edinburgh festival two or three years ago. Now, both acts have shows on BBC Radio 4. I was interested to hear how their respective shticks transferred to the airwaves, and whether they could resist the tone of self-satisfaction that often afflicts comedy on the nation’s most urbane station.
The Pin’s show is entering its third series, and claims fans ranging from Ben Stiller to David Walliams. Daphne Sounds Expensive – starring the trio George Fouracres, Phil Wang and Jason Forbes – is returning for its second run. I hadn’t listened to either outfit on the radio before, although I know both from the Edinburgh fringe. In neither case can Radio 4 be said to be striking out into bold new territory – both companies are graduates of UK comedy’s most privileged finishing school, the Cambridge Footlights.
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That association no longer necessarily implies the narrow demographic it used to. Daphne are “the UK’s most racially diverse sketch trio” (their words), and the first episode of their new series takes us back to Fouracres’ roots in the Black Country. The trio are in debt, runs the conceit, and need to settle it fast or their show will be axed. So tonight, they’re in a Wolverhampton pub hosting a fundraiser for a non-existent hedgehog charity, and planning to swipe the proceeds for themselves.
It is a baggy, sketch-meets-sitcom concept – think Badults or, before that, the Goodies. There’s an anything-goes spirit, bolstered by the unexpected presence of opera singer Sir Willard White – who gets turned into a hedgehog – and an up-for-it Caitlin Moran. The cabaret-night conceit allows for one or two free-standing sketches, including the Frasier sitcom pastiche that largely passed me by when they staged it in Edinburgh and does so again here. Forbes’ anti-Black Country snobbery aside, the trio’s personalities aren’t strongly differentiated, but that’s fine – they’re three squabbling scamps, struggling to hold a plan together, until Moran (“Cheers for the massive bucket of cash, you fat chumps!”) blows the gaff.
Unashamedly clever-clever … Alex Owen and Ben Ashenden. Photograph: Matt Stronge
This all passes enjoyably enough, but it is not as compelling as Daphne’s stage work, which has an intriguing oddity to it. Yes, we still get cutaways to, for example, their close harmony sea shanty singing. Those are, however, corralled by a familiar format: a low-stakes story and a pervasive tone of wackiness that slightly reduces the threesome’s offbeat appeal.
It’s all completely dislocated from real-world concerns and the same could be said of the Pin’s show. Ben Ashenden and Alex Owen are almost parodically Radio 4 in style and vocal mannerism. They’re middle class and dufferish – one sketch is about how rubbish Ashenden’s well-spoken boxer is at trash talk. In another, when they want to recruit a band to make their party swing, they choose U2. These shows occupy a cosy world of self-absorption and zany goings-on, where the only jeopardy derives, in both cases, from the imminent threat of one’s Radio 4 show being cancelled.
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Taking that into account, The Pin is a good listen. The group’s stage work took meta-comedy to whole new tiers of mindbending , and they have captured that quality, to some degree, on the radio. They bookend each sketch with commentary on it, until the distinctions blur between skit and critique of skit. They’ll rewind and replay sketches to reveal improbable – and comical – subtexts. Sketches that look average on paper are elevated by the feeling (it’s in the tone of voice, like an audibly arched eyebrow) that Ashenden and Owen are performing them and deconstructing them at the same time.
On stage and on the airwaves, this is all unashamedly clever-clever – that’s the joke. And they pull it off, because the material is strong: there’s no padding, the conceptual switchbacking never ends. Their relationship has settled into a more traditional one, between know-all Ashenden and idiot Owen – which heads off the risk of all this showy sketch-trickery seeming too self-delighted. We’re left with enjoyable, twisty comedy, as Owen performs the internal monologue of a man embarrassed not to recognise someone he ought to know; or the chimes of Big Ben (we assume) reveal the poor time-keeping of two hapless assassins.
If both shows, then, supply more or less what you’d expect of Radio 4 comedy, they are also both playful, spirited and smart. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/07/christmas-ethical-poor-toys-wages | Opinion | 2018-12-07T09:31:48.000Z | Kathleen Kerridge | At Christmas time it’s almost impossible to be both poor and ethical | Kathleen Kerridge | Christmas is a stressful time for families, especially those on strict budgets, and those surviving below the poverty line. Shops are filled with items crying out to be bought. Toys fill shelves, and children wait not-so-patiently for Santa to come. It’s well known that elves make toys in the north pole, and they will be delivered by a jolly fat man, via a sleigh replete with magical reindeer and gaily ringing bells.
For poorer families, the presents Santa delivers aren’t nice wooden toys made in the north pole (or the UK) by happy elves with secure jobs paying at least minimum wage. It would be lovely if they were, but they’re not. For kids in poverty, Santa sources his gifts from China and India rather than the north pole (or the UK). They’re cheap, they’re affordable, and they ensure something is there to be unwrapped. The true meaning of Christmas. The elves who make these toys are working in conditions that leave them trapped, tired, and miserable. Mrs Claus isn’t feeding these workers mince pies, either.
‘Disney’s Sing & Sparkle Ariel doll retails at £34.99.’ Photograph: PR
It’s not just cheap toys at fault. Disney’s Sing & Sparkle Ariel doll retails at £34.99. This is a “high-end” gift for families struggling to make ends meet. Disney – a company like that can be trusted to pay their elves a living wage, surely? No, as it happens. The workforce making these dolls are paid as little as 1p per doll. Some worked 175 hours of overtime in one month. They sleep at their stations, and work until they can’t see straight. For 85p an hour, these “elves” are little more than modern-day slaves to a consumer society that may have – dare I say it? – got a little bit out of hand. If this is the treatment at a Disney factory, what are the conditions like further down the line? How much are the elves who make the knockoffs paid? How are they treated? I’m going to guess at badly.
From clothing to food, when living on or under the breadline, life is filled with balancing morals against practicality. After all, we all need to eat, and we all need to wear clothes. Importantly, too, children need toys. They must be able to play, to learn, regardless of their family situation. It’s why the cheap knockoff stuff exists in the first place: so families without the cash to buy the “good stuff” can at least access a facsimile of it. My youngest daughter, who is now 14, learned her shapes, letters, numbers, and colours from toys bought for less than £5. They were invaluable to her early years education … and all I could afford to buy.
Revealed: Disney's £35 Ariel doll earns a Chinese worker 1p
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I wanted to buy wooden toys: shape-sorters; tactile bead-tables that sit in the corner of doctor’s surgeries; a cute push-along thing; building blocks; train sets. Not because of their premium toy status, but because I knew they were ethically made, and the people who make them are paid fairly and work in good conditions. I would prefer to buy my clothes from British manufacturers instead of Primark. I would prefer to feed my family free-range food. My ethics have nothing to do with my wallet; they don’t change when I’m struggling to make ends meet, but they do get pushed aside.
I buy what I can afford, and that’s all there is to it really. I have to ignore my ethics and my conscience daily – it can feel like punishment for being “poor”. I’m told by the media that I am responsible for the plight of Chinese workers, because I buy the stuff they make. It’s my fault they are so exhausted they fall asleep in front of their stations when they get a break. It’s my need keeping them in the trap they’re in. Make no mistake – if I didn’t need the things they produce, I wouldn’t buy them.
Ethics are an internal battlefield when you can’t afford to have them. Morals don’t vanish when money does. It could be argued that, because we live in such a privileged society here in the UK, we feel the injustice of the conditions these overseas workers are forced to endure. We know it shouldn’t be happening, and we can see there is another way, but we simply cannot afford to listen to our conscience. It hurts. I do what I can, but our choices are made by what we can afford. In an ideal world, I would be able to afford to balance my accounts and my ethics, but I don’t live in an ideal world. I live in the real one.
Yet, despite the cheap food, the cheap gifts and the cheap booze (it is Christmas, after all), I will make merry and celebrate the season as best I can, and spare a thought for the elves who made it possible – because, this year, I’m afraid a thought is all I can afford to give.
Kathleen Kerridge is an author and food poverty campaigner | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/jun/12/haunted-realism-gagosian-grosvenor-hill-london-review-a-queasy-intoxicating-view-of-late-capitalism | Art and design | 2022-06-12T10:00:45.000Z | Rachel Cooke | Haunted Realism review – a queasy, intoxicating view of late capitalism | At Gagosian’s sleek Grosvenor Hill outpost, not far from Bond Street in London, is a punchy, rather masculine new exhibition that plays around with the detritus of the 20th century, both physical and philosophical, in ways guaranteed to make the visitor feel at once intoxicated and a touch queasy. Here are disembodied eyeballs and floating blond wigs. Here are distended sock dolls and plastic toy soldiers, greasily corrupt politicians and butcher’s shops that resemble murder scenes. Tube strike or not, on the day of my visit people were shopping as invincibly as ever in the streets outside the gallery. Passing them on my way in, I couldn’t help but think, furtively, of a dress I long to own. But no sooner was I inside the Gagosian’s vast spaces than such restlessness disappeared. The first thing I saw was a quiet reproach to my covetousness in the form of a watercooler that looked as if it had been turned suddenly to stone.
Adam McEwen’s graphite Watercooler, 2011. Photograph: Douglas M Parker Studio
Watercooler (2011), which is made of graphite, is the work of Adam McEwen, one of more than 30 artists featured in the Gagosian’s show Haunted Realism, the overall effect of which is to expunge, even if only temporarily, your most libidinous desires. Guilt rising inside you – an inadvertent theme is the warming of the planet – the notion of consumption of any kind soon feels unnecessary and rather tasteless. Turn the first corner, for instance, and four images combine to make you feel even more than usually bad about late capitalism. First comes Hong Kong Shanghai Bank I (2020) by the German photographer Andreas Gursky: an image of an office block at night that resists all warmth in spite of the fact that every window is lit. Then there’s Richard Artschwager’s Industrial Complex (1967), a dishcloth-grey acrylic of urban nothingness that is painted on Celotex, a material used as insulation. Next to this hangs a print based on Gerhard Richter’s masterly blur of a painting September (2009), made in response to the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. Finally, there is Ed Ruscha’s Spied Upon Scene (2019), in which a rocky desert is encircled by black, as if we were looking at it through the sight of a gun.
These pieces have something in common besides their political subject matter: together, they embody a feeling of surveillance, a peeping Tom mood that continues, on and off, throughout the exhibition. Sometimes it arrives courtesy of old-fashioned voyeurism: Untitled (1961), a drawing of a nude by the now much disapproved-of bondage aficionado Hans Bellmer, hangs next to John Murphy’s photograph of a dead woman in a scarlet dress, Worse Days Are Coming (2022), the two in dialogue in highly uncomfortable ways. But at other moments it’s more explicit, the tables having been turned so it is the visitor who is observed. There are eyes all over the place, most notably in the form of Urs Fischer’s sculpture Dazzled (2016), a pair of knee-high, yellow-green orbs that have something of the fairground about them.
Neil Jenney’s Modern Africa #3, 2016-20. Photograph: Robert McKeever/© Neil Jenney, courtesy Gagosian
Haunted Realism, sometimes pulpy and sometimes eldritch, takes its title from “hauntology”, a word coined by Jacques Derrida to denote the way the past lingers inside the present. The term was then popularised by the late cultural critic Mark Fisher, a copy of whose 2009 book Capitalist Realism sits on a shelf at the Gagosian. (Fisher had it that we can no longer so much as imagine an economic system other than capitalism, for which reason his book’s appearance in the gallery tickled me: Gagosian, after all, is the art world’s leading luxury brand.) However, the exhibition’s main focus, we’re told, is on the way the aspirations of modernity have become “lost futures”, perceptible only as “ghostlike traces”; the artists on display tackle this by confronting the “accelerated flow of images” in contemporary culture and the proliferation of “non-places” we increasingly inhabit.
Personally, I think this show is best enjoyed unimpeded by theory. It’s a good introduction to some artists, mostly American, who are relatively unknown in the UK. I was drawn to Neil Jenney’s imaginary landscape of sand and ruins, Modern Africa #3 (2016-2020), struck by the way it brought to mind a frame from a comic book (think Charles Burns). Llyn Foulkes was a name new to me, and I enjoyed his mixed media portrait, Dick (2020), which features the wooden handle of (I think) a bradawl for President Nixon’s nose.
Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled (Black Bed), 1991. © Rachel Whiteread
Trace, 1993-4. © Jenny Saville. All rights reserved, DACS 2022; courtesy Gagosian
Mostly, though, it’s worth seeing for its unlikely and often brilliant juxtapositions. In one room, its curator, Mark Francis, has gathered together Untitled (Upstate), a group of prints (1995-99) documenting rural decline by the American photographer Richard Prince; Untitled (Black Bed) (1991), a sculpture of a mattress by Rachel Whiteread; and Trace (1993-94) by the figurative artist Jenny Saville, a typically unsparing oil of a naked back. They work so well together, these three, Saville’s expanse of waxen flesh now bringing to mind a mattress, and Whiteread’s sculpture seeming to have come straight out of one of Prince’s back yards. Seen like this, Whiteread’s abstraction shades into realism; Saville might have painted not a nude but a still life. As for Prince, an artist known mostly for his way with appropriation, he seems a more benign presence than usual – not so much a thief, you might say, as an influencer.
Haunted Realism is at the Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London W1, until 26 August | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/may/17/michel-hazanavicius-jean-luc-godard-interview-redoubtable-cannes | Film | 2017-05-17T17:07:43.000Z | Stuart Jeffries | Godard is not God!' … Michel Hazanavicius on his film about France's most notorious director | It’s May 1968 and Jean-Luc Godard is marching along a Paris boulevard during an anti-establishment demo. On the face of it, things couldn’t be better for the leading light of the nouvelle vague: the great director is spending his spring lobbing stones at the riot police, haranguing students at sit-ins, and making love to his beautiful wife Anne Wiazemsky, nearly 20 years his junior and the star of his new film.
But, just then, a demonstrator sidles up and praises Godard’s early films – A Bout de Souffle with Jean-Paul Belmondo, Le Mepris with Brigitte Bardot. As the fan heaps on more praise, Godard’s face gets longer and longer. Doesn’t this guy realise that the old Godard is dead? That he has disowned those films? That, henceforth, he will only make austerely political cinema, such as his new picture La Chinoise, about a French Maoist cadre’s ill-fated plot to murder the Soviet ambassador? That Godard is now forming a film-making collective called the Dziga Vertov Group, eschewing bourgeois norms of artistic genius in favour of collective socialist endeavour?
This scene from Redoubtable, Michel Hazanavicius’s unexpectedly hilarious and often touching drama, recalls that moment in Stardust Memories when Woody Allen’s protagonist meets some aliens. “We enjoy your films!” the aliens tell Allen. “Particularly the early, funny ones.” Godard is in the same fix: critics and fans hate his new politicised stuff and want him to continue making films like the old ones they loved. Even the Chinese authorities, whom he thought might enjoy his championing of Maoist politics, send the director a critique of La Chinoise, damning it for political revisionism.
As the demonstrator continues, the camera closes in on the eyes behind Godard’s tinted lenses – the eyes of a man trapped in a personal tragedy and yet painfully aware of how funny his predicament looks from the outside. Godard has become a sad clown in a film he doesn’t even get to direct. Much of Redoubtable has this tragicomic air; there’s a running gag about his specs getting repeatedly crushed in Paris demos.
‘There was clearly something very seductive about him’ … Godard with Anne Wiazemsky in 1967. Photograph: Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/Getty Images
Godard’s plight also resonates with Hazanavicius. The 50-year-old French director has made a film that breaks with expectations and risks making cinephiles, especially French ones, furious. In 2012, Hazanavicius won best picture and best director Oscars for The Artist, a black and white homage to Hollywood’s silent era. Now he’s made what seems to be its polar opposite: a portrait of a Hollywood-hating film-maker struggling through existential, political and marital crises.
Hazanavicius has sympathy for the diabolical genius of the nouvelle vague. “His fans want him to keep making the same movies,” he says. “They want Breathless 2. They can’t bear that he wants to change. I’ve been through that. I get that. All artists get that.”
In Redoubtable, Hazanavicius depicts Godard getting harangued by his friend, the great Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci. He tells Godard that disdaining his old work is folly, astutely adding that the Franco-Swiss director knows nothing about the proletarians whose cause he purportedly shares. “Some people probably think me telling Godard’s story is blasphemy. My friends were worried. But he’s not my hero or my God. Godard is like the leader of a sect and I’m an agnostic.” At this point, I should probably point out that we are chatting in the bar of the Cinéma des Cinéastes in Paris.
In an earlier age, Hazanavicius might have been burned at the stake. In 2017, the most he risks is getting booed at Cannes, where Redoubtable is in competition for the Palme d’Or. “That won’t be a new experience for me,” he says . In 2014, The Search – his follow-up to The Artist, a drama about the Chechen war – was poorly received at the festival (the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it “desperately well-meaning” in his two-star review). “I’m prepared for the worst, but hope for the best.”
Hazanavicius wanted to make Redoubtable after reading the memoirs of Wiazemsky, the German-born Frenchwoman who serially captivated directors. In 1966, aged 18, she starred in Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, fending off the director’s on-set advances. While filming, she met Godard and they married a year later.
He whispered her lines through an earpiece … Anne Wiazemsky with Jean-Pierre Leaud in Godard’s La Chinoise. Photograph: Simar/Anouchka/Rex/Shutterstock
Godard’s biographer Colin MacCabe once suggested that film-making is a ploy used by unprepossessing and sex-obsessed men to get beautiful women to act out their fantasies. If so, Godard was a virtuoso. He was married first to Anna Karina then toWiazemsky, and directed both. In La Chinoise, Godard whispered Wiazemsky’s Marxist-inflected lines to her through an earpiece.
Wiazemsky was scarcely out of her teens when they married. In a monologue Hazanavicius adapted from her memoir, she explains why she became besotted with the middle-aged director: he was free, witty, charming, an artist who didn’t give a damn for bourgeois mores or artistic tradition.
“That’s why I wanted Louis Garrel to play Godard,” says Hazanavicius. “Everybody has heard that he was a mean guy. For me, that couldn’t have been the whole story. There was clearly something very seductive about him. So I cast Louis – he’s so handsome, so seductive.” Garrel had already played a sexually and politically active lead in Paris circa 1968, having starred as Eva Green’s twin in Bertolucci’s ménage à trois The Dreamers.
When Hazanavicius asked to buy the rights to Wiazemsky’s memoir, she initially resisted. “I was about to hang up,” he recalls. “I said, ‘That’s too bad because I think it would be funny.’ And in that moment, she decided that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. She said, ‘I think it was a funny relationship and a funny time.’” So Hazanavicius wrote a film that dares to be funny about her ostensibly earnest husband. “He wants to be serious,” he says, “but you can see sometimes he has a sense of his own comic absurdity. And his films are very funny, even when he’s lecturing you politically.”
One striking parallel between Hazanavicius and Godard is that the former often directs his own wife, Bérénice Bejo (in Redoubtable, she plays one of Godard’s long-suffering friends). “I don’t think there is much similarity,” he says, “between our marriage and the one I show on screen.” Do you share his politics? “No. I am of the left, but not the extreme left like him. Maybe if I’d been his age in 1968, I’d have been a revolutionary, too. But I wasn’t.”
Ready to lob a few stones … Louis Garrel as Godard on a demonstration. Photograph: StudioCanal
And there’s another fault line: Hazanavicius is Jewish and Godard is shown to be antisemitic in the film, telling a booing Sorbonne sit-in that “the Jews have become the new Nazis” and that the question now is to think who are the new Jews. “I think what he said was ridiculous – nobody needed to think, then, about who the new Jews were. And the idea that Jews are Nazis is absurd.”
So what’s the point of that scene? “To show someone who wants to be provocative.” While researching the film, he met Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the veteran soixante-huitard student leader and a Jew, who remains a friend of Godard’s despite everything. “He says Godard’s a masochist and I agree. He always puts himself in painful situations.”
In Redoubtable, those painful situations become the stuff of tragicomedy. “He’s killing everything around him – his films, his friends, his wife. And then it’s logical he kills himself. That, I think, is what he did: when he creates the Dziga Vertov Group, where he no longer directs his own movies, he’s essentially killing himself.” Yet Hazanavicius is compassionate enough to show that Godard is aware of his absurdity, of his ability to alienate people, of the unbearableness of being Jean-Luc Godard.
In one powerful scene that seems to come straight from Godard’s own 1960s playbook, the sound of Richard Strauss’s Im Abendrot swoons heartbreakingly in the background as the couple row in some dismal hotel room. Godard harangues while Wiazemsky tearfully realises, as do we, that the man she loved has become a controlling, sociopathic, joyless jerk and that their marriage is over. What did Wiazemsky think when she saw that scene? “It was difficult for her to speak. She recognised something.”
What about Godard? Did you seek his consent? “No, but I sent him a letter. I said I’m doing a movie based on Anne Wiazemsky’s book and the main character is Jean-Luc Godard.”
Although Godard, now 86, asked to see the script, he has not passed judgment – yet. One possibility is that Godard may step in and try to shut down the Cannes film festival. Does that sound far-fetched? Well, 49 years ago he, along with other French directors, did just that, successfully arguing that in solidarity with the workers and the students who were protesting across France, the festival should be cancelled.
We’re speaking just days before the second round of the French presidential election. Hazanavicius feels obliged to vote for Emmanuel Macron, the centrist ex-banker, if only to keep Marine Le Pen from power. But he stills feels disenfranchised: there is no leftwing candidate.
“You know what?” says Hazanavicius, as he remembers Godard’s protest. “Maybe the same thing should happen now. France was in crisis then and today. Who wants to watch films in Cannes with what’s going on in the country?”
Redoubtable screens at the Cannes film festival on 21 May. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/31/chicagos-lori-lightfoot-mayor-gun-violence | US news | 2019-08-01T06:00:49.000Z | Eric Lutz | Can Chicago's new mayor stop the bloodshed from gun violence? | Heading into a long Fourth of July weekend last month, Lori Lightfoot, the new Chicago mayor, outlined a broad plan to cut gun violence in her city.
Lightfoot, who succeeded Rahm Emanuel in May, said she and the police chief, Eddie Johnson, would put 1,500 more officers on the street and work on confiscating weapons as a short-term effort to curb the shootings – which spike during the summertime and plague the city.
“People cannot and should not live in neighborhoods that resemble a war zone,” Lightfoot told CBS News before the long weekend.
But it was another bloody holiday in Chicago: 63 people were shot over the course of the holiday weekend, including a 14-year-old girl, and six were killed.
The intense violence is continuing as Chicago’s summer wears on. On Monday, six people were shot. The seemingly endless incidents underscore the mammoth undertaking Lightfoot faces in seeking to stop the bleeding in America’s third-largest city.
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Some people in Chicago say they are hopeful Lightfoot can succeed where her immediate predecessors – Emanuel and Richard M Daley – did not. But others say that despite promises during her campaign, inauguration, and as mayor to address the systemic problems driving the violence, they are concerned Lightfoot seems simply to have mirrored previous administrations’ proposals.
The Rev Ira Acree, a pastor in Chicago’s west side Austin neighborhood, is among those who support Lightfoot and believes she has made addressing the complex institutional problems behind the bloodshed a priority.
“You have to give them a grade A for effort,” Acree told the Guardian. “But probably you can say an ‘incomplete’ overall.”
Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot walks during the 50th annual Pride Parade in Chicago on 30 June. Photograph: Kamil Krzaczyński/Reuters
However, Louisa Manske, the policy and communications coordinator at the Workers Center for Racial Justice, sees Lightfoot veering away from the promises she made during her campaign.
Manske said: “What we heard was sort of this same ‘law and order’ narrative that has found a comfortable home in the public discourse around community safety that’s both false and incredibly destructive.”
Where Emanuel’s efforts to combat gun violence may be remembered as centered around the hiring of more police officers, Lightfoot vowed to treat the shootings as a “public health crisis” that would require addressing issues of economic disinvestment, lack of access to resources, and distrust between communities of color and the police department to solve.
She appointed a deputy for a new office of public safety, as promised. She has continued to talk up neighborhood investments on the predominantly black and brown south and west sides, which have been neglected by previous administrations and where most of the city’s deadly violence occurs. She has personally appeared in the communities, including earlier this summer, when she attended an annual peace march at Father Michael Pfleger’s St Sabina church on the south side.
“She’s actually been on the ground,” said Lance Williams, a sociologist at Chicago’s Northeastern Illinois University. “She’s been out in the community, talking to real people … That’s really good.”
But some, including the Workers Center for Racial Justice, have raised concerns that she has reverted to failed “get tough” on crime policies. Such policies “drive up mass incarceration, fracture communities, and point the public attention away from the actual issue”, Manske told the Guardian.
Whether she can succeed in reducing the violence here remains to be seen.
Manske said groups like hers would work to “guide” her toward neighborhood investment, greater police accountability, and reforms of the state’s criminal justice system. But even Lightfoot’s supporters say a holistic, multifaceted approach to tackling both the immediate and deeper problems is likely to take time.
“We know it’s gonna be a heavy lift,” Williams said. “It takes massive coordination. It takes massive resources. It’s not something that’s gonna happen in the next five years. This is long-term strategic planning … This is a cultural change. It’s gonna take a dynamic person to be able to pull this thing off. The mayor seems to be up to the task.”
But even if systemic reform doesn’t happen overnight, communities here are hoping for some victories along the way, as the death toll continues to grow.
“It’s gonna take a long time because we’ve had the collaborative failure of multiple institutions,” Acree said, citing schools, the government, the judicial system and long-term economic disinvestment from poorer neighborhoods.
“It’s gonna take some time to turn things around, but we want to see some small victories. We do want these numbers to go down.
“We don’t expect them to disappear,” Acree added, “but we do expect them to dissipate.” | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/13/termites-robotic-bricklayers-brickies | Science | 2014-02-13T19:00:00.000Z | Ian Sample | Do termites dream of robotic bricklayers? | They have little brains, a dismal work rate, and pay no attention to architects' plans. Rather than looking to humans for inspiration, scientists designing robot bricklayers have learned from termites.
The researchers, at Harvard University, have shown off their first gang of robotic brickies by having them build a small castle. The feat took some time, but marks a leap forward in the design of robots that work together in an ever-changing environment.
Though small, slow and simple, the robots can work without plans to build pre-designed structures. Instead of talking to one another, they all follow the same simple rules drawn up by a computer beforehand.
Autonomous groups of robots that can erect pre-designed buildings could find plentiful work in dangerous places, for example setting up shelters in regions struck by earthquakes, building habitats under the sea, or on distant planets before human missions arrive. They could even stack sandbags to provide flood defences, the US researchers said.
Gangs of robot bricklayers could build habitats under the sea or on distant planets. Photograph: Eliza Grinnell/Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
"The long-term aim is to build structures autonomously where you cannot easily send people, because the work is either too dirty, too dangerous or too dull," said Justin Werfel at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. "The robots move very slowly and that's on purpose. They are being very careful about what they do."
Instead of providing all the robots with a plan of the desired building, and appointing a mechanical foreman to direct them, each is given the same set of rules that tells it when to move itself or a nearby brick. The robots – which have wheels and are the size of a toy remote-controlled car – can trundle around, clamber up and down bricks, and lift and lay them. Simple sensors tell the robots when they are next to a brick or another robot.
Central to the work is a computer program that can take the shape of a finished building and turn it into a set of "traffic" rules that are sent to each robot before the job begins. From these rules alone, the robot gangs will move around and place bricks until the structure is complete. Details of the work appear in the journal Science.
The work has impressed other scientists because it shows how teams of robots can be made to work together without having to follow a plan or pass signals between each other. If one robot breaks down, the others will simply work around it. And if an extra robot is added to the team, it joins the effort seamlessly.
The research was inspired by the behaviour of termites, which have minuscule brains but are able to build huge mounds, complete with intricate air-cooling channels. None of the termites has a detailed plan of the mound they are building. Instead they take cues from each other and their surroundings to decide where to lay the next lump of mud.
The rules the robots follow are essentially one-way signs that tell them which direction they must move in. One crucial aspect of the rules ensures that the robots can get on and off the building site without walling themselves in.
In an accompanying article, Judith Korb at the University of Freiburg in Germany, calls the work "extremely elegant". "Humans build houses according to a blueprint, and the construction process is centrally guided by this plan. In contrast, social insects such as termites build in a decentralised, self-organised manner."
The latest work "allows the autonomous construction of any predefined structures with simple robots", she adds. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jul/15/we-bought-zoo-contraband-devil-inside | Film | 2012-07-14T23:05:55.000Z | Mark Kermode | Mark Kermode's DVD round-up | Once upon a time, Cameron Crowe made perky but punchy pop-literate movies such as Say Anything and Singles which married a rebelliously youthful sensibility with a surprisingly mature tang of melancholia. In the mid-90s he hit the big time with the Oscar-feted Jerry Maguire which gave us two of the period's defining movie catchphrases ("Show me the money" and "You had me at Hello"), and cemented his success with the semi-autobiographical Almost Famous, earning an Academy award for a script which revisited his former days working for Rolling Stone magazine.
And then, like the sudden onset of middle-age spread or male-pattern baldness, the wheels came off Crowe's credibility, with Elizabethtown leaving former fans wondering how someone with such a rock'n'roll past (he penned sleevenotes for Led Zeppelin as a nipper) could have made something so vomit-inducingly maudlin, mawkish and just plain misjudged.
To say that We Bought a Zoo (2011, Fox, PG) is better than its ill-fated predecessor in the Crowe canon is hardly a ringing endorsement. Yes, it's far more likable and less toe-curling than Elizabethtown, and isn't peopled with the kind of quirky characters who make you want to strangle yourself. Yet it's still drenched in that super-sickly saccharine gloss which has become Crowe's métier of late, ensuring that everything is shot in golden-dappled Miller-Time hues, even when our central protagonist is dealing with bereavement and imminent financial catastrophe.
Based on Benjamin Mee's altogether more honest and engrossing memoir about buying a Dartmoor zoo, this translates the action to California, where Matt Damon has to square up to parenthood, accountancy and unplanned animal husbandry. Taking care to leave nary a heartstring untwanged, Crowe surrounds him with a glamorous assistant (Scarlett Johansson), nice kids, a not-very-bad baddie and a menagerie of scene-stealing cuddly creatures including the increasingly famous monkey last seen eating someone's penis in The Hangover II. Problems are faced, issues addressed, children educated, hearts melted and tables duly turned, all in the manner of a handsomely mounted daytime soap opera. The end result is a huge glazed doughnut of a movie; not actively objectionable in any way but so unrelentingly squishy and sugary as to leave you feeling more bloated than uplifted. Hard to believe that the man who wrote Fast Times at Ridgemont High could produce something so singularly lacking in bite.
The depressing spectacle of directors remaking their "foreign-language" hits in "American" is a familiar one, with George Sluizer's hideously lobotomised The Vanishing and Michael Haneke's utterly unnecessary Funny Games U.S. proving that even bona fide visionaries can foul up their own work in Hollywood. In Contraband (2012, Universal, 15), the redactive process takes a novel twist as the star of the 2008 Icelandic thriller Reykjavik-Rotterdam, Baltasar Kormákur, gets behind the camera to direct its passably perfunctory Stateside remake. This time it's Mark Wahlberg playing the retired smuggler who gets roped into the cliched "one last job" in order to bail out his useless brother-in-law who has got himself in over his head with a vengeful drug-lord.
It's nuts-and-bolts stuff – formulaic, predictable and workmanlike – but the action sequences have plenty of zing and Wahlberg holds the attention as the tortured mainstay desperately trying to do the right thing. It helps that the award-winning Icelandic original was in itself no masterpiece, meaning there's little sense that anyone here is desecrating a work of art. Extras include director and producer commentary and a behind-the-scenes smash-em-up doc.
According to posters which were prominently splashed across bus shelters the length and breadth of the county during its theatrical release, The Devil Inside (2012, Paramount, 15) was "the film the Vatican doesn't want you to see". Presumably this is because the assembled pontiffs know a hellish stiff when they see one, and don't want you to erode either your eternal soul or your earthly wealth on this steaming pile of reheated sub-Exorcist pseudo-theological horse droppings. As if anyone wanted another post-Blair Witch Project mock-doc replete with grainy video visuals and annoying shaky-cam "verisimilitude", this tedious, uninteresting, unconvincing and (crucially) unscary balderdash dribbles its way through yet another "inspired by true events!" demonic investigation involving a mad mom, an annoying daughter and the world's most spectacularly unbelievable "troubled priest" – honestly, if you asked him to recite the Lord's prayer he looks as if he'd get as far as "Our Father, who art in… no hang on, don't tell me, I know this one… "
While the infinitely superior The Last Exorcism fell at the final hurdle with a disappointingly dumbo OTT ending, this goes one better (worse?) by having no ending at all – and no beginning or middle to speak of either. If you're stupid enough to rent or buy this movie (which made a fortune in cinemas) then frankly you deserve to be insulted, and on that front alone The Devil Inside does not disappoint.
Finally, a footnote to the surprise success of The Muppets arrives in the form of Being Elmo (2011, Dogwood, E), a touching and ebullient documentary about Baltimore-born Kevin Clash who dreamed of being a puppeteer as a kid and wound up breathing life into one of the most enduringly lovable creations from Jim Henson's magical workshop. Boasting contributions from a number of suitably enamoured celebrities (Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie O'Donnell) this reminds us why we all still want to know how to get to Sesame Street. | Full |
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/06/synthetic-opioids-may-be-behind-rise-of-fatal-overdoses-in-west-midlands | UK news | 2023-10-06T06:27:51.000Z | Robert Booth | Synthetic opioids and sedative may be behind rise of fatal overdoses in West Midlands | Synthetic opioids and a tranquilliser that have killed thousands of drug users in the US may be behind a rise of dozens of fatal overdoses in the West Midlands.
About 30 deaths over two months this summer are being examined for the involvement of the heroin substitute nitazenes and the sedative xylazine, Birmingham city council’s director of public health, Justin Varney, told the Guardian. Nitazenes are up to 100 times more powerful than heroin.
It is believed the drugs are being cut into, or sold as, heroin without users’ knowledge. They have emerged in the UK after heroin supplies were hit by the Afghan Taliban’s ban on poppy farming last year.
Varney said his area normally sees six to eight drug fatalities a month, making the spike in June and July around double the normal rate. Police have launched a crackdown on dealers that has led to seizures and arrests.
“We have seen [these drugs] globally for a while, particularly in the US,” said Varney. “Over this year we have started to see them appear in the UK. There was a cluster in Birmingham, Bristol, London and Coventry.”
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On Thursday, the coroner for Birmingham and Solihull, James Bennett, concluded nitazenes were the primary cause of death of two drug addicts in one night in July at a hostel in the Lozells area of the city. Clive Cooper, 38, was a long-term heroin user with schizophrenia. After he was found on his bedroom floor a neighbour said he had taken heroin. In fact, he had injected nitazene. A wrap of an unused brown crystallised substance was later identified as nitazene, which the case pathologist said was about 20 times stronger than fentanyl.
Maria Green, 42, who lived with bipolar disorder, anorexia and depression, died on the same night from the same drug, Bennett found. She was discovered by a friend collapsed on her bed. She had taken heroin, cocaine and other drugs for years. The day earlier she referred herself for help to a local charity after saying that “her life was going nowhere”, the inquest heard. The cause of death was nitazene toxicity.
Romaan Hussain, the director of the hostel operator in charge where Green and Cooper lived, said at least three other people died in nearby houses of multiple occupation around the same time, probably from the same batch.
“We’re on the frontline of a global issue,” he said. “We require more help.”
“It’s killing people and someone has to stand up,” one local addict said. “My friends are heroin users and I don’t want them dying.”
Two days before the Lozells deaths, Stephen Harrop, 36, died from heroin and nitazene toxicity in a house of multiple occupation in Balsall Heath, while on the same day six miles across the city in Handsworth, the decorator Michael Iddles, 53, was found dead at home caused by heroin and nitazene.
They were not the first fatalities in the city. On 7 June, James Simmons, 38, a labourer, was found collapsed in a house in Aston. His cause of death was opioids, cocaine and nitazene toxicity. A month later, Wayne Purcell, a roofer, died in the same property after injecting nitazene. On 1 July, Armstrong Tabrey 27, was found in cardiac arrest in the corridor of shared housing in Erdington.
Varney said some addicts had become so afraid it had pushed them to seek rehab treatment.
Dr Caroline Copeland, the director of the national programme on substance abuse deaths at King’s College London said the Taliban’s ban “may have done more harm than help”.
“We are now faced with the emergence of synthetic opioids with extreme potencies as heroin replacements,” she said. “With some of these nitazenes even a small amount is sufficient to prove fatal.”
West Mercia police has also issued a warning about as many as 20 nitazene overdoses, including in the Evesham area.
“In one instance, drug users bought what they thought was heroin but instead the substance contained paracetamol, caffeine and nitazene with no heroin present,” it said last month.
Another drug, the sedative xylazine, is used to tranquillise horses but when mixed with fentanyl forms a drug known as “tranq”. The combination increases the risk of overdose and can cause skin ulcers that can result in limb amputation – leading to some describing it as a “flesh-eating zombie drug”.
Xylazine has been detected in tablets sold on the hidden market as the painkillers codeine and tramadol, the anti-anxiety pills Valium and Xanax and cannabis vaping liquid, according to reports published by the Welsh Emerging Drugs and Identification of Novel Substances (Wedinos), which tests users drugs from across the UK.
A user from Birmingham who was left breathless with an irregular heartbeat and suffering a panic attack after taking what they thought was a prescription opioid last month, sent a sample to Wedinos, which found it was xylazine.
The spike in fatalities in the West Midlands appears to have subsided after a multi-agency response involving public health officials, police and drug support charities. Users were warned about the risks by text message, which resulted in more cautious use, potentially reducing fatalities. But agencies expect further peaks as international drug supplies fluctuate.
“Whether it becomes like fentanyl [which has ravaged American cities] we don’t know,” said Varney. “The US experience is concerning but the UK drugs market is different … This is going to happen again whether it is nitazenes or a new synthetic. Like any big industry, the global drug industry is looking at the next big thing.”
The headline, subheading and main text of this article were amended on 6 October 2023. Xylazine is not a synthetic opioid as an earlier version said; it is a non-opioid sedative. | Full |
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